[book review] A Village Lost and Found

[valoise]

Earlier this month I read Flashes of Brilliance, a history of the earliest development of photography and that reminded me that I had another photography book near the bottom of my TBR pile. A big slipcased book by Brian May and Elena Vidal: A Village Lost and Found on a series of sterographic slides from the 185os by T. R. Williams.

May begins by looking back on his childhood fascination on how each eye sees the world slightly differently. This lead to an interest in stereoscopic cards. When a student at Imperial College London he would visit Christies's auction viewing room. "As a poor undergraduate, I had no chance of actually buying any of these treasures . . . But. . . I accumulated a wealth of experience looking at stereoscopic photographs, which was to influence my life for ever."

Once he'd made financial success with his day job (guitarist in Queen) he began collecting. This led him to the 59-card set, Scenes in Our Village, (SIOV) by T. R. Williams. The cards were first published in 1856 and showed life in a rural English village.

May set out to acquire all the cards, then all the variant sets that were published. He researched the possible location of the village, eventually finding it to be Hinton Waldrist. He hired a curator, co-author Elena Vidal, to help him catalog his collection. They visited the village, took contemporary images of some of the buildings in the SIOV slides.

A Village Lost and found reproduces the complete set of slides and includes a folding stereoscopic viewer. The three-dimensional detail of these 175-year old images is stunning. When possible individuals in the photos are identified using census and other local records. Williams was a successful portrait photographer of upper classes, but through his SIOV set you get a glimpse into the lives of the ordinary working class people in rural villages.

Book Review Mirage City

[cornerofmadness]

I absolutely missed my day to post but I doubted anyone would mind now that I actually remembered I said I'd do something...

Mirage City by Lev A.C. Rosen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Somehow I missed there were two books between this and Lavender House because what is time even and that it's been 3 years since I read LH (no wonder I was slightly confused. I just thought I had forgotten stuff). Andy is back with a new case and one of the things I like about Rosen's work is that it's steeped in the real LGBT history and not some pretty fantasy land of it. (Which takes us to the Content Warnings, era typical homophobia and an early version of conversion camps inside mental hospitals which amount to torture).

A woman from the Mattachine Society, an actual early gay rights group, has approached Andy to find three members who have disappeared, one woman and a gay couple Hank and Edward. It's obvious she wants to find the woman more but honestly she's nearly forgotten for much of the narrative as Andy heads south to Hollywood after the two guys who might have been taken by a motorcycle gang.

Worse, this is where Andy grew up and his mother, a nurse, still lives. Their entire interactions any more are a few phone calls per year, basically birthdays and Christmas. This is post-war America so no one is exactly out, even to family (Most of Andy's friends, including his lover, Gene, back at The Ruby have lost their family due to their sexual orientation).

I figured out much faster than Andy some of the clues but I have the advantage of being seventy years down the line and I know the unfortunate, ugly history of how gay people were treated. That said, it did nothing to take away from my enjoyment of this. Andy is in a bad spot of course because naturally he runs into his mother and can't say no to her when she insists he comes home with her.

But will the case come between them forever? Read and find out. This was very good. Andy is a great character and now I need to go back and find the other two books I missed.



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