Despite the painter’s lack of ‘epistolary fluency’, this collection of his writings – from drunken interviews to begging letters – offers some insight into his working methods and private life

Francis Bacon composed his autobiography in paint, not words. His portraiture laid bare the skull beneath the skin, the beast pregnantly housed inside the human form, and all of the figures he painted – copulating men, hybrid monsters, bystanders at a crucifixion, many of them trapped in chrome cages or sadomasochistic cellars – were fractured images of himself. The verbal self-portrait that Michael Peppiatt has assembled could never match that lacerating self-scrutiny; in his correspondence, his scrappy memos for paintings and his repetitive interviews, Bacon hid behind evasive banality or wilful obscurity.

Descended from Irish gentry, he took a snobbish pride in his lack of education, and his writing is clumsy, unpunctuated and whimsically misspelled. His greatest works were triptychs, profane versions of religious altarpieces; he habitually referred to them as “tryptichs”. In an exchange that lasted for decades, he always addressed his close friend Denis Wirth-Miller as “Dennis”. In addition, as Peppiatt admits, Bacon lacked “epistolary fluency”. The volume contains dozens of postcards from Monaco or Morocco in which the laconic messages consist of weather reports, while another terse and entirely insignificant note asks his London cleaning lady to come on Monday.

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In the 1970s, the photographer began teaching in a progressive US women’s prison and made moving portraits of many of the inmates. Looking back, he sees how many of them actually felt safer in prison

In 1970, aged 35, Jack Lueders-Booth left a well-paid management job at an insurance company in his native Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue his interest in photography. “Until then, I was a serious hobbyist,” he tells me over the phone from the city where he still lives, “but my interest had deepened to the point where it was more and more difficult to do my day job. I needed something more stimulating. Photography was my real vocation.”

Soon afterwards he landed a job as an administrator for the fledgling photography department at Harvard University, where later he also enrolled as a student. For his master’s thesis, he submitted a proposal that would alter the course of his life. “I told them I wanted to teach photography in places of confinement such as prisons and mental hospitals,” he elaborates, “I thought it would be beneficial for the inmates in all sorts of ways, not least because they could share their experience with their families through the images they made.”

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The Magnum photographer’s social media feed combines superb old images with modern reflections – on Brexit, bum thermometers and radical coffee shops

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Taken over several years, the British photographer’s latest series shows her world narrowing as loss, and lockdown, strike

Lydia Goldblatt describes her book Fugue as a “story about mothering and losing a mother, intimacy and distance, told through photographs and writing”. It is a companion volume, in some ways, to an earlier project, Still Here , about the unsettled, intense landscape of love and loss generated by her father’s death. “The cultural silence around these emotions,” Goldblatt writes, by way of introduction, “the difficulty of navigating and giving voice to them, has made me want to suffuse them with colour and light.”

The pictures in Fugue were made over four years, beginning in 2020. The world of some of them is circumscribed by lockdown, life narrowing to the bubble of family. The photographer’s young daughters are insistently present in the pictures, climbing and clinging and needing notice. “Abundant” is her word for them. Her mother is already an absence; the words in the book chart not only her loss but also the responsibility of clearing and decanting her London home.

Fugue is published by Gost (£45) in June. An exhibition of the photographs, with Robert Morat Galerie, will be on display at Photo London 2024 , Somerset House, 16-19 May

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The celebrated US photographer’s haunting new series, documenting the locations where people have died in encounters with police, is a quietly devastating commemoration and a critique of modern American culture

In their monochrome starkness, Diana Matar’s images of modern America possess a melancholic undertow that is both familiar and unsettling. Whether a deserted backroad fringed with sun-burnished grass in rural Texas or a single-storey liquor store in a sprawling Californian suburb, there is the sense that these often nondescript places are not where locals tend to linger, never mind gather to mourn and to remember.

And yet the 110 photographs in her new book, My America , are of sites where civilians were killed by law enforcement officers across Texas, California, Oklahoma and New Mexico in 2015 and 2016. “I chose those four states because Texas and California are where most people die in encounters with law enforcement,” she says, “while Oklahoma and New Mexico have the highest per capita deaths. I would have liked to have photographed in other places like Chicago and Georgia, but I simply ran out of money.”

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Magdalena Wosinska spent the 1990s hanging out with bands, skateboarders and whoever else crossed her path. These photos capture blissful free spirits

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When Mikko Takkunen relocated to the Chinese city from New York he felt the urge to capture its vanishing essence

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Justine Kurland’s images capture her unique life raising a child on the road – and offer up a joyous escape from the traditional family photo album

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Nick Waplington’s Living Room caused a sensation when it was published, with its glimpses of everyday homes in Thatcher’s Britain. As his shots go on show, the photographer looks back on a seismic work

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