Why do gallery visitors have no bodies?
Picture this. Someone dashes past you in a gallery, camera in hand, voraciously taking photographs of the famous works, passing swiftly by the others without paying them so much as a second look. How ubiquitous this occurrence has become. The focus on certain artworks — the famous ones — is not
The Snapshot Collective: Spring Corner, New York, Melanie Einzig (2000)
A double-denim man walks into frame with a cockatoo perched on his shoulder. A Rottweiler skulks on the sidewalk, its eyes fixated to the right. A couple embrace for what seems like an eternity. Amidst them all, a lone character seemingly exhausted by life slumps dejectedly, the peak of his hat poin
Male Nude, Man Ray (1933)
I remember my primary school art teacher exclaiming with impatience over a rather wonky still life sketch of a shoe: “Where are these black lines you’re drawing? Do you really see them?” What she meant was that real things, made of matter, don’t appear with black felt-tip outlines. Man
Shakespeare and Shoes
As a schoolboy in Cape Town in the 1960s, I lapped up books by the American satirical writer, Richard Armour, the author who once reminded us that libraries are “places where you lower your voice and raise your mind”. Although the racially-segregated libraries of apartheid South Africa symboli
Forgotten Ballads of the Biafran War
My mum fills our house with music. My earliest memories were singing along to Boney M and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Grace Jones’ A One-Man Show poster stands tall and proud at the top of the landing, her distinctive cheekbones and broad shoulders protruding out of the frame. My mother’s mother fi
Home. David Seymour (1948)
There is something fundamentally chilling about photographic context. With just a few words, a short conversation or fleeting caption, a snapshot can transcend far beyond what we ever imagined it was capable of representing. Consider the two pictures above, by David Seymour. It is quite extraordin
An interview with Daniel Levin, author of “Nothing But A Circus”
When you read a non fiction book featuring a long line of dubious characters, hilariously ignorant and incompetent, yet holding vital positions of power all the same–quite like the characters in a political satire like HBO’s VEEP–you know that the man behind it all would make for a fasc
Where Russia meets Rusholme
Down an unassuming side-street of Rusholme, not far from some of the university campuses, an onion-shaped dome stands proud against the cloudy Mancunian sky. Rusholme is itself a vibrant melting pot of different, cultures, demographics and attitudes: students wandering between the hipster bars and c
Memes, Politics and Social Identity
Memes are a way of hiding from the ‘real world’, and of negotiating our place within it. In recent years, they have spread beyond the formulaic humour of set images and captions and begun to take on the roles of political commentary and autobiography. They develop and mutate so rapidly, a