Introducing Our Talks & Tours: Unreal City with Adriaan van Heerden

At 12pm Saturday in the mezzanine space international award winning photographer Adriaan van Heerden will be on hand to introduce his new art photography book Unreal City. Unreal City is a photographic conversation with The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetic masterpiece. The book comprises 85 black and white photographs (accompanied by lines of text from the poem) which present London as if it were The Waste Land. The book reflects many of the themes of the poem: a feeling of alienation; the failure of people to connect meaningfully; the cruel demands of the City; the failure of religion to provide comfort in this broken world; and the apparently unbridgeable divide between rich and poor.

Join Adriaan and the book’s designer, Claire Parsons Brown, on a journey through this exciting and important project, and discover how Adriaan set about translating Eliot’s words into pictures nearly 100 years after they were written. Claire will provide a first hand view of how the choice of font, papers, design elements and printing process helped to bring the ideas behind the book to life.

A 45 minute presentation will be followed by a 15 minute Q&A session.

To book, register for free tickets to Firsts - London's Rare Book Fair and sign up at the Information desk upon arrival.