cover image The Trouble with Amelia

The Trouble with Amelia

Amelia Troubridge. Thames & Hudson, $40 (200pp) ISBN 978-1-86154-267-0

Amelia does have trouble: a preoccupation with aging British pop culture figures and a debt to '90s jet set magazine photography. Shaun Ryder and others from the band The Happy Mondays make repeated appearances here, and while they may still be news in Britain they're less well remembered here. How about a pic of (as captioned)""Howard Marks, National Car Park, Soho. London, 2000""? Few readers stateside will have any idea who he is. Footballer Johnny Lee Miller, Bernard Sumner from New Order, anonymous misbehaving boys in situ from the UK and Ireland, Ed Vulliamy on the Staten Island Ferry, professional poker players from the Isle of Man--all of registers pretty dimly here, even the seldom photographed Sumner. The book is pitched in the press chat as being about maleness; photos of Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers, a Serbian Monk, African Americans in New York, Motorhead, Fidel Castro, Siena's Paglio horse race and other random masculine people and events contribute to the feeling of a chromosomal hodgepodge. If Troubridge's photographic point of view were stronger, the book might hold together, but the shots feel mostly like sophisticated magazine shots, which is what many of them originally were. As it is, it relies on a set of cultural cares that don't quite match the American Scene, and don't have much to say about masculinity. Perhaps that's the trouble.