London Observed

Fülszöveg

From Macdonald Hastings's introduction to
LONDON OBSERVED
One may be excused for reflecting that London has been photo-
graphed too much already. But then, just as you are dreading
being brought face to face with another awful collection of holiday
snapshots, an album turns up which is so fresh and exciting that it
might be of a place which had never been photographed before. This
is one of them.
Suddenly, Big Ben has a new and paternal expression on his dial.
Lamp-posts have grace, people and traffic have shape, and cat-haunted
alleys a beauty of their own. The teeming city is revealed as intimately
as a village; or, rather, a conglomerate of villages.
London has never been an easy place for the occasional visitor to
learn. She is an old lady who is traditionally punctiliously polite to
her guests but, to people from more demonstrative cities, aloof. She
expects the newcomer to cultivate her, not vice versa. She tries less
than any capital I know to be liked. But... Tovább

Fülszöveg

From Macdonald Hastings's introduction to
LONDON OBSERVED
One may be excused for reflecting that London has been photo-
graphed too much already. But then, just as you are dreading
being brought face to face with another awful collection of holiday
snapshots, an album turns up which is so fresh and exciting that it
might be of a place which had never been photographed before. This
is one of them.
Suddenly, Big Ben has a new and paternal expression on his dial.
Lamp-posts have grace, people and traffic have shape, and cat-haunted
alleys a beauty of their own. The teeming city is revealed as intimately
as a village; or, rather, a conglomerate of villages.
London has never been an easy place for the occasional visitor to
learn. She is an old lady who is traditionally punctiliously polite to
her guests but, to people from more demonstrative cities, aloof. She
expects the newcomer to cultivate her, not vice versa. She tries less
than any capital I know to be liked. But to those who wroo her
patiently and persistently enough, hers is the warmest welcome of all.
This book is the achievement of two and a half years in which,
with the enthusiasm and understanding of a true love, John Gay set
his lens to capture her heart. I believe that he has succeeded in a
measure which only born Londoners have attained in the past.
In his pictures, John Gay shows you some of the things which
London has whispered to him. Taking my theme from his photo-
graphs, I have added what the pictures say to me.
IONDON has never been an easy place
for the occasional visitor to learn. By
-''tradition punctiliously polite to her
guests, to people from more demonstrative
cities she seems aloof. But to those who
woo her patiently and persistently enough,
hers is the warmest welcome of all.
John Gay himself came here from Ger-
many in the bad times of Europe twenty-
five years ago. Today he is a true Londoner
of London's adoption. He is widely known
as a photographer of the English country
scene, where his strength has been in the
achievement of intensely moving effects
with the strictest economy of detail. In
setting his lens to capture the heart of
London, his art is to establish how much
he can leave out of his viewfinder and still
retain the impression in depth that an
architectural elevation or a lump of old
ironwork made on him. Like John Betje-
man, he loves street lamps, gnarled trees,
chimney pots and hard geometric shapes,
but he instils a warmth and sense of period
into them that evoke the city of Good
Queen Bess and Queen Victoria, Johnson
and Pepys, Nell Gwynne and Peter Pan.
Like John Ruskin in Venice, Gay sees Lon-
don through her stones.
o
Macdonald Hastings has a wide and
loving knowledge of the anatomy of Lon-
don, of those facets of its history which
guides scarcely ever know. His commen-
tary interwoven with Gay's pictures makes
a frankly unconventional guide book, in-
tended for visitors with a taste for more
than the Crown Jewels and the Hampton
Court Maze. Vissza