travel, modern and traditional, around the world, understand the culture, historical monuments, natural scenery, the charm of tourism, marine tourism, mountain tourism, popular tourist attractions
It's rare for me to have an ambivalent view on anything, but I've stumbled across a "tweet" on my Twitter page (presumably from one of my 800+ followers addressed to another photographer) which prompts this post.
I don't want to divulge more details than is necessary, so I'll use this hypothetical example:
A travel photographer with somewhat of a distinctive style travels to a remote location and photographs its indigenous people. A year later, another travel photographer with more or less the same style travels to the same location, and photographs the same people. The latter photographer stays at the same accommodations, uses the same guide/fixer, and the subjects are the same. To my knowledge, there's no contact between the two photographers...and there's no exchange of information. However, the photographs closely resemble each other in terms of subjects and photographic style.
So the question is whether this constitutes plagiarism or inspiration. Taking the example of the Rebari shepherd in the above photograph, would it be plagiarism if another photographer traveled to Poshina in Rajasthan, stumbled on my local fixer who then somehow arranged this particular shepherd to be photographed? I don't think so.
Would it be different if the photographer, having seen the above photograph, asked the Rebari shepherd to adopt the exact same pose? Is that plagiarism or just being inspired?
Perhaps it's the degree of the imitation that resolves the question. If the photographer shot the same Rebari, and purposefully arranged the photo shoot so that he'd wear the same exact turban and tunic, against the same background? Yes, I think that's the answer. If the imitation is purposeful and premeditated, then it is plagiarism...otherwise, it's just flattery.
The troubling events in the streets of Bangkok reminded me of the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market near the capital, which is a must-stop for foreign and local tourists, as well as food lovers. I've visited it almost every time I stop in Thailand, when I'm en route to Bhutan, Cambodia or Bali.
Yes, it's a tourist trap to a large degree but the food served by the women on their floating dugouts-kitchens is spectacular. I'm told that getting there very early in the morning will ensure a tourist-free experience, but I doubt it.
The Marco Vernsachi & The Pulitzer Center "affair" seems to have somewhat calmed down after the considerable airing of divergent views, opinions and debate between photojournalists, photographers and journalists in the blogosphere.
Some of these views were expressed on Lightstalkers, which is a popular no-holds barred forum for photographers. Going through the posts, I saw one that claimed that the story (and its handling) was not only a blow to the credibility of photojournalism (which I agree), but also a blow to the credibility of some blogs (and their authors).
Huh? The Pulitzer Center was forced to formally admit (twice) its mistake in publishing an image of an exhumed corpse of a young Ugandan girl on its site, because of the bloggers' criticisms that it violated the rights of a child to dignity and privacy. If it hadn't been for the bloggers, these offensive photographs would be still on the Center's website, circulated on social networks and possibly worse.
I view this story and its results as vindication for those bloggers who had the courage of their convictions, and demand that these offensive photographs be pulled from the Pulitzer Center's website. It's hoped that the Pulitzer Centre will stand by its promise of redoubling its "efforts to authenticate every claim and to insure the privacy rights of individual victims".
The appropriate way to look at it is that the bloggers stepped in and redressed a wrong that would not have been committed had the parents of these unfortunate African children have recourse to a sophisticated legal system preventing such liberties with privacy rights.
Ian Lloyd is an Australian photographer who has undertaken commissions for magazines such as National Geographic, Time, Fortune, Gourmet and Conde Nast Traveler and multinational companies as diverse as ExxonMobil, Pepsi, Motorola and Singapore Airlines have commissioned Ian for commercial photography assignments. He has photographed 36 books on countries and regions around Asia including large format books on Kathmandu, Bali and Singapore and a four volume series on Australian wine regions.
You'll see from the Spirit of Asia video that it's a retrospective look at 20 years of his photography in Asia. Perhaps somewhat different from most of the travel photography I have featured here on The Travel Photographer blog, but certainly of high quality that we expect from photographers who work with the National Geographic.
As I indicated in an earlier post on The Travel Photographer blog, Diego Vergés is back from his 4 months trip to Indonesia (and PNG) and its various islands, and is currently working feverishly on his inventory of images.
He tells me that he has so far edited and readied only one of his expected 8 or more photo essays on the various indigenous groups of Indonesia, and that's the gallery on the Mentawai. The images are spectacular, and I encourage you to view them as they provide a window into a culture which I suspect will soon vanish.
You'll notice Diego's characteristic lighting techniques from the above photographs, and which he told he learned from The Strobist. Photographing the Mentawai, he used off camera lighting, a reflector and a softbox. For cameras, Diego uses a Canon 5d and a 5d Mark II, with prime lenses (24mm f1.4 and 50mm f1.4).
The Mentawai are the native people of the Mentawai Islands, which is a chain of about seventy islands and islets off the western coast of Sumatra. They live a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the coastal and rain forest environments of the islands, and number about 64,000. They are known by their deep spirituality, body art and the tradition of sharpening their teeth for beautifying reasons.
The Mentawai practice traditional animism, and as with other indigenous cultures, are threatened by encroaching modernism.
The May-June issue of American Express' Departures magazine features the work of photographer Hans Silvester, a German photographer, who documents the extraordinary body painting of the Surma and Mursi peoples of the Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia.
The Surma and Mursi tribes are body painters. They paint their bodies with natural pigments made from the earth. They paint themselves and each other in a tradition that has remained unchanged for millenia. They use their bodies as canvases, painting their skin with pigments made from powdered volcanic rock and adorning themselves with materials obtained from flowers, leaves, grasses, shells and animal horns.
Hans Silvester was born in Lorrach, Germany, and is now based in southern France. He is recognized for a wide-ranging body of work and a protracted study of his subjects, most frequently nature, animals and the environment.
As the issue of Departures isn't yet on-line, many of the Omo Valley Fashion photographs can be found on The Daily Mail issue of February 2008.
Michael Rubenstein is a photographer based in Mumbai to cover South Asia for Redux Pictures, having lived in New York City and Portland, Oregon. He has a degree in Environmental Policy and has studied at Ohio University's School of Visual Communications.
His clients include: Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Oregonian, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, Complex Magazine, The Paris Match, Bloomberg News Service and W+K.
Some of his work on Andheri, a Mumbai suburb being transformed into a hip neighborhood appeared in the NY Times. And it's interesting to see the stylistic difference between this photo sideshow and his India gallery on his website.
Update evening of 4.25.2010: Both Marco Vernaschi and the Pulitzer Center For Crisis Reporting responded to the critics.
I was pleased to read this final paragraph of the response (my emphasis):
We do not suggest that the decisions involved in this reporting project are anything but difficult, as we hope was apparent in our statement accepting responsibility for what we believe was a mistaken decision to exhume the body of Babirye and to publish the image on our site. It is our hope that these issues can be discussed without malice, distortions and groundless attacks on the personal motivations of others.-- Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center Executive Director
My morning's post follows:
Along with many others, I wrote a post a few days ago on a story being discussed in photojournalism circles and blogs, involving Marco Vernaschi, an Italian photographer/photojournalist who worked on a project documenting the phenomenon of child witches, human sacrifice and organ trafficking in Africa, and the Pultizer Center For Crisis Reporting. The story as it evolved during the past week hinged on the veracity of Vernaschi as to the circumstances behind the exhumation of a Ugandan girl, and the Pultizer Center's publication of the photograph(s) and its subsequent apologies for doing so.
I am listing the links to these blogs/websites all through this post.
Asim Rafiqui in his always insightful (and frequently provocative) blog The Spinning Head asks:
"Why did Marco Vernaschi do it?"
An important and pertinent question, but mine is different. I don't really care why Vernaschi did it. Perhaps he rationalized that exhuming a child's corpse and photographing it was the right thing to do...that it would bring this issue to the West's "consciousness" (as if we really would and could do something about it)...that it would win him more photojournalism awards...that it would make him the best photojournalist in the world...that it would justify his grant from the Pulitzer Center...that it would put bread on his table or pay his mortgage or pay his children's school fees...whatever. I believe he was wrong, and that's the end of it.
I ask the same question but of The Pulitzer Center For Crisis Reporting's Executive Director and his staff . It was The Pulitzer Center which published Vernaschi's photographs and his essays. So here's the real nub of the matter: why did they do it and why didn't they check the details' veracity before publishing? Had they done what in banking circles is called "due diligence", they may have realized what the incomparable Benjamin Chesterton of A Developing Story did. Had they investigated the story a little more seriously, they may have realized what the courageous Anne Holmes of The Vigilante Journalist did.
As I expressed in my POV: And The Outrage Continues involving the publication of a photo essay on a young girl in Kurdistan being circumcised, photographers and photojournalists operate under intense competition and pressure to submit cutting-edge work, and frequently lose sight of what is right. Exhuming the body of a young girl for a photograph is beyond the pale, but the decision for its publication wasn't Vernaschi's...it's the Pulitzer Center's. I'm not at all exonerating the photographer for what he did, but I'm more critical of those who agreed to publish these photographs.
Let's get real. If most publishers (especially those of Pulitzer's repute) refused to publish photographic tripe of dubious ethical provenance, photographers would toe the line....but because sensationalism has pervaded our media, they cut corners and lose sight of what is right..especially when it involves poverty-stricken Africans or Arabs, who have no or little legal recourse to protect their privacy rights.
Let's all remember how aghast we were when photographer Adnan Hajj was accused to have digitally manipulated photographs (ie cloning thicker plumes of smoke from IDF missiles already raining on Beirut), and we kept tut-tutting about it until Reuters fired Hajj and a photo editor, and subsequently issued new policy guidelines for its photographers. Adding some smoke plumes or exhuming a body for a photograph...which is worse?
Yes, the Pulitzer Center apologized, and promised to "redouble (its) efforts to authenticate every claim and to insure the privacy rights of individual victims."
Kevin Burbriski arrived in Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1975, and spent about 4 years working in remote villages. He returned in 1984 as a photographer, and with a 4” x 5” view camera, a Nepalese photographic assistant, and two porters, he traveled the length and breadth of the country for the better part of three years.
I mentioned Kevin Bubriski's work on this blog in connection with his exhibition at the Rubin Musuem in NYC, but I read (via PDN) that he was named the 2010-2011 Robert Gardner Visiting Artist Fellow at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. The fellowship carries a $50,000 stipend and will allow the photographer-documentarian to continue his work in the northwest of Nepal.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography, all in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
Kevin's website showcases his work from Venice, Pakistan, India, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Nepal among other countries...but it's his work of Nepal that resonates the most with me.
After watching coverage of the volcano in Iceland over the weekend, yesterday I was confronted with a miniature natural disaster of my own in the form of a hailstorm of epic proportions! After an overall beautiful, sunny, late-summers day in Buenos Aires, the sky all of a sudden darkened and lightning started flashing overhead with fast-increasing intensity. After a while it started to rain lightly, soon more and more water was falling from the sky - and then the hail began. For about 15 minutes our house was pummeled by rock-hard balls of ice the size of tennis balls.
I was working in our attic office/playroom, where my desk is located just under a large sky-window. Karin asked our daughters if they wanted to go downstairs with her to watch the garden as the rain was beginning to fall. After some minutes I decided to get a drink and so I followed them downstairs. That was a lucky decision.
I arrived downstairs at 8.15, just when the serious hail started to come down. We were standing on our back porch, under a tiled roof as the first icy bombs came down, hammering into the grass and turning the pool into a wild spectacle. Trees in our garden were rapidly “shaven”, as thousands of ice balls bombarded them, ripping off leaves, branches and taking out the occasional bird on their way down. We quickly ran back into the safety of the house and I started to close the blinds on the most exposed windows.
Each room I ran into echoed with the thuds of ice slamming into the windows, and each time I feared that one would come straight through. By the time I was done most of the hail had subsided and was replaced by a torrential rain that seemed like a huge bucket of murky water was being poured out over our neighborhood. At some point we could hardly see our garden anymore, covered as it was in white icy rubble with massive curtains of water sweeping before our eyes. Then I remembered the attic…
I ran upstairs to find my desk covered in glass, ice and water. Somehow most of the window had managed to miss it and my laptop and auxiliary screens were still functioning. I stood there, frantically looking from left to right, not knowing exactly what to do first, it was as if a giant tap had been turned on directly above what used to be my work space - water was pouring everywhere. And then, all of a sudden, the rain stopped, and at the same moment the entire neighborhood went pitch black.
I managed to find a flashlight and went back down to Karin and the kids. They had had a great time watching the storm and had no clue what had happened. We put the children to bed and went upstairs where we cleared the area of glass and actually managed to salvage most of the equipment. We found some flattened cardboard boxes and a couple of planks and went about with hammer and nails.
Later Karin reminded me it might be a good idea to see if the “vigilante” (the private security guys you see guarding street corners in cities across Latin America) had survived the storm. So I went outside and made my way through a thick carpet of leaves and tree-branches, looking at the cars as I passed; windows shattered and round dents in roofs, hoods and hatches. Our security guy was fine and did not need water or cigarettes, so after chatting to him and our neighbor about insurance policies and how both our dogs had taken this weird natural event, I went back inside. It remained dry for the rest of the night and this morning the sun came out and another sunny day started as if nothing had happened…
The garden, however, told another story, with branches lying all over the place like a jungle floor and the grass dotted with potholes. Power stayed out until midday and with it internet, phone lines and the comforts of working from home. We had enough to do however, especially when we saw what else had happened in those 15 minutes. Roughly 60% of the tiles on our roof had been shattered and our garden furniture was smashed to smithereens. Another window of hardened wire-glass in our garage was hit in three places and had opened up like paper. There were large holes where the ice went straight through and glass shattered all over the cars, which luckily otherwise remained intact. We spent most of the day collecting glass and rubble and it was then that I realized how extremely dependent on all those modern-day comforts I have become.
Still we have been lucky, very lucky in fact. Buenos Aires is not usually prone to serious natural upheavals, apart from a tropical rainstorm every now and then. Other parts of the world are not so well off. Natural disasters are happening more and more often and in many cases have tremendous effects on the world economy, as recently the Financial Times described in an article about the volcanic eruption in Iceland, of which I hereby copy the intro (reply to this post and ask me for an official forward and I will try to send you the entire article!):
“(April 16th 2010) Volcanic disruption
Pandemic flu, blizzards, volcanic eruptions: Mother Nature seems resolved to hurl grit (or fine ash) into the turbine blades of economic recovery. Disruption to international air traffic caused by a rather different Icelandic blow-up from the one 18 months ago is already the most serious since 9/11, and may outstrip it. A Sydney-based consultant, the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, forecasts that if the disturbance extends even three more days, it could affect 1m passengers, and cost airlines $1bn in lost revenues. Yet as with other recent natural phenomena, the overall economic impact may ultimately prove insignificant…”
Of course then there is the human aspect of these occurrences, not only for the people directly involved in them, but also for those that know, are related to, or have simply met them at some point. As my formerly Asia-bound colleague Beth says:
“…the tsunami that hit Sri-Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia was a disaster on a huge scale, but what struck me about it was the world response. It was the height of the Christmas season and most everyone I know knew someone who was there, heard first hand stories of the day, or had been there themselves in the past. News wasn’t just on the TV, it had happened to someone you knew, millions of first-hand stories were transmitted by word of mouth on a global scale.
I have many great memories of Thailand beach holidays, and essential to these memories are the people I met while I was there – the guys who cracked open fresh coconuts for me on the beach, the father and son who took us out in their fishing boat, the girls making seashell necklaces and running along the beach to sell them – all of these people’s faces came back to me when I heard the news, and I wondered how they were and what they lost. I think that this was the same for everyone, and that this is the reason why the world showed such solidarity. It wasn’t something just effecting international airlines and multi-national hotel chains, it was the guy who made you fresh mango juice on the beach in Ha Tien. Yes, it was all going on far away in a distant land, but it was something we could all relate to on a human scale.”
This is one of the positive effects of globalization and ever-increasing world travel, we have, and should have, an increased understanding, empathy and solidarity with our world neighbors. Tourism and travel bring great responsibility on many levels, be it related to preservation of natural habitats and heritage or simple material transactions that keep local economies moving. The way in which the world has developed means that many, many people in many countries rely almost entirely on tourism for their livelihood – if this is suddenly cut off, for example by a natural disaster, what happens to them?
In our globalized world everyone is connected, and so in turn everything that happens and how we respond has repercussions all around the world. The big volcanic dust cloud recently grounding flights across Europe, has all sorts of myriad effects on people around the world, from the plantation worker in Jamaica to the hotel cleaner in Egypt. As soon as the dust settles the world will be up and flying again, but the effects will continue to be felt, if not by you, by someone else in some distant land that you may one day travel to. This volcano reminds me of all the other disasters in recent years, of Chile, Haiti, New Orleans, Thailand, Sri Lanka… the list goes on. And it reminds me that the privileges and pleasures of travel go hand in hand with a responsibility to the people and the places that we travel to.
Our 15 minute hailstorm was an ever so small taste of the destruction that nature can wreak, and it made me realize just how small we really are, and how futile and vulnerable most of the security-net is that we try to pull up around ourselves. Without that net, how long would we hold? Because without all the 21st century shields we reinforce ourselves and our lives with, we are pretty much useless when it comes to surviving in raw natural circumstances. I had to think about “The Road” and wondered what would happen if we had a hailstorm like yesterday’s, but for, say 1 month. …Note to self, must remember to buy batteries and enough freeze-dried food for at least 4 weeks tomorrow!
…signing off now, just got my internet, home computer network, flat screen TV and media PC working again; and it’s time for some channel surfing with a chilled beer, an ordered in pizza, the pleasant hum of the air conditioning and the already fading notion of a different reality, and how it almost bit me…
The Foundry Photo~Journalism Workshop 2010 is in Istanbul, and if your dream is to be coached by some of the best photographers and photojournalists available, do it now!
The roster of instructors reads like a Who's Who in the world of photojournalism: Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario, Jared Moosy, David Bathgate, Jon Vidar, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Rena Effendi, Ron Haviv, Andrea Bruce, Ami Vitale, Kael Alford, Adriana Zehbrauskas, Henrik Kastenskov, Stephanie Sinclair, Guy Calaf and Tewfic El-Sawy.
The courses currently offered are FROM VISION TO LIFE: Documenting social issues outside the mediaʼs agenda setting; Transitioning to the new world of Photojournalism; Formulating a Photo Essay; Photographing stories; Intimacy and Empathy in Storytelling; Capturing Cultures – Communicating Without Boundaries; The Essential Guide to Backpack Journalism; Introduction to Multimedia Storytelling, and many more.
Here's another thing...photographers like Dhiraj Singh who attended a class at the 2009 Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in India was awarded Honorable Mention (Feature Audio Slideshow) in the National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism 2010 for an audio slideshow made during that workshop.
Yes, dreams come true when you attend the Foundry...so get on it! There are still a handful of places available.
Ralph is an active member of the Arlington Camera Club, and his photographs of a Balinese dancer and of a Pemangku (Balinese priest) have both won awards at this month's competition.
He has indulged in a passion for photography since the late 1960s when he took a Minolta ALs camera to France, and he has continued his passion since. Ralph has already been on four of my photo~expeditions, and this coming August will earn the fifth notch on his belt.
On Tuesday night, I watched the harrowing Frontline: The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan which exposed an ancient practice know as as "bacha bazi" which, literally translated, means 'boys' play'.
This illegal practice exploits orphans and street boys, and has been revived by powerful warlords, businessmen and military commanders in Afghanistan. These men dress the boys in women's clothes, who are trained to sing and dance for their enjoyment. The dancing boys are also used sexually by these men.
This is outstanding journalism by Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi, and my hat's off to PBS and to the Frontline producers for doing such an admirable job. I was particularly impressed by Quraishi and his producers' attempts to arrange the rescue of one of the dancing boys profiled in the film, an 11-year-old boy bought from an impoverished rural family.
In contrast with other productions (see my post of yesterday, for instance) the 11-year boy's face was blurred throughout the film to preserve his anonymity and self-respect.
Homosexuality is forbidden in Islam, and yet pederasty and boy concubinage has had a long history in the Persian cultural world which includes much of Afghanistan.
The Travel section of the Washington Post has featured a collection of short videos titled India In Motion. The videos are somewhat eclectic, and start with fast paced clips of Mumbai, then Udaipur, Jaislamer, Agra, Haridwar and Rishikesh.
The videos are by Whitney Shefte, while the design is by Kat Downs. It's unfortunate that some of the music choices chosen to accompany the videos are incongruous. For instance, I'm still scratching my head over the logic of having music which sounds it's played by a Central European zither group with a video clip featuring camels in Jaisalmer!
I realize that the Washington Post is not the National Geographic, but India In Motion is superficially researched, and seems to meander with no clear objective and purpose. It puzzles me when a project such as India In Motion, with the considerable backing and funding of one of the premier newspapers in the world, ends up being an incoherent mess like it is.
"Yet we also believe, and Vernaschi agrees, that it was wrong to ask that the body be exhumed. It showed disrespect for the dead, and forced a grieving family to suffer anew. It also had the effect of focusing attention on the actions of one journalist, as opposed to a horrific crime that needs to be exposed.
We regret any damage that may have been caused. We intend to continue this project, documenting the phenomenon of child sacrifice, but in so doing we we will redouble our efforts to authenticate every claim and to insure the privacy rights of individual victims."
Here's my original post 0f 4.21.2010:
Here's another story that is guaranteed to make your stomachs churn. It involves Marco Vernaschi an Italian photographer/photojournalist who worked on a project documenting the phenomenon of child witches, human sacrifice and organ trafficking in Africa, and the Pultizer Center For Crisis Reporting.
I have linked to various photographs, but be aware that these are highly disturbing.
It appears that the Pulitzer Center funded Vernaschi to do a story on child sacrifice in Uganda, and it published some of his hard-hitting photographs in an article titled Uganda: Babirye, The Girl from Katugwe, in which the photographer convinces a Ugandan mother to allow the exhumation of her mutilated daughter's body in order to photograph it as "visual evidence". The photograph of the corpse is then shown on both Vernaschi's website and on the Pulitzer Center's. Payment (described as "a contribution for a lawyer") was made by the photographer to the mother.
Another photograph on Vernaschi's website shows an abused boy with a catheter protruding from where his penis has been cut off. His face is clearly shown.
Vernaschi's website explains that
"Child sacrifice in Uganda is a phenomenon that has embedded itself within traditional customs but that bears no genuine relationship to local culture. The appeal to "cultural beliefs" is actually an excuse used by witchdoctors to justify their crimes, and by the Ugandan government to avoid taking action. The government tries to minimize the magnitude of the problem because politicians fear losing votes and this is a a country where witchdoctors wield surprising influence at the polls."
I'm all for documentary coverage to expose and stop this barbaric practice...there's no argument there. However, for a photojournalist to ask (and then pay) for the exhumation of a body beggars belief. Had the child died in a ritualistic murder in Italy, could Vernaschi been able to ask its family to exhume the body for a few pictures? Had he been able to photograph an Italian baby boy with a catheter sticking out of his groin? Why can't these photojournalists and publishers understand that they cannot continue to show pictures of mutilated children??
It's immoral. It's as simple and as complex as that.
As I wrote in an older post: To Vernaschi and to the Pulitzer Center's Board of Directors, Advisory Council and Staff: what if Babirye and the baby boy were your children, your niece and nephew or even just a relative...or an acquaintance? Would you still have photographed and published the photographs...or is it because they're "just" Africans?
Vernaschi is an award winning photographer....and well-experienced dealing with gruesome topics. Surely he could have photographed the story differently? Or is it about winning awards and applause from the rest of the lemmings?
Update: For a more detailed and comprehensive opinion, along with some responses from the Pulitzer Center, check A Developing Story.
Although I have a couple of international trips in the interim, my mind is increasingly getting focused on my forthcoming Bali: Island of Odalan Photo-Expedition™ in August, and to refresh my memory, I've been revisiting my RAW images files of my 2007 photo-expedition, and even processing some of them.
As is usual when I revisit images files after a while, I uncovered some images that I missed during my initial edits on my return from the 2007 trip, and some that are worth a second look. I viewed these with my Canon's Digital Photo Professional software (version 3.7.3) which, while admittedly somewhat clunky, still does a reasonable job as a viewer and RAW converter.
I also used DPP's built-in image processor, and edited the images you see in this post entirely with it. I didn't use CS or LR at all. I'm not suggesting that DPP replaces any of those, but I was surprised that it did such a reasonable job in adjusting the exposure, de-saturating the colors and sharpening the images of the Legong dancers.
Here's another photo gallery of Kashgar and the Uyghurs by photographer Ashok Sinha, who traveled in China and was touched by their plight, which prompted him to document their disappearing ways of life. The photo essay is part of a larger project that is titled Life in Balance: The Human Condition in Xinjiang.
Kashgar is a city of 3.4 million surrounded by mountains and desert, and is located at Xinjiang's westernmost tip. It is closer to Baghdad than to Beijing. As a minority, the Uyghurs see their 2000 year-old culture and heritage being erased by the Chinese authorities, with much of Kashgar's old town being demolished. This was justified by the Chinese for safeguarding the population from the collapse of the old buildings in the event of an earthquake, and that the demolition is necessary to the “modernization” of the Uyghur people.
The old city is considered to be one of Central Asia's best preserved sites of Islamic architecture.
The New York Times has featured an audio slideshow on Kahsgar just under a year ago titled A City, and People, at Crossroads that explains the situation.
Terri Gold's artistic creativity and energy were patently obvious during my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition™ , as she moved from one photo shoot in a village to the next photographing with her two cameras; one "normal" like those used by the rest of us, and the second professionally modified to shoot infrared.
She is an award-winning photographer and artist based in New York City, and built an impressive reputation for her rituals, rites of passage, festivals, celebrations and portraits from all over the world.
Her infrared photographs of Rajasthan and Gujarat as an audio slideshow have now been added to her ongoing personal project “Still Points in a Turning World” which focuses on Asia’s vanishing tribal heritage.
With her acknowledged expertise in infrared photography and its intricate post-processing, Terri provides personalized hands-on tutorship to photographers who are interested in the craft. So visit her website, and email her to learn this exciting photographic technique that is growing in popularity.
Stephen JB Kelly is an English photographer, currently based in Hong Kong. He obtained a diploma in Photography from the London College of Communication, which was followed by a degree in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport.
Aside from winning a number of awards for his photography, Stephen has been published in various magazines including The Independent Magazine, The Observer Magazine, D La Repubblica delle Donne, IL Magazine and The FADER Magazine.
One of his portfolios is of Qi Lihe, on the outskirts of Lanzhou which is the most destitute area of this heavily polluted industrial city in northwest China. During the recent years, there has been an influx of migrant Hui and Dongxiang Muslim minorities into these urban centers. The main cause of the influx is the desertification of their land, forcing these farmers and families to seek a better existence in Lanzhou.
The Hui’s ancestors were Silk Road traders, largely of Arab and Persian descent, who first came to China in the 7th Century. The Dongxiang are closely related to the Mongolians and as an independent ethnic group they arose through contact with Central Asians who converted them to Sunni Islam in the 13th century.
Setting up of the Bali: Island of Odalan Photo-Expedition™ has been completed for a while, and the participants will shortly have to advise me their flight schedules. Time flies!!
The photo~expedition is especially structured for established photographers interested in documentary photography, ethno-photography and multimedia, and for those ready to create visual projects from their inventory of photographs, and learn how to control story length, intent, pace, use of music and ambient sound, narration, field recordings and interviews.
As in 2007, the base for this year's photo-expedition is a small Balinese-owned boutique hotel amidst a working rice-paddy in the art center town of Ubud.
Here's another post on Matjaž Krivic's work. This time, it's Mali that he shares with us in this lovely audio-slideshow-movie (he calls it multivision...not a bad name.).
Matjaž just returned from an overland road trip from Slovenia to Nepal via Senegal (Dakar to Katmandu), which took him 13 months of living and photographing out of a 4x4 Nissan Patrol.
For 20 years, he globe-trotted the world capturing the personality and grandeur of indigenous people and places, and found the time to be awarded many prizes, and recognized in various venues and exhibitions. He traveled in Yemen, Mali, Tibet, North and West Africa, Iran, Mongolia, China, Nepal and India.
The spectacular music accompanying the slideshow is Dunya Salam ("world of peace") by the legendary Senegalese singer Baaba Maal. An excellent choice!
So choose full screen, turn up the volume of your speakers and enjoy the show!
The BBC reported that an elderly Greek discovered that his image was being used to sell Turkish yogurt in Sweden, and considered not only a personal affront, but a breach of his right to keep his image and likeness from being commercially exploited without permission or contractual compensation.
Minas Karatzoglou claims that his likeness was used without his permission by Lindahl's Dairy of Jonkoping in southern Sweden, and has commenced legal action against the company for compensation for the amount of $9 million.
On a prima facie basis, this appears to be a simple matter of some photographer not having the requisite model release...however there's more to that than meets the eye, because Karatzoglou is an ardent Greek nationalist who harbors deep-seated rancor against Turkey for its occupation of Greece. His grandfather and great grandfather took part in the War of Independence, which began in 1821, which ended centuries of Ottoman rule, and led to the formation of the modern Hellenic state.
In fact, Karatzoglou wears a panoply of 19th Century flintlock pistols and a curved dagger, which he claims have killed Turks.
The Swedish company claims that it bought the photograph of the mustachioed Karatzoglou from a Spanish photo agency, and that it has all the appropriate rights it needs to use this picture commercially.
I wouldn't like to be in the photographer's (or the head of the yogurt manufacturer's) shoes if he had to travel to Greece. These flintlock pistols seem to be in good working order.
I've posted my thoughts and recommendations on model releases in a 2008 post titled POV: Model Releases.
The announcement that the VII Photo Agency launched VII The Magazine has already been reported and blogged about for a few days already. The magazine is a syndicated online publication with photo stories and interviews with VII photographers.
The first issue of the magazine features multimedia slideshows of projects by several VII photographers, as well as interviews with Jessica Dimmock and Ashley Gilbertson about their projects featured on the site.
"If you show me one more picture of a soldier kicking in a door, I'm going to blow my head off."
I sense Ashley speaks for, not only war photographers, but for many of the sentient public who's been subjected to repetitive and unimaginative visual (and intellectual) presentations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who's had (if they're anything like me) enough of the same stereotypical coverage which passes for cutting edge reporting in our media. I call it the stagnation of war photography...the same scenes over and over, perhaps from different angles...and with no back story. In fact, if I didn't read the captions beneath these images, I wouldn't be able to tell if it was in Iraq or in Afghanistan...or whether they'd been made yesterday or a year ago. Stagnation.
Ashley's powerful and poignant photo essay The Shrine Down The Hall, which shows some of the empty bedrooms of the over 5000 U.S. military personnel killed in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, rammed home the horrors of war much more effectively than seeing (and hearing) yet another photo essay by a gung-ho war photographer following US soldiers in an Afghani village, rounding up "Taliban" members (or whatever the caption writer decides they are), covering their heads with potato sacks while pointing guns at terrified women.
We need to see more work like Ashley Gilbertson's and much less of the kicking of Afghan or Iraqi doors....please.
Here we go with the next installment of my Northern Brazil adventure!
Pipa
The next day we left for Pipa, close to the town of Natal and some 450 km to the north of Olinda. After driving in the wrong direction again (and this time in broad day light) we thought it might come in handy to have a map of some sort. We had packed hastily for this trip (as we usually do) and some things had sadly been left behind. After several stops at gas stations, supermarkets, and other places where one might expect to be able to buy a map, we finally found one at a local pharmacy where, as it turned out, everybody buys their maps. At least that was the fact in Olinda (at the end of this journey, we stumbled upon the “Giua Cuatro Rodas”, an excellent guidebook, with all kinds of tips, directions and hotel options in the country, along with an excellent road map; so we’re all set for our next trip!). Now it became a lot easier to find our way and within no-time we entered the famous BR101 highway. The BR101 is undergoing many repairs these days, so long stretches are “en obras” (under construction), which means our trip took a little longer than expected and we arrived to Pipa after dark, yet again. Another thing we quickly came to realize is that even though we were visiting a neighboring country of our beautifully southern hemispheric Argentina, we had come quite close to the equator, and the sun here sets at 6.30pm sharp, something to take into account if you are planning a full-day’s drive.
Pipa turned out to be amazing. Lovely beaches circled by high cliffs, lagoons, Atlantic forest and dolphins. Pipa has cobbled streets and good surfing beaches, in addition to a lake full of manatees (in neighboring Tibau do Sul). It is an old hippy colony and was recently discovered by Brazil’s traveling youth. Even though the town can get a bit crowded at night it remains a beautiful little spot to relax and enjoy nature.
We spent our days here walking along one of the beaches, spotting dolphins from a small speedboat, and eating… The place was called Panela do Barro and we went back three times. Located in the heart of town, sitting on the cliff, overlooking Pipa’s central beach, their seafood Moqueca is a feast. The ways various African, Portuguese and indigenous ingredients, and cooking methods have merged through the centuries to create this wondrous dish I cannot describe, but man it was good! I really need to get that recipe, or better still, find me a good Brazilian restaurant in town… It can be said though; food in Brazil is GOOD!
Porto Galinhas
From Pipa we moved on to Porto Galinhas, which was not really worth visiting. Supposedly home to the best beach in Brazil, the town changed from a fishing village into the playground of Brazil’s rich and famous and later became a popular vacation spot for domestic travelers. The town has a questionable history as the “chicken port”, so called by the Portuguese during the time when the English started getting bossy and imposing their power to try and force the Portuguese to abolish slavery - just as the rest of the world had done before. On paper, Porto Galinhas was a port where poultry and other livestock arrived from Europe, but that was only to deceive the British; what actually came off the boats was slave trade business as usual, and it would go on like that for many more years. Today Porto Galinhas does not have too much to offer to the discerning traveler. We relaxed in one of the huge resorts there for a couple of days, but were happy to move on.
Praia do Forte
Praia do Forte on the other hand was a very nice surprise. We stayed in the Tivoli Eco-Resort, which is a pleasure in itself, and explored the surrounding area from there.
The Tamar Project (TAMAR being short for Tartaruga Marinha, Portuguese for Sea Turtle) is definitely worth a visit. The story of marine conservation in Brazil coincides with the creation of the TAMAR Program. Seventeen years ago the Federal Government, in tune with international demand and increasing environmental awareness in Brazilian society, began to adopt measures aimed at marine protection. In the beginning of the 1980s, the Brazilian Institute of Forestry Development (IBDF), created the TAMAR Program with the objective of protecting sea turtles in Brazil. The work started in Bahia (Praia do Forte), Espírito Santo (Comboios) and Sergipe (Pirambú), and was then extended nationwide. The project focused on the identification of different species, their main nesting sites, their reproduction period, and the main socio-economic problems related to the exploitation of sea turtles by the coastal residents. Technical staff spent two years traveling along the Brazilian coastline gathering information. In 1982 and 1986, SUDEPE (the Fishing Development Agency) passed regulations prohibiting the capture of all species of turtle.
From April through November one can also go out to sea to spot Humpback Whales, something that I would love to do. Unfortunately, we arrived off-season this time, but I will certainly go back one day to see these wondrous creatures.
Lencois
From Praia do Forte we decided to escape Carnaval (absolutely a great party, but a little too much with two small kids) and head for Lencois, some 450 km inland. Until 1996 this was the wild, wild, west where some 80,000 people tried their luck at discovering diamonds. Lawlessness ruled and the area was notoriously unsafe and environmentally irresponsible. Come the mid 90’s the Federal Government decided enough was enough and diamond mining in Lencois was made illegal. The area almost immediately shifted to tourism for its income, and today Lencois, and the few towns surrounding it, are the heart of the Chapada Diamantina National Park. This is a beautiful area of natural springs, waterfalls, weird rock formations, quaint little towns and large underground cave-systems that can all be visited from Lencois.
We found all ranges of accommodation in the village, but relatively few people seem to know about it, or make the decision to go there, so the whole place is very calm and tranquil. Lencois is also a place where all races seem to be living together in perfect balance (from what we saw at least) and it is throughout a very safe and pleasant place to be. We walked through the outskirts of town after dark with our two small children without ever having the feeling that we should start being careful. We have been around the block a bit in this continent, so our antennae are attuned, but here we felt perfectly at ease. Talks with locals confirmed this feeling; Lencois is one of the safest places to travel. Combine this with a great surrounding area for hiking and sight-seeing and you have one fantastic destination to add to your list of Brazil must-sees.
Happy trails,
Bart
Ps I just had a look at our webpage and came across this aptly named package to Northern Brazil visiting Salvador, Lencois and Praia do Forte - Salvador and the Beauty of Bahia
