From Back Home

©Anders Petersen

Just received a crisp new copy in the post all the way from Sweden of the Anders Petersen/JH Engström book, From Back Home. When I first set eyes on this book in Arles last year I knew I had to own it. The wonderful thing is I will be reviewing this book for 1000 Words. Anders, who I first met in a late night Paris bar in the Bastille, muttering 'things are as they are', is far from a conceptual photographer 'artist' which is probably why, although shortlisted, this influential photographer did not make it to the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize finalists. The fashion these days is for deadpan, emotionless photography, clean, neat, generic, sterile and, dare I say it... smug. Any engagement with the spontaniety of life is apparently, for the most part, redundant. Probably doesn't look good on corporate walls.

Portrait of Will Self

©Michael Grieve

A recent commission for Le Monde found me in the London home of writer Will Self. It's not often that I am commissioned to photograph someone whose work I admire. As as a result of the portrait session I was invited to The Sebald Lecture 2009. The lecture was given by Self on Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: WG Sebald and the Holocaust. A brilliant lecture, delivered with theatrical confidence in which Self analysed Sebalds historical writing in the light of the evolving historical understanding of the Holocaust and the part the German people took in it.

Blog Manifesto

This is where I lay my cards on the table and get things off my chest, open myself up to scrutiny and criticism and undoubtedly learn more about myself. I am fairly certain that no one will really be interested in my ramblings on photography and other such things and so I will simply imagine that I am talking to myself... as I often do.