about everything is an elegy for power brokers and mass-production, it was constructed from a years-worth of newspapers, reordered and reshaped. The titles of ancient dictators - high-ranking officials from Rome, Russia, the medieval church - replace our contemporary Presidents and celebrities. As the poem progresses, words are replaced with zeroes, holes. Verses are paralleled with Davenport’s photos and fragments of a sound score by Ben Gwilliam.

Design and type-setting is by artist Darren Marsh. The poem was devised by cross-column reading and can be read either vertically or horizontally, so that each verse has many possible paths through it. The images and the words vie for attention – as in news reportage – to make conflicts of meaning.

about everything is a coffee-table book from a now populated by medieval-minded politicians and religious leaders, machines that emulate life, breeding ever more products, news images that clone themselves and in the midst, people with their faces turned away.

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An edition of 1000 published 2009.

Supported by Arts Council England.

an apple pie product | isbn 978-0-9539367-7-5

All text © Philip Davenport
All images © Philip Davenport