Popshot Magazine Issue 18 - A/W 2017

Light sits at the epicentre of our existence. Without it, life on this curious spinning globe would grind to a halt. It is what every living thing — whether plant, animal or human — relies upon. It’s what defines day and night, what differentiates one season from the next. But this is just one facet of the word. A scamper through the dictionary will produce a multitude of meanings covering illumination, enlightenment, weightlessness, discovery and delicateness. This is what makes it such a fascinating theme to explore. Light is rich in levels, loaded with positive connotations and ripe for exploring through the fecund minds of today’s literary new blood. What waits to unfurl before you in the thick pages of this issue are just a few of those explorations, expertly…

Five days have passed since I was a prisoner in those red brick walls, but every night I return there. In my night-time terrors I am back in the squalor of that cell, surrounded by anguished people, so cramped that you can barely sit comfortably, let alone lie down to sleep. Cells without heat in the harsh Seoul winters, or cool relief in the sweltering summers; breeding grounds for exhaustion, frostbite and death. During the night in these mountains, my spirit rises from my body hidden in the undergrowth, and floats back to Seodaemun prison to review its structure. Here is where the workshop is, where we produce clothes and paper. Here is the poplar, a mournful tree beside the execution hall, which prisoners cling to in their last haunted…

My mother and I walk leaf-quiet, her hands as delicate as birds as we pick berries from a blue spot of grass rising with heat in its summer madness of bees. Her garden roses open innocently to the fractured light to not threaten a butterfly carefully lifting its wings to worship in this temple of imagined seashells sharing whispers in the remaining shade. How alike they are the butterfly, a buoy guarding the open sea, each rose, a dying breath sweetly awaiting the darkness like mother, younger than trees then and in the moonlight when I dream back, her fingernails move softly as petals.…

This baby breathes the same air, made pure, heart beating its engine on the glass, thumb glued, miming a mother. White submarine on a bleached shore, name in a bottle hurling its cenotaph. Let the bell-buoys ring a safe passage and the sisters keep running and the long tower beacon not toll. See the little packet, halfway to her birthday, naval clamp anchored, bigger than her toes. From the Solent to the Towy we scan her horizon, watching the waves, willing her pound to multiply in the ringing fountain, and swim from the dark to the rock and light of candles lit and her mother’s haven.…

One hundred and thirty-seven of them needed to send a message. Tonight was their last chance. They clambered up the sand dunes, the slope slipping away beneath their tattered trainers and borrowed office shoes, to get closer to the night sky. They spread a pace or two apart, not ready to be pressed together again. Not yet. With unblinking eyes, they held one arm up and stretched as high as they could. They strained until their arms wavered and the small oblongs of light swayed. Seventy-eight were neon green, forty-three crystal white and sixteen desktop blue. Their arms and faces lit the same. A connection — reconnection — with humanity was all they wanted. That would ease the pain of the next few days. Someone just needed a signal. They…

1912 The others are at the penguin rookery, and Levick is alone. He bends forwards, and the halffrozen skins he wears crack as he reaches down to a wooden box where the photographic plates are stored. The smallest of sounds are amplified in this silent continent of white space and light. The sharp-edged glass rectangles grate against each other as he slides one out, and he can hear himself breathe as he crunches across the snow and loads it into the camera. Ponting taught him how to do this and Levick can now take a decent enough photograph. He leans in and presses his eye against the viewfinder. The bright white expanse of the Antarctic is before him. He picks out the details — distant hills and peaks, ice shelves…