Driving around New York with my friend Spencer who tells me I should read this book.

Photographing my friend Steve Pyke in his studio and admiring his wall of inspiration.

It seems to have cooled down a bit today - only 88 degrees!

Wherever you go now in New York museums all you ever hear is, "Please don't take any photography". Drives me mad. Couldn't help sneaking this picture of Mathew Brady's camera and a 19th century studio posing stand at the Met.

Just back from the Walker Evans exhibition at MOMA celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of 'American Photographs' - the first one-person photography exhibition at MOMA - and the accompanying publication which paved the way for the photo book as work of art. These prints from MOMA's collection are supposedly from the orignal exhibition or book, though it doesn't look like all the images are here. This is a list Evan's made for the original exhibition: "Show ideas: small defined sections, people, faces, architecture, repetition, small pictures, large pictures."

At the Met for this wonderful exhibition which explores the role of the camera during the Civil War - a war which left 750,000 people dead. Photography was only twenty years old but more than a thousand artists made hundreds of thousands of photographs during this four year period. Most renowned is Mathew Brady - a former jewelry case maker from Ireland, though he claimed he was from upstate New York. There were many other great photographers at work including another Irishman, Timothy H. O'Sullivan who's image 'Harvest of Death' taken in the afternath of the Battle of Gettysburg is one of the most haunting images from the war. Pictured here is 'Rebel works in front of Atlanta' by George Barnard. He used two negs to make the print: one for the landscape and one for the sky. 

Working on a layout for a new little book. 

Must-read article in the current (July 8th & 15th) issue of The New Yorker. Patrick Radden Keefe on the untapped iron ore deposits in the Simandou region of the tiny West African republic of Guinea (one of the poorest countries on the planet), an Israeli billionaire (whose company B.S.G.R. is the current owner of said deposits) and several of Guinea's Presidents (along with full supporting cast) - all culminating in a US grand jury investigation. The chances of the people of Guinea ever benefitting from this extraordinary mineral wealth (income over next quarter century is potentially a hundred and forty billion dollars) are slim but the pending trial could have huge implications on mining. Africa on the road to recovery!?

Read the article here

Happy to be back in my favourite New York studio. 

At Dublin airport again... and today the sky is even bluer than in this John Hinde postcard - and not a cloud to be seen.