Echoes

Rating:
Summary: Echoes
Review: Every now and then someone is described, to their face, as brave. Habitually the compliment comes after success has been pulled from a venture with more than a small amount of risk hanging in the balance from its outset; and the speaker is pretty much always someone who would have weighed up the risk before steering well clear of such a potentially reckless path. To such people the comforts of home, or career, are not things to be risked lightly or in a potentially foolhardy manner.

Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins is best known as a photojournalist: someone with a need to know. In Afghanistan for example, rather than chasing the course of the war with a thousand other correspondents, he went in search of what passes there for normal life. He's a cultured man and culture seems to energise him, be it that of the far side of the world or others very much closer to home. In The Teds, his look at the seventies teddy boy revival re-released last year by Dewi Lewis, for example, it's impossible to forget Tongue Tied Danny's wedding, Sunglasses Ron, now sadly deceased, or scenes from the Red Deer in Croydon and the Castle on the Old Kent Road.

But the bravery thing isn't always about trekking to remote corners of Afghanistan or Essex. In this instance it's that moment when you turn the camera on yourself. Self-portraiture is a subject belovedly set by bored photography tutors, but a very different thing for someone of the calibre and track record of Chris Steele-Perkins. He recently explained to the RPS Visual Journalism Group that he's always photographed his life around him and for some time wanted to publish a book of these pictures; but they never quite seemed to work as a sequence. The thing only began to come together when he set himself a brief: to photograph his life for a year and publish the result as a book. Not, you understand, a diary of his journeys and assignments, but the mundanities and meanderings of life away from work that make a life the thing it is: a bare hotel room at the end of the day, walking in the woods with friends and family, dusk lit landscape, seeing his wife Miyako off at the airport, pausing to check on a sleeping child; or pondering the tinyness of an aeroplane caught momentarily between cherry blossom. By no means a foolhardy thing to do for yourself, but something of a risk when you have a reputation to preserve as one of the world's top photojournalists: opening, as it inevitably does, a door into the soul of the messenger.

And Echoes, a departure from the norm for both journalist and publisher, is a really rather wonderful little book.