Eh Joe

Tilson
Pop to Present 
Royal Academy of Arts
London, 2002

I've posted some of these before but this catalogue has better images and the work still looks mighty fine.

Good Fortune

A Fortunate Man
John Berger and Jean Mohr (photographer)
Allan Lane, 1967
(this cover Penguin, 1969)

A wonderful collaboration between writer John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr, observing the life of an English country doctor in a small rural community in the mid-1960s. Berger's reportage and left-leaning social commentary is concise, admiring the many qualities of the doctor and the village in which he works, while acknowledging their limitations and the problems they face in a changing world.

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr worked with Berger on at least three further books, him imagery capturing the small-scale, timeless rustic beauty of the landscape, and achieving an intimacy with the locals that echoes their close relationship with their doctor. This is the same world inhabited by the lyrical documentaries 'Requiem for a Village' and 'The Moon and the Sledgehammer', capturing the end of an age as old country practices were dying out in the face of economic pressures and rapid social and technological changes.

In fact, this volume is almost a documentary film in a book. The design layout gives generous space to images and has a carefully considered composition of word and image. This truly is a photobook, images complimenting text and also acting in place of words when an image better communicates a point. 

One can hear Berger's voice as narrator and Mohr's photography is perfect in revealing the locale and the relationship and emotions of the doctor and his patients. Contemporary NHS managers would be advised to read this book and consider the deeper role of rural GPs within the society they care for.

They don't make faces like these any more.

It is noted in the book that the doctor, John Sassall, was prone to periodic deep depression, plagued by self-doubt and worries about his inadequacy and inability to help his fellow man. Fifteen years after the book's publication Sassall shot himself, an act which Berger suggests makes the tone of the book not darker but more mysterious. Thanks to Berger and Mohr, both current members of the medical profession and general reader alike will still empathize with the doctor's predicament.

Live BergerFest event this week at the Royal College of Art.

Finders Keepers

Joseph's Yard
Charles Keeping
OUP, 1969

A fine example of Keeping's visionary psychedelic illustrated children's books.

Bizarro World

Bizarre
compiled by Barry Humphries
London, Elek Books, 1965

Yes, it is the same Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everidge, with a little help from John Wells and Willie Rushton from the Private Eye gang. A miscellany of freaks, peccadilloes and peculiar essays and poetry.

Paradise Regained

A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55
David Mellor
Lund Humphries, 1987

This fascinating catalogue from an exhibition at the Barbican, London, was the first to re-examine the Neo-Romantic movement, which dominated British art in the post-war years. It's interesting to see which artists have sustained a recognised profile, and which have disappeared into the margins. Mellor draws together many interesting themes, not least an early connection between surrealism, science fiction and pagan myth in the work of Graham Sutherland.

 

It is also enlightening to see the work of Gerald Wilde, a decidedly non-conformist painter who saw himself in the novel The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey and took on the persona of the fictional artist Gully Jimson.

The film adaptation, starring Alec Guinness (to whom Wilde bore a strange resemblance), is second only to Hancock's The Rebel in the canon of essential British art films. Wilde is sadly almost forgotten now. The few works available online show an energy and vision that would suggest an exhibition of his paintings is long overdue.

Early Steadman

A Little Treasury of Limericks Fair and Foul
John Letts
Illustrated by Ralph Steadman
London, Pan, 1971