Lowry: At Home Salford 1966, Unseen Photographs by Clive Arrowsmith Hardcover – Illustrated, 15 Jun. 2017

Good book, good service

fine

You know up front it's a small book, only 80 pages. Only it's much sparser than that.10 pages are wasted on enlarged closeups of kiddie faces that could have been photographed anywhere in the country, not recognisably 'Salford' photographs unless you're the kid photographed. Lowry's photographs are taken where he lived in Mottram; Lowry doesn't figure in the Salford photos whose value is the street scenes, except for the wasted 10 pages where no streets figure. The book 'sampled' the Salford photos - - why these 10 were chosen instead of more street photos is anybody's guess unless you're the dimwit editor who made that decision. 10 pages may not seem a lot but that's 10 pages out of 80. And it's not even 80. 3 back pages feature Arrowsmith's flattering colour portraits of rock stars, no bearing on the book's subject. And take away print credits and acknowledgements and endpapers and you're left with a lot LESS than the 80 pages you thought you were buying. This should be a pamphlet, not a book, and priced accordingly.

I Was born in Salford, not far from Peele Park, my grandfather used to take me to the art=gallery there, i Used to ask him to take me to see the 'golden lady' there...in fact a statue of Buddha! the rest was pre-raphaelites which i liked, but all the Lowries had me wondering, aged 3 or 4, what it was about, the people in the industrial landscapes were exactly like i could see out there, for 'real'with passing time, i find out more and now, with this book, i see the man behind it all.. i hope he met my grandpa, who knowing nothing himself, told me, while listening to the boat race on the radio, that i would g o to oxford or cambridge, so i took him literally... a bit like the people in the canvasses