A Rabbit's Foot has published a feature-length interview with the London photography dealer Michael Hoppen on Francis Bacon's photographic archive, headlined under his line "The chaos was important."

A Rabbit's Foot publishes slowly and at length. It has built a back catalogue around longer reads on photography's intersection with painting, fashion, music and the moving image, and it does not chase the news cycle. The Bacon conversation lands squarely inside that remit: painter's archive, photographer's eye.

Bacon's reliance on photographic source material is the most studied aspect of his working method outside his brushwork. His canvases fed on Eadweard Muybridge's locomotion plates, John Deakin's 1960s Soho portraits, cuttings from medical atlases, sports weeklies and tabloid crime pages — and on a substantial private library of prints the artist handled, annotated, re-pinned and discarded across years. The photographs were not reference in the textbook sense. They sat in the studio as substrates the eye could browse; tools for the next canvas, prone to loss and retrieval.

That framing matters now because two parallel markets have formed around Bacon:

• The paintings market, comparatively settled through the headline sales of the past fifteen years.
• The photographs market, smaller, more erratic, and less anchored by formal provenance. Prints passed through assistants, friends and gallerists while Bacon was alive, and they continue to surface in private hands and at auction without the paper trails that track the canvases.

Hoppen's "chaos was important" is therefore a position rather than an aperçu. Treating an artist's working archive as a tool — rather than as a final catalogue — means prints bear the marks of use: pin holes, grease, transfers of pigment from Bacon's brushes, taped corners, scribbled references to a painting in progress. The curator's or dealer's task becomes one of preserving disorder, not imposing tidied institutional order. That posture is unusual from someone whose daily business depends on clean provenance and presentable condition.

The institutional picture has tilted the other way. The major 2008 retrospective at Tate Modern, curated by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, treated Bacon's source material explicitly, devoting display space to printed matter and contact sheets as evidence of process. Estate foundations working since the painter's death in 1992 have continued to stabilise, catalogue and selectively exhibit portions of the photographic library, and a small academic literature now treats the archive as a corpus in its own right.

Hoppen's intervention, read inside that trajectory, is a quiet defence of entropy. A dealer's argument for keeping an artist's chaos visible runs against the curatorial grain. It places the photograph — even the working photograph — at the centre of the picture: an artefact in its own right, not a footnote to a finished canvas.

A Rabbit's Foot does not publish on a fixed schedule, and the editors tend to bring feature pieces of this length online rather than as news copy. Readers interested in Bacon's photographic estate should expect the full interview, image plates and working-notes sidebar in the magazine's standard format.

What this conversation is heading toward, the publication's editorial record suggests, is a slower, object-first criticism of artist-archives more generally. Photography treated as a working medium rather than documentation. Future editions of A Rabbit's Foot will likely continue that line — and may find, in studios from the postwar period to the present, archives that resist tidying as productively as Bacon's did.