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Category / Inspiration Vault

India’s Overlooked Concrete City of Oz

When you think of Indian cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Jaipur, you might think of the impossibly intricate architecture, ancient folklore, explosions of colour and unstoppable energy; a welcome deluge of the senses. But there is one place that is not like the others. In the north of India, on the foothills of the Himalayan…

Miami of India: The Forgotten Capital of Art Deco

Mumbai; the gateway to India, home of Bollywood cinema, infamous for its slumdogs and shanty towns. But did anyone know the city also has the second largest number of surviving Art Deco buildings in the world after Miami? Flickr Photos (c) Sandra Cohen Rose and Colin Rose While visitors to the Indian capital of entertainment…

What David Bowie Learned from the Gugging Psychiatric Institution

By 1994 David Bowie’s musical career was in a bit of a quiet phase, let’s say. He hadn’t managed to recreate the massive success of his 1983 album Lets Dance. Ziggy Stardust had long since departed back to the cosmos, The Thin White Duke had been retired, and Bowie’s latest incarnation, Tin Machine, had disbanded.…

Birkin and Gainsbourg: Dusting off the Family Album

For anyone who still dreams of the swinging sixties with its wild child chain-smoking rockstars and sexually charged style icons, here’s something that might feed your flame. Taschen has released a new nostalgia-filled photo book, Jane & Serge: A Family Album. Jane’s brother, screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, is behind the camera and all the…

The Fantastical World of Mingering Mike, the Imaginary Legend of Soul

When you were young, what did you want to be? An astronaut, a princess, maybe a superhero or president of the world. Mike Stevens dreamt of being a soul super star, he wanted to tour the world, to write and produce award-winning albums and run his own record label. He would star in, write and…

Journey to the North Pole in a Hot Air Balloon

This is the forgotten story of a brave (and perhaps slightly mad) scientist and his two men, who made a perilous one way journey to the furthest ends of the earth. And if an expedition to the North Pole in itself wasn’t dangerous enough, they decided they would do it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three…

A Compendium of Abandoned Greenhouses

Today I opened my computer and typed in my chosen search words of the day: “abandoned greenhouse“. Little did I know how many photographs I was about to scroll through. So many, too many! Why is that? Surely we still all eat greens and enjoy decorating our houses with them. Why have so many of these…

An Ode to Floating Lighthouses

Sure, we’ve all admired picturesque lighthouses on rocky shores, or with waves crashing over them at the edge of a harbor, but…what about floating lighthouses? Like something out of a Wes Anderson movie, these fascinating vessels did exactly what their name suggests: they were lighthouses, guiding ships around obstacles and into safety. They were also…

Why Did this Celebrated Surrealist Talent Get Cancelled?

In 1943, the New York art world was abuzz about a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The esteemed institution was hosting a show featuring one Morris Hirshfield, an immigrant who had found success as a tailor and then shoe designer before becoming a self-taught artist. His work was praised by the…

A Compendium of Native American Tipi Decoration circa 1900

I found an online treasure chest of gas lantern slides today in Yale’s digital rare book library today. There are thousands of hand-coloured slides of the Blackfoot community in northwestern Montana at the turn of the 19th century and reflect the photographer’s particular interest in the unique decorative and artistic styles of the Native American…

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