Photojournalism Now: landscape photography

Showing posts with label landscape photography. Show all posts

August 11, 2017

Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - 11th August, 2017

This week on Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - Christian Thompson documents the world's chronic waste problem with a focus on Ghana, the Bob and Diane Fund calls for entries and a new exhibition at Sydney's Blackeye Gallery. Next week a special feature on the 2017 Ballarat International Foto Biennale.

Photo essay:
Christian Thompson - Waste

(C) Christian Thompson

More often than not photographs do need captions, but in the case of Christian Thompson's visual documentation of the waste problem facing Ghana, these pictures speak for themselves. The west continues to send its waste to foreign shores, and what isn't delivered in containers on ships (which is a huge energy resource drain), washes up on the beaches. And we are all complicit. It is time to stop producing so many things that can't be fixed or can't be safely recycled. Consumption is killing the planet, and its people. For all the things we know today, and for the amazing leaps in technology, we as a species are irrefutably stupid, greedy and bent on our own destruction.

And it is not like we haven't seen images of this kind before. The late, great Stanley Greene's brilliant series on eWaste sent shivers down my spine, especially when he told me how ill he felt shooting in these confined, toxic spaces. But still, he continued to work convinced the world needed to see.

(C) Stanley Greene - India

Greene is not the only one to risk his own health in order to expose these stories.

In India, China and Tibet UK photojournalist Sean Gallagher has documented the environmental degradation caused by industry and mining on the environment.

(C) Sean Gallagher - Tibetan Plateau

Russian photojournalist Vlad Sokhin has photographed communities in the Pacific at risk of disappearing with the rising of the ocean, such as Kiribati.

(C) Vlad Sokhin - Kiribati in the central Pacific ocean

And Canadian Edward Burtynsky has shown the ravages of mining on the landscape.

(C) Edward Burtynsky

These are just a few of the dedicated photographers turning their lens on one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue to face humankind this century, the destruction of our planet. We have the visual and scientific evidence. Where is the social and political will? As these photos show, we are not doing enough.

Swedish photographer Maja Daniels was the inaugural grantee of the Bob and Diane Fund Grant created last year by Gina Martin in memory of her parents. In an interview with the New York Times in 2016, Daniels said that she spent a year getting to know the staff and the relatives of patients at the St. Thomas de Villeneuve hospital in Bain-de-Bretagne, France. It was only after developing these close relationships that she picked up her camera. Over the next two years, she photographed those living with Alzheimer Disease or dementia. The result is Into Oblivion, a beautiful, poignant and very human story, told from the heart.

The grant round for next year opens on 1 September, 2017. You can find out more here.

Exhibition: Sydney
Black Lines - Group Show

(C) Chris Round

This exhibition which is currently on at Blackeye Gallery in Sydney’s Darlinghurst features an eclectic selection of photographs that focus on the built environment.

The show includes works by Chris Round, David Manley, Tom Evangelidis, Rob Tuckwell, Tom Blachford, Damien Drew, Rhiannon Slatter, Chris Walters, Terrence Chin, Luc Remond, Rodrigo Vargas, Gary Sheppard, Vin Rathod, Jade Cantwell, Richard Glover and Kate Ballis.

It’s an engaging collection that shows the photographers' individual approaches and perspectives in capturing our urban environments.

Until 20 August
Blackeye Gallery
3/138 Darlinghurst Road
Darlinghurst

July 28, 2017

Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - 28th July, 2017

This week Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up is dedicated to my wonderful mother-in-law Nancy Taylor who passed away this week at the age of 83. She was a very important figure in my life, a woman whose amazing spirit carried her through life with joy and dignity despite the hardships she faced. I'm going to miss her.

Nancy loved to travel and equally loved photography. Her own archive is quite extensive and contains photographs of her many trips to places where few women of her generation travelled on their own including Zimbabwe and China. I know she would like the collection I share with you today from Sebastião Salgado's Genesis, Edward Burtynsky's China and finally, Nick Brandt's, On this earth, a shadow falls. RIP dear Nan.

Genesis
Sebastião Salgado

China
Edward Burtynsky

(C) Edward Burtynsky
On this earth, a shadow falls
Nick Brandt

(C) Nick Brandt

June 16, 2017

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

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

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

May 12, 2017

Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - 12th May, 2017

This week on Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up - three very different exhibitions are on in Melbourne with works by Helga Leunig, a group show on street photography and Tom Goldner. Plus David Katzenstein's fabulous Bronx Bodegas photo essay. And for those in Sydney, don't forget that Head On Photo Festival is on until the end of the month.

Exhibitions:
Helga Leunig - 3 weeks in Cuba
Australian documentary photographer Helga Leunig brings to life the everyday in her beautiful, relaxed and joyful images of Havana, Cuba.

(C) All images Helga Leunig

Until 7 July
3 weeks in Havana
Epworth Art Gallery
1 Epworth Place
Waurn Ponds Geelong
(about an hour from Melbourne)

Group Show - Shot in the Heart of Melbourne
This annual street photography and photojournalism exhibition, which is now in its 6th year, features work by 21 diverse photographers who use the city as their canvas to “celebrate the decisive, and often indecisive, but always graceful moments that occur within our gritty, yet beautiful city”. Presented by the Australian Association of Street Photographers.

'Degraves Street Reflection' Mark Lourensz

'K9 Uber' Kathy Chapman

'Footscray Station Footbridge' Joe Chow

'Bourke Street from Spencer Street' Joe Chow

Until 22 May
Victorian Artists Society
430 Albert Street
East Melbourne

Tom Goldner - Passage
Melbourne photographer, and gallery owner, Tom Goldner's Passage features photographs taken on medium format film and meticulously printed by Goldner in the Fox Darkroom which he founded in 2014. These contrasty, black and white images of the Mont Blanc regions of Italy, France and Switzerland taken in 2015 and 2016, capture this majestic landscape, and show how analogue practices can bring something new to the contemporary landscape discourse.

Photo Essay:

David Katzenstein - Radiant Excess: Inside Bronx Bodegas

I love this series that captures this American tradition in all its colourful eccentricity and celebrates the diversity of one of New York's most iconic boroughs, The Bronx. To see more visit David Katzenstein's website.