Lost in this sea of misunderstanding are, of course, the people of the country itself. Belgian travel photographer David de Vleeschauwer decided to visit the country with “an open mind and the belief that something human lies behind…despite negative reporting in the West.”
An hour after the Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Abir Abdullah got to the scene unsure where to begin taking pictures. More than a thousand people had died and hundreds more were trapped alive in the rubble. Injured workers were screaming and crying all around him as rescue workers pulled bodies from the debris.
“Service” took many weeks to develop but Platon’s enthusiasm for the project never faltered. He rose to each photographic challenge, no matter what difficulties a shoot presented. Like a house being built, stone by stone, the photographs were crafted into a sequence of spreads that in the end added up to an exceptional essay. Access was difficult, shoot times often limited, and making each spread unique instead of repetitive was a great challenge. In addition to portraiture for which Platon is well known, he took documentary images, and even some still-lives. In the end the New Yorker published a series 16 pages and won a National Magazine Award for it. Bravo Platon!
The Suchiate River is the crossing point between Mexico and Guatemala for thousands of Central American migrants hoping to make it to El Norte, the United States. They cross the water on a couple of beat-up intertubes with planks of plywood taped on top of them. Mexican photojournalist Rodrigo Cruz shot these migrants across the Guatemala-Mexico frontier for his latest project Frontera Sur.
Groundtruth has published their most recent project, Foreverstan, a current and nuanced look at the United States’ longest war. There’s an introduction video embedded above, but the project website is really worth a look
Ahead of the upcoming 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Washington Post staff photographer Bonnie Jo Mount traveled to Piquiá de Baixo to document a community of residents in clay-brick and wooden houses suffering from the heavy pollution from nearby pig iron factories and the noisy Carajás railway that runs through the Amazon region transporting ore.
Panos Pictures photographer Carlos Spottorno has been documenting incoming immigrants and their experience along various European coastal cities for years. “They leave their home countries because poverty, war and hunger have made their lives intolerable, and they’re determined to find a better life for themselves, and maybe their families back home,” he describes about his series via Panos Pictures. “Some of them travel for years, being passed from one trafficker to the other at the mercy of unscrupulous criminals who see them as a commodity and play on their desperation.”
Kacper Kowalski happened to be standing beside his brilliant picture and told me he’d been an architect who traded that in order to do two things he really loves—flying and photography.
Faced with the rigors of a daily three-hour commute on congested highways, he decided to record his wry observations of the folks in the cars behind him, transforming boredom into fine art.
The late 1930s image by Eliot Elisofon shows Zack Brown taking a picture of two dapper African-American men on a Harlem street. It challenged the then-dominant view of black urban life, focusing on dignity instead of suffering, self-possession instead of defeat, happiness instead of sorrow. Mr. Elisofon’s picture also reminds us of the powerful role of photography in African-American life, how the medium — and black photographers — helped reshape the image of a people.
In the seven years between the invention of the daguerreotype and Whitman’s visit to Plumbe’s, the medium had become popular enough to generate an impressive, and even hectic, stream of images. Now, toward the end of photography’s second century, that stream has become torrential.
The war no longer rages, but conflicts persist. That realization led James Rodriguez, a Mexican-American photographer living in Guatemala, to document the continuing search for justice in a country whose people find peace by leaving the country by any means necessary.
“If a photographer’s only job is to take the photos, then I succeeded. If my job is to create change, I have failed”
But perhaps the most mysterious part for me is the way the medium can transmit feeling. Digital cameras record millions of tiny electrical signals that get sent down wires and through multiple computers; and yet somehow the feeling of the photographer’s relationship with the subject can make it through that whole process intact. For me that is one of the greatest powers of photography—to convey relationships, which for me, are all about reverence.
Very few photographers have the gift of finding beauty within conflict. Photographer Dominic Bracco II believes that it’s important to humanize the individuals involved in violent confrontations. One of his photographs in particular illustrates this principle—a striking image of a murdered man and pregnant woman embracing in a dark vehicle in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The image won him a second place prize in the 2011 POYi competition, bringing him international recognition.
In the age of digital image making, we’ve grown to accept that even the most photorealistic images are really just electronic fabrications. It’s led to visual sensibilities that make the real and the unreal tough to distinguish. A world of impeccably composed, crisp lines, hotly lit with fully saturated color.
Most photographs in Pakistan depict something awful or its immediate aftermath: suicide bombings, a horrible earthquake, even more horrible floods, unimaginable grief. The Spanish photographer Diego Ibarra Sánchez, who made Pakistan his home for five years, saw something different amid all the tragedy: hope.
The mines at La Rinconada, a bitter-cold, mercury-contaminated pueblo clinging to the glaciered mountainside, are “artisanal”—small, unregulated, and grossly unsafe. To stave off disaster, the miners propitiate the mountain deities with tiny liquor bottles. CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY MOISES SAMAN / MAGNUM
My ambition was never to do yet another study on perception or to embark on an academic path to street photography. What interested me, was to see how I could use the tools as a photographer. Pictures, not words, have the highest priority.
If you’re measuring by sheer space, Chongqing is the largest city in China. Over the last few decades, it has grown so large that in 1997 its status was changed from that of a city in Sichuan province to a direct-controlled municipality; it was essentially made its own mini-province. In the latest project from Tim Franco, Metamorpolis, the Shanghai-based photographer seeks to document the 21st century mega-city, in all its gritty magnitude.
