Philip Townsend - Mister Sixties

Philip Townsend certainly must have had an interesting life; I can't imagine what it must have been like to be a young man with what amounts to a backstage pass to the centre of a cultural revolution.

He didn't just capture the sixties in his work but also managed to reflect the 'throwing out the rulebook' ethos in the way he did it. Townsend's Photography has strange cropping for the time. He shot his work the way he wanted and flew in the face of conventional thinking. A blurred car passing in front of the Rolling Stones gives the shot a historical context that would have lacked without it. A row of debutantes, some of which have their heads cut off forces the viewer to look up their legs in an almost lascivious manner. Townsend's Photographs of the Beatles are shot very wide angle but in doing this he put the viewer right in the room with them.

This book contains a mixture of Iconic celebrities, 3 Prime ministers, A 'Who's who' of 1960's music and even a few ordinary people. It's beautifully printed and I can highly recommend it.