SIMON CRUMP, My Six Miracles & Other Works, Galerie d'art contemporain du Centre Saint-Vincent, 1992

Produced for a 1992 show at a municipal gallery outside Paris, bilingual and modest in format, it records collages up to two by four metres: skeletons, repeated photographic fragments, a triptych called Elvis Victims built from layered imagery so dense the artist has to stand beside it in the installation shots just to give it scale. Eight years before he became known for anything else, Crump was already building enormous, obsessive, funny-because-it's-horrifying monuments to Presley — a decade before My Elvis Blackout (Bloomsbury, 2000) turned the same fixation into the composite novel that made his name: Elvis reimagined as psychotic, cruel, and — against all reason — sympathetic.

He almost drowned a man dressed as Elvis in a swimming pool. That's the anecdote Simon Crump tells about the end of his career as a visual artist — trying to photograph a local Elvis impersonator in the deep end, nearly killing them both, ruining a Hasselblad in the process. What came next was worse: he bought a dead horse from a Derbyshire knacker's yard, hauled it back to his studio on a trailer, and discovered that horses are actually quite a lot bigger than you think. The great work never got made. Crump gave up photography and started writing instead.

This catalogue documents the practice he was about to abandon — and Elvis is already in it.

The biography page, set in 1992, has no idea any of that is coming. Philosophy at Sheffield. An MA in Art & Design at Sheffield City Polytechnic. Teaching photography at Humberside. Shortlisted for the Fox Talbot Prize in 1989. A commission for the Photographers' Gallery in 1990. Nothing here anticipates a novelist — which is exactly the point. This is Crump before the redirection, filed under the wrong profession, made by people with no reason to expect the swerve.

16.5 × 24 cm. 30 pages. Bilingual French/English exhibition catalogue; illustrated throughout in colour and black-and-white; green card wrappers.