Artist Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar embraces the vertical for his imaginary Iranian villages, which buck the trend for historic low lying structures. Entitled «Retrofuturism», Forouzanfar’s series intends to bring ideas of contemporary architecture to traditional dwellings to create a false, architectural mirage in the middle of the desert. In Iranian architecture, a lack of verticality is traditionally down to the lack of beam and column technology, hence the otherworldly, incongruous appearance of towers stretching from the simple villages in Forouzanfar’s work.
© Tomonari Nishikawa — Luminous Veil, USA, 2016
New Artist
«I am drawn to color, symmetry, industrial buildings, isolated subjects, the detritus of consumer culture, and human-altered landscapes. I avoid taking pictures of people, preferring to document their impact in absentia.»
New Editorials
Featured Publication
Volker Heinze — Mapping Hong Kong’s Bet on Greed
In 2016 Hong Kong was selected for the sixth time in a row as the world’s «freest economy» by America’s Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. «Hong Kong’s Bet on Greed» describes this neo-liberal «field trial» as a proxy for the PRC’s future interests in Asia. In six densely composed sections of images—from Heart of Gold to Dystopian Confusion—Volker Heinze recounts «the Chinese gamble on greed», which features rapid growth and highlights the gap separating rich and poor.
Spotlight
Anargyros Drolapas Finds Beauty In Moments Of Despair And Disgust
«The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world ‹picturesque›», writes Sontag, in her 1973 publication «On Photography». Elements of Sontag’s description are immediately evident in Drolapas’ photographs; he frames obscure moments that connect through their aesthetic language. The world through his lens, even at moments of despair or disgust, appears beautiful.
Bratislava to Tirana: discover the secrets to dreamy travel photos with Mandy Sham
Globetrotter Mandy Sham, better known on Instagram as @peach.punk, will likely give you travel envy with her photos of Dubrovnik’s turquoise waters and Tirana’s pastel coloured architecture. Originally from Toronto, Canada, she’s travelled widely across India, Southeast Asia and Europe, but its her warm and charming photos of the New East that grabbed our attention. Here, she shares her love of the Balkans, the drawbacks to Instagram-worthy photos and how she’s able to balance photography with a full-time job.
Hong Kong - Perspectives, Prospectives, Typologies
Pascal Greco’s Hong Kong series was taken between 2012–17 and captures examples of the city’s predominant residential building types since the 1950s. The series encompasses 135 photos of individual buildings and housing estates photographed on Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon Peninsula and in the New Territories. The most distinctive aspect of the Hong Kong series is the small size of the individual images: 8.5 × 10.6cm resulting from the use of a Polaroid 600SE camera, with Polaroid type 100 films, both which are not produced anymore. The second distinctive aspect of the series is the use of the same 127mm lens for all images. The experimentation with these two self-imposed rules led to unexpected results.
Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar introduces imaginary skyscrapers to Iranian villages
© Jef Beinrinckx — Manhatten, New York City, 2016
You want to be featured in our weekly Instagram round-up?
Simply hashtag your work to have it appear in our feed — 10 posts by 10 artists will be shown every Monday.
Explore: #allcitiesarebeautiful [139k+]
Focusing on one street and its inhabitants over a three-year period, «The Street» charts the toxic collision of gentrification, austerity and the nation’s slide into Brexit.
As the glinting steel and mirror-glass skyscrapers of London’s financial hub have edged ever closer, the area surrounding Hoxton Street has been transformed by hyper-gentrification and sky-high property prices. A traditional East London street less than a mile from the City of London — it has now become the last bastion of the areas disadvantaged — a concentration of the aged, poor and dispossessed.
Hoxton Street’s close-knit working-class community has absorbed waves of immigrants since the 1950’s. But as traditional industry has withered, the latest influx of young urban hipsters followed closely by expensive restaurants, digital media start-ups and corporate property developers has brought with it a deepening sense of inequality.
Sensing they have been left out of the changes swirling around them, the street’s ageing white residents, who lament the loss of their jobs and former ways of life, mirror the 52% of Britons who voted to leave the EU.
Set against the upheavals of rapid gentrification and unrestrained capitalism, years of austerity, the fallout from Grenfell and the eruption of Brexit, the film is a revealing portrait of life in London today.
*For up-coming screenings, see the film's website: thestreetfilm.co.uk/
Podcasts & Playlists
Magic Hour Podcast — Episode 33: Bruno Ceschel
In 2010, with a feeling that the traditional publishing industry was not going to last, Bruno Ceschel founded Self Publish Be Happy, an initiative to support and promote the work of emerging photographers. In addition to his work with Self Publish Be Happy, Ceschel is also a lecturer and a curator and has organized events at numerous international institutions such as C/O Berlin, The Photographers Gallery in London, MiCamera Mian and Printerd Matter in New York. He also writes regularly for publications such as Aperture, the British Journal of Photography and FOAM.
The Messy Truth — Episode 5: On Feedback
Agnes Lloyd-Platt is a fashion and beauty photographer and her work is characterised by positivity, colour, character and a graphic sensibility. Touching on these inspirations, Agnes embraces playfulness in her work and believes fashion photography should be uplifting and inclusive - «There are enough terrible things in the world for us to see. If you look at fashion imagery, it should be good to look at, and make you feel good.»
Aggy and Gem talk about feedback, support systems, social media and how they make, shape and share their work.
Ptwschool Weekend Mixtape Survival Kit
*Smartworking is a selection of nine Weekend Mixtapes that help us focusing and being more productive, even within these walls. Dedicated to all home workers. Happy listening, happy weekend.
Image courtesy Guglielmo Giomi
Typeface in use firm.gs
Darnell Moore: Self-Reflection and Social Evolution — On Being w/ Krista Tippett
Darnell Moore says honest, uncomfortable conversations are a sign of love — and that self-reflection goes hand-in-hand with culture shift and social evolution. A writer and activist, he’s grown wise through his work on successful and less successful civic initiatives, including Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to remake the schools of Newark, New Jersey, and he is a key figure in the ongoing, under-publicized, creative story of The Movement for Black Lives. This conversation was recorded at the 2019 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.
![COMMUNITY ROUND-UP N°79 [curated by @alexandrekurek] Thank you so much to all of you who keep contributing and sharing their perspectives. It’s amazing how small this once started out as and what it turned into in such a relatively short period of time — you guys are the best! I highly encourage you to check out this week’s artists and their feeds, and to share some of your love and attention; and please remember to share, comment, and like this post to heighten it’s visibility and spread the word — Thank you! If you too want to be featured in the weekly round-up, simply share your posts using #allcitiesarebeautiful. Every week 10 posts by 10 artists will be chosen to appear in the community round-up.🍀 Good luck! allcitiesarebeautiful.com / @allcitiesarebeautiful . . . . . . #blandscape #newlandscapephotography #sociallandscape #brutalandbanal #foreveronstandby #alteredlandscape #post_evidence #newtopography #urbanautica #banalography #thought_landscape #archaicmag #phasesmag #fndit #documentingspace #odtakeovers #weltraumzine #collecmag #lucecurated #newtopographics #ignant #thisaintartschool #urbanlandscape](https://www.instagram.com/p/CAnfB__HyZW/media?size=l)
New Artist
Los Angeles
USA
New Editorials
Poems
Rahul Sarit
4 min
Prose
9 min
Poem
Nathan Graves Tuttle
3 min
Featured Publication
Volker Heinze — Mapping Hong Kong’s Bet on Greed
In 2016 Hong Kong was selected for the sixth time in a row as the world’s «freest economy» by America’s Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. «Hong Kong’s Bet on Greed» describes this neo-liberal «field trial» as a proxy for the PRC’s future interests in Asia. In six densely composed sections of images—from Heart of Gold to Dystopian Confusion—Volker Heinze recounts «the Chinese gamble on greed», which features rapid growth and highlights the gap separating rich and poor.
Community Round-Up
© Jef Beinrinckx — Manhatten, New York City, 2016
You want to be featured in our weekly Instagram round-up?
Simply hashtag your work to have it appear in our feed — 10 posts by 10 artists will be shown every Monday.
Explore: #allcitiesarebeautiful [139k+]
Spotlight
Anargyros Drolapas Finds Beauty In Moments Of Despair And Disgust
«The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world ‹picturesque›», writes Sontag, in her 1973 publication «On Photography». Elements of Sontag’s description are immediately evident in Drolapas’ photographs; he frames obscure moments that connect through their aesthetic language. The world through his lens, even at moments of despair or disgust, appears beautiful.
Bratislava to Tirana: discover the secrets to dreamy travel photos with Mandy Sham
Globetrotter Mandy Sham, better known on Instagram as @peach.punk, will likely give you travel envy with her photos of Dubrovnik’s turquoise waters and Tirana’s pastel coloured architecture. Originally from Toronto, Canada, she’s travelled widely across India, Southeast Asia and Europe, but its her warm and charming photos of the New East that grabbed our attention. Here, she shares her love of the Balkans, the drawbacks to Instagram-worthy photos and how she’s able to balance photography with a full-time job.
Hong Kong - Perspectives, Prospectives, Typologies
Pascal Greco’s Hong Kong series was taken between 2012–17 and captures examples of the city’s predominant residential building types since the 1950s. The series encompasses 135 photos of individual buildings and housing estates photographed on Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon Peninsula and in the New Territories. The most distinctive aspect of the Hong Kong series is the small size of the individual images: 8.5 × 10.6cm resulting from the use of a Polaroid 600SE camera, with Polaroid type 100 films, both which are not produced anymore. The second distinctive aspect of the series is the use of the same 127mm lens for all images. The experimentation with these two self-imposed rules led to unexpected results.
Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar introduces imaginary skyscrapers to Iranian villages
Artist Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar embraces the vertical for his imaginary Iranian villages, which buck the trend for historic low lying structures. Entitled «Retrofuturism», Forouzanfar’s series intends to bring ideas of contemporary architecture to traditional dwellings to create a false, architectural mirage in the middle of the desert. In Iranian architecture, a lack of verticality is traditionally down to the lack of beam and column technology, hence the otherworldly, incongruous appearance of towers stretching from the simple villages in Forouzanfar’s work.
Featured Project
Focusing on one street and its inhabitants over a three-year period, «The Street» charts the toxic collision of gentrification, austerity and the nation’s slide into Brexit.
As the glinting steel and mirror-glass skyscrapers of London’s financial hub have edged ever closer, the area surrounding Hoxton Street has been transformed by hyper-gentrification and sky-high property prices. A traditional East London street less than a mile from the City of London — it has now become the last bastion of the areas disadvantaged — a concentration of the aged, poor and dispossessed.
Set against the upheavals of rapid gentrification and unrestrained capitalism, years of austerity, the fallout from Grenfell and the eruption of Brexit, the film is a revealing portrait of life in London today.
*For up-coming screenings, see the film's website: thestreetfilm.co.uk/
Podcasts & Playlists
Magic Hour Podcast — Episode 33: Bruno Ceschel
In 2010, with a feeling that the traditional publishing industry was not going to last, Bruno Ceschel founded Self Publish Be Happy, an initiative to support and promote the work of emerging photographers. In addition to his work with Self Publish Be Happy, Ceschel is also a lecturer and a curator and has organized events at numerous international institutions such as C/O Berlin, The Photographers Gallery in London, MiCamera Mian and Printerd Matter in New York. He also writes regularly for publications such as Aperture, the British Journal of Photography and FOAM.
The Messy Truth — Episode 5: On Feedback
Agnes Lloyd-Platt is a fashion and beauty photographer and her work is characterised by positivity, colour, character and a graphic sensibility. Touching on these inspirations, Agnes embraces playfulness in her work and believes fashion photography should be uplifting and inclusive - «There are enough terrible things in the world for us to see. If you look at fashion imagery, it should be good to look at, and make you feel good.»
Aggy and Gem talk about feedback, support systems, social media and how they make, shape and share their work.
Ptwschool Weekend Mixtape Survival Kit
*Smartworking is a selection of nine Weekend Mixtapes that help us focusing and being more productive, even within these walls. Dedicated to all home workers. Happy listening, happy weekend.
Image courtesy Guglielmo Giomi
Typeface in use firm.gs
Darnell Moore: Self-Reflection and Social Evolution — On Being w/ Krista Tippett
Darnell Moore says honest, uncomfortable conversations are a sign of love — and that self-reflection goes hand-in-hand with culture shift and social evolution. A writer and activist, he’s grown wise through his work on successful and less successful civic initiatives, including Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to remake the schools of Newark, New Jersey, and he is a key figure in the ongoing, under-publicized, creative story of The Movement for Black Lives. This conversation was recorded at the 2019 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.
