Caroline Irby's Exhibition: A Child From Everywhere ~ London, UK

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

A Child from Everywhere by Caroline Irby, published by Black Dog Publishing, 2010Photographer Caroline Irby spent one year tracking down a child born in every country in the world  that now resides in the United Kingdom.  She found children from 185 of the world’s 192 nations, photographed and interviewed each one of them. Her  resulting photographic book, A Child from Everywhere, features the children sharing their thoughts on  leaving their countries of origin, their hopes for their new lives in the UK and their observations of cultural differences.

A selection of Irby’s photographs along with a series of short films that she made of her interviews with the children is on exhibit until August 30th at the V&A Museum of Childhood, London, UK. Entry to the museum and exhibit is free.

Stay tuned to PaperTigers as we will have an interview with Caroline in our  upcoming August/September issue and she will also be guest blogging here on our blog!

Posted by: Corinne | 1 Comment » | Tags: , , , , ,

Happy Earth Day!

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

This year PaperTigers celebrates Earth Day by kicking off Jan Reynolds’ blog tour of Cycle of Rice, Cycle of Life: A Story of Sustainable Farming.

Author/photographer of Celebrate! Connections Among Cultures and the “Vanishing Cultures” series, Jan is no stranger to turning world cultures and natural environments into beautiful and educational books for children. With this new title, Cycle of Rice, Cycle of Life, she has put together a fascinating photo essay that explains sustainable farming by using the Balinese traditional system of rice farming as an example of “growing food while being conscious of the needs of other people and the well-being of the planet.”

The book shows us how rice farming in Bali has been practiced for a thousand years (“from seeds to rice-bearing plants to cut stalks that go back into the soil”), and how its cycle is closely connected to that of community life in the island. For the Balinese people, the natural rice cycle involves a hierarchy of water temples; community rituals performed by high priests to thank the goddess of water and the goddess of rice; careful planning of water-sharing schedules to meet everyone’s needs, allowing for a fallow period between growing cycles to keep the fields fertile; the help of ducks to eat worms and bugs and to fertilize the soil naturally with manure; and more. But in the end, the essence of the process, i.e the spirit of a connected community sharing water to ensure a rice harvest and a good life for all, comes through quite clearly (more…)

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What the World Eats- Part 2

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

© Peter MenzelA recent e-newsletter from Kane/Miller, the wonderful, small, independent publisher of books that (in their own words) “will make children say both ‘wow, that’s just like me’ and also ‘wow, that’s different’” has called my attention to a fascinating online photo gallery of images from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio (Ten Speed Press, 2005). The book, “a unique photographic study of global nutrition” shows portraits of 30 families, in 24 countries, surrounded by a week’s worth of groceries:

On the banks of Mali’s Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice… In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad.

Utterly insightful and educational, its potential for curriculum tie-ins is great: the rich photos and essays will help students compare, contrast, and make generalizations about our “hungry planet” when learning about world cultures, international economic and political conditions, the process of globalization, and more…

Posted by: Aline | 4 Comments » | Tags: , , , , , , ,