sidewaysEye

Choosing books wisely — fly-fishing books

The book that combines insights into the art of angling with general reflections about life is a book to savour. The book that accomplishes this with literary skill in a quiet understated way is a book to treasure. Over a lifetime of angling, as a boy in…

The photography of James Ravilious

In an era of self-referentiality a ‘quiet photograph’ (1) can have much to commend it. There is a…

Don’t just see Cartier-Bresson in terms of ‘decisive moments’. At bottom he was a psychological photographer.

Seeing in photographs something that thought itself cannot think.

Why are we so drawn to photographs of dogs?

“The history of the dog in art is inextricably bound to the history of the dog itself” [The Dog — 5000 years of the Dog in Art by Tamsin Pickeral], and just as in Painting, where dogs have increasingly been used to symbolise something other than Human…

Appreciating Karl Blossfeldt

Today, it is difficult to catch the sense of pioneering playfulness that existed at the dawn of Modernism. On…