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 o
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.
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.
“Through the African American Lens,” culled from a Smithsonian collection, shows how photography — and black photographers — reshaped a people’s image.
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.
Inspirational artist Chris Jordan shares his views on the power of photography — “Art has always made an immeasurably important difference in human culture, and right now might be the most potent time ever for the arts to contribute to the healing and tra
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.
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 essentiall
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
