Giles Mora: Andy Summers: A Certain Strangeness

Andy Summers, former guitarist and composer of the legendary band The Police, has built a unique photographic body of work to parallel his musical oeuvre. According to Summers, these photographs constitute the mental and visual counterpart of his music, marked by a complex melodic search and harmonies of rather melancholic and even convulsive colors. Summers compares these autobiographical photographs to tearing the pages of an intimate diary and reconfiguring them into a new visual syntax. Summers borrows the title, A Certain Strangeness, from the poet Coleridge, saying that the phase succinctly captures a photograph’s ability to open a viewer’s eye wide. Andy Summers has had several photographic books devoted to him.

Designed by Gilles Mora, in close collaboration with the artist, this book presents the most creative visual work of photographer/musician Andy Summers, including many unpublished images. A long autobiographical text by Summers tells of his passion for photography. A text by Gilles Mora situates Summers’s photographic work in American modernist photography.