CURRENT READING: A Visual Inventory : John Pawson: Phaidon

A unique opportunity to look alongside a designer famed for his remarkable eye

John Pawson photography? Who knew such a thing existed. You would expect it to be precise. And it is. You would assume it to be unerring. You would imagine it to be a kind of book-end to "Minimum", Pawson's seminal visual essay on the idea of reductive elegance. John Pawson's "A Visual Inventory " hits all those marks and actually continues a stylistic exercise he explored in Minimum. That is the pairing of images that play off each other in their dialogue about light, material, scale and proportion. Ideas like these are vital to creative visual thinking and in culling through his collection of 200,000 digital snapshots, Pawson allows the outside viewer to step momentarily into his personal consciousness of what an image means. This unique opportunity to look alongside a designer famed for his remarkable eye is one of the best lessons in visual thinking you could hope to buy.