Henry Bond

It has been suggested that the title of the book is a reference to the 1926 Siegfried Kracauer essay The Cult of Distraction.

The book consists of interpretations of forensic photographs from twenty-one crime scenes from 1950s and 1960s England.

The thesis put forward in the book is that homicide can be considered in terms of Jacques Lacan's tripartite psychological model, thus any murder can be classified as either neurotic, psychotic, or perverse.

Bond's approach is closely linked to Walter Benjamin's assertion that, "photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis."

Lacan at the Scene is an interdisciplinary study which is simultaneously an application of the theories of Jacques Lacan in relation to offender profiling and an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography.

Bond's book considers the effects of photography on the spectator, the photographer and the photographic subject.

He refers to a wide range of contextual material including "J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Slavoj Žižek ... and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, among many others."

The book contains a foreword essay The Camera's Posthuman Eye by the Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Žižek.

Many of the photographs reproduced in the book are sexually explicit—they depict murder victims who were raped or tortured before the killing.

Henry Bond, FHEA (born 13 June 1966) is an English writer, photographer, and visual artist.

Henry Bond was born in Forest Gate in East London in 1966.

He attended Goldsmiths at the University of London, graduating in 1988, from the Department of Art, with fellow alumni Angela Bulloch, Ian Davenport, Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume, and Michael Landy—each of whom was to participate in the YBA art scene.

Bond attended Middlesex University in Hendon studying for an MA in Psychoanalysis, where he was taught by Lacan scholar Bernard Burgoyne.

In 1990, with Sarah Lucas, Bond organised the art exhibition East Country Yard Show, which was influential in the formation and development of the Young British Artists movement; together with Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, and Liam Gillick, the two were "the earliest of the YBAs."

Bond's visual art tends to appropriation and pastiche; he has exhibited work made collaboratively with YBA artists including a photograph made with Sam Taylor-Wood and the Documents Series, made with Liam Gillick.

In the 1990s, Bond was a photojournalist working for British fashion, music, and youth culture magazine The Face. In 1998, his photobook of street fashions in London The Cult of the Street was published.

Bond began his street photography in the late-1990s and continued for approximately ten years concluding with his Interiors in 2005.

Monograph books of Bond's street photography include two published in Germany – Point and Shoot (Ostfildern: Cantz) and La vie quotidienne (Essen: 20/21).

The 274 photographs included in the book depict daily life in London in the mid-1990s.

Many of the photographs included in the book were originally taken by Bond whilst shooting commissioned features for the style and culture monthly The Face—during the period that the magazine was art directed by Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding, 1995–1999.

The book includes a foreword essay, "A Response to the Photographs," by psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader.

Characterizing his conception of street photography, in a 1998 interview, Bond said: "[For me street photography] is parallel to the psychoanalytic session, in that anything can be mentioned."

Bond's large book, The Cult of the Street, was published in 1998 by "posh West End gallery," Emily Tsingou Gallery, London.

His Point and Shoot (Cantz, 2000), explored the photo-genres of surveillance, voyeurism and paparazzi photojournalism.

In 2002, a group of large-scale printed examples from The Cult of the Street were included in the Barbican Centre survey Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion Since 1970 and these were shown again, in 2004, at the Museum of London, in an exhibition titled, The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk.

Reviewing the book for the British newspaper The Independent, fashion writer Tamsin Blanchard described the book as, "a rich social document of the way we dress—rather than the way fashion designers like to imagine we dress".

Bond was a research student at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham Spa between 2004 and 2007; he received a doctorate in 2007.

Bond teaches postgraduate photography, in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, at Kingston University; he is a Senior Lecturer in Photography, in the School of Fine Art.

In 2007, Bond completed his doctoral research; in 2009, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in Photography at Kingston University.

Describing his research, in a 2007 interview, Bond said, "the press reporter's access to a crime scene is restricted, it is literally blocked by the ubiquitous black and yellow tape emblazoned with the exhortation: CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS. The photographs that I have worked with are documents made in a place that the press photographer or reporter cannot go."

The critical reception of Lacan at the Scene was positive including reviewers commending the book as 'insightful', 'ground-breaking', 'audacious' and 'enthralling' – writing in the peer-reviewed journal The European Legacy, Viola Brisolin said, Lacan at the Scene is a brilliant, ground-breaking work that will appeal to cultural practitioners and theorists, and to everybody interested in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and visual studies." Writing in the peer-reviewed academic journal Philosophy of Photography'', Margaret Kinsman said "Bond's exploration ... reminds us of just how used to order we are and how shocking and easy its dissolution is ... his approach evokes a kind of aesthetic pleasure, which unsettles even as it satisfies."

Emily Nonko's review said, "Lacan at the Scene ultimately presents a complex dynamic between both psychoanalysis and medium of the camera, the way that photography permits the viewer to delve into both the murder's mind and the victim's corpse, the psychological as well as the corporeal."

Reviewing the book for Time Out New York Parul Sehgal said: "While Bond's interpretations occasionally strain credulity, his sensibility enthralls. His goal isn't police work per se, but to reveal how humble objects at the margins of crime scenes become powerfully allusive and lend themselves to a narrative."

Daniel Hourigan, writing for Metapsychology Online Reviews said, "for the vast majority of the discussions in the more applied third, fourth, and fifth chapters, Lacan at the Scene enjoys a lucid and precise execution. The early chapters help to bring together the theoretical, discursive, and political elements that make these later chapters capable of pursuing such a rigorous and insightful project."

In his Lacan at the Scene (2009), Bond made contributions to theoretical psychoanalysis and forensics.

Lacan at the Scene is a work of non-fiction by Bond, published in 2009 by MIT Press.

In July 2011, Bond's second book on the theory and philosophy of photography, The Gaze of the Lens, was self-published using the Kindle direct publishing format; the book consists of one hundred "concise observations and statements on photography."

In the book, Bond "activates, reconfigures, qualifies, and occasionally contradicts assertions made a diverse range of thinkers and practitioners including Rankin, Stieg Larsson, Antonioni, Charles Baudelaire, J.G. Ballard, Raymond Chandler, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Georg Hegel and Slavoj Žižek."

A characteristic of Bond's style is his pastiche and appropriation of familiar types of photograph, for example, writing in Frieze, Ben Seymour said, "Bond carries on producing images of a homogenised, outside-less culture in a perpetual present of consumption which may be just ahead of, or self-consciously behind – but always deliberately in between – the conventions of advertising, fashion, surveillance or family photographs."

Bond has also considered his work in relation to the dérive – literally: "drifting" – theorised by Guy Debord and the city walks of the flâneur or psychogeographer.