Key Sentence:
- Austin Collings spent five years searching the dusty attic of Charles Gordon Montgomery.
- Collecting pictures of the city of Manchester, its residents, and their mutual friend, Mark E. Smith.
In the mid-1970s, a man named Mental Hospital Photographs Charles Gordon ‘Don’ Montgomery cycled from Croydon to Prestwich for two days. After a group of strangers in a pub asked him to move there with them. The 20-year-old, born in Belfast, has just returned from a hitchhiking tour of Europe, searching for his next adventure.
By the end of the decade, Don had found his home. He spent his evenings at the local pub, playing pool and smoking marijuana, and his days at the Mental Hospital in Prestwich. Where he worked as a “kettle.” When the kettle was running, Don did nothing but read, acidify.
And wander the halls, photographing the galleries, the staff, and the strange daily lives of the patients at the hospital.
These photographs – taken over 30 years from 1979 to 1996 – fill the last five years of writer Austin Collings’ life. After meeting Don in 2005 (mutual friend Mark E. Smith well represented the pair), Collings was intrigued by his delicate photographic portraits of past lives: scenes from the hospital past. Footage showing actual incidents of black people performing between the locals and the seemingly invisible world of Don.
Before and after Don’s death in 2016, Collings visited his home looking for photos of Don happily missing in his dusty attic, under his mattress, and in his old garbage bags. The images discovered by an unidentified photographer are the subject of Collings’ new book. The Fox of God, Mental Hospital Photographs which combines Don’s photos with retellings of the old life, love of freedom, and ordinary life of a former cauldron.
“He’s partly confused by my love for his job,” Collings said in bewilderment. “For him, work is included in the garbage bag. This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like God’s fox – he will.
He understood her judgment. But he also wanted to remain invisible. “
As seen in The Fox of God, Don’s image provides a unique and warm appearance of the elderly patients at Prestwich Mental Hospital as they lie recklessly on the grounds of the asylum, embracing each other in the open air in armchairs and around the hospital halls. The long one. They called home. Don also caught townspeople and local pubs in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s and froze them forever.
Ahead of the book’s release on September 20, you can read an excerpt from The Fox of God below, followed by a Q&A from Austin Collings, who talks about what Don is like, why he’s drawn to his work, and how his photos at Prestwich Psychiatry describe home. Sick and its inhabitants with optimistic tenderness.