Fashion, dust and more - tales from the internet

I found myself trying to explain to a group of students the other day the need for them to consider the overlap between their own experiential field and that of their potential consumer group. This led me to reflect on how I could encourage them to use photography to gain greater insights into the world around them. So here are a few of my thoughts as I explored ‘the world’ through another person’s lens.

First stop had to be the ‘The Sartorialist’ – a quick way to spot emerging fashions or a fantastic way to catch a glimpse of human emotion and to reassure myself that we are not facing an obesity pandemic. Can it be true that only the little size folk like to take an interest in clothes?

Much bemused, my next destination was to head to the NYT to check out whether obesity was still an issue. It was but I got sidetracked by a story about a dust storm in Australia.

As the author of these despatches, I felt it my duty to be able to report on whether this recent bit of dust matched up to previous such events. I remember a few total “blackouts” from dust storms as a kid when literally you could not see anything and you felt time stand still in the eerie pause before the winds hit. Here is a more recent photo of a dust storm in the making. 15 minutes after this photo was taken, the road was totally blacked out.


So I headed to the National Library of Australia online archive of photographs to see if they had any records of prior dust storms. Unhappily, the black and white photos in their archive don’t do justice to what it must have been like back then when scrub was being demolished to make way for ‘soldier settler farms’. But great we have some records for comparison.

Then, thinking about the power of social media, I thought about my friend Flickr (not the book but the photography site). Sure enough, lots of lovely colour pictures of the Sydney dust storm but no archived historical records for this new babe on the block.

Thinking of old books and dust storms led me to think about John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and the dust bowl existence of the sharecroppers in Oklahoma. So my despatch ends with a great set of photos from the US taken during the Great Depression.