The African Photojournalism Database (APJD) is a growing community of talented visual storytellers from across the continent.
via Medium: https://witness.worldpressphoto.org/four-to-follow-3-9e072b528e47
The African Photojournalism Database (APJD) is a growing community of talented visual storytellers from across the continent.
This month, we’re highlighting the work of four members of the APJD, John Wessels, Mahmoud M. Khattab, Shayma Idris, and Yasmine Yusuf.
For nearly seven years now, Italian photographer Nicola Lo Calzo has documented the multiple lineages and the various manifestations of the memories of colonial slavery, of the resistances to it, of its abolitions. He documents these memories because they create life, because they irrigate our present with wisdom and knowledge of the other that is essential to us. He made his own Edouard Glissant’s affirmation: “To forget is to offend, and memory, when it is shared, abolishes this offense. We need each other’s memory, not for compassion or charity, but for a new lucidity in a process of Relation. And if we want to share the beauty of the world, if we want to be solidary with its suffering, we need to learn how to remember together.”
28mm Edition I Manhattan, by German photographer Tomaso Baldessarini is an intoxicating, emotional and at the same time documentary roller coaster ride. One single camera, a 28mm lens and the proximity of the photographer to the objects of the photographs allow the observer to submerge into a special world. The series is a piece of authentic contemporary life – “A slice of life of the present” as he says.
In “An Autobiography of Miss Wish,” Nina Berman tells the story of Kimberly Stevens, a survivor of sex trafficking and child pornography, whom Ms. Berman has known since meeting her in London 27 years ago.
via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/a-photographer-and-her-subject-share-a-journey-over-the-decades/
In the first pages of “An Autobiography of Miss Wish,” the reader meets Kimberly Stevens multiple times: In handwritten notes; dark, cinematic images; drawings of knives and books; and a beaming childhood portrait. Then there’s her psychiatric history written in detached clinical jargon, and a portrait of her prone, living on the street.
Antoine Bruy was the recipient of the 2017 Emerging Photographer Fund and was granted $10,000 for this essay. Burn Magazine revolves around the EPF and it is our most important curatorial contribut…
via burn magazine: https://www.burnmagazine.org/epf-2017/2017/10/antoine-bruy-outback-mythologies/
Everything starts about hundred years, in 1915, when the New Colorado Gold Prospecting Syndicate, consisting of a Mr Jim Hutchison, his 14 years old son William and two other men had been unsuccessfully prospecting for gold out in the middle of nowhere in South Australia. The young Willie had been left in camp to look after their supplies but disobeyed orders and wandered off to search for water around the foothills of a nearby range. There was a degree of apprehension among the men when he failed to turn up after dark. But a short time later, he strode into camp with a grin on his face. Over his shoulder was slung a sugar bag full of opal. The catalyst for the existence of the future town of Coober Pedy had been discovered.
To ensure his photos would not be confiscated by authorities, Walker Evans entrusted a trove of 46 prints made in 1933 Havana to his friend — Ernest Hemingway.
via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/walker-evanss-cuba-via-ernest-hemingway/
It seems fitting that during Walker Evans’s one-month stay in Havana in 1933 he would befriend Ernest Hemingway. The two shared an appreciation of a spare style that would influence countless others in photography and literature. In fact, Evans entrusted Hemingway with a trove of original prints to ensure they would not be confiscated by the authorities who were violently suppressing popular outrage against the dictator Gerardo Machado.
For over 70 years, American photographer Art Shay has documented life, combining his gifts of storytelling, humor and empathy. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1922, Art Shay has pursued photography since his teens, and he took his first Leica to war with him. His first published photographs—documenting a midair collision over his English Air Base—were printed in a September 1944 issue of Look magazine. In fact, during World War II, he was then lead navigator on 30 missions in the Eighth Air Force. His service, which also includes 23 combat supplies missions, earned him five Air Medals, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Croix de Guerre.
Exhibited at the Mind’s Eye gallery in Paris, Masaki Yamamoto’s family photographs strike one by their candor. His family’s life is presented to us in all its spontaneity. No embarrassment, and at the same time not a trace of exhibitionism or indulgence. These shots have the force of veracity. Beautiful, bold, surprising images which remain engraved in the memory.
The idea of this project came to me while reading the novel River of the North by Zhang Chengzhi. Once I started, the current of reality submerged my spirit. The river which previously was the source of so many myths no longer existed. Its future does not remain less radiant, in the image of this immense country with its thousands of years of history. This weak moan will soon be drowned by cries of joy; we would be wrong to not be optimistic.
For its fourteenth edition, the National Association of Iconographers (ANI) is showing three photographers chosen from among the favourites at the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan in 2016. The winners are being shown at the École de l’Image des Gobelins in Paris from November 6th to December 14th, 2017. The ANI has organised a lecture at the same address on 7th December 2017 from 6.30pm to 8.00pm.
What separates, what connects us? How do people live with the shadows of cultural oppression or political domination? The South African photographer Pieter Hugo, born in 1976 in Johannesburg, explores these questions in his portraits, still lifes and landscape photographs. In his images, Pieter Hugo captures the traces and scars of people as well as the country’s history. His special interest is subcultures, the gap between ideal and reality. He portrays the homeless, albinos and AIDS sufferers as well as men who tame hyenas, snakes and monkeys or collect electronic waste. His models are Nollywood actors (African film industry) in costume and pose, but also his own family and friends. This is brought together in the exhibition Pieter Hugo: Between the devil and the deep blue sea, a retrospective of the photographer’s career at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Dortmund, in Germany, on view until May 13, 2018.
Known for his probing, often challenging images that exist in a space between painting, drawing, installation and photography, yet until now, no comprehensive retrospective on African photographer Roger Ballen has been released yet. Based on an entirely new appraisal of his archive, one that looks beyond his monographic projects for the first time, the book Ballenesque takes the reader on a visual, chronological tour of the photographer’s entire oeuvre, including both the iconic images and previously unpublished works.
Yorgos Yatromanolakis is a Greek photographer, originally from Crete. He is currently working on a project on dreamlike images of the fauna and flora of his child hood island, Crete. He explains that, for him, photography is the most direct narrative way for passing on and sharing his personal history. This project is a return to the land of is childhood rediscovered with the eye of the photographer he is today. The photos in this series enable him to merge his memories with his creativity . His images are tinted with a slightly strange, almost mystical atmosphere. This remarkable approach is certainly linked to the ambiguity of the relationship that each of us maintains with the past, childhood, and the enigmatic world of memory.
German photographer Michael Wolf’s started his series entitled Life in Cities in 2011. An update of his project now on view at Christophe Guye Galerie in Zürich gives an even deeper insight in Wolf’s extensive, culturally investigative and artistic work on life in mega-cities. His projects document both the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises.
Zagreb’s annual photo festival continues to grow
There are four constants in the Organ Vida Festival: it happens in Zagreb, Croatia; every year it gets bigger; festival founder Marina Paulenka is at the center of it; and visitors will see some exceptional and challenging photography. This year was no different, as Organ Vida presented its theme, New Citizen, over three weeks in September. The event comprised 13 exhibitions featuring 60 artists from Croatia and around the world, 2 workshops, 2 movie projections, a portfolio review, and of course, plenty of parties. Ten thousand visitors came to the festival. Not too bad for a photo festival in a place many people haven’t heard of.
All the major battles for equal rights — racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, disability — are explored in “The Good Fight.”
via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/a-look-at-the-heart-wrenching-moments-from-equal-rights-battles/
The 54-mile march for voting rights from Selma to Alabama’s state capital, Montgomery, took more than good legs and sturdy shoes. It took defying the police, who ambushed hundreds of men, women and children — on a bridge named for a Klu Klux Klan leader — and beat them bloody. It took a court order and it took journalists covering the struggles to tell and shock the world.
As a result of his roots in the Chinese society, Zhang Hui’s work focused on social issues very early on. One and Thirty, Group Photos, Public Bathhouse, or Yumen Project: these projects are all reflections on the lives of the underprivileged in the Chinese society through experiments of intervention. Social issues such as political systems, modes of production, social relationship, personal identities and history have become the recurrent themes in Zhuang Hui’s work. These important explorations and the personal experience of the artist are what make up the “weight” of his work.
Photographer Leonard Pongo chose a more personal approach to documenting the country of his roots, Congo.
via Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2017/12/07/searching-for-a-new-experience-of-congo/
Leonard Pongo’s photographs of Congo are raw and guttural. They radiate with the sort of unease that comes with discovering a long-sought-out place — one that forms part of the photographer’s heritage, despite the fact that Pongo had to wait until his early 20s to experience it for himself.
This year saw the situation in Venezuela deteriorate to breaking point with an economy on the verge of collapse, severe shortages of food and medical supplies, and accusations of human rights abuses carried out by the country’s embattled Socialist government. Opponents to Hugo Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, failed in attempts to remove him from power during months of street protests that turned violent, killing more than 125 people. Australian photographer, Luke Cody, traveled to Caracas, putting his own safety at risk to report on the protests. He managed to capture a series of incredibly powerful images with his Leica Q, shedding light on the volatile and violent events, which unfolded as the Venezuelan people exercised their right to revolt.
With the title of his series The Kingdom, Stéphane Lavoué, right from the beginning, puts us in a double reality. It is a very concrete “kingdom”, that of the Northeast Kingdom, a region of lakes and forests in the northeast of Vermont, one of the least populated states in the United States (twelve inhabitants per square kilometer). However, it is also a fictional territory constructed by his photographs, a country of melancholic haze inhabited by unique figures, each seeming to reign over their own world, reawakening the dreams of Henry David Thoreau, who, close by in Maine and Massachusetts, lived a life of rebelliousness and fusion with nature in the 19th century.