Friday Round Up - 17th June, 2016

This week on Friday Round Up three photo essays that talk about issues that often don't find their way into mainstream media.

And if they do, these stories aren't given the depth of coverage required for a broader audience to begin to understand what these individual stories are about and how they influence and impact humanity as a whole: Sean Gallagher's The Silent Fields; Sara Terry's Aftermath; and David Verberckt's project on Myanmar's stateless people, the Rohingya.

Photo Essays:

Sean Gallagher - The Silent Fields - Pesticide Poisoning in Punjab


(C) Sean Gallagher

Punjab is the food bowl of India, the country’s most significant agricultural area, but the high use of pesticides, fertiliser and insecticides over the past four decades has turned this region into a toxic bowl. 

Here an increasing number of babies are being born with mental and health disabilities and residents are dying from various cancers which can be attributed to the contamination of soil, water and of course food. 

(C) Sean Gallagher

(C) Sean Gallagher

(C) Sean Gallagher



Sukhbeer Kaur (19) holds a portrait of her father, Pippal Singh, who died in 2010 of cancer, aged 40. It is believed that excessive pesticide use in the region over the past 30-40 years has led to the accumulation of dangerous levels of toxins such as uranium, lead and mercury which are contributing to increased health problems including cancers, birth defects and mental disabilities in children. It's a hidden epidemic which is gripping the Punjab region in northeast India which for decades has been the country's 'bread basket'. (C) Sean Gallagher

Harmangod Singh (6) sits next to a portrait of his mother, Charnajeet Kaur, who died in 2010 of brain cancer, aged only 31.  (C) Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher is a multi-award winning photographer based in Asia for more than a decade. 

His work on environmental issues and their impact on communities is influenced by his background, he has a degree in zoology, and his desire to create work that can help to affect change. 

The recipient of numerous Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grants, Gallagher is also represented by National Geographic Creative and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. 

I've featured his work here before for the simple reasons that is is incredibly important, and truly outstanding. 

You can read Sean’s full report on Punjab here. 


Sara Terry - Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace

(C) All images Sara Terry

The idea that “war is only half the story” is what drives the Aftermath Project, a non-profit organisation founded by photographer Sara Terry whose own work on Bosnia and Hercegovina documents the impact that war (1992-1995) had on individuals and also celebrates their efforts to rebuild their lives.

Terry objective is to show the other side of war, the stories the mainstream media rarely focuses on.

To find out more visit the Aftermath Project here.

David Verberckt - The Stateless Rohingya 

There are around one million Rohingya, a Muslim minority, living in Myanmar in the northwest of that country.

Deprived of citizenship, the Rohingya live a life of persecution and deprivation, denied the opportunity to work legally and to receive basic services such as education and healthcare.

As a consequence they live in an impoverished limbo, their children born into a stateless world where there is little hope for a brighter future. 

(C) All images David Verberckt

Verberckt is a freelance photojournalist based in Budapest.

For twenty years he worked with MSF and also the European Union in Afghanistan, Africa and Bosnia before fully committing himself in 2013 to a life of reportage photography.

This body of work is part of a series on statelessness shot in Myanmar, Bangladesh and India with the Bihari and Rohingya peoples.

To see more of David's work click here. 

Friday Round Up - 10th June, 2016

This week on Friday Round Up the focus is on women photographers: two photo essays, one depicting the survivors 70 years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the other drawing focus on mental health in Bangladesh. Plus an exhibition of late nineteenth century photography at the Tate Britain, and some interesting weekend reading about the New York Times, Snapchat and working with NGOs.

Photo Essay:
Keiko Hiromi - 70 Years After...

This is a significant, and brilliantly executed, project by Japanese photographer Keiko Hiromi. She has interviewed survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts and photographed them in the locations where they were on the day the horrific power of nuclear warfare became a reality. You can read the full interviews on her website here. Please take the time, these are important stories that should not be forgotten. Below are excerpts from some of the stories. 

"The next morning, Hiroshima had been burned to dirt. I saw skeletons, dead bodies of half burned, carbonized bodies, swelled bodies whose gender you could not tell. It was eerily quiet. I walked back to my home in Miyajima. This is when I found out that my younger sister had died.” Hiroshi Hosokawa (above).

"A beam of strong light came in from northern window, and I wondered what it was. Then the huge blast broke through the windows. We did not know what to do, we were panicking. Everyone was crying. I guess I was crying, too.”  Tamiko Shiroishi (above).

"On night of August 9th, we spent a night at the mountain. Nagasaki was burning. It was a cold night. I could not sleep. In the morning, I came down with my relatives to Nagasaki. This was when I first saw dead bodies. I was scared. But I also wanted to see it. I looked to the side. It was two men wearing a factory uniforms. They did not have any visible injuries. Nagasaki was covered with ashes, it was like snow. There was no road, we walked through ashes to air raid shelter. There were many skeletons in the ashes. There were a lot of dead bodies in the ruins. It smelled very strong. It must have been smell of bodies burning. Inside the air raid shelter, there were a lot of people. Many were badly injured and burned. The shelter was filled with crying and a horrible odor. They just lied there and dying, no one got treated." Sachiko Matsuo (above).

“On August 9, 1945, I heard a big bomb was dropped in Nagasaki. My entire family was in Nagasaki. I got ready, carried my youngest child (8 months old) on my back and held the hand of 3 years old Masahiro. I headed to Nagasaki within a few days. We took a boat to Mogi harbor, and walked approx. 10km to Nagasaki city. When I got to Nagasaki, I ran into one of my husband’s relatives. “Uragami is all gone” he said. I found a death toll. I did not see any of my family names. “Maybe they are alive” I had a hope. My hope was shuttered, when I found out that most of my family died of the blast instantly. There was no one to report the dead. There was nothing left in Uragami district. I did get to see one of my sisters who survived the blast. We stayed with her over night. Next morning, I said to her "take care and I will return soon." and I went back to Amakusa. When I came back to Nagasaki next time, she had died. I did not think she would die like that. I heard she lost all her hair before dying. She was 21 years old." Misao Hirano and her son Masahiro (above).

Photo Essay:
Allison Joyce - Mental Health in Bangladesh

I discovered this body of work in a recent article in Huck magazine on the Koan Collective a group of six young photojournalists. Allison Joyce is based in Mumbai and is tackling important topics: abortion, riots, rape, life, death and the environment. Here's a selection of images from her project on mental health in Bangladesh.










All images (C) Allison Joyce
Out of interest, a 'koan" is a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment. (Thanks to the Oxford Dictionary).


Exhibition: London
Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age

1906: Photographer Minna Keene reinterprets Rossetti’s 'Prosperine' with this portrait of her daughter Violet, who also went on to be a photographer.

This exhibition features a number of photographs taken in the late 1800s and early twentieth century, illuminating the connections between early photography and Pre-Raphaelite and impressionist works. Amongst the photographs on show are works by six women photographers who were successful portrait artists and commercial photographers at that time. Check out the dramatic captions of Julia Margaret Cameron's works. Wonderful.

Isabella Grace by Clementina Hawarden (1861-62)

Julia Margaret Cameron "Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die!" 1867

Julia Margaret Cameron "So Like a Shatter'd Column Lay the King" 1875

Zaida Ben-Yusuf "The odor of pomegranates" 1899

On at the Tate Britain until 25 September

Interesting weekend reading:

Poynter: The New York Times of the Future is Beginning to Take Shape
Less stilted writing and more visual stories. "[Masthead editors] have been meeting with department heads and others to collect ideas about how to build a newsroom that produces fewer perfunctory articles and a greater array of story forms, including more visual journalism, and conversational writing."

TIME: Why Snapchat Could Change How Photographers Tell Stories
“Snapchat brings the reader into the story. Each viewer becomes a part of the assignment. They are my travel companions,” John Stanmeyer.

Lensculture: Working with NGOs
MYOP director Olivier Laban-Mattei talks to Kyla Woods about the benefits of working with an agency and the ethics behind working for NGOs.

Friday Round Up - 3rd June, 2016

This week Barbara Davidson, Ryuichi Hirokawa and Look 3 Festival. Plus a reminder that Auckland Festival of Photography starts this weekend. To see Photojournalism Now's preview on the festival click here.

Photo Essay: Barbara Davidson

I greatly admire the work of Los Angeles Times photojournalist Barbara Davidson so it is always a pleasure to share her work on Photojournalism Now. 

Her latest story is about girls as young as 12 years who have been saved from prostitution in Bihar, the poorest state in India.

Davidson again delivers an evocative visual essay that shows how one school near the India/Nepal border is working to give these girls a brighter future. 

Many of these girls were destined to become prostitutes in makeshift brothels set up in the family home, or to be sold as sex slaves. 

The school, which is funded by Apne Aap and the Bihar state government, “aims to break the bonds of caste and inequality”. 

 

You can see more images and read the full story here.
(C) All images Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times

Back Story: Ryuichi Hirokawa

“Palestinians made me a photojournalist,” Ryuichi Hirokawa

Perhaps today he is best known as the founder of the magazine Days Japan, but as a young university graduate, Japanese photojournalist Ryuichi Hirokawa was enamoured with the idea of living in a kibbutz so in 1967 he travelled to Israel.

He was expecting to find paradise, but instead he arrived in a time of great turmoil and not long after the Six Day War erupted. 

That trip was to shape Hirokawa’s future in a way he couldn’t anticipate. 

Fascinated with the ruins of an old Palestinian village that he discovered near the kibbutz he was living in, Hirokawa inadvertently began to uncover the history of the Palestinian plight. 

This story has occupied him for more 40 years resulting in an extensive body of work that includes photographs, the documentary film Palestine 1948 Nakba and oral histories.

Hirokawa made his name as a photojournalist with his coverage of the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in Lebanon. 

One of the first journalists to enter the camps, Hirokawa’s 8mm footage launched his career, but by that time he was already invested in the Palestinian story. 

To date Hirokawa has researched and documented the histories of around 500 villages that have vanished. 

He has also set up a charity, the Japanese Committee for the Children of Palestine, which raises funds to care for orphans and to build kindergartens.

(C) All images Ryuichi Hirokawa

Festivals:Look 3 - Charlottesville, USA

This is definitely a must-attend photography festival that brings together exhibitions and talks with some of the most interesting photographers working today. I haven't been to Look 3 before, but it is on my to do list. Here's a peek at what's in store this year. 

Look 3 Featured Artists this year include Nick Brandt, Gabriella Iturbide, Yuri Kozyrev, Frans Lanting, Sheila Pree Bright, Christopher Morris and Ruddy Roye. There's a host of artists talks and "In Conversation" series also. Check out the website for the full programme, dates and venues.

Nick Brandt’s Inherit The Dust
Nick will also be "In Conversation" with legendary photography scholar Vicki Goldberg  

Graciela Iturbide's Naturata 

Frans Lanting's Encounters 

Sheila Pree Bright's #1960Now

Christopher Morris's War Politics Fashion
Christopher will be "In Conversation" with MaryAnne Golon too

Ruddy Roye's When Living is a Protest

Alexia Foundation 25

Celebrating 25 years supporting documentary photographers, the Alexia Foundation presents works from Aaron Vincent Elkaim's Where the River Runs Through (recipient 2016 Alexia Grant) and Mary F. Calvert's Missing in Action: Homeless Women Veteran (recipient 2014 Alexia Women’s Initiative Grant). 

 
(C) Mary F. Calvert


  (C) Mary F. Calvert


 (C) Mary F. Calvert