' All I want is a room with a view......
A sight worth seeing , a vision of you.....'
A socially inept amateur photographer , an undeveloped roll of film , dodgy nude pin-ups from the late 50s/early 60s , and a mystery............and wonderful illustrations - what more could you want from a book ?
Opening up the latest edition of Varoom magazine , an illustration at the bottom of one page caught my eye - Graham Rawle ? ' Diary of an Amateur Photographer ' ? ....never heard of him - or it - and all literally cut out and pasted together like some anonymous note ?...............no technical artifice ? no computer generated images ?
Hmmm - a mystery about a mystery...............
........and having tracked down a copy of the book it did not disappoint . The story aside - which is excellent - the way the book is designed and assembled is most impressive . Constructed ( ? - designed ) as a diary / scrapbook each page is lovingly and individually assembled , pages overlapping each other in a way so that you suddenly realise that what appears to be an error in continuity is in fact the previous - or next - page reappearing as the page you are actually reading is smaller - and stapled in. Each page looks cut and pasted up , just as a real paste-up diary scrapbook.......
.........and just in case you think that this is just computer trickery , a photo of the designers desk shows his working method.......boxes and boxes of cut-out type , waiting to be selected and pasted up,
Dating from 1997/98 this is real cut-and-paste - ant the seedy world of the late fifties amateur photographer - and the adverts offering various ' services ' live again.
Wonderful.............
' All I want is 20-20 vision..........A total portrait with no omissions..........'
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