Mike Pinnington ✍️

@doublenegativem.bsky.social

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Writer | Editor | Art Criticism | Writing the City | Class | Science Fiction | Popular Culture | PhD student | Lecturer | Incorrigible Buyer of Books https://mikepinnington.cargo.site/ https://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/

Portrait of the fictional Carlotta Valdes, as seen by Madeleine at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, in Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Two odd-couple leads of Station Eleven beat a retreat through a snowy suburbia in this pandemic-set drama adapted from the novel by Emily St. John Mandel.
Picture of film critic/writer David Thomson's new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light. Its artwork is a black and white photograph of people sat in darkness in a cinema, with a shaft of projector/celestial light dominating. From the prologue: "In the nineteenth century our grasp on life was stimulated but compromised by the invention of the lifelike - the photograph, and then it moved." David Thomson, A Sudden Flicker of Light: a revisionist history of the movies, Penguin
Mise en scène (2025), a painting by Louise Giovanelli - depicting a woman in apparent ecstasy - of a found image of a 1970s film.
I mørket (In the dark), 2025, by Eva Helene Pade - contemporary response to expressionism, reframing its female subject as active
A wall of abstract paintings and objects in ZAUM!, a group exhibition at 50MV, an indie gallery space in Waterloo, Merseyside
A man stands on the edge of a swimming pool, gazing down at another figure, under the surface. The submerged swimmer, and distortion lines of the water, seem to reference the 1917 Andre Kertesz photograph, Underwater Swimmer
Iconic black and white image of a swimmer beneath the surface of the water, by Hungarian photographer André Kertész.
A magpie, without a tail, who is a frequent visitor to our patio. Imaginatively, we've named 'him' no-tail - he's learned that we put dreamies out there for our cat.
A man silhouetted by the moon against a cityscape. (Cover artwork for Jo Nesbo's Killing Moon.)
A striking woman - wearing a miracle, no less - in a red and black dress sits, legs crossed, smoking at a table. On the table is a cocktail, a box of matches and open pack of cigarettes - everything any good journalist needs, surely.
Me in my fetching salmon (or maybe red?) coloured running gear, just back from a pretty pedestrian jog/walk, looking a bit sweaty nevertheless.
An abstract composition by British artist Marlow Moss, this piece has black and yellow oblongs on a white ground, bounded by a raised partial grid of white lines.
Ju-jitsu - a brilliant, thrilling, abstract painting of various colours (red, blue, orange, grey, black, white), and geometric forms, by David Bomberg
An unsettling painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi, the artist captures here sunshine streaming through a window - on the left - and a closed door to its right. Known for his interiors, the artist often painted the same scene multiple times over. This work is unusual in that it has been cropped in the framing by the owner, folding the painting on the left, obscuring Hammershøi's wife, Ida.
A flight of stairs leads the eye to a grand old building
Walter Sickert gives us a glimpse of the music hall audience in The Gallery of the Old Bedford (1894)
A magpie is sat on the railing of a patio balcony in Liverpool. Behind the magpie, you can see the River Mersey and Wirral.
Abandoned Second World War bunker photographed in b&w on France’s Atlantic coast by Paul Virilio for his reissued Bunker Archaeology
Our cat, bonbon (a chonky 14 year old tabby), who has been getting us up at about ten to six all week, looking a bit tired and crumpled out on the patio earlier.
A panoramic painting of Liverpool's skyline from a bird's-eye view above the River Mersey.
Artist Yves Klein leaps into the Void in a photograph made by Harry Shunk and János Kender, in 1960
A still of a young woman, mid gesture (sweeping her hair out of her face?), who's pivotal to Chris Marker's La Jetee.
A view from LJMU art school window of the modernist architectural feat, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral; in the foreground is Isabel Nolan's Where you are, what we are, with others, a sculpture inspired by the city's two cathedrals and stained glass windows.
A neoplasticist work by the de stijl artist, Piet Mondrian; primary colours (red, yellow and blue) are plotted onto a grid, representing the beginnings of his mature style.
A lemon and walnut cake, cortado, a yellow notebook, and pen. The cafe setting seems apt for somebody who's been thinking and writing about flaneurism lately.
A pamphlet outlining the conversion of a derelict space on Liverpool's defunct Albert Dock into a new Tate for the north. The site, currently undergoing another renovation, is set to reopen in spring 27, providing a gallery for the 21st century.
A black and white photograph of an adult and child holding hands as they walk through Liverpool's Toxteth of the 1970s. It's photography as time travel; you can hear their footsteps.
Archive photograph of Liverpool's Albert Dock prior to its repurposing in the late 80s as the home to what was then dubbed a 'Tate of the North'; it's a sorry sight/site, showing the then defunct space, empty of water and people.
Installation view of Sean Edwards' Wales in Venice 2019 Undo Things Done exhibition. Large-scale red capital letters on the white gallery wall read UNDO THINGS DONE
Screen print by Victor Burgin from his series, Fiction Film. Based on Breton's Nadja, it captures the woozy feeling of pursuit - looking but not quite finding - through Paris streets. Here, we find ourselves directly behind a ghostly figure ascending steps.
The End #1, a 1993 monochrome painting by Ed Ruscha, depicts a projection of a damaged film reel positioned halfway between two frames. It reads, as the title suggests, The End.
A tabby cat named Bonbon is curled up asleep on a couch which is covered with one of his blankets. It's almost heartbreakingly cute.
The cool cyberpunk cityscape of retro videogame, Lunark
Text art by the artist collective, Common Culture, outlining the intersections of class and accent, and the ways in which it might manifest in the art world.
Sketchbook book page split by diagonal and horizontal lines with some fields filled by red fineliner to produce an abstract picture.
Abstract picture made up of geometric shapes - triangles, squares and oblongs in red and white.
An ominous, very atmospheric painting of the Ruins of Holyrood Chapel (1824), by Louis Daguerre.
Large scale city grid as artwork
3D sculpture/effigy of a character from Rachel MacLean's new work at FACT in Liverpool.
Book cover for The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, by Cynthia Cruz
A notebook, take out coffee and Nathalie Olah's Class, part of Tate's essay series, Look Again
View of the river Mersey, dappled by sunlight. In the middle distance you can make out aspects, across the water, of the Wirral skyline.
A photograph of Mann Island, near Liverpool's Albert Dock, taken outside the Open Eye Gallery
A blurred self-portrait photograph by Francesca Woodman, achieved with long exposure and slow shutter speed
Gabriel Orozco's 4 de Abril 2025, 15:54 hrs, Tokio, 2025 - part of the artists series Partituras, graphic visualisations of music scores.
An ornate, not yet full St George's Hall in Liverpool, prior to a performance of Max Richter's take in Vivaldi's the Four Seasons
A painting of a Seated Tortoiseshell Cat by Gwen John
Hokusai's The Great Wave
Jane Rolo, Helen Cammock and curator Sarah Happersberger in conversation about artist books
Pixelvision toy camera
Nadja theatrical poster
First daffodils have arrived!
Still from Chris Marker's La Jetee
Cover art for Possessed, a 'lost novel of the occult' by Rosalie and Edward Synton.