We have all heard of the stone age and the bronze age, but such a thing as the “porcelain age” is something that is not always recognized. It is much more recent to the Western world than would be suspected. Porcelain: your grandma’s figurines, dolls, mugs, dishes, jewelry, tiles, and yes, toilets. The Western world cannot imagine life without porcelain, and the history behind its formula is one for the books. As with many things, the drive to create porcelain came out of an

Walking down the street in a big city, like here in Chicago, one often notices nothing at all. We are often consumed in where we’ve come from, or where we’re going, to pay any close attention to our surroundings, much less interact with them. But not Vivian Maier, a lower class nanny who always had a camera around her neck and never dared to share one of her hundred thousand photos with anyone. Where we see chaos and crowded streets, she saw the joys of human life. Where we h