In his calling-card self-portrait, Smiler isn’t smiling. With good reason; he has been assaulted, traditional British street violence under the protective rubric of festering resentment, ugly politics. National Front collision, 1980. Full face, front on, abraded. Presented as evidence. His friends and associates, fellow travellers in the art-squat-music, just-do-it community, testify to his charm, his affability. ‘Charismatic and beautiful,’ wrote Tim Banks.

Smiler was on the scene with his weaponised camera, but he came from another planet: Nairobi. He has an older identity, shaken off by his submerged London life. His passport says: Mark Cawson.

Cawson’s mother arrived here in 1939 on Kindertransport and was adopted by an English family. Her parents had been killed in Riga death camps. Cawson’s father worked with both Maasai and settlers, until he was washed off a bridge, drowned. The wild colonial boy is dumped, well before he has acquired his alias, at a Nigerian boarding school. ‘When Smiler’s stepfather went to visit him, he could not understand a word Smiler said,’ notes Neal Brown in Smiler, a telegrammatic book published by Sorika in conjunction with the photographer’s only mainstream exhibition, at the ICA. And then, on achieving his majority, a stroke of fortune, the young man, exiled in a shifting and shiftless community, inherits £2,000. He buys camera equipment. He lends Keith Allen £500.

Smiler is a spectre from a subcultural milieu. His outline feels as opaque and enigmatic as David Bowie – anaesthetised in cocaine reverie, finding himself two miles out of a nowhere town in Nicolas Roeg’s film of the Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth. ‘Human, but not properly, a man.’ A shivering spook with special interest in future-world camera technologies, privileged ways of seeing. Smiler, like Bowie, has come to ground: a forced landing in an airless environment in which he sustains himself by making fallible records on photographic paper. Records that threaten to melt the page if we don’t imprint them on our consciousness. The image journal is time travel.