Mon premier blog

Peter Whelan: The Accrington Pals

The Accrington Pals is a poignant and harrowing play set in the early years of the First World War, as the country's jingoistic optimism starts to wane and the true terror of warfare gradually becomes clear. The play looks at both the terrifying experiences of the men at the front and the women who were left behind to face social changes, deprivation and the lies of propaganda. While often comic vignettes portray the everyday life of a town denuded of men, the men face the terror that is the Battle of the Somme. This compassionate play portrays the devastating effects of war on a typical Lancashire mill town and the suffering of everyday people. This Modern Classic edition includes a new preface by the author, plus a full introduction exploring the themes, social/historical context and characters. The edition also includes a chronology and classroom activities.

William Klein: William ABC

"Traditional photography books put me to sleep - They were untouchable, academic and boring. For me, design, graphics and layout were almost as important as the photographs themselves. And that's why I did everything I could to create a new kind of visual book". William Klein, 1954/5 Born in New York in 1929, painter, photographer, film-maker and graphic artist William Klein is often cited as a tour de force of street photography; however, his influence is far more extensive than that. His book "Life is "Good and Good For You in New York: Trance - Witness - Revels", created in just three months and published in Paris in 1956, was one of the publishing sensations of the decade. Ground-breaking in its use of movement blur, high contrast printing, ultra-rapid film, wide angle lenses, cropping and page design, it was followed by photo-essays on Tokyo, Moscow and Paris. In addition, Klein gained widespread fame for his work as a fashion photographer for Vogue, despite the fact that he had no particular interest in fashion, and for his bitingly satirical films, including "Who are you", "Polly Magoo", "Mr Freedom" and "Le Couple Temoin". Klein lives and works in Paris. This astonishing book, designed and selected by Klein himself, is a visual history of his long and varied career. Including iconic images, painted contact sheets, magazine covers and previously unseen images, the book is arranged chronologically from the 1950s through to the present. The seminal photo-books of the 1950s and 1960s are represented by their graphically powerful jackets and stunning spreads, as fresh and startling today as when they burst upon the world. Fashion photographs in both black and white and colour, range from moody portraits to filmic, surreal tableaux , revealing Klein's revolutionary impact on the genre. Film posters and film stills show the ways in which he captured and commented on the spirit of the times, creating biopics of Muhammad Ali and Little Richard and feature films with stars including Donald Pleasance and Serge Gainsbourg. The journey through Klein's work concludes with a selection of his recent, colour photographs, including the extraordinary scenes he found when shooting in London in 2011 among the crowds during the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Phillipe Arisses: Hour of Our Death

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, "The Hour of Our Death" reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death.