My work on foreclosed homes in Detroit has actually been a continuation of a project that started in Fort Myers, Florida in September 2008. For me the major concentration of the work is on the houses or what’s left of the houses. I chose to photograph them mostly straight on like my street work in a very blunt fashion. To let the houses speak for themselves.
After going to Florida and continuing in Detroit I realized that foreclosure is one part of a circle. There is homelessness, job loss, economic difficulties, etc, etc, etc. In Detroit the problem is not only a subprime problem it’s a problem of people who lost their jobs. And this has been going on for many years. So it’s a much more serious situation. When I went to Detroit - even though I had known that the city was pretty desolate - I was amazed that a major city in America in 2009 can look like this.

Certain areas look like Berlin after World War II or like Beirut. Something is wrong here. Recently I have read books and articles and watched television shows on the foreclosure problem. How can you have a trillion dollar industry that’s not regulated? This was a scam from the beginning - that’s not to say that some homeowners aren’t at fault also, one of the problems is giving mortages to people who have a history of no credit or of bad credit. A big problem in Detroit was people refinancing their morgages and not being able to keep up with their monthly payments. Something is very wrong with a policy like this. But when I arrived in Detroit I saw a city government that does not take care of its people and a lot of those people have stopped caring. I mean I don’t care what the excuse is - how do you leave so many buildings that are almost totally destroyed standing. Kids can get hurt playing in them, it’s a breeding ground for drugs and prostitution. Property values go down, nobody wants to live in these areas, To me it almost seems like they are left standing so that one day they drive everybody out and grand new subdivisions can be made.

What was really sad for me in Detroit was that many of the destroyed houses were well made and beautiful houses at one time, they were like Grande Dames. Detroit at one time had the highest standard of living for blue collar workers because of the auto industry. It’s all gone. This makes the destruction even sader, it’s not like a dilapidated trailer in ruins. There was an elegance here - the houses were beautiful - it’s so sad. There were serious memories in these houses, people lived there for 50 - 70 years. When these houses were built there was pride in craftsmanship and you saw it in the houses. It’s sad.

Links
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Detroit: The Troubled City"
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Foreclosure"
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum Portfolio
» Bruce Gilden's Books (Signed from the Magnum Store)
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Coney Island"
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "The Rat Story"
» Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Fashion Magazine"

On Saturday June 8th, 1968 the body of Robert F Kennedy was carried by a special Funeral Train from Penn Station in New York City to Union Station in Washington DC.

Bobby Kennedy’s last words before he lapsed into unconsciousness after he was shot in Los Angeles on the night of June 5th, 1968 were: “Is everybody alright?”

Oscar winning documentary maker Jon Blair is starting work on a ground-breaking documentary based on the memories of those who watched RFK’s funeral train go by. The film will be focusing on the extraordinary photographs taken from the train by Paul Fusco, combined with interviews with some of the tens of thousands of Americans who lined the tracks.

We recently spoke with Francisca Fuentes, the researcher for the project, to learn more about the film. She had this to say:

I started BURN MAGAZINE just before Christmas 2008. So we have been rocking along now for just over a month. BURN is a spinoff of my 2 year old Road Trips blog which was heavily influenced by both Alec Soth and Martin Fuchs. The very nature of my blog, and the evolving BURN, is a clear educational imperative and so in 2008 I created a $5,000 grant to be given to an emerging photographer who needed financial assistance with a project. Sean Gallagher was the first recipient of the Emerging Photographer Fund grant of $5,000. to continue his environmental series on the "desertification" of China.

For 2009 I have announced a $10,000 grant which comes under the non-profit umbrella of the Magnum Cultural Foundation. The guidelines for submissions can be found on BURN. The deadline for this grant is March 15, 2009. Finalists will be juried by a peer group of 5. Two of which will be from Magnum and the other three will be respected members of the gallery and publishing world. I will NOT be one of the jurors. Why? Because I have "coached" too many to be impartial.

In my role as curator of BURN MAGAZINE, I spend a lot of time reviewing portfolios, editing work, and generally trying to answer the myriad of questions of so many young photographers who are often vexed by the complexities of our craft. The work published on BURN comes primarily from the readers of BURN, but I do plan a series of profiles on various Magnum photographers and talent from other agencies and galleries as well. Right now BURN is just me and my laptop and one super tech helper. Give us just a bit of funding and we will BURN the house down (so to speak!).

My overall goal is to create enough sponsorship so that I can eventually give out several stipends during the year to produce original photography for BURN. Many of the published essays were quite literally originated online with the photographer and me collaborating, much as I would do in one of my own workshops which I have been teaching since I was about 23. I have been teaching almost as long as I have been photographing. The pay back, pay forward ,concept is just in my blood. Of course, I am no good to anyone as a teacher if I am not also deeply engaged in my own work, publishing books, taking assignments, creating exhibitions, and generally being totally immersed in our craft, our art, our life...

With the publishing world changing right before our eyes and a recession hanging over most of us, I do see more opportunities than ever before. It will take a quick wit and some nimble thinking and stealth, but I truly believe that the audience will in effect become the publishers. I do see a time for BURN when the online audience will be sufficient enough to create the sponsorship for not only stipends to finish self started projects, but will lead to an annual print publication as well. Dreaming?? Yes, of course, but how do you think I got into this business in the first place??

One of the things we have talked about at Magnum is creating quite literally "channels" for various photographers off of this website.
Certainly there have not been two better leaders than Alec and Martin. I think together we will literally set the tone for the future. Most importantly, it is not about US. It is about YOU. We might be able to guide a bit, but you will be the stars of the show.

So, hang out here on the Magnum Blog. I plan to be more active here as well. Join us also on BURN. One way or another we will try to keep you informed and enlightened and you will do the same for us.

Links:
» BURN Magazine
» Magnum Cultural Foundation
» David Alan Harvey's Magnum Portfolio
» David Alan Harvey's Books (Signed from the Magnum Store)

Click the image for a popup version of the slideshow. Phnom Penh. 24/01/2009: Portrait of Prime Minister Hun Sen a few hours before final eviction of Dey Krohom. © John Vink/Magnum Photos

I started to work on the Bassac area in 2000 as part of my Quest for Land project (download a PDF on the project here).
It seems it will never end. After Sambok Chap (1300 families) and Dey Krohom (about 400 families), next in line will be Group 78 (88 families), and then it will be the inhabitants of "The Building", an iconic building conceived in the 60's by architect Vann Molyvann.
After that it will be Boeung Kak lake (4225 families)... All destroyed in the name of development.

Left: Cambodia. Angsah Chambak (Pursat). 28/05/2008: Families evicted from Battambang province on their way to Phnom Penh resting at Arong Krouit pagoda after having walked all the way from Bavel district. Right: Cambodia. Phnom Penh. 13/07/2008: Funeral of Khem Sambo, journalist at pro-opposition paper Moneaksa Khmer, killed with his 21 yr old son by gunmen near the Olympic Stadium on 11/07/2008. © John Vink/Magnum Photos

In late September I made my latest visit to Poland, to finally bring some closure to 'The Sound of Two Songs', which began way back in 2004. These are some of those recent pictures.

But what does it mean to bring a project to an end? Why stop now? After all, there are none of the usual reasons: I'm not bored; I don't think I'm repeating myself (much); I don't yet have a publisher, nor do I have an exhibition looming on the horizon.

I used to worry that I wasn't portraying Poland fairly, but I now realise this is surely impossible… I can only ever represent my own experience. Yet I still felt there were gaps in what I already had which needed filling. I wanted a picture of the huge advertisement hoardings that are a feature of any Polish urban conurbation (cross the border into Germany, where advertising is regulated, to notice the difference!). I wanted a picture from the Baltic coast and I'm happy with the one you see here; the poster stuck high on the rusty pier selling apartments in sunny Dubai is a bonus. I wanted more 'modern' buildings: the discovery of an old block of flats wrapped in a computer-generated photograph of the new one was a gift. And the woman (she's there, in the car) selling forest mushrooms and home-made honey has parked beneath a towering digital thermometer, presumably bought with European Union funding which is filtering through to rural communities at last. Other pictures might be the link I need to bring oddments from previous trips back into the fray.

When a project is finished I usually feel a kind of emptiness inside, along with a sense of panic (since I'm unclear what I'll do next) and that dreadful feeling of anti-climax many will recognise. This project has, after all, been a big part of my life for the past four years. But I now have more than 2000 negatives, and because of the sheer cost of working in large format I rarely take more than one of anything. So it's time, finally, to look at what I have and try to make some sense of it. This is the difficult bit.

Too much work. That's the best reason I can offer for why this latest visit will also be my last. At least, that is, until I start my next Polish project...

Links
» View the slideshow for this article
» Mark Power's Magnum Portfolio
» Mark Power's Books (in the Magnum Store)

January last year I travelled to a remote part of Greece called Arcadia. To the ancient Greeks Arcadia was a rural utopian idyll where rustics lazed happily in the countryside, in a land of plenty. Returning 5000 years later to the same region of Greece was quite a different experience. Instead of a bucolic green landscape, I found one devastated by the relentless hunt for fossil fuels. 60% of Greece’s electricity is derived from lignite (brown coal). This involves stripping away whole landscapes – fields, villages, whatever, to get at the stuff to feed the nearby power station. What I found in Megalopolis was Greece’s second largest lignite mine, where the village of Anthohori was simply wiped off the map by bulldozers digging ever further into the earth to feed coal to the fire.

Greece. Megalopolis. The Santa Maria church. The last building left in the village of Anthohori. Picture taken in 2007. © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

All that remained when I got to village was the church of Santa Maria fifteen feet up on a pedestal of earth after the rest of the village was demolished. Why was it there? Because the mining teams were too superstitious to knock it down in case God’s wrath enflamed them. God’s wrath is an interesting concept when considering climate change and such matters. Before the 19th century (even today in some places) any severe storm or earthquake was blamed on God’s anger at the people. Luckily science stepped in and recognized there may be other reasons for hurricanes – such as climate cycles maybe exacerbated by our own irresponsible use of fossil fuels. But not in time to save Arcadia...

Links
» Stuart Franklin's Magnum Portfolio
» Stuart Franklin's Books (in the Magnum Store)

In 2005, I started work on The Places We Live, a project about urban poverty and slums. For three years, I visited dozens of families in four slums around the world.

The Places We Live was not a search for finding the absolute extremes of urban poverty—I wasn't looking for the dirties spot, the poorest hovels or the most crime-ridden street corner. My task was to find how people normalize these dire situations. How they build dignity and daily lives in the midst of very challenging living conditions.

In the project, I asked someone from each family to "tell me about life around here". Since I do not speak either Spanish, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi or Marathi, I had one rule-of-thumb during the recordings: As long as the subject talked, I didn't interrupt to get translations of what they were saying. Only when I got transcripts of the recordings months later did I see the wide spectrum of stories told. For me, the process was a sort of protection from projecting too much of my own preconceptions of what slum life involves—and meant the project had to be interactive and collaborative.

Earlier this summer, The Places We Live book was published, and an exhibition installation launched in Oslo. Now, we've made a Magnum-in-Motion that gives a sample of some of the work.

You can find it at www.theplaceswelive.com

Oddly, I feel like it is a very different thing putting these stories up on the web, as opposed to the book, magazine articles or exhibition. I had the blessings of all the people in the project to use the material for everything I wanted—I really only used homes where the people were quite eager to tell their stories. But still I somehow can't shake the nagging sensation that putting their homes and lives on the web is somehow different from the other mediums.

Is it that the viewing experience of the book, magazine or exhibition is a more private experience than on the web? Or vice versa? Am I alone to have this feeling, or do others feel the same?

I'll be tuning into the blog for some days here and will happily respond to any questions or comments any of you might have.

Links:
» Jonas Bendiksen's Magnum Portfolio
» Buy "The Places We Live" in the Magnum Store (Signed Copy)
» Buy "Satellites" in the Magnum Store (Signed Copy)

I attended the plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe debate, under urgent procedure, on the consequences of the war between Georgia and Russia. As I crossed the debating chamber I realized that the verbal battle was going to be less photogenic than a cannon battle, I took a seat, placed my Canon onto my lap, put on the simultaneous translation headphones and started to listen to the debate. The mouths moved out of line with the words being heard in my ears - the debate enthralled me. My concentration was broken by a security guard, who informed me that I was sitting in a place reserved for a delegate and the area for photographers was opposite. A man of arms, he could not hide his interest in my "cannon", I passed it to him and he examined it with childish curiosity. I gave him permission to fire the first shot at the assembly with it, which he did without thinking of the consequences. That haphazard photo was the key to my understanding of the contretemps needed to photograph anything in the building. Within this Babylonian tower of Europe I made ambiguous images corresponding to the essence of the debate, unsynchronized swimming in murky waters. The politicians spoke with the authority of high mammals and whilst they slept the Canon smoked.

Links
» Gueorgui Pinkhassov's Magnum Portfolio
» View all images of "Battle Of Strasbourg"

In November 2004, our first son Jem was born.
At the time my partner Narelle and I lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Sydney.
Apart from two years living in a tent, I had spent the last 15 years of my life living in apartment blocks.

In October 2006 our second son Dash was born.
Our small two-bedroom apartment became even smaller.

Things had to change. Wanting more space, family support and a change of scenery we moved to the city of Adelaide, Narelle's place of birth.

On arriving in Adelaide, with our life in storage, we bunkered down with Narelle's folks while we tried to find a place to live.
Like my parents in Newcastle, they live in the suburbs.

One afternoon I decided to venture to the local mega mall, specifically to the hairdresser. After removing all of my very long hair the very young hairdresser said 'There you go, a new hair cut for a new start'.
I thought, that's nice and what a great thing it was to be able to see again.

On returning to the in-laws that evening I started to feel very odd and a little queasy.
As day turned to night I lay down on the freshly mown back lawn and watched
clouds drift past a nearly full moon. I expected to hear a dog howl or a cat wail.

I started vomiting, violently, and uncontrollably.
I grabbed the nearest thing I could throw up into.

Narelle and her parents, Laurie and Ann were sitting in the back room watching the TV.

'Narelle' I yelled out, again throwing up.

'What' she said, 'You want me to come out and photograph you?'.

'Yeah' I yelled back.

'Ohh you've got to be joking' Laurie gasped, as he rose from his chair.

Narelle came out and climbed on to a table. The sudden blast of the flash lit up what I could smell, but couldn't see.

Bright, brilliant, red.

Ann joined the crowd gathering to see the show.

Another flash. Bright, brilliant, red.

Ann yells, 'Ohhh Laurie he's vomiting into the Christmas tree bucket!'

Another flash.

And it was there, while staring into that bright red bucket, vomiting every hour on the hour, for fifteen hours straight, that I started to think how strange, families, suburbia, life, vomit and in particular, Christmas…. really was.

Trent Parkes new exhibition "The Christmas Tree Bucket - Trent Parkes family album" will be shown at the Australian Centre for Photography from 21st November 2008 to 21 January 2009.

Links
» Trent Parkes Magnum Portfolio
» View Trent Parkes Magnum In Motion essay "Minutes to Midnight"

"Nature", wrote Raymond Williams, "is perhaps the most complicated word in the English language". Nature photography, however, is simple - or at least unchallenging. The wonder of the natural world is the usual refrain, gasped between shots of galloping zebras, prowling snow leopards or displays of exotic snakes, birds, insects and so forth.

Photography inherited many of its genres from painting - portraiture, nudes, still life, and a particular kind of un-peopled landscape which has become attached to "nature". By abstraction, nature photography obscures our view of what's really going on in tropical forests or the African savannah. Nature photography commodifies the environment for its own ends.

Tourism promoters use nature photography to mask the fact that other people also live in the destinations they wish to market. Look at any holiday brochure advertising the Galapagos Islands. You won't spot any of the twenty thousand inhabitants, or their homes, or their economic activity. In safari brochures it's more or less the same, although some exotic tribespeople are included, almost as another natural feature.

Although the boundaries are not always obvious, environmental photography differs from nature photography in its approach. By attending to the human presence as a part of, and impacting upon, the natural world it sets out to present a more realistic view of Planet Earth dominated, as it is, by us.

© John Vink/Magnum Photos

Right... It takes between ten and 12 hours by various taxis and motorbikes to cover the 250 km or so from Phnom Penh, which says a lot about how to get fresh troops up there (there is a neatly drawn tarmac road on the thai side of the border)... Once at the temple the situation looks like anything but a potential battlefield: for sure there are lots of guns and close to 2000 military around, but Thai and Khmer soldiers are just meters apart, talking or just staring at each other. Because they know each other since a long time. 70% of the cambodian soldiers there are former Khmer Rouge who protected Ta Mok in this same area until ten years ago, before being integrated in the RCAF (Royal Cambodian Armed Forces), and they had many contacts with the thai border units which today have set up camp in the bushes around the temple. Many of the thai soldiers are Khmer Surin and speak cambodian.

"While Fashion Magazine has a single photographer-author, it's still a magazine, not a book. So it doesn't follow my usual mode of slow, solitary production. It's collaboration. The ideas for the collaboration were formulated very quickly. I was approached by the folks at the Paris office of Magnum to work on this issue late last year. I immediately said yes. I was a huge fan of the previous two editions (by Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) and was looking for an excuse to play with fashion . I often say that when I am making a portrait, I'm not "capturing" the other person. If the photograph documents anything, it is the space between the subject and myself. Something similar is at work with Fashion Magazine. I'm not really comfortable saying I know anything about Paris or its fashion world. And I suspect that most fashionable Parisians know just as little about Minnesota. What is interesting is the space between us. My favorite example of this involves Chanel. In Paris, I photographed Karl Lagerfeld at the Grand Palais. In Minnesota, I photographed a girl with a Chanel shopping bag in front of Sally's Beauty Shop. With this magazine, I'm trying to explore the distance between those two places." Alec Soth

Links:
» View more photographs from Fashion Magazine: Paris Minnesota
» Buy Fashion Magazine: Paris Minnesota in the Magnum Store (Signed Copy)

Now that I'm back in Phnom Penh I'll catch up on events here. But as a follow-up on the previous issue of the Khmer Chronicles I'd rather have had something else to talk about than this...

Cambodia. Phnom Penh. 13/07/2008. The cremation ceremony of Khem Sambo took place at the Toul Tompoung pagoda. © John Vink/Magnum Photos

Khem Sambo, 47 yrs, a journalist at the pro-opposition daily Moneaksekar Khmer (Khmer Conscience), was killed, together with his 21 yr old son, by five bullets fired in the middle of a busy street by a lone gunner on a motorbike near the Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh on July 11th.

The reasons for this killing are not clear yet, and considering the previous murders of journalists (12 since 1993), they will probably remain obscure. It is too early and one can only speculate. Has it to do with the elections (we are two weeks away from the polling date)? Did Sambo know things he shouldn't have known about government involvement in casino gambling? But for sure Sambo's director, Dam Seth, who happens to be on the Sam Rainsy Party list (opposition) for the coming elections, is involved in a legal struggle with Foreign Minister Hor Namhong on issues about the Minister's alleged participation as a cadre in the Boeung Trabek reeducation camp during the Khmer Rouge regime. So was it to intimidate his boss that a good journalist and his innocent son were killed in cold blood on a busy street?

Whatever the reason, a journalist's assassination is always a serious matter. Especially so in a country where separations of the powers are not yet fully perceived by all as being essential to a workable democracy. Once the watchdogs will have stopped barking there will be few limits for abuse...

I bear with the suffering of Khem Sambo's family.

I bear with my Cambodian colleagues and hope they will not give in to fear.

There is a multimedia slideshow of the funeral on the Ka-set website.

For 25 years, AIDS has ravaged the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Since the early 1980s, nearly 30 million people have died from AIDS. But over the past few years, a quiet global revolution has enabled millions of people infected by HIV to live healthy lives.

In the early 1990s, when antiretroviral drugs became available, AIDS was transformed from a certain death sentence to a manageable chronic disease–but only for some. The expense of the drugs and their distribution prevented 95 percent of those living with HIV from getting access to them. International outrage that millions were dying because of economic disparity helped reduce drug prices and to create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002. Doctors and healthcare workers around the world have adapted procedures to settings where people often could not access even the most basic care. Already, millions of lives which otherwise might have been lost are being saved.

In Access to Life, eight Magnum photographers portray people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Paolo Pellegrin in Mali, Alex Majoli in Russia, Larry Towell in Swaziland and South Africa, Jim Goldberg in India, Gilles Peress in Rwanda, Jonas Bendiksen in Haiti, Steve McCurry in Vietnam and Eli Reed in Peru. Here are faces, voices, and stories representing those millions of people who by now would be dead if not for access to free antiretroviral drugs–people who are living with HIV, working, caring for their children, and experiencing the joys and struggles of being alive. But there are also the stories of those for whom treatment came too late or where tuberculosis or other diseases brought their lives to an end – showing how the fight to bring access to AIDS treatment is a difficult one, often filled with setbacks as well as success.

Please visit the Access To Life website to view and listen to all stories. We very much hope you'll find this presentation interesting as well as insightful. Please help to spread the word by telling your friends about it, e-mailing them the link to the Access To Life website or by using one of our press images together with a link to the site on your website or blog.

And as always, your feedback and thoughts are very much appreciated!

Links
» Access To Life Website
» The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria