Busybodies of the Small Town
My grandmother is eighty-one years old and hasn’t yet learned how to sit still. This afternoon she’s delivering poinsettias to a woman from her church whose husband is unwell, then going to the fruit shop, the deli, the butcher’s. She’s talking – in that current-quick way of hers ̵
The Time is Now
‘In order to fulfil my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord’, announced President Donald Trump on June 1st 2017 from the White House. Yet the irony is plain to see as this summer both Texas and Florida were plunged
Inbetween Places; The Trouble of Transport in Travel
Ankara Bar crouches in a pothole between the alleys of Penang. The tattered sign above the door is barely visible through the limp streetlights, and the green water drooling out of the drains creeps up your feet the longer you squint to read it. The name of the shop can be a bit misleading. The [&he
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