Compelling photos from the Boston Herald: 
A backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi helps evacuate an injured riot-police officer during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. (OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)
via Iran’s Disputed Election – The Big Picture – Boston.com.
I have to say, springtime in London is pretty awesome. The weather’s been pretty sunny up until today, the trees have been covered in flowers, tulips are blooming, and the city doesn’t look like a gray, sooty mess any more in daylight. I regret that I won’t get to enjoy the better weather here after I leave next month. Well, I’ll probably be back here and there, but it seems a shame that most of my time here was in the Autumn and Winter months. Plus, we don’t have swine flu over here… yet.
Here’s some shots from Tower Bridge of the London Marathon yesterday:
I had about 8 free photo galleries on my list, and I managed to see 5 of them. Not bad, really, considering they were all spread around London, and I didn’t just breeze through any of them. Anyway, on my way, I took some photos of my own. It was a rare sunny winter day. Most of these are from my neighbo(u)rhood.
Update: I also meant to mention that the Angela Gorgas exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery is worth the trip down there all on its own. This photo is one of my new favorites of all time:
There are also two very good smaller (free) galleries near Old Street station. The Yvon Lambert had some really interesting large prints from Andres Serrano. His stuff borders on pornography, but there’s an almost painful intimacy to much of his work that helped it transcend the initial gross-out factor. That, and the gallery was curated really well, with photos in just the right places with respect to each other. The other gallery was Rivington Place, a larger and spacious gallery showing Santu Mofokeng’s work, which consists mostly of South African apartheid subject matter – perhaps less shocking than Serrano’s exhibit, but making no less of an impact.
I hope everyone has a great break, enjoys time with family, eats delicious food, and gets lots of presents. Things are going well this side of the pond; I’m out for break and spending time with family. My brother’s over, and I’ve been trying to show him a good time in London – apparently Shoreditch and Camden are the places to be. Oh, and Portobello market is awesome, especially on Saturdays. I took these the other day in Southampton. If we don’t have a white Christmas here, at least I think we’ll have a foggy one.
Such a cool idea for a photo project:
What SOTM actually means is that people are asked, sometimes by appointment and sometimes randomly, to hold up a large piece of paper, upon which they write something that someone once told them. Or emailed. Or texted. Basically something that’s been communicated to them. But told, preferably.
Check out Someone Once Told Me. Here’s a video of the project:
Julian Röder takes amazing photos (via). I’m really curious what his primary camera is; most of the shots have a vintagey 35mm look to them. If it’s a new digital, then he’s doing some really excellent (and consistent) digital processing. Regardless, the style, content and composition are eye-catching. Take these two from his The Summits, for example:
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Developed a couple rolls from the Nikon F and the Lubitel (after the jump). I recommend hitting the fullscreen button on the slideshows to eliminate crunchy jpeg compression:
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I’m going to unwisely quote Chomsky out of context here, in the hopes that it will whet your appetite for the whole article:
The designers of the international economy sternly demand that the poor accept market discipline, but they ensure that they themselves are protected from its ravages, a useful arrangement that goes back to the origins of modern industrial capitalism, and played a large role in dividing the world into rich and poor societies, the first and third worlds.
This wonderful anti-market system designed by self-proclaimed market enthusiasts is now being implemented in the United States, to deal with the very ominous crisis of financial markets. In general, markets have well-known inefficiencies. One is that transactions do not take into account the effect on others who are not party to the transaction. These so-called “externalities” can be huge. That is particularly so in the case of financial institutions. Their task is to take risks, and if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. To themselves. Under capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do. In economists’ terms, risk is underpriced, because systemic risk is not priced into decisions. That leads to repeated crisis, naturally. At that point, we turn to the IMF solution. The costs are transferred to the public, which had nothing to do with the risky choices but is now compelled to pay the costs – in the US, perhaps mounting to about $1 trillion right now. And of course the public has no voice in determining these outcomes, any more than poor peasants have a voice in being subjected to cruel structural adjustment programs.
A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that cost and risk are socialized, while profit is privatized. That principle extends far beyond financial institutions. Much the same is true for the entire advanced economy, which relies extensively on the dynamic state sector for innovation, for basic research and development, for procurement when purchasers are unavailable, for direct bail-outs, and in numerous other ways. These mechanisms are the domestic counterpart of imperial and neocolonial hegemony, formalized in World Trade Organization rules and the misleadingly named “free trade agreements.”
(Emphasis mine.) Think about that highlighted phrase: essentially our system of credit burdens all of us with the risk, and bestows upon us none of the reward. And as for companies being too big to fail, I think Senator Sanders is right when he says, “If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.”
The Chomsky article as a whole is actually much more broad in its scope than the financial crisis and bail-out; but then, Wall Street’s relationship to government is much broader in scope than just money. It’s very thought-provoking stuff, especially if like me, you rarely take South America’s role into account. History is being written on this mess right now, and it’s bigger than just bad debt causing companies to fold. We need a major philosophical paradigm shift in the corporate financial model if we want something that is sustainable and shields the average person from harm.
I’ve finally redesigned my photo site. Take a look and let me know what you think – it’s a work in progress, and I’m open to suggestions.
I have settled into the hotel here in Stockholm after a very long journey. I left London at 8pm yesterday, landed in Amsterdam a little after 10pm, wandered the streets of Amsterdam all night, didn’t get stabbed, flew to Stockholm around 6am, and walked around like a zombie most of the day. I hopped on the train with Tim and a couple of his coworkers to the central station, where we walked around a street market and inside a shopping mall. I bought a trendy-ish scarf at one of the three H&Ms on one block (no exaggeration). I think I’d like to also buy a nicer scarf somewhere this week, too. Stockholm’s a very fashionable place, so I think I’d do well to shop a bit – but only a tiny bit. It’s Norway-expensive here.
If anyone has any recommendations for places to see and things to do, please let me know. Here are a few pictures from the trip so far (click to super-size):
Waiting at Heathrow:
I felt very welcome at the mall:
Balloons over Stockholm (from the hotel window):
