More than twenty years ago I left England. In April 1994 I waved farewell to Rutland Water and headed away for Hong Kong, on the advice of Jan and Phil; because Jan told me of the books and because Phil asked what I had to lose..

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I'm showing you how I see my world when I'm standing before it, outside Plato's cave.

On these public photos, I have deliberately plonked the subject slap right in the middle of the viewfinder and then let the world take itself from there. It's not my laziness, it's me realising that the world seems to be better at arranging itself than I am at organizing it. I rarely if ever crop anything. And I put the white around the photos because it gives me something to fiddle with in the evenings; in my hotel room, or apartment, after I've been out there wrapped in visuals. And it makes me be there again.

Interned and slaughtered Cambodian mother and daughter.

Tuol Sleng, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

4th August 2012

Nikon D700 1/20 f20

Antonio Gramsci

The Prison Notebooks (1935)

Culture and Hegemony / False Consciousness

"Dominated and exploited classes typically do not understand their situation or their interests. They do not realise that the situation is unjust. This is usually due to the acceptance of ideas which cast the status quo as being legitimate; e.g. peasants might believe that kings have a divine right to rule and that God ordains that the poor should accept their lot with good grace, or that a miserable life in this world is not very important or worth trying to change because the important thing is to prepare one's soul for the next world.

"In any class society there will be a dominant ideology, which will be made up of the ideas which it suits the dominant class for people to hold. The acceptance of these perspectives and values by the working class is also referred to as 'bourgeois hegemony.' "

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"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works."

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If you want any of these photos you can have them. I don't own the things I see.

I'm on Facebook as Ian Michael. www.facebook.com/ianmichaelgu