Dengue fever is one of the most deadly mosquito-borne diseases – half the world’s population is at risk from it. Adrienne Surprenant’s photos from the World Mosquito Program in Brazil capture the fight against it
Category Archives: Art and design
‘I think therefore I cycle’: 50 years of Dutch anti-car posters – in pictures
We rounded up half a century of protest posters and stickers from campaigns which helped Amsterdam become the ‘cycle capital of the world’
Bike City Amsterdam by Fred Feddes and Marjolein de Lange is published by Bas Lubberhuizen
Continue reading...Humans v the city: the staggering scale of Chongqing – in pictures
Chongqing’s population is estimated at just below 10 million but that rises to more than 31 million if the built-up surroundings are included. Belgian photographer Kris Provoost finds that in a city so large, individuals can get lost
Continue reading...Take me to the Boom Boom Room! Inside the risqué hotel for 24-hour party people
America’s raciest hotel chain has turned a boring British office block into an Austin Powers-style crash pad complete with retro reception, leftie library – and rooftop baths. Groovy baby!
When the clerks of Camden’s highways department were issuing parking fines from their gloomy office in the 1970s, little can they have imagined that jet-setting hipsters would one day be supping cocktails in the public library below them before taking an al fresco dip up on the roof. Maligned for years as the concrete “egg box” of Euston Road, the old council headquarters have been reborn as the glamorous Standard Hotel, the first outpost of the risque boutique chain outside the US.
“People thought we were crazy to suggest open-air bathtubs in London,” says Shawn Hausman, the Los Angeles-based designer behind the Standard’s flamboyant interiors, who started out creating film sets for Saturday Night Fever. “But I think it’s always nice to have a bath outside, even in the rain.”
Continue reading...‘He never hit her in front of me again’ – Donna Ferrato’s domestic abuse photos
As two exhibitions of the photojournalist’s work open in Madrid on her 70th birthday, Ferrato recalls some of the most powerful images in Holy – a retrospective spanning nearly 40 years
For nearly four decades, the photojournalist Donna Ferrato has documented the effects of domestic violence on abused women and their families. Her book and series Living with the Enemy is one of the most important works on the subject.
She launched a campaign in 2014 called I Am Unbeatable, which features women who have left their abusers.
Continue reading...Shanghai Sacred: inside China’s religious revival – photo essay
Photographer and anthropologist Liz Hingley uncovers the spiritual landscape of China’s largest city, revealing the spaces and rituals of this cosmopolitan megalopolis that is home to 26 million people – and to religious groups from Buddhism to Islam, Christianity to Baha’ism, Hinduism to Taoism
- Shanghai Sacred is at the Victoria Art Gallery & Museum at the University of Liverpool until 26 September as part of LOOK Photo Biennale, the forthcoming book will be published by GOST in November
By ritual, heaven and earth harmoniously combine
For the last thirty to forty years China has been undergoing one of the great religious revivals of our time. Alongside the country’s rapid pace of development, the search for meaning and celebration of the Sacred are shaping China’s future in new and significant ways.
Continue reading...Pride sale celebrates 50 years since Stonewall – in pictures
To mark WorldPride and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Swann Galleries in New York is holding a Pride sale, which explores and celebrates the art, influence and history of the LGBTQ+ community. Books, manuscripts, photographs, archives, art and objects from the last two centuries will be auctioned
Continue reading...Labour of luxury: the migrant workers who build high-end Shanghai – in pictures
Photographer Jonathan Browning pictures Chinese migrant workers in front of advertising billboards for the projects they are helping to construct – office complexes and luxury apartments for the wealthy of Shanghai
Continue reading...Build it and they will bike: the Bicycle Architecture Biennale – in pictures
15 projects from nine countries have been selected for the second Bicycle Architecture Biennale, which launches on Monday in Amsterdam
Continue reading...Berlin’s Alexander Haus regains its soul after painstaking restoration
Lakeside house where a Jewish family lived before fleeing the Nazis spans a century of German history
Elsie Alexander called it her “soul place”, the lakeside house on the outskirts of Berlin where her family had spent long happy summers before they were forced to flee the Nazis.
Eighty-three years on, her grandson, Thomas Harding, along with members of the local community, reopened it to the public on Sunday after a painstaking restoration process in which the house by the lake – the subject of his bestselling 2015 book of the same name – was saved from demolition and turned into a educational meeting place for young Europeans.
Continue reading...‘They didn’t look old enough’: who filled a French art gallery with fakes?
Last year, a museum dedicated to the work of Étienne Terrus revealed most of its paintings were probably not by him. How did it get there?
Odette Traby was dying. It was the summer of 2016 and the sun baked the terracotta roofs of her hometown, Elne, in the south of France, as she lay in bed. Weeks earlier, the 78-year-old had been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. This grande dame of Elne town life had refused all treatment and chosen to tough it out alone. “She was someone who wanted to grapple with, to face up to, death,” says Dani Delay, her niece.
Traby had one consolation. She had spent the previous months trying to secure the future of her life’s work, the town’s art museum. It was dedicated to the work of the local artist Étienne Terrus (1857-1922), a friend of Henri Matisse who had been largely forgotten by the time Traby established the museum in the mid-90s. When nearly 60 Terruses came on to the market in 2015, Traby rallied two local historical associations to raise tens of thousands of euros, securing at least 30 of the works. As her life ebbed, at least Traby could tell herself that her beloved museum was closer to gaining the “Musée de France” status that would give it priority state funding and resources.
Continue reading...UK rights advocate co-owns firm whose spyware is ‘used to target dissidents’
Exclusive: Yana Peel co-owns NSO Group that licensed Pegasus software to authoritarian regimes
A leading human rights campaigner and head of a prestigious London art gallery is the co-owner of an Israeli cyberweapons company whose software has allegedly been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on dissidents, the Guardian can reveal.
Yana Peel, the chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries and a self-proclaimed champion of free speech, co-owns NSO Group, a $1bn (£790m) Israeli tech firm, according to corporate records in the US and Luxembourg.
Continue reading...Unbuilt Tokyo: ‘depthscrapers’ and a million-person pyramid
Had the creators of the underground skyscraper had their way, the Japanese capital might have looked very different indeed
Protected by cylindrical walls of reinforced concrete, the steel and glass “depthscrapers” extend hundreds of metres underground. Only a single floor of each inverted 35-storey skyscraper is visible at ground level.
Giant mirrors mounted directly above the central wells reflect sunlight to the apartments below. Prismatic glass ensures even light throughout the day, while fresh, conditioned air is pumped down from the surface.
Continue reading...The big picture: Miguel Rio Branco captures incongruous city life
Decay and renewal are encapsulated by fresh pastries on a banger’s bonnet
This picture is taken from a book called Maldicidade by the Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco. The title translates literally from the Portuguese as “malice”, but it carries too the echoes of the words “city” and “cursed”. Rio Branco grew up the son of a diplomat, citizen of the world and for half a century his camera has given him similar licence. Though earlier work, photo essays for National Geographic for example, focused on very specific communities – the young fighters of the Santa Rosa Boxing Academy in Rio de Janeiro or the prostitutes and street children of Salvador de Bahia – he has come to reject expected labelling of time and place.
The photographs in Maldicidade are uncaptioned, drawn from a lifetime of wandering the backstreets of New York, Havana, Barcelona and beyond. Rio Branco looks for those contrasts between grimy decay and daily renewal that are the universal fascination of city life. This picture, of a tray of fresh pastries served under the open bonnet of a beaten-up car, depicts exactly the kind of incongruity that his camera waits for. The colour and sweetness of those cakes contrast with the greys of the car and the street.
Continue reading...Gaudí’s Sagrada Família wins a building permit – 137 years after work began
Spanish architect’s masterpiece still unfinished but there’s now a chance its central towers will be completed
Property owners have a new yardstick for measuring their frustration over building permit requests that are lost in the labyrinth of local government bureaucracy.
Barcelona city hall has finally issued a work permit for the unfinished church designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí, 137 years after construction started on the Sagrada Família basilica.
Continue reading...Hull works towards securing its City of Culture legacy
Residents hope regeneration will continue long after funding runs out
“Change is happening.” You can’t miss the three-word slogan that is plastered over the bright green building hoardings near Hull’s Humber Street Gallery. It feels like an apt one too. Modern townhouses are being built in the area next to the city’s dockside, which is being sold as “Hull’s new modern and exciting regeneration development”. There are temporary gallery spaces, workshops and dance classes, and cheap artist studios are being built. It is the kind of arts-led regeneration that has come to urban areas like the Northern Quarter in Manchester, Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Chueca in Madrid.
But this is different. This is Hull. A place whose name alone supposedly conjures images of “unspecified post-industrial misery”, king of the so-called “Crap Towns” and the bete noire of property expert Kirstie Allsopp – who deemed Hull the UK’s worst place to live in 2005. But Humber Street is a sign of progress and a rebranded city: a place buoyed by successful, year-long City of Culture celebrations that happened in 2017. If Hull has its swagger back, there’s good reason.
Continue reading...Naked protesters condemn nipple censorship at Facebook headquarters
Demonstrators cover bodies with stickers to ensure nipples on display are ‘male’, in line with Facebook policy
Some were hairy. Some were pointy. Some were dark brown, some a pale pink. But the hundreds of nipples on display in front of Facebook’s New York City headquarters on Sunday were technically “male”, despite some being on female protesters.
More than 100 people lay nude on the sidewalk to call for a change to the company’s censorship policies. The action, called #wethenipple, was organized by the artist Spencer Tunick and the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Continue reading...Lewis chessmen piece bought for £5 in 1964 could sell for £1m
Missing walrus tusk warrior was purchased in Edinburgh and stored in a drawer
A small walrus tusk warrior figure bought for £5 in 1964 – which, for years, was stored in a household drawer – is a missing piece from one of the true wonders of the medieval world, it has been revealed.
The Lewis chessmen were found in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides and became beloved museum collections in London and Edinburgh. They have also become well known in popular culture from Noggin the Nog to Harry Potter.
Continue reading...Shen Wei’s best photograph: a naked self-portrait on a Chinese stage
‘Not knowing if anyone would walk in gave me energy and inspired my powerful stance’
On a trip through Jiangxi province in south-east China two years ago, my friend and I were wandering around one of the area’s many small villages. It was tiny and empty apart from a few old men and women sitting in front of their houses.
There was a single street which all the doors of the village opened on to. One had a normal black door with a sign above it that said something like “club” or “meeting hall”. It was the only indication of it being non-residential, so I pushed it open. We found an empty theatre with two raised stages. Chairs were stacked on one and on the other was this set: two chairs and a table, draped in red fabric. I instantly knew I had to take a photograph.
Continue reading...Italy’s new ruins: heritage sites being lost to neglect and looting
Overgrown and weathered, many historical monuments are disappearing as public funds for culture fail to match modern Italy’s inheritance
Legend has it that the grotto hidden among the craggy cliffs on San Marco hill in Sutera in the heart of Sicily holds a treasure chest full of gold coins. In order to find it, three men must dream simultaneously about the precise place to dig.
Treasure or no treasure, the grotto itself is an archaeological gem, its walls adorned with a multi-coloured Byzantine-esque 16th-century fresco depicting Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Saints Paulinus, Luke, Mark and Matthew.
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