Photography
How the railways shaped modern culture
Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to…
Why you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Cecil Beaton
‘Remember, Roy, white flowers are the only chic ones.’ So Cecil Beaton remarked to Roy Strong, possibly as a mild…
How cartomania captivated even Queen Victoria
The craze for photographic cartes de visite that swept Victorian Britain was further boosted by the Queen’s own enthusiasm for the format
John Deakin: the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene
The photographer never attempted to show anyone in a good light, making his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho habitués look like dress rehearsals for morgue shots
The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter
This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first,…
No one should trust the camera in the age of AI
Bryan Appleyard on photographic manipulation, past and present
Pain without gain
It is the stuff of nightmares, or a queasily dystopian film plot. A woman is undergoing a surgical procedure in…
Catching the zeitgeist
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
When the going was good
Though she photographed many society figures of the 1930s, Ker-Seymer lacked ambition and remains largely unknown – as she herself seems to have wanted
‘Be original or die!’
Hermione Eyre on Yevonde, the pioneering 1930s photographer whose colour portraits evoke a vanishing world
When Picasso met Lee Miller
During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue…
Factory setting
When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper…
High and mighty
Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders
The man who disappeared
In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris,…
Out of this world
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
High resolution
Jimmy Chin is part Bear Grylls, part David Attenborough: he both climbs snow, ice and rock and films other mountaineers doing it too, writes Theo Zenou
The telling moment
A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits,…
Flower power
Elizabeth Blackadder, who died last month at the age of 89, was probably the most distinctive botanical artist of our…
Heads, shoulders, knees and toes
We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits…
Car-boot sale of the unconscious
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
Candid camera
William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue
Earthly powers
Exhibitions about fungi, bugs and trees illustrate the depth, range and vitality of a growing field of art, says Mark Cocker
The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge
A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving…
Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot
I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot…
The truth about food photography
While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly…
