Michael Collins begins Blind Corners, a book of essays on photography, with a careful study of a picture most people wouldn’t look at twice. It is a group photo of about one hundred people in a small town in Wales in 1953. Collins describes how he found a negative of the image in a moribund photo studio and restored and printed it with the aid of a high-definition scanner. Printed in high quality or magnified on the screen in high resolution, this ‘unexceptional photograph without obvious compositional merit’ reveals almost infinite detail and becomes, for Collins, an object of profound contemplation. He can tell the time of day the picture was taken from the position of the shadows, and the direction of the breeze from a man’s turned-up collar. He notices the dour look on the face of one elderly woman, the spike of hair sitting up on a little boy’s head. As his eye travels over the picture, his reverie becomes almost Borgesian. He sees:

The mother’s hand reaching through her daughter’s arms, holding her close. The white ribbon worn by the girl with Down’s syndrome, the stick attached to her little Union Jack that is slipping through her fingers; her mother’s striped dress under her heavy coat, the undulating leather of her handbag, the Box Brownie camera in her hands.

In the essays that follow, Collins, an art photographer and for many years a pictures editor at The Telegraph, focuses the same minute attention on an idiosyncratic collection of photographs, most as unassuming as the portrait of the Welsh town. He excludes pictures ‘characterised by exclamation marks’: there are no