Kensington Market Solstice Festival 2022: A Photoessay

Kensington Market is a district in Toronto, adjacent to Chinatown, with a multicultural population, a lot of artists and artist-adjacent people, secondhand shops, imported food stores, and exciting graffiti. Around this time of year, they do a solstice festival and parade which incorporates elements of Indigenous, African, European and neopagan solstice traditions, to reflect the cultural makeup of the area. This year I went along and took pictures, including anatomically correct crow wings, stilt-walking torch bearers, powwow dancers in jingle dresses and flaming clarinets. Yes, flaming clarinets.

The Doors of Tunis: A Photoessay

The Cats of Tunis: A Photoessay

Miami, 2022: A Study in Contrasts

Universite de Paris-Est in the Twenty-First Century: A Photoessay

I’m currently adjusting gradually back to life in 2020, but one of the things I did over the December/January break was to make a collaborative visit with colleagues at Universite de Paris (shortly to become Gustave Eiffel University). The campus architecture is simply amazing, and I want to share the highlights:

Taking a short break…

…over the holidays, will return in January to finish off The Colour Out Of Space Opera and to bring you more nerd-culture-meets-organisation-studies delights and diversions. In the meantime, to get you in the mood for the season, here is my favourite ever Victorian Christmas card:

The Cats Of Athens: 2019

I went to Athens this summer. As a complement to my photoessay on the cats of Istanbul, and the other one on the cats of Foca, here are some images of the lives of their Greek counterparts…

 

The Cats of Foca (2013)

For the season of love, some beautiful Turkish cats, from the equally beautiful seaside town of Foca. The local shop-owners, restauranteurs and fishermen all collectively look out for the cats (at least the ones who aren’t in a long-term living relationship with a  household), and the vets do pro bono work if one of them is sick or injured.

The Cats of Istanbul: 2007

Still catching up on post-holiday things– so here’s a photoessay of cat pictures from my first trip to Istanbul.

Beijing, 2006: A Photoessay

I’ve made multiple visits to Japan and Singapore, and had a visiting fellowship in Taipei for a while, but only ever visited Beijing once. This was in 2006, when the city was clearly well on its way towards becoming a glass-and-chrome metropolis, but really wasn’t all the way there. Looking back, it occurs to me that it’s changed a lot, and people might like to see some of what it looked like at that complicated time:

Many rickshaws:

(seconds before the photo below was taken, the chain came off the gears, and the driver literally hooked it back on with his foot)

A blacksmith fixing a wheelchair:

Old buildings and mosaics, probably gone now:

The old site of the Pan Asia Games:

A Christian wedding at a church:

Dong An Market…

and a state “Friendship Store”.

Man selling rabbits in the subways under the road:

Man selling books off the back of, yes, a rickshaw, above the subway:

Gas masks in the closet in my hotel, a little bit scary:

Finally, fish. Every shop had its lucky goldfish, this jade retailer was making them do marketing work too:

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