All Quiet: 74.8% better than Diane Arbus

So I'm trying to sell a book. But how do you know it's any good. That's what you must be asking. What if the pictures are out of focus or badly composed!

With Everyday Pixel Image Evaluator you will find the answer.

Using a combination of science and creative intelligence, this Image Evaluator will evaluate your images for you and tell you whether they are likely to be awesome or bad.

Images from All Quiet from the Home Front such as the one above score a whopping 99.7%. That means it's an incredible 99.7% better than Martin Parr's picture from Weymouth featured below.

To be fair to Martin, that picture is quite blurred and out-of-focus so obviously not very good. Perhaps he'd have done better if he'd stepped back a bit. To be even fairer to Martin, others of his fare much better, though not quite up to snuff with mine, as we can see from this image of his from the Last Resort.

Close, but no cigar!

That's not to take anything away from me. I'm a very respectable 74.8% better than this famous  Diane Arbus image! Not every likely to be awesome. Who'd have thunk it!

Even Ivars Gravlejs' classic masterpiece, Early Works, is no match for me. All Quiet nudges ahead by a clear 0.5% but it might as well be a country mile.

I'm not getting too much above myself because there's Rineke Dijkstra! It's something to aspire to.

And I'm pretty close to Kohei Yoshiyuki and his amazing Park! Watch out Kohei. I'm right behind you!

It's scientifically proven and is something we should all learn from. I used to think this picture by Max Pinckers was a real belter and Max was one of the great young photographers of our time - both with the images and the ideas! But no, the science tells me otherwise; it's a stinker and that's no lie. I would have given this and Max 100% every day of the week. But I would have been wrong. Thank goodness there are people in the world's leading photographic organisations who have their finger on the pulse and are way ahead of me on Max. Now I understand why. Who could possibly have thought it!

Now you've seen the science, you'll be wanting to buy my book and help fund the printing - and my trip to Paris Photo for the book launch. So...

Buy the Subscriber's Edition of All Quiet on the Home Front Here. It comes with the beautiful print you see below.

Buy the Regular Edition of All Quiet on the Home Front Here.

No, don't think so. Fuck off Everypixel Aesthetics! It's a lie, a lie, a lie I tell you!

Best Neck Photographs

Leon Levinstein.

It's all a bit much this start of the year. All the lists have ended and there's the serious threat of nuance and subtlety getting in the way of everything.

So with that in mind, I think it's time to get a basic set of ranking blog posts up. Not best of, but best.

Starting off with this one. Best necks. Sometimes you need the daft simplicity of a simple list.

Leon Levinstein's is my favourite neck but here are few other challengers.



Albert Watson





Richard Avedon



Shomei Tomatsu




Man Ray




Richard Avedon

Leon Borenszstein




Alfred Stieglitz




Thanks to Sam Anthony, Eugenie Shinkle, Tadhg Devlin, Scot Sothern, Alejandro Acin, Kirsty Mackay, Andy Adams, Brian David Stevens, Christophe Collas, Martin Toft, Stefan Vanthuyne, Mark Page, Claude Lemaire and Simon Anstey for contributing.

Daniel Meadows

I just love the idea that Richard Avedon was inspired by Daniel Meadows Free Photographic Omnibus portraits when he cranked up the subjects for his American West Series, taking the original free-in-every-way portraits  and overcooking, overspicing and overinflating them for the American market.

Of his own portraits, Meadows says, "Running the free portrait sessions was a discipline. It was a Quaker thing and also something I got from my Dad, I suppose. Duty. I had been brought up to be true to my word. It was a contract, plain and simple."

On a good day, I would get 60 or 70 people through the Free Studio, and because I had no film to waste I would try and photograph them all on just three rolls of medium format film. Twelve frames to a roll, two people per frame, 24 people per roll, give or take."

 Perhaps that simplicity comes across in the portraits which are as relaxed and revealing as you like. More of Daniel Meadows, Free Photography and the development of photography in 1970s Britain can be found  in Daniel Meadows: Edited Photographs from the 70s and 80s; a fabulous book with a great text and wonderful, wonderful pictures.

James Mollison and Nuruddin Farah

I enjoyed seeing James Mollison talking about his Dadaab refugee camp (population 370,000 and rising) pictures and the portraits he made of Somalis in the camp - all with an Avedonesque white backdrop to isolate the figures. Which reminds me of Paul Close's fabulous Snakebox Odyssey - even if that is completely different.

Mollison touches on why he has a white backdrop and raises questions of if we should show the normality, show the horror, show the backdrop, don't show the backdrop? Which way should it go? Or should it go all ways?

Show the complexity maybe? I liked seeing the camp best of all in the video, the shops, the restaurant and the guy who was getting married. What is his story I wonder? What happens at night, what are the politics of the camp? Does anyone ever leave?

And at the same time I'm enjoying Nuruddin Farah's tremendous From a Crooked Rib, a Somali man's eye view of a Somali woman's eye view.