A makeshift portrait studio — a scavenged chair set in front of a white backdrop, illuminated by two small lights — draws crack users from their dark, nightmarish surroundings. Some users open up and tell their stories, while others reveal it only through their eyes.
“There is a lot of suffering in this house,” the Indian photographer Sohrab Hura writes in a note printed at the beginning of his photo journal “Life Is Elsewhere.” In 1999, when Hura was seventeen years old, his mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and in the following years the house they shared was overtaken by her illness. In the book, which Hura self-published last month, he describes her screaming obscenities, obsessively changing the locks on the door, beating him with a stick, and at times disbelieving that he was her son
Maybe that’s why Adam Magyar’s work is so impactful. Using eye-grabbing photographic techniques, he stretches the fleeting moments spent in these interstitial spaces into sprawling, meditative strips of film and video. Even though waiting for the train can feel like an eternity, making it look like one is difficult. It actually allows us to contemplate a place many of us endure on our way to more interesting things.
For Life and Lines, Kolkata-based photographer Debosmita Das documents daily life in an illegal slum that runs along an active railroad track, through which trains pass a mere foot or two from makeshift shelters at intervals of ten or twenty minutes.
As a sequence “Zhili Byli” (Once upon a time…) combines images of contemporary living and housing conditions with a series of portraits of residents from the city of Arkhangelsk. The city in northwest Russia is plunged into freezing temperatures for eight months a year, sometimes as low as 40 degrees below zero. The climate makes for an extreme contrast between indoor and outdoor life. Inside pre-fab buildings or wooden houses residents have created cave-like havens of intimacy and comfort where they spend most of the year, while the world on the outside seems strangely neglected.
Hundreds of Iranian homosexual refugees transit by Denizli, a small Turkish town, where they put their lives on hold while waiting to find a country where they can freely live their sexuality. In this context of uncertainty, where anonymity is the best protection, this work questions the fragile notion of identity and gender. It tries to give back to these people an image that their country has momentarily stolen.
Louis and Jan have always lived the carnival life. They travel from fairground to fairground with their Ferris wheel, living life in constant motion. This portrait series examines life between wheels, the family unit and the unshakeable bonds of brotherly love.
This work is based in part on the psychology of James Hillman, who said that the poetic basis of mind places psychological activities in the realm of images and that the mind seeks to explore images rather than explain them
While taking a documentary photography class at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Barb Peacock was told she could travel the world looking for great shots, but a good photographer has the ability to find them in her own backyard.
It is this Greece that photographer Angelos Tzortzinis set out to capture. Over the course of six years, he has documented the effects of austerity measures in his native country, one he says he no longer recognizes.
The Ozark backwoods are a place you feel. The dark nooks to hide, made in encroaching woods and the banks of rivers, the smell of wet life and decay, a steady insect hum, all create a backdrop for a people with a particular fascination for the mysteries of darkness and light. Here some of the oldest stories of humanity are told — wanderers’ lost souls and paths taken towards good or evil — but with a local twist in the tale of a strange orb of light.
For a long time I thought that photographs showed the viewer what the world looked like. It wasn’t until college that I learned that a photograph could tell a story. While studying photography at Massachusetts College of Art I began a series of self portraits that now span 25 years. I was 18 years old when I began to take them. These self portraits helped me better understand who I was and what I hoped to become. I still continue to make these self-portraits, but in a new setting: in 2005 I married an Icelander and moved to a farm in the eastern part of Iceland.
1980′s New York City was a stew of music, drugs, and excess bumping up against populations of hard working immigrants just trying to provide for their families. Photographer Bud Glick was there with his camera, but his focus turned away from disco nights and onto the streets of New York’s Chinatown. For three years, he captured Chinese residents and their workplaces revealing a very different reality in the same metropolis. Bud has continued to revisit and make work about NYC’s Chinatown for 30 years and is a supporter of the Museum of the Chinese in America.
The U.S. debut of an ongoing series by one of the most influential photographers of our time
As much as possible, I worked from instinct. Taking photos resembles an improvised game. I feel that the more a photo is spontaneous and unplanned, the more it becomes alive, the more it moves from showing to existing.
Pulitzer-prize winning photographer, Renée C. Byer, has traveled to 10 countries spread over four continents in the past four years documenting the myriad lives lived on less than a dollar a day. The photographs, both harrowing and inspiring, are Byer’s way to span the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
When Nina Robinson boarded a Greyhound bus from New York to Arkansas last October, she had big plans.
The French photographer Ambroise Tézenas was travelling in Sri Lanka when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, killing more than thirty thousand people on the island within minutes. Four years later, he came across a newspaper article explaining that a train from the disaster, still sitting where the waves had deposited it in the Sri Lankan jungle, had become a tourist attraction. Tézenas was perplexed that anyone could casually visit the remnants of the horror that he had witnessed first-hand. From this disconnect, he found inspiration: he travelled around the world to sites of historic calamity—from Rwanda and Auschwitz to Chernobyl and Dealey Plaza—to document their afterlives as destinations of so-called “dark tourism.”
An all-new world-class photography fair opens this May — Photo London. Centrally located at the grand Somerset House on the Thames, Photo London offers a vibrant celebration of photography in all of its forms. The world’s finest galleries will be there to sell to collectors, with some startlingly fresh work by established masters as well as many new and emerging talents. LensCulture’s editors have created a highly selective preview of some of the work that excites us the most — see them in the slideshow above.
