Philip Larkin’s astute pictures make a tantalising companion to his verse
In October 1947, Philip Larkin wrote to his friend Jim Sutton about a recent “act of madness” – he had spent £7 on a camera. The British-made Purma Special had cost him more than a week’s wages, but it was state of the art compared with his previous model, a box camera that had been given to him by his father in 1937, when Larkin was 15.
“I am so far awaiting my first roll of results,” Larkin told Sutton in the same letter. “If they are bad, I shall feel I have been rather a fool.”
Related: In search of the real Philip Larkin
A young girl stares suspiciously at Larkin’s camera and you almost see him though her eyes, a nerdish outsider observing
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