Tag: photography
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Asterisk
High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…
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Zone de sécurité temporaire
There is a strange but commonly used French phrase with no precise parallel in English: entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf. It refers to twilight, when the light has dimmed and one can no longer differentiate between a wolf and a dog (as if it were once so simple to tell the…
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LEAD
If, as Rebecca Solnit has argued, “science is how capitalism knows the world”, then it should not be surprising that, as new auction records are broken seemingly every week, it is to technology that the business of authentication must increasingly turn. The studied perusal of the expert is no longer enough; now it is the…
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A New Map of Berlin
Anton Newcombe, leader of the psych-rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, is one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio is just a few blocks from my apartment, north-west of Nordbahnhof, where affluent Mitte begins to meld with the predominantly Turkish, working-class neighbourhood of Wedding. I sometimes cycle there for a late…
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Open Call: Wolf Crossing
In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and the wolves – just 200 at the last count. Who will howl in the forests when the last wolf departs? The susiraja may be inviolable…
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Being a Beast
Mankind has celebrated a close connection with the animal kingdom since our Stone Age ancestors dressed in furs and painted bison on cave walls. Mythology abounds with tales of creatures which are half-man, half-beast, from werewolves to centaurs. In the transition from hunter-gatherers to city dwellers, we have gradually lost touch with the land, becoming…
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Lines in the Ice
Human Marks in the Ice Ships fighting against a freezing sea. Masts and ropes caked in ice. Crews of men hauling sledges over crumpled and broken landscapes. These are the mental images conjured when many think of the Arctic and the history of its exploration by Europeans, Russians and Americans. However, this is not the…
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Dead Space and Ruins
Few things capture the present like the ruins of the past. After the lofty projects of the twentieth century have crumbled or collapsed, we are left today with certain reminders: literature, memories, a socio-political legacy, and – more photogenically – the rotting ruins of sundry grand architectural schemes. The connection between architecture and utopianism has…
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The Chernobyl Herbarium
Chernobyl and Plant Life: Silent Witnessing It is incredibly difficult to talk and write about Chernobyl. No serious book on the subject has been able to dodge the task of thinking about the conditions of possibility for thinking in proximity to this theme or this scene. Still before commencing, a work on Chernobyl must first…
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Kaiku
Kaiku peeked through the kitchen window. The scene was empty – the Shaman was out. Kaiku went to the kitchen cupboard. Behind the pots and pans her fingers found a key. With great care she opened the door. The action made her shiver with excitement. The heavy door opened slowly. The room bathed in sunlight….
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Bloom
Where to do plants belong? At the bottom of the food chain? At the centre of the world? In a pot? In the garden? Growing wild across moors and mountains, railways and roads… In Ben Cave’s book Bloom, plants are depicted both in states of careful order, neatly aligned in vases or jugs, and out…