The annual photography exhibition showcased a wide range of photography by LSE staff and students. It attracted over 100 entrants and more than 500 photographs, of which four were deemed winners.

None of these are the winning entrees. Instead these are three which really caught Clare’s beady eyes.

To see the winners and more you will just have to go to

www.lse.ac.uk/collections/artsAndMusic/

How far does your average academic  use   photography’s powers of bringing people to life in their texts? Hardly at all!  Aside from the anthropologists, the standard LSE monograph is too often devoid of human faces, even on the jacket.  Tables, graphs, dense text, hundreds of pages of arguments about people, the states they are in, policies which shape them, matters of life and death. But God forbid we actually see them. That might detract from our High Seriousness.

The designers of Power Point have got the message. They have designed into their standard formats, helpful  photo application opportunities. In the world of Development Policy, some senior practitioners will hardly let three screens appear in succession without putting up alongside the bullet points,  images of people doing something appropriate to the theme. Publishers and book designers understand this. Students certainly appreciate  photos. Social networking sites are not afraid to put faces to names.  What’s the academics’ problem?

It was notable in last year’s LSE Photo Competition how few academics entered. If we wanted to put up a cricket team against the students, or recruit an orchestra, we could probably do it. It cannot be a lack of the competitive spirit – academics are notoriously fiercely competitive about rank, turf, research grants and honour. But if they take good photos, they are keeping pretty quiet about it. My suspicion is that we are dealing with a professional deformation – too much reading and writing dulls the human imagination.   When I pick up a book without photos, my heart sinks a bit. It could have had so much more life. L’imagination, au poivoir!