Category: Photos

Mud Marine: The Rise and Fall of Mangalore Tiles

I was really happy to contribute a photo essay called Mud Marine: The Rise and Fall of Mangalore Tiles to Sharpening the Haze: Visual Essays on Imperial History and Memory edited by Giulia Carabelli, Miloš Jovanović, Annika Kirbis, Jeremy F. Walton.

via GIPHY

In it, through the photo essay, I argue that:

A visual analysis of colonial and post-colonial buildings reveals how the lines that serve as real barriers of exclusion intersect with the in-between material and representational structures of the built form; how cultural and spatial histories can be traced through buildings as they reference both global urban forms and local urbanisms; and, more specifically, how layers of overlapping, crumbling, moss-ridden tiles speak to the overlapping, crumbling and nature-reclaiming temporal and spatial frameworks of coloniality, global capitalism, post-coloniality and indigeneity. This photo essay explores a style of roofing tile associated with a smaller city in coastal southwest India: Mangalore Tiles. Though roof tiles were produced for centuries utilising the clay found on the banks of the rivers than conjoin at the city, Mangalore Tiles rose to prominence after the production process was industrialised by the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society from 1865 onwards. Once tiles of international renown, the production process has slowed to a trickle in recent decades. Using both archival and my own photographs all taken from within a few hundred square metres around the original tile factory, I argue it is possible to see the straight lines of a ‘civilising’ empire; neoliberalism’s desire to produce global representations of sameness; land’s material, economic and poetic instability; ghostly hauntings from the past and future; insecure masculine militaristic language; and the scattered remains left by the transmogrifications of empires.

 

You can download the photo essay here and here: Cook_2020_Mud Marine.

The rest of the open access book is brilliant, and you can read all the chapters here: Sharpening the Haze: Visual Essays on Imperial History and Memory.

 

 

Changing Landscapes

India’s urban – and rural-soon-to-be-urban – landscape is changing fast. So fast, it’s hard to get a grip on the changes.

This is why I was really excited to see Sleepy Backwaters to Real Estate Haven appear over at Economic and Political Weekly last month. S Ananth will be posting a series of photo essays from the periphery of Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh’s new state capital .

As he writes,

A visit to these villages seems to indicate that real estate and ancillary service industries are the only business that interests people – at least, those willing to venture into a business. Everything seemingly revolves around land: people are either keen to buy land, sell land, mediate between the buyers and sellers or offer some service to those trying to fix a deal. The attempt to make a quick buck from real-estate speculation seems to encompass all classes, castes and overshadows everything else. The urgency to close a deal is indicative of the thinking that the good times are unlikely to last long.

I’m looking forward to the future essays so that we get some sort of visual documentation of the changes, as it’s something that I think is often hard to capture in writing, with people often using same old clichéd phrases.

I lived for nine months at the edge of a (cliché alert) rapidly expanding city. I stayed in a newly built block of flats next to a building site, and had the idea to document the new building as it rose next door. Every morning at 7 I’d put the camera in the same spot and take a photo. Sadly I got too busy with other things, and often I’d already left home before the sun came up.

Nevertheless, here are the photos I took (you can see a wall slowly getting bigger)!

Good morning MangaloreGood morning MangaloreGood morning MangaloreGood morning Mangalore Good morning Mangalore   Good morning MangaloreGood morning MangaloreGood morning Mangalore

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building Castles in the Air

Building Castles in the Air, a photo essay on advertising boards for new housing, has just been published in the open access anthropology journal The Unfamiliar. It’s more interesting than I make it sound here (I hope).

You Call it Home
You can access the article here!