Happy weekend Suzan! Unlike you, I'm not up and around at many design events lately, but hopefully the glorious internet keeps me from being totally clueless! As you know I am a bit of a Pinterest addict, although actually at times I feel a bit overloaded  and jaded from all the visual "inspiration" aka bombardment that a Pinterest session sometimes leaves me with - too too many beautiful pictures of stylish interiors, clothes, objects, places, food, whatever. But when I saw this odd-cool image pop up the other day on one of my friend's boards, it sort of cracked through all the pretty designy stuff and I was pro-Pinterest once again. It's an image of a denture shop in Rawalpindi, India, taken by a Hungarian-born photographer called Ferenc Berko – whom I had never heard of before. Just a quick google search tells me that he was actually a pioneer in the use of color film,  took quite amazing documentary-style photos of people and places all over the world, and passed away in 2000. So there you go. Yay Pinterest!

E xox

Hey Suzan!

Welcome back from India! Can't wait to see photos from your trip. So here's yet another post about architectural photography! I came across Christopher Payne's website via the Swiss Miss blog - and am especially intrigued by his "Asylum" series, where he traveled across America over a period of 6 years documenting abandoned mental hospitals. Sounds like it would be a scary, disturbing and ugly body of work – but instead, his photographs bring to light the fact that many of these places were once majestic buildings built by famous architects, born out of noble intentions, and often had actually functioned as self-sustaining communities capable of producing  everything on-site, such as food, power, water and clothes. Ok, so I'm sure tons of awful scary stuff did happen in those places, but in a way that makes these once-grandiose environments even more fascinating! Not to mention that on a purely visual level, the decay is gorgeous...

PS. Check out the Eames chairs in the autopsy theatre. Doing the grotesque in style... nice!!

Hey Suzan! Last week I went to check out the new Anton Corbijn exhibit at Fotografiska, the photography museum in Stockholm. It's the perfect place to take the little monkey on a weekday afternoon.... quiet and spacious (therefore good for prams), and very importantly, has a cafe with a lovely panoramic view of the city. Anyway, the Corbijn show was alright – sure, a lot of nicely done black and white portraits of famous people, but nothing I felt I hadn't seen before. On the other hand, I was much more excited about one of the other non-headlining shows happening there, Spanish photographer Aitor Ortiz. He photographs monumental architectural structures in a stunning abstract way.... quiet, powerful, meditative. I left thinking it was interesting how these images of stark, empty, uninhabited spaces felt more impactful and engaging than the distinctly human Corbijn portraits...I guess the image of a face is not always the thing that speaks the most...