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Like Hearing Music – Only Faster
Helen Levitt, [Spider Girl] New York, 1980 Boris Savelev, Café Ion, Moscow, 1987 Saul Leiter, Snow, 1960 A very fine new exhibition at Somerset House in London (Cartier-Bresson : A Question of Colour,...
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Stray Thought from Paris Photo
The smallest photographs I have seen so far are contacts from 35mm negatives by Kertesz. They are perhaps the pictures which hold each viewer for longest. To see a little picture, you have to bend...
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Fox Talbot – Buy Now While Stocks Last
On 11 December the National Heritage Memorial Fund Trustees meet to discuss the possible acquisition by the Bodleian Library in Oxford of one of the last major archives of material by the British...
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Hodgson’s Choice
Happy New Year, and welcome back to these pages. I’ve never been a collector in practice, but the chance to grow a virtual collection was too good to miss. From 3rd January 2013, my series Hodgson’s...
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On the Strange Business of Mattering
I have been worrying away at the strange question of what matters in photographs. Here is one sketch, from an introduction I wrote to some of the Prix Pictet pictures : “There is a word in all of this...
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Media Space at The Science Museum
I don’t normally simply cross-post here from material I have written elsewhere.But here is a piece which might well have appeared first on these pages. I apologise to those who are subscribed to both...
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Photography Changes Everything
Unknown photographer. Kodak Snapshot of Family Standing in the Back of a Blue Station Wagon, 1962.National Museum of American History. “Most of the billions of pictures that are made with cameras...
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Talking With Jörg
Not long ago, two writers on photography found themselves in broad agreement when each approached some pretty fundamental questions at the core of photography in curiously similar terms. One wrote (and...
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Robert Brownjohn’s Street Level Series
Robert Brownjohn. From the Street Level series, 1961.Victoria & Albert Museum One of the pleasing things about being interested in photographs is that it is really perfectly OK to admit to not...
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Paola De Pietri and the Effort of Memory
Fay Godwin, Markerstone on the old road from London to Harlech, 1976 Years ago I formulated a serviceable description of the great British landscape photographer Fay Godwin as being largely interested...
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Caught in Transit: James Newton’s To / From
James Newton. From the To/From Series, 2012 James Newton. From the To/From Series, 2012 James Newton. From the To/From Series, 2012 James Newton. From the To/From Series, 2012 I liked these very much...
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John Ramsden – Everyday Life Continued
The independent Museum of East Asian Art in Bath, England, has a terrifying time-line on its website: “In recent history, Hanoi became the capital of Vietnam, when the North and South were reunited at...
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Harlequin Without His Mask
Rankin, Life Mask of Ian Rankin, 2013 I have been indifferent to Rankin. I’m not a follower of fashion, and have never had much interest in which brand he has favoured with his efficient but...
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30 and Out? The National Media Museum Under Threat
Work in Progress at the Media Space in London. The Media Space was planned to improve the visibility of one of the great photographic collections in the world.Photographed by Kate Elliott There is now...
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The Quizzical Chamois – Irving Penn’s Cranium Architecture
Chamois, Prague, 1986Copyright © by The Irving Penn Foundation A number of weeks ago I was asked by Hamiltons Gallery in London to write a catalogue text on a group of pictures by Irving Penn which are...
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Hey Charlie – Harry Cory Wright and the Localist Tradition
Harry Cory Wright.The Field, 2012. The story is really very simple. You either get it or you don’t. Harry Cory Wright’s mother died and the family decided they could not hold on to the house she had...
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A Near Approach to Greatness: Meet Victor Albert Prout
Victor Albert Prout.Pangbourne, Before 1862.Courtesy Hulton Archive. A few months ago I had again the pleasure of spending a day at the Hulton archive in West London, the former Hulton Picture Library,...
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Making It Up Is So Very Hard To Do
All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. Woody Allen, Deconstructing Harry It may be eccentric to draw attention to a show that has been open some time; all I...
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Three Cheers for Mr. Yo Kaminagai
Open platforms were a civilizing influence, too A little while ago I published here a little musing about the elegant human-scale double-ting that Paris buses make when in proximity with pedestrians....
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Ansel Adams in the Bath
I’m working on an exhibition of the work of Bernard Plossu and have been thinking about him and his work recently. He is a Frenchman, but thoroughly international in his outlook, his experience and his...
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