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Readings and rereadings (1): Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography The chance purchase in a secondhand bookshop recently of three paperbacks form the late 1930s prompted me to think about a woman who, like many in the history of the arts, has been marginalised. She is Lucia Moholy, and among her publications is A Hundred Years of Photography , published by Penguin Books in 1939. Lucia Schulz was born in Prague in 1894. A good linguist (like so many people in that city where it was an advantage to be fluent in both German and Czech), she qualified as a teacher of German and English, before studying philosophy and art history at university in Prague. She then worked as an editor in various publishing houses, including Rowohlt in Berlin, before marrying in 1920 the artist László Moholy-Nagy. He was developing his interest in photography and the couple explored this medium together.  When Moholy-Nagy went to teach at the Bauhaus – first in Weimar then at its new school at Dessau...

The photographer and the sweep One person I remember from my childhood in Cheltenham (a time that came back to me forcefully when I recently visited The Wilson in the town and came face to face with the figure in my previous post ) was a photographer called Eric Franks. Eric, who was a neighbour of a relative of mine, worked for a publisher of guidebooks, Burrow, who were based in Cheltenham; they presumably sent him round to the various places they were covering in their books to photograph old buildings, picturesque high streets, and atmospheric views. Although colour photography was well established by the time I knew him, colour printing was still costly, and most of his work was in black and white. Eric Franks didn’t put away his camera when he left work. He was always taking photographs, and built up a large archive of images of Cheltenham between the late 1930s and the 1950s. He was still at it when I came across him in the 1960s and 1970s, but those earlier images especially c...

The next in my short series of book reviews is a book full of photographs of buildings – and full of information about taking architectural photographs... Photographing Historic Buildings by Steve Cole Published by Historic England One of my first jobs in publishing was editing books that taught people how to take better pictures. I noticed back then, in the days of film and darkrooms, that there weren’t many books about architectural photography (there was a good one by Eric de Maré, but not much else). There still isn’t much, and Photographing Historic Buildings by Steve Cole closes this gap and is written very much for the digital age. The author is well qualified. He worked for more than 40 years as a photographer in the cultural heritage sector – for the old Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and for English Heritage. He knows his subject backwards and upside-down, and is able to tell us about it in clear, succinct writing backed up with exemplary images. He...