Photography

Do you think you can tell things about writers from the way they look in a painting or photograph? A more demanding test: from their books can you predict how authors look? It sounds unlikely, yet, upon seeing a photograph of an author, we do find ourselves exclaiming: ‘That’s not how I thought he’d look!’ In Portrait of the Writer there are 250 photographs with a potted biography opposite each. ‘In the best instances,’ says Goffredo Fofi in the foreword, ‘we can see in the photograph that the writer (although not just the writer) has discovered something about himself or herself that he or she was unaware of or had not reflected upon sufficiently.’ Can we, though? Take E.E.

This absorbing book is — in both format and content — a much expanded follow-up to the same author’s very successful pictorial anthology Lost London of 2010. It replicates some of the photographs that appeared there and contains many new ones, all in captivating detail. The photographs are ones of record. There is little sense of artful composition or a striving for special effects. Many are of great beauty in their direct simplicity, as though the images were breathed onto the page with no human intervention.

The telephone rang and it was Mark Amory, literary editor of this magazine. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he asked me to review Beautiful Chickens. I said yes at once. I already had a copy of the book, given me by the staff at Heywood Hill as a Christmas present, so I knew the fun I was letting myself in for. The chickens are beautiful indeed. The Frizzle, for instance — a spoilt lady coming out of the hairdressers where they have forgotten to comb out her curls — is truly surreal. But not as surreal as what I overheard a woman telling a friend at the Reading Poultry Show many years ago, long before political correctness had been invented: ‘I put my little Japs in the bath’.

I don’t remember who it was who said ‘memory is genius’, but they were on to something. I’m not sure, either, whether they meant genius in the original sense of ‘animating spirit’ — i.e. memory as constitutive of personality — or in the modern one of ‘brilliance’. But both seem to apply equally well to the peculiar talents of Geoff Dyer. He seems to have a photographic memory; and that’s not a figure of speech. He can remember photographs in an extraordinary way, as witness the opening essays in this collection, in which he spiels on photographers including Alec Soth, Jacob Holdt, Richard Avedon and Martin Parr.

A memorable image by André Kertész shows a steam train passing over a high viaduct behind a row of peeling French houses next to a demolition site while a man in a suit and hat with his back to the train walks across the foreground, a mysterious painting-shaped item wrapped in newspaper under one arm. It is a moment caught. The viewer, naturally, tries to connect the disparate elements. And to us it is not merely a moment but a moment in a place, from the past — when steam trains chuffed and men wore hats with suits — in this case 1928 at Meudon, a Parisian suburb. In this way, photography attains the highest form of art to which painters aspired in post-Renaissance theory: that of history painting.

This book is a work of art by an artistic photographer. It deals mainly with a large minority of the world’s trees whose bark, as the trunk expands, peels off in pretty patterns: snake-bark maples, arbutuses and the like, as well as the familiar London plane. The author has travelled all over the world to photograph these wondrous barks. He also includes some trees whose bark stretches, like white poplar, as well as palms whose trunks are covered in leaf-bases rather than bark, bamboos which are really giant grasses, banana-plants which are not trees, and tree-ferns. He even has one example of that mysterious hard layer that does the duty of bark on the insides of hollow trees. In the real world there is much more to bark than this.

If you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there. Berrin Torolsan’s informative text explores the inspiration behind such gems as a classical wooden yali on the Bosphorus; a rustic chalet in the mountains; a tea-planters mansion on the Black Sea; a Cappadocian cave-dwelling, with beautifully hewn piers and arches.