Two children eat ice creams on the cover of Martin Parr’s The Last Resort. Any other photographer would have wiped their faces first. Parr wanted the drips. Parr called himself the antidote to propaganda, and an antidote isn't the same as a kindness. He died in December 2025, a satirist and a national treasure at once. Somewhere in Blackpool in the 1970s, we might have crossed paths.

Dorothea Lange spent her career insisting that words extend the medium of photography, but the lines she filed with “Migrant Mother” weren’t entirely accurate. The record was corrected in 1978 by the woman in the picture and again in 2002 by her son. I've been working out what all of this means for a book of my own and whether it should include any text.

 The first photobook I ever looked at was Alec Soth's Niagara, and I didn't understand it. Heart-shaped bathtubs, wedding rings in a pawn shop, towels folded into kissing swans. Now that I’m working on a photobook of my own, I've gone back to it — and to what Soth says about sequencing, which turns out to work rather like solitaire.