Automatic Smoke Signals

About the Book

Automatic Smoke Signals is a book of surrealist smoke photography (smoke art), captured digitally, and positioned alongside poetic texts that interpret the images playfully, erotically, and ultimately, generating a modern mythology which only begins to connect the seemingly disparate images via a febrile thread of mad love: this collection of visions from smoke is sure to challenge and enhance the modern sensibility and will capitvate dreamers, poets and anyone else who dares to want a better world. More than 40 full-sized photos, each with accompanying text.

Reviews:

In the author’s own words, Automatic Smoke Signals is “not really an art book, but a cycle of images representing an interpretive delirium.” At times reminiscent of Matta’s paintings, these photographic documents of natural phenomena invite us into the mystery of transient forms caused by the interplay of fire and air. Bragg’s surrational and often humorous captions accompany each image, and suggest to the reader elements of a personal mythology.

If it’s occasionally challenging to decipher the smoke in the manner of the text, other images immediately leap out, in a convulsive shock of recognition. The reader may then be pleased to find their discovery confirmed in Bragg’s poetic narratives. The photographer is aware that these images celebrating mad love are open to interpretation. The scenes and creatures of chance brought to life in a flash of light summon laughter and a new way of seeing as they unfold into the air of surprised revelation..

– MK Shibek



Eric Bragg lifts the veil of the marvelous and reveals a dance of smoke that at times seethes with turmoil and at others rolls and twists with a sensual eroticism. A dance moved by the whim of the breezes that caress it. Like tiny fingers of translucent silk, smoke is evasive, and mysterious, weaving a story of hidden shadows that lurk just beyond the threshold of our sight. Eric’s “Automatic Smoke Signals” is a hallucinatory journey into the marvelous where what we see changes from moment to moment, from second to second, where what we perceive challenges us to look again on what will never be the same. The polymorphic landscapes and the inhabitants that live there are continuously merging and separating like lovers. The poetic texts accompanying the photographs are lucid, sensual and every bit as elusive as the smoke itself. This is not a one time journey into the marvelous, but an invitation to explore its ever changing boundaries.

– Ribitch



With beautiful pictures and stirring text, Bragg leads the reader on a marvelous journey into the creatures and stories hiding within and birthed by smoke. This wonderfully creative adventure leaves the viewer inspired to revisit the pictures and reinterpret them for one´s self. An impressively infectious influence.

Lady Hannah Cadaver
– [a] Melbourne surrealist collective

About the Author