Daniel Soar

In the early afternoon of Monday, 8 May, a sealed A4 envelope was delivered by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. The wire agencies were told that it contained a letter from Iran’s president, intended for his US counterpart. The news travelled fast. Ahmadinejad had written a letter. Might this be a turning point in US-Iran relations? The US denied any knowledge...

Weegee, aka Arthur or Usher Fellig, invented a certain kind of photography. His pictures of New York street life – crime scenes, car wrecks, society girls, circus freaks, racegoers, rough sleepers, fire victims – were intimate and direct. He used a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, preset for instant shooting to 1/200th of a second at f16 with a focal distance of ten feet. He got right up...

Some people won’t read novels. I understand. I’m close to not wanting to read novels myself: they’re trying, and often seem the same. But one thing all fiction guarantees is that it will describe a place that doesn’t exist: ideally, a place that bears some relation to the world you think you know but is larger, stranger, bolder and more promising. The rest –...

When in doubt, toss a coin. If you really can’t decide which alternative is preferable, if everything seems equal and you don’t care a damn, it can’t matter what you settle on. Or so you would think. But to flip a coin – literally or figuratively – and abide by the result whatever the consequences would be an inhuman act. If you’ve ever tried coin-flipping...

Jeff Wall’s Mimic appears to be a documentary photograph. A tough man walks down the street, girlfriend in tow, and exchanges threatening glances with a passer-by. In Vancouver in 1982, when the picture was taken, it may have been more blindingly obvious that (as Wall relates it) the man’s reflexive gesture constituted racial abuse. Mimicry: a white trash white man mimics an...