Book review – photography

Hilly, wife of Kingsley Amis, in Swansea

Larkin’s misty parks and moors — in all their lacerating beauty

12 December 2015 9:00 am

When Philip Larkin went up to St John’s College, Oxford, in the early 1940s, he found himself in a world…

The surreal beauty of Soviet bus stops

12 September 2015 9:00 am

The Soviet Union was a nation of bus stops. Cars were hard to come by, so a vast public transport…

Illusions of grandeur: Roy Strong as a Stuart king (Charles I, after Sir Anthony Van Dyck)

Camp carnival: Roy Strong’s 80th birthday pageant

1 August 2015 9:00 am

For his 75th birthday, Sir Roy Strong gave himself a personal trainer. For his 80th, he has commissioned a book…

Drummers at a graveside wear white, based on Ethiopian orthodox funeral traditions

Death wears bling: the glory of London’s Caribbean funerals

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic…

Cecil Beaton, self-portrait, 1936

Cecil Beaton, the bitch

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Beaton was the great inventor. Apart from inventing not only himself but his look, his voice, his persona and a…

The jilted bride

Charles Saatchi’s new book of photos makes me feel sick

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking…

‘Flying Rock’

Floating bodies, seeing hands, rippling skies - is Jerry Uelsmann’s photomontage a tragic dead-end?

30 August 2014 9:00 am

An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel…

Charles Saatchi's photo play

23 November 2013 9:00 am

The game that Charles Saatchi plays in The Naked Eye is to find photographs of subjects that look surprisingly like…