The band were knackered after travelling on an overnight ferry, I met them at the MTV Studios Camden. Totally knackered and stir crazy in the studio I suggested a walk and a few frames topped off with a coffee / beer in that Mexican canteen that was on Jamestown Road

I think this was taken by John Miles, but does anyone know what for? I found some similar ones on here before but I don't remember if anything was said about them.

There’s a well-known photograph of Polly Harvey showing her standing in a room which is unremarkable at first glance but somehow slightly threatening – made the more so by the large spider on a table in the foreground, pooled in the light from a lamp. It’s from early on in her career – it could be from 1991 and is certainly no later than 1992. She doesn’t look quite as skinny as she became a bit after that. I knew that the photo had been taken by a gentleman called John Miles, and that he’d used PJ as a model a few years later as well: in one image (‘Man and Woman’) he dresses her in a floaty white dress anticipating her White Chalk-era outfits, and also in a man’s black suit which hangs off her, and has her hold hands with herself in an otherworldly dance. I utilised another of the ‘spider’ photos when talking here about Polly’s first album, Dry: it must be John Miles’s, though you can’t find it attributed anywhere.

It was only very recently that I looked at Mr Miles’s website and discovered he was based in Dorset; I thought I might buy his book, Tumulus. I have to confess I gibbed a bit at the price it would have taken to import it from the publisher in the US, but found a second-hand copy on Abebooks, which turned out, when it arrived, to be ex-library stock from Dorchester, rather a nice synchronicity. There’s an independent film-maker called Sarah Miles a couple of whose productions PJH had taken part in; she plays a dangerously thin bunny girl in one, and in another, an inconclusive tale about two teenage Japanese girls who unaccountably find themselves going to school in Lyme Regis, she’s what appears to be a white-draped Japanese ghost. I’d speculated whether John Miles might be related to Sarah, and so it turned out: he’s her father. I’d wondered whether Ms Miles had met Ms Harvey at art college, but as she’s about ten years older that’s not very likely. Again, although John Miles taught at Beaminster Secondary School where Polly was a pupil, he’d left long before then, so that can’t be the connection, either. In his description of how the ‘Spider’ photo came about, he merely says that he planned to do it after his son gave him the spider in a case, and she sort of turned up at the right time, which I don’t quite believe. He says nothing at all in explanation of how David bloody Hockney is in one of the other shots.

It’s a peculiar book, it turns out. In the title photo (one of the ones Mr Miles is proudest of in his career, he says) a little girl looks mischievously – sinisterly – off to the right, the eponymous burial mound behind her, while on the left hand side is what seems to be a cupboard door with a mirror reflecting two older figures, one of them a woman whose face is obscured. There’s not much obvious Dorset material, though apparently the great majority of the photos were taken close to Mr Miles’s base in Loders – one snap of a wedding party shows Loders church, while another has a young girl framed against the toothy ruins of Sherborne Old Castle, just poking over the grass behind her head. The tumulus itself could be anywhere, really. A lot of the photos are collages, compiled from multiple exposures; many have an unsettlingly dark humour to them, and in most you have no idea what might be going on. The Loders wedding is possibly the only one that’s pure reportage, recording a fleeting moment in local life. Or is it? Having looked through the others you become increasingly unsure of anything. Given that the images in this collection were taken over a long while, you start to wonder whether this adult is the same as this child with the addition of 15 to 20 years. It’s a world recognisably our own, yet skewed and unfamiliar: morbid would not be an unreasonable word. Mr Miles favours locations which increase the sense of breakdown in normality, rubbish-strewn sheds, unkempt rooms, barns with holes in walls and roofs – the Other Dorset, maybe, the world behind the mirror. Ms H seems at home here.(...)

it;'s so strange to read about oneself, and then a feeling of wanting to scream a truth.. but then again the internet is a sea of possilibity and impossibilty. My experience working with P J Harvey was by chance, our Mother's were friends, I remember Eva proudly producing all her cuttings of Polly every single note carefully documented. Yes the inconclusive tale was filmed over a weekend. I asked Polly to compose an otherworldly version of the three degrees When will I see you again and the wonderful John Parish produced it.
I wanted to make a Thomas Hardy inspired Western and Polly and I corresponded about it with me loving the return of the native, Polly said she'd never read Hardy before going all Hardyesque.
Whose dorset? It's so tempting to simply publish a truth but feels wanton.

Good heavens, I must apologise for not having noticed this comment until now! I hope you might notice this reply eventually. Thank you for taking the trouble to contribute. I adore Amaeru Fallout, and if you could ever persuade PJH to revive the Hardy project we would all be overjoyed ... If I've said anything inaccurate, do let me know, I will be happy to change it.

and also in a man’s black suit which hangs off her, and has her hold hands with herself in an otherworldly dance.

This was the picture

I did a reverse image search of this picture and found this page, with a larger version of this picture plus 3 more.

Curious that third one is not from the same session tho, its the one my profil pic comes from

It's the same spider on the same table so I would think that it is from the same session. This account, The Boy Who Can, is still active, but clearly they are not the photographer. I wonder where they came from originally?

There’s a well-known photograph of Polly Harvey showing her standing in a room which is unremarkable at first glance but somehow slightly threatening – made the more so by the large spider on a table in the foreground, pooled in the light from a lamp. It’s from early on in her career – it could be from 1991 and is certainly no later than 1992. She doesn’t look quite as skinny as she became a bit after that. I knew that the photo had been taken by a gentleman called John Miles