Monthly Archives: August 2011

It’s basically ‘Bleak Irish Holiday Snaps’ with a fancy camera.

From the New York Times:

Every year, the Irish-Swiss artist Valérie Anex visits her grandmother in Ireland. Every year, the area looks a little different. New houses. New roads. Changed landscapes.

In 2010, while traveling in and around Roosky, a small village on the River Shannon, Ms. Anex, 27, noticed a number of empty houses. All of them were new; all of them “waiting for somebody to come.”

Communities in Ireland where more than half of homes are vacant or incomplete are known as “Ghost Estates,” which is also the title of Ms. Anex’s haunting photo essay. The emptiness symbolizes the country’s degrading economic situation. But it goes beyond visual representation. The estates have had a very physical effect on the face of the open landscape.

“The crisis is something we should think about,” Ms. Anex said. She hopes to turn attention to a very simple question: How do things like this happen?

“One can hear the murmuring of the wind in the grass of the neglected lawns and from time to time a dog barking in the distance,” she writes in the introduction to her project. “Abandoned building sites stand in the surroundings, mounds of earth and all kinds of waste are strewn everywhere.”

 

The Waterways, Keshcarrigan
Forest Park, Kinlough
Armada Cottages, Bundoran
The Waterways, Keshcarrigan
Silver Birches, Longford

In Ireland: Ghosts Of Towns That Never Were (Kerri Macdonald, New York Times)

Thanks Jeannie Sutton

 

A group shot from the 2010 “Arab African Summit” in Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown.

Front row, from left, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Yemen’s Saleh, Libya’s Gaddafi and Egypt’s Mubarak.

Since it was taken, Ben Ali has fled Tunisia and been tried in absentia, Saleh has been seriously injured in an attack on his compound and is recuperating in Saudi Arabia, Mubarak faces the death penalty in his own country, and Gaddafi’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Al Jazeera Live blog