Along a forest road in the small town of Monte Negro in Rondônia state, just south of the Amazon basin, cowboys from the area’s vast cattle ranches display their talent at a rodeo. In recent years, Monte Negro has expanded as a key cattle town with a strong cowboy culture
Continue reading...Category Archives: Art and design
Nazi design exhibition in Netherlands raises fears of glorification
Visitors have been asked not to share photographs of exhibits including Arno Breker statue
An exhibition of Nazi design has opened in the Netherlands to protests and a request for visitors to the museum not to take and share photographs for fear of the exhibits being glorified on social media.
The Museum of Design in Den Bosch is showcasing sculpture by Adolf Hitler’s favourite artist, Arno Breker, a 1943 VW Beetle, photos and Leni Riefenstahl films from the era, in what is being billed as the first great exposition of the “Design of the Third Reich”.
Continue reading...Carol Guzy’s best photograph: a little girl in the war-ravaged ruins of Mosul
‘It was innocence amid war – this tiny girl who should have been enjoying her childhood trapped in this catastrophic battle’
I was one of the last photographers left in Mosul during the final days of the battle to liberate the Iraqi city from Islamic State in July 2017. I have covered the humanitarian consequences of war for three decades, but the sheer horror I witnessed during this conflict felt different.
There was no end to the cruelty. The stream of suicide bombs, grenades, car bombs, and snipers was relentless. People were forced to watch their loved ones die in front of them. And when civilians did reach the point of escape, Isis would use them as human shields.
Continue reading...Meghan pays tribute to fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh
The German photographer, who worked on the Duchess of Sussex’s Vogue cover, was best known for his 90s portraits of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and others
German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh, who died on Tuesday aged 74, was renowned for black-and-white portraits that appeared in magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker, as well as his refusal to retouch images. Recently, Lindbergh photographed women for the “Forces for Change” issue of British Vogue, guest-edited by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, including Jane Fonda, the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern.
On the duke and duchess’s official Instagram account, Meghan shared an image of herself with the photographer, captioned: “His work is revered globally for capturing the essence of a subject and promoting healthy ideals of beauty, eschewing photoshopping, and preferring natural beauty with minimal makeup.”
Continue reading...Show me the mummy: the undying allure of ancient Egypt
Paris’s Tutankhamun exhibition is a record-breaking hit – but scarabs, pharaohs and man-eating monsters have been thrilling us for centuries
Paris’s current mania for Tutankhamun should come as no surprise. The Grande Halle de la Villette exhibition of 150 objects found in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh is now France’s most-visited exhibition ever, having attracted over 1.3 million visitors. Many of the objects on show – “wonderful things”, in Howard Carter’s words, including mini-coffins, a gilded bed and a calcite vase – have left Egypt for the first time for the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition, which will move to London’s Saatchi Gallery in November.
The exhibition’s popularity echoes the wave of “Tut-mania” that swept the west almost 100 years ago when Carter first discovered the boy-king’s tomb. Suddenly everyone seemed interested in Egyptology, evident in the fashions, arts, culture and advertising of the time, and most enduringly in art-deco architecture such as the Chrysler building in New York – especially its distinctive elevator doors – and the Carreras Cigarette Factory in London, with its line of sleek black cats guarding the entrance. US president Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut, and there were calls for the extension of the London Underground’s Northern Line that linked Tooting and Camden Town to be named Tutancamden.
Continue reading...Revolutionary poster designs from cold-war Cuba – in pictures
An upcoming exhibition at London’s House of Illustration collects 185 posters and magazines from Cuba’s golden age of design, from the 1960s to the early 90s.
“The posters tell us that Cuba sees supporting the struggles of liberation movements internationally as an integral part of its own revolution,” says curator Olivia Ahmad.
Designed in Cuba: Cold War Graphics is at House of Illustration, London N1 from 27 Sept to 19 Jan
My best shot: Rena Effendi on haymaking in Transylvania
‘The light was soft … They were so graceful. They are the last peasants, the last of their kind’
In 2012, I travelled to Transylvania to document what is effectively the last remaining bucolic landscape of Europe. England, for example, has lost most of its hay meadows because of large-scale agriculture, but in Romania this kind of small-scale sustainable way of farming persists. It survived the Ceaușescu regime. It survived the EU. Today, however, it is a vanishing way of life as young people increasingly choose to migrate to western Europe in search of work and faster money.
I spent three weeks in Maramureş in the northern Carpathian mountains, exploring life in six tiny hamlets, each with no more than 500 inhabitants. It was August, the height of the haymaking season. Families worked in the fields from dawn to dusk. These women were from a village called Breb. I saw their haystacks from the road as my translator and I drove past. I shouted “stop!” and ran out of the car towards them. They smiled at me, but we didn’t talk, they just carried on with what they were doing. It was late in the day, and they were getting ready to go home. The women wear trousers to make hay because the wind blows their skirts up. Here, they were putting their headscarves and their traditional skirts back on. Then they gathered their baskets, in which they’d brought their lunch, and walked back to the village. I followed. The light was very soft, and the shadows long.
Cutting hay and stacking it is physically demanding, I tried doing it myself and failed miserably
Continue reading...Life after apartheid: images from the new South Africa
Thabiso Sekgala’s solo show features work taken by the late South African photographer offering nuanced, alternative narratives about life in contemporary Africa. His work focused on the idea of home and the personal, political or economic conditions that determine our relationship to it.
Continue reading...‘Terrifying’ hand sculpture flies in to give Wellington nightmares
‘Monstrous’ and ‘malevolent’ sculpture Quasi alarms office workers and divides opinion
A “terrifying” five-metre tall sculpture of a hand with a face has been flown in from the South Island to perch on top of a contemporary art gallery in the New Zealand capital of Wellington.
It fixes passers by with a disapproving expression. Meant to liven up the Civic Square that was damaged in a 2016 earthquake, the work has instead alarmed and terrified locals, who have described the work as “a Lovecraftian nightmare [that] has come to life”.
Continue reading...‘Does a dog know art can disappear?’ Surrealism and subsidence in Mexico City
The illustrated city: Its main arts institution may be sinking, but the city’s influence on artists and thinkers from Carrington to Trotsky cannot be so easily erased
Continue reading...Life in Tel Aviv’s bohemian bus station – in pictures
Opened in 1993 with hopes of rejuvenating one of Tel Aviv’s poorest neighbourhoods, the central bus station is now an eclectic mix of commerce and culture
Continue reading...Joy, despair and determination: photographs from Kibera
Despite its poverty, Kibera is a vibrant place where people survive in testing conditions, both physical and mental. These images by four photographers born and bred there capture the spirit of Africa’s largest slum.
An exhibition, ‘Kibera: Living in the slum’, is on show at the Guardian’s London offices until 31 August
Continue reading...Remembering the Berlin Wall – in pictures
The order for work to start on building the Berlin Wall was issued on 13 August 1961. East German guards sealed the border, preventing an exodus to the west. Barbed wire was gradually replaced with the concrete barrier, which remained until 9 November 1989
Continue reading...Small is beautiful in Tokyo’s Golden Gai – in pictures
Nearly 300 bars and restaurants are squeezed into an area about the size of half a football pitch in the Golden Gai area of Tokyo. Everything is smaller and narrower in this warren of shacks, a sliver of old Tokyo in a modern metropolis
Continue reading...UK and Ireland commemorate 1979 Fastnet race disaster
Series of events include exhibition of portraits by Welsh artist Dan Llywelyn Hall, poetry and vigils
It was the summer storm that roared without warning into the Celtic Sea, unleashing monster waves that ambushed a fleet of 303 boats competing in the Fastnet race.
Instead of skimming along the south coast of the UK to the Fastnet Rock off south-west Ireland, sailors found themselves battling for life against howling winds and walls of water. Dozens of yachts capsized, trapping crews in their cabins and tossing others into the foam.
Continue reading...Toni Morrison: a life in pictures
With novels including Beloved and The Bluest Eye, the acclaimed author who dramatised the African American experience with fierce passion for five decades, has died aged 88
Big cats and exotic birds: Colombia’s rescued animals – in pictures
Most of the animals at the Santa Cruz Foundation in San Antonio, Colombia, have been rescued from traffickers and circuses. The multimillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is the fourth-largest in the country after drugs, guns and human trafficking
UK art dealer jailed in US for defrauding clients of up to $30m
Timothy Sammons used works by Picasso and Chagall as collateral for personal loans
A prominent British art dealer who defrauded his clients out of millions by using a scheme that involved masterpieces by artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall has been sentenced for up to 12 years in prison.
Timothy Sammons – a former Sotheby’s specialist who had offices in New York and London and who brokered multimillion-pound deals for the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – used art that did not belong to him as collateral to obtain personal loans between 2010 and 2015.
Continue reading...Redesigning Delhi’s Champs Élysées: ‘It represents all that’s complex about urban India’
From heaving traffic and dense crowds to car-free and tranquil: that’s the vision for Chandni Chowk. But is it achievable?
The Champs Élysées is one of the most famous streets in the world, but you could say the French were beaten to it by the Mughals. About 15 years before the avenue was laid out in 1667 in Paris, India’s Mughal emperor Shah Jehan built a grand mile-long street in his capital to reflect the glory of the empire at its height.
It ran from Fatehpuri mosque at one end to the colossal Red Fort at the other and was lined with trees, elegant mansions, mosques and gardens. Provisions for the Red Fort, the imperial residence, were carried down the boulevard by elephants, camels and horse-drawn carriages.
Continue reading...Dreaming of Antarctica: where beauty and fragility meet
Rona Mcseveny, a former patient of UCHL, is showcasing her photos of the continent at the hospital’s Street Gallery. The exhibition is a thank-you to the NHS for the treatment she received. Below, she details the spellbinding sights she captured on her trip
- Dreaming of Antarctica is at the Street Gallery from 18 July to 4 September 2019