A few weeks ago (in Bleeding London – re-Inventing Streetview?) I wrote about one widely quoted legend that had become accepted as fact despite it having little or no basis, that of Phyllis Pearsall walking the streets eighteen hours a day for several years in the 1930s to produce London’s first street atlas, the A-Z. It’s a story you can still read on Wikipedia, referencing two apparently unimpeachable sources, her New York Times obit and the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography. But the Wikipedia article (at least now – it was last modified on 31 May 2014 at 05:39.) also contains more accurate information about how the A-Z was put together as well as links to sites which disprove some of the more extravagant claims.
from ‘1989’
Although it linked to photographic issues, including my own personal journey in photography (and I have walked more than the 3,000 miles on London streets she was alleged to have done, though over more than thirty years) and gave a pretext for sharing of few of the images of London I’ve taken, Pearsall’s was not a photographic story. But many of the legends of photography are just that, with only a tenuous connection to the facts, with some photographers being at least as good story-tellers in words as they are with images. While photographs are rooted in the facts of the situation, there is little to anchor the stories that can be constructed around them.
from ‘1989’
The first book I brought out on Blurb a few years ago was a deliberate exploration of some of these issues and of how we interpret or construct the world we see and photograph through stories and other images. ‘1989’ is a series of carefully chosen images taken in 1989 but written in 2005-6 for a web site (and soon after featured on this blog when that site folded and I put it in a corner of my own), then shown as an exhibition in a documentary festival before finally being put into a small book, later re-issued with minor corrections and an ISBN – and in a PDF version. There is a preview of around half the book on Blurb.
In a recent post Ends and Odds Yet Again on Photocritic International which began my train of thought. A D Coleman busts one legend about Steve Martin and Diane Arbus and breaks the spell over Pentti Sammallahti’s mystical relationship to dogs, as well as taking a critical look at ‘Selfies with the Dead‘, ending with a link to a dramatised version of a truly surreal transcript from the Ohio Supreme Court. As ever, Coleman’s posts are stimulating.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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