Agata Pietron: War Songs (Part 1)

Here's the powerful, technically well-made and intelligent multimedia work by the talented Agata Pietron.  It's about teenagers who live in one of the most dangerous places in the world: in the two Kivus in East Democratic Republic of Congo, where war lasted for two decades. These young men and women experienced the influx of Rwandan refugees into their homeland of South and North Kivu, which caused political instability, genocide and eventually civil war.

These young people want to rebuild their lives by embracing hip-hop, rap and R&B as musicians, and take American monikers such as  Dangerous, Young Boys, B2K, Kashmal, Lille Cent, Peace Life, Victory etc. They speak in French, but the audio slideshow is subtitled in English. Excellent pacing, top notch audio...enviable resolution.

Agata Pietron is an independent photographer and journalist, currently based in Warsaw. She graduated from Cultural Studies at University of Warsaw, studied at European Academy of Photography and Academy of Film and Television. Now she works mainly on social projects. Her works has been exhibited in Poland and abroad. Her clients (among others) are: Orange, Unicef, RR Donnelley, Sotis, Lego, Natura, Lyreco, Fundacja Pomocy Dzieciom Niepelnosprawnym, Fundacja Synapsis.

She's also an alum of the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop...which she attended a number of times; last of which was in Buenos Aires. She worked in the DRC; covering many social issues that put her safety at risk on more than one occasion.

A real pro. What else can I say?

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John Kenny: Kenyan Portraits

Photo  John Kenny-All Rights Reserved

The Guardian newspaper in London alerted me of an exhibition opening next week of John Kenny's new portraits from Kenya.

John Kenny started a journey in 2006 that took him though many of Sub-Saharan Africas remotest communities. He spent hours walking, hitch-hiking and driving across African countries making photographs of people, ancient cultures and traditions.

The Guardian and the exhibition venue (3 Bedfordbury Gallery) has a selected number of these portraits, but the collection can be best seen on John Kenny's website.

He tells us that the images were taken during his second trip to the far North of Kenya in 2011. With major drought across the Samburu, Rendille and Turkana villages in the region, he wanted to to convey a little more on how climate changes are undermining traditional pastoral ways of live in East Africa.

I have featured John Kenny's work a number of times. You can the posts see here and here.

Should I go and see the exhibit at the Covent Garden gallery whilst I'm in London, I'll post my impressions.

I just noticed that John Kenny used a 10x8 format Chamonix camera for some of his work.

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Dominic Nahr: Travels Through Islam

Photo  Dominic Nahr-Courtesy TIME

With good reason, I've become skeptical of mainstream Western magazines abilities or interest to present non-stereotypical (and non-judgmental) features dealing with Islam, but I found TIME International's Travel Through Islam five-part series in its Summer Journey issue, to be interesting and insightful.

In this first installment, photographer Dominic Nahr followed the footsteps of famed 14th century explorer and traveler Ibn Battuta into sub-Saharan Africa. In February 1352, Ibn Battuta set off from the city of Sijilmasa at the edge of the Sahara to journey with a camel caravan to lands far to the south.

A few years ago, I was fascinated by Ibn Battuta (whose full name is Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta), and read anything I could find about his life and his travels, to the point that I went to the New York Public Library to read some older manuscripts.

Ibn Battuta's journeys took almost thirty years and covered almost the entire known Islamic world and beyond, extending from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance far surpassing that of his predecessors and his near-contemporary Marco Polo.

For an interesting book on Ibn Battuta and his exploits, Tim Mackintosh-Smith followed the traveler's footsteps as well, and wrote Travels With A Tangerine. Not to be confused with the fruit, Tangerine is a resident of Tangiers...as Ibn Battuta was.

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Roger Job: Turkanas, The Last First Men

Les Premiers Derniers Homme from Reporters Magazine on Vimeo.

Roger Job is a Belgian photographer, whose work in Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Kosovo, South Africa, Rwanda, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Somalia, US, and Zaire frequently appear in the Belgian and international press. He has also published 5 books.

Roger's Turkanas: The Last First Men started in September 2008 and ended in July 2010, and documents the impact of climate change on the Turkana pastoralists in north Kenya. A group of people who have lived for ages tending to their livestock, remote from the modern world and with a way of life of freedom, pride and in perfect harmony with nature.

The Turkana have begun to face the difficulty of accessing water points and pastures for their cattle and their way of life that has largely been intact for some 6,000 years is likely to be destroyed. Roger's photographs aim to document a way of life that is likely to disappear within a span of a generation.

The Making of The Last First Men can also be seen here. I could only find it in French, but it's more or less self-explanatory.

Incidentally, Reporters Magazine is the brainchild of Reporters, a photo agency in northern Europe, founded in 1989.

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The BBC Celebrates Sir Wilfred Thesiger

Wilfred Thesiger in Ethiopia 1934 (Courtesy The BBC)

For historical buffs and admirers of adventurers/explorers, here's a BBC feature that will please you.

Sir Wilfred Thesiger took nearly 40,000 photographs during his eight decades of travels throughout Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The BBC, in commemoration of his centenary of his birth, has featured an audio slideshow of his photographs.

Thesiger is best known for two travel books. Arabian Sands (1959) narrates his travels in the Empty Quarter of Arabia between 1945 and 1950 and describes the vanishing way of life of the Bedouins, while he Marsh Arabs (1964) is an account of the indigenous people of the marshlands of southern Iraq. 

From an article 'Gentleman Thrillseeker 'in the Independent newspaper:

Since 1930 Thesiger had documented his journeys in photographs, diaries, and letters to his family. Many of his finest photographs were taken, after 1945, in Arabia and Iraq; he took thousands more, just as fine, in the mountains of Asia, Morocco, Kenya and Tanzania. Thesiger's photographs have long been regarded as works of art in their own right; they also preserve a unique and imperishable record of vanishing tribal societies.

Thesiger was an intriguing man...to say the least. There are plenty of articles and opinions pieces about him and his life.

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Evan Abramson: When The Water Ends

Ethiopia's government is building a new dam in the Omo river projected to be the largest hydropower project in sub-Saharan Africa. Almost 50% of its electrical output has already been sold to neighboring countries, but it will reduce the water flow to the Omo River and threaten the lives of some 500,000-800,000 nomadic pastoralists.

Evan Abramson's When The Water Ends photo essay examines the impact of such a massive infrastructural on the lives of the Omo Valley tribes.

Evan's photographs were also used in a 16-minute video When the Water Ends produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm. It tells the story of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa, and the eventuality of conflict.

Evan Abramson is a 32-year-old photographer and videographer based in New York, who spent two months in the region, living among the herding communities. His project focuses on four groups of pastoralists  the Turkana of Kenya and the Dassanech, Nyangatom, and Mursi of Ethiopia  who are among the more than two dozen tribes whose lives and culture depend on the waters of the Omo River and the body of water into which it flows, Lake Turkana.

Quite a number of photographers have photographed the tribal people of the Omo Valley, and I'm certain they, as well as many non-photographers, are lamenting the change that will befell the region.

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NY Times: Madagascar's Famadihana

Having just returned from Bali where I attended and photographed exhumations and cremations, I was interested in reading a The New York Times' article and watching its accompanying video about the celebratory exhumation of the dead in Ambohimirary, Madagascar.

The article written by Barry Bearak (with accompanying photography by Joao Silva) reports that in the island nation of Madagascar, ancestors are frequently taken from their tombs with musical fanfare from brass bands, sprayed with perfume and wine and the skeletons lovingly rearranged.

It's a testament as to how many traditions are carried over from one continent to the other, from one race to the other and from one culture to another.

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PBS Features "Starved For Attention"

PBS' Need To Know is featuring a Starved For Attention slideshow with 19 large photographs by Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer.

It's based on the extremely well produced multimedia campaign by Doctors Without Borders/Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF) and VII Photo which exposes the neglected and largely invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition.

As an aside, I also noticed on Need To Know an article by Kavitha Rajagopalan on the buffoonish remarks made by Palin on the plans to erect a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero.

All I have to say is that it is New York and its inhabitants who suffered on September 11, 2001....and it's they who have the voice in this.

No one else.

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MSF's Starved For Attention

"this year 195,000,000 children will suffer from malnutrition"

and so starts Starved for Attention the extremely well produced multimedia campaign by Doctors Without Borders/Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF) and VII Photo which exposes the neglected and largely invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition.

The campaign aims to present a series of multimedia documentaries of still photography and video from the well-known photojournalists at the VII Agency, such as Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer.

The first multimedia reportage is titled Frustration and is by Marcus Bleasdale, who narrates it out of Djibouti.

Bookmark this website, since the remaining reportages will be featured over the course of the coming months.

For more background on the project, JournalismNow features an interview with Ron Haviv, which touches on his work in Bangladesh for Starved For Attention.

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Marc Garanger: Femmes Algriennes

Photo  Marc Garanger -All Rights Reserved
Algeria's War of Independence from France officially lasted almost a decade, but its genesis goes back to the early 40s. It was one the bloodiest struggles against a brutal colonial power with over a million Algerians killed, with thousands interned in concentration camps. To this day, the French have not accepted responsibility for these crimes.

Growing up in my native Egypt and full of nationalistic fervor against colonialism, I remember quite well the admiration we had for the Algerian resistance...the names of Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Djamila Bouhired still easily roll off my tongue.

So it was with much interest that I saw recent coverage from photo websites and newsmedia on Marc Garanger, who was stationed against his will in Algeria, and managed to avoid combat by becoming a photographer in the French army. His job was to produce images for new mandatory ID cards, and villagers were forced to sit for him.

Less than a year later, Garanger's photographs of shamed and angry Algerian women would become a symbol of French oppression over its Northern African colony.

I left a comment of the New York Lens Blog which featured Garanger's work:

"the French colonialism/occupation of Algeria was one of the most brutal in history, and the Algerians' independence war cost over a million of their lives. in my view, the expressions of these women are principally of defiance, hatred of their oppressors, and rebellion. the women were combatants as well, as has been mentioned in the article. perhaps there's an inkling of truth in that they were ashamed to show their faces, but what i sense from these expressions is that they're telling the French "you'll soon be gone"...and they were right."

Garanger received today a Lifetime Achievement Award at the New York Photo Festival for Les Femmes Algeriennes.

For further photographs, go to Algeria.com which has a number of large images of these Algerian women; some ashamed, some scared but many defiant.

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Jehad Nga's Turkana in NYC

Photo  Jehad Nga -All Rights Reserved
The beautiful work of Jehad Nga, one of my favorite photographers, is on show at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery on the Upper East Side in New York. The exhibition runs from May 13 to June 16, 2010, and is timed to coincide with the New York Photo Festival. Limited edition prints are priced from $2,800-$10,000.

The UK's Daily Telegraph also featured Jehad's Turkana work. I scratch my head in puzzlement that a UK daily would feature news of a photographic event (and images), while our own newspapers have not. Perhaps I've missed it...?

For background on Jehad Nga and the Turkana images, check my earlier post here.

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POV: Marco Vernaschi & Child Sacrifice

Update: 4.25.2010: See my follow-up post So Whose Judgment Lapse Is it?
Update 4.22.2010: Jon Sawyer of the Pulitzer Center responds, and within the response is this:

"Yet we also believe, and Vernaschi agrees, that it was wrong to ask that the body be exhumed. It showed disrespect for the dead, and forced a grieving family to suffer anew. It also had the effect of focusing attention on the actions of one journalist, as opposed to a horrific crime that needs to be exposed.

We regret any damage that may have been caused. We intend to continue this project, documenting the phenomenon of child sacrifice, but in so doing we we will redouble our efforts to authenticate every claim and to insure the privacy rights of individual victims."

Here's my original post 0f 4.21.2010:

Here's another story that is guaranteed to make your stomachs churn. It involves Marco Vernaschi an Italian photographer/photojournalist who worked on a project documenting the phenomenon of child witches, human sacrifice and organ trafficking in Africa, and the Pultizer Center For Crisis Reporting.

I have linked to various photographs, but be aware that these are highly disturbing.

It appears that the Pulitzer Center funded Vernaschi to do a story on child sacrifice in Uganda, and it published some of his hard-hitting photographs in an article titled Uganda: Babirye, The Girl from Katugwe, in which the photographer convinces a Ugandan mother to allow the exhumation of her mutilated daughter's body in order to photograph it as "visual evidence". The photograph of the corpse is then shown on both Vernaschi's website and on the Pulitzer Center's. Payment (described as "a contribution for a lawyer") was made by the photographer to the mother.

Another photograph on Vernaschi's website shows an abused boy with a catheter protruding from where his penis has been cut off. His face is clearly shown.

Vernaschi's website explains that

"Child sacrifice in Uganda is a phenomenon that has embedded itself within traditional customs but that bears no genuine relationship to local culture. The appeal to "cultural beliefs" is actually an excuse used by witchdoctors to justify their crimes, and by the Ugandan government to avoid taking action. The government tries to minimize the magnitude of the problem because politicians fear losing votes and this is a a country where witchdoctors wield surprising influence at the polls."

I'm all for documentary coverage to expose and stop this barbaric practice...there's no argument there. However, for a photojournalist to ask (and then pay) for the exhumation of a body beggars belief. Had the child died in a ritualistic murder in Italy, could Vernaschi been able to ask its family to exhume the body for a few pictures? Had he been able to photograph an Italian baby boy with a catheter sticking out of his groin? Why can't these photojournalists and publishers understand that they cannot continue to show pictures of mutilated children??

It's immoral. It's as simple and as complex as that.

As I wrote in an older post: To Vernaschi and to the Pulitzer Center's Board of Directors, Advisory Council and Staff: what if Babirye and the baby boy were your children, your niece and nephew or even just a relative...or an acquaintance? Would you still have photographed and published the photographs...or is it because they're "just" Africans?

Vernaschi is an award winning photographer....and well-experienced dealing with gruesome topics. Surely he could have photographed the story differently? Or is it about winning awards and applause from the rest of the lemmings?

Update: For a more detailed and comprehensive opinion, along with some responses from the Pulitzer Center, check A Developing Story.

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Condition Critical: Eastern Congo

Bahati's Story - Condition Critical from duckrabbit on Vimeo.

Benjamin Chesterton of the award-winning duckrabbit has done another jaw-dropping job with Condition Critical, a highly commendable and important project for Medecins Sans Frontieres.

As Ben says:

"I've finished four videos on the Congo subtitled into eight languages to run on a website where people can leave messages to be translated and put up in the camps and clinics in Eastern Congo. The strongest thing about this project is that all you hear is the voices of the Congolese affected by the violence."

Here's some background of the Eastern Congo's conflict. It's the world's deadliest conflict since the second world war and yet the majority of people have never heard of it. According to the IRC at least at least 5 million Congolese have died in more than a decade of conflict sparked off by the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Most of the deaths are linked to a lack of medical facilities as the ability to access medical care in Eastern Congo has crumbled with the war. The four videos on the Condition Critical website give voice to the pain and trauma of those caught up in the conflict, bearing witness to their dignity and attempts to survive the conflict.

In Ben's own words:

"Told only in their own voices all the website asks you to do is send a message of support. At first that might sound a bit daft. I mean why send a message of support to people I know nothing of? Surely what they need is cash, right? Well first off if you watch the videos you can find out a little about their lives, that they're not that much different to you and me except that they've been caught up in an unforgiving conflict. Secondly messages of support do make a difference. I know this because last year I worked in camps in Kenya and the thing that people were most frightened of was being forgotten, the sense that no-one cared. That's what leads to depression and despair. Worse than that, when no-one cares people get away with murder, literally."

So the fact that MSF will take these messages and share them in the camps and clinics will make a difference. It will also give a huge morale boost to the MSF staff working in Eastern Congo.

People can do four great things:

1. Leave a message of solidarity on the map
2. Twitter about it and link to it on Facebook (for Twitter use #conditioncritical)
3. Embed one of the video's on their blogs.
4. Write something about the project"

It's worthwhile to reiterate what Ben realized from his time in the Kenya camps:

"...the thing that people were most frightened of was being forgotten, the sense that no-one cared. That's what leads to depression and despair. Worse than that, when no-one cares people get away with murder, literally."

So show you care.

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Global Post: Finbarr O'Reilly: Senegal

GlobalPost brings us a feature by photographer Finbarr O'Reilly. The photographer came across performers of the Dseu Renaissance de Pikine theater group, and was smitten by the intense colors he saw when the female artists put their traditional headscarves and applied black makeup and markings worn by the Toucouleur people of West Africa.

The "Toucouleur" possibly originates from the French (slightly misspelled) meaning "all-colors", and are Muslims who live mostly in the Senegal River Valley in Northern Senegal and Southern Mauritania.

The theater group seeks to keep alive West Africa's superstitions, oral storytelling, and narrative skills of the griots.

Finbarr OReilly joined Reuters in 2001 as a freelance text correspondent in Kinshasa, Congo and spent two years covering Central Africas Great Lakes region from Kinshasa and from Kigali, Rwanda. He took up photography full-time in 2005 and covers West and Central Africa for Reuters, based in Dakar, Senegal. In 2006, he was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year.

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LENS blog: Dominic Nahr's Uneasy Congo

The New York Times' LENS blog brings us the work of photojournalist Dominic Nahr in a series of photographs titled Uneasy Congo. Though he is only 26 years old, Dominics photographs of Congos brutal conflict are being exhibited in Perpignan at Visa pour lImage, one of the most important international photojournalism festival.

The article explains the reasons as to why Dominic's photographs were chosen for the venue, but what is the most poignant of his statments is this one as he recalls viewing the results of a massacre:

"At first, you feel like a scavenger because youre hanging over these bodies, but you have to document it. This had to be remembered. Laws were broken. There had to be evidence and this had to be remembered."

While this is another example of "bearing witness" to the atrocities committed in Africa, there are others who bemoan the fact that not enough photography and coverage are dedicated to show Africa's success stories...perhaps these are also right.

For more photographs, Dominic Nahr's website is here.

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Sexual Warfare: Congo

The Sydney Morning Herald has featured a superbly produced multimedia project titled Sexual Warfare: The Democratic Republic of Congo. The multimedia is produced by Kimberley Porteous
and Kate Geraghty.

From its website, we learn that sexual violence is a devastating weapon in the war-torn North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congolese army and rebel groups systematically use brutal gang rape against their enemies, causing crippling injuries and spreading HIV.

Aid groups estimate one in three women in North Kivu have been raped. Over 30 per cent of these have been infected with HIV.

All across this devastated region  in every village, every camp and almost every home  a man-made plague is stealing and destroying the lives of women. In a scale never seen before around the world.

(Via Duckrabbit Multimedia: an always interesting and brave blog, which I encourage you bookmark.)

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Matt Powell: Humanitarian Photographer

Matt Powell is a documentary photographer and a multimedia producer ( his bio tells us that he's also a budding documentary filmmaker), as a well as a writer, who works for the Christian humanitarian relief agency Samaritans Purse. It's a job which takes Matt all over the developing world, and nourishes his passion for visual storytelling and his desire to improve the world.

Soon after his graduation, Matt undertook a 2.5 month trekking journey into some of the most remote terrain in South East Asia to perform an ethnographic survey of tribal minorities known to be living under severe religious and ethnic persecution. It was the adventure of his lifetime, and established his career as a humanitarian photographer.

His subsequent assignments took him to Indonesia, Cambodia, PNG, Viet Nam, India, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Uganda, to mention just a few.

I'm greatly impressed by Matt's commitment and talents, and feature his Portraits portfolio, however I also encourage you to explore his work beyond this gallery, and check the rest of his galleries and informative blog .

It's immensely refreshing to meet an altruistic photographer, and Matt Powell is it.

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Michael Kamber: Hard Lessons in Somalia

"It is also important to keep a low profile when youre moving through dangerous areas where kidnapping risks are high. Try to find vehicles with tinted windows. Long sleeves, beards, hats and local dress all help. Dont be embarrassed to wrap a scarf around your head or put on local garb. From a distance, this makes you less visible. It may save your life."-Michael Kamber (from LENS-New York Times)

Michael Kamber is a well-known photojournalist, and is currently working on a book on photojournalism and war photography. He was nominated three times for the Pulitzer prize. He has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Cote D'Ivoire, Sudan, Somalia, Haiti, Israel, the Congo and various others.

He shares some of the hard lessons he learned while working in Somalia on The New York Times LENS blog.

posted from London en route to Morocco

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Daylight Magazine: Jehad Nga

I just received Daylight Magazine's May newsletter, which features Jehad Nga's wonderful photo essay titled "My Shadow My Opponent" which deals with boxers and boxing clubs in Kenya. It explores the scarcely-known boxing subculture of Nairobi's largest slum.

I'm sure many of you will agree with me that the title of the photo essay fits Jehad's trademark chiaroscuro photographs like a glove. It's excellent work by an extremely talented photojournalist/photographer, however it's a shame that there's very little ambient audio of the grunts, exertions, sound of glove on flesh, and other sounds normally associated with boxing (think Rocky Balboa!), nor do we hear the voices of the boxers.

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Hallelujah! BBC Goes Big

Micah Albert-All Rights Reserved
I always thought that the BBC website was created and administered by a tea-lady who's a dead ringer for Terry Thomas.

However, having been alerted by Benjamin Chesterton's post over at the excellent duckrabbit, I now realize there are stirrings of modernity, and someone may have finally found the nerve to tell the omnipotent tea-lady that size does matter after all. Some of the photographs on the BBC site are now displayed in a larger format and at a higher quality.

Micah Albert's photographs of Somali refugees arriving in Yemen is one of the first BBC photo essays to appear in the larger size. Not as large and not as many as those appearing on The Big Picture blog or the WSJ's Photo Journal, but a step in the right direction.

The BBC's picture editor Phil Coomes has just started a blog called Viewfinder, which deals with the world of photojournalism, photos in the news and BBC News' use of photographs. Perhaps he'll introduce some more large sized eye candy imagery to the BBC's website.

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