Category Archives: Photos

THE WONDROUS BEAUTY OF INNER LIFE

March 12, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The Wellcome Image Awards are for images of living processes and structures using sophisticated microscopy and photography techniques – photographs, 3D models and digital illustrations. They are often extraordinarily beautiful. The 2017 winners have just been announced. Here is a sample of the work. The full set of images are at the Wellcome Image Awards website. . Vessels of a mini-pig eye A 3D model of a mini-pig eye using CT scanning and 3D printing. Created by ophthalmologist Peter Moloca, vascular biologist Ruslan […]

Categories: Photos, Science & Technology • Tags: photography, wellcome image awards

THE WONDROUS EYE OF MALICK SIDIBÉ

January 29, 2017 by Kenan Malik

He was blind in one eye through a childhood accident. But what a wondrous eye was the other! It is almost impossible to miss a Malick Sidibé photo. Black and white and suffused with life. Sidibé, who died last year, was born in 1935 or 1936 (he was not sure which) to a peasant family in what was then French Sudan. ‘We knew nothing of the outside world’, he was later to say. ‘We were enclosed in a capsule. It […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: mali, malick sidibe, photography

IN TRISTRAM HUNT’S FUTURE FIEFDOM

January 15, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Tristram Hunt, historian and MP for Stoke on Trent, this week resigned his parliamentary seat to take up a new post as Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The V&A is one of the most infuriating museums in London – a stunning collection, some superb exhibitions, but too often imbued with a desire seemingly to be more indulgent than inspiring or insightful. If I was unkind I might suggest that that is a good description also of […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: india, islamic art, mughal india, museums, photos, renaissance, tristram hunt, victoria and albert museum

TO SCULPT MEANING FROM AN ANCIENT ROCK

November 20, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Standing stones have a strange, evocative power, perhaps because they offer a tangible, material connection to peoples like us, yet so different from us; peoples whose thoughts and actions we can appreciate, and yet which also leave us baffled; constructions that express the extraordinary lengths to which humans will go to find meaning in the cosmos, and yet meanings that we cannot comprehend. When non-believers visit Chartres Cathedral or the Blue Mosque or St Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue or the […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: calanais, lewis, standing stones

SICILIAN BAROQUE

October 30, 2016 by Kenan Malik

In 1693 Sicily was devastated by a great earthquake. The cities of the south-east – Ragusa, Modica, Noto among them – were destroyed completely. In the wake of the disaster came an extraordinary period of reconstruction. Not for the poor, of course, who continued to live in primitive hovels at the edge of cities. But for the nobility, and for the Church, rebuilding the cities became an occasion for the flaunting of wealth. The result was a series of dazzling […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: architecture, baroque, modica, noto, photography, ragusa, sicily

A CATHEDRAL OF MANY CULTURES

October 9, 2016 by Kenan Malik

In the recent wonderful British Museum exhibition on the historical cultures of Sicily, the curators described 12th century Norman rule as a ‘Golden Age’ , an ‘Enlightened Kingdom’ in which the ‘coexistence of Western, Islamic and Byzantine cultures created what was probably the most progressive court in Europe.’ From the perspective of the time, the relationship between different peoples in Norman Sicily, as in Moorish Iberia, was remarkably tolerant. There was, of course, nothing equal in the relationship between different peoples; […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Photos • Tags: architecture, byzantine, christianity, indigenous culture, islam, monreale, religious art, sicily

THIS MOURNFUL GLOOM FOR THAT CELESTIAL LIGHT

September 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

. …the shattered side Of thund’ring Etna, whose combustible And fueled entrails thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds And leave a singèd bottom all involved With stench and smoke… John Milton, Paradise Lost Now let hot Aetna cool in Sicily And be my heart an ever-burning hell! William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Some say its name derives from aitho, the Greek for ‘I burn’, others that it is a corruption of attuna, the Phoenician word for ‘furnace’. For poets, […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: etna, hell, italy, milton, volcano

ON SCOTLAND’S ANSWER TO ROUTE 66 (OR PERHAPS NOT)

September 4, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The North Coast 500. Scotland’s answer to Route 66. Or perhaps not. ‘Get your kicks on NC 500’ does not quite have the ring of Nat King Cole’s original. The North Highland Initiative’s branding of a 500-mile circular route that begins and ends in Inverness as Scotland’s answer to the iconic US highway may make sense in terms of marketing, but not much else. But however one brands the route, what is unquestionable is that this is one of the […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: assynt, dunnet head, forsinard flows, landscape, nc 500, north coast 500, photography, route 66, sandwood bay, scotland

GOD-FEARING AND QUITE MAGICAL

August 21, 2016 by Kenan Malik

It may be the most God-fearing place in Britain. So strongly Presbytarian is the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides that it is said to be to be the last place in Britain where the fourth commandment – Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy – is observed in letter as in spirit. It is not just that virtually every shop and cafe and museum and sports hall and workplace closes its door. It is also that barely […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: isle of lewis, photography, scotland

LINES AND SQUARES (NOT ALWAYS STRAIGHT)

August 7, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I rarely set explicitly out to photograph lines or shapes. But the images are often defined by them. Perhaps I only notice the lines and shapes around me when I later look at the photographs. Here, though, is a somewhat random collection of photos from over the years defined by lines and squares and other shapes. And I will leave you to work out where each is from.

Categories: Photos • Tags: photography

IN BRILLIANT COLOUR AND IN ITS ABSENCE

July 10, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Two of my favourite contemporary photographers are Yener Torun and Damion Berger. Each transforms the way we look upon the world by using colour in almost opposite ways. Torun is not a professional photographer but an architect from Istanbul, whose work I have published before on Pandaemonium. His shots of Istanbul, usually taken on an iPhone, are of the city as few will have seen it, not the Istanbul of ancient buildings, grand mosques and tradition, but that of modernist […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: damion berger, photography, yener torun

CATHEDRALS OF GRACE, A CASTLE OF LIGHT

June 19, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The Latvian capital Riga has a long and turbulent history, one that is, in a popular saying, as complicated as the Latvian language, and constructed out of as many influences. There existed a settlement on the site as far back as the second century CE. Its modern history begins in the thirteenth century with the arrival of German mercenaries and missionaries. German merchants had established an outpost from around 1158. Then, in 1201, the newly-proclaimed Bishop of Livonia, Albert, landed […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: churches, gothic churches, latvia, latvian national library, photography, riga, soviet architecture

IN THE FORTRESS OF THE PILGRIMS

May 8, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Herengracht 401 lies at the heart of Amsterdam’s beautiful canal district. For more than 70 years it was home to the artist Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht, known usually just as ‘Gisèle’. During the Second World War it was a place of safety for Jews and others fleeing the Nazis. Today it is home to Castrum Peregrini, originally set by Gisèle in the 1950s as a literary magazine, but which has evolved into a space for exhibitions, discussion and […]

Categories: History, International, Photos • Tags: art, castrum peregrini, freedom struggles, morality, netherlands, photography

A MONUMENT TO RED VIENNA

April 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Vienna has more than its fair share of magnificent, beautiful and historically significant buildings. The Hofburg Palace, the Belvedere, Stephansdom, Schloss Schönbrunn, the Secession Building, Staatstoper, Karlskiirche, Hunderstwasshauss, Maolika Haus. Along Helinganstädter Strasse, at the end of the U4 U-Bahn, stands a building that even its greatest admirers would not describe as magnificent or beautiful. It is, however, historically significant – though of a history that is often forgotten – and architecturally striking. The Karl Marx Hof, built between 1927 […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, International, Photos • Tags: architecture, austria, left, photography, red vienna, vienna

OF CORAL ARE THESE WALLS MADE

March 26, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Neduntheevu is one of the remotest parts of Sri Lanka – a small, oval shaped island in the Palk Strait, off the northwest coast. It is still known, even to many locals, by its Dutch name, Delft. (The Dutch came in the seventeenth century, driving out the Portuguese who, a century earlier, had seized large parts of Sri Lanka). Delft is home to wild horses and boabab trees, the former introduced by the Portuguese, the latter by Arab sailors almost […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: photography, sri lanka

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