Sunday 9 December 2018

Text & photographs: 3 books



Books in which text speaks to photographs and vice versa: not a new thing, but here’s a recent cluster.

A Stranger’s Pose by Emmanuel Iduma. Published by Cassava Republic Press; foreword by Teju Cole. Journeys across African cities ‘from Dakar to Douala, Bamako to Benin, Khartoum to Casablanca’; memories, encounters, meditations on migration and the meaning of images; a stunning selection of black-and-white photos by African photographers, some of them anonymous, some from archives. This is a deeply moving and completely brilliant book.

Blush. Texts by Jack Robinson – with citations from a range of fiction and non-fiction – and colour photographs by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas – including many of her own artwork – investigate the cultural and social history of the blush from the late 18th century to the present day. Published by CBe (and if you can’t think of what to buy X or Y or even Z for Christmas, here’s your answer: go to the website page and press the ‘buy now’ button).

Sottoripa. Poems by Julian Stannard set in Genoa selected from his books from 2001 to What were you thinking? (CBe, 2016); a bilingual English/Italian edition, with excellent black-and-white photographs of Genoa. Published by Il Canetto Editore, Genoa. Many of these poems I've read before; in this new setting they appear as new.

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