Spoke the other day to @isaac_z._b about Simon Guttmann and saw that today is the anniversary of his death, so thought to post some pictures from his archive that I went to see at the Modern Records Centre in Warwick about a year ago. It came to me also as, the other week, I was talking with my mum about people she had met who were born in the nineteenth century, and if I had met anyone who was too. At least someone born around 1910 took me to see the Halle Orchestra in Manchester a few times when I was a teenager, and I thought of her as a friend. We searched her name online and found that, in 2002, she was still teaching piano on the same piano she had bought in 1933. I (obviously?) never met Simon Guttmann but he was born in 1891, and – somehow incomprehensibly – died in 1990, only three years after I was born. He floated around with Walter Benjamin and others in the 1910s-20s, set up a photographic agency in Berlin in 1928 (called Dephot) then another in London (called Report), after he got out of Germany in 1933 – the same year Florence bought her piano and the Nazis came to power. His archive is full of images of post-war leftist struggles: anti-colonial, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-militarist, trade unionist, anti-poverty, women’s movement, gay and lesbian liberation, but then there’s suddenly a copy of his portrait done by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1910, and then again, a random picture of Harrison Ford at Notting Hill Carnival in the 1980s. Struck me how much a life can be lived over so many epochs, and how a life can be lived, with age, increasingly, on the left. I don’t know why sharing this but maybe something about the importance of intergenerational friendship and solidarity and how that it can be played out at a distance and not just in person