'Gone to Patagonia for six months.' With this telegram Bruce Chatwin left the 'Sunday Times' and embarked on a series of journeys from South America to West Africa, Australia and Eastern Europe. Throughout his travels Chatwin took thousands of photographs and completed a number of notebooks, the springboard and inspiration for his books. They are startling documents - the notebooks are trenchant, learned, humane and witty; the photographs show an unparalleled sense of colour and visual imagery and a deep feeling for beauty in all its forms. In words and pictures unexplored places and people are brought alive - Nouakchott shanty towns, Moorish travellers, Nepalese temples - and the formal simplicity and perfection of their worlds protrayed. Lyrically and concisely he evokes the vertiginous splendour of the shrine of Ansari and mudbrick granaries in Mali, the ghostly desolation of Mauritania and the flower-filled gardens in Afghanistan.
