Martin Parr, the British photographer whose saturated colours, wry humour and unflinching eye reshaped documentary photography, has died aged 73 at his home in Bristol on 6 December 2025. Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, Parr’s interest in photography was encouraged early by his grandfather, himself a keen amateur. He studied at Manchester Polytechnic inContinue reading “Martin Parr, photographer who transformed the everyday into cultural testimony, dies aged 73”
Category Archives: Aesthetics
The History of Perfume: From Sacred Ritual to Modern Luxury
Perfume is among the oldest of human luxuries, a bridge between ritual, desire, and identity. To wear fragrance is to participate in a tradition stretching back millennia, from ancient temples to Parisian ateliers. Its story is both chemical and cultural — the distillation of plants and resins into invisible art, and the shaping of personalContinue reading “The History of Perfume: From Sacred Ritual to Modern Luxury”
Style Over Substance? Cinema’s Four Dialects of Surface
“Style over substance” is one of cinema’s laziest insults. It assumes that style is decoration, that substance is depth, that the two can be peeled apart like shell and kernel. But cinema is not literature in disguise. It is an art of surfaces: light, rhythm, color, sound, the textures that move us before plot orContinue reading “Style Over Substance? Cinema’s Four Dialects of Surface”
In Memoriam: Frank Gehry (1929–2025)
Frank Gehry, the visionary architect whose sculptural, boundary-breaking buildings transformed skylines across the world, has died at the age of 96. His death marks the end of an era in contemporary architecture, one defined by daring imagination, irreverence toward convention, and the belief that buildings could be as emotionally resonant as art. Born in TorontoContinue reading “In Memoriam: Frank Gehry (1929–2025)”
SHE, WHO IS MOTHER: BJÖRK
For more than four decades, Björk Guðmundsdóttir has moved through genres, art forms, and technologies with the elemental force of Iceland’s geology: eruptive, unpredictable, deeply rooted in nature, and yet astonishingly futuristic. To speak of Björk is to speak of sound as sculpture, voice as topography, emotion as a form of design. Hers is notContinue reading “SHE, WHO IS MOTHER: BJÖRK”
Fortuny: The Venetian Alchemy of Light and Fabric
Fortuny is not merely a brand; it is a myth. Born from the vision of Mariano Fortuny (1871–1949), the Spanish-born, Venice-based artist, inventor, and designer, Fortuny stands as one of the most enigmatic and enduring names in fashion and interior design. Known for pleated gowns that shimmered like water and fabrics that seemed to holdContinue reading “Fortuny: The Venetian Alchemy of Light and Fabric”
The Sugarcubes: Iceland’s Beautiful Shock to the System
In the late 1980s, at the faint edge of Europe’s cultural radar, a strange and electrifying sound drifted out of Reykjavik. It came from The Sugarcubes, a band whose brief but incandescent life changed the trajectory of Icelandic music — and launched one of the most singular voices of the 20th and 21st centuries, BjörkContinue reading “The Sugarcubes: Iceland’s Beautiful Shock to the System”
Joan Didion: The Cool Precision of a Literary Icon
Joan Didion was one of the defining writers of the 20th century, a figure whose cool prose, sharp eye, and unsparing self-examination reshaped the possibilities of nonfiction. From her portraits of California in the 1960s to her searing meditations on grief in the 2000s, Didion’s work remains a model of style, clarity, and depth. HerContinue reading “Joan Didion: The Cool Precision of a Literary Icon”
Stanley Kubrick: The Architect of Modern Cinema
Few directors have reshaped the possibilities of film as radically and enduringly as Stanley Kubrick. Working across genres but loyal to none, Kubrick forged a cinematic language defined by precision, ambiguity, and a relentless fascination with human psychology. His films are not simply watched; they are inhabited — vast, meticulously composed worlds where narrative, imagery,Continue reading “Stanley Kubrick: The Architect of Modern Cinema”
Proust & Bergotte
Marcel Proust on the Death of the Writer Bergotte The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting),Continue reading “Proust & Bergotte”
My World of Interiors 