Nick Holdstock

Found in The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne. Interesting stance of the man in the corner.

Similarly interesting legwork above.

Classic stalker-shot. A crossword, perhaps.

I wish the bird in this photo were part of some shamanic ritual, or failing that, an art piece by a hermit who lives on the coast of Novia Scotia. Unfortunately, this is not the case. It, and the other photos below, were taken by Chris Jordan a month ago on Midway Atoll.

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

There’s something about these pictures, and also Lu Guang’s, which troubles me, and not just because they starkly demonstrate the degree to which we have devastated our environment. What I find equally upsetting is how beautiful they are- as if even pollution now has its own aesthetic. Even as we push species into extinction, and ecosystems into radical change, we are making art from these actions. The fault, of course, is not in the photographers, but in those who provide subjects for them.

Two Gentlemen 1951

This week Kodak announced that they would no longer be manufacturing Kodachrome film. Even someone like myself who has little interest in taking photos (though always interest in looking at them), feels a degree of sadnes at this news, which is all the more acute on looking at Margaret Strickland’s pictures, taken by her grandfather during the Korean war, and in Valdosta, Georgia (which I found via the excellent new Oxford American art blog).

It is, of course, quite typical, that the one picture of hers that I was able to paste in is the least colour saturated. You’ll need to go the immense trouble of clicking to see what I mean.

I came across these whilst looking for photos to use in a long piece I’m working on. These are all from Flickr, which has many collections of found families, wedding pictures etc (lovedaylemon’s collection is a good place to start).

Woman and half cat found in a paperback edition of Other Men’s Flowers.

The petrified boy on the left.

Found in a Beano annual.

Cheers!

3 pages of humility, then a moment of wordly ambition. Found in the pages of a book on ducks.

This is the front cover of a Christmas card found in a paperback copy of Huysmans’ Against Nature. It is in all likelihood from Christmas 1963. Inside, once, the pleasantries are disposed of, the writer bemoans the state of the nation.

The analysis continues on the reverse:

Whilst the thought of the US ‘falling back to the level of some South American republics or the Congo’ must have been chilling for Pat, one hopes she was comforted by the excellent work of the CIA in makng sure that other people’s elected leaders met broadly similar fates.

My work at a charity bookshop (that cannot be named) mainly involves selling books I don’t care for to people who ask me questions like, ‘So, do you read much?’

My other main duty is going through bags of donations, finding what can be sold, then disposing of the chaff (all of which gets recycled). For the next few posts I’ll be sharing some of the things that have slipped from the pages. Today’s involves the photo above, that came from a 1982 Blue Peter annual. Though obviously some kind of photo collage, it is all the more impressive for being pre-Photoshop, as attested to by the inscription on the reverse.