Notes from attending 'Attention Lab 1' at the School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn. The event included two guided exercise and a few guided discussions between groups of two, four, half or all of the 40 odd participants. Introductory conversations while waiting for the lab to begin covered themes around the question of why each... Continue Reading →
dedicated to my father Dr. Ahmed Achrati In my recent review and documentation of photos from past trips to Algeria, I've come across a number of visits to prehistoric carvings and etchings in the areas surrounding El Bayadh. These day trips were a part of a broad effort on the part of my father to... Continue Reading →
this post is part 4 of a series covering my trip to Algeria this past February South of Brezina, in the Algerian province of El Bayadh, lies a series of mesas marking the start of the Sahara. I've visited the area on three occasions, the first of which was during a sandstorm in December 2017.... Continue Reading →
this post is part 3 of a series covering my trip to Algeria this past February These photographs from Algeria show the geography and geology of the Saharan Atlas mountains between El Bayadh and Brezina, a small oasis marking the start of the desert. All photos taken by the author, from the front seat of... Continue Reading →
this post is part 2 of a series covering my trip to Algeria this past February The previous post reviewed photographs taken from a flight from Algiers to El Bayadh in February, comparing the bird's eye view from the plane to the God's eye view of satellite imagery. As the flight approached El Bayadh we... Continue Reading →
part 1 of a series covering my trip to Algeria this past February The documentary L'Algerie Vue du Ciel is a beautiful portrait of Algeria with slow motion sweeping panoramas of many cities and regions. The ever present voice-over commentary keep the feeling closer to a travelogue or nature documentary than an experimental documentary like... Continue Reading →
There is a famous location in Brooklyn, on Washington Street in DUMBO, where the Manhattan Bridge tower frames the Empire States Building. It isn't quite Leaning Tower of Pisa, but there are enough tourists posing for photographs to slow car traffic and produce a curious scene when viewed from above: The view of skyscraper framed... Continue Reading →
I came across a recent prompt asking "what is your favorite book about NYC?" Mine is the The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill (1964), a children's book I first red in 4th grade and probably my first exposure to New York City. The book has plenty of fans, its own New Yorker profile from 2014,... Continue Reading →
Following on from the Red Hook Pier photos from Halloween, I am posting a few other images of New York harbor. All images are from 2019 - the first six are from late May and the last two are from early June. The air is visibly much cleaner in the first photos; the views towards... Continue Reading →
Thomas J Campanella's tome is a skip stop tour of Brooklyn's history, focusing on the built environment but full of rich sketches of the outsized personalities inhabiting and shaping the borough. A blurb from the publisher: Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never... Continue Reading →
Adam Achrati 