A London Inheritance is a photography blog exploring London’s vanished landscapes and forgotten communities. This post presents images from the 1980s on the eroding last traces and disappearing worlds of independent shops, hand-painted signs – and pre-“streetart” graffiti.
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After becoming a new mother, Michelle Henning found herself looking for different models of parenting. This conversation with the photographer Jimmy Nelson explores some of the indigenous approaches to parenting that he found during his extensive travels documenting tribes all over the world. The two of them discuss the differences in approach- and philosophy – between many traditional cultures and the ways children tend to be raised in the modern western world, asking if there are lessons or inspirations for parents in the west.
Read the article here >>
The conversation explores some of the terrain presented by the anthropologist Jean Liedloff in her seminal Continuum Concept, which was perhaps the first western parenting model to draw on indigenous ways .
Note that Jimmy Nelson’s work is not uncontroversial, his project Before They Pass Away having been criticised by indigenous leaders and advocates as idealised fantasy disconnected from the reality of indiegenous peoples and their contemporary situation.
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Robert Frank’s classic book The Americans was a seminal piece of work in a variety of ways.
In this essay, George Cotkin explores how Frank’s photographic expression was fundamentally aligned with the literary vision of Beat writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs et al) and their “sustained critique of the barrenness of American culture,” overlapping with “a vision of renewal and rebirth”.
As part of his thesis, Cotkin suggests that Frank saw and portrayed Black Americans in the Fifties as living an embodied form of existential freedom that far surpassed the experience of the theoretically freer White American “walking dead”…
After a near-death experience, the photographer Kim Weston re-awakened a dream of being an artist. She went back her to roots, creating “Seen, Unseen”, a subtle document of an African-American family, layered with meditations on culture, photography and the sacred. Read article & watch slideshow
KKK, Sony, Xbox… Hacking has never been so “en vogue”, whether the motivation is political, criminal, exposing the system – or “just for the LULZ.” But hacktivism and codebreaking are of course not new, having been around since the very technologies they use…
Reportage journalist Paul Salopek is re-tracing the footsteps of humanity’s ancient ancestors, literally walking from Ethiopia in Africa, into Palestine/Israel and across the globe.
Out of Eden Walk tracks the progress of what is planned as a 7-year walking journey around the world and across the arc of time.
His latest dispatch is a fascinating meditation on the historical and contemporary complexities of the Holy Land and the Levant, cradles of agriculture, monotheism and cities – in fact civilisation as we know it. Read the article >>
Photograph from Samaria-Sebaste by John Stanmeyer. View the gallery >>
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As in most areas of history, the contribution of female activists and revolutionaries has often been ignored; it is mostly men who have become famous as the leaders of resistance and revolutionary movements. This article by Kathleen pays tribute to ten women “who you probably won’t ever see plastered across a student’s college T-shirt.”(Image by unknown illustrator.)
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The annual Notting Hill Carnival in London has spanned the full spectrum of the post-colonial experience, from multicultural street parties to race riots and back again.
Josy Forsdike takes a photographic review of the early days >>
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“Africa produces its fair share of aspirational pop with glossy videos featuring fast cars and seemingly faster women. But peer under the hedonistic surface and you discover there are musicians all over the continent who are worthy successors to the griots, Africa’s traditional storytellers.” Article by DJ Rita Ray. Read >>
Almost every country on the planet was formally or informally incorporated into a European colonial empire at one point or another in history… And of course we still see the consequences all over the world today.
This map is one in a series of 38 maps exploring what is/was/will be Europe.
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What did Palestine look like in 1896? This film footage of Palestine at the end of the 19th century shows Palestinians of all faiths – Christians, Jews and Muslims – living and praying side by side.
