Toronto writer Andrew Pyper made a stop in Victoria to give a reading at Chapters bookstore for his newest novel The Killing Circle. He was interviewed by Jo-Ann Roberts of CBC’s All Points West following the reading.
Category: Photography
A steady stream of visitors filled the Cool Aid Society Downtown Community Activity Centre for Victoria’s 3rd annual Anarchist Bookfair. Booths were manned by publishers (big and small), groups and activists. The biggest publisher represented was AK Press, with Ashley Rowe (top photo) making the trip up from Oakland, California to attend. Local bookstore Camas Collective in attendance and Melanie Sylvestre (R) chatted with one of the Bookfair organizers Kim Croswell (2nd photo). The D.I.Y. crowd was well represented with lots of zine producing groups including members of the Sharpie Fumes Collective (bottom photo).
Several hundred people turned out to hear essayist, historian and novelist Ronald Wright read from his new book What is America? at Victoria’s Alix Goolden Hall. The event was sponsored by Munro’s Books.
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Anonymous Bookshelf #3
Artist Robert Amos creates art in a multitude of mediums and a variety of subjects. He is noted for his paintings of Victoria, his collage photographic portraits of artists in their studio and other work. He is less known for his James Joyce related art. Amos, fascinated by Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, has turned to his art to help him understand the book.
Here are a few photographs of Amos and the artworks. The photos were taken at the James Joyce Bistro in downtown Victoria which Amos used as a giant canvas for a Joyce tribute. Images of Joyce, text and characters from his books are featured on murals and paintings and tables. Text from the books even covers the bar top and his suit.
His website is: www.robertamos.com
I hope to post a long interview with Robert regarding the Joyce project but for now I’ll post these photographs.
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Literary Graffiti
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Miriam Berkely
A link and story from Eric Kisor’s The Reluctant Blogger after reading an interview with photographer Miriam Berkely in Eric Forbe’s Book Addict’s Guide To Good Books.
Berkely specializes in photographing authors and there are a lot of samples of her work on all the links. Check out the image of Stephen Hawking. In the Forbe’s interview Berkeley says of the Hawking photo ‘My favourite of Hawking was shot in a horizontal format, although when it was used for publicity for the first American edition of A Brief History of Time, it was cropped and sent out as a vertical image with a fair amount of its Cambridge background removed, and some publications published only Hawking’s smiling face, which was a very small part of the entire image.’
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Russell Books
This photo originally ran as part of a photo feature in the Victoria News. Russell Books is well known in Victoria, BC, both for the service and the selection. The 
store is the largest used and remaindered book shop in Canada. Aliyah, the young daughter of managers Andrea and Jordan Minter spends lots of time in the store with her parents. On this day she spotted the stool and made a beeline for it. Her mother removed her before she actually climbed up on the steps.
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Allen Ginsberg As Photographer
The late U.S. poet Allen Ginsberg also took photographs.
Essentially snapshots,
taken, as most of us do, while hanging out with family and friends these images form a visual archive of Ginsberg’s literary acquaintances including most of the other major writers of the Beat era including Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William S. Burroughs.
When Ginsberg began having these images enlarged from their negatives he started to add captions, written in longhand on the white space left at the bottom of the photograph. These captions add information, dates, locations, names and events, to our understanding of the photos. Somehow the idea of a poet adding text to photographs of writers seems so very appropriate
Chronicle Books published a collection of these images in 1993 entitled Snapshot Poetics.
If you like the idea of photographers combining text with their images, especially images of writers have a look through Elsa Dorfman’s site and click on the Housebook link which is sort of at your lower left on the transit map inspired guide to her site.