i will pay to make it bigger

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella and photobook by poet and visual artist Ahren Warner. Through text and image, the book searches for a way through a network of related subjects, ideas and feelings: the consumption of pleasure, freedom and hedonism; the purchase of feeling; the construction of (particularly male) identity as a cultural product, and the fragility of that construction; the fine, blurry lines between acquisition, enjoyment, love and desire, and the way any and all of these can be used to fill holes in our selves, even if only momentarily, and even if destructively.

The book is also a work of both autofiction and docufiction. The photographs were produced during three months documenting ‘party hostels’ in Thailand. Yet, for all that these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of ‘moments’, they are in fact quite painstakingly constructed: almost always beginning their lives as several still frames from film footage which have been composited and processed at length to reintroduce an artificial sense of movement, to become both a record of movement and hedonism, and a fictionalised artefact of impulse, drive and motion, that speaks directly, and on a level of materiality, to the concerns of the novella, whilst never illustrating, and only very rarely interacting directly, with the text itself.