Unseen - The New BPPA Book

Anyone who knows me, will know that along with a few colleagues, I spent most of last year working on a book. After countless meetings with colleagues, calls to photographers, meetings with publishers and designers and our sponsor, its finally done.....and looks fantastic. I'm naturally talking about the new BPPA book called Unseen.

Its a collection of great images taken by our members over the years, which have remained unseen. As most photographers know, our best work is often not published, even from commissioned assignments. The reasons are wide and varied; from clueless picture editors and designers, to the image being the wrong shape, or it not fitting with political or ideological stance the paper is taking on a given story.

In this book we have gathered, in our opinion, the best of this work and would like to share it with you.

I'd also like to personally thank Canon who have again stepped up to the mark and supported great photography by being the sponsors of this project. My gratitude goes to Matt Beard and Nick Millen from Canon, who after a couple of conversations made this project a reality.

The book itself is being launched on March 25th, 2009, but is available for pre-order from Amazon.

*UPDATE* - Unseen now available at SnapperStuff.

About UNSEEN

In 2004 our ground-breaking retrospective book and exhibition Five Thousand Days underlined our commitment to bringing outstanding photography to the public. Since then we have been constantly working on new projects, and new ways to showcase our members’ work. UNSEEN is the culmination of one such project. It highlights one of the Association's every day frustrations: that huge numbers of brilliant pictures never see the light of day through too tight deadlines, design limitations or editorial indifference. The images in UNSEEN were selected by a jury of BPPA members, and offers a glimpse of the variety and extraordinarily high standard of the members work.

After spotting that the author Jilly Cooper had written a letter to The Times in June 2008 highlighting the lack of proper photographers bylines, the Association wrote to her to ask that she write a foreword for Unseen, and was delighted when she accepted. Here is an except:

"Thank goodness for Unseen. "The sweetest songs,” wrote Shelley, "'sing of the saddest thought", and these photographs are so beautiful yet compassionate that, despite their appalling images of death, loss, mutilation and destruction, one feels an overwhelming elation and relief that someone has drawn attention to such suffering. Without photographers invading the worse troublespots, armed only with their cameras, so much tyranny and brutality would go unrecorded."

Unseen - Photographs from The British Press Photographers' Association is published on 25th March by Skateboarding Duck and the project was sponsored by Canon.

It is a cloth bound 170x240mm book with 176 pages and 108 photographs (both colour and duotone) and was designed by Stuart Smith (Five Thousand Days - The BPPA, Personal Best - Elliot Erwitt, Inferno - James Nachtwey) the ISBN is 978-0-9561801-0-0 and has a RRP £19.95