The Domesday Book (The Critical Image)

This book combines poetry, photography and photomontage to create a narrative of our time as we approach the Millennium. Kennard's narrator is a wandering figure who arrives at the Millennium Dome as it is still under construction. In a fragmentary and hallucinatory fashion, the narrator flicks through images of the 20th Century as though seeing the images on a projector. This attempt to find a new form for the photographic book is a creative example of the The Critical Image series, which was commissioned to illustrate the links between photography and power, and to reveal how photography builds a sense of reality and promotes "national interests." As the foremost practitioner of photomontage, Kennard is responsible for expanding and furthering the subject of photography itself.