- Jonathan Meades
100 quirky Meades original photos, in a box, for Christmas
PLEASE NOTE: Pidgin Snaps is now in production so your name can not be listed in the back of the box. However, you can pre-order a copy of the special Unbound Limited edition that will not be available in the shops.
Why?
Photographs are a way of making the seemingly banal fascinating and calling into question the very idea of banality. Perhaps banality doesn't exist.
The concentration demanded is akin to the concentration demanded by writing, by making film. But photography is also a tool that is useful in those disciplines. I don't mean photographs as a visual notebook — I am suspicious of employing photos as an aide-memoire. Rather the act of photography makes the (potential) photographer look more intently. You don't passively survey: you gape, you stare. And you reinvent the world, you shape it.
At least you do so if your name is Brandt or Sternfeld or Witkin or Arbus.
Me, I just take Pidgin Snaps.
What?
It’s a box. A boxed set. A boxette. Containing 100 colour postcard-sized snaps of places with brief oblique texts about them on the back of the card. By me. For you to use (or abuse). Or give. Or keep.
If you like the idea, pledge at one of the levels opposite and we’ll aim to have a lovely, shiny boxette with you (or a loved one) in November.
I’m a writer: Filthy English, Pompey, The Fowler Family Business, Peter Knows What Dick Likes and Museum Without Walls, which was crowd-funded and published by Unbound. It will be released as a paperback in November alongside a reissue of my novel, Pompey.
I also make films for the BBC — more than sixty of them altogether, including Abroad in Britain, Further Abroad, Meades on France and most recently The Joy of Essex. I live in Marseille.
Some recent reviews:
'I pick up Jonathan Meades’s new collection of essays, Museum Without Walls, and I read a paragraph or three. It’s the writerly equivalent of standing on the top of Kinder Scout and breathing deeply. The scope of his ideas, the force of his arguments, the sheer vitality of his sentences: these things come at you like negative ions after a storm, with the result that you soon start to feel an awful lot better –envious but revitalised, too.'
Rachel Cooke, New Statesman
'For the last thirty years Britain's most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment.'
Owen Hatherley, The London Review of Books
'There’s only one Jonathan Meades. His continuing joy is the ability to show us things we imagine to be familiar in a way that completely changes them.'
AA Gill, Sunday Times
'Meades’s use of words is as kinky and eclectic as one of those French rooflines he is always warning us against, but underneath the floridity there are firmly held moral principles.'
Clive James, Daily Telegraph
'Whatever he is doing and however he is doing it, he will make you think. And by the end you feel as bruised and exhilarated as if you had been battered by a rough sea but washed up safely on a slightly different shore from the one on which you started out.'
Lucy Mangan, Guardian
The Artist
Friday, 19 April 2013
An (idealised) self-portrait.
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- Posted on Pidgin Snaps – A Boxette by Jonathan Meades
