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London's Square Mile
Stumbling into London’s Square Mile - the heart of the powerful financial district - you could lose your way within minutes. Public streets blur into private forecourts. Seductive passages become corporate cul-de-sacs of soaring glass, steel and stone. Much of the new City architecture has a preening bravado. These are offices built to look great in photographs. Each new London landmark is launched on a wave of computer generated anticipation, reducing the public city to publicity. But in the end a city is not its buildings, it is its people and there is something salutary in the way Londoners fail to live up, or down, to the cosmetic gloss of their surroundings. Whether or not we wish to, we just don’t mirror these facades.
To a newcomer the City looks impenetrable, like an oiled machine with a hidden logic. City folk might seem coolly efficient but it’s an illusion. Look again and many of them seem out of their element, as if caught between one air-conditioned sanctuary and the next. These are not employees ‘on message’. There is doubt and indecision in their gestures. Others are not dressed for the office at all but residents from the housing estates.
Something of the essence of the City is visible here: the telling gap between official power and the lived experience of flesh and blood. This is a modern England bathed in a light more typical of American street photography. There is no long lens involved. The City teems with people, but selecting just one can feel unbearably intimate. As a locus of power this place voyeur in us, and this is part of the appeal. To look, or more accurately to watch without being seen is a part of what defines metropolitan life. But these photographs are looking for some measure of humanity. To be a voyeur is not always anti-social. It can be very different from the cold gaze of the ubiquitous surveillance camera or the miscreant, more guardian angel than opportunist gazer. CCTV catches every second of every day in the high security Square Mile but it misses the things that really matter.
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Hotshoe
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Portfolio Catalogue
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ICON Magazine
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Orbis in Bangladesh
Orbis is committed to eliminating avoidable blindness in developing countries through hands-on training, public health education and improved access to eye care for those who are most disadvantaged. They work in partnership with institutions in developing nations so that they can provide services to patients in the long-term.
They have worked closely with Islamia Eye Hospital and through this partnership they can now provide ocular care in rural areas such as Jamalpur, Barisal and Naogan through Islamia’s team of doctors and nurses.
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Made in China
When you see the words Made in China, do you wonder by whom? One morning I went to Top Shop on Oxford Street and saw the shoes I had seen being made in a factory in China: English size 8, made by girls with feet of size 4.
Ho Ping is 20 years old, a typical age for a factory worker; she comes from Henan Province, 24 hours' travel north of the factory. For two years now she has been working and like all her other co-workers living at Selena. Once a year she goes home to visit her family during Chinese New Year
After leaving school at 16, Ho Ping says it was 'interesting and exciting' coming to work in the factory. For the first few weeks there was little pressure and workers were allowed to make mistakes. After the initial period of meeting co-workers, learning the company song and settling in amongst the 6,500 other employees, work became more demanding and the following six months were really tough. This being her first time away from home, she began to miss her family and friends very much.
These days, some two years later, she enjoys the university-like atmosphere and life at Selena, saying that there is always something new to learn. In a grey coat, she is a supervisor, overseeing the work of 35 young girls who sit in a row on the factory floor and stitch the upper part of shoes. There are eighteen levels in the factory. The system defines the colour of your coat - pink for factory floor workers, grey for everyone above that. It defines the resaurant you eat in the size of your dormitory and your pay.
The photography of Polly Braden documents one individual’s story within China's massive social change. Braden follows Ho Ping, a young girl from the Henan Province, to work for Selena, a shoe factory that produces products for Nine West and Clarks, amongst others. Braden documents Ho Ping and her co-workers, all of whom live at the factory in tight quarters, often operating under strict rules. Concerned less with Ho Ping’s exploitation, Braden focuses on the material prosperity she enjoys. Like thousands of others, factory work has brought her out of poverty and turned her into a consumer - in one picture, Ho Ping shops for shoes with her friends in a mall. Braden then follows Ho Ping home to visit her village where she documents her showing pictures of her new life stored in her cell phone to her family and friends, who still live in an agricultural society that has changed little since the 18th century.
- Natasha Egan, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.
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City of Collision. Jerusalem and the principles of Conflict Urbanism. Birkhauser
A project commissioned for the book Jerusalem - City of Collision. It weaves a path from Bethlehem through a checkpoint into an Israeli settlement; a Palestinian village, the commercial centre of East Jerusalem; the Old City; an orthodox Jewish area; a Palestinian refugee camp, another Israeli settlement; and finally to the checkpoint into Ramallah. The route becomes the structure for a photo-story looking at the relation between architecture, social space and political conflict. In print, the photo-essay forms a map to help navigate the content of the book.
Since the occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem to West Jerusalem in 1967, all processes of urban change have been deeply influenced by the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. One of the world’s most historic cultural thresholds has been transformed into a frontier city characterised by destructive dualities and opposites, where cultures and mentalities collide in an unprecedented intensity. Following intense Israeli construction in the annexed East after 1967, the single demarcation line (border) that had divided the city since 1948 has been gradually replaced by a matrix of isolated insular urban realities contained by physical and mental frontiers. Architecture and urban planning have become instruments in the struggle for territorial and demographic control. - Philipp Misselwitz, co-editor of Jerusalem - City of Collision (Birkhauser, 2006)
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ICON Magazine: Jenin took ten days to destroy and three years to rebuild.
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