Pidgin Snaps

by Jonathan Meades

Jonathan Meades sees the world differently. He can find the extraordinary in the everyday, as his fiction and his TV films show. Now Meades is sharing his remarkable collection of photographs for the very first time. Published as a boxed set of 100 photographic postcards, Pidgin Snaps contains abstract close-ups, disturbing landscapes, overlooked details of buildings, surreal signs and odd collections of found objects. Nothing escapes Meades' quizzical, teasing eye and the result is a strangely beautiful collection of images, a glimpse into the inner world of one of our most singular writers and thinkers. 'Photographs,' he says, 'are a way of making the seeming banal fascinating and calling into question the very idea of banality. Perhaps banality doesn't exist. The act of photography makes the (potential) photographer look more intently. You don't passively you gape, you stare. And you reinvent the world, you shape it. At least you do if your name is Brandt or Sternfeld or Witkin or Arbus. Me, I just take Pidgin Snaps.' Each of the 100 colour postcard-sized snaps will feature a short caption by Jonathan Meades on the back. 'There's only one Jonathan Meades. His continuing joy is the ability to show us things we imagine to be familiar in a way that completely changes them.' A.A. Gill, Sunday Times

203 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 7, 2013

About the author

Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is a writer, food journalist, essayist and film-maker. Meades has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects. His books include three works of fiction and several anthologies.
Meades is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of the British Humanist Association.
Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at King's College, Taunton, which he described as "a dim, muscular Christian boot camp". He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1968.
Meades wrote reviews and articles for The Times for many years, and was specifically its restaurant critic from 1986 to 2001. He was voted Best Food Journalist in the 1999 Glenfiddich Awards. Having given up writing about English cuisine in 2001 after being The Times' restaurant critic for fifteen years, Meades estimated, in an interview with Restaurant magazine, that he had put on 5 lb a year during his reviewing period, which works out around an ounce per restaurant. By his own statement in the series Meades Eats, after being pronounced 'morbidly obese' he subsequently managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of a year.
His first collection of stories Filthy English was followed by Pompey (1993), which was widely praised and compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Dickens and Joyce amongst other great stylists.
Meades' An Encyclopaedia of Myself was published in May 2014 by Fourth Estate. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece."
Meades's book Museum Without Walls was published on the Unbound crowd-funding site, in both print and e-book editions.