Australian journalist, Alison Stieven-Taylor, publisher of popular blog Photojournalism Now, has launched a new monthly video series in which she interviews leading documentary photographers. The…
The series, Photojournalism Now: In Conversation, kicks off with a 22-minute discussion with Robin Hammond, an award-winning New Zealand documentary photographer and human rights activist. Hammond is represented by Panos Pictures, has won a World Press Photo prize, is a W.Eugene Smith Fund recipient, and exhibited work across the world.
Robin Hammond photographed life in Lagos for the story “Africa’s First City,” which appears in the January 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. In a series of five posts on Proof, he chronicles this city of contrasts that is fast becoming Africa’s hub of creativity, fashion, and business.
Robin Hammond set out to document Lagos, a teeming metropolis where “intimacy and exclusion, love and hate, laughter and insult regularly rub shoulders” on its streets.
Robin Hammond: I have been an outsider most of my life. As an immigrant or photographer in the countries where I have lived and worked, I have not truly belonged. I’ve been a foreigner for so long that I don’t really know anything else. It has become part of who I am.
While powerful work on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in Africa has been done by documentary photographers like Robin Hammond of New Zealand, with his project “Where Love Is Illegal,” the approach of liberal Western media can reinforce the notion that homosexuality in Africa is a “perversion” of traditional African values introduced by foreigners, or a colonial legacy that imposed European religious conservatism and rails against such relations as “unnatural.”
Conflict, available now on Netflix, comprises six episodes. Photographers Pete Muller, Joao Silva, Donna Ferrato, Nicole Tung, Robin Hammond, and Eros Hoagland are each given seven minutes or less to explain, justify, or simply to testify to the years they’ve spent on the frontline of some of the world’s deepest traumas. The entire series is barely 35 minutes, and those minutes go by in the blink of an eye, but—like the photographs made by its heroes and heroines—they stick around for a while.
Photographer Robin Hammond has won the 2014 World Understanding Award at the Pictures of the Year International (POYi) competition for “Condemned,” his widely acclaimed project about the neglect and mistreatment of the mentally ill in African countries ra
“Where there is war, famine, displacement, it is always the most vulnerable who suffer the greatest” says Robin Hammond. The mentally ill, he notes, are a “voiceless minority condemned to lives of quiet misery.”
Photographer Robin Hammond has been awarded the 2013 W. Eugene Smith Grant, a $30,000 prize, to help complete his ongoing project called “Condemned–Mental Health in African Countries in Crisis.” Hammond has spent two years working on the project, which do
Photographer Robin Hammond has been awarded the 2013 W. Eugene Smith Grant, a $30,000 prize, to help complete his ongoing project called “Condemned–Mental Health in African Countries in Crisis.”
The photographer Robin Hammond’s long-term work documenting mental illness in several African countries has earned him the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography.
Robin Hammond: “I never wanted to photograph death but the real world violence and blood filled the streets,” he said. “The social pain was so great and injustices so constant that the only way to understand this madness was through photography.”
Winner of the third Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award in 2011, Robin Hammond has now chosen to illustrate the humanitarian crisis touching Zimbabwe
New Zealand-born photographer Robin Hammond won this year’s FotoEvidence Book Award for his work Condemned, which documents the bleak conditions faced by mentally ill people in African nations
“But you get into some of these places and they’re vertical city slums: no power, no water, no jobs. And the atmosphere. I’ve been to Congo and Somalia and all those kinds of places but I don’t think I’ve seen people as scared as the people in Zimbabwe.”
