On The Bookshelf: Our Time by Cat Garcia

‘The underpinnings of genius are always invisible: no matter how hard you look, you can never see the strings.’

This sentence instantly caught my eye when I flicked through the intro of ‘Our Time’ and is probably one of the most canny and truthful statements about perceiving and valuing creativity I’ve read in a long time. London-based photographer Cat Garcia released this heavy bible of creative inspiration already a year ago and after vanishing entirely from my mind, I couldn’t be happier that my better half remembered and caught me unaware with it for my last birthday! And even though I’ve only finished reading through maybe 50% of its content, it’s due time to feature this beautiful thing on my bookshelf.
For ‘Our Time’, Garcia set out to portray Britain’s 60 most creative people over the course of one year, following them into their homes and studios, observing their daily work routine, the process of designing and crafting, then again encountering and carving out the human being itself, detached from the artist’s persona. Printed on tactile, uncoated paper, her wonderful, classy and predominantly b/w photographs are nestled in inspiring words, mostly written by other friendly creative heads, who have one or another interesting story to tell about the likes of Kate Moross, VON, Polly Morgan or Sir Paul Smith. And let’s face it, creativity is an odd one. Difficult to describe and impossible to measure, yet with this fascinating book it magically seems to become a little more conceivable once you flip open the first page.