RIP Bud Cort. A young man obsessed with death falls in love with an old woman obsessed with life. She dies and teaches the kid how to live.

For the past three mornings I have woken up with my heart aching and fragments of words in my head. ‘..one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.. And paced upon the mountains overhead..’ This morning, I remembered where they came from. When You Are Old. William Butler Yeats.

Lotte Laserstein. Portrait of Katharina and Anne-Marie Riedl. 1932.

Conrad Felixmüller. Lovers in Dresden. 1927.

Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. Christina Rossetti.

RIP Philippe Gaulier. “Always there must be humanity, complicite and play.”

John Claridge. Portraits of people that you might expect to meet in his cherished East End of London. 1966-75.

Glasgow.

Mikko Takkunen is a Finnish-born, New York City-based photographer and Photo Editor at The New York Times. From 2016 to 2021, while living in Hong Kong, he served as the Asia photo editor for the NYT International desk.

Edvard Munch. The Storm. 1893.

Really?

Humphrey Spender. The Worktown Archive is a unique historical document of everyday life in Bolton and the first Mass Observation study to take place in Britain. 1937/8.

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. Shelley.

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” John Berger.

It’s out there all on its own.

RIP Ebo Taylor. He helped define the highlife genre and influenced generations of African musicians. youtu.be/cMiPIq0dfmo

Charmaine Watkiss. Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well. 2021.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

Spoken from the Olympian’s! 😭🙏🇺🇸💙🇨🇦

Duelling.

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With self same hand, self reasons, and self right, Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another. substack.com/@rawstory/no...

Czesław Siegieda. Polska Britannica. He took up photography from a young age, going on to document the Polish refugee community in the East Midlands. 1974 and 1981.

Martin Lewis died in obscurity in 1962; a retired art teacher who had found some success in his early career, but was largely forgotten. Lewis spent his last three decades teaching other people how to etch. History chose Edward Hopper, but Martin Lewis was his mentor.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas. Liverpool Bold Street.

Simple.

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.” The Road. Cormac McCarthy.

I THINK YOU ARE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CREATURE IN THE WORLD.

Two lovely ladies, tea for two. Birkenhead.

Wayne Sorce. Urban Colours. Images of urban environments taken in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in both Chicago and New York City.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The series consists of 64 portraits of “Lucybelle Crater”, a name adapted by Meatyard from a character in a Flannery O’Connor short story.

If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self. Iain Sinclair. On my walk into liminal spaces.

Dana Stirling. Why Am I Sad? “My artistic process has always been guided by a search for meaning in places and objects that might otherwise be overlooked, transforming them into something significant through the act of photographing them”.

February 2. Candlemas. The midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last public appearance before his death on Feb. 2, 2014 was at the Sundance Film Festival. This tintype portrait was taken by Victoria Will at the festival. Haunting.

“A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being.” Roy DeCarava.

Tamara Eckhardt portrays the lives of the young people of St Mary's Park, continuing her focus on the theme of childhood and growing up. The living conditions in the area are difficult; yet the young people develop coping skills, adapt and find ways to divert themselves.

Neighbour is a word defined by proximity…

To engage in a Smithian pun – this is Art in the Age of Mechanical Mass Destruction. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...

Eli Weinberg. Crowd near the Drill Hall on the opening day of a Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19. December 1956. Punctum.

Dod Procter. Morning. 1926. Sleeping Ariadne. A Roman-Hadrian work based on a Hellenistic bronze sculpture of the Pergamenian school from the 2nd century BC.

31st January. A year ago today I visited old haunts. The Philharmonic dining rooms, an old flat of mine on Hope street, my old local Peter Kavanagh's, and ended the day at a candlelit guitar recital at the Anglican cathedral. A fond memory from across the water.

“I did know that fundamental changes were taking place, and nobody seemed to be interested in recording the faces of the people or anything in their lives" Shirley Baker. Shirley photographed the streets where I was a kid in shabby clothes living in a cockroach infested house. I love her so.

Towards the end of an 8,000 mile road trip across America in 2015, that the Dutch photographer Robin de Puy, riding her Harley-Davidson through Ely, Nevada, discovered a skinny youth of fifteen, who flashed by, in the night, on a child’s bicycle. www.theravestijngallery.com/press/310-a-...

Martin Parr. From the Pope to a Flat White: Ireland 1979-2019. “At the time these images were being made by Parr, the Pope, had he seen them, might well have felt that he had nothing to fear from what they seemed to express.” Fintan O'Toole.

I’ve used Jung and Campbell to navigate the last 40 years of my life. It isn’t a panacea for everything but it does help our difficult individual and collective journeys. I introduced them into my teaching and my students responded so remarkably. apple.news/A75KDfYgtQry...

Oleksandr Glyadyelov. ‘For Ukrainians About Ukrainians’. Homeless children Kyiv, 1996. Heartbreaking in many ways.

Fritz Lang. Spione. 1928.

Edward Steichen. Brooklyn Bridge, New York. 1903.

“You can only imagine, through his widely published black and white pictures, how that might have affected him.”