Friday Round Up - 22nd April, 2016

This week on Friday Round Up a sneak peek at this year's Head On Photo Festival and the Pulitzer Prize for Photography winners. Next week Friday Round Up will be live from Head On's opening night in Sydney.

Farewell Prince
I woke this morning to the news that one of the greatest musical talents of my generation was dead at 57. Shocked and saddened at his untimely demise, I want to acknowledge his passing here. Losing David Bowie and now Prince... I began my career as a music journalist and he was one of my favourites. I still have his vinyl albums...rock on.





Festival:
Head On Photo - Sydney

Australia's largest photography festival, Head On, opens next week in Sydney for a month-long celebration of photography in all its forms. Annual photographic festivals face the challenge of keeping it fresh and programming events and exhibitions that will appeal to loyal followers and also attract newcomers. This year the programme features an eclectic and engaging collection of exhibitions that reinforces the capacity of photography to peel back the layers of human complexity, to transport us to new worlds, to reveal difficult truths and hidden stories as well as to entertain.

Here's a sneak peek at what's in store:

Swiss visual artist Catherine Leutenegger’s ‘Kodak City’ is an anthology that reveals what remains of Kodak as a business and looks at the impact the company’s decline has had on the inhabitants of Rochester, where Kodak’s headquarters was situated for more than a century.

(C) Catherine Leutenegger

(C) Catherine Leutenegger

(C) Catherine Leutenegger

(C) Catherine Leutenegger

1% -Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality, curated by Myles Little, a photo editor with TIME magazine, which features around 30 images, by various photographers, that define the upper echelons of wealth.

Canadian-born, Perth-based photographer Mark Lehn's photo essay of the Bajau Laut nomads, known as the ‘sea gypsies’, captures this group that lives a stateless existence in boat dwellings in the Sabah region of Borneo.

 
(C) Mark Lehn


  (C) Mark Lehn


 (C) Mark Lehn

 (C) Mark Lehn

Three Australian female photographers - Raphaela Rosella, Dutch-born Ingetje Tadros and Kerry Payne Stailey - who are all doing really interesting documentary-based work and tackling highly emotive subjects, have exhibitions too.

(C) Raphaela Rosella -You'll Know It When You Feel It

(C) Ingetje Taros

(C) Kerry Payne Stailey

 Australian landscape photographers Paul Hoelen, Scott McCook and Sheldon Pettit take an aerial view to highlight the environmental impact of mining practices in Australia. These works look like abstract art on first viewing and are visually stunning, but their underlying message is clear, as is the ecological devastation.

© Paul Hoelen Photography

© Paul Hoelen Photography

© Paul Hoelen Photography

There is host of umbrella exhibitions too including two Melbourne photographers whose shows are definitely worth checking out:

Nicola Dracoulis' Living in the Middle of Hackney

Living in the Middle of Hackney documents the lives of five young people in one of London’s most marginalised suburbs. This series shot in 2015 follows on from Nicola's original 2008 commission to create a series of portraits of teenagers deemed ‘at risk of exclusion’ by virtue of their demographic. A lot has changed in Hackney in the ensuing eight years and Nicola found a suburb in the midst of gentrification creating an even greater gulf for those on the margins.

(C) Nicola Dracoulis

(C) Nicola Dracoulis

(C) Nicola Dracoulis

Nathan "Natti" Miller's Notes from the Mississippi Delta

Natti describes this series as “visual notes of a traveller with a camera passing through”. What he doesn’t add is that this traveller has a highly developed eye and his visual rendering of the Mississippi Delta is rich in textural notes and emotions that encapsulate the essence of the blues.

(C) Nathan Miller

(C) Nathan Miller

(C) Nathan Miller

To find out more visit Head On here

Pulitzer Prize 2016 - Photography

Four New York Times photographers, together with the news agency Reuters, won this coveted award for their intense coverage of the refugee crisis in Europe. Congratulations to Tyler Hicks, Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev and Daniel Etter.

(C) Daniel Etter

 (C) Mauricio Lima

(C) Sergey Ponomarev

(C) Tyler Hicks

Friday Round Up - 15 April, 2016

This week on Friday Round Up - Winners of Chris Hondros Award, inaugural Magnum Photography Awards, Grief and Glory at Magnet Melbourne and Donna Ferrato's unfailing commitment to expose domestic violence.


Awards:
Chris Hondros Award

(C) Bryan Denton

Award-winning freelance photographer Bryan Denton is the recipient of this year’s Chris Hondros Fund Award, which was established in honour of Getty Images photojournalist Chris Hondros who was killed in 2011 while on assignment in Libya. 

Denton is a regular contributor to the New York Times and has worked throughout the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia and Afghanistan. Iranian photographer Kiana Hayeri is the recipient of the award in the Emerging Photographer category. Both will use their awards to pursue longterm projects. 

(C) Kiana Hayeri

Magnum Photography Awards

Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson

In 2017 Magnum Photos celebrates its 70th anniversary. In the lead to a year which will feature numerous events and exhibitions, the inaugural Magnum Photography Awards has been launched and is now accepting entries. Magnum has joined with LensCulture to present these awards. There will be 12 Winners and 20 Finalists from Documentary, Street, Portrait, Fine Art, Photojournalism and Open categories. In addition, the jury will select 7 photographers as "Jurors’ Picks” and award 5 "Student Spotlight” awards to young, up-and-coming talents. Enter here.


Exhibition: Melbourne

Grief and Glory - Victoria’s Unseen Anzac Photographic Treasures

Until 2 May
Magnet Galleries
Level 2
640 Bourke Street
Melbourne

Photographer & Activist:
Donna Ferrato - I Am Unbeatable

(C) Donna Ferrato

In 1982 American photographer Donna Ferrato took a photo assignment that changed her life. Shooting for Playboy Japan, Ferrato photographed the open marriage of a couple living in New Jersey. What she discovered wasn’t a happy-go-lucky lifestyle, but one of hidden domestic violence. 

More than 30 years later she is still fighting for the rights of women who are victims of domestic violence. Her series I Am Unbeatable celebrates those women who have left their abusers, but that’s only part of the story. Watch this incredible video on The Atlantic to learn more about her unrelenting commitment.

(C) Donna Ferrato

(C) Donna Ferrato


(C) Donna Ferrato


(C) Donna Ferrato

(C) Donna Ferrato

Friday Round Up - 8th April, 2016

This week on Friday Round Up - Omar Havana's Endurance, Getty Grants round open, Head On Photo Festival workshops and some great weekend reading.


Kickstarter Project
Omar Havana- Endurance: Earthquake Nepal

On the 25th April last year nearly 9000 people were killed and more than 22,000 injured in the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal. Countless thousands were left homeless. Among the shocked inhabitants of Katmandu that morning was Omar Havana, an award-winning Spanish photojournalist who along with his wife and neighbours fled their home as the building crumbled around them. “I was filled with fear and had no idea what was happening but, as we emerged onto the street, I felt sure that we were some of the lucky people,” he tells.

In the days following Havana’s photographs of the immediate aftermath were used by media around the world and have been published more than 1000 times. But more importantly Havana followed the story long after the world’s attention was taken elsewhere and travelled around the country to tell people’s stories. Endurance is a story of destruction, but also of recovery, a testimony to the endurance of the Nepali people. 

“One night, after running all day, photographing, as aftershocks struck repeatedly, I finally fell asleep, hugging my cameras,” he says. “Someone touched me. I immediately thought they might want to steal my cameras but I turned to find an old woman, a woman who had lost everything, covering me with her quilt. She said, “We need to take care of you. You are telling the world the situation in our country. At that moment, I began “Endurance.”

In association with FotoEvidence, Havana has launched a Kickstarter project to raise money to publish his book. “Endurance” will include over 70 black and white photographs shot across Nepal, immediately after the earthquake and in the months following. It will be printed in a hardbound edition, measuring 20 x 30 cm. 

Film director Bernardo Bertolucci, who used images from “Endurance” for a fundraising campaign in Rome to help Nepal, will write a foreword. Other contributors include: South African photographer Gareth Bright, AFP Nepali journalist Paavan Mathema and Amir Thapa, Senior Program Officer for International Medical Corps Nepal.

To find out more and support this campaign visit Kickstarter

Grants:

Getty Grants for Editorial Photography - Entries Open

The 2016 round for Getty Grants for Editorial Photography is now open. Last year around 400 photographers from 78 countries applied for one of five $US10,000 grants that are intended to provide the funding and freedom to pursue projects of personal and journalistic significance.

This year one Editorial Grant recipient will be chosen for the newly instituted David Laidler Memorial Award, in honour of this former employee who passed away in August 2015. David was instrumental in bringing the Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography programme to life.

Judges this year are Magnum’s Eli Reed, Time’s Deputy Director of Photogrpahy and Visual Enterprise Paul Moakley, National Geographic’s Director of Photogrpahy Sara Leen, Visa Pour L’Image’s Director General Jean-Francois Leroy and LA Times photographer Carolyn Cole. 

Apply here.

Workshops:
Head On Photo Festival - Sydney

Australia's largest annual photo festival opens at the end of April for a month of photography in Sydney. Included in this year's programme are a number of workshops. Spaces are limited so book your place now. And look out for the preview on Head On in the April issue of Pro Photo magazine and on Photojournalism Now later this month.

Master of Portraiture - Michael Grecco
Learn the secrets from the master of portraiture, Michael Grecco, who has created iconic portraits of some of the most recognized entertainment star in the world, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Will Ferrell, Penelope Cruz and Teri Hatcher.
 

Photojournalism with Ron Haviv

VII Agency co-founder and award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv will help you understand the reality of photojournalism and documentary photography and the importance of expressing your own voice. You will leave with a clearer understanding of what it takes and closer to defining your personal voice. 

Street Photography
Streetscaping: Meander through Sydney with Head On Photo Festival international guests, one eye on the street, one eye in the viewfinder. A Street Photography experience not to be missed!

Portfolio Reviews
Gain valuable feedback on your portfolio of work and learn tips on how to break into the area of the industry you are working towards. Choose your preferred industry leaders, from a list including gallery directors, curators, photographers and editors!

Weekend Reading:

Photojournalism Now: The Significance of Captions - L'Oeil de la Photographie

Attack on the Frontline Club - The Guardian

In Photography Follow Instinct and Emotion, Never the Market - Medium  

Courageous photographers shed light on their industry’s glaring gender disparity
Photography: A Democratic Language Not An Exclusive Club

Friday Round Up - 1st April, 2016

This week it’s all about books – three books are reviewed Erika Diettes’ Memento Mori: Testament to Life; Tanya Habjouqa’s Occupied Pleasures and Olof Jalbro’s Refuge.

Erika Diettes – Memento Mori: Testament to Life

Imagine your husband, child, lover, wife, or best friend abducted without warning or cause, tortured and murdered simple for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during a political conflict that no one really understands. Then imagine having no way to honour this person or their life because their body has either been mutilated beyond recognition or dumped where you cannot go.

This horror is what thousands of people live with everyday in Colombia where the armed conflict between the government, the guerillas and the drug lords have claimed over a quarter of a million people this past fifty years.

Colombian artist and anthropologist Erika Diettes has made it her life’s work to honour the victims creating four elaborate bodies of work that come together in Memento Mori: Testament to Life, an exquisite double volume with slipcase that does justice to this phenomenal collection.

I first interviewed Diettes in 2013 about her body of work Shrouds/Sudarios, which features haunting portraits of women as they remember watching loved ones tortured in front of them. These portraits are printed on a grand scale on linen to resemble shrouds. I remember seeing this exhibition hanging from the high ceiling of the Mining Exchange in Ballarat (for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale) and walking between the portraits that swayed in the breeze, the light fabric wrapping itself gently around my shoulders and sending shivers down my spine. I saw it again the following year in a church in Sydney (for Head On Photo Festival) and this time felt it was even more moving given the venue, the hushed tones of visitors, the candles lit in sympathy. 

Above: Shrouds/Sudarios

Diettes has continued to work on this project creating additional bodies of work that fit together to tell an extraordinary story that is at once politically and socially relevant, but also deeply personal – Diettes has spent many hours interviewing each of these women. This is a story beyond the horrors of conflict. It is a story of humanity, of loss and of love, a story that is underpinned by Diettes’ commitment to give voice to the victims.

“My work is inspired by the extremely complex social, political, and cultural situation that exists in Colombia, along with theoretical questions raised by my reaction to the unrelenting violence that my country has experienced for decades. I have decided to bear witness to that violence, and to give the victims – both those murdered and disappeared and their survivors – voice through my art," she says.

“Because the work originates in the direct testimonies of the families of the victims as well as in objects belonging to them, it assumes a significance that transcends aesthetic considerations. I create a physical and emotional space within both the images and their installations that is recognizable to the mourners as a memorial and that is also accessible to other viewers, allowing them to go beyond the idea of a violent event and to identify with the humanity of the people affected.”
In Drifting Away/Rio Abajo, images of artifacts of the disappeared – a shirt, shoe, pair of reading glasses – are photographed in water and then suspended in glass. In Relics/Relicarios personal effects are embedded in blocks of polymer resin that resemble tombstones. These two bodies of work are joined by Shrouds/Sudarios in one volume of Memento Mori: Testament to Life. In the other volume is the final body of work that brings all three together in photographs of these memorials displayed in cathedrals and churches around the world, lit with the candles of mourners and visitors. 

Above: Relics/Relicarios

Above: Drifting Away/Rio Abajo

This is an amazing body of work and I am honoured to have Memento Mori: Testament to Life in my collection.

Publisher: George F. Thompson Publishing

Artist Website: Erika Diettes

Tanya Habjouqa – Occupied Pleasures

Over four million Palestinians live in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The inhabitants of this region have lived with conflict for decades and there is a well-entrenched narrative around life here.

But in Occupied Pleasures, published by FotoEvidence, photographer Tanya Habjouqa, who has Circassian and Jordanian roots and grew up in the US in Texas, takes an unconventional approach to capturing the daily lives of those Palestinians living in the shadow of conflict.

Here we see women practising yoga on a mountainside; men pumping iron; a woman traversing the tunnels to attend a party, carrying flowers for the hostess; a family picnicking on the beach; a young girl surfing. In these pictures are humour and irony, laughter and sorrow, stories told through Habjouqa's unique insight; it is obvious she has a background in anthropology. She is also a founding member of Rawiya photo collective, founded by five female photographers from the Middle East.












All images (C) Tanya Habjouqa

Having worked as a war photojournalist, Habjouqa says with Occupied Pleasures she was looking for a new way to tell the Palestinian story that didn’t traverse the familiar “hackneyed tropes”.

"I am always grappling for an angle to shake up what so sadly are dogmatic, reductive views of this place…every story I have done was from an angle of bringing a fresh analysis, or new gateway into this place...having covered some dark events in the Region, Palestinians continue to amaze me, how they keep their humanity."

Habjouqa says Occupied Pleasures was a departure, "something far more intimate than anything I have ever done before. I had something to say in what I was documenting, a personal stake. It was for my children, a push back against misrepresentation. A move from traditional documentary to what is being called new documentary, and an attempt to say something different".

Occupied Pleasures is like a breath of fresh air in the rhetoric on conflict in the Middle East and is another title from FotoEvidence that pushes beyond the stereotypical boundaries to bring new insights.

Published by FotoEvidence

Olof Jarlbro - Refuge

One of the true pleasures of writing this blog is the opportunity to review books from around the globe. Often a publisher will write to me having discovered my work online and offer to send me a book that ordinarily I might not have seen. That was the case with Refuge by Swedish photographer Olof Jarlbro, which came to my attention quite unexpectedly.

Refuge documents those who have fled Syria and find themselves confined now to the refugee camps in Bulgaria. Why Bulgaria? Jarlbro says his choice was premised on the fact that this destination was one of the cheapest offered by smugglers.








“There were no wealthy Syrians who fled to Bulgaria. The refugees there were already economically fragile and from different minorities, that is why their stories felt important to me.”

Refuge begins with a story of Aleppo, the shattered lives of its inhabitants, as well as the shattered buildings. Jarlbro focuses on the people and their environs. In the quietness of these strong black and white images, many of which evoke thoughts of a ghost town, Jarlbro tells the story of what is lost juxtaposed against the strangeness of what has become daily life; a woman queues up to buy bread, a soldier calls to a stray cat, a man sits texting with his weapon over his shoulder, a child holds a gun in his open hand.

The second part of Refuge takes us into Bulgaria where refugees spend days, weeks, months on end faced with uncertainty. Housed in rough accommodation, the boredom and frustration is clear, but life goes on; a baby is fed, washing is hung on barren trees, tablets and mobile phones keep people connected, children sleep, mothers prepare meals, men play cards.



All images (C) Olof Jarlbro

Refuge follows Jarlbro’s book Syria: The War Within, which he shot in 2012 after entering the country illegally. He says, “During my first hours in Aleppo, we drove towards the bombs, the smoke, the frontline. Instinctively I wanted to go the opposite way – toward safety and security…I imagined war as entering the gates of Hell, but adding madness and the unthinkable to it”.

He says that experience gave him some inkling of what those fleeing were running from. But he also knew what they were leaving behind – full lives, homes, friends, family - a torment beyond understanding. Jarlbro says travelling to Bulgaria completed the picture allowing him to also document what the refugees were fleeing towards…an uncertain future, in a foreign country with little means or support, but a future that could still offer hope.

These aren’t easy photographs to look at, but then the situation isn’t easy either and in a small way through the act of looking we can connect and understand what these people face; for they are people first and foremost before the label refugee is given and here Jarlbro has given them the opportunity to be heard.

Publisher: Rough Dog Press

Easter Break

Dear Subscribers

There won't be a Friday Round Up this week as I'm taking full advantage of the Easter Break. I hope you too have a few days off and look forward to next week's Round Up.

Thanks for reading.
Alison Stieven-Taylor