Former Editorial
| 2nd May 2009 World of Contrast |
| There’s a photograph - it’s a dusk scene and has been blown up poster size so that a women clad in brightly coloured robes in the foreground, looks as though she’s been painted - displayed in the gallery space of the Oxo Tower Wharf. It shows a slum, fringed with makeshift come-work, come-buy shops, strung out along a dreary dirty (“malaria-affected”, so we’re told) mud bank canal in Calcutta, India. I’m sitting in a craft, retail come-eatery area known as Gabriel’s Wharf – just up from Blackfriars Bridge, and before me is the Thames. It’s a sunny day and behind and in front of me people walk, stroll and jog. The river carries, rolling and flowing. Lunch and sight seeing cruisers ride the current. It’s obvious, there’s a contrast between the two scenes and it makes me wonder about lives and landscapes (environments) and beauty. Despite its bleakness there is something of the twilight blue green, shimmer of sparse light on water that has a mysterious beauty in the Calcutta canal picture (by William Daniels). I remember Morocco (Taroudant) – the souk and tiny under lit workshops spilt down narrow alleyways. Men and young boys crouched and stooped at work in dull corners. The bright colours of the newly dyed fabrics bowing on ropes, strung like banners between buildings. Zimbabwe, which at that time, for all it’s development – in Harare – still had people slumped in corners begging change – that happens on prosperous central London streets too. But, the crying need is like a pleading scream for the disadvantaged, captured in urban zones of disadvantaged. © Khome, 2009 (all rights reserved) |
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