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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Five Photographs that (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything

The Essay: The Five Photographs that (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything: Episode 3: The Dogon

The Dogon

Episode 3

Episode 3: The Dogon

The Five Photographs that (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything

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Jeanne Haffner discusses how aerial photography changed the spaces we live in.

Jeanne Haffner discusses a bird's-eye photograph of the Dogon tribe working their fields in Mali, explaining how aerial photography changed the spaces we live in.

The Dogon. Jeanne Haffner on how aerial photography changed the spaces we live in.

You won't find this photograph in a glossy coffee table book. It's not art and the person who took it doesn't feature in the Photographers Hall of Fame. But this picture has had an enormous impact on the organisation of our living spaces.
The birds-eye photograph of the Dogon tribe working their fields in Mali was taken by the French Africanist Marcel Griaule. He'd trained in aerial photography during the First World War and he argued that the Dogon landscape, seen from the air, revealed the patterns and secrets of the lives of its inhabitants, patterns which could teach Western city planners and architects how to build a happier society.

Jeanne Haffner is lecturer in the Department of History and Science at Harvard University.

Producer: Rosie Dawson.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series focusing on historically important yet little-known photographs

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