Ansel Adams, a photographer who died in 1984 and is famous for his large-scale black and white photographs, has had his work improved upon or rendered differently or besmirched (depending on how you regard this) by someone using AI.

The image in question, Moonrise Hernandez, New Mexico is described in Wikipedia thus:

The photograph shows the Moon rising in a dominating black sky with low clouds above a collection of modest dwellings, a church and a cross-filled graveyard, with snow-covered mountains in the background. Adams captured a single image, with the sunset lighting the white crosses and buildings.

According the Ansel Adams Gallery, Adams used an 8x10-inch wood view camera paired with a Cooke triple-convertible lens.

It's not just the finished photograph that singles out Adams, but also the exposure system that he devised. Not to get too deep into this, but film cameras in Adams' day would have no way of knowing what the lens was being pointed at.

That is not so with more with digital cameras that can have thousands of scenes pre-locked inside them against which they can judge what they were looking at and adjust exposure accordingly.

The classic example of a scene that a camera of Adams' day would find hard to interpret is a white cat on a black mat versus a black cat on snow, versus a grey cat on a grey mat.

So what Adams is noted for quite apart from his photographs, is that he invented a system for placing all the gradations of dark to light in a scene so that they would render pleasantly.

Adams was an art photographer and a commercial photographer. And when he was out on trips he would put his tripod and view camera on the roof of his shooting brake to get the height needed to get the perspective he wanted. Maybe he did for the Moonrise shot.

It was taken in 1941 and it is in the pubic domain due simply to the years that have passed since it was shot. So the legal right - at least according to the photographer who used AI - exists. Assuming that to be true, then the photographer could do pretty much what he wants with the original image.

Attribution

Let's clear this up first. In his rebuttal statement after being criticised, James Danziger said "When it was exhibited it was very clearly attributed as to exactly what it was." I assume that is true.

So the photo is in public domain and Danziger gave attribution - so he could do what he liked. But should he?

A number of photographers have come out and said it is a cheap affront to the work of a world-famous photographer.

The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust had this to say about the colourised photo.

Regarding the "Al-generated color version" of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, exhibited and offered for sale by Danziger Gallery at the 2026 edition of The Photography Show, presented by AIPAD

The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust was established by Ansel Adams to steward his artistic and environmental legacies, consistent with his own ethos and intentions. The Trust did not authorize, endorse, consent to, or acquiesce in the "AI-generated color version" of "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" exhibited and offered for sale by Danziger Gallery at The Photography Show presented by AIPAD in April.

This was a substantial editioned offering at a major international sales event. It exploited Ansel's name, reputation, and his most iconic image, while failing to identify any human artist responsible for its creation.

The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

What does The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust do?

Notably, it does not have a public-facing presence. It does not, for example, have its own website. The Trust manages the copyrights, licensing, and archives of Ansel Adams's work, but directs official inquiries and licensing requests through authorised representatives.

The University of Arizona Center For Creative Photography is one, and I cannot find any others. Their collection comprises a broad range of Adams' materials - everything from letters to contracts to exhibition materials.

The Ansel Adams Gallery

Then there is The Ansel Adams Gallery, which does have a website. The meta-description (the code built into a website that describes to search engines what the website is about) states:

Largest collection of Original Ansel Adams Photographs, framed prints and Contemporary Artists artwork. Buy Ansel Adams Fine Art Exclusives, Yosemite Special Edition and more

The lead text on the home page, the text intended to be read by visitors to the site, states:

The Ansel Adams Gallery strives to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation and concern for our world by offering visitors a unique variety of books, handcrafts, fine art prints, and an extraordinary collection of Ansel Adams original photographs.

The Ansel Adams Gallery and The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust are legally distinct entities with different purviews, with an intertwined history of crossover personnel.

The primary bridge between the two is the Adams Family (son, daughter-in-law, grandson) and business advisors who transitioned between the commercial retail business and the legal trust overseeing Ansel Adam's legacy.

Everybody Wants A Piece

It's the way of the world - everyone tries to make something from the material around them and from the people who have made something from the material around them.

I see two kinds of people trying to get a piece of what someone else has. There are those who openly declare their offerings, and there are those who try to sidle in sideways. I look at the former as people trying to make a living, and deserving of politeness, and the second as spammers.

Maybe Mr Danziger is one or other of these kinds. But where I stand on this Adams issue is that try as I might, I cannot get worked up about it.

The Trust and the Gallery want to hang onto either or both of Adams' reputation and of their piece of the pie that Adams created - a reputation that they did not create but inherited.

It is worth repeating that they are not the creators. This is why we have copyright - to protect creators for a meaningful period.

Maybe what Danziger did, was a betrayal. But what sort of betrayal? I am hard put to define it. It doesn't diminish Adams. If anything, the opposite.

In some ways these are the last struggles of individualism, like lava bubbling up in little splats from the general liquid below. We're all connected now and what one does really came from somebody else and from all of us. This is the end of any claim to be separate and apart.

None of this diminishes Ansel Adams. He took some terrific photographs.

But of course the sky is falling. The ground upon which we stand and upon which we rely for our peace of min, is shifting under our feet. The Earth has been pushed and pulled and now it is responding in kind. 

This is the mindset we have in the early part of the 21st century. And naturally, it only adds to the sense of insecurity and unease that people throughout the world are feeling.

Certainly the threat of disaster will push people along to trying to avert it. And some people think that is a laudable way to get people to solve the problem of climate change.

The problem in that is that the argument implies that all the polluting we do is OK or at least not as important as climate change and that as long as the consequence of our actions is that we do not cause climate change, and famine and total societal breakdown, etc. – then we can keep on polluting the way we do.

And if you don’t think that way, there are plenty of people who do.

I Have A Different Argument

I have a different argument on the ‘why’ of what we should do. What I mean is that there may be a bit of wiggle room for argument about exactly what effect that man is having on global warming and how the planet will respond in the medium or long term.

Climate scientists constantly revise their models because the planet is more complex than the models of it and it keeps ‘outwitting’ the those who model it.

But what is not in doubt is that we are destroying the Earth and ourselves with pollution. 

How many pieces of plastic are in the seas, in your body?

So don’t let arguments about global warming deflect from the fact that we should clean up the mess we are making irrespective of climate change.

And stop making more mess.

To stop polluting the planet doesn’t or shouldn’t need the justification that we are facing climate disaster.

Think about it. A tree does not need to justify its existence. We, however, do need to justify destroying it, whether or not at some point down the road the fallen tree will get its innocent revenge by releasing CO2 and killing the planet.

Careful housekeeping – looking after the place and not treating it like a rubbish tip – is simply good manners and a show of gratitude for the benefits we receive from the place we live.

We don't expect things to stay the same. We expect change. We expect changes to come faster and faster.

We think we're probably not too far from a huge shift in technology that will bring about something really big. It could be anything - rocket propulsion, energy supply, ways of communicating.

At the same time, we don’t think we have an assuredly better future.

We think the future may well be worse than today. We know that a lot of it comes from waste, negligence, and greed, because that's the way things are.

We think that untangling the mess will fail because for every person who wants to solve the problem there are those who have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. And they are more powerful than those who want to correct things.

And even if those elusive advances in technology happen, we question whether they will help us. We already wonder about that with AI.

Do we have enough time?

Asteroid 99942 Apophis will pass within 32,000 km of Earth on April 13, 2029. That's closer than geostationary satellites.

If you are in the right spot when it passes, you will be able to see it with the naked eye.

The diameter of the Earth is about 13,000 km, so 99942 Apophis will pass about at a distance that is just two-and-a-bit times the diameter of the Earth.

That's pretty close.

In 2004 when 99942 Apophis was first seen, observers thought there was a high probability it would hit Earth.

Now NASA thinks there is no risk of impact for at least a hundred years.

That's not very comforting. A hundred years is not very long when we are talking about The End.

Let's say that in seventy years the impact was judged certain, with no way to avoid it.

Can you imagine how that would knock the wind out of people's sails? How much would people care about carrying on as before - making money, aiming for success, paying the mortgage?

How would authorities impose order when every year was bringing The End nearer?

99942 Apophis is named after Apophis, the Egyptian god of chaos and destruction.

Someone has a sense of humour.

OK, Forget The Catastrophe

OK, let's assume 99942 Apophis isn't going to hit - not in one hundred years and not ever.

That's a relief.

Now think back to the days when communities were closeknit and stable for generations, how did individuals view themselves?

What was it like when whole villages grew up together and made decisions together in a community? And not decisions like whether to paint the town hall, but life and death decisions about crops and animals and defences and disease.

Everyone was part of their extended family. If anyone needed anything then they would turn to the community The State would be far-off and remote.

They would be cautious about strangers because they threatened the balance of things.

Within living memory we have seen how the individual and individual expression have ballooned like crazy.

In the great plagues of Europe, death and disease increased the price of labour and adventurers returned from foreign countries and made themselves rich, and everyone couldn’t wait to run to the city and be anonymous.

So what is it like to be an individual now? With billions of people on the planet, it is easy to say that most people are redundant, irrelevant. They are not needed to keep the species going or to develop new ideas or technologies.

At least for the time being, most people are not needed, despite falling birth rates being at or below the replacement rate worldwide.

In fact the current occupants of the planet are needed mostly so that they continue to buy things.

How satisfying is it to think that? Better not to think about it at all.

But if a person does, where do they find meaning in their lives when they are irrelevant?

In a crowded world the bottom can get knocked out of a person's will to act responsibly. They might feel that it simply doesn't matter how they react to life, the whole structure is irrelevant to them.

It gets worse. How does a person even know which of their responses are truly theirs?

We are all influenced by our environment, and what is to say that the environment is working for us and not against us?

We fear of losing our way, of being swept up in a convincing story, of being attached to a false cause?

When communities cease to exist, when man doesn't have the support of the family, the community, the village, then he is on his own.

We have to live with uncertainty, and uncertainty is unpalatable.

And with the loss of religion, any claim to a higher authority is looked at as meaningless, or oppressive, and the ultimate arbiter becomes the individual himself.

The message of the Second World War was that a man cannot absolve himself of responsibility for his lack of humanity. He cannot say in his defence that he was just following orders.

Within the law, the individual is king. the individual decides what is right and wrong.

How convenient that the individual can appeal to his own conscience above all other claims to authority.

Is it anything more than a convenient smokescreen, a mask for selfishness?

Selfishness means others have no intrinsic value. They are only valued for what they can do for us.

There is no downside in trying to ignite a spark of caring for everything into a flame. It's an experiment that needs other people who feel similarly; people that a man aspires to be like. If he finds them he might be able to find a bigger meaning.

There is no collective noun for flaneur.

It is not surprising. The archetype flaneur is a solitary observer of the human condition.

What would happen if two flaneur dressed so similarly that they might be twins, and then met by chance?

They would laugh together because they are flaneurs, and the detached observer has a sense of humour.

Theodor Herzl wrote for a newspaper – elegant essays observing society – until the antisemitism that began in France and spread to Germany took him on a different course.

Oscar Wilde was the quintessential flaneur in his observations and in his dress. And he says so himself.

When he was sentenced to two years hard labour for gross indecency, and was transferred to Reading Gaol, he wrote De Profundis, a letter to the young man who was a trigger to his downfall.

…The gods had given me almost everything.  But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease.  I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion.  I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds.  I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy.  Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation.  What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. 

Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others.  I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on.  I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop.  I ceased to be lord over myself.  I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it…

'Ancient lights' is a doctrine in English property law providing a right to light, where a property owner who has enjoyed natural light through a window for at least 20 years can legally prevent neighbours from blocking it. Formalised by the Prescription Act 1832, this law ensures 'adequate illumination,' often marked by signs on older buildings to warn developers.

You can see the sign above the window on the white flank wall of the building here.

The big question is how to measure the adequacy of illumination to determine whether a proposed obstruction compromises 'adequate illumination?' There is a science and a convention with rules that enable professionals to calculate to what extent a building may have its illumination compromised. The calculations involve the angle of the sun at different times of the year, the height and distance of proposed adjoining buildings, etc.

When submitting plans for a development to the Local Authority, where the development overlooks existing buildings, you will sometimes see a document that sets out the what and the why of how the proposal does not compromise light, whether an 'Ancient lights' sign has been displayed or not.

This is the text of an email I received from John Lewis on 28 November 2021 about a home delivery during Corona Virus. It's one of those emails that becomes a social document in time.

I am reproducing it here because those days seem almost like a dream now.

In the middle of the pandemic when the vaccines were being distributed, who thought that the virus would effectively disappear from our daily lives?

Dear Customer

In addition to our usual service, we made some changes to our delivery and installation services to keep you and our Partners safe.

If we are coming into your home, please follow these 4 simple steps.
Open windows and doors -Where possible please create ventilation in your home
Maintain 2 metres distance - Please maintain social distance at all times and remain with all family/household members in another room
Keep access routes and hallways clear - Make sure it’s easy to access the room where your order is being delivered to minimise contact levels

Face-coverings

For Scotland and Wales - Please wear a face-covering if possible. Unless exempt, our policy requires our delivery crew to wear a face-covering when delivering.

For England - In line with Government guidance, we recommend and encourage that our customers and Partners in England continue to wear a face covering, unless exempt.

For our lengthier and more labour intensive in-home services, our delivery crew may remove their masks providing household members aren’t present in the room.

If you have an in-home service booked with us, watch our video to understand our important steps to keep us all safe.

We stayed in a hotel once where the door handles fell off the wardrobe, and we laughed about it. It was a cheap hotel and we didn't expect much.

But recently we stayed in quite an expensive hotel in a very old canal-side building.

That first night, we plugged in our phones to charge, turned the lights out and in the morning we saw that our phones had not charged.

Apart from one lone socket by the bed, the writing desk was the only place to charge things.

We told reception the sockets in the desk were not working, and an electrician came and showed how the sockets only worked when the room lights were on.

So at night when we wanted to sleep, the sockets did not work and the phones did not charge.

How crazy is that?

The electrician swapped over the plugs and the leads in the wall behind the desk, explaining that someone must have swapped them at some point.

Now the sockets worked, but that caused a new problem that we discovered when we tried to boil the kettle: It only worked when the room lights were on.

There should have been more sockets but the building was hundreds of years old, so we made allowances and kind of understood it would mean a lot of work to rip out paneling to run new cables.

On the other hand though, it was an expensive hotel, and you would think they could run to installing a couple more sockets.

But, come on - we were on holiday and we weren't going to let a paucity of sockets spoil things, so we laughed about it. But then...

Trash Along The Street By The Canal

The hotel had a long frontage to the canal. And the trash on the street outside was an eyesore. We were paying for a canal view, and we wondered why the management of the hotel didn't see this eyesore.

Why didn't the management clean the stretch by the canal. It was an easy job.

We could see how the trash got there. The trash cans filled up before the Council street cleaners came by. Homeless people opened the trash cans looking for bottles and tins that they could take to shops to get money back on the returns.

And once the trans cans were open, the gulls dragged the trash everywhere and the breeze did the rest.

OK.

But from the amount of trash along the side of the canal, it must have been there for a long time without anyone cleaning it up, or even noticing it.

I told reception that it was not pleasant to look out from our windows to see trash along the canal.

The staff cleaned up the area right next to the trash cans immediately but they left the trash all along the grass next to the canal.

Why would they do that? Why would they not clean up all that trash that had obviously been there a while?

We could only think that years of seeing the trash made them simlpy not see it.

But we chose a canal view for its beauty, and the trash was right in our view.

The trash problem was never resolved, so we did what people do. We blotted the image of the trash from our consciousness as we looked at the canal and the pretty little boats moving up and down.

Then Another Problem

Then water started dripping through a ceiling light in the bathroom from the floor above.

A man came and did something to cure it. We were out when he did the work, and when we did we saw a grille lying in the room because he had forgotten to put it back when he finished. So we called reception and they sent someone to screw it back in place.

The grille was the straw that broke the camel's back. Just a little grille that someone forgot tot put back. But come on, this was a pricey hotel. Very pricey. Get it right - you are charging enough for it.

That's what we thought and we wrote an email to the manager detailing everything. We were expecting a response and we got one - a meeting with the manager and the the bill halved. As I said to her at the time - when a situation cannot be righted, for whatever reason, then money is the only available compensation.

And it seemed that the situation could not be righted because the trash by the canal was still there.

Why didn't it bother the hotel management? After all, they were running an upmarket hotel whose business it was to create a temporary pleasure dome for their guests.

It just shows how impossible it is to get inside someone else's head.

They say a person can be themselves but they cannot see themselves. In fact, they say that there is no certainty that a person can be themselves. It depends on the environment in which they operate.

And for that, they say that many people do not choose their environment. They find themselves in an environment and go along with it, making choices that are not really theirs and not really being themselves. Perhaps not ever.

They settle at a certain level or give up and switch off. The light goes out of their eyes and they stop seeing how they are struggling inside. They would move if someone or something opened the door for them and if they had enough determination. But the doors are closed, too heavy to move. So they don't.

How can we even live if we don't make all the mistakes and lives that make up a life lived?

Two women seated, one eating, both middle aged and almost certainly English and solidly middle class, one wearing a keffiyeh and holding a flag.

I recognise the patterns of my own positions in this. And then I rein myself in and think how people are entitled to take up a cause, including one I think is misguided and that they don’t know what they are supporting.

And if I were to mention October 7th, what would I hear in return? It’s as though the rape, torture, and murder of that day was a blip justified in an otherwise virtuous story.

The March was billed as being against the Far Right, and there were people from unions representing care workers, educators and other sectors, and people in favour of refugees and the contribution they make to British society.

In amongst the union flags, thought, I must have seen over a couple of hundred huge Palestinian flags and endless people wearing keffiyehs, and people chanting freedom for Palestine, and more people with signs opposing supposed Israeli genocide and similar accusations.

I’d say the anti-Israel faction all-but hijacked the march and the narrative of the union supporters and people holding up pro-immigrant banners. Somehow 'the far right' became conflated with Israel. Ironic, really.

Olly from Pagecord just wrote that it is now possible to create a gallery of photographs - so I am testing it with some photos from my site at Photographworks.

That's a site that has been through changes. First I reviewed Nikon cameras and lenses. Then I scrubbed that and wrote more generally about the photographic process. And recently I junked it once again and rebuilt it with just portrait photos.

Photographworks is not to be confused with my other Photographworks site, which is a hosted solution where I write at least a couple of times a week as a diary in photographs. Check 'em out!

In this map, the bigger area on the left marks the boundary of the City Of Westminster and the smaller area to the right is the City Of London. And as you can see, they are adjacent to one another.

And here is a map of London with the two 'cities' marked on it - one orange and one green.

So how come they exist are all bearing in mind they are right in the middle of London.

They say you have to be English to understand why we have such weird pronunciations or why we have a city within city and in fact two adjacent cities within a city.

Looked at logically it makes no sense at all, but it makes more sense when you think about how the areas grew up historically and how once people are invested in something they don’t want to give it up.

Within Greater London there are two cities, the City of London and the City of Westminster, and they are adjacent to one another.

Perhaps the best way to explain how they came about is the often used description that London is a collection of villages. In the case of the City of Westminster and the City of London, they grew to become cities in their own right before the London we know today had grown and surrounded them and taken them into its fold.

The City of Westminster borders the north bank of the River Thames and stretches north as far as St John’s Wood and The Regent’s Park. It also covers Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, 10 Downing Street, and Westminster Abbey. And it is one of the 33 local government districts that make up Greater London.

It has been a city since 1540 and both it and the city of London are subject to UK parliamentary legislation and national governance. So they are not a law unto themselves at the national level.

The City of Westminster is governed by Westminster City Council, which is a local authority responsible for providing services and making decisions within its jurisdiction. So Westminster is a typical modern borough. Sure, it is called a city, but it obeys all the rules just like another borough.

The City of London is different.

The City Of London

The City of London Corporation governs the City of London. The Corporation was established in medieval times, but there is no record of a charter that incorporated it. Instead, the corporation is considered incorporated by prescription, meaning that the law assumes it was incorporated because it has been considered as such for so long.

In other words, we don't know when it started and we don't have evidence that it was created this way, but it has been there so long that we must assume that it did start that way.

This is a typically English solution.

The leader of the City of London is the Lord Mayor of London, which is a distinct and separate office from the Mayor of London who is the leader of the Greater London Authority.

More English confusion if you didn't know there are two mayors.

The police authority is the City of London Police, founded in 1839, one of the oldest police forces in the UK. It is separate from the Metropolitan Police Service and has jurisdiction in the Square Mile, as the financial district of London is known.

Beyond its general role as a police force, it focuses on fraud, cybercrime, and money laundering, and it is headquartered in Guildhall Yard East located within the City of London.

The Metropolitan Police, or to give its full title the Metropolitan Police service on the other hand has its headquarters at New Scotland Yard, at the Curtis Green Building on the Victoria Embankment in Westminster.

So two quite separate police forces rubbing shoulders with one another.

And did I mention that British Transport Police, which has its own jurisdiction over the land and buildings and locomotives of all kinds on British Transport land? Just one more jurisdiction that has resulted from the millennia-old origins of Britain.

Minsters

The word Minster comes from the Old English mynster, meaning a monastery or mother church. Mynster in turn comes from the Latin monasterium, which traces its roots back to the Ancient Greek monasterion which meant a place to live alone, separate from the world.

In England, minsters originated in seventh century Anglo-Saxon England as missionary teaching churches or churches attached to a monastery.

Historically, the main minsters in England began in the north, and stretch from Beverly Minster in East Yorkshire and down the eastern side of England.

And that brings us to Westminster, which describes the West Monastery established in the tenth century as an Anglo-Saxon church.

When it was re-endowed and enlarged in later centuries This church became known as the west minster to distinguish it from the east minster (St Paul's Cathedral) in the City of London.

To those who may wonder at President Trump’s position in Iran, you can see it clearly from his speech in Riyadh in 2017.

So what is happening now is not a surprise but a step on the way of a stated objective.

This is an extract from his speech, the part that he addressed to Iran,

Starving terrorists of their territory, of their funding, and the false allure of the craven ideology will be the basis for easily defeating them. But no discussion of stamping out this threat would be complete without mentioning the government that gives terrorists all three — safe harbour, financial backing, and the social standing needed for recruitment. It is a regime that is responsible for so much instability in that region. I am speaking, of course, of Iran.

From Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, Iran funds arms and trains terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region. For decades, Iran has fuelled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror. It is a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death to America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this very room.

Among Iran’s most tragic and destabilising interventions, you’ve seen it in Syria. Bolstered by Iran, Assad has committed unspeakable crimes, and the United States has taken firm action in response to the use of banned chemical weapons by the Assad regime, launching 59 missiles at the Syrian air base from where that murderous attack originated. Responsible nations must work together to end the humanitarian crisis in Syria, eradicate ISIS, and restore stability to the region and as quickly as possible.

The Iranian regime’s longest suffering victims are its own people. Iran has a rich history and culture, but the people of Iran have endured hardship and despair under their leader’s reckless pursuit of conflict and terror. Until the Iranian regime is willing to be a partner for peace, all nations of conscience must work together to isolate it, deny it, funding for terrorism, cannot do it, and pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they so richly deserve.

Drought

Actually, there is something else to say, something that doesn’t hit the headlines. Iran is not the only country in the region to suffer drought, but Iran’s problems are off the scale.

Here is an update I wrote just a few days ago:

The drought continues. Authorities have started rationing water at night and President Masoud Pezeshkian has discussed evacuating the capital.

Iran invested heavily in large-scale dams in the late 20th century, and there are over 500 dams in the country. As of now, though, roughly 64% of the reservoirs are empty and nineteen major dams across the country are at less than 20% capacity.

The drift from the countryside continues. Because of drying wetlands and the inability to sustain farming, approximately 31,000 villages, nearly 45% of Iran’s rural settlements, are now deserted

Chinese New Year (Year of the Fire Horse) in 2026 falls on Tuesday, 17 February.

In preparation for it, the Chinese community in London has been putting up new lanterns. Lots of them.

You see lanterns strung up in Chinatown all year, and they didn't look to my casual eye as though they are in need of replacing, until I saw the old ones on the ground after they were taken down. 

I took photos over two days - the first when I was with some other photographers and we happened to walk through Chinatown. The second time a couple of days later when I was walking to Covent Garden and came through Chinatown.

It got me thinking about the new year and how decision makers in China regard astrology and signs that are above normal calculations.

We might think that in the 21st century we have left astrology behind. But how about in China?

The Fire Horse

The Fire Horse (Wu Wu) is one of the personalities in the sixty-year cycle of the Chinese Zodiac. In traditional Chinese metaphysics, the Horse is associated with the element of fire.

The year of the Fire Horse combines the fire of the Horse with the Fire element to make double fire, double energy.

The last year of the Fire Horse was sixty years ago.

In 1986 China was in a state of high-energy transformation. The student demonstrations began that year and eventually led to the Tiananmen Square confrontation in 1989 and the crackdown. Some estimates put the dead at 10,000.

Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the Communist Party was a favourite of the reformers. The authorities blamed him for being too soft on the students.

The decision to remove him was finalised in late 1986. His death three years later was the catalyst for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Now in 2026, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has dismissed two of China's most senior generals and basically torn apart the command structure of the armed forces.

Does Xi Jinping consider astrology? Is it in his DNA?

Does he think now is a good time to act and invade Taiwan because of the energy of the Fire Horse?

How might his calculation be affected by the recent actions of President Trump? It is not hard to think that Xi Jinping might consider President Trump to be less predictable than President Biden or President Obama. Maybe a falling out about strategy is what led to the removal of the generals.

Whither now, China?

The word domino originally referred to a long, hooded cloak (or mozzetta) worn by priests in France and Italy during the Middle Ages. The name is likely derived from the Latin phrase benedicamus Domino, meaning 'let us bless the Lord' or simply dominus, meaning master or lord.

By the 18th century, this black hooded garment became popular at Venetian and French masquerades to hide one's identity. It was often made of black silk and worn with a small black mask.

Couturiers in France then transformed dominos into a more colourful version worn over other clothes in colder weather.

Meanwhile, the game of Dominoes originated in China and arrived in Italy in the early 18th century.

The European version of the tiles were often made with dark, ebony wood backs and white ivory faces. This reminded people of a priest's hooded domino cape, and by extension, the fashionable hooded capes worn by the rich.

And so the capes and the tiles were both called dominoes, with the first recorded use for the tiles in French being in 1771.

If Marie Antoinette had not been guillotined she would have faded from history along with other Royals who are all forgotten.

But she was guillotined, and very publicly. And she he gave women the Marie Antoinette style that has come down through the centuries to fashion today.

The Victoria & Albert Museum staged an exhibition devoted to her with her dresses and shoes, and the story of her life and the very blade of the guillotine that took her life.

But what else was on show were scurrilous little books with drawings of her being penetrated in her boudoir by soldiers, with her genitalia exposed, and others showing her fingering the King.

In the lead up to the revolution it was all designed to make her more vulnerable to attack.

The book, now in the British Library, is entitled The Amorous Day, or the Last Pleasures of Marie Antoinette - A comedy in three acts, and portrays her as immoral while asserting dominance over a powerless king.

The aim was to bring her down, and finding any way into lowering her in the estimation of people was fair game. Beneath it, the main fear that brought down Marie Antoinette was the suspicion that she was a treacherous, foreign-born spy actively conspiring with Austria to destroy the French Revolution.

But guillotined she was, and here is her last entry

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