The latest issue , No 24, Autumn 2008, of 8 Magazine that thumped through my letter box recently is another bumper one with almost 180 pages, although thankfully for the health of the magazine, a few of them are adverts. It’s not cheap, but given its size and contents I think is reasonable value at £44 for the two issues per year (UK, including postage – see the web site for subscription details and sixty preview pages.)
It includes eight features with some fine photography; the oustanding work to my mind was Kathryn Cook‘s on the legacy of the Armenian genocide, but I also very much liked Alvaro Ybarra Zavala‘s pictures of the FARC in Colombia. Features by Murray Ballard, Ilan Godfrey, Michael Donald and Andrea Diefenbach also very much caught my eye.
Obviously I disagree with some of the opinions expressed by the writers, but that’s good too, and there are plenty of other things here to stimulate or entertain. It was good to read Chris Steele Perkins on press photographers including images by Don McPhee, Dennis Thorpe and Neal Libbert, and even more so to read his review of David Mellor‘s book and exhibition “No Such Thing as Society.”
The main problem with this book is, as he says, its sub-title “Photography in Britain, 1967-87” which it so clearly is not (and a similar criticism could be and was levelled at the great Tate “How We Are: Photographing Britain” last year, not least on this site.)
Mellor’s show and book has the same limitations as the two collections on which it was based, that of the Arts Council and the British Council, both missing out on most of what was happening in photography in the UK at the time (and probably at all times.) Steele Perkins makes clear that Mellor failed to consult people such as himself and David Hurn who were at the thick of things and the book misses out – as the collections did at the time – on a whole new flourishing of photography in this country, both in the commercial sector with colour supplements and foreign picture magazines, but also in the independent sector which emerged in this period with many photographers working without the benefit of recognition or funding from official bodies.
“No Such Thing as Society” is one of a number of attempts to rewrite the history of the era – an earlier example would be the ‘Camerawork Essays‘ – see the article by Paul Trevor and myself.