2006 – Page 2 – followthethings.com

“Manufactured Landscapes“
A documentary film directed by Jennifer Baichwal, starring photographer Edward Burtynsky, for Zeitgeist Films.
Trailer embedded above. Search online for streaming availability here.

Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal follows industrial landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky as he visits factories, dumping and recycling sites in China and Bangladesh. His photos are stunning, beautiful, mesmerising and disturbing. Her film picks out the details and follows them, ‘unfreezing’ his photos in time. On the one hand, it’s a portrait of the artist at work. But, on the other, some say it’s a critique of the way that his work is more interested in the aesthetics than the politics and ethics of global capitalism. As he’s high above or far away trying to get a stunning visual composition framed and lit just right, she documents lives and livelihoods up close. People watching the film say that it transforms the cinema into an art gallery, as his photos linger long on the screen. Many remark on the ‘beauty’ of his work. It’s sublime. But is Baichwal’s film complicating these aesthetics with ethics? Or does his interest in capitalist industrialisation’s huge scale, order, patterns and visual contrasts ,and his eye for pollution, invite the viewer to see these ethics at play?

Page reference: Lucy Bannister, Harriet Beattie, Katy Charlton, Lawrence Cook, Daisy Livingston, Romain Tijou & Alex Tucker (2011) Manufactured Landscapes. followthethings.com/manufactured-landscapes,shtml (last accessed <insert dae here>)

Estimated reading time: 36 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell The Coffee

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Grocery

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

IMPROVE PAY & CONDITIONS

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

FLIP THE SCRIPT

FIND A CHARACTER

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

JUXTAPOSE EXTREMES

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

ADD TO THE MIX

“Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell The Coffee“
A documentary film directed by Marc & Nick Francis, starring Tadesse Meskela, for Speak-It Films & Fulcrum Productions.
Trailer embeded above. Rent or buy on Vimeo here. Search streaming availability here.

At a time when coffee shops are appearing on every street corner in the Western world and the home of the world’s finest coffee beans is mired in poverty, British filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis don’t want to make yet another documentary about Ethiopia needing Western aid. They want to show Tadesse Maskela, a representative of an Ethiopian coffee co-operative, as he travels the world trying to get a better price for his farmers’ coffee. Tadesse is irritated that importers such as Starbucks are making massive profits from this coffee while the people who grow it in ‘the home of coffee’ don’t even have schools, clean water or healthcare. This is a fascinating ‘follow the people’ documentary because it chooses to follow a producer as they try to find where the commodity the grow and sell ends up, and who profits from them. It’s not a guilty consumer trying to find who made their stuff. It stars an African man on a quest in the Global North, looking for his coffee on the shelves of a British supermarket, asking questions not only about where the coffee goes, but where – and by whom – the profits from its trade are generated and enjoyed. How will people explain to him the extraordinary inequalities in wealth and poverty along the coffee supply chain? From his perspective, this doesn’t make sense.

Page reference: Blayne Tesfaye & Julia Potter (2012) Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell The Coffee. followthethings.com/blackgold.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 26 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Made In Cambodia

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Fashion

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

“Made in Cambodia“
A dissertation by Helen Clare, submitted as part of their BA Geography degree at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Click the preview pages above to read the dissertation.

Undergraduate student Helen Clare looks through her clothes and finds an H&M t-shirt ‘Made in Cambodia’. She’s traveling to Cambodia to do some charity work in her summer vacation. She wants to find and meet one of the garment factory workers who helped to make that T-shirt for her. But, despite her best efforts, she cannot gain access to the factories where she’s convinced it may have been made. So, she does the next best thing. She takes a course that will give her the qualification to work there. What does she learn along the way? Who does she get to meet? And what can she learn from them about the lives her t-shirt connects?

Dissertation reference: Helen Clare (2006) Made in Cambodia. BA Geography Dissertation: University of Birmingham, UK (followthethings.com/madeincambodia.shtml last accessed <insert date here>)

Page reference: Helen Clare (2024) Made in Cambodia. followthethings.com/made-in-cambodia.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 92 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Socks

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Fashion

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

INCLUDE HAUNTING & HORROR

ENCOURAGE CURIOSITY

MAKE IT SNAPPY

“Socks“
Undergraduate coursework written by David Roberts, published in the Teaching Geography journal.
Full text above. Reference below (Cook et al 2007).

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and what properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming’ it. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives via that thing. One student – David Roberts – thinks about his Marks & Spencer socks. He has a drawer full of them. And none of them has a ‘made in’ label. After some online detective work, he’s finds one pair were made for him far away in Bulgaria in a factory owned by an Israeli company that’s fighting battles against consumers boycotting their goods because they’re also made by non-unionised workers in factories in Palestine’s Occupied Territories. Marks & Spencer encourages its shoppers to ‘Look Behind The Label’. And that’s exactly what he’s done. He finds some uncomfortable geopolitical issues are protecting his feet.

Page reference: David Roberts (2006) Socks. followthethings.com/socks.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Ballet Shoes

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Fashion

“Ballet Shoes“
Undergraduate coursework written by Maya Motamedi, published in the Primary Geography journal.
Full text below.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Maya Motamedi – is a ballet dancer. She loves her Grishko pointe shoes. They’re part of her dancing body. After some online detective work, she’s finds who made them for her, far away in Russia. The shoes’ component parts come from plenty of other places. This kind of thinking, this kind of detective work, means you are never alone, never do anything by yourself! The lives of thousands of people are wedged into those shoes, says Maya, dancing with her.

Page reference: Maya Motamedi (2006) Ballet shoes. followthethings.com/ballet-shoes.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.