Kremlinology, they used to call it. Analysis of an opaque obscurantist state, using indirect clues: the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, the standing positions and precedence on the parade podium on the Red Square. Even the choice of capitalization (“First Secreta … | Continue reading
Many photos featured throughout this blog were iconic, some have made or unmade careers, others have changed the course of public opinion and wars. But few have actually started a religion, except these. In November 1930, National Geographic sent a reporter and a photographer to … | Continue reading
On 8 December 1941, seventeen Japanese bombers dropped bombs over the island of Singapore, the opening salvo in their campaign against Dutch, British, and Portuguese possessions in South East Asia. Months earlier, Japan had already taken advantage of the defeat of France and the … | Continue reading
. It was a fraught game on Saturday 17 April 1993 when St Kilda faced Collingwood at Victoria Park in Melbourne, the home ground for Collingwood, the Australian Football League team affectionately known as the Magpies. The Saints had beaten the Magpies in the finals the previous … | Continue reading
Hi Readers, I haven’t updated the blog for a while. Well, life happens. A lot seemed to have happened in the world since my last post too. I will have longer updates and new posts on here soon enough. But in the meantime, here is a link to a side-project I just started. An instag … | Continue reading
April 10th 1959. There were more than 500,000 people lining up on the street of Tokyo, along the 8.8 km processional route, and although TV had only arrived in Japan six years earlier, 15 million v… | Continue reading
When Wilson Bentley died in 1931, his hometown newspaper eulogized him thus: “Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of… | Continue reading
To understand France’s political malaise, look to Raymond Depardon’s works. As the popular revolt paralyzed France last week in the ways unseen since the events of May 1968, one curiou… | Continue reading
American states are a weird assembly of riotous traditions, laws, and items. Pumpkin pie is the official state pie in Illinois, Oregon has an official state nut, and New Mexico an official state qu… | Continue reading
Business of photography is largely the business of death, destruction, and misery. Humans are naturally drawn to images that underscore the fragility and the impermanence of their existence, and th… | Continue reading
In 1956, when the American government approved the Colorado River Storage Project Act, it was considered a significant achievement towards taming the Colorado River and powering to the southwest. T… | Continue reading
There is a book called The Café of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano, French novelist and the recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature, which chronicles lives and anxieties of Parisians in the … | Continue reading
Seeing is believing, they used to say. With the advent of digital technology, that has been a harder statement make, in any field from politics to pornography. Yet, even without technology, people … | Continue reading
This week we saw a glimpse of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, who traveled to Singapore with his own personal toilet (to prevent others from assessing his diet). There had always been crazy dictat… | Continue reading
Perhaps no other photo has been scrutinized as much as the one above. Books have been written about it, and the University of Texas even has a $10,000 reward for the first person who could provide … | Continue reading
(contd. from the previous post). As Mount St. Helens primed for its explosion, the government dithered. Logging companies (including Wyerhaeuser, one of the largest private owners of timberlands in… | Continue reading
At 8:27 a.m. on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens in the Pacific Northwest of the United States was 9,677 feet high. Over the next five minutes, the volcano lost 1,300 feet, blowing its top in an expl… | Continue reading