KEVIN DONNELLY suggests that the task of transforming cultural spaces is far from over and that photography still has a key role to play
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The idealist mould breaker
GREGOR GALL recalls the times and politics of the legendary Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer
[Kat123/Creative Commons]
RITA DI SANTO talks to Scottish-Irish filmmaker MARK COUSINS about his new series The Story of Documentary Film
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
New releases from Shearwater, Florry, and Navy Blue
CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
ANGUS REID recommends a very unusual documentary: a love story between two disillusioned journalists
JOE STRUMMER, leader and lyricist for The Clash, died nearly 20 years ago. But his progressive political legacy lives on not just in his lyrics and what he said and did but, critically, in what he showed the left was possible.
Strummer showed us that culture can be consciously constructed in order to be used by the left to progress its own agenda.
He understood that most people come to an interest in – and commitment to – left-wing politics through life experiences and the influence of others – not a result of locking themselves away in their bedrooms to read volumes 1-3 of Das Kapital or by attending political meetings.
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