Those who follow me on Twitter will know that I've been at the ABA Chelsea Bookfair today in Chelsea Town Hall. I don't go to buy but to help on the stand of a shop I work with, but every now and again at these things something catches my eye. So I was delighted to come away with this set of photographs from "Expo 58", one of the last of the great world trade fairs, this one in Belgium. The Atomium is still something of an icon of that moment of technological optimism in the 1950s and 60s when we honestly believed that technology held the answers to all the worlds problems: it's a representation of a basic iron crystal.
These photographs, although about 8" x 6" don't have ink stamps on the verso just some handwritten captions, which makes me think that these are by a talented amateur who took them and then developed and enlarged them him/herself in a home darkroom. Very evocative I thought.
