I worked with Andrew Southam quite a bit in the past, so when he told me about a personal journey he recently underwent, I asked to publish an account of it on the blog. I think you will find his honest and humble account of what happened to him inspiring.
Ed Kashi’s new book “Witness Number 8: Photojournalisms” (Nazraeli Press 2012) is a collection of images, diary entries and letters to his wife, Julie Winokur. Mr. Kashi spoke about the book with James Estrin this month at the National Press Photographers Association’s Northern Short Course in Fairfax, Va. Their conversation has been edited.
Bruce Haley’s book, Sunder, (published by Daylight) is a fascinating and quite poetic take on the demise of the Soviet Union and communism. I see it and am instantly drawn to the landscapes, the combination of complete environmental and industrial devastation mixed with romantic, rural landscapes and economic decay. I’ve been corresponding with Bruce Haley (see interviews here, and here) for a while and he has a fascinating take on photography that includes thoughts on landscape, politics, narrative and process.
He’s currently shooting panoramic landscapes on the history of mining in the US. These are shot on 10 inch negative in an extreme ratio – click on the pictures for more detail as the layers that are revealed are quite amazing.
Absolutely. I went Paris Photo recently, and it is the same 8 or 10 photographers who are dominating the whole scene. It’s almost like they’re eating the main meal, and there’s another 200 photographers eating the scraps around it. And I’m not even eating the scraps
I’ve spent the last fifteen years with the title of “War photographer”, going to the other ends of the earth, to photographs stories of other people, looking for photographic intimacy from people that I didn’t know. In Afghanistan, which could not be further away from what I grew up in, which was milk and toast Texas. My father was an evangelical preacher, and I grew up in a very conservative and religious environment. My family is not right wing, born again, or that kind of thing, but the environment, the town, the culture that I grew up in were conservative, and I became a photographer, really, to escape that.
Then all of sudden you have a child, which is a crazy experience, because it is at the same time the most intimate and unique experience a person can have, and it is also the most common and universal experience a person can have. Then I was having this internal dialogue: “I’ve been going off to Afghanistan, and now I’ve come the full circle, where I’m not running away from home anymore, I want to be at my home. I want to understand myself through my family”.
Editing is absolutely crucial. Everyone is a photographer these days and where you can make a difference is with interpretation. As a good editor you have to be true to yourself but not be too emotionally attached. If you let someone else edit your work, you have to make sure you put your point of view across well and work with someone you trust.
I can’t justify what I do if I’m not reaching the planet. I gotta have a huge audience because my work is about saving the planet, you know. Its not about me, its about tigers and elephants and stuff like that. So if I didn’t have this microphone, I’d just be pissing into the wind. This is the only place on earth that I can do what I do.
There’s an element of trying to capture a realness, a kind of spontaneity to both that’s appealing. But of course in punk, like just about anything else, there’s definitely an element of performance, controlled chaos and building off of what’s come before. To that end, covering music, especially larger bands, reminds me of when I was covering Congress. It’s funny, when I’ve shown my portfolio to editors, I’ve been knocked on more than one occasion for including music photography. I was told that work is “just capturing a performance.” Hell, outside of spot news or street photography, just about everything a photojournalist shoots is “just a performance.” Sports? No doubt. Politics? Hell yes. Especially today, in the reality show soaked world we’re living in, you pull out a camera and people perform
This photo essay, part of our collaboration with Magnum Photos, documents Alex Webb’s exploration of Chicago and the Loop. Inspired in part by one of his early influences, Ray Metzker’s “My Camera and I in the Loop,” he explores the streets of the US’s “Second City.”
Marc Shoul is a South African photographer, born in 1975 in Port Elizabeth. Interested in exploring social issues, four years ago he began photographing the city of Brakpan, which is a 45-minute drive from Johannesburg. Street scenes and more intimate portraits compose a personal portrayal of a place that is “anchored in time, the same, but its own” — as the photographer characterized it in the following interview — stumbling between a heavy past and an uncertain present.
