Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

You can see it all, and yet still be unaware of the whole story that unfolds before your eyes. Seeing is believing, so they say, and yet what our eyes are able to visualise is barely enough to grasp the enormity of what the future is offering.

Today we are urged to take photographs of everything, to capture the moment, and this lends itself to two very different attitudes, one is the verification of the story, the proof framed that adds definition to the verbal narration, the other is the line taken by some that the photographer is merely seeking attention, demonstrating their life, be it humble, humdrum or beige, as one as an exciting monologue that deserves the full attention of likes, loves and shocked memes.

Photography, as with every other art form, is the point of delivery to how see the world, and it deserves the respect that comes the way of sculpture, performance, and any other form of expression, it does not, and should never be, an artform that lends itself to ridicule from the fast-fading opinions of those who refuse to see life in anything but sepia tones.

Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool is joyous art in itself, and one that exemplifies the notion of framing every picture that tells a story; even if you believe you know the full story of his life, of the implications of his and his brother Paul’s early life and how they came to be part of the emerging and enduring human wealth of the city of Liverpool in the years after World War Two.

To see life through the eyes of a star is one thing, to see it through the mind of a legend, not just in the city where his brother entertained the locals as part of The Beatles, but where he and his camera, his own story as part of the extraordinary The Scaffold with John Gorman and Roger McGough, and where even today he can be found demonstrating all that is good, all that is beautiful of the city by the Mersey.

Photography, like poetry, is about experimentation, you cannot frame a moment in time and let the art speak for itself if you only take the occasional photograph, if you don’t venture into the many fields of learning as the artform insists, openly declares you should seek. You wouldn’t own a guitar to create a sound on one string, so why should photography be any different; and it is with that in mind, as the book unfolds, as the pictures and memories of Mike McCartney’s life bring to life a Liverpool that many will not have seen, that this astonishing, creative, demanding of true belief, rises upwards and leaves the reader with a full sense of enthusiasm and trust in the subject’s eye.

Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool is more than a physical representation of what the eye can frame, it is art, it is evidence, it is a testimony of all that was in the heady days before the mania; and it is glorious.

Ian D. Hall