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The chapter on ‘Landfill’ was particularly interesting, and led me to look up the art of photographer Keith Arnatt (above) who spent a lot of time photographing objects from his local tip and in landfill sites, as well as other ‘edgelands’ landscapes, in his home of Wales. The photos owe a lot to post-war documentary photography, which he was strongly influenced by, and also still life photography and painting in these colour photos of decomposing rubbish. He was apparently interested in the ‘conjunction between beauty and banality’. I like that phrase. I might nick it. I’m really warming to this edgelands theme.
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I was also deeply moved by Arnatt’s series ‘Notes From My Wife’. They are jottings and reminders written by his wife, Jo, in the early 90s. Soon after, she was struck down by a brain tumor and Arnatt nursed her until her death in 1996. He decided to collect the most poignant of the notes and photographed 18 of them. Taken out of context and blown up, they become surreal. Photographer Marin Parr has said that ‘this is Arnatt's strength as a photographer: he understood how the smallest detail or observation could be transformed by the act of isolation’.
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