DISTIL LONDON is a collaboration with the renowned Roca brothers, Joan, Josep and Jordi, owners of the three Michelin star restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca. They asked me to create a book of images from London as part of their collaboration with Macallan Whisky.
The new Whisky, along with a book of my images was launched in Spain, October 2020
Here is a preview from the factory, where it’s currently being printed.
Laura Winningham, CEO of City of Harvest
That’ll teach ’em
The latest school to take part in Channel 4’s Educating… series is Willows High, formerly one of the worst in the country, where a head who has overcome many obstacles has fought to help students and staff do the same.
A project commissioned for the book Jerusalem – City of Collision. It weaves a path from Bethlehem through a checkpoint into an Israeli settlement; a Palestinian village, the commercial centre of East Jerusalem; the Old City; an orthodox Jewish area; a Palestinian refugee camp, another Israeli settlement; and finally to the checkpoint into Ramallah. The route becomes the structure for a photo-story looking at the relation between architecture, social space and political conflict. In print, the photo-essay forms a map to help navigate the content of the book.
Since the occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem to West Jerusalem in 1967, all processes of urban change have been deeply influenced by the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. One of the world’s most historic cultural thresholds has been transformed into a frontier city characterised by destructive dualities and opposites, where cultures and mentalities collide in an unprecedented intensity. Following intense Israeli construction in the annexed East after 1967, the single demarcation line (border) that had divided the city since 1948 has been gradually replaced by a matrix of isolated insular urban realities contained by physical and mental frontiers. Architecture and urban planning have become instruments in the struggle for territorial and demographic control. – Philipp Misselwitz, co-editor of Jerusalem – City of Collision (Birkhauser, 2006)
North Alberta, Canada, is sitting on a great pile of oil which is the product of ancient marine life and geological forces some 200-300 million years ago. The reserve of bitumen lies in “tar sands” under a vast wilderness of forest in the basin of the Athabasca river, 430 km north of Edmonton, the capital of the province. The original inhabitants of this area, the Cree, one of Canada’s aboriginal- or First Nation – peoples, boiled up the tarry sands to repair canoes. It was also used to mend leaky roofs. The first oil company built a mine on the banks of the Athabasca in 1967.
Now the Athabasca tar sands are a global concern. A rise in oil prices and the threat of dwindling supplies has sent global corporations pouncing on Canada. Alberta has approved over 100 extraction projects since 2000. Shell’s Athabasca oil sands project meant cutting down forest the size of 33,702 ice rinks. But soon this will be much more. Working mines account for only one seventh of the total land that has been leased for the oil sands development. An area the size of Greece could be stripped of it’s forest.
On the Northern shore of lake Athabasca, Fort Chipewyan was founded more than 300 years ago by a Scotsman, Roderick Mackenie, but First Nation people have been here since the Ice Age, nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived close to nature, ice-fishing and hunting muskrat and moose.
The community has evolved to a steady 1,200, living in modest clapboard houses. The old world prevails but there are signs of the modern worls with a cinema, an ice-rink, an adult education centre.
Fort Chipewyan has an ambiguous relationship with the oil industry. It has bought much needed jobs, paved streets and running water to every home. But there is also a deep sense of anxiety: a study by the Alberta health services in February 2009 confirmed elevated levels of cancers in the community. In 2006 a local doctor recorded five cases of cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the bile duct.
The Athabasca river flows through their community, that is how they get their drinking water. The locals suspect contaminated water and they believe it has reached their food chain in the traditional food they consume on a regular basis such as duck, fish, geese, mouse and muskrat.
The First Nations people in this area are fighting a huge battle to be consulted by the oil companies before development is permitted. They are not against the companies, they need the jobs and they benefit from the good economy but as a small community it is hard for them to have their concerns heard.
All Move is an inclusive sport project run and funded by Mencap. The project brings children with and without a learning disability together on the same team, to learn new skills and try out different physical activities together.
When you see the words Made in China, do you wonder by whom? One morning I went to Top Shop on Oxford Street and saw the shoes I had seen being made in a factory in China: English size 8, made by girls with feet of size 4.
Ho Ping is 20 years old, a typical age for a factory worker; she comes from Henan Province, 24 hours’ travel north of the factory. For two years now she has been working and like all her other co-workers living at Selena. Once a year she goes home to visit her family during Chinese New Year
After leaving school at 16, Ho Ping says it was ‘interesting and exciting’ coming to work in the factory. For the first few weeks there was little pressure and workers were allowed to make mistakes. After the initial period of meeting co-workers, learning the company song and settling in amongst the 6,500 other employees, work became more demanding and the following six months were really tough. This being her first time away from home, she began to miss her family and friends very much.
These days, some two years later, she enjoys the university-like atmosphere and life at Selena, saying that there is always something new to learn. In a grey coat, she is a supervisor, overseeing the work of 35 young girls who sit in a row on the factory floor and stitch the upper part of shoes. There are eighteen levels in the factory. The system defines the colour of your coat – pink for factory floor workers, grey for everyone above that. It defines the resaurant you eat in the size of your dormitory and your pay.
The photography of Polly Braden documents one individual’s story within China’s massive social change. Braden follows Ho Ping, a young girl from the Henan Province, to work for Selena, a shoe factory that produces products for Nine West and Clarks, amongst others. Braden documents Ho Ping and her co-workers, all of whom live at the factory in tight quarters, often operating under strict rules. Concerned less with Ho Ping’s exploitation, Braden focuses on the material prosperity she enjoys. Like thousands of others, factory work has brought her out of poverty and turned her into a consumer – in one picture, Ho Ping shops for shoes with her friends in a mall. Braden then follows Ho Ping home to visit her village where she documents her showing pictures of her new life stored in her cell phone to her family and friends, who still live in an agricultural society that has changed little since the 18th century.
– Natasha Egan, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.
