The Guardian on Photography in Art and Design

A review of Leigh Harrison's portfolio

Kamila Kruk on capturing achievement on film assignment

At the beginning of the year we introduced you to the new 52 weeks project our communities team are running on Flickr to document the year in pictures – here's an update on the and showcase of some of the best photos from week five

Since we started the 52 weeks project to document the year in pictures – a collaborative effort with Flickr users – we've seen the group taking part grow to more than 700 members and so far more than 1,000 photos have been submitted.

From fireworks and storms in week one, to back-to-work blues and foggy sunsets in weeks two and three, we have now reached week five and the first week of February has been dominated by the snowy scenes.

The aim of the group is to not only chronologically track 2012 in pictures – but to explore the ways we are taking and sharing photos in 2012. The news Kodak was filing for bankruptcy sparked this thread with users showcasing their favourite snaps taken on a Kodak and reminiscing on their favourite Kodak products.

The group has also been sharing links to other places where these photography themes are being explored – including Timeout London's instagram albums, and soundcloud's storywheel.

Finally 52 weeks users are sharing their favourite iPhoneography apps they use to add to the feel of the moment on their android snaps – this thread has a great list of apps for android including RetroCamera and Paper Camera and this thread looks at the top apps for the iPhone including Camera+ and Tiltshiftgenerator.

As the group continues members are exploring and experimenting with taking photos on all sorts of devices - but especially new photograph apps and how phones are styling the day-to-day images of our lives. If you're interested, join the 52 weeks project here - we're now in week six but it's not to late to get involved!

See all the Photos of 2012: 52 weeks project images so far in this slideshow:

Thanks to all the readers who have got involved so far. You can also see a gallery of our readers' snow pictures here.

• Photography
• Open journalism
• iPhone
• Flickr

Guardian readersHannah Waldram
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London's V&A compiles collection of royal portraits from 1939-1968 to help mark year of Queen's diamond jubilee

In 1963, the Queen Mother wrote to Cecil Beaton to thank him for a book he had sent of photographs of the royal family. "I find it nostalgic looking through the pages," she wrote. "The years telescope, and I suddenly remembered what it felt like when I wore those pre-war garden-party clothes – all those years ago."

The V&A in London has assembled a collection of portraits by Beaton taken from 1939 to 1968 as its contribution to the Queen's diamond jubilee.

Though the fairytale atmosphere of his early portraits of the Queen Mother give way to a more sombre style in the late 60s, Beaton still focuses on gowns, crowns and grandeur. A theatre set designer as well as a photographer, in 1945 Beaton shot the young Princess Elizabeth against a painted backdrop of a frozen lake to emphasise her springlike qualities.

Some informality creeps into shots of the Queen with her young children, including a shot of Prince Charles as a toddler kissing the infant Princess Anne, while two others show bomb damage to Buckingham Palace – it was hit nine times in the second world war.

The curator, Susanna Brown, who picked the 100 images out of almost 18,000 in the V&A collection, said the "primary purpose" of Beaton's pictures was to promote the royal family around the world: "They were PR, not family portraits." Underlining this, the exhibition includes notes to the press with details of clothing and embargoes.

One of Beaton's 145 diaries is also on display, describing his anxieties about taking the official photographs for the Queen's coronation, though the lavish images show that he rose to the challenge. Before his final shoot with the Queen in 1968, Beaton fretted in his diary: "The difficulties are great. Our point of view, our tastes are so different. The result is a compromise between two people and the fates play a large part."

Though he continued to photograph members of the royal family until the late 70s, he lost his place as pre-eminent royal photographer to Antony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon), who married Princess Margaret in 1960 – "so he was the obvious choice".

"Though [Beaton] greatly respected and admired the Queen, the Queen Mother was his champion and his friend," said Brown, adding that Beaton nonetheless threw himself into the popular culture of the day. "He had a whole new lease of life in his 60s," said Brown. "He was such a pal of Mick Jagger he was nicknamed Rip Van With It."

• Queen's diamond jubilee
• The Queen
• Monarchy
• Photography
• V&A
• Museums

Alex Needham
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The Sacramento Bee newspaper has fired a man for editing a nature image. Don't all journalists alter reality?

All of us media consumers should applaud the management of the Sacramento Bee, which this weekend courageously fired photographer Bryan Patrick for high crimes against journalism. Patrick, or as he shall forever be known, the Great Satan, actually deserved far worse.

It's difficult to believe that as recently as Friday, the fiend was merely suspended without pay, only a day later to be dismissed permanently. Let us only hope that losing his livelihood is merely another prelude. A prison sentence would serve nicely, followed by stoning. This would be carried out by his peers, the Pure, if they can stomach the sight of him long enough to pelt him back into his lower world.

Did not Patrick, after all, digitally combine two photos of two egrets and a frog? Yes, it's true. His camera caught two images in a local estuary of a snowy egret and a great egret trying to chow down. In one, the great egret has something in its beak – a steamed Ipswich clam or a lovely smoked oyster or a Gummi bear, it's hard to make out. Meanwhile, the snowy egret is making a grab for the same morsel. It's a danse macabre, and they're dancing beak to beak. In a second image, shot an instant earlier or later, the snowy egret is seen gazing indifferently at the water, most likely contemplating journalism ethics. But here's the thing: in that photograph, the food item is revealed not to be a Gummi bear at all but a little frog, its froggy legs extended in mid-wriggle.

What Patrick did was combine the images so that the frog could be visibly a frog in the same image as the egrets in a kerfuffle over lunch. In short, he altered reality! So let him suffer the fate of the frog! Here's what the Bee editors had to say:

The Bee's ethics policy strictly forbids such manipulation of documentary photographs. It is considered a violation of our core values, as it misrepresents the accuracy of the event. When we alter a photograph for illustrative purposes, we disclose that at the time of publication. The photographer has been suspended pending investigation. The Bee regrets the publication of this photograph and apologises to our readers.

The Bee, ahem, egrets the error. So did Sean Elliot, the president of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). "If this photographer in Sacramento can diddle around with a photograph of an egret," he told the Poynter Institute, "how can I know that any photograph I look at is trustworthy? It feels like a betrayal … It violates a feeling of trust I think we have with all of our members."

Elliot was on to something. Further investigation revealed that the Great Satan was a serial Photoshopper, once digitally removing a shadow in a sunflower field and replacing it with a sunflower, another time manipulating small wildfire flames to look like ever-so-less-small wildfire flames. So he was summarily sacked. For, after all, in violation of all that is sacred, had he not deliberately misled the reader by manipulating the image to suit his narrative purposes? Yes, he certainly had.

Exactly like every press photographer does at every newspaper every day and always has. Every photo cropped to eliminate extraneous imagery and every single shot selected from a roll of 24 deliberately portrays time and space to suit a narrative. So does photo processing, depth of field and aperture selection – none of which is neutral. For that matter, every snap represents the photographer's choice to focus on what he or she is focusing on. Manipulation, editing, selective reality: it is the essence of photography. That's what they give out the prizes for (plus luck).

Oh, and if Photoshopping photographers should be stoned to death, print and broadcast reporters should be genetically culled from the species. We compulsively manipulate reality. Are you aware that people don't speak in handy two-sentence bursts of clarity? Did you know that folks say "um" a lot? Did you know that they are not psychic, and therefore do not deliver their thoughts in a sequence anticipating our reports, forcing us to reproduce those miraculously concise, um-less quotations out of their natural order? Sometimes, the worst among us even pluck words out of context, making the banal seem sinister and vice versa. Go to the news section of this paper. I promise you: every single article has been Photoshopped.

So let's go back to the loathsome Patrick. In this photographic fraud, were these egrets present together? Yes. Did they fight over a frog? Yes. Was the frog in question the one used in the ultimate image? Yes. Therefore, did he misrepresent the story, or did he perhaps just make it clearer?

The Bee and the NPPA argue this all boils down to a question of trust. Precisely. Writing and photography are powerful weapons issued to journalists, like Ian Fleming's HM secret service-issued double Os. We have the license to eliminate verbatim. The difference between good journalists and bad journalists is how effectively and judiciously we kill. Obviously, it's hard to fault a news organisation for placing a premium on trust. The Pure Ones, however, should give some thought to where they are in the food chain. Today the egret, tomorrow the frog.

• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree

• Newspapers
• US press and publishing
• Newspapers & magazines
• Ethics
• United States
• Photography

Bob Garfield
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Using a QR code in the design of a movie poster risks allowing it to date fast – but then adverts for films are not principally designed with posterity in mind

Using an image from currently-fashionable technology in a movie poster risks producing an image that will date quickly, and that will almost certainly be the case with this striking poster for Martha Marcy May Marlene - but then film adverts are not principally designed with posterity in mind.

The poster is based around a QR code, a form of barcode that can hold much more data than the traditional version, including links to videos and websites. QR codes have been around since the 1990s but have become increasingly popular in the UK in the last year or two because smartphones such as the iPhone are able to read them.

Many businesses have started to incorporate them as a design element, but this is the first time I have seen a film poster do so – although strangely the QR code on the poster does not actually seem to contain any information.

Whether or not it will date, for now, to my mind, the Martha Marcy May Marlene image looks attractively elegant and modern. But more importantly it fits neatly with the the themes of identity the film is built around.

The QR code in the poster hides or gradually reveals an image of the film's star, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the former child stars the Olsen twins), who has fled a cult where she was given the name Marcy May. (All the women in the cult also have to use the name Marlene when they answer the phone.) The film flashes back and forth from the present, when Martha is living with her sister and her husband in their spacious lakeside home, to her life in the cult, under the spell of charismatic leader Patrick (John Hawkes).

The idea of Martha's identity being hidden behind a layer of something fits neatly with this premise. That this layer needs to be decoded before it can be understood also seems apt. In addition, the image is strongly suggestive of Martha's imprisonment: her eyes gaze out from behind the code as if from behind the bars of a jail cell, while the framing of the image, the thick white margins either side of it and the way the name of the film and its stars are squared off so neatly all seem to contribute to boxing Olsen in. She seems trapped behind the poster, rather than a part of it.

As the trailer shows (above at 1min 29s), when the film uses the same image, director Sean Durkin frames her face in a similar way, this time behind the bars of curtains or an opening door.

Another version of the poster (left) uses the same image but with an M replacing the QR code - essentially a more conventional version of the same idea.

The principal poster for the film (below left) takes a different approach, emphasising the dual identities of Martha and Marcy May by merging two photographs of Olsen's face to create a gauzy, sundrenched image.

Jack Crossing of Empire Design, the company responsible for main poster as well as well-received ads for Drive and A Single Man, said he had wanted to create something that was "beautiful but also haunting", just as the film was.

"It was basically trying to capture that beautiful feel," he said, but with hints of something "horrific" involved too.

His intention in overlaying the two images had been that "you didn't know where one started and one finished". Olsen's hair blowing in the breeze in the left-hand image was meant to represent her freedom in the present day, he said, while the blurred image of Patrick hanging in the background was intended to give the right-hand picture a menacing feel.

• Martha Marcy May Marlene is out now

• Posters
• Advertising
• Photography
• Thriller
• Smartphones

Paul Owen
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A selection of images sent in by readers of the heavy snowfalls that have disrupted traffic across the country

One of the world's most famous fashion photographers celebrates 30 years in the business with a shoot for LOVE

Thirty years of smiley, steamy, glossy pictures. Pictures beloved by the very A-listers Mario Testino has shot. "I trust him completely," says Gwyneth Paltrow. "He sees me sexier than other people," agrees Kate Moss.

Born in Peru in 1954, Testino moved to London in 1976, where he hassled Vogue's fashion editors for work while squatting in a derelict doctors' hostel. By the 1990s Testino was one of the most famous (and most highly paid) photographers in the world; he was commissioned to shoot Princess Diana for Vanity Fair, taking the famously relaxed portraits published months before her death.

"To me the magic of photography per se is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after," Testino says today. "It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead – not them. To me photography's always like that. The fact that I think of photography like that will always make you think that there was a moment before and a moment after because I like it to be… not so dead. I want the person to be there and to feel also my presence in my photographs. And you only feel that if it's a moment in time rather than a static moment."

Testino worked with LOVE's editor-in-chief Katie Grand on this fashion story, his first for the magazine. "Mario shot some of the most iconic images of this century," Grand says. "Last year was a particularly memorable one, with the royal engagement and Kate Moss's wedding.  It was an absolute pleasure to work with him."
LOVE 7 After Taste issue spring/ summer 2012 is on sale from 6 February (thelovemagazine.co.uk)

• Photography
• Kate Moss

Eva Wiseman
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Images from an exhibition by the California-based French photographer that features a series of mysterious photographs of two sets of sisters

What does it take to be a top blogging fashion photographer? We get a lesson from Wayne Tippetts

We've been stalking central London for an hour, cameras slung low but ready for the quick draw, when we spot something: a flash of vivid green, across a busy Mayfair thoroughfare. Wayne Tippetts, a photographer who since 2008 has been taking pictures of any fashionable strangers he meets for his blog, Street Style Aesthetic (streetstyleaesthetic.com), cranes for a better look. "We might have something," he says, with the don't-jinx-it caution of a hunter who has learned not to trust any old rustle of leaves. "But no need to rush it."

Ignorant about clothes and about cameras, I've spent the morning being patiently schooled by Tippetts in the ways of street style photography. He's told me to avoid a magpie-ish temptation to focus on something singular and flashy, such as a hat, but to consider instead a passer-by's whole get-up; he has counselled me, above all, to "work to your own aesthetic. Have confidence in what excites your retina".

The woman we've spotted in Mayfair is wearing a green dress under an enveloping black shawl. I can't tell how the whole package rates in fashion terms, but, yeah, I think my retinas are decently excited. The green fabric makes me think pleasantly of toothpaste. The shawl has a nice Nancy from Oliver! feel. We cross the road to say hi.

Her name is Zoë, she's 32 and a doctor, just off a night shift at King's A&E. Remembering what Tippetts has told me about the approach phase (that he's occasionally been taken for a mugger; that it's best to kick off with a compliment), I mention the dress. Zoë agrees it's very green and lets us take her picture. "I don't know what to do!" she says, posing awkwardly. "Give a little more hip," Tippetts advises. "That's it. You look great."

Earlier, he'd told me: they're giving up their time, so it's your duty to "make them look fabulous. Don't shoot them next to an overfilled bin". I guide Zoë away from a pile of construction signs so that she's in front of some attractive slate steps. I'm pleased with the results.

Before Zoë, we'd stopped 21-year-old Florienne in Fitzrovia, and after we had taken some surprisingly brilliant photographs of her in a brown poncho she revealed she was a model, which made it all feel like cheating. After that, we'd found Helena (24, in a spotty skirt and a beanie); then Zoë in her green frock. Now, walking in Soho, Tippetts decides I'm ready to strike out alone. I gingerly accost a woman wearing a colourful puffer jacket.

She's Carri, 31, a fashion designer, and I ask her to pose on busy Berwick Street. The shoot's a bit rushed and I'm worried there might be a piss-streak on the wall I've stood her next to. Happily, Tippetts approves the pictures. "Who's the jacket by?" he asks and I admit I didn't find out. "The jacket's the whole piece!" It's another lesson learned: ask for label names.

To end the day, we move east to scour Hoxton. Nobody's wearing the hoped-for bowler hat and there are no full-body animal costumes, so we call it a day after taking some shots of Roxeanne, 24, wearing cool earmuffs. "Sometimes you've got to accept," shrugs Tippetts. "You can't get 'em all."

• Photography
• Blogging

Tom Lamont
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From British family portraits in Sheffield to Japan's 'princess of polka dots' in London, Skye Sherwin and Robert Clark find out what's happening in art around the country

Skye SherwinRobert Clark

Yayoi Kusama, London

Kusama is the artist who sees dots – everywhere. As a result she's spent the past 50 years obsessively creating psychedelic patterns, from her early hyper-intricate monochrome net paintings to dizzying mirrored rooms where toadstool-ish luminous spots repeat ad infinitum. This survey promises a heady bite of the mushroom, boasting her largest mirror room yet while tracing an artistic career that's certainly taken some unusual turns. Putting an oppressive traditionalist upbringing in Japan behind her, Kusama became a media sensation dubbed the "princess of polka dots", only to voluntarily retire to a Tokyo psychiatric institute in the 1970s, where she continues to work to this day. While her output has been aligned with minimalism, pop and feminist performance art, she remains an original, pronouncing her trippy creations as a kind of therapy for her hallucinations.

Tate Modern, SE1, Thu to 5 Jun

Skye Sherwin

Jennifer West, Sheffield

S1 Artspace continues to establish itself on the contemporary art-world map with this unashamedly spaced-out show of Jennifer West film installations. West dissolves the recognisable narrative orientations of documentary and movie film with techniques of almost desperate disruption. Film stock from Hollywood blockbusters is subjected to physical attack from the application of chemicals, whisky, urine, smoke, nail varnish and – oh yes – LSD. Film strips are burned, scratched and even bitten, then projected. Titles include Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film and Dawn Surf Jellybowl Film. In an age of digital media, West reminds us of the sensuous physicality of genuine celluloid film by distressing its surface gloss.

S1 Artspace, to 10 Mar

Robert Clark

The Starry Rubric, Cambridge

This cosmos-themed show is full of art that offers its own version of stargazing. Things kick off tonight with a performance by Mark Aerial Waller, interpreting conceptual artist and science boffin John Latham's Government Of The First And Thirteenth Chair, an attempt to reconcile the infinite expanse of time with the fleeting moment. Further meditations on time include Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry's This Story Is About A Little Boy, a film riddled with black holes due to its narrator's halting attempts to remember the where, who and when.

Wysing Arts Centre, Sun to 18 Mar

Skye Sherwin

Lucian Freud, London

Freud's portraits are hard, disquieting things, attuned to the tough reality of bare, veiny sprawling bodies and the jaundiced walls, gummy sheets and cruel furniture around them. Alongside Francis Bacon he was Britain's greatest postwar artist, tirelessly working in his Holland Park studio, up until his death last year. This show spans Freud's entire career, from the early stylistic experiments of the 1940s to his legendary, hit-you-in-the-guts realism. It features some of his most iconic paintings, like his nude portrait of Leigh Bowery, slumped in a chair with legs nonchalantly akimbo, and the one of Bowery's friend Sue – the Benefits Supervisor Sleeping – which made Freud a record breaker in 2008 when it reached a cool $33,641,000 at auction

National Portrait Gallery, WC2, Thu to 27 May

Skye Sherwin

The Indiscipline Of Painting, Coventry

By the 1970s, the modernist tradition of abstract painting was presumed dead as its assumed historical progression reached a minimalist full stop. Yet the raw matter of paint refused to disappear from studios, and painting as a discipline outlasted the clear-cut predictions of its own demise. So this exhibition's title cleverly encapsulates the survival of a tradition within a field of almost anti-academic indiscipline. Taking the geometric abstraction of Frank Stella and Bridget Riley as its guiding aesthetic, it reveals a host of maverick abstractionists working away through an era of postmodernist multimedia.

Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, to 10 Mar

Robert Clark

The Family In British Art, Sheffield

As usual the Millennium Gallery follows its populist agenda with a wide-ranging thematic show that nevertheless includes some works which – though all too familiar to most of us – are of genuine historic significance. So this exhibition covers the days of Gainsborough to the incisively critical art-world obligations of our own time. Richard Billingham's shockingly frank photographic portraits of his own parents' domestic lot are redeemed from satire by a touching empathy. But, of the contemporary work, it is Sarah Jones who introduces a less familiar perspective with her photographic reveries of almost painterly compositional subtlety.

Millennium Gallery, to 29 Apr

Robert Clark

Michael Shaw, Oldham

The considerable physical presence of Shaw's sculptures, their ability to animate the atmosphere of a gallery space, lies in the presence of seemingly contradictory characteristics. They are rigorously abstract, yet suggest some kind of cellular or amoebic organisms that indicate the almost primal origins of living things. Their often translucent surfaces suggest the more evanescent of natural phenomena and their compositional rhythms seem more derived from improvised and, well, doodled drawing than the building up or carving out of sculptural space. At their best here, they glow and mutate like eerie things unearthed from some creepy dream of a sci-fi future.

Gallery Oldham, to 10 Jun

Robert Clark

The Near And The Elsewhere, London

The shrinking world conveyed here by 15 artists has nothing to do with technology-fuelled interconnectedness. Its gloomy theme is economic decline and squeezed space in our overcrowded cities. Captured in photography, film and installation, abandoned buildings from the USA to Asia create an unnerving vision of society on the edge. Rachel Whiteread's print of a doll's house rubs up against Edgar Martins's chilling photography of American homes left as half-finished piles of rubble in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. In Noel Jabbour's photos squat brick Middle Eastern buildings look like ancient ruins; while the eerie urban models Thomas Demand builds and photographs are neat, boxy and empty. Lastly, in Francis Alÿs's slides of people living on the street, we see the human impact of all these failed business schemes and collapsing financial institutions.

PM Gallery And House, W5, to 17 Mar

Skye Sherwin

• Art
• Exhibitions
• Installation
• Sculpture
• Painting
• Lucian Freud
• Photography

Skye SherwinRobert Clark
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Readers' favourite photographs, songs and recipes

Snapshot: Uncle Tommy, our hero

I recently went to the Coriano Ridge war cemetery in Italy to visit my uncle's grave. Thomas Cyril Walter Dabner, my mam's only brother, was killed in 1944, 14 years before I was born. My mam, Betty, died in 1984 and I know she felt his loss to the end. She never had the chance to visit his grave and I wanted to go to pay her family's respects to our hero, the first member of my family to do so.

Thomas enlisted in the Durham light infantry in 1939, part of the ill-fated 11th Durham light infantry, which, despite being poorly equipped and lacking essential training, put up strong resistance during the British Expeditionary Force campaign in France during 1940, using rifles to snipe at the oncoming German panzer commanders.

Thomas was, like hundreds of others, captured. He was forced to drive a lorry of wounded British soldiers between two panzers that were escorting them. During the night, Thomas made a dash for freedom, turning his lorry off the main road and making good his escape, despite heavy German retaliatory fire. He delivered the wounded men into the safe hands of the Royal Army Medical Corps before completing his journey back to England via the Dunkirk beaches.

Thomas Dabner was awarded the military Medal for his actions that day, 21 May 1940. Back in England, he remained with the 11th Durham light infantry and as part of the 49th ("Polar Bear") division, spent 15 months in Iceland where this photograph was taken.

On his return, Thomas was promoted to corporal and transferred to the 16th Durham light infantry.

Later, and promoted to sergeant, Thomas, took his place alongside the rest of the 16th Durham light infantry as they stormed ashore in the footsteps of the Hampshire brigade at Salerno on 9 September 1943.

On 12 September the following year, 4457133 Sgt Thomas Cyril Wallace Dabner MM, aged 25, was killed in action near Gemmano in Italy.

The cemetery is in a beautiful setting and immaculately kept. Thanks to the internet, I knew the exact location of his grave and found it easily. I felt very emotional and shed quite a few tears. My sisters had given me an angel to place in the soil, poppy bulbs to plant and some British Legion poppy crosses. Once I'd completed this, I stood for a while, thinking of my mam and the pain she must have gone through in losing her only brother, and how I wish I'd asked more questions about him when she was alive. I said a prayer, and read the inscription on his grave – "He gave his tomorrow for our today."

Thank you, Uncle Tommy, although we never met you, your family will never forget you. Tina Hutchinson

Playlist: Time out with my brother

Time Out by Dave Brubeck

Dave Brubeck's Take Five from the album Time Out is one of the eternal jazz greats. But on a cold winter's day some time around 1960 in rural Somerset, it was somewhat off the radar.

In fact it was more under the door than off the radar. Because under the door was where I first heard it. It was swinging from under my brother Kit's chipped cream bedroom door, from a place strictly off limits. Kit was an art student and I was six years younger. The gap when you're those ages – especially in taste terms – is huge.

On Friday nights or Saturday mornings, my brother would unpack the goodies he'd bought in the week when he'd been at art college. Where did he get the money for this stuff, I wondered? Out of the bag, along with his dirty socks, came the Woodbines, a Françoise Sagan or Bob Dylan (droning and more droning). This week, it was the record with crazy modern art for its cover: Time Out.

New to grown-up cultural toys, I was a bit wide-eyed. Kit played the aloof elder brother. I had to sneak into his room and play Time Out secretly. The door always ajar, one ear listening to the music, the other for his feet on the stairs. I had to be careful not to scratch Brubeck, keeping him shiny black without trace of a thumb print.

If music can be happy, Time Out was it. If music can be playful, Time Out played you along. It made you tap your feet. Its charm was its whole point. I'd no idea what it meant – this music made me feel free. Kathy's Waltz was one of its tracks. A waltz? Did I like waltzes? Crazy! All I knew was that Brubeck and his sidekicks were the kind of people I'd like to hang out with one day.

I don't even know what Kit's musical taste is now – what matters is how Time Out threw me head first into jazz. Oh, so much better, so much more sophisticated, than Eddie Cochran or Elvis! For that I'll always be indebted to Kit.

When I hear Take Five and Time Out today, the music takes me straight back to that scuffed door at the top of our landing. More important is how Brubeck still hits the spot, just like he did then. Still the epitome of cool. Time Out was the first. It was the best.

Nick Durston

We love to eat: Butter chocolate sandwich

Ingredients

Two slices white bread

Butter

Your favourite chocolate bar

Take two slices of white bread, butter them thickly, put in a whole bar of chocolate, squidge together and enter choccy heaven.

Fry's Chocolate vending machines – what memories they bring when I see one in the railway museum. An excited small boy decked out in best white shorts and shirt waiting with Mum, Auntie and Teddy my dog on Bromley South station waiting for the mighty steam train that would take us to Margate. There, standing by the wall was a green iron machine resplendent with ornate cast lettering promising a bar of chocolate for a penny.

I had a penny; in fact I had my shilling pocket money in pennies, all 12 burning a hole in my pocket. The drawer for a coin was at eye height. I placed a penny in the tray and with a great heave forced the slide into the machine. I waited; nothing came. Mum called, "Alan, the train is coming.Quick, here."

I put my hand up the chute looking for my precious bar. It was empty, there was no chocolate and my penny was gone. I began to cry. The train roared into the station with a loud hiss of steam, smoke billowing, cries of the guard, porters running. Auntie dragged me away from the machine, much to my disgust and howls of disappointment. I was pushed into the carriage where I told Teddy how the machine was a cheat and had stolen my precious money. Mum tried to explain that, one day, rationing and the war would end and Fry's chocolate would be in every machine and shop.

When rationing did end, I bought my chocolate and had the special treat, which even now I sneak when no one is looking – a chocolate buttered sandwich. Don't tell the wife, though, she'll bang on about cholesterol. But I reckon a little bit of what you fancy does you good. Go on, try it.

Alan Moser-Bardouleau

We'd love to hear your stories

We will pay £25 for every Letter to, Playlist, Snapshot or We love to eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@guardian.co.uk. Please include your address and phone number

• Family
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What we wear is increasingly shaped not by glossy magazines but by fashion bloggers – arbiters with a camera, a website and a sharp eye for clothes. Morwenna Ferrier and Kathy Sweeney look at the history of the trend and speak to some bloggers

Morwenna FerrierKathy Sweeney

Our pick of the most eye-catching and innovative entries to the 2011 International Science & Engineering Visual Challenge

Hockney On Paper sale at Christie's to include etchings inspired by Hogarth, 1954 lithograph and work from his time in America

The past few years have seen David Hockney experimenting with iPads and iPhones, but an auction at Christie's in London will focus on work made with the most basic of art materials. Hockney on Paper will see almost 150 works go under the hammer, from the artist's 1954 lithograph of a fish and chip shop owned by friends of his parents in Bradford, to photomontages of the 1980s.

The sale, on 17 February, will feature numerous works from the artist's years in America, including a set of 16 etchings based on Hogarth's The Rake's Progress and others inspired by the young Hockney's experiences in New York. The etchings are expected to sell for between £150,000 and £200,000, with the whole auction estimated at £1m. On Monday Hockney visited the Royal College of Art in London (RCA), where he graduated 50 years ago, as part of its 175th anniversary celebrations. He told the Guardian: "Drawing and painting was the centre of the old college and I don't know whether it is now, but I always think the phrase 'back to the drawing board' tells you something, doesn't it? Drawing – it's still there. Nothing's altered in that way."

The auction will feature the 1962 sketch The Diploma, which Hockney drew in protest when the RCA said it would not let him graduate. He had refused to write the essay required for the final examination, stating that he should be assessed solely on his artworks. Recognising his talent and growing reputation, the RCA changed its regulations and awarded the diploma.

Hockney's current show at London's Royal Academy has received huge public acclaim, with all advance tickets sold out, though some critics have been less enthusiastic. Hockney said he had watched the reaction unfold on Twitter, although he did not tweet himself.

He said: "The show is actually one enormous piece, and people who don't get that pick out bits and little points – not very smart, really. Especially for a landscape show, if people are queueing for it, it tells you something. We're very, very pleased with the response – and I'm not complaining about the press. Of course not. It doesn't matter what they say either."

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Alex Needham
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From Rooney Mara's hair to the art deco set, Mario Testino's shot of '1920s pure beauty' shows the dream factory in full effect

Rooney Mara, star of the US version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, poses in this year's cover photograph for the annual Hollywood special of the magazine Vanity Fair with raven black hair sculpted to evoke the legendary silent- era film beauty Louise Brooks. Her 1920s look gives the ethereally nostalgic keynote to a clever formal gathering of 11 young women across a fold-out cover, shimmering in a bright white space especially built for the photographic shoot in imitation – explains an article within – of works by the art deco interior designer Syrie Maugham.

From Mara's hair to the statuesque pose of Adepero Oduye, star of the film Pariah, to the pink fur worn by British actress Lily Collins, the picture is a panorama of wittily contrived nostalgia for Hollywood in the 1920s. It was taken by Mario Testino, best known for his portraits of Princess Diana, and it is not hard to see the connection with current Hollywood: the two most nominated films for this year's Oscars, Hugo and The Artist, both linger in the early days of cinema. The Artist is famous for being silent and in black and white. But Martin Scorsese's Hugo is also set in the 1920s, and includes extensive clips from early films such as Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon and Harold Lloyd's funny and terrifying stunt in the 1923 film Safety Last! when he dangles from a clock high above a city street.

Testino claims his recreation of what he calls "a 1920s pure beauty" has a political as well as cinematic agenda. "With everything happening in the world, dreaming of beauty felt right," he told Vanity Fair. Let's escape today's deficits and debts and fears of decline in fantasies of golden age glamour.

If you compare this cover with previous Vanity Fair Hollywood issues – and you can do so because the magazine offers, inside, a history of what it modestly calls its "artful, innovative, prescient" Hollywood covers – it really is very different and thought-provoking. Realism and personality have previously been the dominant themes, with the images often deliberately dressing the A-list participants in "normal" high street clothes. Or, if glamorous, the glamour was bold and brash. Here instead is a photograph that seems utterly unreal, and is contrived to suggest some 1920s producer's mansion, where the latest stars are gathered for their screen tests.

It's all nonsense, of course. The cinema of nine decades ago has little to do with the mainstream of cinema today. In Hollywood itself, vast copies of the fabled white elephants of Babylon from DW Griffith's film Intolerance now decorate a shopping mall. Like the Vanity Fair cover, these decorations don't really capture the history of Hollywood, partly because they efface its dark side. The drugs, depravity and scandal so lovingly chronicled in Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon are as much part of the 1920s golden age as is the "pure beauty" Testino longs for. Anger begins his history with those fantastic elephants, built at great expense for Griffith and later left to rot.

And yet … this photograph hits a vein deeper than mere nostalgia. The dream factory is America's secret weapon. The desire, this Oscar season, to celebrate cinema history is actually a subtle way to remind the world who is boss. Hollywood, the mythological expression of America, has been shaping our minds, crafting our desires, fantasies, longings and ambitions, since before any of us were born. The Hollywood of the 1920s is not dead, because the basic elements of modern entertainment it created – sex, action, spectacle – still work.

The most genuinely profound of this year's Oscar hopefuls, Scorsese's film about film, Hugo, suggests through its juxtaposition of state-of-the-art 3D effects and quotations of early cinema classics that we may actually be at an uncanny point where the innocence and wonder of new technology gives film a chance to return to its fairytale origins. That return to the magic of the movies of yesteryear is also an evocation – on the Vanity Fair cover – of the American century – the 20th century – whose best and most beautiful images were American, from screen sirens to skyscrapers.

Art deco daydreams of an America that built the modern mind are not mere wishful thinking. Where will salvation from today's crisis come from? Probably from those dreams and that place. While the European economy chokes and splutters, there are promising signs of growth in the US. Even if those green shoots prove misleading, the perennial cry of the global left that the US is in terminal decline is mocked, every year, by the global fascination with the Oscars. It would take massive disruptions in the psychic makeup of the modern world for us to stop caring who gets Oscars, for us to resist the movies and their pounding American heartbeat.

Vanity Fair may seem to be fleeing the present in its Hollywood cover. In reality it is subtly displaying the power to shape our fantasies that makes America impossible to kill. For as long ago as the 1920s era this picture evokes, America wrote the DNA of my dreams and yours.

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Jonathan Jones
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French photographer Lise Sarfati talks to Sean O'Hagan about her latest exhibition, featuring images of two sisters, their mother and her sister

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