Photoblogging Friday - 18

It's Friday and I'm certainly glad to see it end.   The Dow ended the day only down 140 points, and everybody seems to think that is good news.

But Friday also means another edition of Photoblogging Friday. Our contributor, Dean Brierly, sent this entry to TNM early this week -- a tribute to the British writer Alan Sillitoe:

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← Portrait of writer Alan Sillitoe
by Monire Childs

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Last week Photoblogging Friday noted the April 17 passing of Life photographer Myron Davis. Not to establish a morbid trend here, but I thought it fitting to pay tribute this week to the British writer Alan Sillitoe, who died April 25 aged 82.

Sillitoe arrived on the literary scene with the landmark novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which presented a bracingly unsentimental view of British working-class life. His follow-up collection of short stories, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, validated the brilliance of his first novel and placed him solidly in the ranks of the era’s “angry young men” literary movement. (Both books were made into critically and commercially acclaimed films.) Yet Sillitoe always resisted facile labels, and his subsequent output varied widely in tone and content. He was a staunch atheist and critic of political and societal complacency, and remained true to his convictions and his highly personal muse until the end of his life.

Monire Childs’ portrait of Sillitoe is full of evocative detail—the book-lined den, the ever-present pipe, the ink pen with which he wrote his first drafts in longhand. The image is direct, telling and unpretentious, just like its subject. You can find a full obituary of Alan Sillitoe at The Guardian.

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You can read more interviews with photographers at Dean Brierly's website, Photographers Speak.