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Rio de Janeiro -

as shot through a vaseline-smeared lense.

This site's overly sentimental introduction calls Rio "the city loved by all" in Brazil. My impression from the many dozens of Paulistas I've talked to indicates anything but. Still, I love the sun-baked grimey side of Rio that these images bring out.

WTC Bombings: 1993

Such odd proportions when one tragedy stands so close to another.

Expat Express Blog Ring

"I believe that those of us who?ve changed our environment so drastically tend to have a unique perspective on things. We?ve given our minds and hearts some space and objectivity with which to consider where we started from, where we?re going, and where we are now."

The Falling Man

"Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. "

Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda Project

"Jaar is not a photojournalist, and his work does not include images of dead bodies (those were the province, however belated, of the mass media). Rather, this is a media artist's encounter with holocaust, memorializing his tourism of the scenes of genocide. It shares the conceptual space of photojournalism and documentary film: cold, neutral, modern. But the work's referent is suffering, distant, incomprehensible, unimaginable pain and loss. "

Markets and Anti-markets in the World Economy

"Moreover, other historians have recently shown that that specific form of industrial production which we tend to identify as "truly capitalist", that is, assembly-line mass production, was not born in economic organizations, but in military ones.... This largely ignored military component of large scale enterprises is, I believe, another good reason to replace the term "capitalism" with a neologism like "the antimarket", since we can simply build this military component right into our definition of the term."

British Industrial Ruins

"In Britain, at the end of the 1970?s and through the eighties, the government of Margaret Thatcher allowed ?market forces? full reign, promoting an orgy of real estate speculation which produced a reconstructed industrial landscape. But not everywhere was able to capitalise on this economic reconstruction and in many areas, as old industries died, the buildings that housed them lay dormant and empty. This process persists and the material legacy of the industrial revolution, in the form of ruins, can still be found in most British cities. "

[via pennyDreadful].