Economy: photographs of the Elephant and Castle

Economy: the Elephant and Castle was the third part of a three-part work in book and exhibition format and entitled The Elephant Vanishes. Patrick Sutherland is Director of The Elephant Vanishes, a long-term photographic documentation of the regeneration of the Elephant and Castle, undertaken with students on the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course (MAPJD). Each year of the project students were set themes, which interrogate different aspects of the regeneration and development project. The resulting exhibition and book embraces divergent creative strategies: a key aspect of the work produced is its visual variety, leading to a rich layering and overlapping of documentary forms. This work is edited and curated into exhibition and book format by Sutherland. The overall project. The Elephant Vanishes, was launched with a PARC study day at LCC in 2006. Numerous people including Prof Val Williams, Prof Tom Hunter, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Paul Lowe , John Easterby and Brigitte Lardinois contributed to the project

Disciples of a crazy saint: The Buchen of Spiti

The Buchen are specialist religious performers from Spiti, a culturally Tibetan valley in North India. They are widely known for performing an elaborate exorcism ritual that culminates in a slab of stone, marked with images of demons, being smashed on a man’s belly. In winter groups of Buchen perform their religious theatre, a localised form of Ache Lhamo, the Tibetan Opera. This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford is the result of a research project and substantial fieldtrip funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with project partnership from the Pitt Rivers Museum. Patrick Sutherland has been photographing in Spiti for nearly two decades and working with the Buchen for several years. The book consists of a self-reflexive essay by Patrick Sutherland illustrated with historical photographs and his own photographs, followed by four sections of photographs and captions by Patrick Sutherland. It concludes with a substantial essay, placing the Buchen into a wider cultural and historical context, by Tashi Tsering, founding Director of the Amnye Machen Institute (Tibetan Centre for Advanced Studies) in Dharamsala. This essay is also illustrated with historical photographs

From a Distance

An exhibition of very large scale documentary photographs of the Elephant and Castle exhibited at London College of Communication. From a Distance was a commission given to photographer Paul Reas to respond to the regeneration of the Elephant and Castle in south London. Paul Reas was chosen for his track record of personal, socially committed documentary work. From a Distance forms part of the Elephant Vanishes project, a long-term documentation of the changes facing this area. The exhibition was curated by Patrick Sutherland and Paul Reas and co-curated by Monica Takvam and the accompanying catalogue (Fieldstudy 16) was edited by Patrick Sutherland and Monica Takvam, with a commissioned essay by Giles Fraser, the Guardian's "Loose Canon" columnist. Installation shots by Monica Takvam

The Photo Essay: Patrick Sutherland

This invited essay reflects upon the use of the photo essay within documentary photography. In particular it compares Righteous Dopefiend, the much-lauded anthropological text by Philippe Bourgois with photographs by Jeff Schonberg, to work by photographers exploring similar subject matter. It aims to tease out some of the essential elements of the photo essay as well as the connections between the practices of visual anthropology, documentary photography and photojournalism. It is accompanied by a separate online article that describes an approach to shooting, editing and constructing a photo essay and offers guidelines for the submission of photo essays to Visual AR

Disciples of a Crazy Saint: Photographing the Buchen of Spiti

PDF poster, PDF of PowerPoint presentation, MP3 of audioThe Buchen of Spiti in the Indian Himalayas are performers of rituals, actors and disciples of the fourteenth / fifteenth-century "crazy saint" Thang Tong Gyalpo. They are renowned for performing an elaborate exorcism called the Ceremony of Breaking the Stone. They also enact a local form of the Tibetan Opera for village audiences. These Buddhist morality plays illustrate the principles of karma and ideas of impermanence but also offer a space for uninhibited speech and earthy humour. Photographer Patrick Sutherland has been photographing the Buchen for many years. When he recently gave them some prints he was told that they were so awful that the performers had torn them up and thrown them in the fire. Disciples of a Crazy Saint describes Sutherland's further return to Spiti to investigate Buchen ideas about photography and to negotiate a form of documentation more appropriate to the Buchen self-image as specialist religious practitioners. Patrick Sutherland is a documentary photographer and Reader in Photojournalism at the University of the Arts London. He has been photographing in Spiti since 1993 and his work has been exhibited and published internationally. A book entitled Spiti: The Forbidden Valley with an essay by Tibetan filmmaker Tenzing Sonam and a dedication by Henri Cartier-Bresson was published in 2000. Disciples of a Crazy Saint was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with project partnership from the Pitt Rivers Museum, where it is being exhibited until 3 July, 2011.World Oral Literature Project: an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without recor

The role of architecture in providing physical & social wellbeing for the youth: a proposed youth centre in Wentworth Durban.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Youth Centres have been proven to promote physical and social wellbeing amongst modern youth. Previous research has proven the importance of architecture in community empowerment as mediator between user and surrounding environment. Offering great potential in economic, cognitive, physical and social development for disadvantaged youth. This research will explore the potential of a youth centre in the Wentworth Township. Situated in the industrious back of port South Durban Basin. The lush natural environment, thriving petro-chemical industry, lack of basic health amenities and excessive crime rates present interesting and challenging discussions for research. The overburdened low-income youth are challenged with great social deterrents however offer unwavering potential in their local interests. Limited government aided skills development and youth facilities have resulted in current negative socio-economic activities amongst Wentworth youth. The research to follow will engage scarce youth spaces and related popular peripheries. Exploring existing local and international literature for proposing the design of a youth centre that pro-actively participates in the lives of the youth. Stimulating local youth culture, economic empowerment and holistic development through architectural design. Limited local research carried out in South African youth centre typologies present potential for development of a local framework for inspired and appropriate youth spaces. Dealing with the specifics of the township and greater South African context. Engaging unemployment, hopelessness, scarce basic amenities, skills development, substance abuse and other related social dilemmas that exist because of poverty. The research to follow will analyse the social and built environment within a context specific theoretical and conceptual framework. Determining the role of architecture in youth wellbeing by establishing specific architectural design principles, for designing youth spaces in Wentworth. Place, culture and empowerment theories form a framework for analysing the local urban and social fabric. Concepts of youth culture, proactive design strategy and dreamscaping will orientate methods of response to potentials, and challenges established based on relevant case studies. Incorporating qualitative analysis of both primary and secondary data for the support of outcomes

Indirect Signs of the Peccei-Quinn Mechanism

In the Standard Model, the renormalization of the QCD vacuum angle $\theta$ is extremely tiny, and small $\theta$ is technically natural. In the general Standard Model effective field theory (SMEFT), however, $\Delta\theta$ is quadratically divergent, reflecting the fact that new sources of hadronic CP-violation typically produce $\mathcal O(1)$ threshold corrections to $\theta$. The observation of such CP-violating interactions would therefore be in tension with solutions to the strong CP problem in which $\theta=0$ is an ultraviolet boundary condition, pointing to the Peccei-Quinn mechanism as the explanation for why $\theta$ is small in the infrared. We study the quadratic divergences in $\theta$ arising from dimension-6 SMEFT operators and discuss the discovery prospects for these operators at electric dipole moment experiments, the LHC, and future proton-proton colliders.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures. Comments welcome

No Heroes: The photographs of Roger Hutchings

An anthology examining the work of the renowned British photojournalist Roger Hutchings, from his early work for The Observer, his extended documentary project on the Kurds in Southern Turkey, his work in the Balkans during the wars in the Former Yugoslavia and his photographs of the fashion industry for Giorgio Armani. 128 page softback in colour and black and white duotone. Edited by Patrick Sutherland with preface by Sutherland, essay by Stephen Mayes and fifty six photographs by Hutchings

The Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary Gala: A Conversation with Robert Sutherland, Chief Librarian

In an interview with Patrick Lo, Robert Sutherland, Chief Librarian of the Metropolitan Opera, describes the work carried out by the organization's library staff in preparation for the Met's 50th Anniversary Gala.

Exogenous Amino Acids Regulate Trophectoderm Differentiation in the Mouse Blastocyst through an mTOR-Dependent Pathway

AbstractAt the late blastocyst stage, the epithelial trophectoderm cells of the mammalian embryo undergo a phenotypic change that allows them to invade into the uterine stroma and make contact with the maternal circulation. This step can be regulated in vitro by the availability of amino acids. Embryos cultured in defined medium lacking amino acids cannot form trophoblast cell outgrowths on fibronectin, an in vitro model of implantation, but remain viable for up to 3 days in culture and will form outgrowths when transferred into complete medium. The amino acid requirement is a developmentally regulated permissive event that occurs during a 4- to 8-h period at the early blastocyst stage. Amino acids affect spreading competence specifically by regulating the onset of protrusive activity and not the onset of integrin activation. Rapamycin, a specific inhibitor of the kinase mTOR/FRAP/RAFT1, blocks amino acid stimulation of embryo outgrowth, demonstrating that mTOR is required for the initiation of trophectoderm protrusive activity. Inhibition of global protein translation with cycloheximide also inhibits amino acid-dependent signals, suggesting that mTOR regulates the translation of proteins required for trophoblast differentiation. Our data suggest that mTOR activity has a developmental regulatory function in trophectoderm differentiation that may serve to coordinate embryo and uterus at the time of implantation