Latest news with #ayahuasca
.jpeg%3Ftrim%3D0%2C0%2C0%2C0%26width%3D1200%26height%3D800%26crop%3D1200%3A800&w=3840&q=100)
The Independent
7 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Exclusive: Aspiring CBP officer sues after being rejected over ‘religious' ayahuasca tea use
An aspiring U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer is suing after getting rejected for the job by admitting she consumes ayahuasca during biweekly religious ceremonies. Juliana Reis, a Brazilian-American member of União do Vegetal, a Christian reincarnationist sect that regularly drinks a sacramental ayahuasca tea to, the group contends, 'heighten spiritual understanding and perception, and bring the practitioners closer to God.' The tea contains various compounds and often produces a hallucinogenic experience. 'Religious practitioners ritually prepare the tea and consider it sacred, much as Catholics believe the wine and host they take at communion to be holy,' according to União do Vegetal, otherwise known as UDV. But when Reis revealed this during the pre-employment polygraph exam that all CBP applicants undergo, the job offer was withdrawn, according to a federal religious discrimination lawsuit filed Tuesday. DHS policy disqualifies any job-seekers who have used a substance classified as a Schedule I drug – which the tea contains – within the three years preceding their submission of an employment application. In 2006, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the right of UDV members to import and use ayahuasca, which contains the powerful hallucinogen DMT, ending a years-long dispute between the church and the federal government. The UDV uses a tea called hoasca, or, ayahuasca, as a religious sacrament, Reis' complaint explains. Ayahuasca tea is prepared by brewing two plants together with water, one of which contains dimethyltryptamine – DMT – a drug regulated under the Controlled Substances Act. However, the Department of Homeland Security, of which CBP is a component agency, still considers the drug's use to be disqualifying, even though Reis emphasized that she did so 'for spiritual purposes only,' according to her suit, which names Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem as the sole defendant. 'Her religious practice is recognized as something very similar to Native Americans with peyote,' attorney Kevin Owen, one of the lawyers representing Reis, told The Independent. 'We think that DHS has made a wrong decision here, and that our client shouldn't have been denied a job with CBP just because of her religious observance.' Owen said that UDV's ayahuasca use is a 'bona fide' spiritual custom, and that the Trump administration has professed a strong commitment to religious accommodation – which is what Reis, who was turned down by CBP under the Biden administration, is now seeking. In May, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order establishing a so-called Religious Liberty Commission, intended to guard against 'threats' to unfettered religious practice. 'It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law,' Trump's EO read. 'The Founders envisioned a Nation in which religious voices and views are integral to a vibrant public square and human flourishing and in which religious people and institutions are free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or hostility from the Government.' According to Owen, there are very few cases that are as clear-cut as the one he and co-counsel Gary Gilbert and Brian Sutherland are bringing on behalf of Reis. 'A lot of times, it's muddier, or a bit grey,' he said. 'I don't think the facts here will be in dispute.' CBP and a spokesperson from Noem's office did not respond to requests for comment. Reis was born in Espirito Santo, Brazil and became a naturalized American citizen in 2009. She became a devoted follower of UDV, which was founded in Brazil in 1961 and now includes more than 21,000 adherents in 11 countries, about 10 years ago, according to her complaint. Reis' congregation in Boca Raton, Florida, meets biweekly, usually on the first and third Saturdays of the month, although it 'sometimes holds extra services,' the complaint goes on. 'Like the other members of the UDV, Ms. Reis participates in the sacramental use of ayahuasca when she attends UDV services,' it says. 'When she drinks ayahuasca tea, she feels the effect of DMT, the active psychotropic ingredient, but she drinks it only for sacramental purposes.' The UDV's use of ayahuasca is legal under federal law, which provides an exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, according to the complaint. In October 2018, some three years after Reis joined the UDV, Reis applied for a position as a CBP officer. On December 4, 2018, the complaint says she received a provisional employment offer from CBP at the GS-7 pay rate, which comes with a starting salary of just over $40,000. To complete the process, Reis would be required to undergo a pre-employment procedure consisting of a medical exam, fitness exam, drug test, structured interview, polygraph exam and background investigation, the complaint states, noting that Reis successfully passed the medical and fitness exams, along with the interview. Next, Reis was scheduled to sit for the polygraph, known colloquially as a 'lie detector test,' which she did in March 2021, according to the complaint. 'Ms. Reis was asked several questions about drug use during the exam,' the complaint states. 'When the polygraph examiner asked her about [her] use of psychoactive substances, she disclosed her membership in the UDV and explained her religious use of ayahuasca.' The polygraph examiner asked 'extensive questions' about the UDV, all of which Reis answered fully, and later told her she 'was doing well,' the complaint contends. During a lunch break, the complaint says the examiner contacted an adjudicator at CBP's Personnel Security Division to inquire about Reis' use of ayahuasca. The adjudicator told the polygraph examiner that 'the admission to recent drug use disqualified Ms. Reis,' and when Reis returned from lunch, she was informed that the test was over, the complaint states. 'At this time, Ms. Reis executed a voluntary written statement for the report of the exam, which explained that she was a 'member of the Uniao do Vegetal…' that her church imports the ayahuasca from Brazil, and that she drinks the tea only at church services and 'for spiritual purposes only,'' according to the complaint. Still, it says, on April 1, 2021, DHS officially found Reis 'unsuitable' for employment with CBP, and four days later sent her an email telling her that the tentative job offer had been rescinded over her ayahuasca use. She subsequently appealed to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, unsuccessfully, to intervene, with their final decision coming on May 8, 2025. Reis then filed suit. Reis' adherence to 'the precepts of the UDV Church, including the regular consumption of sacramental ayahuasca tea,' has been recognized as lawful by the Supreme Court and is protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,the complaint maintains. At the same time, it alleges that CBP 'refused to consider [Reis] for employment because of her religious belief and practice,' and wanted to 'avoid providing her with reasonable religious accommodation.' This, the complaint argues, constitutes religious discrimination in violation of Title VII and accuses CBP of acting 'in bad faith and in willful and wanton disregard for [Reis'] federally protected rights.' 'When we went thru the EEOC process and got an administrative decision that wasn't what we had hoped for, we figured we had to go to district court,' Owen, Reis' the attorney, told The Independent. 'She has a sincerely held religious belief, and therefore it's going to be covered by Title VII.' On Monday, one day before Reis filed suit, the Trump administration further expanded religious liberties for government workers, allowing federal personnel to proselytize on the job. 'Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,' U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said in a press release. 'This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths. Under President Trump's leadership, we are restoring constitutional freedoms and making government a place where people of faith are respected, not sidelined.' The federal government 'is supposed to be a model employer,' according to Owen, noting that he hopes Reis' lawsuit will spur wider changes for public-sector workers. 'Our client wants to make this situation a case not only vindicating her rights, but also for other people to make sure their religious practices aren't violated under the law,' Owen said. Reis says in her suit that she has suffered 'emotional distress, inconvenience, humiliation, and other indignities' as a result of the 'discriminatory conduct' by CBP and DHS. She is now seeking damages, to be determined by a jury, for lost wages and benefits, compensatory damages, and punitive damages, plus attorney's fees and court costs.
Daily Mail
17-07-2025
- Science
- Daily Mail
Users of psychedelic drugs say aliens live among us and they've met ‘machine elves' with a dark side
Users of a naturally occurring psychedelic drugs are convinced they've encountered real alien beings, including 'machine elves,' which inhabit a realm beyond our Earth. These machine elves, described as chattering, mischievous entities, consistently appear in the visions of those who take DMT, which one neuroscientist suggested could mean users are actually entering a shared alien reality. DMT (or N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is present in thousands of plants, including ayahuasca, which is used in religious ceremonies, but is also present in small amounts within the human body. Dr Andrew Gallimore, who has a PhD was in biological chemistry and has studied computational neuroscience, said he encountered these beings first hand after being transported to a hyper-dimensional world teeming with intelligent lifeforms. Unlike earthly creatures, these beings - ranging from insectoids to God-like figures -seem to exist in a space that defies our three-dimensional understanding. Gallimore's encounters with these alien intelligences have convinced him that they are not mere drug hallucinations but may represent a genuine presence accessible through DMT. The consistency of these visions among DMT users, where no human or animal forms appear, has raised profound questions about whether these aliens are already here, embedded in an unseen dimension. Gallimore added that DMT may act as a key, unlocking this hidden world where these advanced intelligences await, potentially holding answers to their purpose on Earth. With most psychedelic drugs, such as LSD, people's experiences are very different each time, unlike the reported experiences of those on DMT, where there are strange similarities. Dr Gallimore described his first trip on the drug, having put a small amount of powder in a glass pipe and smoked it. 'Within a few seconds, the normal waking world is obliterated and replaced with an entirely novel, what can only be described as alien reality, highly complex, hyper dimensional, quite abundantly and quite obviously populated, by extremely intelligent and advanced beings,' Gallimore described. The scientist added that the creatures he saw were 'non-human, non-animal beings' that were not from this world. He claimed that DMT differs from other drugs because, rather than altering reality, you find yourself in a new world, taken to an alien reality. Famous psychedelics researcher Terence McKenna described the drug as a 'reality channel switch.' Gallimore believes that one way to understand how psychedelics work is through computational models of the brain. According to the neuroscientist, taking drugs like DMT switches the brain to constructing an alternate waking world model, allowing it to access information it normally does not have. This differs from our 'normal' experiences of the world, which rely on the brain constructing a model of the environment using sensory information, such as sight, smell, and taste. In simpler terms, Gallimore doesn't think the drug is transporting people to another planet. Instead, it's allowing people to see what the normal range of human brain activity is unable to process - including beings living in other dimensions on Earth. 'You don't have to travel anywhere. I'm not saying your consciousness is going somewhere. All that's happening if you are interacting with some kind of alternate intelligence is the DMT has to somehow allow an alternate source of information to enter the brain,' Gallimore said. Gallimore added that in his many interviews and interactions with users of DMT, he has spoken to several people who have encountered the tiny 'machine elves.' 'Probably the most famous of all are these multitudinous, giggling machine elf type beings, and these very small creatures that operate in great numbers and are generally very lively, cheeky, jovial, mischievous,' Gallimore revealed. 'They sing impossible objects into existence. They speak in some kind of visible language,' he added. Meanwhile, the insectoid beings have a 'dark side,' seeming to perform 'psychic surgery' on some DMT users. Others creatures seemed 'more like Gods' according to the scientist. 'It's impossible to put into words, but beings that seem to be constructed from more than three dimensions, that are quite obviously, inordinately more complex than any other kind of intelligent being that you are ever going to encounter in this universe,' Gallimore described. In his book, Death By Astonishment: Confronting The Mystery Of The World's Strangest Drug,' Gallimore said that he does not know where these beings are, but has a sense that it is a realm that is trillions of years older than our universe, and the beings are billions of years more advanced than us. He said that the 'space' in which the entities are discovered feels like a 'higher dimensional structure,' as if someone who had lived in a two-dimensional world suddenly gained access to 3D space. Gallimore has now devoted himself full-time to researching the drug, and said that while there is a lot of academic work with DMT and brain imaging, many researchers are 'counter cultural'. He said that he hopes to one day fully understand 'where' the DMT experience takes people. 'We don't know the relationship between our universe and this place, whether it's parallel in some way, whether we are kind of a lower dimensional slice of some higher dimensional structure. We don't know where this place is or our relationship to it,' Gallimore admitted.
Daily Mail
14-07-2025
- Science
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Aliens are already here...they are intelligent but have a dark side and operate on us
Users of a naturally occurring psychedelic drug are convinced they've encountered real alien beings, including 'machine elves,' which inhabit a realm beyond our Earth. These machine elves, described as chattering, mischievous entities, consistently appear in the visions of those who take DMT, which one neuroscientist suggested could mean users are actually entering a shared alien reality. DMT (or N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is present in thousands of plants, including ayahuasca, which is used in religious ceremonies, but is also present in small amounts within the human body. Dr Andrew Gallimore, who has a PhD was in biological chemistry and has studied computational neuroscience, said he encountered these beings firsthand after being transported to a hyper-dimensional world teeming with intelligent lifeforms. Unlike earthly creatures, these beings - ranging from insectoids to God-like figures -seem to exist in a space that defies our three-dimensional understanding. Gallimore's encounters with these alien intelligences have convinced him that they are not mere drug hallucinations but may represent a genuine presence accessible through DMT. The consistency of these visions among DMT users, where no human or animal forms appear, has raised profound questions about whether these aliens are already here, embedded in an unseen dimension. Gallimore added that DMT may act as a key, unlocking this hidden world where these advanced intelligences await, potentially holding answers to their purpose on Earth. With most psychedelic drugs, such as LSD, people's experiences are very different each time, unlike the reported experiences of those on DMT, where there are strange similarities. Dr Gallimore described his first trip on the drug, having put a small amount of powder in a glass pipe and smoked it. 'Within a few seconds, the normal waking world is obliterated and replaced with an entirely novel, what can only be described as alien reality, highly complex, hyper dimensional, quite abundantly and quite obviously populated, by extremely intelligent and advanced beings,' Gallimore described. The scientist added that the creatures he saw were 'non-human, non-animal beings' that were not from this world. He claimed that DMT differs from other drugs because, rather than altering reality, you find yourself in a new world, taken to an alien reality. Famous psychedelics researcher Terence McKenna described the drug as a 'reality channel switch.' Gallimore believes that one way to understand how psychedelics work is through computational models of the brain. According to the neuroscientist, taking drugs like DMT switches the brain to constructing an alternate waking world model, allowing it to access information it normally does not have. This differs from our 'normal' experiences of the world, which rely on the brain constructing a model of the environment using sensory information, such as sight, smell, and taste. In simpler terms, Gallimore doesn't think the drug is transporting people to another planet. Instead, it's allowing people to see what the normal range of human brain activity is unable to process - including beings living in other dimensions on Earth. 'You don't have to travel anywhere. I'm not saying your consciousness is going somewhere. All that's happening if you are interacting with some kind of alternate intelligence is the DMT has to somehow allow an alternate source of information to enter the brain,' Gallimore said. Gallimore added that in his many interviews and interactions with users of DMT, he has spoken to several people who have encountered the tiny 'machine elves.' 'Probably the most famous of all are these multitudinous, giggling machine elf type beings, and these very small creatures that operate in great numbers and are generally very lively, cheeky, jovial, mischievous,' Gallimore revealed. 'They sing impossible objects into existence. They speak in some kind of visible language,' he added. Meanwhile, the insectoid beings have a 'dark side,' seeming to perform 'psychic surgery' on some DMT users. Others creatures seemed 'more like Gods' according to the scientist. 'It's impossible to put into words, but beings that seem to be constructed from more than three dimensions, that are quite obviously, inordinately more complex than any other kind of intelligent being that you are ever going to encounter in this universe,' Gallimore described. In his book, Death By Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World's Strangest Drug,' Gallimore said that he does not know where these beings are, but has a sense that it is a realm that is trillions of years older than our universe, and the beings are billions of years more advanced than us. He said that the 'space' in which the entities are discovered feels like a 'higher dimensional structure,' as if someone who had lived in a two-dimensional world suddenly gained access to 3D space. Gallimore has now devoted himself full-time to researching the drug, and said that while there is a lot of academic work with DMT and brain imaging, many researchers are 'counter cultural.' He said that he hopes to one day fully understand 'where' the DMT experience takes people. 'We don't know the relationship between our universe and this place, whether it's parallel in some way, whether we are kind of a lower dimensional slice of some higher dimensional structure. We don't know where this place is or our relationship to it,' Gallimore admitted.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From ayahuasca rituals to a birthday in the favelas: Arles photography festival takes us on a trip
Artists have always been fascinated with imagining the invisible – but few have taken it quite as far as Musuk Nolte. The 37-year-old Mexican photographer has spent a decade working with the Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon region – and found inspiration there by taking ayahuasca with a shaman called Julio. Nolte tells me he first took ayahuasca when he was five years old – with his mum, an anthropologist who studied the psychedelic brew. The powerful hallucinogenic visions he experienced while with the Shawi community in their ancestral homeland, the Paranapura basin, have been translated into a series of images titled The Belongings of the Air, presented as small suspended light boxes, glowing like fireflies in a darkened room. They are unconventional documents, not showing the Shawi directly but reflecting the Shawi cosmovision. Pulsating with flashes of bright white light, the images have an allegorical tenor: we move with quickened breath from the intimate to the epic, from a woman and child washing clothes in a river to a closeup of a man's ear, to the blazing eyes of a big cat, to a dazzling constellation of blurry silver flecks. This latter image was created by photographing rows of candles lit for forcibly displaced relatives whose whereabouts remain unknown. The feeling it stirs is one of the universe melting. The Belongings of the Air is among the highlights of this year's Les Rencontres d'Arles, the world's oldest and most prestigious photography festival. There are dozens of exhibitions here, taking over the ancient, crumbling cloisters, churches and crypts of the Roman city until October. Nolte's trippy, illusory work is also included in An Assembly of Sceptics, the shortlist exhibition for the 2025 Discovery award Louis Roederer Foundation that includes seven projects by artists using photography to conjure alternate versions of reality and destabilise the status quo. Bolivian-Algerian artist Daniel Mebarek presents portraits taken in a free mobile photo studio he set up in the huge open-air market in El Alto, Bolivia. The photographs reflect an eagerness, particularly of middle-aged men, to be seen. He recounts a story of an inebriated man who later returned to thank the photographer with a bag of pears, and another of a man who kissed his photograph in elation. There are also the fraught, time-bending, cryptic collages of Cairo by Heba Khalifa, who uses family photographs and photomontage techniques in part to help her confront and heal after an abusive childhood. The spellbinding photographs by Octavio Aguilar also travel through time to the artist's Ayuuk ancestors, a heritage conjured through images of his friends dressed as deities important in Ayuuk mythology who influence nature. Aguilar, like Nolte, offers another way of interacting with the environment based on Indigenous knowledge and ways of seeing. As wildfires raged nearby in Marseille, less than an hour from Arles, the urgency of this message loomed large. An Assembly of Sceptics reflects this year's strong Latin American focus, centred on several big exhibitions diving into the past, present and future of photography in Brazil – part of the programme of the Brazil-France cultural year. The story of Brazilian photography at Arles begins in São Paulo in 1939, when 18 amateur photographers founded the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). The FCCB's headquarters in São Paulo's first skyscraper emphasised the intertwining of photography and architecture as the vehicles of modernism. The early works of the FCCB photographers, in the 1940s and 1950s, reflected modernist ideals with a cool, graphic poise – pristine documents, sometimes verging on abstraction, of urban construction, cables, wires and the clean, curvilinear forms of São Paulo's new modernist landmarks by the likes of Oscar Niemeyer. Human figures, when they appear, are puny against the might of progress. Later, though, several photographers started to unravel this modernist utopia, revealing those cast out, excluded from the benefits of this supposed social progress. Alice Brill was one of the rebels, who was ejected from the FCCB after less than a year. Her images move away from the exaltation of modernism to a darker picture of the human cost of development. Her photos of poverty and the poor living conditions of communities on the city's outskirts, of cluttered streets littered with rubbish, São Paulo's proud skyscrapers distant in the background, are a far cry from the untainted, uncrowded visions that followed the FCCB's guidelines at the time. They act as reminders that progress rarely benefits all. At cultural space La Croisière you are propelled into the rhythm and colour of one of Brazil's largest favelas, the sprawling Aglomerado da Serra located in the hills of Belo Horizonte. A dual exhibition, Portraitists of the Hill draws from the archives of Serra residents João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta. Mendes and Pimenta collaborated to document their local communities for more than 50 years, but this show focuses on the first two decades of their work there, between 1970 and 1990. Though Serra was established out of a lack of proper housing for Belo Horizonte's swelling population, Mendes and Pimenta show the autonomy of an energetic, stylish community who they photographed with obvious affection and warmth. Here are images of irrepressible joy and happiness, beautiful and chaotic. They record the lively tempo of children's birthday parties, the shining primary school graduates at a local state school and the agile moves of those trained in the martial art capoeira. But they also pay homage to quieter domestic moments, families in their living rooms and around kitchen tables. The exhibition pays particular attention to the duo's images of fathers, grandfathers and men holding children – in one image, a local shopkeeper proudly holds a neighbour's newborn baby up to the camera. A man in his underwear in his living room puts his arm around his smiling wife. A father props baby twins on his knees, a balancing act belied by his composure as he looks directly at the camera. The pictures shift ideas about the caring roles of men in a patriarchal society, as if conscious too of the legacy of these pictures, and their potential to shape how the children in them might look back and remember. Activist and artist Claudia Andujar, who has lived in São Paulo since 1955, is best known and widely celebrated for her work with the Yanomami Indigenous people of Amazonia. Her decades-long activism contributed to the recognition of Yanomami territory in 1992. Yet while this acclaimed work continues to be relevant given the struggles of Indigenous peoples in Brazil and beyond, it has perhaps skewed the understanding of Andujar as an artist. In the Place of the Other at Maison des Peintres redresses that, the first exhibition to home in exclusively on Andujar's early, less known works, made in Brazil soon after she arrived in the country in the 1960s and 1970s, and before she began to work with the Yanomami. It's a small but utterly enthralling show, bringing to light several series originally produced and published by Realidade (Reality), a groundbreaking Brazilian magazine published between 1966 and 1976 that combined reportage and experimental design. The images are astonishing – Andujar's fearless, extraordinarily direct gaze is emphasised by these large-scale reproductions. For a 1967 story about the work of traditional midwife Dona Odila, Andujar captured, with an unflinching eye, the climatic moments of a child being born. These photographs of a woman labouring at home led to the magazine being confiscated by the police. Other works soar with cinematic beauty, such as a series of pictures following a controversial medium known as Zé Arigó, who was later imprisoned for his 60-second 'psychic surgeries'. One excruciating image immortalises the surreal moment he inserts the flat blade of a knife into a patient's eye. This exhibition draws out Andujar's unique combination of empathy and audacity, and her deep interest in the human psyche. Her first experiments with colour filters applied to the camera evoke an apparent interest in 'aura', the things felt but not seen. Her photographs of drug addicts and of a psychodrama session take photojournalism into a daring, bold new terrain and have more in common with Dario Argento and Quentin Tarantino than Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, who Andujar exhibited alongside at MoMA in the 1960s. The exhibition culminates in A Sônia, a series of nudes of Andujar's one time muse, an aspiring model from Bahia. Andjuar met Sônia, and never saw her again after the three hour shoot. A Sônia presents another completely different facet to Andujar. She wasn't happy with the original slide film portraits she took and so rephotographed them through coloured photographs – the resulting nudes look like X-rays, ethereal and strange. On the face of it this intimate exchange (and more classical subject matter) seems disconnected from Andujar's other works – but it is ultimately about one person trying to understand another, from the outside in. Just as her photojournalism in Brazil began as a way of understanding her adopted homeland, here Andujar writes that 'perhaps I was seeking an idealised reflective identification with what I do not know about my own body'. Latin America dominates, but Australia too has an important landmark moment at Arles this year – the first ever big exhibition of Australian photography to be held at the festival. On Country is an expansive, encompassing survey featuring about 20 artists in the huge Eglise Sainte-Anne. As a result of its ambition and diversity, it is varied in quality, with some repetitive moments. The exhibition centres on connections to Australian terrains and topographies, taking inspiration from the First Peoples' definition of 'country' as a broad way to describe a spiritual and cultural connection to the land. Adam Ferguson's brooding, dramatic photographs of the Australian outback, made over the course of a decade, ruminate on the devastating impact of environmental crisis on rural life in these scorched, vast landscapes. Ying Ang's evocative, architectonic installation, with intersecting images and vinyls, explores the overdevelopment of the Gold Coast, now Australia's crime capital. The best works, though, were the large-scale, weirdly wonderful performances of Michael Cook, a Bidjara peoples artist who photographs himself as an alter ego, dressed in a suit, in places of colonial power, multiplied until he fills the space. If one show truly blew me away this year, it was the mind-boggling In Praise of Anonymous Photography. Marion and Philippe Jacquier ran the recently closed Lumière des Roses gallery, a home for the nearly 10,000 photographs they'd collected over 20 years by unknown and amateur photographers. This exhibition brings together images from the collection in various categories – there's some of the 120 Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraits by a photographer the collectors name 'Zorro', posing with whips, aviation masks and thigh-high boots. There are Mr Roussel's carnivalesque portraits of a wife, her features altered, sometimes grotesquely, by painting applied to the photograph. There are the pictures a Parisian pharmacist took of his customers without consent via a secret camera installed behind his counter – only one child seems to have spotted what was going on. Why the pharmacist did this, we will never know. There is also a tranche of the self-portraits of Lucette, the hero, in my mind, of Arles this year. Born in 1908, she travelled solo to France, Greece, Egypt, Syria and Scandinavia between 1954 and 1977. On her trips, she took 850 pictures – and the sole subject of them all is herself. She is also almost always out of focus. The photographs, when the Jacquiers acquired them, were meticulously organised and catalogued by date and location. The show is brilliant and bizarre, telling stories about obsession, fetish, loneliness and secret desire. In fact it's so good that it sends out a warning to all professional photographers – perhaps anyone really can take a decent picture. Les Rencontres d'Arles runs until 5 October
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Six great reads: gravity-defying boobs, an ayahuasca multinational, and Jesse Armstrong on tech bros
In America, the impact of the Trump administration is going way beyond policy, reshaping culture at a granular level. The Maga ruling class has a thirst for busty women in tight clothes, which fuses something new – what Mark Zuckerberg has called 'masculine energy' – with nostalgia for 1950s America. (The 'again' in Make America Great Again may not have a date stamp, but it comes with a white picket fence.) As a symbol of fertility, full breasts are catnip to a regime obsessed with breeding and keen to limit reproductive freedoms. 'Breasts,' wrote Jess Cartner-Morley, 'have always been political – and right now they're front and centre again. Is it yet another way in which Trump's worldview is reshaping the culture?' Read more 'His staff were underpaid and overworked, his manner overbearing. He built a hierarchical organisation that made him rich, while many of his employees went into debt with the company. He promoted ayahuasca as a panacea for all suffering, and despite having no training, practised a confrontational and sometimes cruel form of therapy on vulnerable people with serious trauma. Traditional practitioners and healers protested he was bringing their practice into disrepute. Ayahuasca was not something you could roll out on an industrial scale with minimal oversight, they said. Accidents would happen.' Alberto Varela claimed he wanted to use sacred plant medicine to free people's minds. But as the organisation grew, wrote Sam Edwards, his followers discovered a darker more The Guardian reproductive health and justice reporter Carter Sherman has spent the past few years travelling the country and interviewing more than 100 teenagers and twentysomethings about their sex lives: 'It is true that they are having even less sex, less than millennials, but they are not uninterested in sex. Instead, many have understood, from an early age, something that eluded past generations: that sex, its consequences, and control over both are political weapons.' Here, she explores how they're resisting older definitions of sex and gender – in the face of the right's bid for bodily control. Read more 'From the road, it's barely visible; glimpsed, maybe, if peered at with cheeks pressed against the property's imposing iron gates. There is otherwise little out of the ordinary in this quiet Kent corner of London's affluent commuter belt – St Michael's has a village hall, a country club, a farm shop. But at the end of a snaking, hedge-lined driveway is an incongruous home: a sprawling, six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion, almost every inch, inside and out, covered in the trademark black-on-white line drawings of its owner, Mr Doodle, the 31-year-old artist Sam Cox.' Michael Segalov travelled to the Doodle House to meet Cox and his family and to talk about how, behind the scenes of creating this piece of giant liveable art, he was unravelling into psychosis. Read more Armstrong is the master of ripped-from-the-headlines drama, a writer who skewers the billionaire class. As Mountainhead takes him into new territory, he told Danny Leigh about his nuanced view of the world's richest man: 'Musk has done huge damage in the world, particularly with Doge, but I have a lot of sympathy for him – this is a traumatised human being.' Read more Once a hangout for sex workers and drug addicts, a parking lot in Medellín, Colombia, has been reborn as a green haven for all. Oliver Wainwright met the 'social urbanists' credited with reducing crime – and even temperatures. Read more
