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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 anoth...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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 boxe...

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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...

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