If you’ve ever been to Dhaka, you might know that capturing its colorful pulsing energy is difficult. There’s just too much going on. But this image by Noah Addis seems to get it. I keep coming back to it.
This image is part of his impressive Future Cities project where he documents “slums and informal settlements” where “one out of every seven people on the planet” live. He notes that they “may outwardly appear to be ruled by chaos and disorder, but they are in fact very organized places that grow almost organically to suit the needs of the people who live in them.” Addis is a photojournalist and artist who has long been focused on urbanization and climate change.
Are you a Robert Johnson obsessive? Musicologist Nick Dellow remastered a clean test pressing of Crossroads Blues. This is one of the cleanest recordings of Johnson I’ve ever heard.
Mr. Dellow seems to specialize in finding amazing things. Here’s an photo he uncovered taken in 1931 of McKinney's Cotton Pickers at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Kansas City:
Say what you will about missionaries, they made great maps in their quest to collect souls. Some of my favorites of this genre were made by the Reverend Oliver Beckwith Bidwell and printed by his brother at 120 Nassau Street in New York.
Back when I was in college, and back when Soho wasn’t the souless high end mall it is today, I somehow found a shop called E. Buk at 151 Spring Street.
“Shop" is maybe a generous term, imagine a steam punk hoarder’s nest up a flight of rickety stairs. The E was for Elli. And Elli was a mad collector of vintage medical equipment, space ephemera, 18th century pornography, voodo dolls, early movie cameras and missionary maps (amongst other things… he kept a hand decorated Philippino electric chair in the bathroom and jars of Japanese glass eyes). Elli’s loft always smelled of oil and paint and leather with a roomtone of whirs and clicks from his many machines. I could have lived in there, and Elli always let me linger and even take things apart as long as I put them back together.
I would visit on every trip to NY to hear his adventures about how he had saved each object. Always after poking around for a while, he would say, “Want to see something really cool? This one is too good to sell.”
As a poor college student I couldn’t afford anything, but I think he saw in me a fellow collector and when I moved to NYC he gave me a very good deal on a 12 foot wide mammoth missionary map of India as a moving in gift. It was published in 1841 by the Bidwell company. It’s still hanging on my living room wall today. My only regret is not grabbing the other Bidwell maps he offered (“I can’t give them to you, but I can sell them as long as you promise to sell them back. You’re never allowed to resell them.”) He probably didn't realize my studio only had one wall big enough for a single map, but I still regret not grabbing the rest. The one I still think about was a handcolored world map from the 1850s with large red “SAVED” labels over certain areas.
Elli passed away some time ago ( these were some of his things ), but I still hear his voice in my head when I’m able to point someone to the many neat details of his mammoth map.
Jamie Hawkesworth is a British photographer with a nice range of professional and personal work. I especially like his informal work around the British Isles. I can tell he shoots on film and I’ve heard his prints are beautiful.
Fun fact from his Wikipedia page: “He first used a camera in 2007 as part of his studies for a forensic science degree…" Find more work at his gallery.
One of the ironies of being someone who always has a camera close is that I have few photos of myself. Rarer still are candid, unposed photos in which I am unaware of the camera, and rarest of all are photos in which I am happy. So it felt like a minor miracle last night when I found this image from 1993.
I had been taken in by a Tibetan family near a small village, and despite having zero language in common, we were having the conversations that made everyone laugh to the point where our faces hurt (they were trying to match me, but thought it was hysterical I had no yaks). I had taught one of the kids how to use my camera a few days earlier, and he must have picked it up my FM2 and snapped this picture. When people ask why I fell in love with this corner of the world, it was exactly this.
This are a few of my photos from that same afternoon.
When I was a kid one I would often fall asleep finding far away away stations through the static on a little Grundig shortwave radio. I loved tuning my way around the dial.
Every few years I stumble upon sites that collect world radio streams. They're always worth exploring. Radio Garden is one of the better ones. My only quibble is that it doesn’t integrate w/ Apple Music/Spotify.
I’d love to wire one of these sites to a physical device with knob to hear the various stations resolve through the static. I miss the serendipty of that kind of radio. Come to think of it I miss serendity in general, but that’s a longer post.
