New & Forthcoming
This is the first update on this website since February 2020 and much changed just after that. While a lot of work took place during lockdown, little of it was made public. But now there are some new items to add here.
The largest is the slideshow The Chartists in Newport, a collection of old and new pictures showing the memorials in the city to the Chartist Uprising of 1839. Now installed on the Newport Rising website, there are links here under ‘Visual Culture’ and ‘Photoworks’. The picture on the right was taken at the Chartist memorial outside St Woolos Cathedral on the evening of November 4 2021.
A few writings appear here for the first time: reviews of an exhibition of Helen Levitt’s work and Kim Sichel’s book Making Strange. I am also very pleased to have permission to include a PDF of the essay ‘Things as They Are’ from A Companion to Photography (2020), an extended summary of my thoughts on documentary photography. And indeed, all these texts can be found in that section: ‘Documentary’.
In addition, the website has had a thorough spring cleaning and there are a number of other additions and changes, including some new links. In particular, I have added sequences to the section ‘Uncollected’, all from a long term photo project Literary Britain Revisited.
Finally, looking forward, there are several works in progress being developed. The largest is a book-length study of the work of Frederick Sommer, which I am co-authoring with Hazel Donkin. It has been commissioned by Routledge, but will taken another two or three years to complete.
