The photography expert and curator’s new book collects 51 personal and pivotal encounters with pictures of meaning
“Name any collector, and they will be able to tell you about the moment they first laid eyes on a picture that was important to them,” says Zelda Cheatle. “And that was the beginning.” Cheatle, a photography expert, curator and consultant, is discussing her new book, The Photograph That Changed My Life, published by Art Cinema. With an introduction by Geoff Dyer, the book is a collection of life-changing images, selected by a prestigious list of photographers, including Alec Soth, Alex Prager, Don McCullin, Eileen Perrier, Jack Davison, Nadav Kander, Nan Goldin, Sue Davies, Takashi Arai and many more.
The idea for the compilation arose following a conversation with photographer David George, about his “epiphany”. In 1980, George attended the Art College in Middlesbrough to study painting. As part of his studies, the class learned how to use a camera, expose film and use a darkroom.
He became fascinated with the practice, and befriended a tutor, Don Cox, who let him use the darkroom at his home any time he wanted. “I took him at his word and every evening after college, and every weekend, I was at his house, there in his darkroom, asking endless questions and using all his paper and chemicals with cavalier abandon,” George recalls in the book. But the image that changed his life didn’t come from college or the darkroom, but a book he happened upon in the tutor’s library. “There was a black-and-white plate simply titled Pepper No 30, 1930 by Edward Weston,” he recalls in his text. “I was dumbstruck. It was jaw-droppingly wonderful and I believed it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.” Indeed, the fleshy pepper, deliciously contorting in the light, almost resembles a nude. It is a sight to behold.