Beijing in 1966: Streets full of young people bustling around, the demonstrations of Mao’s activists, a sea of red flags. The 19-year-old Solange Brand, then a secretary at the French Embassy, captured the early years of China’s Cultural Revolution with a camera that she had bought in Hong Kong. Color photography was practically nonexistent in China at that time; a handful of government publications … Read More >
Each summer the Russian state honors 25,000 “gifted” children aged between eleven and sixteen at an activity camp in Orlionok, on the Eastern coast of Black Sea. Girlie cult mixes with the Soviet tradition of Komsomol – exuberant beach games and party-jinks… Read More >
Around 1905 the chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky devised a plan to systematically document the Russian Empire using color photography. He received the necessary materials, a railway car refitted especially for the enterprise and a permit to enter prohibited areas from Czar Nicholas II himself. The photographs, created between 1909 and 1915, aimed to give Russian school children a better understanding of the history and culture of their… Read More >
After almost 30 years of absence in galleries, following and long and successful career in cinema, Daoud Alouad-Syad returns home and to his first love, with Au pays de l’enfance (In the Land of Childhood), a beautiful exhibition of vintage photography at Galerie 127 in Marrakech. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Franck and Richard Avedon, Marrakech-born Daoud Read More—
December 16th 1977, the infamous Sex Pistols gig at Brunel University. Infamous for its lack of cohesive sound, Sid Vicious’ inability to stand up sober and Johnny Rotten’s claim that it was the worst gig the band ever played. Anarchy and nihilism and all that the Sex Pistols stood for was not enough to pull off this gig. Following the chaos of the ill-fated concert, lies a powerful pictorial testament: A photo of Sid and Nancy taken by the Sex Pistols’ photographer… More—
The pictorial technique employed to make these pictures, an ingenious and abstracted use of aerial photography, offered a solution to a problem Giles Price wished to overcome. Knowing Giles, I would further propose that these pictures were even begun is in keeping with a set of character traits I admire in him immensely; and which as a photo historian I imagine are manifest in all the best photojournalists one way or another – though Price is not strictly a photojournalist. More—
