Night Waves - 16/07/2008

Rana Mitter talks to American writer, academic and expert on modernity Marshall Berman about a series of essays he has co-edited, tracing the cultural history of New York City, covering the darkest days of the 1970s, when the Bronx was burning, up to its recovery after the trauma of 9/11. There is a look at the modern commercial phenomenon of the shopping mall, focusing in particular on the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, where they are becoming pockets of freedom, in which men and women can meet freely. Rana asks whether malls can be agents of liberalisation or if should we be worried that they seem able to change or bypass wider social rules. Celebrated photographer Roger Hutchings and former Guardian picture editor Eamonn McCabe discuss where responsibility lies for the safety of individuals whose images are captured by press photographers, in the light of the case of Iranian political prisoner Ahmad Batebi. A student demonstrator, whose image was featured on the cover of The Economist magazine in 1999, Batebi has reported that when he was arrested he was shown a copy of the magazine and told that the photo had sealed his death warrant. And Rana also talks to Andrew Sean Greer, a young American novelist whom John Updike has compared to Proust and Nabokov, and whose latest book The Story of a Marriage offers an account of America in the 1950s, throwing the country today into relief.