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“The haunting photo exhibition Whistling As The Night Calls (link) by Martin O’Brien and Zack Mennell is open at VSSL Studio in Deptford, running from November 1 to December 1, 2024.”

Imagine being drawn to the forgotten places—the abandoned churches, windswept beaches, and decaying landmarks that quietly hold echoes of the past. For Zack Mennell, these aren’t just locations; they’re stages where life, death, and identity intermingle. In their latest photo essay, Whistling As The Night Calls, Mennell captures these haunting spaces and the emotional weight they carry, drawing us into a realm where each image feels like a whispered conversation with the ghosts of history.

Mennell’s work isn’t just about documenting decay; it’s about finding meaning in it. Through their lens, these sites become symbols of resilience, vulnerability, and transformation. Working closely with performance artist Martin O’Brien, who lives with cystic fibrosis, Mennell’s photographs take on a deeply personal tone, exploring themes of mortality, existence, and identity with a rawness that’s both intimate and universal.

- Martin

The things I make and do are the things I am compelled by. Images linger, haunting me until I meet or make them with my camera; only then, when latent in the canister, can I let them be silent until they call again, revealed and awakened in development.

I have purely shot on film since I was a teenager, so I experience photo-making as an extended process that resists and denies immediacy and welcomes errors and accidents. Photography, for me, is a process of cementing or folding time and space; the film within my camera meets the subject that I witness before it, and through this light-sensitive plane, our existences intermingle to be fixed in place. In the case of a double exposure, two moments and places are inextricably bonded within the 36 x 24 mm rectangle, impossible to distinguish where one image ends and another begins.

Martin O’Brien is an old friend and a long-term collaborator, someone I have learnt and grown with throughout my adult life. His Live Art practices explore living and dying with cystic fibrosis (a life-shortening chronic illness that results in mucus buildup that primarily impacts the lungs). His performances use BDSM practices and foreground his body as artistic material. I have worked with Martin for nearly a decade, present in his performances as carer, witness, and dom. That this is on Martin’s behest complicates the perception of sub/dom dynamics. We have worked with fetish objects, green slime and coffins across durations from one hour to ten. I have pierced, cut, caressed, whipped, bound, washed, force-fed, manipulated, burned, and held him, learning & witnessing the minutiae and details of his being. In performance, we converse without words, understanding a glance in that mode of presence where our boundaries dissolve so that, at times, I mistake his thoughts for my own as we breathe in unison. An aspect of these performances has been my photographing Martin on Fuji-Instax mini film and my 35mm SLR - a meeting of my performance and documentation practices.

This latest work is one that works beyond the limitations of the live performance, taking us on pilgrimages to abandoned religious sites in Cardross, Scotland and Romney Marsh, Kent, as well as to Dungeness Beach in the shadow of a decommissioned nuclear power station. Each of these sites has been of interest to us, but they are places where a live audience could not follow, so we activated these places with actions resurrected from Martin’s practice, performing to the non-human inhabitants. Photographing these actions on 35mm Cinestill 800T, we considered the presences within Martin’s works from priests to gimps, placing them within these sites to imagine what may become of us in death and beyond. While I am behind the camera and Martin is in front, we dreamt these images together, discussing at length the queer and sick artists who came before us, who have faced and imaged death and dying and who have inspired us. As with everything we make together, this process has been permeated by our laughter and ease around the topic of dying that follows years of imagining death in all its guises for each of us. These photographs will one day be a testament that speaks of Martin and myself, and I relish how they may encourage fellow queer and sick viewers to create bold and unapologetic work.

You mention a fascination with the interplay of light, space, and time in your photography, particularly with double exposures. Could you elaborate on how these technical aspects help convey the themes of death, existence, and transformation that are central to your work with Martin?

The temporality I experience in analogue photography is what Karen Barad calls diffractive; by this, I touch on the sense that it both opens time to a broader register and closes into an instant in the same motion. Double exposures allow me to muddle the restrictions of the linearly experienced physical world, undermining the boundaries of matter so that flesh is inter-mingled with concrete. This inherently speaks of the matter that constitutes us, decaying and destined to transform into varying degrees of inanimation beyond the limits of our fleshy selves.

I think a lot about the particularity of time in our friendship and collaboration. When Martin was born, the life expectancy of someone with cystic fibrosis was thirty years old, which he surpassed a few years ago, and now – in a tongue-in-cheek way – he refers to himself as a zombie, living temporarily in a space between life and death. My priorities in our work and relationship are shifted by the knowledge that he will likely die before me; it means that we cut away the bullshit (but not the silliness) and get on with it. My relationship to my disability and mental illness means that death has been present in my landscape for most of my life, and we are bonded, in part, by our familiarity with death – which we meet with humour and a refusal to be morose! Photographing Martin is a way to envisage these philosophical and emotional preoccupations literally; we began asking, “What does it look like for Martin to face death? What does Martin’s vision of death look like?” The kinky spirits and personas depicted in this series are facets of his own personal Grim Reaper.

The use of abandoned and liminal spaces like religious sites and nuclear power stations adds a strong sense of place to your imagery. What draws you to these desolate environments, and how do they reflect the themes of your work with Martin around death, illness, and queerness?

We worked with places that were significant to us, that had lingered in our memories and imaginations and felt a compulsion to activate. These sites also spoke to the themes already present in our collaboration - apocalyptic landscapes, decay and dilapidation, and religion. Martin was raised as a Catholic, and power and hierarchies show up in Catholicism's pervasive visual culture all the time. These qualities are ripe for playing up and fetishising, particularly shame, flagellation, and absolution. Part of the work is inversion and perversion, but to do so without resorting to sensationalism. To consider a world in which the majority of people are sick was a few years ago a relatively novel thing; with the ongoing COVID pandemic, this is much more of a shared awareness. What does it reveal about the structures in our society?

Part of the reason for our pilgrimages to these sites was to face the immensity of structures and systems. Considering the blasted landscape of the shingle in Dungeness in the shadow of the decommissioned nuclear power station, we faced a complex and violent past and an uncomfortable future. For us, imagining a lurid green phlegmburg future is more conceivable than comprehending and reckoning with the scales of time and infrastructure necessary to contain the waste from the civil and military nuclear industry. In these works, you see something with an expected “lifespan” of ten thousand years meeting a person with an expected lifespan of thirty. These photographs attempt to attend to the utter inconceivability of death and time.

You’ve described photography as a process that “resists and denies immediacy” and embraces accidents. How do these unpredictable elements influence the emotional tone or narrative of the images you create, especially in relation to the themes of mortality and bodily existence in your collaborations with Martin?

The unpredictability affords a magick to the process for me, which I hope is legible in the work to a viewer. The distinct tone and colour of shooting on a film like Cinestill emulates experiences of old family photos and taps into something deeply familiar and now distant from people beyond the realm of the cinema. I think that also helps the work; it does feel cinematic in some frames, which I enjoy. For this work, specifically, the sense of opening to the influence of the film, sites with such overwhelming power, the elemental shifting weather, and the invitation for something beyond our comprehension to appear in the image. Martin and I often think about the 90s and 00s TV shows we watched. We both love ghost hunter trash TV, and the history of photography is ingrained from the very start with visualising spirits. This has been done through many means, most often controlled double exposure, but I grew up watching Most Haunted and looking out for flecks and orbs of light – both regular features in the textural material of photography.

I enjoy the romantic idea of analogue photography as alchemy, an interplay between magick and science that makes me wonder at the preposterous miracle of the world. While a very technical, imposter syndrome-fed part of me is infuriated that a light leak in my camera has bled bright red across a photo, another louder part screams with delight at how it reveals something in the image. I recurrently wish to produce cleaner and more controlled images, but achieving this would require me to break with myself and deny the fraught magick of this process, which I love. Each photo is like a prayer, and while many return unanswered, if I remain open to the erratic potential, at least one frame lands with a resounding yes.

Zack Mennell

Zack Mennell is a UK-based photographer and multidisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, performance, and writing. Self-taught and shooting exclusively on film, Mennell brings an analog warmth and unpredictability to their images, often exploring themes of queerness, mortality, and the human experience. Known for their long-term collaboration with Martin O’Brien, Mennell’s work delves into spaces that blend reality and imagination, capturing a sense of haunting beauty in places often overlooked. Their work has been showcased in various exhibitions, including collaborations with the Thames Festival Trust, and they are an active member of the Bethlem Artist Collective and the LGBTQ+ cultural scene. (Website, Instagram)

Martin O’Brien

Martin O’Brien is a UK-based performance artist and academic whose work explores themes of mortality, endurance, and the body, shaped by his experience living with cystic fibrosis. Known for his intense, long-duration performances that blend pain-based practices with humor, O’Brien confronts audiences with powerful reflections on life, death, and chronic illness. His performances have been showcased at renowned venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. A leading figure in live art, O’Brien’s practice often incorporates BDSM elements and ritualistic actions, challenging perceptions of illness and vulnerability. He also teaches at Queen Mary University of London, where he inspires the next generation of live artists.