Mexico: fiestas, salsa dancing in the street, big sombreros, jolly Mariachi bands, tasty enchilladas. Rewind. Mexico: women working 12-hour shifts in factories making parts for iPhones, fighting off the headache they get from not drinking water, because if they drink they need to pee, and if they leave their work station they are sacked. Police […]

Imagine a time capsule, to be buried deep in the ground; or sent out into deep space, perhaps. What would you put in it? A snatch of Mozart? A dash of the Blues? Japanese Koto? Children’s drawings? Photos of works of art or architecture? Scientific formulae? Poetry? A letter from Albert Einstein? A letter from […]

We live in a lovely town with parks and shops and very good schools. We have fathers who work hard as doctors and farmers and butchers, and we have pretty smiling mothers. Our school is School Number One – the biggest and best school in the town. We have a lovely big gymnasium – see […]

Every year Horse + Bamboo organise a puppet festival at their base in Waterfoot, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town on the road to Bacup which is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town on the road to Todmorden. Put simply, the festival is a little gem and features indoor ticketed shows and free outdoor work. So the audience gets to see […]

In 1971 photographer David Hamilton caused a stir by releasing a book, Dreams of a Young Girl, filled with nude, or almost nude, soft-focused and dreamy images of teenage girls on the brink of adulthood. Looking at them now, they still provoke an uneasy tension – the likes of Nabokov’s Lolita, and the films Leon […]