#richard beard

[keepingitneutral]

Blue Oaks Residence, Geyserville, California,

Richard Beard Architects,

Interior Design: Bamo,

Landscape: Mix Gardens

Photography: Matthew Millman

[malrie]

lazarus is dead / richard beard

[moodboardmix]

“Hillsborough” Residence, San Mateo County, California, United States,

Built in 1958 by Architect Joseph Esherick and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin & Associates.

Renovation by Richard Beard Architects and The Wiseman Group.

Photo: @josemanuel.alorda

[thepastisalreadywritten]

These rare historical photographs were taken from 1873 to 1877.

They are part of Street Life in London, a book that was one of the first examples of social documentary photography.

The authors, photographer John Thomson and journalist Adolphe Smith, aimed to reveal by the innovative use of photography and essays the conditions of a life of poverty in London.

Born in Scotland on 14 June 1837, John Thomson was a pioneering documentary photographer, one of a breed for whom arduous travel under extremely difficult conditions did little to dampen enthusiasm.

Exploring and photographing China for ten years (1862-72), he published his photographs and texts of his journeys in The Antiquities of Cambodia (1867), Illustration of China and its People (1873-74), and The Straits of Malacca, Indo China and China (1877).

Returning to London, Thomson turned his attention to the city, his Street Life in London (1877), frequently credited as the first instance in which photographs were used as social documentation.

He subsequently developed the art of “at home” portraits, was appointed photographer to Queen Victoria and was the photographic adviser to the Royal Geographic Society.

He died of a heart attack in 1921 at the age of 84.

By the mid-twentieth century, the popular perception of the poor had changed.

Previously viewed as morally defective, the poor were now regarded as the object of study and charity.

Henry Mayhew’s monumental London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851, had been illustrated by woodcuts based on photographs by Richard Beard.

While Street Life in London is hardly as comprehensive a work as Mayhew’s, it has the virtue that its photographic reproductions not only show the subjects as they actually appeared but, by capturing the contemporary streetscape of London, also reveals them in their milieu.

The book is famous for these street photographs, but the accompanying text should not be ignored.

Thomson wrote some (signed J. T.), but most of it was written by Adolphe Smith (A. S.), a journalist who became an activist concerned with labor and the unions.

Smith’s short essays were based on interviews with a range of men and women who eked out a precarious and marginal existence working on the streets, including flower-sellers, chimney-sweeps, shoe-blacks, chair-caners, musicians, dustmen, locksmiths, beggars and petty criminals.

It is impossible not to detect the sympathy that both Smith and Thomson feel for their subjects who, more often than not, are threatened by deprivation and hunger.

The costumes and backgrounds depicted in the photographs may seem picturesque to us today, but Thomson’s subjects are caught in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of poverty.

According to The Photobook: A History by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger:

“Structurally, Street Life is a combination of street portraiture… and interviews with the subjects.

Thus it was the direct predecessor of the journalistic picture stories that would appear in illustrated magazines from that period onward.

… is a pioneering work of social documentation in photographs and words

… one of the most significant and far-reaching photobooks in the medium’s history."

(Photo credit: John Thomson / Hulton Archive / Getty Images / Victorian London street life in historic photographs by John Thomson, Adolphe Smith 1994)

Published on: January 25, 2021

[finita--la--commedia]

My Dearest, I love you ! I love you ! It does bear repeating, doesn’t it ? I have never grown tired of hearing it, and how I wish I could hear it from you tonight. I am trying awfully hard to be brave, Dearest. So don’t worry about me — just take care of yourself.

Richard Beard (1909-1997), in a letter to Reva Beard in: “From Calcutta with Love. The World War II Letters of Richard and Reva Beard”  

[chubachus]

Daguerreotype portrait of British abolitionist and Member of Parliament George Thompson taken by photographer Richard Beard, c. 1841.

Source: Boston Public Library.

[gladstoneslibrary-blog1]

Presenting Our Gladfest18 Speakers...

Richard Beard talks about his moving new memoir, The Day That Went Missing

TALK:, Sunday, 9th September 11.30am - 12.30pm

On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Nicholas and his brother Richard are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. He isn’t, and then he is. He drowns. Richard and his other brothers don’t attend the funeral, and incredibly the family return to their cottage to complete the holiday. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe and their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory. Nearly 40 years later, Richard Beard is haunted by the missing grief of his childhood but doesn’t know the date of the accident or the name of the beach. So he sets out on a pain-staking investigation to rebuild Nicky’s life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident. Who was Nicky? Why did the family react as they did? And what actually happened? Peter Francis, Gladstone’s Warden, interviews Richard about this heart-rending and personal tragedy, and explores questions of faith and doubt.

Tickets just £7, so don’t miss out on this moving event. Click here for more information. 

[dk-thrive]

Why wait? Do something, anything. Wrest control away from fate.

Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing (Little, Brown and Company. November 5, 2018)