Youqine Lefèvre, in her own words, “shouldn’t exist”. She was the second child born to middle-class parents in China during the country’s one-child policy, which restricted families to a single child as part of a government initiative to curb population growth. Implemented in 1979 and abolished in 2016, the consequences of the policy have been… Read more »
You might not think that shredding waves has much to do with the toxic clouds billowing out of a factory in Louisiana, but a new documentary called The Big Sea shows the two are inextricably linked. The plant, which was acquired by Japanese chemical company Denka in 2015, produces a colourless, volatile liquid called chloroprene,… Read more »
In February 2020, before the UK began its cycle of pandemic lockdowns, photographer John Bolloten travelled to a hotel in his hometown of Bradford. He wasn’t going to spend a night there, but to attend a meeting of the Spartan Bare Knuckle Fight Club – the only licensed hay bale fight club in the UK…. Read more »
Friedrich Nietzsche once said that “Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold. It sharpens their feelings of alienation.” This notion couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to 69-year-old Norman Whiteside, a veteran soul singer from Columbus, Ohio, who shows no signs of bitterness despite losing 31 years to a highly contentious… Read more »
“What shocked me the first time I went and what still shocks me now is just the scope of the metal scene in Africa, and how deep it is,” says author Edward Banchs. As a lifelong metalhead whose first album was Poison’s Open Up And Say…Ahh!, Banchs thought he knew everything there was to know… Read more »
At a time when the UK was undergoing tremendous political, economic, and social changes, a new generation of emerging photographers kept pace. Now, a new exhibition, This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, brings together work by artists who chronicled the nation as it grappled with the impact of deindustrialisation, racial unrest, The… Read more »
An apple a day keeps the doctor away; unless, of course, it’s the doctor that’s helping hand out the apples. At the end of last year, the Alexandra Rose Charity launched its “Fruit & Veg On Prescription” scheme, the first of its kind in the UK. For the last eight years, Alexandra Rose has offered… Read more »
Nan Goldin’s work is often described as cinematic because it tells stories. But it strikes me as I watch her images click seductively in a slideshow before me that they are cinematic because they are not even still at all. Each frame vibrates with an electrifying and unpredictable tension that has defined her work over… Read more »
Just over a decade ago in 2012, photographer Gideon Mendel travelled to Nigeria after hearing about the outbreak of flooding across the country. The floods were a natural and humanitarian disaster in the country, killing 363 people and displacing over two million from their homes. Mendel travelled to the southern state of Bayelsa and while… Read more »
The crowd cheered as the creature came over the hill. It was the Old Crockern, a mythical monster of folklore. The story goes that once, a rich man came down from the city to fence off farmland on the Moors. The locals were furious. It’s said that the ancient Pagan god appeared with a threat:… Read more »
When Tristan O’Neill was driving up the A1 at the weekend in the 1990s in anticipation of capturing another rave, it never occurred to him that he might be making history. “My mom used to say that to me about my pictures,” says O’Neill, who lives in London. “She’d say: ‘One day this will be… Read more »
In January 2021, Becky Tyrrell was driving in her car along the idyllic northern coast of Cornwall on her daily commute to work. Having flicked through a few radio stations, she settled on the local news. One story piqued her attention: the United Downs Raceway, situated by the village of St Day, and the last… Read more »
