Our Peaceable Kingdom: The Photographs of John Drysdale

by John Drysdale, Margaret Regan (Compiler)

Overview

A collection of gorgeous photographs depicting the loving bond between humans and various species of animals.
John Drysdale's photographs are exciting, tender, hilarious, often exhilarating - but for more than the obvious reasons. Certainly it's not every day that one sees a lion that's befriended a Boston terrier. Maybe elephants don't usually go fishing, and parrots generally don't tend to lounge around in beach chairs, next to their human companions. But in the "peaceable kingdom" of John Drysdale, surprisingly unique alliances flourish. His photographs are whimsical and charming, but also carry a very important, necessary truth - the essential bonds of friendship transcend appearances, expectations, and traditions. Cats can love mice, bulldogs can rear squirrels, and foxes can protect chicks.
With a refreshingly honest eye, Drysdale has captured the many ways in which the creatures that inhabit the earth bring one another comfort and happiness. Never mind that a burro and a boy are curled up on the sofa, or that a chimpanzee is sunbathing with his human family by the pool. Friendship is where you find it. The familiarity and love expressed in Drysdale's work is heartfelt and very real - as the endnotes explain, the exotic animals that are his subjects were often orphaned as babies, and reared along with the humans and other animals in the photographs.
Since his earliest photographs of children frolicking on the cobblestoned streets of London, Drysdale's wonderfully illustrious career has spanned close to fifty years. And in Our Peaceable Kingdom, for the first time, 100 of his most memorable images are collected in one beautiful volume, destined to become a favorite on the shelves of children, adults, animal lovers, and anyone who appreciates a good friend.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466867642
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	04/08/2014
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

John Drysdale was born in Uganda, and learned photography at an early age. He spent the majority of his life in England, where he currently resides. His first assignments after studying photography at the Guilford College of Art were with Norman Parkinson at Vogue Studios and with Cecil Beaton, including a stint as royal court photographer for the Queen's coronation. He is best known for his photographs of unusual interspecies bonding and of children, which have received worldwide recognition in the form of postcards and calendars. His publishing credits and exhibitions are extensive. His awards include prizes from the British Press Pictures of the Year and from World Press Photo.
Margaret Regan, who has mingled careers in physical medicine and the arts, is a worldwide advocate of John Drysdale's photographs. She lives in New England.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

British photographer John Drysdale's pictures can be deceptive. They seem to depict play — spontaneous fun and funniness, exquisite ease and frolic, the real and the surreal cozily at home in the world together. But we should not forget that play, along with its larkiness and hilarity and glee, is very serious. And that it is civilized and civilizing.

At bottom, Drysdale's pictures reveal the emotion of love. Brimful of play, his guileless subjects luxuriate in strong and happy feeling, in loving and being loved. We see the conventional gestures and natural abandon of love, the ordinary moments of love, but among a most unexpected and extraordinary mix of creatures. Beethoven claimed that next to love, the best things in life are surprises. And John Drysdale's droll and elegant eye revels in surprise. When did you last embrace a hippopotamus? And if you have, did you then invite the hippo into your house to watch television? And when did you last notice that your dog was in thrall to, and enthralled by, a llama? Or that your cat had unselfishly befriended a white mouse, even sharing her dish of milk with him?

Whether we gasp and gape, or laugh and laud, we recognize the imperishable longing of the heart — and not just the human heart! — for affection. Pervading the strange and humorous beauty of Drysdale's gaze, of his receptiveness to fleeting moments that enshrine the wit and wildness and tenderness of experience, is the verve of his subjects' affection — affection that is unconstrained and unguarded and unambiguous, untutored and unselfconscious and uncomplicated. And unusual, i.e., unusual to a culture that tends to glorify human romantic love and sometimes forgets the importance, even the existence, of love that flourishes between friends, human and nonhuman. But in the wonderland of John Drysdale, love is various. And love is wise.

Rather than limit love to the commotion of romantic ardor, of being in love, Drysdale's world reminds us that it is smart and helpful to be loving, to forge friendships that make life less difficult for one another, even to play and prance and have fun together. Self-preservation thrives on calmer aspects of love: empathy, cooperation, and kindness. With pictures that have the deft power to engage our serious reflection and to tickle laughter out of us, that have a sense of beauty and a sense of humor, Drysdale evokes a place of sunlit harmony and mirth, a peaceable kingdom, abounding in delights.

But interspecies love? Between wild and domestic animals and humans? Why ever not? Though Drysdale has pointed his camera at unlikely friends who are bizarrely unalike, we are soon ambushed by a greater surprise: suddenly our attention is spirited away from odd juxtaposition and dissimilarity and magically ushered into a portrait gallery of affinities, where resemblances sparkle and differences fade to insignificance. It is as if one were freed to regard intimacy anew, for, the very strangeness of these friends intensifies the mystery and majesty and emotional power of love. Natural feeling outwits the unnatural. "Curiouser and curiouser," as Lewis Carroll's Alice said. And eminently sane, as John Drysdale and his subjects might say. (A celebration of seeing, one could add.)

Always gracefully composed and eloquent of wonder, each rendering the improbable familiar and the ephemeral momentous, these photographs flare into merriment and gladden us with their unexpected emotional truths. They are the achievement of Drysdale's lifelong alertness to the feelings and personalities of animals and children — since his boyhood in remote regions of Africa, surrounded by wildlife, and despite his many years in the most sophisticated circles of London society. Whether working at Vogue Studios or in Fleet Street, assisting on Condé Nast assignments or in making portraits of the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, Drysdale would steadfastly return to his animal and children studies, peering at life — at the startling otherness of others — from odd and playful angles.

This watchfulness, very much a reverence, has spawned a body of work that leads us into exotic adventure, at once comic and enlivening and fun, via an agile and generous guide. It is a watchfulness that gives us a peek into the lives of certain beings with whom we share the earth: those who are less noticed, less considered, and who have met and liked and bonded with one another — anomalously or in circumstances unusual, yet with feelings marked by a gift for friendship. With deference and delicacy, Drysdale has slyly brought to light a corner of the world where the ways of the heart are winding and magical as a Venetian canal, and from where he has brought back pictures that exemplify W. B. Yeats's statement, "Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible."

— Margaret Regan

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Our Peaceable Kingdom"
by .
Copyright © 2000 John Drysdale and Margaret Regan.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Introduction,
The Kingdom: Photographs,
Notes on Selected Photographs,
About the Photographer, John Drysdale,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

Our Peacable Kingdom presents the photos of John Drysdale in an unusual volume which was destined for the slush pile before an editor rescued it, where it became a hit. Drysdale's black and white images of primarily children and animals provide warm and fun observations of life and ironies. A unique, recommended pick.