Review of Paul Embery, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021 June 23rd 2016 marked a political earthquake in the UK as the country voted to leave the European Union despite the domestic and international establishments warning that such an outcome would be an…
Category: Reviews
The Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve stood by this fountain with Mauritian friends and family, statically frozen for that photo moment, being a tourist in London. It’s an iconic, majestic monument, but I never really paid much attention to it other than that…
Martin Parr is a delightful photographer. His bright, sweet shop sense of colour oozes fun, humour, eccentricity and a sense of optimism in being Only Human, the name of this solo exhibition of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. The show is grouped into themes, from capturing members of hobby…
Scattered rather than assembled, the photographs in Zarina Bhimji’s Lead White use the walls as a working surface for investigation. Seemingly hovering on the walls, viewers are tempted to step back and reorder the documents and artefacts that map a story woven across India, East Africa and Britain. A first glance…
We are living in a world where truth seems larger and more bizarre than fiction. The university – the institution where diverse, dissenting, critical and difficult knowledge, ideas, thoughts and perspectives should be freely and passionately debated – now seems like a utopian ideal. Safe spaces, trigger warnings on art,…
Over a number of years, the artist, Franklyn Rodgers, photographed his mother Loretta and her close circle of friends, building up an extraordinary series of large-scale portraits. The size and grandiosity of the works combine with a remarkable intimacy, achieved by the artist’s close relationships with these women.