While I love Jack London the author, his writing doesn't always hit the mark for me, sometimes falling into purple-prosed, mawkish sentimentality. Jack London the photographer, however, is right on target, as amply evidenced by this book, which focuses on his camerawork (I think there's a pun in there!).

Following a decent introduction, editor, Davide Sapienza, to accompany selections of his photos, has excerpted parts of several London works, including The People of the Abyss, and The Cruise of the Snark, and his journalism from (nearly) the front of the Russo-Japanese War, and the San Francisco earthquake and fire. If I've a complaint, it's that sixty-nine images from the thousands-upon-thousands of photographs London took isn't enough.

My favourite photographs are those from The People of the Abyss, to obtain which London ignored police advice, adopted the dress of a down-on-his-luck American workman, and immersed himself in the slums of East End of London, the capital of the largest empire the world has known at the height of its power and wealth. The grinding poverty and gross inequality London exposed was an acute embarrassment to the British government, and laid bare the hypocrisy underlying the façade of respectability. It was one thing for the plight of "natives" of the colonies to be debated, but the rot at the heart of Empire was something else entirely. Sadly, there is much injustice upon which London shone his light that festers still today.

The photographs of the San Francisco earthquake and fire are affecting, too. The devastation and abandoned ruins are literally post-apocalyptic (if on a relatively local, rather than global, scale), and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that London's science fiction stories set in civilisation's aftermath were informed by his experiences in San Francisco. His picture of the skeletal remains of the domed tower of the City Hall eerily prefigures the mutilated cinema at Hiroshima ground zero.


- San Francisco City Hall


- Hiroshima cinema

London's photographs from his tragically shortened South Seas voyage endearingly illustrate his intimate closeness to his second wife, Charmian, while those of the people he met on the Pacific Islands captures their humanness, rather than presenting them as exotic "primitive" curiosities, as was more often the case in his time.

A lovely book, printed on good quality paper which well-services the photographic reproductions. ( )