Pidgin Snaps

Jonathan Meades sees the world differently. He can find the extraordinary in the everyday, as his fiction and his TV films show. Now Meades is sharing his remarkable collection of photographs for the very first time. Published as a boxed set of 100 photographic postcards, Pidgin Snaps contains abstract close-ups, disturbing landscapes, overlooked details of buildings, surreal signs and odd collections of found objects. Nothing escapes Meades' quizzical, teasing eye and the result is a strangely beautiful collection of images, a glimpse into the inner world of one of our most singular writers and thinkers. 'Photographs,' he says, 'are a way of making the seeming banal fascinating and calling into question the very idea of banality. Perhaps banality doesn't exist. The act of photography makes the (potential) photographer look more intently. You don't passively you gape, you stare. And you reinvent the world, you shape it. At least you do if your name is Brandt or Sternfeld or Witkin or Arbus. Me, I just take Pidgin Snaps.' Each of the 100 colour postcard-sized snaps will feature a short caption by Jonathan Meades on the back. 'There's only one Jonathan Meades. His continuing joy is the ability to show us things we imagine to be familiar in a way that completely changes them.' A.A. Gill, Sunday Times