During a visit to Ireland a few years ago, I went to an exhibition on Francis Bacon and the fascinating contents of his chaotic London studio. After the painter’s death, everything in his famed 7 Reece Mews studio was left untouched for years and eventually all donated to Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. Paint brushes, ...
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the May 1968 protests in Paris. My father was living in Paris’s Latin Quarter at the time. He had finished his studies at la Sorbonne, was working as an English teacher at Air France and still living in his student hotel. “L’hotel de la Loire” on Rue Du ...
“I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot.” – George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) The Irish Playwright, literary critic and essayist was an avid amateur photographer, taking and collecting around 20,000 images between the 1870s to 1950. Shaw began his love ...
A few years ago, while working on a project in Yangon, I came across a small antique / curiosity / junk shop in the old city centre. I searched through boxes of old photographs and eventually found a pile of old movie stills, many stamped with “British, Burma Film co., ltd – Rangoon” a film ...
“It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.” Henri Michaux Paris, the beginning of summer 1995, I just got the results of my Baccalauréat littéraire (en: literary Baccalaureate) I’m through to the next round and next chapter of my life, university. Excited? Not hugely, as I had picked a field of study ...