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Lacedonia – Frank Cancian’s Pictures of a Disappearing World
In 1957, it must have been a trip of a lifetime. Frank Cancian was going to Italy. An American student, child of Italian immigrants, he had won a Fullbright scholarship. The project would combine his love of photography and his studies in anthropology. He would use his camera to document the life of Lacedonia, a town in the hills of Avellino. To reach Lacedonia you have to climb into the Apennines to the east of Naples. In ancient times this had been the land of the Samnites, Rome’s bitter enemies, who had long resisted conquest. Later it became the border lands of southern Lombard duchies before the Normans placed their…
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All Things Made New: Humanity’s Coming of Age
Who can doubt that we live in a new age? Our times are profoundly different to the past. So different as to be entirely unprecedented. We live, indeed, at the threshhold of humanity’s coming of age. The inadequate terminologies that capture the “newness” of our times include terms such as the industrial age, the information age, the Anthropocene and modernity. Societies which had undergone relatively little change in centuries or millennia have been entirely reshaped. Relations between the genders have broken out of a strict hierarchy that stretches back to the beginning of agriculture. Relations between government and citizen, likewise, have been entirely reshaped compared to the past. Human equality…
