Welcome to my Blog!
I hope to share here my irrepressible thoughts on news, music, books, arts, history, cultural events and such like.
In general these will be items, events and issues which I feel have no place on my website (which focusses on aviation history and my travel photography).

The item immediately below this would be the latest posting.

"Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself. - Charles Baudelaire
Esse est percipi (To be is to be perceived)" ¬Bishop George Berkeley

"Not even I understand everything I am" ¬Aurelius Augustinus of Hippo

"I'm only myself in front of my typewriter" ¬Joan Didion (I'd replace 'typewriter' by 'desktop PC'..)

In 2013 I started a series of photo albums on Blurb.com, named '36Exp' (a subject adressed in 36 exposures, a reference to the exposures on most common rolls of 35 mm film: 12, 24 & 36 exp.) back in the day.
The books can be ordered directly from the Blurb.com or Amazon.
www.blurb.com/user/ruudleeuw

CURRENT BLOG

On Saturday, Sept. 13, and Sunday, Sept. 14 (2025), the Doesburg Kadedagen took place. On these days, historic ships will dock, and the IJsselkade will be filled with atmospheric market stalls.
A fair with fun for young and old!
Alas, perhaps for the forcasted thunder storms, the expected historic ships ('kasteelschip' Vlotburg, Julius, De Witte Swaen and the Scheepmaker) were found absent.
We were lucky with the weather, those thunderstorms did not appear until the end of the afternoon.

bezoek-doesburg.nl/Doesburgse-Kadedagen

Founded in 1991, the Technical Image Press Association, TIPA, is composed of many member publications in the photo/imaging field published in print and online. These publications cover the full range of the industry, including consumer, professional, business-to-business, and fine art photography and imaging.

Member magazines and their online presence have wide reach and readership in many languages and cover markets around the world in Europe, Asia, Australia and North and South America.

Editors and their staff make up a global panel of knowledgeable experts who have earned a reputation for honest and trustworthy appraisal of photo and imaging products. Their magazines and websites have built a loyal following among their readers. Each member publication is engaged in the selection and final vote in the TIPA WORLD AWARDS process to name the Best Photo and Imaging products of the year.

www.tipa.com/tipa-world-awards-2025

A Bernie Gunther novel, #4

It is 1954 and the reader finds Bernie Gunther in Cuba. Tiring of his increasingly dangerous work spying on Meyer Lansky, Bernie acquires a boat and a beautiful companion and quits the island. But the US Navy has other ideas.

There are two principal ways in which the thriller writer can utilise the form. One is to use all its accoutrements to take the reader on a pleasurable ride; the other is to shake out all the clichés and tackle serious issues.
Philip Kerr has taken the latter course in the latest entry in his Berlin Noir series.
With great audacity, Kerr sets the reader in a narrative that is less to do with a body count than with the protagonist's collusion with his corrupt society...
What is more, in Field Grey the reader is asked to draw his or her own conclusions about Bernie Gunther, his survival exploits and conditions he is and had to face (the narrative switches between the 1940s and 1954 for Cuba, New York prison and Germany).

His first novel, March Violets (1989), sutured a Chandlerian private eye, Bernie Gunther, into a boldly realised 1930s Berlin. Other successful books followed – but then Kerr decamped to Hollywood to toil on several big-budget projects that did not come to fruition.
After his return to the UK, he set about regaining his credentials as a novelist. Now he is flying high again, his comeback consolidated by his winning the 2009 Ellis Peters Award for historical crime fiction with If the Dead Rise Not.

The novel deals with his hero's military service in the SS. Kerr has not revealed this side of Gunther before – perhaps because it would risk alienating readers.
In a prologue, set in 1950s Cuba, Bernie is arrested by the Americans and sent to Berlin to answer for his alleged war crimes.
His questioning at the hands of the CIA relates to Erich Mielke, a man whom Bernie has – on numerous occasions – tried to kill. A flashback to 1931 introduces Mielke, while Bernie is an onlooker to brutality committed by German soldiers and SS personnel recruited from France.

Kerr eschews the easy option and invites us to make up our own minds about Gunther's compromised actions. Bernie is a member of the SS and kills partisans – but we are reminded that the partisans were killing German soldiers. It is a brave and sobering tactic, but a measure of Kerr's skill that such ambiguity makes Field Grey so challenging a novel.

A superb novel that explains the cynical character of Bernie Gunther in later editions and makes him a realistic survivor of the Weimar era and WWII including the post war era.

Philip Ballantyne Kerr (b.22Feb1956 – d.23Mar2018) was a Scottish author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers.

www.independent.co.uk/ -/ - /reviews/field-grey-by-philip-kerr
en.wikipedia.org:_Philip_Kerr

Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins (b.28July1947 – d.08September2025) was a British photographer and member of Magnum Photos, best known for his depictions of Africa, Afghanistan, England, Northern Ireland, and Japan.

Steele-Perkins was born in Rangoon, Burma, in 1947 to a British father and a Burmese mother; but his father left his mother and took the boy to England at the age of two.
He grew up in Burnham-on-Sea.
He went to Christ's Hospital and for one year studied chemistry at the University of York before leaving for a stay in Canada. Returning to Britain, he joined the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he served as photographer and picture editor for a student magazine.
After graduating in psychology in 1970 he started to work as a freelance photographer, specializing in the theatre, while he also lectured in psychology.

In 1975 he worked with EXIT, a collective dealing with social problems in British cities. This involvement culminated in the book Survival Programmes in 1982.
He joined the Paris-based Viva agency in 1976. In 1979 he published his first solo book, The Teds; he also edited the Arts Council of Great Britain's book, About 70 Photographs.

Steele-Perkins joined Magnum Photos in 1979 and soon began working extensively in the developing world, in particular in Africa, Central America and Lebanon, as well as continuing to take photographs in Britain: The Pleasure Principle explores Britain in the 1980s.
In 1992 he published Afghanistan, the result of four trips over four years.
After marrying his second wife, Miyako Yamada, he embarked on a long-term photographic exploration of Japan, publishing Fuji in 2000.
A highly personal diary of 2001, Echoes, was published in 2003, and the second of his Japanese books, Tokyo Love Hello, in March 2007.
He continued to work in Britain, documenting rural life in County Durham, which was published as Northern Exposures in 2007.
In 2009 he published a collection of work from 40 years of photographing England - England, My England.
A new book, on British centenarians, Fading Light will be published at the end of July.

www.all-about-photo.com/ - - - /chris-steele-perkins
en.wikipedia.org:_Chris_Steele-Perkins

'On Photography and Social Media'

How serious is a selfie? Why circulate a shot of your dinner plate? Defenders of photography as an art form tend to quake at what’s happening with their beloved medium. The casual way shots are taken and indiscriminately shared feels like a thinning and cheapening of the camera’s purpose...
Prolific preening and posting isn’t watered-down art, Jurgenson argues, but augmented communication. Nobody expects poetry out of "talking and hanging out", social photography’s closest kin.

Jurgenson, a sociologist employed by Snap Inc., normalizes the phenomenon of snapshot saturation by erecting a historical, contextual scaffold around it.
The social photo fulfills a fundamental human impulse to document experience, he writes, an impulse that takes different forms as technology evolves.
Social photography, according to Jurgenson, is more about appreciating the present for its own sake than compiling a permanent visual archive.

www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/ -selfies-social-photo-nathan-jurgenson

We share the passion for England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, so it was a must to visit the British Weekend at Castle Vorden (05Sep-07Sep2025), to indulge in fine and traditional items, while taking also my camera around the market stalls.
The indoor and outdoor areas, as well as the meadows of Castle Vorden were equipped with luxury pagoda tents (soon in stark contrast to the looming thunder storm clouds) where exhibitors showed their products.
It started out as a beautiful late summer day but we had to take shelter for c.30 minutes for a massive rainshower. We came away with a few fine purchases and enjoyed tasty titbits.

britishweekend.nl/de-fair/
See also my Streetphotos for more images here: B+W | Colour

Bestselling historian William Dalrymple reinstates India as the great superpower of Ancient Asia!

This thoroughly fascinating work of ancient history offers an important backdrop to understanding contemporary India.
Dalrymple recovers a period that lasted from around 250 BC until roughly the 8th century (though last chapters range to events in 11th century), when India could plausibly be considered the center of the world!
Indian goods flowed west; during much of this period, India was Rome’s largest trading partner.
The imprint of Indian art, architecture, and literary imagination shaped Southeast Asia.
The grandest monuments of Hinduism can be found not in India but in Cambodia, notably at Angkor Wat.
Buddhism, which originated in central India in the 6th century BC, transformed Asia. Even in the sciences and especially in mathematics, India was indispensable; the ten-digit numeral system spread west from there through the Middle East to Europe.
More intriguingly, the shape of the modern university, organized around 'quads', can be traced to the educational institution at Nalanda, which at its height between the 5th and 7th centuries was probably the most significant university in the world.

The book might be considered a riposte to both right-wing and left-wing historiography in India; right-wing historians make fantastic claims that cloak India’s real and substantial achievements, while those on the left prioritize social history in a way that displaces intellectual achievement.
Dalrymple finds another India in the past: open to trade, tolerant, scientific, creative, and universalist.

How the ten-digit numeral system spread west from there through the Middle East to Europe was a revelation for me and I very much enjoyed chapters on places I've visited myself e.g. Angkor Wat en the Borobudur!

William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple (b. 20Mar1965- ) is a Scottish historian, art historian, curator, broadcaster, critic and author.
Dalrymple's books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński, the Arthur Ross Medal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award.

www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/golden-road-how-ancient-india-transformed-world
en.wikipedia.org:_William_Dalrymple

Original title 'Leo' (2023)

Detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido are languishing in Stellenbosch. Run-of-the-mill police work in the leafy university town is a far cry from their previous life in Cape Town fighting crime and government corruption at the highest level. Then a student is found dead on a mountain trail, and the key suspect, a local businessman, is found murdered in what looks like a professional hit delivering a message—suffocated by fast-action filler foam sprayed down his throat...

On the other side of the country, a beautiful wildlife guide is recruited by a group of special forces soldiers to act as a honeytrap, part of a dangerous multi-million-dollar heist that goes tragically wrong. A single link connects the murdered businessman to the special forces, making Benny and Vaughn’s case all the more mysterious. Another former soldier is soon killed, as is an agent of the country’s disgraced former president; and then the heist crew reorganizes with an even more audacious theft in mind.

In a corrupt South Africa, the criminals are as likely to be in government—or even in the police—as on the streets.
An excellent thriller again, Benny Griessel #8, by Deon Meyer!

www.goodreads.com/book/ -LEO
en.wikipedia.org:_Deon_Meyer

In UKRAINE, photojournalist Eddy van Wessel documents a raw account of three years of war in Ukraine through (analogue) photography and firsthand testimonies.
With decades of experience covering conflict zones, he focuses -often with his own life on the line- on what war means for those living through it: the soldiers on the front lines, civilians sheltering in devastated towns and cities, and those forced to flee.

His images capture the visible destruction and the psychological and emotional toll of prolonged violence, making this book a visual and narrative testimony with a complex and layered depiction that is reflecting on the human cost of the largest war in Europe since World War II.
It explores displacement, survival, and the boundaries of humanity in times of crisis. Where does humanity end and inhumanity begin? How do individuals maintain dignity and resilience under constant threat? What does survival look like when basic needs – and life itself – are no longer guaranteed?

Van Wessel emphasizes that this war affects him more than previous conflicts he has photographed, such as in Chechnya, Syria, or Iraq. The proximity to Ukraine and the personal contact with people in the area make the impact significant; friends and acquaintances have been killed, and the future of his children worries him.
His photos – sometimes grim and in black-and-white – bring the suffering of soldiers and civilians close and also show moments of resilience, such as a girl playing in front of a burned-out building.

fw-books.nl/product/eddy-van-wessel-ukraine
NL.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_van_Wessel

Death and the Penguin is a novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 1996 in Russian, it was translated and published in English in 2001.
The events of the novel take place in 1996 and 1997 in Kyiv.
It is a bleak, satirical work with surreal elements and dark humour. Spoiler alert: I didn't caught on and it was a struggle to finish it.
The novel became Kurkov's most famous work, translated into more than 30 languages!
In 1997, the novel was translated into German and published by the Swiss publishing house Diogenes, and it was for the German-language edition that 'Picknick auf dem Eis' first appeared.

The novel follows the life of a young aspiring writer, Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov, in a struggling post-Soviet society.
Viktor, initially aiming to write novels, gets a job writing obituaries for a local newspaper. The source of the title is Viktor's pet penguin Misha, a king penguin obtained after the local zoo in Kyiv gave away its animals to those who could afford to support them.
Viktor's work is accepted enthusiastically by the editor-in-chief of the paper but Viktor soon finds that his obituaries are being used as a hit list for enemies of some unknown organization for which the paper is just a front.

Andrii Yuriyovych Kurkov (b.23Apr1961- ) is a Ukrainian author and public intellectual who writes in Russian and Ukrainian.
He is the author of 19 novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin, nine books for children, and about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts.

en.wikipedia.org:_Death_and_the_Penguin
en.wikipedia.org:_Andrey_Kurkov

From an elephant resting with his master to a dog led through the rubbles of Kabul; these images by
Steve McCurry tell a thousand stories, each a touching tribute to the creatures who share our planet.
The photographer presents his favorite shots of animals in this collection ranging from Asia to South America, the United States to Europe.

Steve McCurry (b.23Apr1950 - ) is an American photographer, freelancer, and photojournalist.
His photo Afghan Girl, of a girl with piercing green eyes, has appeared on the cover of National Geographic several times.
McCurry has photographed many assignments for National Geographic and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1986.

www.taschen.com/en/books/ - /steve-mccurry-animals/
en.wikipedia.org:_Steve_McCurry

14 locations, 14 stories

There are few writers as productive as Jan Brokken, traveller and author from The Netherlands.
Nearly every year a new title of his is published, and almost all of his books are worth reading. This year he comes out with the collection of stories The Melancholy of the Traveler.
A beautiful title for yet another typical Jan Brokken travel book. Fourteen stories about fourteen diverse places.
The stories meander through places he has visited, often following in the footsteps of writers, painters, or musicians. Special encounters, often sad life stories and unique anecdotes. For example, he writes about Béla Bartók's farewell concert in 1940 in Budapest, when the composer, with a heavy heart, decided to flee fascism.

Brokken visits the Czech Republic of composer Antonín Dvořák, who loved trains so much that he incorporated their sounds into his music. ‘For Dvořák, life was like a train that is undeniably on its way to the end, to the Day of Judgment.’
In New York, Brokken meets the poet and hematologist Leo Vroman. It is a memory of a visit he made to Vroman in 1980 for an interview for the Haagse Post, a magazine where Brokken was working at the time.

Also touching is the story of the Chapelle du Rosaire, a chapel at the Dominican monastery in Vence, designed in old age by the French artist Henri Matisse. The project arose from the close friendship between the ailing artist – he suffered from colon cancer – and his caregiver, the fifty years younger Monique Bourgeois, who, to the artist's dismay, decided to become a nun.

Brokken was born on June 10, 1949, in the Diaconessenhuis in Leiden, not long after his parents returned from the Dutch East Indies.
His father, a theologian, had conducted scientific research on Islamic movements in Celebes and Selayer. "I undoubtedly inherited my curiosity about other cultures and ways of life from my father," Brokken said in an interview, "and my desire to travel and to put my impressions on paper from my mother."

www.tzum.info/2025/ -jan-brokken-de-weemoed-van-de-reiziger (NL)
nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Brokken (NL)

Garry Winogrand (b. 14Jan1928 – d.19Mar1984) was an American street photographer, who portrayed U.S. life and its social issues in the mid-20th century.
Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.

This monograph 'Winogrand Color' stands as a groundbreaking tribute to the early color work of renowned American photographer Garry Winogrand.
While he is most recognized for his candid and lively black-and-white street photography, Winogrand's portfolio also includes an impressive collection of over 45.000 color slides captured between the early 1950s and the late 1960s.
Using two cameras strapped to his chest, one loaded with color film and the other with black-and-white film, he extensively documented his surroundings between commercial assignments, developing and refining a distinct and progressively daring body of personal work.
From the bustling streets of Manhattan to the shaded underside of Coney Island’s boardwalk to the expansive landscapes and open roads of the American West, Winogrand Color unveils a fascinating portrait of a version of the country that feels at once bygone and timeless.
Exploring everyday postwar America, the large photobook presents 150 photographs selected from the archives at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, this is the first monograph dedicated in full to Winogrand’s vivid color photography.

Born and raised in the Bronx, Garry Winogrand (1928-84) was a highly influential American photographer who came into prominence for his trailblazing contributions to street photography.
His keen eye for human emotions and his ability to freeze spontaneous moments immortalized the essence of American society.
His work left a lasting impact on both his contemporaries as well as future generations of photographers.

en.wikipedia.org:_Garry_Winogrand
fraenkelgallery.com/artists/garry-winogrand
www.theartstory.org/artist/winogrand-garry

The largest book market in Europe!
On Sunday, 03Aug2025, the 35th edition of the Deventer Book Market kicked off in the charming booktown and Hanseatic city of Deventer. The largest book market in Europe!
Thousands of books from renowned booksellers and antiquarians from all over the Netherlands will be present to provide the best literary offerings.
Although the book market officially starts at 9:30 am, the first visitors were already eager to enter the market as early as 7:00 oçlock.
The Deventer Book Market attracts thousands of visitors every year, allowing them to indulge in a range of genres. From children's books to poetry, from literature to comics, and from art to topography as well as self publishers, there is something for everyone.
It worked out quite well for my street photography as well!

www.deventerboekenmarkt.nl/boekenmarkt-2025

The Lives of Lee Miller | Anthony Penrose (Thames&Hudson, 1985/2021)

• Lee 1927: New York. Classically beautiful, she is discovered by Condé Nast and immortalized by Steichen, Hoyningen-Huene, Horst, and other famous photographers.
• Lee 1929: Paris. Protégé and lover of Man Ray, she invents with him the solarization technique of photography and develops into a brilliant Surrealist photographer.
• Lee 1939-1945: Europe. She becomes a U.S. war correspondent and covers the liberation of Paris. Her photographs of the Dachau concentration camp shock the world.

Somewhere she got married to an Egyptian and lived in Egypt, until she grew tired of both. After WW2 she travelled south through the Balkan countries until she ran 'out of wars to cover'. By that time she was suffering from PTSD (unknown at the time), an alcoholist as well as extranged from the man she loved.

The many lives of Lee Miller, intimately recorded here by her son, Antony Penrose, whose years of work on her photographic archives unearthed a rich selection of her finest work, including portraits of her friends Picasso, Braque, Ernst, Eluard, and Miró.
To these are added many other photos that complement Penrose's highly readable biography of this talented artist, warts and demons included.

Part memoir, part photo essay, part search for the real woman behind an unconventional mother. Includes 171 duotone illustrations.
Excellent biography, many details and a hard look on this (kick-ass) woman.

www.goodreads.com/book/ - /The_Lives_of_Lee_Miller
en.wikipedia.org:_Lee_Miller

Original title: Petsamo
Translated into Dutch: Adriaan Faber

In Petsamo, in the far north of Finland, a young woman is waiting for her beloved. They want to return to Iceland by ship, away from the war that has now spread to the northern countries.
However, her boyfriend does not show up...
And during sea voyage someone disappears never to be found.
In the spring of 1943, the World War has reached its peak. In Reykjavík, the population is in turmoil.
A body has washed ashore at Nauthólsvík beach. Behind a military bar on Klambratún, a boy becomes a victim of violence. A woman who has many contacts among the military seems to have disappeared.

Plenty of mysteries and we see the crime writer, and historian, with the protagonists police detective Flovent and Military Police Thorson (from Canadian military socalled 'West Iceland' background) unraveling murder mysteries, which seem unrelated, against the backdrop of unease of US military forces versus the Icelandic population.

en.wikipedia.org:_Arnaldur_Indridason

A new-born baby is carefully checked over at a hospital in Jaipur, a small girl grins from a bench on Rome's Piazza Navona and energetic boys jostle in front of the camera in Havana - over his long career and on his many travels Steve McCurry has taken an incredible selection of photographs of children, each one managing to hint at an epic story.
'Stories & Dreams' brings a unique selection of these images together. With an introduction from Ziauddin Yousafzai, father of Malala, this is a colourful portrayal of the challenges, hopes and
adventures of children from across the world.

Steve McCurry (b.Philadelphia,PA 24Feb1950-) is an American photojournalist best known for the photograph 'Afghan Girl' that appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985. This cover is the most recognized of all National Geographic covers.
He studied at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), initially in film but graduated in theater arts. He became interested in photography when he took pictures for the university newspaper.
His career as a photojournalist began with the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. He disguised
himself in native clothing and hid film rolls in the hems. His photographs were among the first images of the conflict and were widely published.
McCurry continued his career reporting on a whole series of international conflicts, each time in Asia.
His photos are widely published.
Since 1986, he has been a member of Magnum Photos.

www.stevemccurry.com/books
en.wikipedia.org:_Steve_McCurry
shop.photomuseumireland.ie:_stories-dreams-portraits-of-childhood

Longstaff was born in 1907 on Little Lear Ings farm near Heptonstall in the Calderdale borough of West Yorkshire.
She left school at 14 in 1921 and was apprenticed to the photographer Ada Westerman (Mrs Ada Redman). Westerman had continued the Westerman Studio in Hebden Bridge, founded in 1890 by her father Crossley Westerman, after he died in 1918.
In 1935 Longstaff married and her family took over as owners of the studio.
Her brother was the picture framer and darkroom technician. Her husband took over as picture framer after her brother died in 1963. The business continued until her death in 1992.

In the late 1930s she added a Rolleiflex camera to her equipment allowing greater photographic flexibility, especially outside the studio. Longstaff's main income was from wedding and portraits, but she also took many photographs of the small town, its people and surroundings. These are now an important archive of local life and changes in a small town over the 70 years of her career.

She had kept the studio's negatives and equipment, so providing unusual insight into the development of photography as well as local history. These extended from the foundation of the studio in 1890s so included photographs by her predecessors.
This material was catalogued and preserved. Her photographs are now archived at Pennine Heritage. Many have been digitised for on-line access.
End of the Roll: the Photographs of Alice Longstaff, a book of some of her photographs, was published in 2024.

en.wikipedia.org:_Alice_Longstaff
www.bbc.com/news/articles

A few quotes to start with: "“Dachshunds, debutantes and Donald Trump: capturing the glitzy, bizarre world of 80s high society.”
“British photographer Dafydd Jones documented New York’s upper class in the 1990s. His photo book “High Life, Low Life” is a testimony to a time lost in dreams.”

At the end of the 1980s, society photographer Dafydd Jones began a new life in New York. He had been hired by Vanity Fair to attend the most talked-about parties in the city and soon found himself descending into a world of human tableaux, ladies who lunch, princesses in powder rooms and dachshunds scrapping over canapés.
Camera at the ready, Jones quickly filled the society pages of the illustrious magazine, snapping the likes of Leona Helmsley, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Imelda Marcos as they celebrated, mourned and unravelled in the bright lights.
Davydd wrote: "Early one evening I dropped in on a launch at the Harley-Davidson Café. Amongst the guests I saw a wolf-like man watching the room from a balcony. It was a strong image and I took a picture (above). Then I asked his name. It was Jeffrey Epstein."

"Mr. Jones goes about his business with cheery zest and a wicked eye."
During the day, he captured the city streets and the ordinary citizens grounded in the real world. In these pages, the author of England: The Last Hurrah reveals the story of New York, the highs and the lows, as the ’90s unfolded in front of his expert lens.

In 1981 Dafydd Jones was a prizewinner in a photography competition run by the Sunday Times magazine with a set of pictures of the 'Bright Young Things'. He was then hired by Tina Brown to photograph Balls, debutante dances and weddings for the Tatler magazine.
Jones moved to New York in 1989.
While there he worked as a photographer for the New York Observer producing feature and news related pictures. Jones covered celebrity and society events for Vanity Fair.
Also for his own enjoyment he did all the pictures for one issue about New York for Paper magazine.
Davydd Jones moved back to London in 1996.
In 2018 Stanley Barker produced a special publication ' The Last Hurrah' to go with an exhibition at the Photographers Gallery.
In 2019 a book of his colour pictures ' Screen Time ' was published by Circa Press. In 2020 his 1980s photographs of Oxford: The Last Hurrah was published by ACC Art books.

www.accartbooks.com/us/book/new-york-high-life-low-life/
www.dafjones.com

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), which I read and liked and made me pick up this one.
Haddon won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, the Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie.
He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.”
Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. Such as himself being effected by cancer and finding his wife having sex with a former colleague David in their marital bed. It doesn't help that his son is gay and in a relationship that seems on the rocks.
The narrative proceeds to the marriage of his daughter Katie with the unassuming Ray, which seems not much of a match to George and his wife Jean. They are also worried about Jamie showing up at the marriage with a male partner.
Katie has been married before and has a young child, Jacob. Katie cancels the marriage but is reluctant to tell her mother who made all the arrangements. George gets to drinking which does not go well with the valium he's been prescribed and starts wandering.

It took me a while getting a grasp on the narrative, it isn't a book about humerous observations or other funny moments but rather a (very, VERY!) weird storyline. But Mark Haddon pulled it off!

www.goodreads.com/ - /A_Spot_of_Bother
en.wikipedia.org:_Mark_Haddon

The Blitz (English: 'flash') was a bombing campaign by Nazi Germany against the United Kingdom during the Second World War. It lasted for eight months, from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941.
The name is a shortened form of Blitzkrieg, a term used in the popular press to describe a German style of surprise attack used during the war.

In spite what of many think, it effected many more cities than England's capital, London.
Many of the most memorable images of the war in Britain come from the assault on Britain by Luftwaffe bombers and the V-1 & V-2 rockets.
Compiled here are some of those images from the archives of the Daily Mail. This book, 'The Blitz', shows the devastation and destruction but also of the people's unbroken spirit during these months of onslaught.

The Luftwaffe gradually decreased daylight operations in favour of night attacks, to evade attacks by the RAF, and the Blitz became a night bombing campaign after October 1940.
The Luftwaffe attacked the main Atlantic seaport of Liverpool in the Liverpool Blitz.
The North Sea port of Hull, a convenient and easily found target or secondary target for bombers unable to locate their primary targets, and the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth, as well as Southampton, Sunderland, Swansea, Belfast and Glasgow were also bombed.
And of course the industrial centres of Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Sheffield.
More than 40.000 civilians were killed by Luftwaffe bombing during the war, almost half of them in the capital, where more than a million houses were destroyed or damaged.

en.wikipedia.org:_The_Blitz

David Lykes Keenan was born in Michigan in 1954 and has been photographing since presented with a clunky East German camera in 1966.
He graduated from Michigan State University (Go GREEN!) in 1976 with a B.S. in computer science.
In the nearly 30 years between 1976 and 2003 he worked in the computer software business, started a couple of related businesses, and hardly touched a camera...
Between 2003 and 2016, David steadily pursued a life change in the direction of fine art photography.

In 2006, he stepped back from the software business that he founded in 1986 and focused on photography full-time.
His first love is street photography, in black and white, using a small, unobtrusive rangefinder camera. People, usually random and anonymous, are essential elements of these photographs.
His preferred method is to see and photograph, but not be seen...

www.dlkphotography.com/fair-witness includes a link to book presentation
www.dlkphotography.com/biography

Lia van Bekhoven has been living in London for more than 40 years. Almost all that time she worked for Flemish and Dutch radio and television, newspapers and magazines to report on what was happening in Great Britain.
With expertise, but above all with sharp humor and surprising insights.
Her portrait of the UK is surprising and versatile. She praises British humor and culture, the openness and tolerance of the Brits, their ability for self-deprecation...
But at the same time, she is annoyed by their adherence to traditions and their longing for the past, by how they engage in politics, by the enormous social disparities, and by the way Brexit has come about and has reduced the country to Little Britain, how a once great country can be small.
She writes this with bravado and wit, illustrating it with countless facts and stories drawn from her British life.
I enjoyed reading this during a 10-day trip recently through England and though I have visited the UK many times, it was a pleasure to read with her insights and confirmations of mine.

www.liavanbekhoven.nl (NL)