Our thanks to Craig Atkinson from Cafe Royal Books who made the short trip over from Southport to give his excellent talk to Lancashire Monochrome on the 17th March 2019. Craig has been publishing books for over 10 years and produces around 1 a week. To date he has published 580 books of which 400 are in the photo series – by his own estimation there are probably over 100000 books in circulation!

This massive body of work is centred around British documentary photography and has featured the work of both unknown photographers to the very well known. The books are in both private collections and public collections such as the V&A, and fill in some important gaps in the chronology of British documentary.

Craig studied art and was a pcraticing artist and used the A5 zine format to publish his own work as an artist / illustrator/ photographer / collector before starting to publish the work of others. He’s also a lecturer at UCLan in Preston. All that, and he’s a thoroughly decent chap as well!

Follow Craig on Twitter @craigatkinson and Cafe Royal @caferoyalbooks as well as on Instagram and Facebook.

https://www.caferoyalbooks.com/