Echoes from the Eighties

Street-Scenes-14-MaggieA 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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The Roots of Parenting

Takel villagersAfter 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.
Read more on this angle here >>

 

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The Freedom of the Oppressed

frank-001-Custom-4Robert 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”…

Read the article here >>
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Photographing the Unseen

20140626-lens-weston-slide-MZDE-superJumboAfter 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

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Hacktivism: cracking the system

Anonymous_croppedKKK, 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…
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This article by Helen Cahill looks back at some of the famous hackers in history >>
This longer read by David Kushner is a history of the now-notorious collective Anonymous >>
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Image by Jeff Nishinaka (paper sculpture) / Scott Dunbar (photograph)
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Posted in Movement, Roots
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From: Stream

The Long Walk from Eden into the World

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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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The Revolution will not be Chauvanised

female_revolutionariesAs 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.”
Read the article here >> 

(Image by unknown illustrator.)
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How the Fall of the Berlin Wall Changed Techno

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Martin Guttridge-Hewitt’s conversation with Felix Denk & Sven Von Thulenlooking back at the roots of Berlin’s techno culture in the extraordinary time of open possibility that followed the fall of the wall.
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Future of Cities : Yesterday’s Tomorrows

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Cities are often described as the nexus for economy, enlightenment, democracy, freedom and inscribed with transformative power for individuals, communities and society. At the same time, these positive aspects are in contrast to portrayals of hellish places full of fear, despair and imminent or post-apocalyptic situations.
‘A Visual History of the Future’, a report by Professor Nick Dunn, Dr Paul Cureton and Nicholas Francis examines how future cities have been visualised over the last 100 years, and considers what these depictions sought to communicate…
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Post-Colonial Streets: Carnival in London

c77605ff-4721-45ca-8cc4-6ba0a2777805-1020x681The 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’s Musical Activists: a New Generation of Griots


“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 >>

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38 Maps that Explain Europe

World map euro control copyAlmost 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.
View & Read >>

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A Viable One-State Solution?

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.

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