The Snapshot Collective: Spring Corner, New York, Melanie Einzig (2000)
A double-denim man walks into frame with a cockatoo perched on his shoulder. A Rottweiler skulks on the sidewalk, its eyes fixated to the right. A couple embrace for what seems like an eternity. Amidst them all, a lone character seemingly exhausted by life slumps dejectedly, the peak of his hat poin
Male Nude, Man Ray (1933)
I remember my primary school art teacher exclaiming with impatience over a rather wonky still life sketch of a shoe: “Where are these black lines you’re drawing? Do you really see them?” What she meant was that real things, made of matter, don’t appear with black felt-tip outlines. Man
Home. David Seymour (1948)
There is something fundamentally chilling about photographic context. With just a few words, a short conversation or fleeting caption, a snapshot can transcend far beyond what we ever imagined it was capable of representing. Consider the two pictures above, by David Seymour. It is quite extraordin
My Sister Says the Strangest Things
Press play to listen the accompanying music as you read… Where was I? On the top of the night bus, coming back home. Pretty empty, in fact basically empty, which usually makes me nervous – you know? – like remember that story that used to go round school about the kid who got ruffied by [&
Wonder, Full of Grace. Holly Andres (2009)
With their rich colour palettes and Hitchcock-esque, frankly histrionic lighting, Holly Andres’ carefully arranged images linger somewhere between tangible reality and make-believe motion picture. Citing her photography as “a journey into the nature of memory and female introspection&#
Creating Narratives to Change the Mood
On the first page of our story The future seemed so bright Then this thing turned out so evil I don’t know why I’m still surprised. Even angels have their wicked schemes And you take that to new extremes But you’ll always be my hero Even though you’ve lost your mind.
Francis Bacon, Primrose Hill. Bill Brandt (1963)
To a pedantic and dogmatic doctrinaire of photography, almost everything about Bill Brandt’s fêted snapshot is wrong. Categorically, indubitably wrong. Consider, for a moment, the warped composition of the picture. The central, yet uncomfortably off-kilter lamppost awkwardly brushes the very
Post-Post Truth
When the Oxford Dictionary announced ‘post truth’ as its word for 2016, media around the world were quick to link the term to the improbable political events of the year. Trump’s startling triumph in the American Presidential elections, the success of the Brexit movement in Britain and the ris
Dart and other meetings
A whimsical flick through the Faber and Faber Poetry Diary 2013 led to an encounter with Alice Oswald’s ‘Woods etc’. I remember reading that poem aloud several weeks later, during a lunchtime of poetry in the school library, and feeling the nerves of public speaking fizzle into the goosebumps