Darren Almond (*1971) is without doubt one of the outstand­ing English contemporary artists.

The title of the book and exhibition is derived from the large-format ­Nocturnes (2004–2010) featuring photographs of moonlit landscapes using long exposure times which evoke Romantic landscapes in their European variants and classical Japanese and Chinese landscape painting in their Asiatic motifs. The absence of shadows in these photographs is visible testimony to a seemingly frozen time and whose light doesn’t actually ­illuminate the scenes as such, but instead hangs upon the open sur­faces rather like an emanation from the landscape, a fleeting substance. Thus these photographs can be situated in the place where painting and photography, perception and imagination intersect.

At the point where the photographs allow time to become the yardstick of their own perfect genesis, the artist duly formulates the experience of time as an endless ­repetition of abrasive and lengthy spiritual retreats in his powerful video piece Sometimes Still (2010). Darren Almond, running at a pace with his camera, was allowed ­accompany a Buddhist Ten-dai novitiate monk on a thirty kilo­metre nocturnal cross-country run through forests alongside the holy mountain Hiei – an ascetic and ­simultaneously physical and spiritual exercise of the utmost rigour, which the novitiate had to perform 1,000 times over a period of seven years. In the course of this he had to stop at appointed places and utter prayers, which he then ­rounded off with two handclaps.

The special nature of this publi­cation in cassette form relates to the specific execution of individ­ual works, sometimes as a concertina folder or a simple booklet. Thus all of the photographs in the exhibition are adequately covered and the film receives a form of ­publication which can been ­viewed in particular as a mirror of the artist’s experiences.