Back in the Land of the Living

Over 6 weeks since I last posted a blog largely due to ill health. Currently nursing a badly swollen leg that restricts the amount of walking I can do and therefore any photography. Mind you it has allowed me to do a lot of reading and I used a Fathers Day gift to acquire a couple of books relating to photography.

The first - "London Street Photography 1860 - 2010" (Dewi Lewis Publishing 2011) is a selection of photographs from the Museum of London Collection. Apart from a brief foreword and introduction and short biographies at the end of the book everything else is the photographs themselves that are accompanied by the photographers name and a the title. To my delight there are no explanations or interpretations of the images so one is left to make up one's own mind. As one would expect, given the time span of 150 years, there is a wide range of technical differences but the commonality of theme and that all contain people provides a coherence that allows for a sense of continuity. It is a book that allows you to browse again and again and each time discover something new.

The second - "The Genius of Photography" (Gerry Badger  Quadrille Publishing Paperback Edition) is linked to the BBC Television series of the same name. It is essentially a text book tracing the history of photography from the early days of Fox-Talbot and Daguerre to the present day. It is a book worthy of close reading and I would not wish to make comment at this stage as I am still reading it.