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Recent books of photographs

Christopher Howse

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Christopher Howse

A variant of the portrait is explored by Libby Hall in These Were Our Dogs (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a charming choice of 250 unpublished photographs from her historical collection. Each contains at least one dog. Some are prettily framed ambrotypes and tintypes from the 1850s and 1860s, but most are the popular cartes de visite and postcard formats that have left us thousands of anonymous moments. All their owners needed to say was ‘Sit! Good dog,’ and they did, staring unruffled at the camera and stealing the show. So, from some time in the 1920s, in the doorway of G. E. M. Hedley, grocer and newsagent, a stone-built house with its shop-window stacked with jars and tins, a woman and perhaps her son stand next to a Newcastle Journal placard reading ‘Government scheme to aid coal industry’. But upstaging them bang in the middle of the pavement, halfway along the shopfront, there stands, passant regardant, a little black shaggy Cairn terrier.

The Faces of World War I by Max Arthur (Cassell, £25) is for strong stomachs. The faces are not the problem so much as missing bits of faces. A little less troubling, and beautiful in its way, is a hand lying on its own on the battlefield at Verdun.

It is not all mud and bandages. There are smiles, stoicism and camaraderie. A parade-ground full of convalescent German servicemen do exercises standing on one leg, the one leg left to each of them. Another image curiously echoes Noah’s ark, with the loosing of a carrier pigeon by a hand emerging from a small aperture in the side of an early tank.

Max Arthur, a military obituarist for the Independent, accompanies the photographs with contemporary observations. Next to a line-up of new recruits in 1915, some not perhaps fully grown, he puts a remark from a lieutenant of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. ‘When they came to us they were weedy, sallow, skinny, frightened children — the refuse of our industrial system. After six months of good food, fresh air and physical exercise they changed so much their mothers wouldn’t recognise them.’ Nor, for many, later.