Photobooks of 2019: At least thirteen gentle men by Vanessa Winship

This has been a terrible year of uncertainty. What still gives me hope are works such as the one listed below.

I began by attempting to write about each of the works but I have found myself lost in a sea of words that did little to describe nor do real justice to the work laid out on the pages before me, for pictures at their best are visceral and visual, they are by their nature indescribable, they work in an experiential way.

What I can do perhaps is highlight a single key element of their makers and one that feels pivotal in enabling the creation of a work that has meaning, one that is generous in that affords us the possibility to enter into in so that we as reader may fully experience it.

In this context I can speak about the one man I know best, George Georgiou, for in this there is a certainty of what I am witness to. I can attest that every inch and every fibre of this mans mind, body and soul was put into the creation of this work in order that it might best honour the people depicted in the photographs and of what the work addresses with compassion, clarity of our contemporary society. To do this also involves an understanding that the input of other people coming together adds a richness which both carry forward and hold together the pages contained within the book, from the light-handed work of design, some few words, immense and endless patience of a committed printing house.