I chaired a talk last night organised by the Cambridge Literary Festival in the Fitzwilliam Museum in which the Scottish photographer, Norman McBeath, talked with Edmund de Waal about their publishing project, Perdendosi, in which McBeath documented the appearance of dying leaves in Edinburgh during lockdown in beautiful, austere, classical images and then approached de Waal if he would consider providing text to accompany them. De Waal was himself alone in his studio in West Norwood and has written evocative short prose poems about aspects of mortality and decay which work alongside the images in an effective reciprocal way. He then introduced the project to Daphne Astor who has created a small press based outside Cambridge, The Hazel Press, which mainly publishes poetry. The photographs are displayed in the ground floor ceramics galleries. And the book is available either online, or from the London Review Bookshop or John Sandoe, or up until Christmas in the Gagosian pop-up shop in the Burlington Arcade. It’s an ideal Christmas present !

The latest on the Whitechapel Bell Foundry has appeared online (see below, but it may be behind a paywall). Our legal advice suggests that any lessee will need to reinstate a Bell Foundry in order to satisfy the requirements of the existing planning consent and we hope that Tower Hamlets will insist on this, assuming that some level of change is required to the existing fabric. So, we look forward to hearing what the alternative is to the proposal from The London Bell Foundry which has made an offer to lease the building from the current owners, Raycliff, and would move in forthwith.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/11/17/historic-london-bell-foundry-could-be-saved-from-hotel-development?s=09

If you’re in Cambridge this evening, I see there are still tickets available for Edmund de Wall in conversation with Norman McBeath, talking about the beautiful small book they have produced together, Perdendosi (https://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/events/edmund-de-waal-perdendosi/).

I’m pleased to see that David Kohn’s Red House has been shortlisted as House of the Year – a very well-deserved accolade.

I’ve written about it for the December issue of The Critic, due to hit the newsstands probably at the end of next week.

https://www.bdonline.co.uk/news/david-kohn-and-rx-shortlisted-for-house-of-the-year/5120477.article?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Building%20Design%20%20Daily%20news&utm_content=Daily%20Building%20Design%20%20Daily%20news+CID_111b5cc422c7ec27e17acd62b1277b2d&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor%20emails&utm_term=David%20Kohn%20and%20RX%20shortlisted%20for%20House%20of%20the%20Year

I came across a fascinating and vehement debate on Twitter about the virtues or otherwise of Martin Parr’s photography, based on the the work he did in New Brighton in the 1980s (see attached). This gives me the opportunity to thank him for allowing me to post a photograph he took of me in about 2008 at the RA (it’s one of the photographs in my headers). I had wanted him to take photographs of the RA’s Summer Exhibition which I felt would have suited his style of sardonic social photography as I was an admirer of the immediacy of his photographic style – social realism which I can now see might be regarded as possibly lacking in sympathy for his subjects. He’s surely both an interesting and important photographer with a very identifiable and, in its time, new approach.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/martin-parr-the-last-resort/

Long-standing readers of my blog will know that whenever we go to Anglesey, we visit the wonderful antique shop run by Merfyn and Trish Jones in Castle Street, which is always full of unexpected Welsh treasures, informed by Merfyn’s shrewd eye and encyclopedic knowledge of Welsh furniture makers, as well as where to acquire them. It was as if the furniture makers of the past had been his friends, which in a way they were. He was also a fund of local information as a long-standing local councillor and, more recently, the founder of the Menai Food Festival.

Now we have heard the sad news of his death. He was diagnosed with cancer some time ago, which he bore with characteristically cynical stoicism, still surprisingly cheerful a month or so ago when I took photographs of him, knowing it was likely to be the last time we would see him:-

We went to a private screening last night of a film that Jake Auerbach persuaded Hannah Rothschild to make about his father, a healthily reluctant, indeed sceptical, subject for Jake’s camera. I wish I had seen it before because it is so illuminating about his early life, his upbringing in Germany, his attitude to drawing and to his long-standing sitters, one for every day of the week, his total, absolute dedication to his art, with only a day away in Brighton once a year.

I have now been told that it is available on Jake’s website. I very strongly recommend it.

We went down to Trinity Buoy Wharf to see an exhibition of images of the ‘Pillars in the River’ by Michael Collins, a photographer who likes to document modern industrial remains in a studiously deadpan documentary style:

He takes the pictures digitally – they are apparently multiple images in order to get the precision in the depth of field and the element if surrealism in the images, documenting detail in a way that would not ordinarily be visible to the eye. The pillars are all that remain of Beckton Gas Works, described by Ian Nairn as ‘a magic world of plant and pipes, holders and small hills of coal – even wharves and funnels, for good measure, at the far end’, all of it now gone. Collins is documenting these twentieth-century survivals of the industrial economy before they too have gone.

If you want to hear what is happening to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I am giving a talk on it alongside Dickon Love, a campanologist, at the Horse Hospital on Thursday 24th. November. It was organised some time ago when all hope was dead, but now that the hotel scheme has been abandoned, we need public support.

https://salonforthecity.blogspot.com/2022/09/salon-no98-london-bells.html?m=1&s=09