In the mid-1980s documentary film maker, photographer and teacher Lou Stoumen was commissioned to produce a series of photographs that would accompany Raymond Chandler’s classic, archetype 1930s detective fiction book The Big Sleep.

The resulting photographs were intended to look like stills from a film of the book and the process of creating them shared a number of similar aspects with that of film making; casting, location scouting and so forth.

What he produced he called “a paper movie”.

In the book’s Photographer’s Note, Lou Stoumen talks about how he was a street photographer (he photographed New York’s Times Square for 45 years – work that was published by Aperture), that his camera eye eschewed fiction and that he had always though that there in the streets was where visual truth manifests itself.

However, he came to realise that it didn’t matter that the book was fiction, that truth was truth even in costume.

In a way the finished product reminded me of the staged mod/scooter boy photographs that accompany The Who’s Quadrophenia album; although a photographic fiction, they seem like a definitive, minds eye observation of the spirit of the subculture from which they sprung.

I think the Lou Stoumen accompanied version of The Big Sleep quietly wandered into my mind at a pivotal, transitional point of my own Afterhours work. Not so much the photographs themselves, as the intention of creating a film on paper.

It helped move my own Afterhours work towards where I had always wanted to be; not so much a document of particular scene or subculture, more a reflection of the filmic Soho noir that played behind my eyes, an expression of my own particular Soho of the mind.

Peruse the book here.

View a selection of Lou Stoumen’s other work at Luminous Lint.