Thought I’d post some random shots of my bookshelves.

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Richard Billingham’s ‘Ray’s a Laugh’, was always controversial . The sequence is formed of starkly intimate images of Billingham’s often chaotic parental home under the heavy effects of alcoholism and poverty. 1996.

Lore. Director: Cate Shortland. DP: Adam Arkapaw. 2012. Click.

In the winter of 2007, John Maloof, a 26-year-old Chicago realtor, stumbled upon a box of negatives at an auction house. They belonged to Vivian Maier. The rest is history.

“Reading has become so bound up with attainment and literacy, that we’ve failed to get across the emotional benefits, the fact that it is fun and should be done for pleasure.” apple.news/AOVzIqC74TtC...

Shirley Baker. “Wandering the unpicturesque streets of Manchester and Salford with a camera in the 1960s seemed quite crazy to most people at the time,” she recalls. But she saw it as her personal duty to be there with her camera, to represent peoples’ experiences. My home.

Albert McCabe. The Gorbals area of Glasgow. 1960s.

Bernd Arnold. Power and Rituals of the Roman Catholic Church in Cologne. The images analyse and document the power structures of an autonomic system of salvation, surviving seemingly untouched by all developments of the century. Photographs from 1986 to 1996.

Walter Martin. Two nuns cleaning Jesus. Leipzig. 1939.

I walked the trail one blustery December day, ambushed by snow flurries and sunshine that spotlit Manchester like spilt crystals on the dark plain. I’ve climbed Kinder from many directions, but this is the route that tells the best story. apple.news/Ag2-uPtHlTVC...

Films I loved to teach #11 Pan's Labyrinth. Written, directed and co-produced by Guillermo del Toro. 2006. youtu.be/AcHasH-nLhU?... Pan's Labyrinth is returning to theaters nationwide for its 20th anniversary on October 9, 2026.

Egon Schiele. Conversion. 1912.

Olive Edis was a photographer at the turn of the 19th century, she had studios in London, Cromer and Sheringham where she photographed members of the aristocracy, monarchs, clergymen and the local fishermen.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. Friedrich Nietzsche.

The tragic loss of Trish Keenan. A unique voice, an extraordinary woman. youtu.be/Zw5ztuhEat4

Swimmer. Short film directed by Lynne Ramsay. I screened this amongst others for my students when they were producing their own short films in the production module. youtu.be/NF0H-Lfpa9s

Cidade de Deus. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund. I taught this alongside La Haine and Tsotsi. All magnificent films, and such a pleasure for me to introduce my students to such astonishing world cinema. youtu.be/_mDvXaRJcTM?...

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce and Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. I explored the subjective reality, and psychological tension of the ‘death dream’ and the gap between consciousness and death when teaching Vertigo. (Went down a storm)!

People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures, bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful, call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing. Richard Powers, The Overstory. Image bb.

Elizabeth Strout. “Quotidian” is a word often used to describe the charm of Strout’s books. apple.news/AB0Qrp3CqT3y... Love them. Read them all.

From the moment Takashi Miike’s Audition premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in late 1999, it caused shockwaves in the horror genre. Took me completely by surprise..😳 youtu.be/2wr_om5LsuI?...

RIP Raghu Rai. A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.

Mathieu Kassovitz. La Haine. Amélie. Poles apart.

Seamus Heaney. We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening. Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun. Image bb.

Lunch.

Edward Povey. Nightbirds. 2021.

Nell Dunn. Lord Snowdon. 1982.

Paula Rego. The Family. 1988.

In a very real sense, loss of imagination is by definition a loss of hope. Totally agree. I began, many years ago by teaching photography, then drama in community groups. There is always potential in children, that is stifled or worse, ignored. apple.news/ABm3jtWgnSe6...

Vermont photographer Richard W. Brown pays tribute to the vanished landscape of Vermont hill farms and to its people, his friends. He photographed the region in the 1970s and ’80s.

Leonard Misonne (1870-1943). Pictorialism is a style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography from approximately 1885 to 1915. It refers to a style in which the photographer has manipulated a photograph as a means of "creating" an image rather than simply recording it.

Consuelo Kanaga. W. Eugene Smith and Aileen. 1974.

There are times, as a photographer, that there is a brief, very brief moment when we see something that touches us, like a pin prick. It happened today in Conwy in a scruffy underpass. He was singing his heart out and as I stood before him I nodded and he smiled back at me. Eye contact. The punctum.

And with that our lovely mini holiday in the mountains of Wales comes to a close..

Conwy. North Wales. Walkabout.

Conwy. North Wales. Mini break shopping trip.

The early bird.

Vaughan Tomlinson.

Unfertile seed
when first I came

Determined I staid
and from this spot spring forth
a mighty trunk of courage

Now 
etched I stand
Aged by sand
wind
and man. Gloria Mary Rodriguez.

Happy 100th birthday. David Attenborough. A remarkable man to say the very least. “We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature .”

Vera Chytilová’s film posters Fruit of paradise Something Different Pearls of the Deep The Apple Game in the 1960s, filmmakers of the Czech New Wave like Chytilová, Milos Forman and Jirí Menzel emerged, with the poster designs to match the experimentation of their films.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too. ~ Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner . Ane Brun - Words youtu.be/1tHCe7yW3UY?... 🖼 Collage "Empty Words" by Lindsay Stroud.

'She is the wanderer, bum, émigré, refugee, deportee, rambler, strolling player. Sometimes she would like to be a settler, but curiosity, grief, and disaffection forbid it.’ Deborah Levy, Swallowing Geography.

No, a cynical way to make more money. Phillippa Perry becomes the latest in a long line of celebrities ‘writing’ crime fiction.

Ladybird books have always had their finger on the pulse for the young reader. I swear by them.

Hello.

“The chicken needs to be a chicken. Sometimes we play with what a chicken can think, but we try very carefully to use a chicken as a chicken.” apple.news/APJKY-obvRiK...

Our lovely Vietnamese neighbour Văn has just brought homemade sourdough bread for us to add to our glamping hamper..

From 1969 to 1972, photographer Nick Hedges took pictures of life in Manchester, England. Nick was hired by housing charity Shelter. He was working up the road from where I Iived, and the accommodation wasn’t that much better. It does leave a mark on you.