Need Cash: Guangzhou, China
Walking along the street in Guangzhou yesterday evening I passed a scene of some folks at an ATM waiting for cash.
Categories: China, Photo Essays, Social Class • Tags: Guangzhou, homeless
Category Archives: Photo Essays
The Split Presence of the Tourist: Battambang, Cambodia
While enjoying breakfast in a local restaurant on the street in Battambang, Cambodia, I captured a wonderful moment that highlights some of the contradictions of tourism. Two tourists, sitting in the comfortable posture of the lounge chair attached to the front of a sightseeing tricycle, passed by. Each wore dark sunglasses and large white headphones. They stare ahead watching the streetscape unfold to the personalized audio soundtrack of narration or music. They are in the city and yet distinctly apart from it—both […]
Categories: Photo Essays, Random Reflections, Tourism • Tags: Battambang, Cambodia
“Sing Red to Fight Darkness”: Chinese Urban Development as Apocalypse
“Yes, people are constructed by their material world, but often they are not themselves the agents behind that material world through which they must live” (Miller 2009: 84). “The apocalyptic describes not just the spilling forth of the unseen, but also of the undifferentiated matter of the possible, of what could have been and was not, of what neither came to be nor what went away” (Williams 2011: 6). While in Dalian last month I found myself with a free […]
Categories: China, End of Times, Material Culture, Mythologies, Photo Essays, State of Emergency, Urban • Tags: apocalypse, Chinese Communist Party, corruption, 红色年代, Dalian, Daniel Miller, Evan Calder Williams, 钉子户, homes, Mao Zedong, nail houses, neighborhood, Omega Man, security, slogans, surveillance, tea, urban planning, 口号, 拆, 人情味
A Practical Science of the Singular
This morning I finally finished The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. I don’t have time to write a commentary, but did want to post some choice quotes from the short essay at the end by de Certeau reflecting on the study of everyday life, “A Practical Science of the Singular.” In the short essay his emphasis on culture as everyday human practice and creativity is clear—much of it a summary of points he made in the […]
Categories: Books, Consumption, Everyday Life, Photo Essays, Quotes • Tags: communication, culture, Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau, orality, practice, technology, The Practice of Everyday Life
Ghosts in the City
This month I am finally whittling away at a few of the books in my pile. Among these is the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life—Living and Cooking. I have been meaning to read it since visiting de Certeau’s grave back in 2012. And now that I am in the middle of it, I’m embarrassed that I waited so long. I didn’t expect that most of the book consists of two projects by the book’s co-authors, Pierre Mayol and Luce […]
Categories: Consumption, Everyday Things, Mythologies, Photo Essays, Urban • Tags: Ghosts in the City, Michel de Certeau, museums, neighborhood, nostalgia, Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, urban planning
“Moroccan” (Tourist) Things
Categories: Collecting, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Representation, Souvenirs, Tourism • Tags: Morocco, Orientalism, souvenir, tourism, tourist experience, travel
Surveillance Graffiti
Categories: Photo Essays, Public Art, Surveillance • Tags: graffiti, Morocco
Sleeping Under a Bridge in Shanghai
Yesterday, while walking along the Suzhou River in Shanghai, I came across an area under a bridge where a bunch of migrant workers were living. They weren’t around–presumably they were working at their day jobs. Walking by, I was struck by the belongings of one person. They were carefully laid out under the bridge as if in a room at home. The bedroll was neatly folded over, and bags and boxes and a cup and a bowl were all meticulously […]
Categories: China, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Urban, Work • Tags: homeless, migrant worker, Shanghai
Antique Theory: Race
Encountering the warm objects of an antique store can be a pleasurable experience that negotiates memories and nostalgia of the past. Walking among these objects, however, there are jarring moments when one comes face to face with objects inspired by foreign understandings—past understandings of gender, class, work and other common categories often fascinate and even alienate. The most startling of these objects, however, are those collected or created things that reflect past racist or cultural-essentalist assumptions. On a recent trip […]
Categories: Antiques, Collecting, Photo Essays, Race • Tags: antique collecting, collectibles, dolls, figures, Orientalism, racism
Among Warm Objects
“These wild objects, stemming from indecipherable pasts, are for us the equivalent of what the gods of antiquity were, the ‘spirits’ of the place. Like their divine ancestors, these objects play roles of actors in the city, not because of what they do or say but because their strangeness is silent, as well as their existence, concealed from actuality. Their withdrawal makes people speak—it generates narratives—and allows action; through its ambiguity, it ‘authorizes’ spaces of operations.” —Michel de Certeau, “Ghosts […]
Categories: Antiques, Collecting, Consumption, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Photo Essays, Value • Tags: carnivalesque, commodity chain, flâneur, global commodity, Junk Bonanza, maker culture, memory, Michel de Certeau, nostalgia, patina, practice, Shakopee, shopping, souvenir, vintage, warm objects
