1997 - A Good Year for Berets!

Fiestas de la Virgen Blanca 1997, Vitoria

Gypsy Magic (1997 film)

John Olsen with painting The bath, 1997

In Loving Memory of John Henry Nobles

1996 - A Good Year for Berets!

French jazz musician Bernard Lubat, the actress Laure Duthilleul and their son Louis. August 1996

Fiestas de la Virgen Blanca, Vitoria

A youngster waves a Bosnian flag at an Independence Day celebration held at Tuzla's stadium on March 1, 1996

Director Abel Ferrara, Los Angeles 1996

Anselm Dreher in Installation Roadrunner, Matthew McCaslin 1996

Jean-Claude Pertuzé R.I.P.

I am incredibly saddened by the news that my friend Jean-Claude Pertuzé has died last Sunday.  

Jean-Claude was a great supporter of The Beret Project; designing my logo, sending me beautiful artworks of his and telling me the story of the “Bigue-les” badge that I wear every day around my wrist…

Jean-Claude had a kind of humour that gave me the energy to go on with life, enabling me to laugh at the dark side of the world we live in. 

He was a great man, a good friend and a real mensch.

I will miss him. 

1995 - A Good Year for Berets!

Gerhard Hertel 

Hazmat, 30 years old, Grozny, 1995 by Romano Cagnoni

Diane Kruger by Dominique Issermann for Emporio Armani Magazine #12, 1995

Gypsy Music Festival, Czech Republic by Josef Koudelka

Nice, France 1995

1994 - A Good Year for Berets!

Artist Jean-Claude Pertuze, by Philippe Gérard Dupuy. 1994.

Worker at Asbestona, Harderwijk (Netherlands), 1994

Diane di Prima and Ted Joans at The Poetry Project, St Mark Church, NYC, 1994

Worker at a cigar factory, 1994, by Thomas Hoepker.

Sigurd Rosenheim with Franziska von Almsick, 1994

1993 - A Good Year for Berets!

Agustín Ibarrola and Jorge Oteiza. Both belonged to Equipo 57, a group of Spanish artists who founded in Paris and in 1993 received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.

Sarajevo. 1993. A Bosnian soldier in uniform checks his gun. On his right is his fiancee.

Hawaii. Honolulu Airport. 1993.

Fashion show at the Garden Hotel in Shanghai.1993.

Lew Kopelew in Weimar, Germany, 1993

1992 - A Good Year for Berets!

Donkey Carrying Crates and an Elderly Man, Albania 1992

Sint Petersburg, Russia

Portuguese fishing village 1992

Commemorative plaque for the 'Whistling Shepherds' of the Pyrenees, at the church of Aas, by Marcel Gilbert, René Guy Busnel and René Arripe. 1992

1991 - A Good Year for Berets!

River Phoenix reading Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace 

US Vogue 1991, Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen

Ambassadors of the Gascon cattle breed, its breeders and Ariégeoises personalities

In Bayonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques (Basque country).

Artist Ellsworth Kelly

1990 - A Good Year for Berets!

Bizzy Bone

Elton John

Ara Leather workers at Kazlicesme (Istanbul)

A man in a beret stands with other striking workers from the Urbis Iron Works in Bucharest; 16 may 1990

Paolo Villaggio and Italian actress Anna Mazzamauro walking on a muddy ground in the film Fantozzi alla riscossa. The actor used plastic bags to cover his shoes. 

Katsumoto Saotome

Katsumoto Saotome has spent much of his life documenting eyewitness accounts of those who survived the Tokyo Fire Bombings.

Seventy-five years ago, less than 10 miles from where he now lives alone in a low-lying neighborhood known for its moderate rents, Saotome survived the brutally effective American firebombing. Over the course of nearly three hours, an attack by the United States Army Air Forces killed as many as 100,000 people — more than some estimates of the number killed the day of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But while the Japanese public — and the world — rightly remember Hiroshima as a living symbol of the horrors of nuclear war, the Tokyo firebombing is generally regarded as a footnote in any accounting of the war in Japan.

An aerial view of Tokyo after the March 10 bombing.Credit...

For 30 years, Saotome tried to secure public funding for a museum to commemorate the Tokyo air raid. In 1990, the city government designated March 10 as Tokyo Peace Day, and it commemorates the anniversary every year, but it never allocated funding for a museum. Undeterred, Saotome raised private donations and opened a modest museum 18 years ago.

Katsumoto Saotome at his home in Tokyo with his hachimaki headband from World War II.

Saotome was just 12 when he and his mother, father and two older sisters scrambled for their lives to escape the incendiary bombs that fell from low-flying B-29s.

As a child, Saotome spent his days working in an iron factory, collecting scrap metal for munitions. He still keeps the headband he wore to work, which bears the large red circle of the Imperial Japanese rising-sun flag and the Chinese characters for kamikaze, or “divine wind.” 

A hachimaki headband printed with the text “kamikaze” (“divine wind”) and the Japanese Hinomaru sun.

Children who worked in the factories were known as Jugo no mamorite, or “defenders behind the guns.” He said American war planners justified the air raids that targeted predominantly residential neighborhoods on the grounds that everyone, even children, was working for the war effort. “We were taught by teachers and on radio programs that Japan would definitely win the war because we were children of the god” — meaning the emperor, Saotome recalled. Even then, he said, he had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. “It was not an era when you could say anything like that,” he said. “If I ever said that I would be disgraced and considered a traitor.”

Alexander George Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath

Alexander George Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath (1932 –2020), styled Viscount Weymouth between 1946 and 1992, was a British aristocratic landowner, who sat in the House of Lords from 1992 until 1999, and a self-acclaimed artist and author.

Lord Bath was in the media spotlight for his hippy fashion-sense and for developing his mansion Longleat as an animal sanctuary and tourist attraction.

In 1969, Thynn married Hungarian-born Anna Gyarmathy, also known as Anna Gaël, but he had open sexual relations with over seventy women during his marriage, many of whom lived "grace and favour" in estate cottages. Lord Bath referred to his mistresses as wifelets.

Lord Bath was admitted to the Royal United Hospital, Bath, on 28 March 2020 and while in hospital tested positive for COVID-19 during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. He died whilst infected by the disease on 4 April 2020 at the age of 87.

Thanks Paul