Yearly Archives: 2024

Overlooking the Sicilian capital, Pizzo Sella is a natural promontory also home to hundreds of unfinished constructions – the result of a wave of illegal urban sprawl started in the late 1970s. Artist Erik Smith freely explores the enduring presence of these concrete ghosts, engaging with the fragments – materials… Read more »

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Heliograph, Calotype, Talbotype, Daguerreotype: these are some of the early names that circulated prior to the word “photograph” during the early, experimental stages of its invention. This fascinating historical text from the mid-1800s lays out the early development of photography from a point in time when the technology had advanced,… Read more »

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Between the areas of Spitalfields and Aldgate in east London, where Middlesex and Wentworth Streets converge to form Petticoat Lane, lies a stretch of market stalls selling clothes, street food and everyday goods. This very space became the setting for a short workshop on place-writing, held in October 2023 by… Read more »

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Every February in Southern Italy, the LGBTQ+ community gathers for a religious event at the Sanctuary of Montevergine in Mercogliano, a small village nestled in the hills of Irpinia. The group collectively enters trance-like states which celebrate “Mama”, a local medieval black Madonna who is believed to protect the marginalised…. Read more »

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The question whether comets are habitable, and how their potential inhabitants would endure such unforgiving characteristics, was seriously considered by early modern speculators on extraterrestrial life. First published in French in 1875, this extract from Amédée Guillemin’s book “The World of Comets” (Les Comètes) summarises a few of those views,… Read more »

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Southern California is many things. Quite infamously, it is known as a landscape defined by the automobile, from the emergence and diffusion of the highway system to fast food burgers, and the suburbanization of the United States. Walking this place then, would seem not only inconvenient, but ill advised. In… Read more »

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What is today known as ‘whistleblowing’ could once take the form of interacting with a threatening gaze carved into the city wall. It is the case of the ‘boche de Leon’ or ‘lion’s mouths’ disseminated by the old Venetian Republic throughout its territory to suppress illegal activities. Through a close… Read more »

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As he navigates through the recurrent lockdowns of the pandemic, stranded between hitchiking and muggings, job hunting and separations, Fabio Valerio Tibollo rediscovers photography as a powerful coping mechanism. Recording everything that happened around him for one year straight, from attending momentous events to finding curiosity in shots of simple living,… Read more »

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How many types of lightning are there, and how did the Victorians perceive and rationalise them? This article by James Broome, first published on The Strand Magazine in 1897, puts together photographs from both observatories and amateurs to show lightning in many of its different forms and shapes, while reflecting… Read more »

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Venice is perhaps the only city in the world where food can only be delivered on foot. Recounting his experience as a delivery “walker”,  Giorgio Pirina traces a fresco of his daily shifts, caught between digitalised work and timeless sites, with the liberating experience of walking contrasting with the impact… Read more »

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In 2011, a series of infrastructural failings following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami triggered a radiation leak today known as the Fukushima nuclear accident, leading to the evacuation of around 200,000 people. By the time photographer Philipp Zechner visited the area 8 years later, restrictions were limited to parts of… Read more »

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