FED AND WATERED...

It is a well known fact among those close to me that I have an insatiable appetite... for restaurants in Paris. The rolling list keeps rolling and though I feed and water the demand, it is never satisfied.

How convenient then, that a very local, low key restaurant I go to all the time recently changed chefs and happened to employ two of the most happening ones in Paris: Shaun Kelly - former chef at Au Passage and Elenie Sapera, formerly of Bones.

At first, I was horrified at the thought of my little secret becoming not so and of the cobbled rue de Mont-Louis thronging with, I don't know, people who don't live in the furthest reaches of the 11th arrondissement, forming a bawdy, excitable congregation outside; making it impossible for me to slip in for a quiet dinner on a Wednesday night without being in the background of several people's Instagrams. I thought it would change, and I liked it just how it was. I felt almost Parisian feeling this.

But luckily, although the food has changed, it's much for the better and the charming and friendly servers remain, along with the calm and happy atmosphere. They also had the good sense to keep the famous Kate Mousse on the dessert menu - adding Eton Mess as a new option, which I'm told is a direct transplant from Au Passage. The opening hours are still maddeningly confusing/non existent at the weekend - maybe I hallucinated that one time we ate there on a Sunday evening. But the food, ah the food - somewhere I already liked very much raised its food game at least several notches? It couldn't really be a better result. Below, some photos from a recent dinner, where we sat at an outside table during l'heure bleue, which did not turn to night until at least 10.45pm.

The menu was printed on white paper - it was the hour that was blue

Octopus and black radish, bone marrow and fresh petit pois

Rilettes of rabbit and pork sandwich - basically a pulled pork burger.  

So then it was onto a special meal on a special day, at the almost impossible to reserve Septime. I did not make this reservation, but I'm told it involved stalking the online booking system to determine when the advance booking thingy clicked round. (FYI - 0.01 AM.) Septime is, of course, somewhere I had wanted to dine since it opened - named one of the top 50 restaurants in the world and one of the few on that list that has the exact vibe I'm looking for in a restaurant, which I can only describe as natural and luminous. Everything in the place glowed with a kind of healthy, radiant light. Bertrand Grébault looked way too young to be directing the kitchen staff, but direct it he did. We ordered so as to try everything on the menu and everything was sublime. The juicy octopus tail with rhubarb will remain in my memory for many years. (The hot trend in Paris is currently meat or fish paired with fruit apparently.)

Details like the tiny white flowers - maybe they were from some kind of bean? and a single nasturtium leaf were considered, but didn't feel pretentious. The candlelight, flowers, rough wooden tables and the enchanted garden behind the restaurant all added to the feeling of goodness and wellbeing. Can you tell I was very happy to be there? I surreptitiously 'stazzed our meal as it seemed rude not to just concentrate on the flavours:

I had cheese obviously

Sea bream, fromage frais, cucumber, those little white flowers; pink veal with bonito cream and capers

(Amazing) octopus with pepper, rhubarb and green beans

The courtyard garden behind Septime

But my brain, the never ending list... is now saying - we have to go to Clamato next.

THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY...

I was recently invited to a special preview screening of The Two Faces of January, the directorial debut of screenwriter Hossein Amini, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last night. The film is an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name. which will invite inevitable comparisons with The Talented Mr Ripley; but this is a tighter, more subtle film that plays on the tension between the performances of Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac.  It's the relationship between Chester and Colette Macfarland (Mortensen and Dunst) and Rydal (Oscar Isaac) under the blazing sun of Greece and Turkey which drives the film. Any other characters are incidental.

It's the summer of 1962. First we see Chester and Colette as wealthy vacationing Americans, singled out by the shady small time con-man Ryder, who works as a tour guide, short-changing pretty American tourists. As the story unfolds, the position of who is not to be trusted changes places between Chester and Ryder several times, with the complication that Ryder is now implicated in Chester's much darker crime, and the Macfarlands are indebted to him for helping them flee Greece and the police. Eventually the action becomes a straight battle of wits between the two men, each desperate to escape, but unable to disentangle themselves.

The costumes by Steven Noble hit just the right spot - again, subtle. Viggo Mortensen's white linen suit's deterioration from pristine to crumpled follows the story arc to a T. Kirsten Dunst only has three or four costumes - all pitched perfectly. The backdrop of bright Greek sunshine and holiday resorts to what is essentially a film noir is a great contrast - also highlighting the Greek tragedy elements of the story.

{Released in the UK on 2 May 2014}

COINCIDENCE...

I was reading James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime the other day and came to a scene in Paris, quite near the beginning, set at the old Les Halles market in the early hours of the morning. As soon as I started reading this scene, familiar images flashed into my mind of the photographs taken there by Tom Palumbo in 1962, which I've always loved. A Sport and a Pastime was published in 1967, Les Halles was demolished in 1971 and replaced by the Forum des Halles - the depressing, labyrinthine underground shopping centre and Chatelet-Les-Halles transport hub where I've never been without feeling lost and that I'll never emerge above ground again. Together James Salter's book and Tom Palumbo's photographs transport me to a place that was razed to the ground before I was born, as if I'd been there myself, clattering over cobblestones in the dark, looking for the pig place.

 Below, some excerpted paragraphs from the book interspersed with some of Tom Palumbo's images of Les Halles:

Isabel laughs. The evening has only begun.
At three in the morning - Christina never goes to bed when she's drinking - we are wandering through the disorder of Les Halles. The air is chilly at this hour, noises seem to ring in it. The workmen glance up from their crates at the unmistakeable sound of high heels. Isabel is talking. Christina. They are pointing everything out. We trail foolishly between great barricades of fruit and produce, past empty bars, through the carts and trucks. Finally we emerge at the roaring, iron galleries where meat is handled. ..........

"We're really going to sleep sometime?" Billy asks.

"Let's go to the pig place," Isabel says.
"Sweetheart, where is it? Isn't it right around here?"
"It's just down the street," Billy says.
It takes us ten minutes to find it. Of course, there's an enormous crowd, there always is this time of night. Taxis are waiting with their lights on dim. Cars are parked everywhere. The restaurant is filled. There are tourists, wedding parties, people who've been to cabarets, others who've stayed up in order to visit the famous market. It's said they are planning to move it to a location outside the city, it will soon be gone.

Au Pied de Cochon - the pig place! 

Somehow we find a table. Billy is rubbing his hands. There's a delicious odor of rich, encrusted soup which is the specialty. Christina doesn't want any, she wants wine. ..........

The crowd is thick. The waiters struggle to get through. They seem to hear nothing, or it has no effect. The patrons are multiplying as if in a dream. Incredible faces on every side, Algerian, bony as feet, cardboard American, the pink of French. Isabel is laughing, laughing. ..........

"Don't ever marry a Frenchman," she says. Then she laughs. She is hugging Coco, her poodle, and laughing.

{Excerpted passages from A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, photographs by Tom Palumbo, Les Halles, 1962.}

THE SET TABLE...

Last Thursday night I went to the launch of The Set Table: The Art of Small Gatherings at Anthropologie in Kings Road. The book is by Hannah Shuckburgh, (who is the features editor of Easy Living magazine) with photography by the very talented Charlotte Bland and illustrations by Lydia Starkey. It's about setting a beautiful table with what you love and have collected: mismatched linens and charity shop crockery, flowers from the garden, a few candles. It's the sort of artfully informal way you'd set a table now.

There was an atmosphere of excitement as we toasted the book, surrounded by armfuls of gorgeous flowers from the flower arranging workshop Hannah had hosted just prior to the launch.

Flipping through The Set Table I was struck by the photography of Charlotte Bland, who happens to be a very kind and exceptionally modest friend of mine. As I am not modest I will tell you that the book also happens to feature my hands, twice! Below are some exclusive original photos used in the book, which you can buy here and at lots of other good bookshops.

{All photos © Charlotte Bland}

FILM ADVICE...

Hey girl, I need to ask you to go to the cinema and watch The Place Beyond the Pines. I know, it's a big ask but trust me. I would like to watch it at least three more times, and not just for the obvious reasons. Best film. Best film! A multi-layered, epic trilogy that avoids the Hollywood norm of everything having to be black and white, good or bad. It was so fantastic that it's made me go silly and I can't compose a sensible review of it. Here's one I liked and would have written if I could think straight.

I also need to ask you to not bother seeing that film where both Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones are psychiatrists and blah blah something about anti-depressants and share prices. I mean, had I known before watching it that it starred those two, I would have quickly realised it was going to be lame. But I just scanned the listings and critics seemed to love it. I wasted two hours and £10 - I don't want the same fate to befall you. Watching it did, however make me appreciate what Derek Cianfrance did with a $15 million budget in The Place Beyond the Pines, versus the $30 million budget of Side Effects. Twice the budget, less than half the film.

CHATS...

In Paris last weekend I was intending to see the Eileen Gray exhibition, when I kept coming across this funny poster for another exhibition: Les Chats. Yes, paintings of cats. I did walk past the Pompidou Centre, intending to stick to my Eileen plan, but it was the final day of the big Dali exhibition and the queues stretched for miles. Chats it was. I made my way over to the Quai des Orfevres and found myself in a room covered floor to ceiling in hundreds of small paintings of cats, by different artists. Many oil paintings; some er, better captures of the feline soul than others. The pinnacle of naive art. But while I was there I discovered the incredible work of Christel Le Vaillant. Cats in clothes, like painted cats from a Lula editorial. I felt sudden, joyous waves of love.

I snatched up as many postcards of Christel Le Vaillant's work as I could - there's one of a tough tabby cat wearing a striped breton top, battered jeans and a biker jacket that is unbelievable. I'll try to scan it, except my scanner is now defunct and being used as a cat bed. Chats!

BONES...

Two weeks into this trip to Paris I gave up on going to all the newly opened hyped up bars and restaurants. In part, checking out new places to go is work for me - to potentially review for HiP Paris for example. But a big part of it is that I genuinely enjoy trying new places when they open; the holy grail being that they might become a favourite I'll want to return to. Variety is the spice of life, non?

While my friends are messaging me from London asking which date I'm back so we can go to Balthazar, it doesn't really work like that in Paris! I'm becoming convinced that the new restaurant/bar openings' lifeblood here is made up of reviewers and what I'm dubiously terming foodie tourists. Many Parisians and "people who aren't Parisians but live here" alike just don't really care that much about going to new places, which leads to weird scenarios where you end up taking them to places they hadn't heard of. It also means that if you do go, you might discover a great place not particularly full of people speaking English, plus the owner's friends, or just a great place that lacks atmosphere or a sense that something is *happening*. So while I'm not quite at the stage of being content to rock up to the most convenient corner brasserie for a croque monsieur (I tried) I really had to calm it down a bit in terms of what I expect to happen on a night out.

BUT.

Out of all the places I've been that were newly opened, the one place that stands out and that I'd happily visit again - and again - is Bones. The most talented young chef in Paris (I'm trying to avoid typing hottest, well, because...) opens own restaurant in the 11th, food bloggers get all in a lather, all I hear before I come to Paris is Bones, Bones, Bones. I managed to get a table for the early seating by booking three weeks in advance. Bones. I was expecting all hype and no substance to be honest. The description of it being punk that I kept hearing didn't help. I was a bit worried that the friend I was taking would hate it and we'd be served something really unappetising, but worse that we'd be uncomfortable and unconvinced. The way it was described in some reviews you'd think they had fluorescent strip lighting, chainsaws for chairs and the meal would consist of them throwing pork scratchings at you from the kitchen.

So I was relieved when we turned up at this lovely, slightly industrial, sensitively renovated stripped back room, with a big bar area at the front featuring a suckling pig resting on the bar; no more than ten tables with comfortable chairs or banquettes and an open kitchen at the back. The staff was friendly and relaxed, the music was GREAT, natural wines were offered, discussed and ordered, we both noticed that the bread was really nice, the butter was delicious. Hmm, nice stoneware plates. Then we got into the prix fixe menu of the day, which at €40 is pretty amazing value. There were five courses on the menu, including cheese and dessert, but I'm sure we were given at least three other dishes in between the courses. Everything we ate was good. Everything was balanced, had care taken over it - whether it was on the menu or not. That is some sophisticated freestyle cooking if that was all based on what they felt like doing that day. Saint-Jacques with pear, smoked? octopus, duck heart, boudin noir - a lazy person like me could say the food was a bit like St. John crossed with 40 Maltby Street in London. By about 9pm the bar area was heaving and I felt that elusive *something's happening* vibe, which is so important in creating an atmosphere that makes you want to return.

Good food, good wine, comfortable surroundings, good music, good atmosphere - if that's considered punk, I'm into it.

CONTACTS, COLOUR...

At the William Klein exhibition at Tate Modern they showed the film Contacts and it has stayed with me ever since. William Klein narrates as he goes through his contact sheets:

A picture is taken at 125th of a second. What do you know of a photographer's work? 100 pictures, let's say 125. Well, it's a body of work. That comes to, all told, one second. Let's say more like 250 photographs. That would be a rather large body of work. And that would come out to 2 seconds. The life of a photographer, even of a great photographer they say: two seconds. 

Genius. {Here's a very old blog post about when I kind of 'met' William Klein.}\

On Sunday I went to see Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour at Somerset House. It wasn't what I expected at all: 10 of the photographs were by Cartier-Bresson - the rest of the exhibition set out to disprove HCB's assertion in the 1950s that colour photography could never live up to black and white. I was particularly excited about the colour works by Saul Leiter and Joel Meyerowitz included in the exhibition.

Saul Leiter

Joel Meyerowitz

{Both exhibitions continue into January 2013. If you're in London, they're worth a visit.}

THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL...

It's been rather a long time since we talked about Diana Vreeland here, hmmm? In fact this year has been quite DV intensive for me, as Lisa Immordino Vreeland (who is married to DV's grandson Alexander - who I met! Wonderful suit, excellent shoes, lovely man) has been rolling out her project on DV: The Eye Has to Travel. First, I missed a screening of the film back in February, then I went to Venice to see the exhibition at the Fortuny museum. I then, through being away or unavailable missed a whole load of further screenings, bought the book, perused it, missed another couple of screenings, went to a talk on DV hosted by Alexander Vreeland and the wonderful Justine Picardie; who it would be announced just days later is the new Editor-in-Chief of UK Harper's Bazaar, which is amazing, thrilling news that DV would approve of greatly I'm sure. A very apt appointment indeed. (It is now amusing to recollect myself that evening going, "So what have you been up to lately Justine? Are you working on anything interesting?" when the epic news was about to be announced. She was the soul of discretion!)

But the film. Never has a film screening so eluded me - it was like a sick joke. Every time I was away, or I missed the email, or I couldn't go - until a few days ago I squeezed into one of the final press screenings prior to the release of the film next week.

If you're reading this blog then the chances are that you're more than familiar with the world of DV. The film tells her story, charmingly, and if you're a DV freak comme moi and have heard a lot of those stories before, it's lovely to hear them straight from the horse's mouth - like the languor in the lips story from David Bailey and Penelope Tree, both still giggling and wide eyed with disbelief/frustration/awe in the recollection of it. What I find fantastic is that for people who were not previously DV freaks this will all be new - it will, to paraphrase DV, "knock them in the eyeballs, give them what they don't know they want yet." Finally, everyone will get what/who I've been going on about for the past twenty years! (Dies happy.)

Lisa Immordino Vreeland has said that in researching the book, she realised that DV's particularly visual story needed a three-dimensional visual platform to be properly conveyed. As the film begins there is a fabulous montage, kind of a tumbr-esque sketchbook collage with pages of her work mixed with snippets of interview, which is very effective. The film is pieced together from the recordings of DV talking to George Plimpton when compiling her memoir DV, which are available to watch online, but in very bad quality. There are some parts that are DV, others taken from the memoir are voiced by actress Annette Miller, who does a pretty good job. There is archive footage of DV mixed with recollections from family, friends and former employees. There is a tantalising snippet of early home video taken at the family's upstate NY home in Brewster. I would have loved to see more of that, but it probably doesn't exist.

I'm glad that the second generation has taken this on. The impression I have is that it was not easy to be the sons of an icon, but as Alexander Vreeland said, it was fun to be her grandson, so the distance of a generation makes it a very different film perhaps. But you get a hint of the strong underlying emotions when DV's son Frederick (Frecky) talks about her never acknowledging his success in his military career. Totally reminding me of Granny Dragon there, maybe that's why I picked up on it. The English stiff upper lip (DV has said she received a very British upbringing from her much adored father - no outward emotion) has a lot to answer for. But back to work: watching the film there is no denying DV's major influence on fashion, on media, on culture, on how we digest and consume creative content in general. The film shows this very well, actually just lays it out like a fact. There's no need to shout about it: There. You have all the pages with Lauren Bacall, Anjelica Houston, Veruschka, Penelope Tree, the first photo of Mick Jagger that UK Vogue turned down first, the Irving Penn flowers, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood... She saw it coming: the twenties, the sixties, the cultural revolution - and she was able to channel the times for the public to understand and be inspired by.

Woven through all this is DV as self-creation. Of taking what was an unlikely start and through sheer creative force and imagination, making of herself something unique and irreplaceable.

One DV quote from the film I had never heard before. It's from the George Plimpton interviews but I hadn't remembered it. She says,

"There's only one very good life, and that's the life that you know you want and you make it yourself."

{The Eye Has to Travel is released in the UK next Friday 21 September. Here's the trailer. If you're in London there's a premiere screening at Curzon Mayfair on Wednesday 19 September, plus a Q&A with the director Lisa Immordino Vreeland}

Bonus! In honour of the release of The Eye Has to Travel I'm conducting a special, once in a blue moon edition of Ask DV. If you need to be reminded of how it works, see here. Get your questions in to The Oracle now!

VREELAND IN VENICE...

I'm two weeks behind and still have loads to show from Venice. But it's about time I got to the point.

This year, as it sometimes does, my birthday fell on Mothers' Day. (In the U.K. but not the rest of Europe.) All props to mums but I don't have one and I'm not one - so trying to celebrate your birthday when everyone around you is celebrating mum-ness can be a little... grim?

So this year I took positive action. I'd wanted to try and go to Venice in March to see the Diana Vreeland exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny anyway. Throw in my birthday and some good friends and an escape plan was hatched.
I got on a plane on the morning of my birthday, was met at the airport in Venice by sweet friends and an hour later we were at the DV exhibition.

If you've ever been to Palazzo Fortuny you'll know that the main room is beautiful and atmospheric - hung on all sides with heavy draperies, with low lighting and glimmering pieces of art; even if it was empty it would strike you as special. But this time it had Diana Vreeland's clothes and personal memorabilia displayed in cabinets: all her shoes (always the same style made by Dal Co. in Rome) lined up neatly side by side on a tooo higgghhh shelf, the originals of family photographs and portraits of her I've seen reproduced in books a million times, a huge glass case filled with Harper's Bazaars and Vogues from her time working there. It was almost a shock to see how modern some of the covers from the thirties or fifties looked. The exhibition is intentionally staged not in chronological order but as a narrative, perhaps to place the importance on imagination first and foremost, rather than as a straight up retrospective.

The second floor is more to do with curation than with Diana Vreeland somehow. It was the curators' interpretation of what she represents, is the best way I can describe it. In any case I got the feeling they'd had free reign with this floor, and while it was interesting, sometimes the connection with DV was a little tenuous - though I'm never going to complain about seeing beautiful clothes. Every decade she influenced is represented in some way. Another possibility is that this floor relates to DV's work at the Metropolitan Costume Institute, where she freed up the way exhibitions could be curated and displayed: on entering the room you're greeted by a large white calico covered horse {here} placed with some 1960s Pucci and Missoni - a triple reference by the curators Judith Clark and Maria Luisa Frisa: one, to the infamous Tahiti shoot where DV sent photographer Norman Parkinson in 1965 with strict orders to shoot a picture of a beautiful white horse with a long tail, plaited to the ground using pounds of fake Dynel hair she gave him (DV's favourite prop in the '60s). Upon arriving in Tahiti the crew discovered there wasn't a single white horse on the island. The second reference is to her Costume Institute exhibitions where she would always place a huge prop at the entrance, to set the scene. For her Balenciaga exhibit she used a 17th century white horse, but here the horse is Italian (apparently!). And thirdly, choosing Pucci and Missoni clothes from the sixties to remind us that the exhibition we're seeing is in Italy. (I'm not sure the casual visitor would have picked up on all that!)

At the end of the exhibition (right about the time I overheard two guards discussing 'that girl who keeps snapping away with her cellphone, I've told her time and again not to take pictures' - sorry guards, but you didn't threaten to kick me out!) was the most beautiful display against the stripped, layered, mottled wall of the palazzo: two Fortuny delphos gowns in silvery gold, a Schiaparelli cape from Judith Clark's personal archive and this shimmering soft gold Chanel tailleur from the twenties.

All in all, a fantastic birthday treat!

{Diana Vreeland After Diana Vreeland is on at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice until 25 June (closed Tuesdays).}

POLANSKI, PAINTINGS, PYJAMAS...

Carnage
I had been meaning to get to a screening of Carnage for ages, but for some reason I kept failing to make it. Perhaps I was subconsciously put off by the description of it as tense and fraught. Also knowing it was a stage adaptation (I'm strangely allergic to theatre) I assumed that meant it was one of those actor-y films that big-time actors (in this case Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) do to really "inhabit" their characters and get all luvvie about their "craft." (I'm looking at you, Winslet.) But because it's a Roman Polanski film I finally went along last week. When you're sitting in a screening room full of film critics and everyone is cracking up laughing for all the right reasons you know you're onto a winner. The premise is that two sets of bourgeois liberal Brooklyn parents meet to politely discuss a playground fight between their two young sons in which one of them has been injured. I would imagine it stays very faithful to the play - the action doesn't stray from the four in the apartment, adding to the claustrophobia. Within the first half hour the mask of civil cordiality starts to break down, finally irrevocably. But it's all handled so deftly that the slightest detail can make you wince or burst out laughing. {Carnage is released in the UK on 3 February.}

The Last Nude
When I was poorly a while ago, my very kind friend Lauren (who thankfully will be visiting London soon, which is dull without her) sent me a care package containing all kinds of lovely things. One of those things was The Last Nude by Ellis Avery, an imagined account of the love affair between Tamara de Lempicka and Rafaela, her muse in 1920s Paris. This is the book that dragged me out of my reading drought - a very evocative, gripping read. As luck would have it, my other friend Lauren (who thankfully is MOVING from Paris to London this week) has written a fine review of it here.

Poplin PJs at Avenue 32
I wear mens' style pyjamas - it's one of my things. I say mens' style, not mens' because I don't like that gap they have, you know. For a long time I'd wondered about those silk Olatz pyjamas, that really chic people seem to own and rave about. But those really chic people are clearly also really rich because these PJs cost an arm and a leg (or a Schnabel) and are dry clean only. I don't currently have a maid so I was thinking of going for cotton instead. Olatz pyjamas do come in cotton but they're still priced for the 1% crowd. What I wanted was contrast piping pyjamas  - like Coco Chanel wore. These cotton J. Crew PJs might work now that my favourite stripy flannel Toast ones are falling apart, though I still have my APC Madras cotton polka dot PJs er, and some stripy Princesse TamTam ones. I like pyjamas a lot, ok? I thought you could get the J. Crew ones monogrammed, but maybe I made that up because I can't see that option now. Finally I found Poplin Pyjamas which might just be the answer. The proportion looks a little off but that might be a case of real person proportion photographed on a lanky model. The best thing is it's a London label and you can buy them from Avenue 32, also UK based, making things less complicated for me with shipping than J.Crew. I might go for the Shrimpton.

EYEWITNESS...

All by Munkácsi

In some ways, the Eyewitness exhibition of Hungarian photographers of the 20th century at the Royal Academy wasn't what I'd hoped it would be. (Luckily it was other things instead.) I was interested to see the works I love by Munkácsi, Brassaï, Moholy-Nagy et al - I had never realised they were all Hungarian - but what I found was an exhibition putting Hungarian photographers and photography in the context of events of the 20th century. This meant that I missed out on seeing some photographs I love, but gained a better understanding of how events in Hungary contributed towards creating a distinctive Hungarian style, which then became internationally influential when the photographers left Hungary for France, London and New York. (Only one of the above Munkácsi images is in the exhibition I think: the one of the woman sprinting along a beach, which is noted as the first (as in the first ever) fashion photograph for Harper's Bazaar.) Those who stayed in Hungary forged another style, due to the restraints of having to photograph in the style of Socialist Realism - whereby works of art had to "depict and glorify the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress." Cue a lot of technically superior images of farm workers and labourers with scythes looking aspirational - on first look at least. The photographers had to be inventive to sneak any sort of comment on society through. My favourite photo in the exhibition is by László Fejes (below) and shows a wedding party walking in front of a wall full of bullet holes. This image led to him being banned from publishing photography because it showed the bullet marked wall.

I thought I was going to see some of my favourite fashion photographs by Munkácsi and Brassaï's images of Paris - instead I got an unforgettable history lesson. Why don't schools teach history like that?