Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - 7th July, 2017

This week Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up comes to you from Hong Kong where I'm a lecturer on a master tour for global journalism studies.

It is a fascinating time to be here given the city has just celebrated, or commiserated depending on your perspective, the 20th anniversary (1 July) of the handover from Britain to China. Meeting with the major media organisations has also delivered different perspectives on the future of journalism and the significance of this city as a hub of global media.

But this Hong Kong visit has not only been about media and politics, it has also been about seeing exhibitions. Today I share my favourite with you, the retrospective of Fan Ho's work.

Profile: 
Fan Ho (1931-2016) - The Cartier-Bresson of the East


Fan Ho



Born in Shanghai in 1931, Fan Ho began his love of photography at the age of 14 after he was given a Kodak Brownie. Four years later he bought a Rolleiflex, which became his camera of choice. When he moved with his family in 1949 to Hong Kong he began documenting the city, spending long days waiting for the right light, the right scene, his imagination sparked by the daily happenings on the street.

Fan Ho experimented with lighting using the elements he found on the streets - smoke, shadow, steam, water - as special effects. He favoured shooting at dusk and his subjects were the ordinary people on the streets and in the markets.





















As is often the case, Fan Ho never set out to create an historical visual document of Hong Kong, but that is exactly what his collection, shot in the 1950s and 1960s, has become. Later Fan Ho went on to work in motion pictures and is also revered as a film director, but his love for still photography remained throughout his life. He also shared his knowledge teaching at various universities around the world.

Considered the father of street photography in Hong Kong, in 1959 Fan Ho published his book of essays, "Thoughts on Street Photography" which is still in print today, but only available in Chinese.

Fan Ho saw photography's "special link to reality" as its greatest asset, yet he also acknowledged the complexities involved in capturing that decisive moment.

He spoke on ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, debates that still occupy photographers' thoughts today. Fan Ho believed objectivity "seeks to portray reality in a direct, straightforward manner," while subjectivity "aimed at portraying another type of truth and had to be seen more as a reflection of one's soul and spirit in nature".
















(C) All works Fan Ho


To find out more about Fan Ho's work and to buy his books visit the website here.

Next week I'll be back blogging in the freeze of Melbourne's winter, but for now I'm enjoying the 80+% humidity, the massive daily thunderstorms and pelting rain and the heat of the East. Have a great weekend.

Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - 30 June, 2017

This week on Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up a triple treat with Josef Koudelka in Berlin, Georgian photographer Daro Sulakauri's photo essay Black Gold and Siberian photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva's Amani. Plus some interesting weekend reading.

Exhibitions: Berlin
Josef Koudelka - Invasion/Exiles/Wall

“When I left Czechoslovakia, I was discovering the world around me. What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photographs.” Josef Koudelka

France, 1967 © Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos

This exhibition features three significant stages of work by Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka, his first dedicated exhibition in Germany for nearly 30 years. With around 120 photographs and projections this exhibition ranges from the Soviet occupation of Koudelka's homeland in 1968 to his time in exile. The exhibition is curated by Xavier Barral in cooperation with Sonia Voss and organised in partnership with the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam.

Czechoslovakia, 1968 © Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos 

Czechoslovakia, 1968 © Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos 

Czechoslovakia, 1968 © Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos 

C/O Berlin Foundation, Amerika Haus, HardenbergstraBe 22-24, 10623 Berlin

Photo Essay:
Daro Sulakauri - Black Gold

(C) Daro Sulakauri

Georgian photographer Daro Sulakauri’s photo essay on the mining town of Chiatura in Georgia is absolutely captivating. Sulakauri’s empathy with the miners and their families is palpable and her compositions take you right to the heart of this mining community. 

Once a bustling manganese ore mining town, since the collapse of the Soviet Union these miners, who toil for 12 hours a day, earn less than USD $300 a month. It is a brutal job in a harsh region where there are few creature comforts.

(C) Daro Sulakauri

(C) Daro Sulakauri

(C) Daro Sulakauri

(C) Daro Sulakauri

(C) Daro Sulakauri

You can read the full story on National Geographic's PROOF. 

Photo Essay:

Evgenia Arbugaeva - Amani

(C) Evgenia Arbugaeva

This photo essay, by one of my favourite photographers Evgenia Arbugaeva, is in complete contrast to the previous subject matter of this Siberian artist whose Weather Man and Tiksi series I’ve written about. But her visual signature is unmistakable and immediately I'm transported to another world. There's something so rich and hauntingly beautiful about her images that captivates me. 

In 2014 Arbugaeva turned her lens on Tanzania and the Amani Hill Research Station to “bring back the atmosphere of this dark, magical place,” as she told National Geographic’s Jeremy Berlin. This station is located in the remote Usambara Mountains where Arbugaeva worked with anthropologist Wenzel Geissler, to capture this “hidden world”. It’s a wonderful visual story told beautifully by Arbugaeva. Berlin’s story is equally engaging. You can read it and see more images here. 

(C) Evgenia Arbugaeva

(C) Evgenia Arbugaeva

 
(C) Evgenia Arbugaeva

Great Weekend Reading:

Photobooks - Australian photobook specialists and noted academics Doug Spowart and Vicky Cooper recently showcased a range of books from Australia and New Zealand at the Vienna Photo Book Festival with great success. Check out their blog posts at WotWeDid.

How Some Photographers Make a Living - World Press Photo

Lens Culture Interview with Justyna Mielnikiewicz

Alison Stieven-Taylor's review of Judith Crispin's The Lumen Seed on L'Oeil de la Photographie

Getting Others Right - the New York Times

Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - 23rd June, 2017

This week on Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - World Refugee Day 2017 (20th June) and some images that provide a sobering reminder of just how many people are in need.


Australians welcome refugees, but our federal government doesn't
(C) Greg Wood, Sydney (AFP/Getty)

Special feature:
World Refugee Day 2017

Play therapy - helping refugee children overcome trauma

(C) Philippe Carr/MSF

The world is facing the largest refugee crisis on record. Millions are displaced. Governments are slow to act and in terms of the humane treatment of refugees, Australia is one of the worst offenders.

According to the UNHCR in 2016 there were 22.5 million refugees. Of those refugees only 189,300 were resettled last year. More than half of the refugees are under the age of 18 years and many are born in refugee camps - a whole generation knows no other existence.

Africa still remains the continent where the largest number of refugees are “hosted” followed by the Middle East. Asia and the Pacific have the lowest number. 55% of refugees worldwide come from three countries - South Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria.

Doing research for today’s blog I came across numerous media articles about the plight of refugees. What I found incongruous was the advertising that appeared on many of these online sites - banner ads across pictures of refugees that were advertising ways to improve your investment fund; pictures of celebrities and half clad women; holidays in exotic locations; consumer goods on sale. The effect these ads have is to normalise the refugee crisis. It just becomes part of the visual noise and when there’s so much other information available it takes away from the import of these media articles and photographs in raising awareness.

While the plight of the Syrian refugees is currently headline news, and rightly so, there are many others that the West rarely hears about such as the more than 66,000 Sri Lankan refugees living across 109 camps in Tamil Nadu State in India. Some of these people have been living in miserable conditions in the camps for nearly 20 years with no prospect of change for the better. A scenario repeated across the world.

The size of the problem is overwhelming, but we cannot lose hope. The great work being done by so many is recognised, yet there is so much more to do and governments around the world need to take a global view and come together. We've heard it all before, but we need to keep saying it. Change is possible. We need to hold onto that belief. As the Dalai Lama says, change can begin with a single act. Sharing these photographs and raising awareness is a small contribution that may spark a conversation that may influence people to act.

This is where some of the world's 22.5 million refugees live:

Dadaab Refugee Camp Kenya - the world's largest (C) UN


Tamil Nadu State in India

Nyarugusu, Tanzania (below) - more than 290,000 people live in the refugee camp in Tanzania’s northwestern Kigoma District, the majority of whom come from neighbouring Burundi. Overcrowded, unsanitary and dangerous, camps like this struggle to provide even the most rudimentary shelter and care. Often perpetrators live in the camp along with their victims. The psychological trauma is beyond comprehension. This refugee camp is one of the oldest, established in 1959.

(C) Eleanor Weber Ballard/MSF


Tanzania (C) Erin Byrnes/AFP

Yida South Sudan (below) where 70,000 Sudanese refugees live


Yida camp, South Sudan from the air.


Yida camp on the ground.



The majority of Malian refugees living in Mbera camp in Mauritania (above and below) arrived in 2012 after violent clashes in north Mali and refugees numbers continue to rise. Photos: MSF



Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan (below) houses around 80,000 Syrians more than half of which are children. The camp is so large it is now considered Jordan’s fourth biggest "city".

Syria, ten, and Hassan, four, walked for almost 12 hours to cross the border from Syria to Jordan. 

They now live in Za’atari refugee camp with their mother.

 Za’atari refugee camp/Oxfam

Jabalia (below) is the largest of eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. Today nearly 110,000 refugees occupy an area of only 1.4 square kilometres. There is one health centre, high unemployment, electricity supply issues, high population density and 20 schools running double shifts to accommodate the large number of children.

Kakuma refugee camp Kenya (below)

J Craig VOA

The refugee camps outside Dolo Ado in Ethiopia (below) have become a sanctuary for Somalis fleeing the violence in their homeland.

Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - 16th June, 2017

This week on Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - a feature interview with legendary photojournalist Maggie Steber, the Every Brilliant Eye exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and a new group show for Colour Factory celebrating the darkroom. Plus the Maggie Diaz Portrait Prize is open for entries, closing 14 July.

Interview: 
Maggie Steber - The Secret Life of Lily LaPalma
Alison Stieven-Taylor







“I can’t wait to get home to my dead lizards in the freezer,” Maggie Steber tells me as we sit down to talk about this legendary photojournalist’s most personal body of work, The Secret Garden of Lily LaPalma, a fantasy world in which Steber’s artistic side is flourishing. I tell her I’m going to have to start my article with that quote. “Of course. That’s absolutely fine,” she laughs. But we’ll get to the dead lizards later.

Having spent more than three decades documenting some of humankind’s less than honourable moments, and witnessing more death and destruction than anyone’s psyche can bear, Steber is finding a new way to engage with photography and the results are exquisite.

In some ways Lily LaPalma has seen Steber reconnect with the type of photography she did as a child. “When I first started taking pictures I did this sort of work,” she explains. “I grew up as an only child and was brought up by my mother who was a scientist and very eccentric. We had a very lively, cultural life”.

(C) All images Maggie Steber

In her formative years she was drawn to the dark side of fantasy. Steber experimented making what she calls “very strange pictures. I loved science fiction, as well as pulp fiction and B-Grade horror movies. I loved to be scared to death sometimes as a kid,” she laughs.

As a student of photography her professor told her she’d never make a living out of her photographic art. Unable to imagine a life that didn't involve taking pictures and telling stories, she moved into documentary photography, becoming the first female picture editor for Associated Press in New York.

After several years behind the picture desk, and with the threat of being promoted to management, a career step Steber wasn't interested in, she threw in her job, left her boyfriend behind and headed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) which was in the grips of a long guerrilla war.

In Rhodesia Steber sought out the back-story to the war, something she found far more interesting than the fighting itself, forging a narrative style that would come to define her documentary work. “All of these people who had built a life, who had established farms, who were the colonial rulers, they were fleeing and that was the story I wanted to cover. I stayed for two years until the ceasefire and then returned to the United States”.

Back home she started working as a photojournalist, but says it was “hard” and she found herself covering a lot of news stories, which she didn't enjoy. “You know the five hour stake-out to get a single shot. That was not for me”.

Steber decided she wanted to tell stories and began experimenting with long form photo essays. “I started working in Cuba quite a bit, on my own dime and time. I’d do portraits or whatever I had to do, to earn enough to go. Over time I built a big body of work, but it was terrible, and I never showed it,” she laughs at the memory. “But I learned how to do a long term project and to tell a story”.

After Cuba, Steber decided she was ready to try her hand at a long-term study. She thought about going back to Africa, which she really missed, but it was too far away. At the time she was freelancing for a French picture magazine and they commissioned her to go to Haiti. “I fell in love with Haiti. After 30 years I still work in Haiti doing various projects. That early work really put me on the map and that’s when things changed in my career and I used the Haiti work to get my foot in the door with National Geographic magazine.” A relationship that continues today.

Steber’s career has been a mixed bag, as is the case with most freelancers. She’s shot fashion and commercial work, often as a way to fund her documentary photography, but at the heart of everything she shoots is the desire to tell a story.

Which brings us to The Secret Garden of Lily LaPalma, in which Steber’s skills as a master storyteller are clearly on display. But there is also a sense of playfulness here, as well as experimentation making the work fresh and engaging. “I’m reinventing myself as a photographer,” she says brightly. 

Steber tells me that she was one of triplets, but the other two babies were stillborn. As an only child, but patently aware that there were meant to be two others, she gave her sisters names. One of them was Lily, who was dangerous and adventurous, dark and mysterious and it is this alter ego who Steber draws on for inspiration. “In Lily’s secret garden there are no rules, no boundaries and anything can happen.” Steber’s eyes sparkle with possibility as she warms to the story.

“Suddenly I had this place I could play and it didn't have to be real, or sad or happy or dangerous, it could be anything. It was somewhere that I could act out all of these things through Lily. The thing I love about the Garden is that I don't have to care if anybody likes it. You know as photographers we are always worrying about whether people like our work.”

After years of experimenting, and sharing some work on Instagram, her favourite social media platform, Steber is now bringing The Secret Garden of Lily LaPalma out into the wider world. “Yes I am,” she says, her childhood Texan drawl suddenly noticeable. “But the Garden is not me, it is Lily. Sometimes it is fun to be bad and Lily is always killing people, so it’s pulp fiction, it’s fantasy”.

The pictures in the Garden are spontaneous, often found images that Steber works with later in Photoshop. She also uses Instagram filters and other apps. “I’ll be out and see something and just photograph it, which is a different way for me to work. Or I might be walking with friends and I’ll be like, oh can you lie down there for a moment, or could you run down that hall!” It’s clear she’s having a lot of fun and inviting viewers to use their own imagination in reading the work.

The Garden has not only provided a way for Steber to spread her artistic wings. Lily has also allowed her to exorcise some personal demons. “I’ve seen some terrible things in my life,” she says quietly acknowledging that many of the darker moments she has witnessed stay with her. We talk a little about art as therapy, and she agrees that in some ways playing in Lily’s Garden has been a release. “What I can say is I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time. I’m gleeful in the Garden”.

And we're back to the lizards. “For the last few years I’ve been collecting dead lizards and freezing them.” We both burst into peals of laughter. “I live in Miami and I have a courtyard and these small lizards come in and I have cats and they are always catching them and killing them. I love them, they are like little dinosaurs, so I started saving them, wrapping them in foil and putting them in the freezer.” There’s more laughter and a caveat that she doesn't use the freezer for anything else. “It’s funny, when I was a little girl we had a freezer and my mother would bring home specimens from her lab, and she’d tell me not to eat anything out of the freezer. So I’m more like my mother than I’d care to admit!”.

Steber, who is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, is continuing her work on the Garden and the lizards will be its sentries. “They’ll keep the meanness, the criticism out. They are just beautiful. Some that didn't go in the freezer have deteriorated and they are now these amazing delicate skeletons”.

“The Secret Garden has given me a playground in which I can exercise my creative instincts and nature without any boundaries and any cares. At this point in my life I feel like I’ve earned this moment to play with something I have treated in a very serious nature and given up a lot in order to do.”

“My life has been so enriched by photography,” she says. “You know I’m just a little nobody from Texas. I’ve had a life I never thought I’d have and I can’t believe it sometimes. I’m grateful to photography and mostly grateful to the people in my pictures.”

See more images on Maggie Steber’s Instagram

In Brief:

Exhibitions: Melbourne

Every Brilliant Eye - NGV

(C) Patricia Piccinini - Psychogeography 1996 from the Psycho series
National Gallery of Victoria

This new exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Melbourne explores the cultural phenomena of the nineties - grunge, techno, cyborgs, identity politics and DIY - with more than 100 works by some of the foremost artists of the period.

Util 1 October

Ian Potter Centre

Federation Square

Cnr. Flinders & Swanston Streets

Melbourne

For more information click here

For the Love of the Dark - Colour Factory

(C) Tom Goldner

A group show celebrating the craft of the darkroom. Artists include Phill Virgo, Linsey Gosper, Shane Waghorne, David Tatnall, Ellie Young, Tom Goldner, Lynette Zeeng and Sophie Caligari.

Until 1 July
Colour Factory
409–429 Gore Street
Fitzroy