The Ideas Bazaar

A Nice Line (in) Drawing

Whenever I do a post about anthropology in business - which is fairly often - I waste a few minutes looking for a nice picture of a pith helmet. Thanks to Wayne Payne, and his rather spiffy website, I found this one. Lovely. 

You can buy some of his things here. 

Via the ever wonderful  Swissmiss

A shadow of our former selves?

I was given this postcard yesterday by some lovely people from Nas na Riogh Housing Association who are doing some great work in a Naas, county town of Co. Kildare. The donor of the card had picked it up on a holiday in Portugal and was captivated by what she felt it said about the social invisibility of people as they age. 

A Martian's Guide to Coffee

Next time you take a visitor from Mars to your local coffee shop, slip him this guide first: 

From the Air

There's a piece in this weekend's FT magazine about a project that was conducted in the last days of the Shah of Iran's rule - to photograph the country from the air: 

When Georg Gerster first flew over Iran on a business trip, he decided that he should somehow photograph the contours and colours that he saw passing beneath him. The Swiss aerial photographer bypassed officialdom by hand-delivering a request, in October 1975, to the Imperial Court in Tehran. Within weeks, Gerster was meeting an Iranian official anxious to know what kind of aircraft should be purchased. The Empress Farah, it seemed, had taken a liking to the project.

The pictures displayed in the piece are mesmerizing in a way that only pictures from the sky can be - but these seem to accurately portray the details of the landscape below and also to transform that landscape into a well detailed and slightly abstracted painting. For example:

Tabriz, June 13 1976
Tiered croplands in the highlands near Tabriz, the earthquake-prone home of the Blue Mosque

Some of the pictures put in mind of the Belfast-based artist Clement McAleer, one of whose pieces I was lucky enough to pick up for a rather good price at an auction last summer.

Lime Quarry - Clement McAleer, image courtesy of James Wray and Co. Gallery

The book ‘Paradise Lost: Persia from Above’ by Georg Gerster (Phaidon, £35) is published on March 21. 

Goodbye George

This was one of my favourite pictures from around the time of the Gulf War II protests. A simple statement made with a coder's sense of efficiency. 

Fruits of Winter

From my Flickr photostream

The Rising Cost of (not) Living

Spotted in a pub in Newcastle, County Down.

Emergency

Emergency
Originally uploaded by alistairh

From a lovely set of pictures to use as wallpaper on an iPhone, if you have one.

His Master's Voice

From a junk shop in India, found on an old hard drive. No idea what sort of publication it came from.

Light and Dark

At a dark time of year, it's time for some light. A good excuse to reprise this photo of Olafur Eliasson’s installation in the turbine hall at Tate Modern in 2003, taken by Rob Gardiner, and on his currently mothballed blog, NYC London.