Last night at a small meeting of photographers, one of my friends came with a copy of the recent book, Burke + Norfolk (published by Dewi Lewis Publishing) and I was greatly impressed by it, truly a handsome volume, and some stories to tell about an event he had attended with Norfolk at Tate Modern where work from it is currently on show in the Level 2 gallery until 10 July 2011. A second show of the work opens at the Michael Hoppen gallery in Chelsea tomorrow (May 13) until 11 July 2011.
Much though I like Norfolk’s work, to me the major figure in the book is John Burke, whose life and work I wrote about at some length in a feature ‘Baker & Burke: Photographers of India‘ in 2004, the eighth of a series of features on 19th century photography in India unfortunately no longer on line, linking to work by Burke in the British Library collection and elsewhere, and as I made clear, very much dependent on the researches of Omar Khan published in History of Photography in Autumn 1997 as John Burke, Photo-Artist of the Raj and his 2002 book From Kashmir to Kabul, a generous amount of which is available on line in a Google preview, which unfortunately does not include what Khan describes as the only known photo of Burke himself.
I don’t own the book, but it would be interesting to see, if only because Norfolk on the Hoppen site is quoted as saying “There are no photographs of him. In a couple of sketches we see him from behind, but never his face; that has to be more than just reticence, surely?” There are two sketches in the preview pages, but I think the answer to the question is in any case not really. Many photographers dislike being on the “wrong” end of a camera, and of course photography was not the ubiquitous medium it is now. I have very few pictures of my own ancestors of that period, and unless people took care to caption and conserve them most images of the time are now anonymous. Of course, Burke’s son Willie was also a photographer – having started as his father’s assistant, and might perhaps have photographed his father, but the only images of his I know about are a few in the India Office collection and they would be unlikely to include the family snaps.
You can of course see more of Norfolk’s (and Burke’s) work from this project on Norfolk’s own web site, which also has a transcript of a conversation between him and Paul Lowe about the project, and you can see him at work (not with a wood and mahogany camera that he mentions in that piece but with something more modern and possibly digital) in Afghanistan in a Tate video on YouTube. Also worth listening to is a series of 5 short audio clips of him talking to Jim Casper on Lensculture, along with 30 of his pictures from his series Forensic Traces of War.
The book is also I think a good example of the kind of production values that “proper publishing” can achieve, the kind of volume that makes me think there is still something that they can do that Blurb and other publishing on demand can’t, or can’t yet, match.
