As he continued, seismic changes erupted across America and the country descended into an age of crisis. He photographed protests and Washington politicians in Congress and the White House, climate change disasters and environmental defenders, the rise of the regime of Donald Trump, the Trump rallies and America’s reactions to it all. He comprehensively probed the fractured social and economic condition, going beyond the tropes of inequality we all recite by heart to create a visual portrait of a country mired in calamity, its people deeply splintered, angry and in pain.

The resulting portrait of the American social landscape is a riveting historical and visual record of a complicated country in a complicated time. It is compelling, and one of the earliest photographic accounts of an age that historians and citizens will be scrutinizing for generations to come.

Course of Empire is a hard and unsparing look at the United States in the last decade, a period marked by protest, political polarization, racialized violence, income inequality, climate change-induced disaster, and a deadly pandemic. In this series of black-and-white pictures made across the country, Light captures the divisiveness and collective insanity that characterized American life in the Trump era. He does not tread lightly. This bold and affecting work is an angry indictment of a country gone off the rails. –Erin O’Toole, Baker Street Foundation Associate Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Read more

• Britain’s industrial age is often perceived through a black-and-white filter as the ‘funereal’ age of coal pollution and bleak working class slums. This catalogue will dispel that perception, demonstrating how the industrial revolution transformed colour, and focus on the central role it played in art, culture and technology
• As opposed to approaches favouring a long history of colour, the catalogue focuses on the second half of the 19th century and argues that this was a crucial chromatic turn, which has been significantly ignored by prominent historians of colour and previous publications
• Several essays in the catalogue offer new research into key chromatic events of the period including the 1862 International Exhibition
• Accompanies an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum from 21 September 2023 to 18 February 2024

Contrary to the monochrome vision of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses and the coal-polluted streets of Charles Dickens’ London, Victorian Britain was, in fact, a period of new and vivid colours. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the Victorians’ perception of colour and, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, it became the key signifier of modern life.

Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design charts the Victorians’ new attitudes to colour through a multidisciplinary exploration of culture, technology, art and literature. The catalogue explores key ‘chromatic’ moments that inspired Victorian artists and writers to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, these figures learned from the sacred colours of the past, the sumptuous colours of the Middle East and Japan and looked forward towards the decadent colours that defined the end of the century.

Section 1: Glowing Colour: Introduction; Ruskin and Colour Pedagogy; Turner, Ruskin and the Lure of Venetian Colour; The Colour of the Middle Ages; Unweaving the Rainbow: Nature’s Colours in Art and Fashion; Pretty Plant Photographers or Pioneering Women?; Object in Focus: Hummingbird Necklace by Harry Emanuel;

Section 2: Colour for All: The Aniline Revolution; The International Exhibition of 1862; Object in Focus: Technical Analysis of the Great Bookcase; Sculpture and Race; The Colours of the Ancient Past; Orientalism; Object in Focus: Joseph and his Brethren by Owen Jones; India and Colour;

Section 3: Colour for Colour’s Sake: The Colours of Decadence: Yellow, Green and Blue; Object in Focus: St. Mark’s Venice by James McNeill Whistler; Queering Colour; Object in Focus: Tanagra; Object in Focus: Japanese Boardgame; Loie Fuller.

Read more

Read more

Read more

More than just How To Start Sewing, this book will help you start sewing, keep sewing, and sew better than ever before.

Whether you have been sewing for years, or just starting to learn how to sew, whether you are studying fashion design, or sewing for yourself at home, How To Start Sewing has been designed with you in mind. This is a sewing book you will want to keep beside your sewing machine for reference whether you are learning a technique for the first time, or reminding yourself of a detail you haven’t sewn for a while.

The Perfect Reference Book

For the more experienced sewer, How To Start Sewing is designed for quick reference. Forget trawling multiple books and videos to decipher sewing instructions, sometimes you just want a book that you know you can trust. Use our Table of Contents and Index to get right to the technique that you need. We have focused on the most versatile techniques and explained them step by step with detailed drawings and matching patterns. Use our troubleshooting guides to master your sewing machine, improve your stitch quality and solve recurring issues to raise your sewing skills to the next level.

A Sewing Course in a Book

If you have just started to sew, this book has been designed for you. Learning to sew can be both frustrating and rewarding, so you want a book that will start slowly, build your confidence and help you avoid common problems. Designed as a thorough sewing course, How To Start Sewing will walk you through the entire sewing process, from your first hand sewing stitches to your first complete garment. You don’t even need to have a sewing machine to start learning. Just like having a sewing teacher in your own home or studio, let us show you how to choose and use your first sewing machine, troubleshoot your way through common sewing issues and build your sewing confidence. Go easy on your budget by buying new equipment and materials only as you need it, then put your new supplies and skills to use in hands-on exercises. Don’t let the large size of this book intimidate you; everything is explained in straightforward language with practical examples. No prior experience required.

Practical Sewing Exercises with Patterns to Match

It’s frustrating trying to sew a new detail when your pattern doesn’t match the instructions. So inside this book you’ll find a whole library of small sewing patterns. Trace off the patterns, cut them out in fabric and follow the step-by-step exercises to sew seams, darts, pockets, zippers, vents, and plackets. Then you can create a reference folder full of your favourite techniques. Next time you forget how to sew the lining for an invisible zipper, or how to adjust the tension on your overlocker, you will have your test sample there to remind you. This pattern library is also the perfect reference for when you are pattern cutting your own patterns or amending sewing patterns.

Sew Like a Professional

Professional sewing machinists know where to invest their time and effort to get the best results and you can learn the construction principles at work and achieve a finish worthy of high-end ready-to-wear too. This book focuses on the most versatile garment details used in womenswear and menswear collections for you to apply to your own designs.

Designed for Different Types of Sewers

If you are a perfectionist, this book will suit your pragmatic desire to know everything about the how and why of sewing and build your skills and knowledge in a specific order. Or if you prefer to make mistakes first, and then ask questions later then we are here for you too. Just use our troubleshooting guides to tell you why you keep breaking needles and tangling your thread so you can quickly solve your issues and plough through your first projects. The sooner you start making mistakes, the sooner we can help you fix them.

Read more