Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress Wed, 22 May 2013 18:08:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 World Press Photo controversy: Objectivity, manipulation and the search for truth http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/xNG3ogGgqSM/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/22/world-press-photo-controversy-objectivity-manipulation-and-the-search-for-truth/#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 18:08:08 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/?p=9992

World Press Photo of the Year 2012′s winning image by Paul Hansen, Sweden, Dagens Nyheter. Two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and her big brother Muhammad, who soon was to be four years old, were killed when their house was destroyed by an Israeli missile strike on Monday evening. Their father, Fouad, was also killed. Their mother is [...]

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World Press Photo of the Year 2012′s winning image by Paul Hansen, Sweden, Dagens Nyheter. Two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and her big brother Muhammad, who soon was to be four years old, were killed when their house was destroyed by an Israeli missile strike on Monday evening. Their father, Fouad, was also killed. Their mother is in intensive care at Al-Shifa Hospital. In accordance with their religion, the dead are buried quickly. The badly mangled body of Fouad is put on a stretcher and his brothers carry his dead children to the mosque for the burial ceremony. When darkness fell over Gaza on this day, at least 26 new victims were to be buried. That makes the total more than 140 dead so far since the beginning of the bombardment. Approximately half of the dead are women and children. The picture was taken on 20 November 2012 in Gaza City, Palestinian Territories.

Beyond the attacks leveraged against Paul Hansen’s winning World Press Photo, the recent controversy over image toning is symptomatic of the current state of photojournalism and its place in a society that has learned not to trust what it sees. Photojournalists, photography directors and post-producers speak to Olivier Laurent, and ask whether objectivity in photojournalism is actually attainable

Author: Olivier Laurent

There’s nothing worse for a photojournalist than to have his or her integrity questioned. As the most recent debate about Paul Hansen’s winning World Press Photo image has shown, rumours, speculation and misinformation travels far quicker than the truth. Last week’s exposé by Extreme Tech, ‘How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop’, was shared 17,000 times on Facebook and more than 2500 times on Twitter, while World Press Photo’s clarification clocks only 130 shares on Facebook.

The intense debate forced World Press Photo to appoint a panel of forensic analysts to study Hansen’s image. One of these analysts found that, when comparing the raw file with the prize-winning version, “I can indeed see that there has been a fair amount of post-production, in the sense that some areas have been made lighter and others darker,” writes Eduard de Kam, a digital photography expert at the Dutch Institute for Digital Photography. “But regarding the positions of each pixel, all of them are exactly in the same place in the JPEG – the prize-winning image – as they are in the raw file. I would therefore rule out any question of a composite image.”

As far as World Press Photo is concerned, Hansen’s image is authentic – but questions remain. “Why did he do it at all?” asks Roger Tooth, head of photography at The Guardian. “I guess the answer is: because he can. The tools are there to do it. I guess, in the professional world, what’s actually changed is that photographers now have the raw files of their images, whereas, if we go back to the pre-digital era, they would have handed the film on to someone like me and I would have got a darkroom printer to do a decent print of it.”

Yet the idea of post-processing being a recent innovation is fundamentally wrong. Before digital, photographers made the same decisions about how their images should look. But, as Ashley Gilbertson argues, these decisions were made at B&H, when “we were buying these different film stocks and filters”. For the VII photographer, today’s situation isn’t different from what happened in the early 1990s in Bosnia, when “we had four photographers photographing the same thing on a street corner, where one guy was shooting with a tungsten filter, one guy was shooting with Kodachrome and a warm filter, another guy was shooting on black-and-white film, and another was shooting on colour negative,” he says. “You had four completely different images, four different perceptions of reality, four very different looks, but all very relevant.”

What has changed, adds Santiago Lyon, director of photography at the Associated Press and this year’s chair of the World Press Photo jury, is that previously “the aesthetic was proprietary, in the sense that it was a look that was produced from a film that was owned by a filmmaking company”, he says. “So, to a certain extent, you bought the aesthetic that you liked. Now technology allows us to create an aesthetic of our own choosing – people can go after a certain look if they like it.”

Gilbertson concurs. “We all have the same-looking raw file now. It’s when we go back to our hotel room that we make the decision of how our image is going to look.” But is it wrong to do so, as many commentators have argued in the case of Hansen’s image?

“I think there have always been different aesthetics in photography – whether it’s black-and-white, different colour temperatures, different kinds of film, with people preferring a Kodachrome look over an Ektachrome look or a colour negative. I don’t think that’s anything new,” says Lyon. “And, most recently, 10B [a post-production photographic lab in Italy] has produced a look that some photographers find so appealing they imitate it. In the end, it’s the photographer’s choice.”

Two years ago, Gilbertson was strongly against the idea of sending one of his frames to a lab such as 10B, “because I knew how it would come back, and I knew it would not look like the reality I saw,” he tells BJP. “Two years ago, I was only shooting in colour because I felt that black-and-white wasn’t real. But now I’m of a completely different mind and, to be honest, I love the toning of Hansen’s picture. It looks beautiful. A lot of my friends strongly disagree with me on that point; maybe, in five years, I will want to take 50 percent saturation out of my pictures because I’ll think it looks amazing.”

Yet, Gilbertson adds, photographers can’t hide from the fact that an increasing portion of the population is skeptical of the images they see. “The photographic process has become a lot more complicated ever since digital, but I think it goes beyond that,” he says. “Twenty years ago, the public trusted the blueish images they saw in Newsweek, the warm images in Time, the black-and-white images in The New York Times, and the straight images in Life magazine. I think the level of trust in the media from a public standpoint has dropped so dramatically that everything that’s presented now is questioned. People are looking for faults and reasons for things to be factually incorrect.” But, he continues, “When Alex Majoli presents a picture, when Philip Blenkinsop presents a picture, and when I present a picture, you get three really different styles and interpretations – and the word ‘interpretation’ is key here. It’s all about what we saw, how we envision it, and what we’re trying to say. Photographers are a lot more opinion-driven than reporters.”

And that should be at the heart of this debate, says Magnum Photos member Christopher Anderson. “It is beside the point to argue about the degree to which facts have been altered, because all photography does that,” he tells BJP in an email conversation. “I could care less whether or not a photographer uses HDR techniques to produce melodramatic, hyperbolic alterations of the facts. I am more interested in the truth in what they have to say, even though I know it is subjective. I don’t need an algorithm to know that I am looking at a lie. I know because the world we live in does not look like that. My mind knows it, my heart [knows it]. When a suburban kid in garage in New York is retouched to look like he is in a burned out alley in Aleppo, I don’t have to examine the raw file to know that the photographer has created something that has nothing at all to do with facts.”

He adds: “My point is that facts do not exist, but truth does. And truth is paramount. Authenticity and integrity in the image is something I think we understand intuitively. When we come to grips with the fact that all photography is a lie, the question is not whether or not it is factual, the question is whether or not it is true. It is not the technique that makes it true or not, therefore it is pointless to argue about how much retouching should be acceptable. But, as a general rule, heavy handed retouching makes me doubt the photograph’s intention towards truth.”

Anderson is quick to point out that he too retouches his images and alters the colour palette to his liking. “I am not making a claim to some integrity in that regard,” he says. “But I also do not make claims to factual, objective photography anymore. My goal is truth, not fact, but it is my own personal subjective truth. That is all I can offer, and I no longer enter contests for that reason.”

For Anderson, the question of photojournalism’s integrity is on the table because of the “perpetuation of the myth that photography is objective,” he says. “I think journalism and the public will be better served when we acknowledge that photography is subjective, but it can also be ‘true’ – and that truth is a personal truth.” Yet, he argues, the aesthetics as seen in Hansen’s image might not help. “The intention in creating these colours is different, and this is where the truth begins to break down. The intention is to alter the reality to make it look otherworldly. This is an insult to intelligence because we know the world does not look like that. And somewhere in the back of the public’s mind, even if it is not a conscious thought, a question is raised: ‘Can I believe what I am looking at? Why is the person who is delivering this message trying to fool me? Why does it look like an airbrushed cartoon?’”

For 10B, which helped popularise this ‘look’ with the work of photographers such as Yuri Kozyrev among many others [full list here], these questions are influenced by a sort of technophobia. “It is appalling how today’s criticism of digital photojournalism overlooks the simple historical fact that in the days of analogue, the big ethical dilemmas and the responsibility of photojournalists were just the same,” says Francesco Zizola, a Noor photographer who co-founded 10B. “Disapproving of the ‘look’ is necessary, if this ‘look’ is the result of manipulation. But disapproving of the use of new technologies that improve and amplify perception – the real thing represented in the image in full compliance with the strict rules of photojournalism – requires us to be acquainted with the history of photography and its technology.”

Read more about 10B in our special report – Post-processing in the digital age: Photojournalists and 10b Photography

He adds: “The general public is experiencing a new relationship with photography, in terms of numbers and purpose. The global spread of mobile devices is changing the relationship between image and society. This in turn is having important consequences on a number of social and cultural processes: how identities are formed; how information and knowledge are transmitted; the relationship between memory and historical documents; the value of images as historical evidence, etc. We live in an age where the picture on our ID document is not enough to prove our identity, yet photos are still accepted in law courts as evidence of a crime, or as evidence of a discovery in a scientific environment, without mentioning certain sophisticated technologies that enable doctors to take very complex images inside our bodies. Journalistic and documentary photography will have to rediscover the underlying reasons of their essence.”

Zizola welcomes the public criticism. “It’s very useful, especially if it gives us a chance to reflect on the political importance of photographs. What is of fundamental importance is to keep interrogating ourselves on our personal and collective responsibility as witnesses, and on the purpose of the images we produce. Technology has a huge impact on our visual language, but it doesn’t necessarily alter its credibility.”

In the case of Hansen’s “unnatural colours”, Zizola argues that they appear as such “because they are different from what we are used to seeing since the appearance of the first colour photograph of the modern era, in 1935, with the invention of the Kodachrome slide. The question is: when was the representation of reality ever natural? Certainly not when one photographs in black-and-white; in that representation, all colour data disappears. Today, when a photojournalist photographs an event in black-and-white, no one contests it and no one asks for his or her exclusion from a competition for having falsified reality.”

That might be because black-and-white is closely associated with the history of photojournalism, says Gilbertson. “Black-and-white is regarded as arty. There’s a tradition behind it but, in actual fact, if we are to talk about the manipulation of colours, that is the most violent you can be.”

The question remains: what should World Press Photo in particular, and the photojournalism community as a whole, do to regain the public’s trust? “World Press Photo and other contest organisers need to think about the predominance they have in today’s world of photography,” Lyon argues. “They have an important role in defining what is acceptable, and I would encourage them to take an active role in defining these things. If that means they should request the raw file from all entrants, I personally think it would be a very good thing because it would make photographers aware that their images are going to be compared and contrasted to the original files. That level of transparency would be very useful and powerful, and would serve to encourage photographers to attempt to display their work as closely as possible to what they saw in the first place.”

This, however, would be the start of another debate: “What did the photographer see, or what does he remember seeing? Does he remember a particular colour being vibrant? And when that photographer sees his image, it might be at odds with his memory of it,” says Lyon. “Memory plays into it. And sometimes your memory plays tricks on you.”

For Anderson, there’s no point in coming up with new rules. Instead, “we could create a dogma for contests that illustrates the pointlessness of trying to perpetuate the myth of photographic objectivity: no black-and-white (the world is not black-and-white); no wide-angle or telephoto lenses (the eye does not see in that way); no retouching at all. But then we would have to include everything that makes a photo subjective,” he adds. “The photographer cannot choose the moment to press the shutter, but instead must just randomly and repeatedly press the button. And no framing – you can’t even look through the viewfinder. These would constitute choices to include or exclude moments, events or subjects, and that, of course, means altering the objective truth. And, of course, the photographer could not choose the image that is submitted to the contest. Only through a silly dogma like this can we ensure objective photojournalism in the contests.”

“I think that we have to learn to understand the context,” adds Zizola, “draw barriers, ask questions, look carefully, think consequently. This is the only healthy attitude with respect to the truthfulness of images, avoiding such excesses as believing that all is fake and nothing is true, or the opposite – that photography is nothing but the exact representation of reality.”

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www.10bphotography.com
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In the midst of the chaos and devastation that descended on Moore, Okla., one of the first photographers to the scene recounts the heroic moments of a community banding together.

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On Tuesday, the world awoke to the photographs of Sue Ogrocki. Based in Oklahoma City as a staff photographer for the Associated Press, Ogrocki’s images of rescue workers carrying injured children from the rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School appeared on the cover of many of the world’s leading newspapers, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Early this morning, TIME spoke with Ogrocki about what she witnessed on the ground in Moore – a scene of devastation and raw humanity.

“I could see on TV that the storms were headed towards Moore, and I knew I needed to get in the car and get down there, because if you don’t [hurry], you can’t get in. Cell phones go down, traffic lights go down, and it’s gridlock and you can’t communicate.”

Driving underneath pitch-black clouds and rain turning to baseball-sized hail, Ogrocki arrived in Moore, population 55,000, just after the F4 tornado leveled it.

Standing in a landscape that, minutes earlier, had resembled a suburban neighborhood, Ogrocki spotted a large mass of toppled cinder block. Too large to be a residential home, a bystander explained that she was looking at the remains of Plaza Towers Elementary School. Watching a crowd buzzing around a makeshift triage area set up in the parking lot, Ogrocki began to photograph.

“I could see people searching a section of the school that was close to me. And I could hear people saying that there are people trapped under the wall.”

Continuing around the backside of the school, Ogrocki found an incredible scene of humanity — police, firemen, parents, neighbors and rescuers were helping to dig children out of the rubble. Forming a human chain, a firefighter or police officer would pull a child out of the rubble and pass them to safety along the chain of bystanders.

“I couldn’t hear the children,” she explains, “and every now and then, police or fire would ask people to stay quiet so they could listen for the kids still trapped.”

“A lot of the parents were coming to the school to get their kids,” Ogrocki said. “It was bad out there, but for what they were doing, it was surprisingly calm — I was amazed.”

Ogrocki, who has photographed tornadoes in the past, including the one that devastated Moore in 1999, said she had never seen anything like this destruction. “This is probably the worst. I’ve never seen a school hit or people trapped before.”

“It was heartwarming because they kept pulling out kids that were alive. Kids that, although they looked a little stunned, didn’t really look like they were seriously injured. It was nice to see them come out in good shape.”

Each time a child was pulled from the rubble, covered in concrete dust and scared, the group of spectators and parents cheered.

“As I was walking out, there were still parents looking for their kids. I hope they found them.”

Sue Ogrocki is a staff photographer with the Associated Press based in Oklahoma City.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/21/moments-of-hope-in-oklahoma-one-photographers-story/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/21/moments-of-hope-in-oklahoma-one-photographers-story/ Ponte City: An Apartheid-Era High Rise Mired in Myth http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/A87narGmLk4/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/ponte-city-an-apartheid-era-high-rise-mired-in-myth/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 21:58:55 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=72258

South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse set out to create an epic visual document exploring the long and complex history of Ponte City, the tallest residential skyscraper in Africa and a common symbol of apartheid.

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It is the ultimate in chic and sophistication. Join us on a guided tour of a building that brings Utopia to life and proves that South Africa has caught up with the world’s urban centers. Yes, indeed, all of a sudden there is excitement in the air! You get carried away by the exhilarating feeling of immensity. Because the dimensions are huge and, if you are not familiar with the whole layout, you can easily lose your way. But have no fear, the generous expanse, the serenity and beauty of it all, the smooth functioning of all procedures and processes take a load off your mind, make you feel relaxed and cheerful.

—Advertisement Brochure, “Ponte City, A Residential Dream Comes True,” 1973

Ponte City, the imposing 54-story cylindrical skyscraper in South Africa, is the tallest residential building on the continent, crowned by the largest advertisement in the southern hemisphere. As the most iconic building in country, it is a common symbol of apartheid, of urban decay, of illusions and aspirations. It dominates the skyline of Johannesburg, towering over the legacy of segregation with views of the glass and steel condos of Sandton to the north as well as the matchbox-like shantytown houses of Soweto to the south.

In 2008, South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky, in collaboration with British artist Patrick Waterhouse, set out to create a visual document of the building as monumental as the structure itself, exploring a long, complex history mired in myth.

Ponte was unveiled in 1976 as a sleek utopian housing complex in the exclusively white, well-to-do inner-city neighborhood of Hillbrow, the same year as the seminal student protests against apartheid legislation known as the Soweto Uprising. At one point, designers even envisioned a ski slope in the building’s massive hollow core.

Following the fall of apartheid in 1994, the exodus of wealth to the northern suburbs and the influx of unauthorized immigrants from neighboring countries, the building was overrun by gangs and skyrocketing rates of violent crime, its hollow core packed not with snow-covered slopes, but with trash and debris.

“Tales of brazen crack and prostitution rings operating from its car parks, four stories of trash accumulating in its open core, snakes, ghosts and frequent suicides have all added to the building’s legend,” the artists write. “And yet, one is left with the feeling that even the building’s notoriety is somewhat exaggerated—that its decline is just as fictional as its initial utopian intentions were misplaced and unrealized.”

In 2007, developers bought the building with the hopes of renovating the structure and realizing those original prospects, targeting upwardly mobile professionals with the promise of “chic Manhattan-style inner-city living” and apartments individually branded with exotic themes like “Future Slick,” “Old Money,” and “Glam Rock.” The ambitious project failed spectacularly a mere year later, falling into bankruptcy in the aftermath of the global housing bubble’s implosion.

Subotzky and Waterhouse have continued work on the project ever since, in part spending three years completing three epic, comprehensive typologies: one, which is featured above, looking outward through every single window of the building onto the social and natural landscape of the city; another looking inward at the doors of each apartment; and a third looking at the fragmented fictional space of each of the residents’ television sets.

The work, honored with the Discovery Award at Recontres d’Arles in 2011, is comprised of more than 600 photographs presented in an installation of three light boxes towering over viewers at a height of 13 feet. The images in each typology are arranged to replicate the building, “floor above floor and flat by flat,” the artists explain, “lives lived stacked together and on top of each other… [revealing] layers of history as well as individual fragments of interest.”

Michael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

Windows, Ponte City, 2008- 2010

Mikhael Subotzky is a South African photographer currently based in Johannesburg. Patrick Waterhouse is a British artist. Ponte City will be on view at A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial, May 17 – Sept. 8, 2013 in New York.

Eugene Reznik is a Brooklyn-based photographer and writer. He recently wrote for LightBox on The Sam Abell Library: 40 Years of Life and Still Life. Follow him on Twitter @eugene_reznik.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/ponte-city-an-apartheid-era-high-rise-mired-in-myth/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/ponte-city-an-apartheid-era-high-rise-mired-in-myth/ Havana Coast, Cuba by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/CmqWkNRGE_0/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/havana-coast-cuba-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 12:50:23 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000.eEUDu3t7fM

Two People Sitting on a Rock, Havana, Cuba (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Two People Sitting on a Rock, Havana, Cuba (Paul Cooklin)

Havana, Cuba (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/havana-coast-cuba-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/havana-coast-cuba-by-paul-cooklin/ PJL: May 2013 (Part 2) http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/bbhOE0IA3tA/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/pjl-may-2013-part-2/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 08:00:19 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71952

Curated by Mikko Takkunen, a collection of the best photojournalism around the web from the past two weeks.

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Features and Essays

Amy Toensing for The National Geographic

Amy Toensing for The National Geographic

Amy Toensing: First Australians (National Geographic) Aboriginals had the continent to themselves for 50,000 years. Today they make up less than 3 percent of the population, and their traditional lifestyle is disappearing. Almost. In the homelands the ancient ways live on. | From the June 2013 issue of the National Geographic magazine.

Marcus Bleasdale: Last of the Viking Whalers (National Geographic) Norway reserves the right to hunt minkes. But kids don’t want to grow up to be whalers.

Dmitry Kostyukov: Dagestan (LightBox) After the FBI announced that two brothers from southern Russia had bombed the Boston Marathon, the world’s attention quickly turned to where these brothers had come from — a lush strip of highlands called Dagestan. Photographer Dmitry Kostyukov reports from the Russian republic.

Arthur Bondar: Signatures of War (The Huffington Post) Soviet Veterans Of World War II

Ivan Sigal: White Road (NYT Lens) Trek through Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

Eric Thayer / Reuters

Eric Thayer / Reuters

Eric Thayer: Along the Southern border (Reuters) Border Patrol agents are recording a rise in deaths and apprehensions in south Texas,where the Rio Grande River separates the U.S. from Mexico. | Thayer on working on the series

Erin Trieb: Faces of the NRA: Inside America’s gun club (NBC News)

Matt Mills McKnight: The Klansman (CNN Photo blog)

Daniel Shea

Daniel Shea

Daniel Shea: Chicago Fire (The Fader) On the ground, navigating the city’s epidemic of youth violence. | Related on HuffPost Live: Lens on Chicago Violence

Phillip Toledano: Beatitude’s Dementia Ward (Photo Booth) Retirement community in Phoenix, Arizona.

Ilona Szwarc: A Daughter-in-Law’s Tale (LightBox) Photographer Ilona Szwarc’s camera has brought her closer to her mother-in-law than she could ever imagine.

Brandon Thibodeaux: When Morning Comes (Esquire Russia) Life in the Mississippi Delta

Jeffrey Milstein: Flying (Slate Behold photo blog) Airports from the flying viewpoint

Ruth Prieto Arenas: In Color, the Waitresses in a Restaurant for Lonely Men (NYT Lens) Photos of Mexican women in The United States

Jay L. Clendenin: A Coachella Double Take (LA Times Framed photo blog)

Mae Ryan: Imported Filipino Brides (AudioVision) United States

Massimo Berruti / Agence VU

Massimo Berruti / Agence VU

Massimo Berruti: On Pakistan’s Election Trail (LightBox) Photographs of the build-up to Pakistan’s elections, which were held May 11.

Tyler Hicks: Preparing for Watershed Elections in Pakistan (NYT)

Andrea Bruce: Pakistan, as Seen Through its Railways (NYT)

Zhang Kechun: Chinese Dream (MoST)

Philip Cheung: Shifting Sands: Surreal Landscapes of the United Arab Emirates (LightBox)

Cedric Arnold: Thailand’s Magical Tattoos (Slate Behold photo blog)

GMB Akash: Factories of Death (Panos Pictures) Bangladesh

Behrouz Mehri: Sister battles breast cancer (AFP Correspondent blog) Tehran photographer Behrouz Mehri documents his sister’s battle against terminal breast cancer

Hajime Kimura: Life And Death Of A Japanese Racehorse (NPR)

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Mauricio Lima: Brazilian Military’s Crucible: Jungle Warfare Instruction (NYT)

Miquel Dewever-Plana: Guatemala, trial of a genocide (Agence Vu)

Helge Skodvin: Norway, 240 Landscape (Agence Vu) 2 850 000 Volvo 240 cars were made between 1974 and 1993. It became the car of choice of the Nordic countries. 84 287 were sold in Norway. More than any other car, the 240 became a symbol of Norwegian and Nordic values.

Maja Daniels: Monette and Mady (Slate Behold photo blog) The identical life of identical twins, Monette and Mady

Chloe Dewe Mathews: Summoning the Caretos (Firecracker) Portugal

Piotr Malecki: Disco Polo Fever (Panos Pictures) Poland

Warrick Page: London Burlesque (Stern)

Hector Mediavilla: The Surprising Sartorial Culture Of Congolese ‘Sapeurs’ (NPR)

Alexia Webster: South African Village Still Grappling with Apartheid (NYT Lens)

Guillaume Herbaut: Benin: Independence Day Parade (Institute)

Siegfried Modola: Ethiopia’s ancient salt trails (Reuters)

Riverboom: Maternity in Cameroon (Institute)

Articles

Taslima Akhter

Taslima Akhter

Final Embrace: The Most Haunting Photograph from Banglandesh(LightBox) Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image.

Not So Long Ago, In Iraq (Vanity Fair) Images and captions excerpted from Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq, by Michael Kamber, with an introduction by Dexter Filkins. The book came out on May 15, 2013, via University of Texas Press.

Tomás Munita: 2013 Recipient of the Chris Hondros Fund Award (LightBox)

Honoring a Fallen Photographer’s Spirit (NYT Lens) Tomás Munita Wins Chris Hondros Fund Award

Iconic war photography – audio slideshow (Guardian) War/Photography has won the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz best photography book award at this year’s Sony world photography awards. Here, author Anne Wilkes Tucker explains the meaning and history of photography in armed conflict and what constitutes an iconic war photograph

Robert Fisk on War Reporting (Indepedent)

Enhanced Reality: Exploring the Boundaries of Photo Editing (Spiegel Online) Even top news photographers have their work digitally enhanced these days. Mounting competition in the market for news images is forcing photo-journalists to make their output as dramatic as possible. But where are the limits of cosmetic improvement? | Related: The Story Behind a Photo: How Prize-Winning Images Are Edited (video)

Is the ‘Press Photo of the Year’ Actually Photoshop Art? (The Atlantic Wire)

Digital photography experts confirm the integrity of Paul Hansen’s image files (World Press Photo)

Super-reality of Gaza funeral photo due to toning technique says contest winner (Guardian)

No Sense of Irony In Hansen “Fake” Journalism Accusation (PDN)

Hansen’s World Press Winning Photo Not Fake… Just Unbelievable (BagNewsNotes)

Arko Datta / Reuters

Arko Datta / Reuters

The Rhetoric of Prize-Winning Photographs (No Caption Needed)

When Words are Photoshopped (No Caption Needed)

Who believes photographs? (David Campbell blog)

Tattoo Removal on the Photo Desk (NYT)

Ethics? What ethics? State-of-the-art photo retouching tips from 1946 (American Copy Editors Society)

Everybody Street (Nowness) A New Documentary Turns the Lens on New York’s Luminary Curbside Photographers

Revisiting Some Well-Eyed Streets (NYT) Garry Winogrand Retrospective in San Franscisco

Garry Winogrand – Nonstop and Unedited (NYT Lens)

Garry Winogrand, edited by Leo Rubinfien et al – review (Guardian) Winogrand’s photos on the Guardian website here

Supporting Photographers, Moving Walls (LightBox) The Open Society Foundations mark their 20th group exhibition of “Moving Walls” — a project reflecting the group’s support for long-term documentary photography.

Moving Walls — and Minds (NYT Lens) Open Society Foundation’s 20th ‘Moving Walls’  Exhibition

Donna DeCesare captures children in a world of gangs (AudioVision)

Jon Lowenstein on the South Side: Shots Fired (BagNewsNotes)

Featured photographer: Chiara Tocci (Verve Photo)

Featured photographer: Sam Wolson (Verve Photo)

Featured photographer: Lorenzo Tugnoli (Verve Photo)

David Moore’s best photograph – children on a Derby estate (Guardian)

FT Weekend Magazine, May 11/12 2013

FT Weekend Magazine, May 11/12 2013

Vanessa Winship : Looking for America (FT Magazine) On her road trip across the US, British photographer Vanessa Winship captured the smallness of ordinary lives set against a vast backdrop of land, sky and the illusion of escape

Each picture paints 1,000 words in Vanessa Winship’s US photos (BBC)

Vanessa Winship: she dances on Jackson (Nowness)

Book review: Control Order House by Edmund Clark (Rationalist Association)

Publisher Bets on Big Collectible Books (WSJ) While many book publishers are heavily investing in the digital frontier, Benedikt Taschen is looking to corner the market in oversize collectible books.

JR’s Times Square Photo Booth (Photo Booth)

Alexandra Avakian’s revolutionary photography (AudioVision)

Documenting Quiet, Deadly Hardship in Sierra Leone (American Photo magazine) Mustafah Abdulaziz’s series “Water Is Gold” takes us to a place where access to clean water is a matter of life and death

Luigi Ghirri’s Kodachromes Revisited (LightBox) Jeffrey Ladd writes for LightBox about a recently re-released edition of Luigi Ghirri’s 1978 book, ‘Kodachrome’.

Is Nobuyoshi Araki’s photography art or porn? (Guardian) Araki’s pictures of trussed-up women in various states of undress – currently on show in London – explore the hidden eroticism beneath Japan’s polite society

Precious, by Jane Hilton, review (Telegraph) Precious, by Jane Hilton, captures intimate scenes in the brothels of Nevada.

This Week In Photography Books – Walker Evans (A Photo Editor)

Don McCullin to headline Visa pour l’Image’s 25th edition (BJP)

Image Singulières festival presents Cédric Gerbehaye’s Winter in Sète (BJP) Documentary photographer Cédric Gerbehaye received carte blanche to document Sète, which hosts, each year, the Image Singulières photography festival

Tom Waits – through the lens of photographer Anton Corbijn (Guardian)

America in Color by Martin Parr (Photo Booth)

Anarchy, Attitude and Outrage: When Punk was Young and Dangerous (LightBox)
TIME looks back, through the work of three photographers—Alex Levac, Steve Johnston and Ray Stevenson—to the early days of Punk, by reproducing their gritty images in the photocopied aesthetic of the era.

Rhiannon Adam’s Seaside Polaroids (BBC)

Terry O’Neill, Photographing the icons of the ‘60s (CNN photo blog)

Pete Pin captures Cambodian diaspora in the US (AudioVision)

David Emery’s best photograph: an Andalucian brothel (Guardian)

Polaroid: The pioneering instant art (CNN Photo blog)

South Korean Newspaper May Have Just Printed the Worst Photoshop Ever (Gizmodo)

Meet the photographer behind those ‘simple’ Apple product images (Connect.dpreview.com)

Hipstamatic launches Oggl, a new social network for creative photographers (BJP)

How Photographers ‘Photoshopped’ Their Pictures Back in 1946 (PetaPixel)

Smartphones captured 2 iconic shots of new World Trade Center (Poynter)

Interviews and Talks

Peter van Agtmael

Peter van Agtmael / Magnum

Peter van Agtmael (Vice) van Agtmael Won’t Deny the Strange Allure of War

Peter van Agtmael (NYT Lens) A Photographer’s Unfiltered Account of the Iraq War

Michael Kamber (Aperture blog) Photojournalist Michael Kamber, a recipient of the World Press Photo Award, has worked in the field for more than twenty-five years. He covered the war in Iraq as a writer and photographer for the New York Times between 2003 and 2012, and he was the paper’s principle photographer in Baghdad in 2007, the war’s bloodiest year. His new book, Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq, includes illustrated interviews with three dozen of the world’s leading photojournalists about their experiences in Iraq.

Mike Kamber (BBC) On the new book – Photojournalists on War: The Untold Story from Iraq

Platon (Fora TV) Photographer Platon Reveals Power Through Portrait | video from  WIRED Business Conference 2013

Larry Towell (World Press Photo) World Press Photo 2013 Sam Presser lecture

Don McCullin (Dunhill)

Sebastião Salgado and Edward Burtynsky (Globe and Mail) The world according to the photography masters

Mark Seliger (New York Magazine : The Cut) Photographer Mark Seliger on Shooting Barack Obama, Cindy Sherman, Kurt Cobain, and More

Mario Tama (Lomography)

Paul Shambroom (Minnesota Orginal)

Nic Dunlop (dvb) ‘It is no longer useful to view Burma through the prism of Suu Kyi’

Andrea Gjestvang (NYT Lens) On her project on Utoya massacre survivors

Claudio Palmisano (DE Akademie) Digital photo editing and the ethical line between aesthetics and truth?

Louie Palu (In The Tank)

Stacy Pearsall (NYT Lens) Still Shooting After the End of War

Mitch Dobrowner (LA Times Framed photo blog) In conversation with fine art photographer Mitch Dobrowner

Camille Seaman (PW)

Maja Daniels (The Stare Show Tumblr)

Brad Smith (Inside Sports Illustrated) Sports Illustrated Director of Photography Brad Smith Discusses this Week’s Leading Off

Frank Meo (PDN) Meo Weighs In on iPad vs Print Portfolio Presentation

Mikko Takkunen is an associate photo editor at TIME.com.


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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/pjl-may-2013-part-2/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/20/pjl-may-2013-part-2/http://timethemoment.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/petervanagtmael.jpg Fresnel lens, Havana lighthouse, Havana, Cuba, 2010 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/_p6UAK0NNR4/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/fresnel-lens-havana-lighthouse-havana-cuba-2010-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 16:00:07 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000SZIUmCDcPl8

Inside Havana lighthouse (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Inside Havana lighthouse (Paul Cooklin)

Inside Havana lighthouse (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/fresnel-lens-havana-lighthouse-havana-cuba-2010-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/fresnel-lens-havana-lighthouse-havana-cuba-2010-by-paul-cooklin/ Inside Havana lighthouse by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/EPqZJRMsceY/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/inside-havana-lighthouse-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 16:00:07 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000JTDv1agHNMs

Inside Havana lighthouse (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Inside Havana lighthouse (Paul Cooklin)

Inside Havana lighthouse (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/inside-havana-lighthouse-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/inside-havana-lighthouse-by-paul-cooklin/ Woodland, Tarr Steps, Exmoor, 2011 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/5D7TfRP8CQQ/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/woodland-tarr-steps-exmoor-2011-by-paul-cooklin-2/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 23:33:32 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000IIuhVL.KYn0

Woodland, Tarr Steps, Exmoor, 2011 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Woodland, Tarr Steps, Exmoor, 2011 (Paul Cooklin)

Woodland, Tarr Steps, Exmoor, 2011 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/woodland-tarr-steps-exmoor-2011-by-paul-cooklin-2/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/woodland-tarr-steps-exmoor-2011-by-paul-cooklin-2/ Treeline, West Thorpe, Suffolk 2013 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/FksrVPO4wmM/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/treeline-west-thorpe-suffolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 23:29:52 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000HVh_wF3h13w

(Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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(Paul Cooklin)

(Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/treeline-west-thorpe-suffolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/treeline-west-thorpe-suffolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/ Coconut Trees, Santa Maria Beach, Havana, Cuba by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/EKeJ0yE68tc/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/coconut-trees-santa-maria-beach-havana-cuba-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 23:01:36 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000jtIomcE2epo

Santa Maria Beach, Havana, Cuba (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Santa Maria Beach, Havana, Cuba (Paul Cooklin)

Santa Maria Beach, Havana, Cuba (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/coconut-trees-santa-maria-beach-havana-cuba-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/18/coconut-trees-santa-maria-beach-havana-cuba-by-paul-cooklin/ Rocks, Berrynarbor, North Devon, (Infrared), 2011 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/3e5GQgx_QZo/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/17/rocks-berrynarbor-north-devon-infrared-2011-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 22:37:31 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000.TU741_WHSI

Rocks, Combe Martin, North Devon, 2011 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Rocks, Combe Martin, North Devon, 2011 (Paul Cooklin)

Rocks, Combe Martin, North Devon, 2011 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/17/rocks-berrynarbor-north-devon-infrared-2011-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/17/rocks-berrynarbor-north-devon-infrared-2011-by-paul-cooklin/ Stillness and Light: Chris Levine Captures Kate Moss http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/-mBy3S8eXps/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/17/stillness-and-light-chris-levine-captures-kate-moss/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 04:01:02 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71813

Photographer and visual artist Chris Levine seeks to illuminate the power inherent in stillness. A new show of his 3D portraiture opens today at the Fine Art Society in London.

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Many artists perceive power in movement. Photographer and visual artist Chris Levine seeks to illuminate the power inherent in stillness.

His larger-than-life subjects — which include Queen Elizabeth II and singer Grace Jones — might be among the most photographed people in the world, but Levine has a knack for capturing them at rest, as if in the calm of a storm. “Every opportunity I got [to shoot a portrait], I tried to distill it back to just pure essence without any suggestion or iconography or anything,” he told TIME during a recent visit to his studio in Oxfordshire, England, ahead of his solo retrospective show at The Fine Art Society on May 17. “I’m experimenting with that and trying to get stillness in the image.”

He says the challenge as a photographer is to distance himself from the idea of his subject  and focus on the person he has right in front of his lens. In a recent sitting with Kate Moss, Levine says he was determined to ignore Kate Moss, the supermodel, and instead tried “to bring her back, just to Kate – Kate, Kate, Kate.” In doing this, he manages to take one of the fashion world’s most recognizable faces and show it in a new light.

Which may explain why an artist who largely focuses on lights, lasers and holography — as Levine has done since his student days at London’s Chelsea School of Art; his light installations will be included in the retrospective at The Fine Art Society — has made a name for himself in recent years for his portraits. The Canadian-born Brit, now 41, says that he never expected to be shooting icons at this stage in his career. In fact, back in 2004, when he received a call from Buckingham Palace asking him to shoot a portrait of the Queen, Levine initially thought it was a prank. “I thought it was a hoax at first! Seriously, I really did. It just seemed so far-fetched.”

Once Levine was sufficiently convinced that it was not a ruse but a Royal request, he went to work preparing lights and equipment, wanting to put his knowledge of light and holography to use capturing the monarch in a truly modern fashion. Setting up the visual light equipment in Buckingham Palace took Levine about three days – “and it took every second,” he recalls – and the shoot itself took about an hour and a half. However, the resulting images, including Lightness of Being as well as the shot selected for TIME’s cover on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, are arresting and timeless.

“I think [these images] struck such a chord because it’s going somewhere into a more spiritual dimension and into a deeper realm,” he says. ”It’s what we are but people don’t very often connect with it.”

Chris Levine: Light 3.142 is on display from May 17 to June 15, 2013 at The Fine Art Society in London.

Chris Levine is a Canadian born light artist based in the United Kingdom.

Megan Gibson is a writer and reporter at the London bureau of TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeganJGibson.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/17/stillness-and-light-chris-levine-captures-kate-moss/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/17/stillness-and-light-chris-levine-captures-kate-moss/ Horsey Windpump IX, Norfolk 2013 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/bbzR-HpghZ8/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-ix-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 15:04:23 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I00009xllBscMDQY

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-ix-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-ix-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/ Horsey Windpump VII, Norfolk 2013 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/jsNck1sQXRs/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-vii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 12:30:31 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000PQU_Jv3W2MA

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-vii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-vii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/ VICE Loves Magnum: Peter van Agtmael Won’t Deny the Strange Allure of War http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/CfPsqSCGdJY/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/vice-loves-magnum-peter-van-agtmael-wont-deny-the-strange-allure-of-war/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 12:20:00 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://www.vice.com/187633


USA. South Carolina. 2011. "Wounded" soldiers are treated during a combat lifesaving course that attempts to train soldiers to treat common wounds during simulated combat.

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers on the agency, so becoming a member is a pretty gruelling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

Thus far, American photographer Peter van Agtmael's amazing career has largely focused on documenting the effects of America's post 9/11 wars at home and abroad. Before travelling to Iraq in 2006, he had covered certain issues surrounding HIV-positive refugees in South Africa and the Asian Tsunami in 2005. After starting work in Iraq, he went on to win numerous awards, work in Afghanistan – both embedded and unembedded – and documented injured servicemen and their families. We spoke to him about the mysterious attraction of conflict, and the realities of censorship and care for a country's wounded.

VICE: You graduated in history with honours from Yale. What specifically did you study?
Peter van Agtmael: I studied a pretty general curriculum, that being the expectation. By the time I wrote my thesis, I had decided to write it on how the iconography of WWII Yugoslavia, of opposing forces like the Chetniks and Ustaše, was renewed in the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. How it was used to stoke fear and exploited by the power brokers to wage a civil war.


USA. Wisconsin. 2007. Wounded veteran Raymond Hubbard plays with Star Wars lightsabers with his sons Brady and Riley.

Do you think that your education led to you finding yourself as a photographer in a warzone at the age of 24?
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC. Those suburbs are like suburbs anywhere. It's easy to want to dream about more exciting places. When I was a kid, I was always very into pictorial history books, especially ones about WWII. I found it all very exciting and romantic, in its own way.

Obviously, you get older and the reality of these things kicks in, but the romance doesn't go away, even when you get caught in the midst of it, that's the strange and scary thing. I have had depraved and scary experiences in the last decade but beautiful ones, too. The fact is that when you get caught in the middle of these things, in these places there's an indescribable merit somehow to feeling involved, to be making a record for history, it is satisfying a certain natural curiosity – one with certain useful impulses and certain dark impulses, as well.

Do you think that built-in fascination with conflict applies to most soldiers, too?
I think it's across the board. If you have read Michael Herr's Dispatches, he puts it really well – though it may be a dated reference in some ways. He essentially said that you can't take the romance out of war. It's sort of innate. It's a genetically hardwired part of the experience. We all objectively realise the awfulness and brutality of it, but also for a lot of young people – especially men – there is this draw to it, not at all based on logic or rational thought. There are a million ways to try to intellectualise it, rationalise it and break it into its tiny component pieces, but at the end of the day there's a pull that can't really be described or explained away. At least not for me. I envy people who aren't drawn to war in a lot of ways. I've had a good and interesting life so far, but at times I wish I had made different choices.


AFGHANISTAN. August 10, 2009. Marines of Fox Company, 2/8 Battalion swim in a canal that runs through their Forward Operating Base in Helmand province.

Your photos of graffiti on military bases betray, possibly, a waning enthusiasm for war, or these wars at least, among soldiers. Did you see a great change in morale over your time in Afghanistan or Iraq?
I felt some dissatisfaction from when I first started covering these wars, which was at the beginning of 2006 when things were already going wrong. But actually what I most often found striking was the lack of curiosity that a lot of soldiers had about the ramifications of what they were doing. There was something sporting about what they were doing, people testing their limits, doing it for the love and protection of their comrades, but the big picture? I don't think the average guy on the ground is very curious about it.

Of course there are some who are extremely engaged in it, others not at all. I remember in Iraq in 2010, one guy came up to me and he had heard that I had been covering both Iraq and Afghanistan for some years. He wanted me to clarify if the wars had started at the same time. I was stunned by this question, obviously there’s a pretty important historical trajectory of how these wars started. I asked how old he was and he said 19. I realised then that he was just ten years old when the war in Afghanistan started, 12 when Iraq did, he joined the military in an era of wartime and none of these things had made much impression on him.

I speak with a lot of qualifications when talking about these things, because the US military is a pretty diverse cross section of society, but I was surprised by a general lack of interest in why these wars were being fought at all. In terms of how these wars were going – I would say the average soldier was pretty sceptical.


IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. An Iraqi man is shoved to the ground to be searched after acting suspiciously. No contraband was found after a search of his person and house.

How did your own views on these wars change?
I try not do draw too many conclusions before going into a situation. Despite working within the media I have always had a pretty healthy scepticism about it. The problem is it’s very hard to interpret what’s going on in the longview when you are seeing things on a day-to-day ground level. By going to these places I learned an extraordinary amount about them, and more specifically because I spent so much time embedded I learnt a lot about how America wages a war. Which is a fascinating thing, the way this gigantic military bureaucratic machine arrives, builds these structures and then conducts itself.

That’s what I focused on. I became pretty jaded about ill-informed people, or even decently informed people, spouting their opinions that are often manipulated by their desire to be heard. When you sift through all the white noise of it you end up with very little of real worth. I think that the meaning of historical events is really determined during them or in the immediate aftermath, so at this point I am very cautious about making judgments, I am of the "wait and see" category. But of course its pretty dispiriting being there and seeing what's going on. I am left with more feelings of concern than optimism.

Was the military ever hard to work with? That "huge machine" you spoke of?
I have heard a few reports of censorship. But as a general structure I think embedding with the military is amazingly open. There are certain unit commanders who might be concerned about you and what you are doing, more often out of concern for their men than for some sort of fear of reality getting out. But then you can just move to a different unit. I have never had any problems with censorship. I have been able to record the depraved core of these events. I am referring here more to the Americans. The British and the Germans, for example, allow hardly any access at all – certainly not to combat operations.

I heard of one instance, involving the British photographer Jason Howe, who had taken a photo of an injured British soldier. The soldier in question gave full consent for the photos to be published, but the MOD tried to make it very difficult for him. To me, that feels very un-democratic. That said, I feel like the real censorship, in my experience, came from the media institutions, if anywhere. There's been a lot of discussion about what the iconic images of these wars are, but iconic images rely on a lot of dissemination, and I think that a lot of the iconic images have just not been afforded that.


IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. Aftermath of a suicide bombing that killed 9 and wounded 20.

You have taken a number of images that are shocking, have you directly had trouble getting them seen?
Don’t get me wrong on this. I am not in favour of publishing graphic images for graphic images' sake. I think there are a lot of violent and brutal images that actually can have a distancing effect. But there are plenty of violent images that do bring one into the subject. Actually, my photo of a US soldier holding up a boot in front of a blood spattered wall in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, for example, did get published, and in an American magazine, but only in the European edition. The article ran in both, but they substituted that photo with a generic image of some helicopters in the US edition. A similar thing happened with another photo of mine of an injured soldier staring at the camera. To me that amounts to the media’s reluctance to expose Americans to these brutal facts of war. Wars that we are all incriminated in by the nature of our democracy. Lots of people try to absolve themselves by saying, "Oh, I voted against Bush, I did my part." But at the same time we haven't exactly had an anti-war movement to speak of. I find those gestures and claims a bit empty.

As well as photographing these wars, you spent a great deal of time following injured soldiers trying to reacclimatise to life in America. What’s your impression of the situation for injured veterans in America?
It’s an interesting question. What we have had here in the US is a lot of "support for the soldiers", on the surface at least. After the Vietnam War it went too far toward disgust for the soldiers, they were seen as bloodthirsty criminals rather than for the most part victims of poorly crafted foreign policy. In these wars it has flipped to the other side, where the soldiers are almost fetishised, but in a very superficial way. People are putting on all these Support Our Troops events, tying yellow ribbons on their cars, these very public displays. The idea of the soldier as noble and serving the nation is there. But what I have found in practical terms is that it's all pretty empty. Once it gets down to it, a lot of these soldiers I know who have been injured – physically or emotionally – no one wants to really care for them much beyond a pat on the back. The interest in soldiers is that sort of classic "Did you kill anyone over there? Did you get in any scary firefights?" – that sort of interest. The empathetic interest in soldiers is, I would say, extremely limited.


USA. New Orleans. 2012. Second line on a Sunday with the Dumaine Street Crew.

What are you working on now?
I am still working with these soldiers. But my focus is shifting onto looking at the other side of these wars. The Iraqis and Afghans who have been affected by the war. The diasporas of refugees around the world as a result of these wars. I was recently in Bavaria, which has very strict immigration laws, to look at one of these refugee camps where Afghan refugees are essentially in limbo, confined to a Hitler-era barracks for years at a time with limited support from the local government. The fall out from these wars is that, and it will continue for many years.

As well as warzones, you have also worked in civil situations, photographing daily life in America. Or the Egyptian revolution, or post-earthquake Haiti. How does your working style differ in these different settings?
I try to work pretty consistently wherever I go. I find myself attracted to fairly similar things in most situations. What I like about photography is that I can make myself as open as possible to what the place has to offer – obviously you can't avoid having a point of view but you can be confronted by beautiful, novel, confusing or shocking things without warning. That can happen in a warzone, or anywhere. I think as long as you are keeping your eyes open, it’s much the same.

Click through to see more photography by Peter van Agtmael.


AFGHANISTAN. August 18, 2009. US Marines play a game involving landing beanbags in a hole as a helicopter lands in the background in a cloud of dust.


AFGHANISTAN. August 17, 2009. A Marine Sergeant and an Afghan village elder during a lull in conversation at a Marine base in Mian Poshtay.


USA. South Carolina. 2011. New recruits to Fort Jackson prepare to board a bus to their barracks.


IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. A young boy is separated for questioning after a raid.


AFGHANISTAN. Nuristan. 2007. A helicopter comes in to land on an impromptu helipad built into the side of the mountain at the outpost of Aranas.


USA. New York. 2008. Fleet Week in Manhattan.


IRAQ. Rawah. 2006. A weary American soldier stands guard as a residential home is searched.


IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. Women grieve as their loved ones are detained after a raid that netted a large weapons cache.


IRAQ. Baghdad. 2006. Specialist Jeff Reffner, 23, moments after being wounded by a roadside bomb (IED).


USA. Chicago. 2011. Anthony Smith, a prisoner in the Cook County Jail system, complains to Sheriff Tom Dart about his treatment and sentence.

Previously - Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

More from Magnum:

Thomas Dworzak Has Photos of Sad Marines and Taliban Poseurs

Steve McCurry Goes to Horrific Places and Returns With Incredible Photos

The Way Christopher Anderson Sees the World Is Amazing

Posh Snow, by Martin Parr

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USA. South Carolina. 2011. "Wounded" soldiers are treated during a combat lifesaving course that attempts to train soldiers to treat common wounds during simulated combat.

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers on the agency, so becoming a member is a pretty gruelling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

Thus far, American photographer Peter van Agtmael's amazing career has largely focused on documenting the effects of America's post 9/11 wars at home and abroad. Before travelling to Iraq in 2006, he had covered certain issues surrounding HIV-positive refugees in South Africa and the Asian Tsunami in 2005. After starting work in Iraq, he went on to win numerous awards, work in Afghanistan – both embedded and unembedded – and documented injured servicemen and their families. We spoke to him about the mysterious attraction of conflict, and the realities of censorship and care for a country's wounded.

VICE: You graduated in history with honours from Yale. What specifically did you study?
Peter van Agtmael: I studied a pretty general curriculum, that being the expectation. By the time I wrote my thesis, I had decided to write it on how the iconography of WWII Yugoslavia, of opposing forces like the Chetniks and Ustaše, was renewed in the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. How it was used to stoke fear and exploited by the power brokers to wage a civil war.


USA. Wisconsin. 2007. Wounded veteran Raymond Hubbard plays with Star Wars lightsabers with his sons Brady and Riley.

Do you think that your education led to you finding yourself as a photographer in a warzone at the age of 24?
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC. Those suburbs are like suburbs anywhere. It's easy to want to dream about more exciting places. When I was a kid, I was always very into pictorial history books, especially ones about WWII. I found it all very exciting and romantic, in its own way.

Obviously, you get older and the reality of these things kicks in, but the romance doesn't go away, even when you get caught in the midst of it, that's the strange and scary thing. I have had depraved and scary experiences in the last decade but beautiful ones, too. The fact is that when you get caught in the middle of these things, in these places there's an indescribable merit somehow to feeling involved, to be making a record for history, it is satisfying a certain natural curiosity – one with certain useful impulses and certain dark impulses, as well.

Do you think that built-in fascination with conflict applies to most soldiers, too?
I think it's across the board. If you have read Michael Herr's Dispatches, he puts it really well – though it may be a dated reference in some ways. He essentially said that you can't take the romance out of war. It's sort of innate. It's a genetically hardwired part of the experience. We all objectively realise the awfulness and brutality of it, but also for a lot of young people – especially men – there is this draw to it, not at all based on logic or rational thought. There are a million ways to try to intellectualise it, rationalise it and break it into its tiny component pieces, but at the end of the day there's a pull that can't really be described or explained away. At least not for me. I envy people who aren't drawn to war in a lot of ways. I've had a good and interesting life so far, but at times I wish I had made different choices.


AFGHANISTAN. August 10, 2009. Marines of Fox Company, 2/8 Battalion swim in a canal that runs through their Forward Operating Base in Helmand province.

Your photos of graffiti on military bases betray, possibly, a waning enthusiasm for war, or these wars at least, among soldiers. Did you see a great change in morale over your time in Afghanistan or Iraq?
I felt some dissatisfaction from when I first started covering these wars, which was at the beginning of 2006 when things were already going wrong. But actually what I most often found striking was the lack of curiosity that a lot of soldiers had about the ramifications of what they were doing. There was something sporting about what they were doing, people testing their limits, doing it for the love and protection of their comrades, but the big picture? I don't think the average guy on the ground is very curious about it.

Of course there are some who are extremely engaged in it, others not at all. I remember in Iraq in 2010, one guy came up to me and he had heard that I had been covering both Iraq and Afghanistan for some years. He wanted me to clarify if the wars had started at the same time. I was stunned by this question, obviously there’s a pretty important historical trajectory of how these wars started. I asked how old he was and he said 19. I realised then that he was just ten years old when the war in Afghanistan started, 12 when Iraq did, he joined the military in an era of wartime and none of these things had made much impression on him.

I speak with a lot of qualifications when talking about these things, because the US military is a pretty diverse cross section of society, but I was surprised by a general lack of interest in why these wars were being fought at all. In terms of how these wars were going – I would say the average soldier was pretty sceptical.


IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. An Iraqi man is shoved to the ground to be searched after acting suspiciously. No contraband was found after a search of his person and house.

How did your own views on these wars change?
I try not do draw too many conclusions before going into a situation. Despite working within the media I have always had a pretty healthy scepticism about it. The problem is it’s very hard to interpret what’s going on in the longview when you are seeing things on a day-to-day ground level. By going to these places I learned an extraordinary amount about them, and more specifically because I spent so much time embedded I learnt a lot about how America wages a war. Which is a fascinating thing, the way this gigantic military bureaucratic machine arrives, builds these structures and then conducts itself.

That’s what I focused on. I became pretty jaded about ill-informed people, or even decently informed people, spouting their opinions that are often manipulated by their desire to be heard. When you sift through all the white noise of it you end up with very little of real worth. I think that the meaning of historical events is really determined during them or in the immediate aftermath, so at this point I am very cautious about making judgments, I am of the "wait and see" category. But of course its pretty dispiriting being there and seeing what's going on. I am left with more feelings of concern than optimism.

Was the military ever hard to work with? That "huge machine" you spoke of?
I have heard a few reports of censorship. But as a general structure I think embedding with the military is amazingly open. There are certain unit commanders who might be concerned about you and what you are doing, more often out of concern for their men than for some sort of fear of reality getting out. But then you can just move to a different unit. I have never had any problems with censorship. I have been able to record the depraved core of these events. I am referring here more to the Americans. The British and the Germans, for example, allow hardly any access at all – certainly not to combat operations.

I heard of one instance, involving the British photographer Jason Howe, who had taken a photo of an injured British soldier. The soldier in question gave full consent for the photos to be published, but the MOD tried to make it very difficult for him. To me, that feels very un-democratic. That said, I feel like the real censorship, in my experience, came from the media institutions, if anywhere. There's been a lot of discussion about what the iconic images of these wars are, but iconic images rely on a lot of dissemination, and I think that a lot of the iconic images have just not been afforded that.


IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. Aftermath of a suicide bombing that killed 9 and wounded 20.

You have taken a number of images that are shocking, have you directly had trouble getting them seen?
Don’t get me wrong on this. I am not in favour of publishing graphic images for graphic images' sake. I think there are a lot of violent and brutal images that actually can have a distancing effect. But there are plenty of violent images that do bring one into the subject. Actually, my photo of a US soldier holding up a boot in front of a blood spattered wall in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, for example, did get published, and in an American magazine, but only in the European edition. The article ran in both, but they substituted that photo with a generic image of some helicopters in the US edition. A similar thing happened with another photo of mine of an injured soldier staring at the camera. To me that amounts to the media’s reluctance to expose Americans to these brutal facts of war. Wars that we are all incriminated in by the nature of our democracy. Lots of people try to absolve themselves by saying, "Oh, I voted against Bush, I did my part." But at the same time we haven't exactly had an anti-war movement to speak of. I find those gestures and claims a bit empty.

As well as photographing these wars, you spent a great deal of time following injured soldiers trying to reacclimatise to life in America. What’s your impression of the situation for injured veterans in America?
It’s an interesting question. What we have had here in the US is a lot of "support for the soldiers", on the surface at least. After the Vietnam War it went too far toward disgust for the soldiers, they were seen as bloodthirsty criminals rather than for the most part victims of poorly crafted foreign policy. In these wars it has flipped to the other side, where the soldiers are almost fetishised, but in a very superficial way. People are putting on all these Support Our Troops events, tying yellow ribbons on their cars, these very public displays. The idea of the soldier as noble and serving the nation is there. But what I have found in practical terms is that it's all pretty empty. Once it gets down to it, a lot of these soldiers I know who have been injured – physically or emotionally – no one wants to really care for them much beyond a pat on the back. The interest in soldiers is that sort of classic "Did you kill anyone over there? Did you get in any scary firefights?" – that sort of interest. The empathetic interest in soldiers is, I would say, extremely limited.


USA. New Orleans. 2012. Second line on a Sunday with the Dumaine Street Crew.

What are you working on now?
I am still working with these soldiers. But my focus is shifting onto looking at the other side of these wars. The Iraqis and Afghans who have been affected by the war. The diasporas of refugees around the world as a result of these wars. I was recently in Bavaria, which has very strict immigration laws, to look at one of these refugee camps where Afghan refugees are essentially in limbo, confined to a Hitler-era barracks for years at a time with limited support from the local government. The fall out from these wars is that, and it will continue for many years.

As well as warzones, you have also worked in civil situations, photographing daily life in America. Or the Egyptian revolution, or post-earthquake Haiti. How does your working style differ in these different settings?
I try to work pretty consistently wherever I go. I find myself attracted to fairly similar things in most situations. What I like about photography is that I can make myself as open as possible to what the place has to offer – obviously you can't avoid having a point of view but you can be confronted by beautiful, novel, confusing or shocking things without warning. That can happen in a warzone, or anywhere. I think as long as you are keeping your eyes open, it’s much the same.

Click through to see more photography by Peter van Agtmael.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/vice-loves-magnum-peter-van-agtmael-wont-deny-the-strange-allure-of-war/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/vice-loves-magnum-peter-van-agtmael-wont-deny-the-strange-allure-of-war/ Tomás Munita: 2013 Recipient of the Chris Hondros Fund Award http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/g7L0mG23i8A/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/tomas-munita-2013-recipient-of-the-chris-hondros-fund-award/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 11:40:08 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=72255

Named in honor of the late photojournalist, The Chris Hondros Fund offers financial support to photographers who work in the same vein that Hondros did — with empathy, dedication and humility.

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Shared human experience.

That was the driving force behind photojournalist Chris Hondros’ work. Moments of humanity, brought into the light and into the consciousness of the greater public. His images — whether made within the baked-clay walls of a compound in Basra, the mold-blanketed alleys of post-Katrina New Orleans or the quiet glades of a snow-covered Central Park — reflected an innate desire to photograph the human world he saw unfolding around him. His work was deeply empathetic, a quality that allowed him to tell stories that lingered in viewers’ minds long after the page was turned. And Hondros’ staff position at Getty Images amplified his reach — his photos sent on the wire to thousands of publications around the world, with the potential to reach literally billions of eyes.

In April 2011, in the very midst of doing the hard, important work that he loved, Hondros’ life was cut short by a mortar round.

The Chris Hondros Fund, established in his name by his fiancée Christina Piaia and close friends, aims to “continue and preserve Hondros’ distinctive abilities to bring shared human experiences into the public eye.” Now in its second year, the Fund offers financial support to photographers who work in the same vein that Hondros did — with empathy, dedication and humility.

“This award recognizes and supports photojournalists who bring the news stories of our time into view,” says Piaia.

Today, the fund, in conjunction with Getty Images, gave Chilean photographer Tomás Munita the $20,000 award, citing his “fierce commitment to photojournalism and endless drive to tell a story.” Munita’s portfolio of work, shot in a wide variety of settings and locales, reflects a strong and nuanced grasp of the human condition. His photographs of refugees in Afghanistan, prisoners in El Salvador and daily life in Cuba all demonstrate just how in touch Munita is with the currents (and undercurrents) of life.

“I would like to express my gratitude,” Munita told TIME. “[This award] is not just a recognition. It is the means to keep working on personal projects, which I am definitely going to do.”

Photographer Bryan Denton was selected as a finalist for the 2013 award; the committee cited Denton’s “rare ability to capture both the complexities and daily life of those living in conflict and its aftermath with an unyielding commitment and intellectual curiosity.”

Bryan Denton

Bryan Denton

Libyan residents of Tripoli stormed through the Bab al-Azizia compound in search of weapons as a structure burned in the background. Aug. 23, 2011.

Previously, on the first anniversary of Hondros’ death after he was killed in Libya in 2011, the fund awarded $20,000 to NOOR photographer Andrea Bruce. Emerging photographer Dominic Bracco received a $5000 runner-up award.

Tomás Munita is a freelance photographer based in Santiago, Chile. He previously photographed Church and State: The Role of Religion in Cuba for TIME.

For more information on the Chris Hondros Fund, visit ChrisHondrosFund.org.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/tomas-munita-2013-recipient-of-the-chris-hondros-fund-award/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/tomas-munita-2013-recipient-of-the-chris-hondros-fund-award/ You Have One More Day to Show Berlin Fotofest Your Pics http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/2PMt-rqsTB0/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/you-have-one-more-day-to-show-berlin-fotofest-your-pics/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 11:15:00 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://www.vice.com/187664

The nice folks at the Berlin Fotofest, the ones who are running an exciting contest to find the best cell phone photographers in the world, just told us that they have extended their deadline by one more day. That means you have until the end of tomorrow to submit your work. The competition is at a fever pitch. The top three entries, chosen by a panel of distinguished photographers, will win cash prizes (as in, thousands of dollars) and a chance to exhibit their work at a show. Submit your five photos today by going here. While you're at it, peep some of your competition, above. 

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The nice folks at the Berlin Fotofest, the ones who are running an exciting contest to find the best cell phone photographers in the world, just told us that they have extended their deadline by one more day. That means you have until the end of tomorrow to submit your work. The competition is at a fever pitch. The top three entries, chosen by a panel of distinguished photographers, will win cash prizes (as in, thousands of dollars) and a chance to exhibit their work at a show. Submit your five photos today by going here. While you’re at it, peep some of your competition, above.

The post You Have One More Day to Show Berlin Fotofest Your Pics appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/you-have-one-more-day-to-show-berlin-fotofest-your-pics/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/you-have-one-more-day-to-show-berlin-fotofest-your-pics/ Horsey Windpump IV, Norfolk 2013 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/_tjwZNI2ky0/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-iv-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 09:01:30 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Cyv7QcE3kkw

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-iv-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-iv-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/ Horsey Windpump VIII, Norfolk 2013 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/08po3GXO1bQ/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-viii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 09:01:30 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000ezJuRDUS5xc

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-viii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-viii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/ Horsey Windpump II, Norfolk 2013 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/SyXW69xMJ1s/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-ii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 09:01:30 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000CxNhZi4ects

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-ii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-ii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/ Horsey Windpump III, Norfolk 2013 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/bJEAV_oiEhM/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-iii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 09:01:30 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000wJH2pyNLaRE

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Horsey Windpump, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-iii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/horsey-windpump-iii-norfolk-2013-by-paul-cooklin/ Syria’s Refugees Are Wedged Between Hells http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/oLRmWCK079k/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/15/syrias-refugees-are-wedged-between-hells/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://www.vice.com/186258

I first met war photographer Giles Duley a month ago, to talk about his work both before and after he became a triple amputee in Afghanistan. Giles's most recent trip since we spoke was to Jordan, where he documented the arrival of Syrian refugees after a long journey across the border. Here's his account of new arrivals to the Zaatari Camp. – Jamie Collins

The nights become so bitterly cold that I’ve taken shelter in a portakabin staffed by UNHCR doctors. We sit, sipping tea, fighting our tiredness, waiting. It’s nearly 1AM and there's still no sign of any refugees arriving. Restless, I go outside to join my colleagues, who are sharing a cigarette in the starless night. Suddenly we are silent – in the distance we can hear buses and then out of that cold dark night they start to arrive. The first to appear is a young girl, maybe five years old, dressed in a cream coat walking with a purpose beyond her years, followed by two young mothers clasping their children, wrapped tightly in blankets to protect them from the cold. They make their way into the large military-style reception tent where they will be processed, fed, given medical attention and finally allocated their own plot within Zaatari Camp.

I watch as more and more arrive; tens, hundreds and, by dawn, nearly 2,000. A man wearing a suit; holding his kid’s hand; an elderly couple struggling to carry their meagre possessions; a pregnant woman in tears; a young man carried across the rough ground in his wheelchair. Each face seems haunted; etched with exhaustion, uncertainty and fear. The scenes are reminiscent of so many earlier wars, faded black and white images of civilians uprooted, forced to flee with only what they carry, memories of lives they had. But this is not some terrible past, this is now; the plight of those displaced by the ongoing war in Syria, a war that grows more violent and brutal each day.

The numbers are almost beyond comprehension: more than 70,000 people killed, over four million displaced and more than one million refugees registered by the UNHCR. In Jordan alone, there are 340,000 refugees, many in the tented Zaatari. This number is expected to rise to over one million by the end of the year.

Those with chronic or war-related disabilities face the greatest challenges. Often fearful of receiving treatment in government hospitals they have little option but to flee Syria. While charities, such as Handicap International, are able to provide physiotherapy and some support, the realities of living in a refugee camp with a disability are hard to overcome. Many choose to leave the camp and to privately rent homes in the area. However, rents have nearly trebled, funds are limited and many properties are unsuitable.

Over the following days I meet and photograph some of the refugees, listening to their stories. Men, women and children who are the individuals behind the numbers, everyday people who have lost everything, all control of their lives, who now face a bleak future as refugees. No home, food insecurity, unable to work, unable to attend school, with limited medical care and often with extended families to support. For this to be their only option, one can’t help but think what hell they must have left behind.

This conflict is unbearably complex, with answers hard to come by and rightly debated. Yet while we ponder the rights and wrongs of arming the Free Syrian Army, talk of the red line that will be crossed with the use of chemical weapons and discuss the ramifications of intervention, it seems we are missing the one simple truth. Each day, innocent civilians are being killed, maimed and forced into a refugee’s life. We should prioritise their protection and support without debate.

Zaatari Camp, Jordan. 30th March, 2013.

Follow Giles on Twitter @gilesduley

Check out some more of his work by clicking here

And learn a little more about him by reading this:

I Spoke to the Photographer Who Got Blown Up in Afghanistan and then Went Back

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I first met war photographer Giles Duley a month ago, to talk about his work both before and after he became a triple amputee in Afghanistan. Giles’s most recent trip since we spoke was to Jordan, where he documented the arrival of Syrian refugees after a long journey across the border. Here’s his account of new arrivals to the Zaatari Camp. – Jamie Collins

The nights become so bitterly cold that I’ve taken shelter in a portakabin staffed by UNHCR doctors. We sit, sipping tea, fighting our tiredness, waiting. It’s nearly 1AM and there’s still no sign of any refugees arriving. Restless, I go outside to join my colleagues, who are sharing a cigarette in the starless night. Suddenly we are silent – in the distance we can hear buses and then out of that cold dark night they start to arrive. The first to appear is a young girl, maybe five years old, dressed in a cream coat walking with a purpose beyond her years, followed by two young mothers clasping their children, wrapped tightly in blankets to protect them from the cold. They make their way into the large military-style reception tent where they will be processed, fed, given medical attention and finally allocated their own plot within Zaatari Camp.

I watch as more and more arrive; tens, hundreds and, by dawn, nearly 2,000. A man wearing a suit; holding his kid’s hand; an elderly couple struggling to carry their meagre possessions; a pregnant woman in tears; a young man carried across the rough ground in his wheelchair. Each face seems haunted; etched with exhaustion, uncertainty and fear. The scenes are reminiscent of so many earlier wars, faded black and white images of civilians uprooted, forced to flee with only what they carry, memories of lives they had. But this is not some terrible past, this is now; the plight of those displaced by the ongoing war in Syria, a war that grows more violent and brutal each day.

The numbers are almost beyond comprehension: more than 70,000 people killed, over four million displaced and more than one million refugees registered by the UNHCR. In Jordan alone, there are 340,000 refugees, many in the tented Zaatari. This number is expected to rise to over one million by the end of the year.

Those with chronic or war-related disabilities face the greatest challenges. Often fearful of receiving treatment in government hospitals they have little option but to flee Syria. While charities, such as Handicap International, are able to provide physiotherapy and some support, the realities of living in a refugee camp with a disability are hard to overcome. Many choose to leave the camp and to privately rent homes in the area. However, rents have nearly trebled, funds are limited and many properties are unsuitable.

Over the following days I meet and photograph some of the refugees, listening to their stories. Men, women and children who are the individuals behind the numbers, everyday people who have lost everything, all control of their lives, who now face a bleak future as refugees. No home, food insecurity, unable to work, unable to attend school, with limited medical care and often with extended families to support. For this to be their only option, one can’t help but think what hell they must have left behind.

This conflict is unbearably complex, with answers hard to come by and rightly debated. Yet while we ponder the rights and wrongs of arming the Free Syrian Army, talk of the red line that will be crossed with the use of chemical weapons and discuss the ramifications of intervention, it seems we are missing the one simple truth. Each day, innocent civilians are being killed, maimed and forced into a refugee’s life. We should prioritise their protection and support without debate.

Zaatari Camp, Jordan. 30th March, 2013.

Follow Giles on Twitter @gilesduley

Check out some more of his work by clicking here

And learn a little more about him by reading this:

I Spoke to the Photographer Who Got Blown Up in Afghanistan and then Went Back

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(Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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(Paul Cooklin)

(Paul Cooklin)
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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
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Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

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Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Happisburgh Lighthouse, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
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Walcott, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Walcott, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Walcott, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
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Rapeseed, Happisburgh, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Rapeseed, Happisburgh, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Rapeseed, Happisburgh, Norfolk 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
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Ladybower Reservoir, Sheffiled 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Ladybower Reservoir, Sheffiled 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Ladybower Reservoir, Sheffiled 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Ladybower Reservoir II, Sheffiled 2013 (Paul Cooklin)Copyright: Paul Cooklin

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Ladybower Reservoir II, Sheffiled 2013 (Paul Cooklin)

Ladybower Reservoir II, Sheffiled 2013 (Paul Cooklin)
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Photographer Philip Cheung spent the past five years as a newspaper photographer in the United Arab Emirates, photographing the country's fast-changing landscapes.

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In 2007, after only one year of working as a freelance photographer in Toronto, Philip Cheung was asked to shoot for a newspaper in Abu Dhabi, a move that eventually led him to spend a total of five years professionally photographing the Middle East.

“It was a very spontaneous move,” Cheung told TIME. He arrived knowing very little about the region — when he was still in Canada, he was able to find very little concrete information about the country. But once he arrived, he began relentlessly observing and researching the lives he found around him. This diligence aided him as he crafted a series of photographs that embody much of the United Arab Emirates’ fast-changing landscapes.

It’s not hard to notice the rate at which the UAE is developing and adapting as a country. “In 2008 and 2009, I spent some time taking pictures in Mussafah, an industrial town and a suburb of Abu Dhabi. It was known for its labor camps, home to many of the country’s labor force. A year later, when I returned to Mussafah, once a small, bustling city within a city, full of shacks, low-end restaurants, convenience stores and makeshift markets  — it had completely disappeared. The camp had been demolished and the laborers were moved to better housing,” he says.

Oil-driven development has propelled cities and suburbs through drastic change. Foreigners now make up 85% of the population, people come and go, and with them come radical cultural shifts. Cheung’s approach is interesting and unusual, focusing on rather anonymous objects in sparse environments. Ultimately, his photographs show the strange and beautiful result of two very different cultures — the local Bedouin culture and the international business-oriented culture — as they try to co-exist in one space.

Cheung explains that the absence of men, women and cultural reference points was deliberate, so that he may push the boundaries of the kinds of photos he wanted to make, and take a closer look at the environment and its awkward subtleties. “My focus for the project is space — as a holding environment for human interaction or the remnants of it. People, especially the expatriates, are present in many of the images indirectly as the foreign influence on this evolving space.”

Today, when one searches for ‘Abu Dhabi’ online, there are pages and pages of links detailing countless tourist attractions and activities. Cheung’s series of photographs are an interesting documentation of this change, but also act as a personal reminder of Cheung’s experience there. “Taking these photos was like writing in a journal,” he says. Now, back in Toronto and starting to re-build a home for himself, he looks back on his five year journey.

“Just like all those people coming in and out of the city, it felt like my time to go through the revolving door and head home.”

Philip Cheung is a photographer currently based in Toronto. He has recently returned to Canada after five years in the Middle East where he worked on commissioned and self-initiated projects.

Sophie Butcher is a writer and photographer based in New York.

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American-born Hannah Pierce-Carlson lives in Vietnam, where she spends her time teaching English to middle class children and photographing their daily lives. Those daily lives seem to mostly be made up of Dora the Explorer, American-style video game arcades and overweight children. In fact, if it wasn't for the Chinese-language signs popping up everywhere, I'd have a hard time figuring out whether the photos were taken in Asia or some carnival-obsessed hinterland in the American Midwest. Here's what Hannah had to say about her work:  

"I might be caucasian and American, but since 2006, I've been an intermittent member of the ever-growing Asian middle class. I've been teaching English to that generation of Asians who haven't been faced with the same kind of political turmoil as their parents' generation. And while that might sound relatively banal, it just isn't. As a subject, the middle class is diverse, awesome and visually intriguing. They have money for neon, karaoke dance stages at their birthday parties. They can airbrush fantasy scenes on to their car hoods. They can pimp their scooters and afford dazzling pedicures.

"Their children can be crazed and invigorated by video games, and at the same time sedated and fatted by enormous piles of schoolwork and processed junk food. They can face existential identity crises in their 20s. Their families can throw big, sprawling block parties on the street. Some events like these could yield a picture, or not. I want to make strange and beautiful pictures of my community, and I want them to be at once over-the-top and quintessential."

See more work by Hannah here and check out the blog she keeps with her husband here.

 

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American-born Hannah Pierce-Carlson lives in Vietnam, where she spends her time teaching English to middle class children and photographing their daily lives. Those daily lives seem to mostly be made up of Dora the Explorer, American-style video game arcades and overweight children. In fact, if it wasn’t for the Chinese-language signs popping up everywhere, I’d have a hard time figuring out whether the photos were taken in Asia or some carnival-obsessed hinterland in the American Midwest. Here’s what Hannah had to say about her work:

“I might be caucasian and American, but since 2006, I’ve been an intermittent member of the ever-growing Asian middle class. I’ve been teaching English to that generation of Asians who haven’t been faced with the same kind of political turmoil as their parents’ generation. And while that might sound relatively banal, it just isn’t. As a subject, the middle class is diverse, awesome and visually intriguing. They have money for neon, karaoke dance stages at their birthday parties. They can airbrush fantasy scenes on to their car hoods. They can pimp their scooters and afford dazzling pedicures.

“Their children can be crazed and invigorated by video games, and at the same time sedated and fatted by enormous piles of schoolwork and processed junk food. They can face existential identity crises in their 20s. Their families can throw big, sprawling block parties on the street. Some events like these could yield a picture, or not. I want to make strange and beautiful pictures of my community, and I want them to be at once over-the-top and quintessential.”

See more work by Hannah here and check out the blog she keeps with her husband here.

 

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/14/hannah-pierce-carlson-and-the-line-between-east-and-west/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/14/hannah-pierce-carlson-and-the-line-between-east-and-west/ The Dreamy Dissonance of @echosight http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/wsUMNpDcaqw/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/13/the-dreamy-dissonance-of-echosight/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 08:00:25 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=72127

The way we collaborate is simplified more every day. No longer are we required to share printed essays or negatives to work with each other; all we need is an internet connection. This idea is part of the inspiration behind @echosight, a joint-Instagram account between photographers Danny Ghitis in New York and Daniella Zalcman in London.

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Every day, across all kinds of media and all sorts of pursuits, creative minds are reinventing the ways we collaborate with each other in the second decade of the 21st century. Photographers, for instance, no longer need to physically exchange negatives, prints, contact sheets or other “analog” materials in order to work with each other; all we need is an internet connection — a new reality that helped inspire @echosight, a joint-Instagram account between photographers Danny Ghitis in New York and Daniella Zalcman in London.

The two met at Eddie Adams Workshop in 2009, but never really interacted despite both living in New York City for years. Zalcman moved to London in late 2012 and began making multi-layered images that combined her new home with her old one. The result, New York + London: A Collection of Double Exposures, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, also led to the formation of @echosight.

Unlike most collaborations, @echosight has taken shape without the artists ever working together face-to-face. While they’re divided by oceans and continents, Ghitis and Zalcman are free to collaborate on their own schedules and share the results on social media.

In a way, the project is an evolution of each photographer’s personal work. “I’m kind of allergic to my SLRs outside of newspaper assignment work,” said Zalcman, who shot most personal photos on medium format film before exploring phone photography. “One is as old-school as you can get and is slow and laborious,” she said. “The iPhone is just the opposite of that. It’s fast and easy and quick.”

Ghitis said he never had a problem with phone photography, but had not fully explored it until getting an iPhone. “I have this thing and I can carry it around in my pocket and it allows me to take pictures casually,” he said.

@echosight is like a “puzzle game,” according to the pair. The entire process takes place on a phone: Images are uploaded to a Google Drive folder, each pulls photos from the other and creates the final piece in an app called Image Blender. Each photo is uploaded to the Instagram account with a quote, something that Ghitis initiated in order to communicate the feeling being conveyed. “Photos are very abstract and words can be very literal so I didn’t want to go too far in one direction,” he said.

The resulting images are at times elegant and at others chaotic. Some have an edge of darkness, like a nightmare; others are meant to be more lighthearted. Ghitis describes an image of a hippo’s open mouth blended with a beautiful spiral staircase as a joke on their shared architectural backgrounds—both studied it at one point in college. “Daniella was making this lovely comment about architecture and I totally made a joke out of it, but that’s kind of what’s fun,” he said.

The game of @echosight is not limited to two players. In the future, the duo hopes to become a trio, quartet or something larger to create more complex and deeply layered images. As each photographer travels, so does the project—Vietnam has been in the mix during a recent trip by Zalcman.

“It would be great to have someone else join our ‘pictures with friends’ game,” Ghitis said.

Tanner Curtis is an associate photo editor at TIME.com.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/13/the-dreamy-dissonance-of-echosight/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/13/the-dreamy-dissonance-of-echosight/ Emil Jakobsen Takes Awkward Photos of Awkward People http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/awwafWkMH2k/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/11/emil-jakobsen-takes-awkward-photos-of-awkward-people/#comments Sat, 11 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://www.vice.com/187251

I enjoy taking pictures of strange people, like Denmark's star sex therapist Carl-Mar Møller whom I was fortunate enough to photograph clothed (he doesn't do clothes, usually). I also appreciate an obviously awkward situation in pictures. In fact, I often find it quite awkward when I take someone's picture. It's probably because I'm not as funny as I think I am.

See more of Emil's work here.

More great photos:

Animals Keep Photobombing Henry Gorse

Delaney Allen Hates Shooting People

Give Shane Deegan a Job

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I enjoy taking pictures of strange people, like Denmark’s star sex therapist Carl-Mar Møller whom I was fortunate enough to photograph clothed (he doesn’t do clothes, usually). I also appreciate an obviously awkward situation in pictures. In fact, I often find it quite awkward when I take someone’s picture. It’s probably because I’m not as funny as I think I am.

See more of Emil’s work here.

More great photos:

Animals Keep Photobombing Henry Gorse

Delaney Allen Hates Shooting People

Give Shane Deegan a Job

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/11/emil-jakobsen-takes-awkward-photos-of-awkward-people/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/11/emil-jakobsen-takes-awkward-photos-of-awkward-people/ The Camera as a Bridge: A Daughter-in-Law’s Tale on Mother’s Day http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/_JqA501iqEE/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/10/the-camera-as-a-bridge-a-daughter-in-laws-tale-on-mothers-day/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 08:00:28 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71158

Photographer Ilona Szwarc's camera has brought her closer to her mother-in-law than she could ever imagine. LightBox presents Szwarc's on-going project in honor of Mother's Day.

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When Ilona Szwarc and her husband moved from Poland to New York in 2008, she had never met her mother-in-law, Anna, who had made the same move decades earlier. Other daughters-in-law might have endured awkward meals or family vacations until the relationship got comfortable, but Ilona Szwarc is a photographer and she took a different approach. Although it’s only been a few years between that beginning and this Mother’s Day, Szwarc and her mother-in-law now enjoy a warm relationship. And photography helped get them there.

“We have a unique relationship where we connect through the camera and through the act of photographing,” says Szwarc. “This is a way for us to spend time together. It brings us close.”

Perhaps even closer than other daughters-in-law are to their husband’s mothers.

Szwarc’s pictures of Anna—whom she calls by her first name—capture a broad range of emotions. Despite their family connection, the photographer does not always present a rosy picture of Anna’s life; neither does Anna hide from the camera. Szwarc says Anna loves to be photographed and is courageously open. The pictures chronicle moments of joy, as well as instances of loneliness. That juxtaposition of fun and melancholy was manifest in the very first picture in the series: right after Szwarc suggested that they do a project together, Anna picked up a Venetian-style mask and held it in front of her face.

“I think this very much reflects her personality,” says Szwarc. “She likes to laugh, though not all of the pictures show that; she’s a free spirit; she loves costume parties. But for me, as a photographer it brings another layer of significance, thinking about identity.”

Thinking about the idea of masks—which show up several times throughout the series—was one of the ways in which the photographer grew closer to her subject. As immigrants, both Anna and Ilona have had to deal with the decision of whether, and to what degree, they want to blend in or distinguish themselves, to grapple with what it means to be a Polish woman in America. (Or a woman, period: like much of Szwarc’s other work, the Anna photographs also touch on a fascination with other sorts of masks, like beauty and appearance.) Immigration inevitably means that people become physically distant from one another. Although Anna left Poland partly to make a better future for her family, she was not able to arrange for her son—Szwarc’s husband—to join her until he was 19. (He traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Poland several times between then and 2008.) Her husband, who appears in one of the photographs, does not live in the U.S.; she has not yet fully found her place in the community of her new homeland. The process of the family coming back together is still a work in progress, and Anna’s life is often, as Szwarc’s photographs show, a solitary one.

Ilona Szwarc

Ilona Szwarc

A snapshot of Anna from the 80′s, taken at Liberty Island during one of her first trips to New York.

The immigrant’s story especially stands out in the one photograph in the series that Szwarc did not take, a snapshot of Anna in front of the Statue of Liberty, taken by Szwarc’s husband Bartek Rainski shortly after his mother arrived in the United States. The composition is noteworthy—Anna’s figure and the statue’s seem to echo one another—as is its meaning for Szwarc.

“It represents Anna’s journey to fulfill her dreams and hopes for a brighter future in this country,” Szwarc says.

When it comes to Szwarc’s photographs, Anna is more concerned with the journey than with the destination. She wants to be photographed and to spend time with her daughter-in-law, but Szwarc gets the impression that when Anna sees the pictures of her own life, they seem so ordinary as to be uninteresting. Szwarc feels differently: though her period of intense work on the Anna series has finished, she says it’s an open-ended project and will continue to evolve. Just as their relationship has.

“It’s gone from not knowing someone at all,” she says, “to knowing this person very intimately, in a sense, and witnessing this person’s ups and downs, witnessing her life.”

Ilona Szwarc is a photographer based in New York City. Her work often examines gender, identity and beauty in context of American society.

Lily Rothman is a writer-producer for TIME.com.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/10/the-camera-as-a-bridge-a-daughter-in-laws-tale-on-mothers-day/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/10/the-camera-as-a-bridge-a-daughter-in-laws-tale-on-mothers-day/ Anarchy, Attitude and Outrage: When Punk was Young and Dangerous http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/fFDKwfG0Rk0/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/anarchy-attitude-and-outrage-when-punk-was-young-and-dangerous/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 18:34:15 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71650

TIME looks back, through the work of three photographers—Alex Levac, Steve Johnston and Ray Stevenson—to the early days of Punk, by reproducing their gritty images in the photocopied aesthetic of the era.

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In the beginning, punk happened on the streets — a rebellious embodiment of disillusioned British youth, expressed through style and music. Where once its images were reproduced in stapled fanzines, four decades on a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art carries punk into more rarefied surroundings. TIME looks back, through the work of three photographers — Alex Levac, Steve Johnston and Ray Stevenson — to the early days of Punk, by reproducing their gritty images in the photocopied aesthetic of the era. Below, Jon Savage writes about the movement as the introduction to the new publication PUNK: Chaos to Couture.

The many arguments that have since clustered around punk authorship and, indeed, authenticity only serve to
 cloak the fact that it was an impulse that crystallized into an
 idea and a manifesto in various cities throughout the
 Western world during the early 1970s. A word trace on ‘punk’ 
will take you through gay prison slang and 1950s juvenile 
delinquency to the 1960s garage rock ideal espoused with
 increasing frequency after the 1972 release of Lenny Kaye’s 
groundbreaking compilation Nuggets.

The 1960s were over. It was time for a truly 1970s rock 
music. But what could that be? In Paris, New York,
 Cleveland, San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles and London, young fans,
 writers and activists began to grope toward a definition of a 
new rock age. Their enemy was the spectacle, which had, by the early
 1970s,
 successfully incorporated youth rebellion into its armory of repression.
They
 railed against the tyranny of soft rock, the hegemony of the mellow.
 The forward, unitary motion of 1960s pop modernism was 
gone and in its place came an eclectic, restless, uprooted
 culture. The past was up for grabs: not just the
 history of postwar pop music — already thirty years old — but a gnostic 
tradition
 of outcasts and visionaries that began as far back as the late eighteenth century with the Romantics. 
Anything, as long as it was youthful and sharp-edged, as 
long as it helped the new aesthetic, the aim of which was to hone 
everything 
down to a fine point. 

New York was well ahead of the pack: it was both big enough to 
foster an independent rock scene and open to ideas from Europe. Andy 
Warhol and 
Lou Reed were always at odds with the prevailing late 1960s
 counter-cultural
 rhetoric, and their influence hung heavy: in November 1970, the week  that 
the Velvet Underground’s Loaded was
 released, the performance art/rock group Suicide printed a flyer for a 
small show 
on West Broadway that read ‘Punk Music.’

Ray Hamilton—Camera Press/Redux

Ray Hamilton—Camera Press/Redux

The punk movement spread from the UK into the USA. This starry-eyed and safety-pinned girl was pictured in California, 1977.

The city’s biggest hope in the early 1970s was the New York 
Dolls, fashion-obsessed brats from Queens and Staten
 Island. Pop culture mavens and Anglophiles, they adopted 
a wardrobe that fused the wilder excesses of hippie, the
 androgyny of the drag queens, who were omnipresent at Max’s Kansas 
City and in the Warhol entourage, and the glamor of rock and roll: “It
 was more like ’50s gold 
lamé,” said New York Dolls member Sylvain.

Sylvain remembered the look: “I was sick and tired of wearing bell-bottoms. . . . then
 there was the whole thing with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,
 and our relationship with drugs, and that fact that we were
 flamboyant. If you wore a little makeup, influenced in any
way by the best of the late ’60s, The Doors and the Rolling Stones, you 
had to
 have sex appeal. Before we started, me and 
[original drummer] Billy [Murcia] used to put on makeup just to go down
 to the supermarket. Getting dressed up to go 
shopping, it was fun to do that. That’s where we were, and
 that’s what it was.”

Punk began with a feeling of frustration and rage and 
turned it into an idea that could be acted upon. Employing
 deconstruction and self-starter empowerment — the
 DIY ethic — it liberated a generation to create its own
 culture. In this, it returned, for a brief while, rock music back
 to its original teenage inspiration and function, which was 
to be critical, rebellious, unpalatable, to tell an
existential truth otherwise denied in the culture, and to envision
 what the future could be.

Jon Savage is a renowned music journalist best known for his history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England’s Dreaming. The excerpt above is republished from the exhibition catalog, Punk: Chaos to Couture, Copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

PUNK: Chaos to Couture is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from May 9 – August 14, 2013.


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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/anarchy-attitude-and-outrage-when-punk-was-young-and-dangerous/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/anarchy-attitude-and-outrage-when-punk-was-young-and-dangerous/http://timethemoment.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/xzzxzuntitled-1.jpg?w=258 Photography, Expanded: Rethinking Engagement and Impact http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/_D2OmWS1FCA/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/photography-expanded-rethinking-engagement-and-impact/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 09:58:29 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/?p=9677

Photography, Expanded: Rethinking Engagement and Impact April 19, 2013   by Anna Overstrom-Coleman   Documentary Photography Project   Add your voice Photography, Expanded: Rethinking Engagement and Impact info  What happens when experts in technology, software design, media, gaming, and film collaborate with documentary photographers? That’s what participants at Photography, Expanded hope to find out. Sponsored by the Open Society Foundations and the Magnum Foundation, [...]

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Photography, Expanded: Rethinking Engagement and Impact

April 19, 2013   by Anna Overstrom-Coleman   Documentary Photography Project   Add your voice

Photography, Expanded: Rethinking Engagement and Impact

What happens when experts in technology, software design, media, gaming, and film collaborate with documentary photographers? That’s what participants at Photography, Expanded hope to find out. Sponsored by the Open Society Foundations and the Magnum Foundation, the conference aims to inspire photographers to experiment with digital tools to mobilize audiences around pressing social issues.

I caught up with photographer Marcus Bleasdale, who will be presenting his work-in-progress, Zero Hour: Congo, an immersive game based on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

You’ve dedicated many years to addressing the conflict and resulting human rights violations in DRC through partnerships with organizations like Human Rights Watch. With support from an Open Society Foundations Audience Engagement Grant, you’ve challenged banks and businesses directly involved in the mineral extraction industry, and you’ve also created multimedia pieces for educational curricula. Why gaming? And why now?

Natural resource exploitation in DRC is a problem in which we are all complicit. Grassroots users of electronic products (smart phones, tablets, laptops, cameras, and game consoles) are largely unaware that they are involved. Developing a game that could entertain and at the same time guide people to increased awareness seemed to be the right direction to follow. We increasingly see youth today not engaging in mainstream news. If they are not coming to traditional platforms for information, I figured I would bring mainstream news to them.

People would play your game using technology that requires the very resources that are fueling the conflict. What are the challenges of tapping into this consumer appetite in order to educate people and raise awareness?

We inaccurately assume that those who buy products and mobile applications geared toward entertainment don’t want to learn about current affairs. But if we don’t intelligently engage them on the platforms they want to use, we lose this audience.

Then how do you connect that audience to ongoing advocacy or conversations about what’s happening in DRC?

The characters in the game would be based on people in the field: doctors, nurses, aid workers, journalists, photographers, child soldiers. NGOs would be involved in the game’s design so that the user is educated as well as entertained. These organizations could also benefit from revenues generated by the players, which could aid real world projects in specific places.

Your aim is to have a strong range of characters representing all sides, races, and politics within the Congo story. What do you want to convey with the character of the photojournalist?

The photojournalist will hopefully be the link between the aid/NGO world and the people who are impacted by the conflict. They will be able to go behind rebel lines to see the use of child soldiers and to report on the violence, displacement, and desperate health situation. In this way, the photojournalist will be the eyes for the game “world.”

Zero Hour: Congo’s project team includes media producer Daniella Steadman and the CEO of nDreams, the digital games developer and publisher Patrick O’Luanaigh. What expectations do you all have for Photography, Expanded?

We hope we can learn about process and understand more about the needs to deliver such a product to the market, both on a messaging level as well as on a financial level. The desire is to arrive at a point where individuals or corporations are interested in partnering to make this a reality.

Follow—and join—the conversation about Photography, Expanded via the Twitter hashtag #PhotoEx.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/photography-expanded-rethinking-engagement-and-impact/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/photography-expanded-rethinking-engagement-and-impact/ A Final Embrace: The Most Haunting Photograph from Bangladesh http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/U984h1DK0mw/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/a-final-embrace-the-most-haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 04:58:15 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71788

Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image.

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A Final Embrace: The Most Haunting Photograph from Bangladesh Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2013/05/08/a-final-embrace-the-most-haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/

A Final Embrace: The Most Haunting Photograph from Bangladesh
Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2013/05/08/a-final-embrace-the-most-haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/


Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image.

Shahidul Alam, Bangladeshi photographer, writer and founder of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, said of the photo: “This image, while deeply disturbing, is also hauntingly beautiful. An embrace in death, its tenderness rises above the rubble to touch us where we are most vulnerable. By making it personal, it refuses to let go. This is a photograph that will torment us in our dreams. Quietly it tells us. Never again.”

Akhter writes for LightBox about the photograph, which appears in this week’s TIME International alongside an essay by David Von Drehle.

I have been asked many questions about the photograph of the couple embracing in the aftermath of the collapse. I have tried desperately, but have yet to find any clues about them. I don’t know who they are or what their relationship is with each other.

I spent the entire day the building collapsed on the scene, watching as injured garment workers were being rescued from the rubble. I remember the frightened eyes of relatives — I was exhausted both mentally and physically. Around 2 a.m., I found a couple embracing each other in the rubble. The lower parts of their bodies were buried under the concrete. The blood from the eyes of the man ran like a tear. When I saw the couple, I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I knew them — they felt very close to me. I looked at who they were in their last moments as they stood together and tried to save each other — to save their beloved lives.

Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me. It’s as if they are saying to me, we are not a number — not only cheap labor and cheap lives. We are human beings like you. Our life is precious like yours, and our dreams are precious too.

They are witnesses in this cruel history of workers being killed. The death toll is now more than 750. What a harsh situation we are in, where human beings are treated only as numbers.

This photo is haunting me all the time. If the people responsible don’t receive the highest level of punishment, we will see this type of tragedy again. There will be no relief from these horrific feelings. I’ve felt a tremendous pressure and pain over the past two weeks surrounded by dead bodies. As a witness to this cruelty, I feel the urge to share this pain with everyone. That’s why I want this photo to be seen.

Taslima Akhter is a Bangladeshi photographer and activist.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/a-final-embrace-the-most-haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/08/a-final-embrace-the-most-haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/ Supporting Photographers, Moving Walls http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/sNSqO59Kh7w/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/supporting-photographers-moving-walls/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 21:00:02 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71755

On Wednesday, the Open Society Foundations will mark their 20th group exhibition of "Moving Walls" — a project reflecting the group's support for long-term documentary photography.

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On Wednesday, the Open Society Foundations will mark their 20th group exhibition of “Moving Walls” at their new location in midtown Manhattan. Initially conceived 15 years ago as a way to highlight the foundation’s issues and to support documentary photography, the exhibition highlights and adds value to important (and often under-reported) social issues.

Initially, the Foundations’ goals were focused on Eastern Europe and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now, the Moving Walls exhibition encompasses work from around the globe. This year, the exhibition features the work of 5 photographers from China, Russia and Ukraine to Sierra Leone and the countries of the Arab Spring.

“On Revolution Road,” a project by TIME contract photographer Yuri Kozyrev, features work from the uprisings and unrest in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen. Shot on assignment for TIME, Kozyrev’s work demonstrates both the collective nature of world politics as well as the individual characteristics inherent to each nation’s unique issues. “In the end, the differences between the aftermaths of the region’s revolutions may be more important than their similarities,” he said.

Katharina Hesse‘s project, “Borderland: North Korean Refugees,” tells the individual narratives of North Korean refugees along the Chinese border. Because they’re classified by the Chinese government as ‘economic migrants’, the refugees are ineligible for official UN refugee status. “After experiencing a world like this, it just didn’t feel ‘right’ to take pictures and move on to the next job,” Hesse wrote. She has been shooting the project for nine years.

“Juveniles Waiting for Justice” is a project by Fernando Moleres shot in the Pademba Road prison in Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, some 1,300 prisoners languished in squalor, lacking proper hygiene and provisions while awaiting trial. “My Sierra Leone prison photography has been published in the European press,” Moleres said, “but I feel that the story has not exposed a broad audience to this tragedy.”

Ian Teh‘s project, “Traces: Landscapes in Transition on the Yellow River Basin,” explores the existential impact the Yellow River has on the more than 150 million people it directly sustains. “My photographs play with the tension between the Yellow River’s place in Chinese culture and history and China’s emergence as a major economic power,” he said. “By using the landscape, I attempt to show what happens when an area that was largely rural becomes increasingly urban and industrial.”

VII photographer Donald Weber‘s “Interrogations” takes a surreal view on the Russian judicial system. Photographing people inside police interrogation rooms, Weber captures “a place where justice and mercy and hope and despair are manufactured, bought, bartered and sold.” Says Weber: “With each image, I was looking to make a very simple photograph of an actual police interrogation, but also a complex portrait of the relationship between truth and power.”

Moving Walls in on view at the Open Society Foundations at 224 West 57th Street, New York City, from May 8 – December 13, 2013. 

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/supporting-photographers-moving-walls/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/supporting-photographers-moving-walls/ Dreamscapes: The Fantastical Photographs of Lieko Shiga http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/Pv0nqkYiktc/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/dreamscapes-the-fantastical-photographs-of-lieko-shiga/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 08:00:32 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=70474

The striking pictures in Japanese artist Lieko Shiga's series, Canary — currently on display at the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam FOAM — reference the powerful metaphor of a canary in a coal mine.

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As the old expression “a canary in a coal mine” suggests, the small songbirds have long been a symbol of a type of early-detection system — a way of indicating something that might otherwise remain unknown. And just as the old coal mine canaries alerted miners to invisible gases and fumes, the camera is capable of capturing moments that might pass unrevealed, or undiscovered. The striking pictures in Japanese artist Lieko Shiga’s series, Canary — currently on display at the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam FOAM — references this powerful metaphor with images that are not immediately recognizable, nor easily understood, but that are nevertheless laden with meaning.

The Amsterdam show is comprised of an extensive body of work first published as a book in 2007 — a book that has since become something of a classic among photobook collectors. The majority of images in Canary are utterly fantastical, bordering on the surreal: a giant animal skull in a room lit by mysterious blue light; a fireball writhing in midair; a woman floating above the half-naked body of a man lying in bed. Elaborate and visually arresting dreamscapes, the pictures’ effectiveness is largely achieved through an intriguing interplay between light and color. However, much of the work is also manipulated: relying on analog technologies, some negatives appear scratched while other effects appear to have been produced in the darkroom. The extent of this manipulation varies. As Shiga points out: “I always try to approach the subject in its own way.” The photographer’s methods, in other words, are dictated by the subject of the image, and not the other way around.

Perhaps because most of the images in the Canary series were produced at night or in dark, interior spaces, the work at-once possesses and exudes an unsettling, ambiguous aura. The viewer’s sense of stumbling upon another’s intensely personal dreamscape is heightened even further in the photos where the identity of the subject is disguised.

In “Restaurant Surtaj,” for instance, the details of a restaurant interior recede before the eerie presence of a woman whose face is obscured by a ghostly black presence. The photograph has the palpable sense of a half-remembered dream. The dreamer struggles to give shape to a dream — perhaps even recalling the table number in a restaurant — but can not bring into focus the face of her dinner companion.

Shiga’s work is strongly reminiscent of the black and white photography of Masatoshi Naito. In his classic project, Tono-Monogatari, from 1983, Naito interrogates the complex relationship between mysticism, spirituality and Japanese folklore in a striking series of nocturnal landscapes and portraits. By manipulating the photographic negative or print, however, Shiga also points to the inherent vulnerability of the human body. If not suspended, as it were, in Shiga’s imagination, many of her subjects would fall, collapse or drown, simply as a consequence of the laws of physics.

The emphasis on the body perhaps relates to Shiga’s past experience as a dancer, which she practiced before teaching herself photography. Rather than depicting or documenting a recognizable physical world, however, Shiga instead employs photography as a means of choreographing an emotionally and psychologically complex inner landscape.

Lieko Shiga is a Japanese fine-art photographer.

Marco Bohr is a photographer and writer based in London. He maintains the Visual Culture blog.


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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/dreamscapes-the-fantastical-photographs-of-lieko-shiga/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/dreamscapes-the-fantastical-photographs-of-lieko-shiga/http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/d9a6b68463b57416829823f78c5a6aaa?s=96&d=http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/ad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536?s=96&r=G Easter in the Mountains http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/s0iLk-yFYTQ/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/easter-in-the-mountains/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://www.vice.com/186604

The Cora, or Naayari, as they call themselves, were the last indigenous ethnic group in Mexico to be conquered by the Spanish – they held out until 1722. Many of them still live in isolated communities along the Sierra del Nayar mountain range, remote settlements that are only reachable by plane and lack basic services like running water and electricity. Not much has changed since precolonial times. The Cora adhere to their own idiosyncratic blend of Catholicism and animism, which manifests in their unique way of celebrating Easter.

I shot these portraits during the Judea Cora (their version of Catholicism’s Holy Week), in San Juan Bautista, a small town in the state of Nayarit. The celebration’s rituals involve physical acts of contrition, similar to Lent, but the Cora also celebrate in all-day ceremonies meant to represent a cosmic battle with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, while simultaneously depicting the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It’s pretty confusing, but as I understand it, the significant rituals begin on the night of Ash Wednesday, when participants covered in body paint made from burnt, ground-up corn – who are meant to represent Jews and Romans – perform a dance that signifies the “rise of evil”. On Thursday morning, these Cora fast while wandering through town in a ritual that evokes the Romans’ search for Christ. Later that afternoon, another set of dancers, this time representing Christ’s apostles, paint themselves white. Then the two factions meet in the center of the village for a ceremony – the “Jews” eat while the “apostles” dance until nightfall, after which they host a separate meal before returning home. The Jews then dance from dusk until around midnight, when they go out in search of corn to “steal”. (In reality, a farmer donates the corn in exchange for a blessing of his harvest.) This year, the Jews left the town center at 1AM and returned with sacks full of corn around 6AM. Other biblical characters like the Pharisees and figures from the Coras’ own myths round out the cast.

I was awed by the dedication and attention to detail shown by the Cora who paint their bodies and elaborately decorate their sabers and crowns. Each design is different, and all the participants, even the youngest dancers, create their own. 

All of this, I was told, represents a battle in the spirit kingdom that is resolved when a figure representing both Jesus and the sun resurrects itself and punishes the Jews, who repent for their sins. I found the detailed explanations of the rituals I received from the Cora difficult to comprehend because the ones most familiar with the story are adults who only speak the Cora language. In the end, though, I think the portraits speak for themselves. 

Click through to the next page.

Check out more photos:

Horsing Around at the Gypsy Mecca

Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

Jonathan Hobin Re-Creates the World's Most Infamous Tragedies with Children

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The Cora, or Naayari, as they call themselves, were the last indigenous ethnic group in Mexico to be conquered by the Spanish – they held out until 1722. Many of them still live in isolated communities along the Sierra del Nayar mountain range, remote settlements that are only reachable by plane and lack basic services like running water and electricity. Not much has changed since precolonial times. The Cora adhere to their own idiosyncratic blend of Catholicism and animism, which manifests in their unique way of celebrating Easter.

I shot these portraits during the Judea Cora (their version of Catholicism’s Holy Week), in San Juan Bautista, a small town in the state of Nayarit. The celebration’s rituals involve physical acts of contrition, similar to Lent, but the Cora also celebrate in all-day ceremonies meant to represent a cosmic battle with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, while simultaneously depicting the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It’s pretty confusing, but as I understand it, the significant rituals begin on the night of Ash Wednesday, when participants covered in body paint made from burnt, ground-up corn – who are meant to represent Jews and Romans – perform a dance that signifies the “rise of evil”. On Thursday morning, these Cora fast while wandering through town in a ritual that evokes the Romans’ search for Christ. Later that afternoon, another set of dancers, this time representing Christ’s apostles, paint themselves white. Then the two factions meet in the center of the village for a ceremony – the “Jews” eat while the “apostles” dance until nightfall, after which they host a separate meal before returning home. The Jews then dance from dusk until around midnight, when they go out in search of corn to “steal”. (In reality, a farmer donates the corn in exchange for a blessing of his harvest.) This year, the Jews left the town center at 1AM and returned with sacks full of corn around 6AM. Other biblical characters like the Pharisees and figures from the Coras’ own myths round out the cast.

I was awed by the dedication and attention to detail shown by the Cora who paint their bodies and elaborately decorate their sabers and crowns. Each design is different, and all the participants, even the youngest dancers, create their own.

All of this, I was told, represents a battle in the spirit kingdom that is resolved when a figure representing both Jesus and the sun resurrects itself and punishes the Jews, who repent for their sins. I found the detailed explanations of the rituals I received from the Cora difficult to comprehend because the ones most familiar with the story are adults who only speak the Cora language. In the end, though, I think the portraits speak for themselves.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/easter-in-the-mountains/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/07/easter-in-the-mountains/ Luigi Ghirri’s Kodachromes Revisited http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/GierD3sRg5Y/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/luigi-ghirris-kodachromes-revisited/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 19:05:51 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=69090

Jeffrey Ladd writes for LightBox about a recently re-released edition of Luigi Ghirri's 1978 book, 'Kodachrome'.

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As an avid photobook enthusiast I have gone to great lengths to see books that are far out of my reach economically. I have spent countless hours at photobook auction previews just to carefully flip the pages of rarities that will be sold for thousands of dollars. I have no intent to bid or buy, or to check the condition which is the main reason for attending previews. My reasoning is just to experience and gauge my own level of interest (albeit quickly) concerning what are the important titles of photobook history. When so much material is out of reach, one depends almost entirely on the scholars and historians as a guide, but in the end it is all subjective. This is why I am so happy that MACK has succeeded in creating a facsimile edition of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s 1978 book Kodachrome. On the anniversary of Ghirri’s death, I finally have the chance after so many years to have the opinion that it’s, well, not my cup of tea.

Luigi Ghirri came to photography in 1970 with an interest in the conceptual side drawn from his training. One pursuit was the paradox of photography itself and uniting the real and the artificial, visible and invisible in the single image. Photographs in general, Ghirri believed, whether “art” or advertising, create a vast labyrinth of images to navigate daily through which it is difficult to decoding our true surroundings.

‘The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory… to the point at which we might merge with them… The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.’

That, for me, is interesting to ponder philosophically but are the works in Kodachrome, in the words of essayist Francesco Zanot, “powerful devices for the re-education of the gaze?” This seems a modest collection through which many things can be projected, but without the textual introductions of the edition laying out the intent, or at least providing guidelines for reading, I don’t see the photographs alone enabling the task. A small handful of the 92 images compel me to try — but most have me grappling just to keep my attention.

The qualities of the photography in Kodachrome call into question for me why this book seems so universally revered among the writers of photobook history. The major developments in color photography in general seem so often boiled down to the Americans “William Eggleston and Stephen Shore,” whereas post-war European color photography books seem to get scant attention — even though one of the first true pioneers of color work was the Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen with his 1948 book 122 Colour Photographs. Then the historical timeline of European photobooks continues along mostly in black and white until 1978 and the publication of Kodachrome? Are there no other landmark books between 1948 and 1978 that could also act as balance to the historical dominance of Eggleston’s color?

Being that I approach most photography, my own and that of others, knowingly comfortable to be trapped within the labyrinth of illusion, aesthetics, style, and photography as the language of metaphor — Kodachrome is a deck stacked against me. It stands as the antithesis to my own practice where the visual component compels you to explore the relationship to the image before you.

Luigi Ghirri’s Kodachrome was reissued by MACK in November, 2012. Twenty-five vintage color prints from the series were recently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Jeffrey Ladd is a photographer, writer, editor and founder of Errata Editions.

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/luigi-ghirris-kodachromes-revisited/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/luigi-ghirris-kodachromes-revisited/ Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/VV1AsuREpZc/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/thornham-walks-suffolk-2012-by-paul-cooklin/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 15:19:56 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I00004rdzCaDAnr8

Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

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Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

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]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/thornham-walks-suffolk-2012-by-paul-cooklin/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/thornham-walks-suffolk-2012-by-paul-cooklin/ Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 by Paul Cooklin http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/9uUdBxeKk44/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/thornham-walks-suffolk-2012-by-paul-cooklin-2/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 15:11:08 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://paulcooklin.photoshelter.com/image/I0000p84MUHiEMr8

Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

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Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 (Paul Cooklin)

The post Thornham Walks, Suffolk 2012 by Paul Cooklin appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/thornham-walks-suffolk-2012-by-paul-cooklin-2/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/thornham-walks-suffolk-2012-by-paul-cooklin-2/ PJL: May 2013 (Part 1) http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/lbzR_isxras/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/pjl-may-2013-part-1/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 08:00:38 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71563

Curated by Mikko Takkunen, a collection of the best photojournalism around the web from the past two weeks.

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Features and Essays

Alessio Romenzi

Alessio Romenzi

 

Alessio Romenzi: Aleppo: Scenes from a City of Ruins (TIME) Italian photographer Alessio Romenzi has been chronicling the Syrian civil war for months. The following pictures of his are from a few days in mid-April spent in the battle-scarred city of Aleppo. They include a glimpse of a rebel fighter encamped in the famed Great Mosque of Aleppo, built nearly a thousand years ago by the once mighty Umayyad dynasty.

Andrea Bruce: Syrian Prisoners Talk, as Jailers Look On (NYT) Syrian officials say the civil war is driven by Islamist extremists from across the globe and poses a threat not just to President Bashar al-Assad but also to Americans. To prove it, they picked these prisoners, who arrived blindfolded, to meet journalists from The New York Times.

Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times

Lars Tunbjörk for The New York Times

 

Lars Tunbjörk: The Largest Falcon Hospital in the World (NYT magazine) Abu Dhabi

Newsha Tavakolian: Through Story, a Look into Iran (LightBox) Portraits of declining Iranian middle-class.

Oded Balilty: Jews in Red Army (AP Big Story) Few know story of Jews in Red Army

Natalie Naccache: No Madam (CNN Photo blog) Lebanon’s ‘uncomfortable’ maid culture

Tomas Munita: The Egyptian Revolution’s Transformation of Cairo, Block by Block (NYT)

Tara Todras-Whitehill: A Growing Egypt (NYT)

Brendan Bannon: Outside Nairobi, the Only Track for 3,300 Miles (NYT Lens)

David Guttenfelder / AP

David Guttenfelder / AP

 

David Guttenfelder: A New Look at North Korea (LightBox)

Guillaume Herbaut: China: Wedding Studios (Institute)

Sim Chi Yin: Chinese River’s Fate May Reshape a Region (NYT) Plans to harness Chinese river’s power threaten a region

Michele Palazzi: Mongolia In Flux (NPR)

Kuni Takahashi: Rapid Growth Creates Cities Within Cities in India (NYT)

Abir Abdullah: Death Trap: Tragedy in Bangladesh (Photo Booth)

Gazi Nafis Ahmed: Bangladesh Garment Factories (Guardian)

Maria Turchenkova: The Hidden War in the Caucasus (LightBox) While Chechnya emerges from a decade of conflict, Maria Turchenkova photographs the hidden guerrilla war in the republic of Dagestan – the largest, most heterogeneous and, today, the most violent republic in the North Caucasus region.

James Hill: Caught Cold When Sochi Freezes Over (NYT Lens) James Hill’s Photos of Sochi, Russia, Site of the Winter Olympics

Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit: Remnants of glory in former Olympic cities (CNN Photo blog)

Laura Lean: Camouflage in Afghanistan (BBC)

Philippe Schneider: Paga Hill, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (Foto8)

John Moore / Getty Images

John Moore / Getty Images

 

John Moore: Border Patrol (NBC News) Border patrol faces new challenge with surge in rural Texas border crossings

Samantha Appleton: Hidden from View (Photo Booth) Migrant labor in the agricultural heartland of Florida

Tim Hussin: Resurrecting a Texas ghost town (CNN Photo blog) In the desert surrounding a mercury mining ghost town, an ambitious band of misfits have built homes and cultivated a modern wild west. It’s a group brothers Noah and Tim Hussin felt drawn to during their two-year bicycle journey across America.

Gerd Ludwig: Sleeping Cars (Institute) There are more than seven million registered vehicles in Los Angeles County, California/USA. Images of traffic jams are omnipresent. But where do all those cars go to rest? These photographs examine where LA cars are spending their nights.

Jehad Nga: The End of Horse Racing (LightBox) In its heyday, horse racing had it all. It was the speed and danger sport before NASCAR came along; movie stars and gangsters rubbed glamorous elbows; and a couple sawbucks on a winning long-shot could put you on Easy Street. Jehad Nga’s photographs show that, as with all nostalgia, the reality could never match the legend.

Mark Peckmezian: Half-Wild Cats (Photo Booth) On the growing trend of crossbreeding domestic cats with their more feral cousins in an effort to create a feline that looks exotic but is tame enough to cohabit with humans. Photographs from A1 Savannahs cattery in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

Nolan Conway: The People You Meet at McDonald’s (NYT magazine)

Maria Scheinfeld: Resorts Reborn in Decay  (NYT Lens) Photos of Dilapidated Resorts in the Catskills

Cédric Gerbehaye / Agence VU

Cédric Gerbehaye / Agence VU

 

Cédric Gerbehaye: Winter in Sète (Photo Booth) This year, Cédric Gerbehaye spent December and January photographing in Sète, France, the sixth photographer to do so as part of an artist-in-residency program. Accustomed to working in conflict zones, such as Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan, this experience presented Gerbehaye with the opportunity to photograph in a different way.

Andrea Gjestvang: Utøya massacre survivors (Guardian) Photographer Andrea Gjestvang’s poignant portraits of survivors of the Utøya massacre in Norway

Stefano de Luigi: On the Gondola (Photo Booth) Venice

Irina Werning: Back to the Future 2 (burn magazine)

Rodrigo Cruz: Mexico’s Porous Southern Border (NYT)

David Alan Harvey: Livin’ La Vida Rio (NYT Lens) Harvey’s personal photo project from Rio de Janeiro

Meridith Kohut: A Spotlight on Crime in Santa Cruz, Bolivia (NYT)

Elie Gardner and Oscar Durand : A Historic Community Dismantled In Peru (NPR)

Articles

Bernat Armangue / AP

Bernat Armangue / AP

 

2013 Overseas Press Club Winners Announced (LightBox) Since 1948, the Overseas Press Club of America has recognized photographers and photojournalists for exceptional photographic reportage. On April 24, the OPC announced the four winners of the organization’s annual prizes.

Fabio Bucciarelli Wins Robert Capa Gold Medal Award (PDN)

Sebastião Salgado: to the ends of the earth (FT) Sebastião Salgado says his latest show is a ‘love letter to the planet’

A Tribute to David Goldblatt, ICP’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Honoree (PDN)

The Dude Abides on the Other Side of the Lens (NYT Lens) Jeff Bridges honored by International Center of Photography

Trailer : “God’s Ivory” (Reportage by Getty Images) “The ivory trade of today is all about power and elitism,” says Reportage photographer Brent Stirton. Together with filmmaker Andrew Hida, Mr. Stirton and National Geographic contributing writer Bryan Christy examine the institutions that continue to sustain the world ivory trade. Full 14-minute video can be seen in the latest issue of Reportage’s online magazine here

Behind the Walls With Argentina’s 1 Percent (NYT Lens) The Sub Cooperative’s photos of wealthy Argentines

Mexico Points the Camera at Itself (NYT Lens) A new book pulls back Mexico’s masks

Capturing a Vanishing New York (NYT Lens) Photography by Sid Kaplan, a master printer, emerges from obscurity

Joy, Compassion and Fulfillment: Kitra Cahana’s Spiritual Transformation (LightBox) 2013 Infinity Award for Young Photographer honoree

Alfred Eisenstaedt / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

Alfred Eisenstaedt / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

 

Behind the Picture: Goebbels Glares at Eisenstaedt, Geneva, 1933 (LIFE) The unsettling image of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, glaring at photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt during a League of Nations conference in 1933 remains, 80 years later, one of the signature — and certainly one of the most unflattering — portraits ever made of any high-ranking Nazi figure.

Front Row Seat: Eric Draper on George W. Bush (LightBox) President George W. Bush’s official White House photographer Eric Draper has a new book, Front Row Seat, A Photographic Portrait of the Presidency of George W. Bush, published by the University of Texas.

Birmingham’s civil rights crusade, 50 years later (CNN Photo blog) On May 3, 1963, escalating racial tensions came to a violent head when black activists clashed with city authorities in Birmingham, Alabama. Bruce Davidson of Magnum Photos was among the photographers on the scene.

John Karales’s Photo of the Civil Rights Era (NYT Lens)

Women Unveiled: Marc Garanger’s Contested Portraits of 1960s Algeria (LightBox)

Paul Kwilecki’s Photos of Decatur Country, Ga. (NYT Lens)

A Major Case of ‘the Mondays’: Photographs of Office Life (LightBox)

Ashley Gilbertson / VII

Ashley Gilbertson / VII

 

The Guide: May 2013 Edition (LightBox) Monthly round-up of the best books, exhibitions and ways to experience photography beyond the web—from the Reportage Photography Festival in Sydney and a new Mitch Epstein book to Martin Parr’s ‘Life’s a Beach’ at Aperture in New York and an André Kertész show in London. Above Ashley Gilbertson photo from a new book: Photojournalists On War: The Untold Stories from Iraq. University of Texas Press, May, 2013.

The month in photography – audio slideshow (Guardian)

Lee Miller: war, peace and pythons | Lee Miller: intimate moments of a 20th-century muse – in pictures (Guardian) Lee Miller, muse to Man Ray and pal of Picasso, was a celebrated photographer who captured the spirit of 20th-century life. Her archive – showing her various turns as war reporter, society snapper and fine-art photographer – went online at leemiller.co.uk on 23 April, on what would have been her 106th birthday

René Burri: A Study of Color (CNN Photo blog) His iconic black-and-white photographs have become part of history. However, his latest book, “Impossible Reminiscences,” offers a never-before-seen journey in color from the perspective of the great photographer.

Briton Bert Hardy captured the drama of war, and of daily life (CNN Photo blog) Bert Hardy, who would been 100 this year, was a renowned photojournalist. His photos are on exhibit the Photographers’ Gallery in London.

In Revealing Self-Portraits, Body Image Is Front and Center (Slate) Jen Davis’s self-portraits

From Above and Below: Man and the Sea – in pictures (Guardian) In a stunning new book of photographs, aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, founder of the Good Planet Foundation, and underwater snapper Brian Skerry have teamed up to observe our relationship with the sea.

Emilio Morenatti / AP

Emilio Morenatti / AP

 

Photographer Emilio Morenatti’s loss offers hope for Boston wounded (AP Big Story blog) Photographer who lost a leg to a road side bomb while covering the war in Afghanistan for the Associated Press, offers words to the maimed victims of the Boston bombings

How the AP verified photo of Boston bombing suspect leaving scene (Poynter.)

The Multiplier Effect and the Role of the Photograph in Boston (LightBox)

Boston Marathon runner who fell in photo joins the ranks of history’s sudden icons (Washington Post)

Boston Bombings Focus Attention on Caucasus, And Photo Projects on the Region (PDN)

I’m A Photo Editor for a News Organization and I Looked At Every Single Photo Taken At The Boston Marathon Bombing (Xojane)

When the line blurs between sport photography and photojournalism (Guardian)

Boston and Lower West: How Two Disasters Stack Up in the Media Eye (BagNewsNotes)

When pictures save lives (AFP Correspondent blog) Sometimes a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words.

Nick Turpin

Nick Turpin

 

Olivier Laurent: Protecting the Right to Photograph, or Not to Be Photographed (NYT Lens) Protecting Privacy, Limiting Street Photography

NPPA Sends Letter Opposing Proposed Anti-Paparazzi Statutes in California (NPPA)

Appeals Court Overturns Previous Ruling, Rules Fair Use in Richard Prince Case (PetaPixel)

Richard Prince Wins Major Victory in Landmark Copyright Suit (Art in America)

The N.P.P.A.’s Best of Photojournalism (NYT Lens)

12 photographers selected for 2013 World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass (BJP)

Snapshot: ‘By An Eye-Witness’ by Azadeh Akhlaghi (FT) The Iranian photographer reconstructed scenes of the deaths involved in the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s

Featured photographer: Isabelle Eshraghi (Verve Photo)

Featured photographer: William B. Plowman (Verve Photo)

Featured photographer: Lindsay Mackenzie (Verve Photo)

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin—To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light (Aperture)

Roger Ballen’s “Asylum of the Birds” (Photo Booth)

Infinite possibilities (FT) From the Venice Biennale to the Hayward Gallery, photographer Dayanita Singh is having a big year

Interviews and Talks

Fabio Bucciarelli / AFP

Fabio Bucciarelli / AFP

 

Fabio Bucciarelli (AFP Correspondent blog) Syria offers grim bounty for photojournalists

Sebastião Salgado (TED) ‘The silent drama of photography’ | Gallery of photographs

Elliott Erwitt (Nowness) ‘At Home With Elliott Erwitt’

Alec Soth (American Photo)

Alec Soth (PDN) Alec Soth on Wandering, Storytelling and Robert Adams vs. Weegee

Ian Berry (Vice) Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

David Guttenfelder (National Geographic) ‘Live! From North Korea, It’s AP Photographer David Guttenfelder’

David Guttenfelder (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner for Photojournalism

Anne Wilkes Tucker (LA Times Framed photo blog) In conversation with WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY curator Anne Wilkes Tucker

Santiago Lyon (World Press Photo)

Santiago Lyon (NYT Lens Facebook page) Santiago Lyon, director of photography at the Associated Press,  on how to assemble a portfolio

MediaStorm

MediaStorm

 

David Goldblatt (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner, Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement

Sebastian Junger (Now Toronto)

Platon (Wired Rawfile photo blog) Ego-Wrangling the World’s Most Powerful Leaders for a Portrait

Kitra Cahana (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner for Young Photographer

Sebastian Meyer (Thuraya) Moments on the frontline: A photojournalist’s perspective

Aaron Eckhart and Peter van Agtmael (Capture) Aaron Eckhart and Peter van Agtmael join Mark Seliger to discuss the paths that led them to photography, the welcome you must earn as a photographer and capturing the intersection of fashion and the street

Jeff Bridges (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award, Special Representation

Joel Sartore (PetaPixel) Nat Geo Photographer Talks About What it Takes to Lead ‘a Photographer’s Life’

Kevin Kunishi (A Photo Editor) ‘How to make a photo-book’

Mishka Henner (MediaStorm) 2013 ICP Infinity Award Winner for Art

David Goldblatt in Conversation with Broomberg & Chanarin (Ahorn Magazine)

Benjamin Lowy (Archetype) ’Award-winning iPhone photojournalist, on how to make tremendous art with your iPhone’

Rena Effendi (Open Society Foundation YouTube channel)

Pete Muller (Open Society YouTube channel)

James Mortram (Tiffinbox)

George Georgiou (Open Society Foundation YouTube channel)

Mikko Takkunen is an associate photo editor at TIME.com.

The post PJL: May 2013 (Part 1) appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/pjl-may-2013-part-1/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/06/pjl-may-2013-part-1/http://timethemoment.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/goldblatt.jpg Photographs from California’s ‘City of the Dead’ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/SteY7mptkX0/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/05/photographs-from-californias-city-of-the-dead/#comments Sun, 05 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://www.vice.com/186415

Colma is a town just south of San Francisco, between the airport and the city. Surprisingly, many of the people who live there that I've talked to never really stop to think twice about the fact that there are nearly two million people buried in this tiny town, which spans about two miles from one side to the other. The city is a necropolis, a literal "city of the dead".

When I got off the Bay Area Rapid Transit in Colma for the first time, it was pitch black out. My friend Tom and I wanted to kick off our time in the necropolis by shooting photos of the sunrise. I'd read stories about the town and its abundance of gravestones and cemeteries. What I didn't realise was that there are gravestones everywhere, including the medians of the streets and out in front of shopping strip malls. What we were greeted with when we got off the train was just about as quirky and bizarre as we anticipated. Smiles were the norm. People were super friendly and really happy to talk about their cemeteries, which they referred to as their city's parks. They referred to the dead buried in Colma as their neighbours and wouldn't stop joking about how quiet and pleasant they are. 

It's a weird combination of the suburban American dream and the common American horror story, with a heavy dose of capitalism thrown in the mix. Founded in 1924 as the largest necropolis in the country, the town's entire socio-economic and cultural heartbeat lies in burying and maintaining dead bodies. Turns out this isn't a bad living, considering people don't and won't ever stop dying. There is no shortage of business for the cemetery owners and monument builders. In 2010, the population of Colma was marked at just shy of 1,800 people. With nearly two million bodies buried in two square miles, the dead outnumber the living 1,000 to one. I came to find out during my time there that despite this alarming ratio, the people who basically live in a giant cemetery are really happy and life in Colma is pretty normal. 

Eric Arthur Fernandez is a photographer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. More of his work can be seen here. Also, check out his Tumblr and Twitter. 

Check out more great pictures from VICE:

Daytona Beach, 1999

People Skateboard in St. Petersburg, Too

Henry Hargreaves Photographs Death Row's Final Meals

The post Photographs from California’s ‘City of the Dead’ appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

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Colma is a town just south of San Francisco, between the airport and the city. Surprisingly, many of the people who live there that I’ve talked to never really stop to think twice about the fact that there are nearly two million people buried in this tiny town, which spans about two miles from one side to the other. The city is a necropolis, a literal “city of the dead”.

When I got off the Bay Area Rapid Transit in Colma for the first time, it was pitch black out. My friend Tom and I wanted to kick off our time in the necropolis by shooting photos of the sunrise. I’d read stories about the town and its abundance of gravestones and cemeteries. What I didn’t realise was that there are gravestones everywhere, including the medians of the streets and out in front of shopping strip malls. What we were greeted with when we got off the train was just about as quirky and bizarre as we anticipated. Smiles were the norm. People were super friendly and really happy to talk about their cemeteries, which they referred to as their city’s parks. They referred to the dead buried in Colma as their neighbours and wouldn’t stop joking about how quiet and pleasant they are.

It’s a weird combination of the suburban American dream and the common American horror story, with a heavy dose of capitalism thrown in the mix. Founded in 1924 as the largest necropolis in the country, the town’s entire socio-economic and cultural heartbeat lies in burying and maintaining dead bodies. Turns out this isn’t a bad living, considering people don’t and won’t ever stop dying. There is no shortage of business for the cemetery owners and monument builders. In 2010, the population of Colma was marked at just shy of 1,800 people. With nearly two million bodies buried in two square miles, the dead outnumber the living 1,000 to one. I came to find out during my time there that despite this alarming ratio, the people who basically live in a giant cemetery are really happy and life in Colma is pretty normal.

Eric Arthur Fernandez is a photographer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. More of his work can be seen here. Also, check out his Tumblr and Twitter. 

Check out more great pictures from VICE:

Daytona Beach, 1999

People Skateboard in St. Petersburg, Too

Henry Hargreaves Photographs Death Row’s Final Meals

The post Photographs from California’s ‘City of the Dead’ appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/05/photographs-from-californias-city-of-the-dead/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/05/photographs-from-californias-city-of-the-dead/ 2013 Infinity Awards at ICP: Video Profiles of the Winners http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/_bliaJ84NDM/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/02/2013-infinity-awards-at-icp-video-profiles-of-the-winners/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 14:18:49 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://lightbox.time.com/?p=71491

Last night, the International Center of Photography held its annual awards gala in New York City, announcing the 2013 recipients of the Center's Infinity Awards. LightBox is proud to present short films of each winner, produced for ICP by MediaStorm.

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Last night, the International Center of Photography held its annual awards gala in New York City, announcing the 2013 recipients of the Center’s Infinity Awards. Recognizing eight photographers in the fields of art, photojournalism, fashion photography and publishing, the awards pay tribute to the highest levels of achievement.

For this year’s awards, ICP commissioned the award-winning interactive design studio MediaStorm to produce short films about each award recipient, screened during the ceremony to more than 500 attendees. LightBox is proud to present each winner’s film above.

The 2013 Infinity Award Winners:

Read more about the International Center of Photography.

The post 2013 Infinity Awards at ICP: Video Profiles of the Winners appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/02/2013-infinity-awards-at-icp-video-profiles-of-the-winners/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/02/2013-infinity-awards-at-icp-video-profiles-of-the-winners/ Henry Hargreaves’s Photos of What Famous Musicians Eat Backstage http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PaulCooklin/~3/lw88qQ7caB8/ http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/02/henry-hargreavess-photos-of-what-famous-musicians-eat-backstage/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000 Paul Cooklin http://www.vice.com/186230

A rider is a contractual proviso that outlines a series of stipulations or requests between at least two parties. While they can be attached to leases and other legal documents, they’re most famously used by musicians or bands to outline how they need their equipment to be set up and arranged, how they like their dressing room organised, and what types of food and beverages they require. Anyone who’s seen Spinal Tap knows these requests can be extremely outrageous and unreasonable. (And, in the case of Iggy Pop's, unexpectedly hilarious.)

I was inspired to create this series after reviewing a few riders from some of the biggest acts in the world, all of which were ridiculous. But what I found most interesting about them is that they offered a glimpse into their larger-than-life personalities. 

I initially thought I would try and shoot all of the items listed on the catering riders but quickly realised that this would become an exercise in wasting money. So I decided to focus on the quirkiest requests and shoot them in a Flemish Baroque still-life style because I felt that there was a direct connection between the themes in these types of paintings and the riders: the idea of time passing and the ultimate mortality of a musician’s career as the limelight inevitably fades – they only have a short time in which they are able to make these demands and have them fulfilled.

Photography and Direction: Henry Hargreaves

Prop Styling: Caitlin Levin

Al Green

Twenty-four long-stem (dethorned) red roses.

 

Axl Rose

Fresh Wonder Bread (white), Dom Perignon

 

Beyoncé

Juicy baked chicken, heavily seasoned: garlic, sea salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper. Beyoncé can only have Pepsi products.

 

Billy Idol

One tub I can’t believe it’s not Butter!, Pepperidge Farms Soft Baked Nantucket Chocolate Chip Cookies.

 

Britney Spears

Fish and chips, McDonald’s cheeseburgers without the buns, 100 prunes and figs, a framed photo of Princess Diana.

 

Busta Rhymes

Twenty-four pieces of fried chicken, Rough Rider condoms, Guinness.

 

Foo Fighters

Big-ass kielbasas that make men feel self-conscious.

 

Frank Sinatra

One bottle each: Absolut, Jack Daniel’s, Chivas Regal, Courvoisier, Beefeater Gin, white wine, red wine. Twenty-four chilled jumbo shrimp, Life Savers, cough drops. 

 

Lady Gaga

Small plate of cheese (nonsmelly, nonsweaty), on ice.

 

Mariah Carey  

Cristal Champagne, bendy straws.

 

Marilyn Manson

Gummy bears.

 

New Kids on the Block

Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Oreo cookies.

 

Nine Inch Nails

Two boxes of corn starch.

 

Prince

Coffee and tea setup, including honey, lemon, sugar, cream, fresh ginger root. Physician will be used to administer a B-12 injection.

 

Rihanna

Hard-boiled eggs, turkey bacon, turkey sausage, at any time throughout the day. Please be prepared!

 

Van Halen 

Herring in sour cream, large tube of KY jelly, M&M's (Warning: absolutely no brown ones).

 

Previously: Henry Hargreaves Photographs Death Row's Final Meals

The post Henry Hargreaves’s Photos of What Famous Musicians Eat Backstage appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

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A rider is a contractual proviso that outlines a series of stipulations or requests between at least two parties. While they can be attached to leases and other legal documents, they’re most famously used by musicians or bands to outline how they need their equipment to be set up and arranged, how they like their dressing room organised, and what types of food and beverages they require. Anyone who’s seen Spinal Tap knows these requests can be extremely outrageous and unreasonable. (And, in the case of Iggy Pop’s, unexpectedly hilarious.)

I was inspired to create this series after reviewing a few riders from some of the biggest acts in the world, all of which were ridiculous. But what I found most interesting about them is that they offered a glimpse into their larger-than-life personalities.

I initially thought I would try and shoot all of the items listed on the catering riders but quickly realised that this would become an exercise in wasting money. So I decided to focus on the quirkiest requests and shoot them in a Flemish Baroque still-life style because I felt that there was a direct connection between the themes in these types of paintings and the riders: the idea of time passing and the ultimate mortality of a musician’s career as the limelight inevitably fades – they only have a short time in which they are able to make these demands and have them fulfilled.

Photography and Direction: Henry Hargreaves

Prop Styling: Caitlin Levin

Al Green

Twenty-four long-stem (dethorned) red roses.

Axl Rose

Fresh Wonder Bread (white), Dom Perignon

Beyoncé

Juicy baked chicken, heavily seasoned: garlic, sea salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper. Beyoncé can only have Pepsi products.

Billy Idol

One tub I can’t believe it’s not Butter!, Pepperidge Farms Soft Baked Nantucket Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Britney Spears

Fish and chips, McDonald’s cheeseburgers without the buns, 100 prunes and figs, a framed photo of Princess Diana.

Busta Rhymes

Twenty-four pieces of fried chicken, Rough Rider condoms, Guinness.

 

Foo Fighters

Big-ass kielbasas that make men feel self-conscious.

Frank Sinatra

One bottle each: Absolut, Jack Daniel’s, Chivas Regal, Courvoisier, Beefeater Gin, white wine, red wine. Twenty-four chilled jumbo shrimp, Life Savers, cough drops. 

Lady Gaga

Small plate of cheese (nonsmelly, nonsweaty), on ice.

Mariah Carey  

Cristal Champagne, bendy straws.

Marilyn Manson

Gummy bears.

New Kids on the Block

Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Oreo cookies.

Nine Inch Nails

Two boxes of corn starch.

Prince

Coffee and tea setup, including honey, lemon, sugar, cream, fresh ginger root. Physician will be used to administer a B-12 injection.

Rihanna

Hard-boiled eggs, turkey bacon, turkey sausage, at any time throughout the day. Please be prepared!

Van Halen 

Herring in sour cream, large tube of KY jelly, M&M’s (Warning: absolutely no brown ones).

Previously: Henry Hargreaves Photographs Death Row’s Final Meals

The post Henry Hargreaves’s Photos of What Famous Musicians Eat Backstage appeared first on Cooklin's Blog | An Amalgamation of Photography.

]]> http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/02/henry-hargreavess-photos-of-what-famous-musicians-eat-backstage/feed/ 0 http://paulcooklin.com/wordpress/2013/05/02/henry-hargreavess-photos-of-what-famous-musicians-eat-backstage/