Sunday Preview. A glimpse at the week of stories

A collection of reconstructed and repurposed landscape photographs to give them a new life. A museum of modern life in the city researched through the things people use and discard. An excursion to the layer of Indian modern history and nowadays life via the calm and charming atmosphere of Indian coffee houses also called "talking shops".

Enjoy the newsletter!

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Dafna Talmor: Constructed Landscapes

Monday, 29 Nov

Dafna Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes are the end result of many years of frustration caused by her own photographs. The images are taken in different countries, among which are Israel, Venezuela, the UK and the United States, but their initial purpose was nothing more than personal keepsakes. As Talmor accumulated a large archive, she became increasingly conscious that the photographs don’t show much about the places that they depict and they are just that — pictures of places she once visited. She decided to use them as her source material instead of photographs in their own right in order to create something new and this is how her ongoing series was born.

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Chloe Juno: Someone's Rubbish

Wednesday, 01 Dec

Someone’s Rubbish consists of more than 2500 photographs, religiously taken daily since 2014 — the commitment and dedication are truly remarkable. We have all walked past detritus like this, it could be a coffee cup, a pack of cigarettes, a condom box, or, more recently, a Covid antigen test. We have been conditioned to think that these objects are of little value but it really depends on how we determine value, because if we move away from the financial sense of the word they can do a really good job in illustrating the big picture of what life is like in the present, as Juno tells us.

The photographer sees these as a street museum of the time we live in — they are objects belonging to their time which we need for play, work, education, bills, entertainment, general life.

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Stuart Freedman: The Palaces of Memory

Friday, 03 Dec

This work is a journey across India through the Indian Coffee House, a national network of cafes owned by their workers. Within the walls of these cheap cafes, the very idea of a modern India was born and brought to life.

The Indian Coffee Houses are also central to my experiences and work in India over the last two decades. When I first came to India, the Coffee House in New Delhi – an almost secret place atop a Brutalist 1970's shopping centre on a corner of Connaught Place – was a refuge for me. It provided a respite from the noise and movement of a difficult but fascinating city and it made me very welcome.

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Today, the Coffee Houses serve as a nostalgic aide-mémoire to a whole generation of Indians that remember them as political meeting places. Artists like Satyajit Ray and Manna Dey sat in the Coffee House in Kolkata. They remain inextricably linked to the Post-Indepence settlement and are the last gasp of the Nehruvian moment that is fading fast in today's India.

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