Echoes

Le livre

The echo has a nostalgie de la boue that history cannot convey; Proust was a master of the reverberating sounds of the past, ill-defined and resonant. Chris Steele-Perkins has selected here, from the fragments of a working photographers life and the archive of a single year - 2001, and the new millenium - images that unashamedly evoke his memories of that year, sentimental, odd, striking and intensely personal. Photographers create in an instant an image that is indelible - until the print fades. Memory, wilful and indiscriminate, cannot compete. But in Echoes Chris Steele-Perkins has somehow combined the two by selecting images he created throughout a single year that recall his misting glimpses of 2001. They are not his normal milieu, the stunning images of Africa and further abroad for which he is renowned. They are something new. Here are the Surrey hills, New York, Japan, family, Africa, home, solipsistic aide-memoires he has arranged in a chronology that combine to make, for him, a Pandoras box of his recollections of that year. No matter that they are at once intimate and unengaged. After all, photographers are human beings with the flickering sight of a raptors eye, scanning the horizon and the nest.