Weblog

I don’t remember, as a child, there being photographs of people on any walls or mantlepieces at home. Nor were there family photograph albums, or at least, none that I knew about. But what there was was a number of thin albums of Victorian and Edwardian photographs of classes at the local primary school, and…

Jonathan Raban’s travel memoir of the Montana prairies, Bad Land: An American Romance (1996), makes brilliant use of an aside into photographic history to make a point about the nature of the landscape. He begins by relating his own difficulties with his Pentax Zoom 105, whose widest focal length of 38mm had been more than…

One of the grand narratives of the story of European photography between the wars is that of the westward journey taken by so many of the great practitioners, from Hungary, Austria and Poland, to Berlin, first, and then, as the forces driving the journey catch up with them, on to Amsterdam and to Paris. Somehow…

There came a point when I’d seen sufficient historical photographs to be able to date them instantly within a decade or so from the emulsion of the print rather than by any chronological giveaway in the image from fashion or cars. Calotypes of the 1840s look as if God had dimmed the sun, for instance,…

The careers of visual artists boil down to almost nothing – a handful of images imperfectly remembered, and nothing left at all of the moment of their creation. It’s true even of a comparative modern like Robert Capa. Capa’s intense working career was twenty one years long, stretching from his encounter with Trotsky at the…

I am starting this Weblog in August 2023 as a place for “working with the garage door up” – a kind of public notebook about what I’m currently thinking about and working on. The phrase is Andy Matuschak’s and relates to the broader idea of the Digital Garden as discussed by Maggie Appleton. As such…