A Walk Down The Hallam Line: a personal account of the West Riding of Yorkshire
A Walk Down The Hallam Line@Blurb.com
http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/5273100-a-walk-down-the-hallam-line-a-personal-account-of
This account has culminated from years of wandering and musing around an area loosely centered around Leeds, Wakefield, Barnsley and Sheffield. It has been displayed in an arrangement of photographs taken between 2008 and 2014, that roughly span the time that the thoughts that make this personal account came together. Yet, always being somewhat concerned with the notion of place – what is urban, what is rural, what is home, what isn’t – it is probably more accurate to say these thoughts have grown over 30 years.
This ‘walk’ through 4 districts that span the old West Riding of Yorkshire is foremost a personal account, yet it also aims to serve as a psychogeographical account. I know psychogeography is a term that is often said to be thrown around carelessly. So, to my make my use of it more clear, I see it as a means of mapping ones experience of a place. I’m trying to show what inhabiting these places/walking through a human landscape feels like, because I believe doing so has much-overlooked potential for understanding a 21st century world that few would argue is working for the majority of us. Thus the accompanying photos aren’t the type to make pretty wall-hangings; all too often I find reality is massively cropped to take the more picturesque. I have chosen this area because it is a landscape I know better than any other. My time remaining on this earth as John Ledger will be indelibly-coloured by this area, whether I am in Barcelona or still in Barnsley.
http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/5273100-a-walk-down-the-hallam-line-a-personal-account-of
Let the Lyrics Talk (new book)
http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/5262007-let-the-lyrics-talk
This image and text book is about the phenomenological impact lyrics have on you; where they ‘philosophise’ for you, whether you want them to do so or not, by emerging in your stream of thoughts, articulating your unconscious, at least a long time before you find any other means of articulating it
The lyrics aren’t always from favourite songs; they’re just ones that can somehow identify with your life, and tell you things about your life, that would otherwise unlikely be recognised. Personally, pop music lyrics often haunt me as warnings of things going off in the world I am only half-aware of (half asleep to) or they reveal something I had thus far been unable to put into sentence.
Often the lyrics heard cut themselves from the rest of the songs lyrics and become specific to your own life, and your relationship to them bears no meaning to the lyrics of the song as a whole.
Regarding the images, there is no intention for them to be picturesque. They are more to do with the mundanity and psychological grind of much of life. The existential frustrations and longings such mundanity prises out of our souls is largely a response to the very opposite of that: the exciting, aspirational imagery of a capitalist culture, beaming from every poster and screen, that makes us feel that something is wrong if our lives are not always dynamic and exciting.
The songs are part of this culture and possibly evoke the dreams laden within it, even whilst they are often critical of the inconsistencies and injustices of this culture.
John B Ledger 
