Obituary: Ian Cameron

Published on Monday 22 March 2010 20:19

Incisive writer and bold designer who united his talents in many exquisite publications.

Born: 13 March, 1937, in London.

Died: 26 January, 2010, in Moffat, aged 72.

IAN Cameron enjoyed a successful and varied career, making significantly original contributions to movie criticism and film studies, to publishing in natural history, fine art and design, and to the editing and design of books in all those fields.

Cameron had an acute and highly informed visual sense, which he exercised in his love of film, photography, architecture, art and design. As a designer of books and other publications, he had a genius for marrying image to text, and for creating each page as part of a complete and coherent visual experience. His designs were simple, precise and beautifully fit for their purpose.

Convivial, gentle in manner, unfailingly courteous and uncombative in personal circumstances, he was strong-minded, determined and a perfectionist in his professional work, bringing to everything he did a quizzical enthusiasm, intellectual integrity and a sometimes quirky individuality of approach.

He was born in 1937 of a Scottish father and an English mother, his childhood marked by frequent solitudes: at first, after the death of his mother when he was five, in the care of maiden aunts in Inverness; later with his father and stepmother in Hampstead, London, where he attended University College School and spent long hours immersed in the study of the flora and fauna of the Heath.

These experiences laid the basis of a lifetime's passion for natural history and also, no doubt, of a distinctive, self-contained intensity of approach to those things that most interested him. While on national service, he spent innumerable hours of his free time in flea-pit cinemas, a habit which continued when he went to St John's, Oxford, in 1958, to read zoology, and from which in part stemmed his encyclopaedic knowledge of film.

At Oxford, Cameron was immediately active in the Film Society and in 1959 became film editor of Oxford Opinion. He proved a perceptive, witty and incisive critic and polemicist, and quickly established himself as a strong presence in the newly vibrant discourse he had himself done so much to bring to life. "Film criticism in Britain is dead," he wrote in his first editorial. "Perhaps it was never alive…" It was now.

In 1962, he founded Movie, an elegantly intelligent magazine which he edited, designed and wrote for over many years, and whose integration of text and pictures was to become a defining feature of his book design over succeeding decades.

From the outset, he worked with such brilliant fellow writers as Mark Shivas (subsequently a successful television and film producer), Paul Mayersberg (later a screenwriter and director), VF Perkins and Robin Wood (both to become key figures in academic film studies).

In 1966, he launched a handsome series of Movie paperbacks – copiously illustrated studies of American and European filmmakers – co-authoring several titles, including Antonioni with Wood (1968), and two, Heavies (1967) and Broads (1969), with his first wife Elisabeth.

Other writers for the Movie series included the great Raymond Durgnat and Peter Bogdanovich, the future Hollywood director. Cameron was never a film snob: he enjoyed and wrote with critical penetration about popular and art-house movies alike; this enthusiastic catholicity of taste was an exemplary critical strength.

From the mid-1970s, however, Cameron was to exploit the depth and breadth of his other interests, editing and designing an expanding range of books on natural history, the decorative arts, architecture and design.

After being frustrated by various unsatisfactory and short-lived publishing ventures, he became a pioneering exponent of book packaging, by means of which the books he wished to produce, and for which he undertook the entire editing, design and production, would be published and distributed under other imprints, among them Thames & Hudson in London and Harry N Abrams in New York. In 1978, he produced Roger Billcliffe's major catalogue raisonn of the furniture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (republished last month in an edition entirely redesigned and updated by Cameron); soon after came Adrian Forty's classic text on industrial design, Objects of Desire, which has remained in print ever since.

Beautiful books followed on ceramics, ornament and book illustration, encyclopaedias of shells, rocks and minerals, illustrated books on art and natural history. Cameron himself undertook the photography for many of these publications.

In 1988, Cameron married his second wife, Jill Hollis. From the mid-1980s they had constituted a formidable team, combining Cameron's design vision with Hollis's expert text-editing, management and entrepreneurial skills. In 1989, the couple moved to Moffat, in Dumfries and Galloway, where they continued to produce an eclectic mix of titles, including film books under the Movie imprint and art books, all edited and designed with Cameron's characteristically impeccable precision and style.

In 1990, Cameron and Hollis collaborated with the artist Andy Goldsworthy on the first of nine books on various aspects of his work. Published internationally, these have made Goldsworthy one of the most widely known and admired contemporary artists in the world. Fine monographs on other artists of international significance added to their achievements. These included Herman de Vries, Chris Drury, John Hoyland, David Nash and Ceri Richards.

Cameron & Hollis, the imprint he co-founded, will continue to publish books reflecting Cameron's exacting aesthetic and critical standards. A monograph on the artist Merlyn Evans, who grew up and was trained in Glasgow, is currently in press; Cameron completed its design only days before his death.