STANLEY/BARKER by Peter Watkins

Books do not live in isolation. They gather on coffee tables and beside our beds, leaning into one another, becoming part of the quiet scaffolding of a life. Over time they begin to alter the weight of a room. Each season, we ask someone we admire to photograph our books where they truly reside, in the lived spaces that hold them.

Peter Watkins is an artist, educator, and writer from the United Kingdom, now based in Prague, where he lives with his partner Tereza Zelenkova. The pair met while studying at the Royal College of Art. Watkins approaches photography expansively, working across spatial, sculptural, and moving image installations. 

 

STANLEY BARKER: What was the first book that meant something to you?

Peter Watkins: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. It was published the year I was born and takes place during the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history. When I was nineteen, a crush bought me this book, and I read it and reread it without really knowing anything about the country. That I would eventually end up living in Prague is wild to me, and perhaps not entirely disconnected.

SB: How did you come to photography?

PW: Through a perfect storm of late night Channel 4 documentaries on photography and discovering that my school had a darkroom in the furthest, hardest to reach corner of the campus, somewhere near the rugby fields. I did not get along with school particularly well otherwise, but photography offered a way forward.

 

 

SB: How did you come to live where you are now?

PW: We moved to Prague during the madness of Brexit and before the isolation of Covid. I think the idea was that we were going to try it out for a year or two. That whole period made the world slow down for a moment, and somehow we stayed. It has now been almost eight years.

 

 

SB: How do books exist in your life now?

PW: Books are everywhere in our apartment. The centre of the flat has a large floor to ceiling built in bookshelf, but it has long been overfilled, so my desk has become a kind of three sided bunker of books. I often use our photobook collection as teaching tools, and that gives me enormous joy.