To Contemplate the Concepts – Review of “Blind Corners: Essays on Photography” by Michael Collins

For a number of years, I used to hold in my bag a small e-book titled Sauntering: Writer’s Walk Europe. Introduced and edited by Duncan Minshull, the e-book is an anthology of excerpts about strolling, starting from a paragraph to only a few pages. For me, it was a sort of day-book. I might convey it out at any time after I needed to consider certainly one of my favourite and sacred actions, which is solely taking a stroll. It felt good to have this e-book with me.

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Michael Collins – “Blind Corners: Essays on Photography”
Notting Hills Editions, 2025
US/Canada distribution: New York Review Books
Review by W. Scott Olsen

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The e-book was produced by Notting Hill Editions, a UK writer I consider understands extra intimately than another writer on the planet the tactile pleasure of holding a e-book and studying. Barely the scale of a mass market paperback, with a improbable really feel to the linen material cowl, their books are snug and stylish on the identical time. The typeface and web page design favor the reader. They also have a ribbon bookmark to maintain one’s place.

Sauntering was adopted by Globetrotting: Writers Walk the World—the identical thought made a bit bigger than Europe, additionally edited by Minshull, and as soon as once more I discovered myself taking the e-book with me wherever I went. It crammed each lengthy and quick moments with concepts and love.

I convey up these two books as a result of I’ve as we speak a brand new e-book from Notting Hill, equally pleasurable to carry within the hand, equally straightforward to place in my bag and carry with me it doesn’t matter what I could also be doing. This one is titled Blind Corners: Essays on Photography, by Michael Collins, and I’m assured this one can be in my bag for a really very long time.

Blind Corners is the sort of e-book the place you compromise in because the world you understand is articulated, is given language. Think about that for a second. There is a sort of studying expertise the place what you’re studying is unique and recent and utterly new to you, and but on the identical time, when you’re studying, you suppose, “Wow. I didn’t know I knew that.”

The best possible love poem can be an instance of this. It offers form and type to an emotion we maintain in our hearts and in our souls, and the phrases, which we now have by no means learn on this order earlier than, strike us as true. Yes, we expect. That’s precisely how I really feel. In different phrases, Yes, I didn’t know I knew that.

Blind Corners is a e-book I consider each photographer ought to personal. Not simply the professionals. Not simply the excessive finish amateurs. But everyone who has ever raised a digicam or a mobile phone with the hope to create a picture ought to in some unspecified time in the future have this e-book, put it of their day bag and carry it with them.

I’ll admit, after I started this e-book yesterday, I used to be merely going to dip in. I used to be occurring a reconnaissance journey to see what this e-book was all about. However, I then spent the subsequent couple hours sitting in a snug chair at house, as soon as once more in an expertise I’ve not had for a really very long time, studying a e-book, cowl to cowl, in a single sitting. And I couldn’t have been happier.

Blind Corners is a set of essays, interrelated in that they’re all about pictures. Some of them are historic. Some of them are unpackings of single photos. They are all deeply knowledgeable, erudite and probing. And if I say the e-book offers form and type to concepts many photographers have intuited, I imply that as a excessive praise. It’s troublesome to present particular and compelling language to an thought all of us maintain in our personal model.

For instance, in an essay referred to as “Coronation Day, Tenby,” which is the unpacking of a single group portrait, Collins writes:

Photography’s obvious realism makes it probably the most accessible, comprehensible and credible of all of the visible arts. People relate instinctively to pictures. It has the uncontrived eloquence of immediately recorded expertise; that uncooked expression of humanity so potent in transcribed types comparable to oral historical past, leaves fingerprints within the {photograph}’s, profusion of incidental element. The voice and vernacular of oral historical past, the mixture of the ostensibly vital and superfluous, are what makes it so compellingly plausible and informative. Photography takes this to an excessive diploma as a result of it has no filter; every thing and something is recorded indifferently. Incidental element is the hallmark of pictures. God shouldn’t be within the particulars; on a regular basis life is.

Yes, I believed. Exactly.

There are chapters in right here which might be firmly narrative, comparable to when Collins was concerned in organising a digicam in a zoo in order that chimpanzees after which gorillas had been invited to take photos of the individuals who got here to take a look at them. (The experiment was not what one would have hoped.) There are essays concerning the historical past of portraiture; there are frequent references to the Camera Obscura. But the actual genius of this e-book is twofold. When Collins is telling a narrative about a picture, both one he took or one he found, the writing is compelling, easy, researched and knowledgeable, and has that sense of a quest behind it that drives the studying pleasurably. His historic contexts are deep.

Sometimes I discovered myself staring on the ceiling, deep in thought, even when easy concepts would go by. For instance, in an essay titled “Photography’s Realism,” he writes:

Here lies the genie in pictures’s digicam; the flexibility to make an intensely detailed file instantaneously. But the velocity and omnivorous nature of pictures can be its undoing. The means to supply a picture bristling with unexpected element is accompanied by a tradition of haste and plentitude, the picture receiving solely glancing consideration.

Yes, I believed. Exactly.

Personally, my favourite elements of this e-book are when Collins takes on the concepts of pictures. His articulation of particular pictures is second to none. But then he writes:

To compose the {photograph}, an extraneous body is positioned on the vista, eliminating every thing besides what’s featured on the rectangle of the bottom glass. That rectangle turns into its personal entirety, its edges, the borders to that world. However formally neat and pleasing, inside that rectal rectangle lurks anarchy, for what’s envisioned as a nonetheless print is {a photograph} of a dynamic scene overflowing with particulars. That panorama is a world in flux whose parts—mild, water, air, mud—are in perpetual movement, with such superabundance they surpass our visible acuity. So, the composition will all the time be compromised, and as such, composed with the human contact.

Finally, (and sure, I’m quoting at size, as a result of that’s what this e-book deserves) he writes:

Photography is called the artwork of fixing a shadow, however nothing is fastened, not least which means. It’s wishful to take a look at pictures for certainty, as a result of the sunshine in its publicity is an explosion of consciousness, rambling off script, garrulous and unfiltered, leaving a swath of complexities and contradictions in its wake. Photography is the medium of dialectics. Everyone sees one thing barely (or considerably) totally different within the image…Rather than clarifying, it complicates. Photography is a long-winded reply unrestrained by the query.

There are nice many books of pictures. There are a handful of actually good books about pictures. Blind Corners, a brief e-book certain with the class of a Notting Hill Edition is a type of books that can strike deep. It offers language and examples to the issues and wonders and pleasure of what we do.

A word from FRAMES: Please tell us if you’ve an upcoming or not too long ago printed pictures e-book.