by Ciro Battiloro

Sanità and Santa Lucia are two districts in the center of the cities of Napoli and Cosenza. They are in the epicenter of Una Disperata Vitalità which focuses on the intimacy of the life of its people which carries the marks and scars of incurable wounds within their flesh. Both of these areas were born in the core of Napoli and Cosenza but after years of gentrification within these cities, Santa Lucia and Sanità suffered from a process of marginalisation which excluded them from the rest of the cities growth.

Una Disperata Vitalità is an essay about life through indentity, culture, cross generational relationships, family, parenting and memories. In these wounds grows solitude and love in its most sincere display escaping the superficiality of a consumerist society. Inside these doors and windows you can find an amazing energy of life – full of dignity where precious authentic stories tell the nature of humanity in the everyday life. At the center of the project lays the population of the districts within their intimate lives, often ignored because of the stigma of marginality excluded of the great economical and political processes of gentrification. This essay is an intimate disclosure of invisible existences.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ciro Battiloro (Torre del Greco, 1984) is an italian photographer based in Napoli. He studied philosophy at “Federico II” University of Napoli. He uses a very intimate approach and throat everyday life he discusses more general social thematics.In particular his research of the last years is focused on some urban marginalities in Southern Italy districts (Rione Sanità in Napoli,Quartiere Santa Lucia,Cosenza). In 2015 he was selected for the 2nd edition of LAB, Irregular Laboratory created by Antonio Biasiucci. He was selected for the artistic residency Bocs Art – International Artistic Residences, Up-urban People and Tremplin Jeunes Talent Festival Planches de Contact. His work has been published in several magazines: Internazionale, Courrier International, l’Espresso, LFI, GUP, FOTOILMIC and been exhibited in different museums/galleries and festivals.

Website: www.cirobattiloro.com

Instagram: @cirobattiloro

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

by Johann Bertelli

«Like one who returns to the place where he spent his youth, I manage, thanks to a simple cheap cigarette, to return entirely to that place in my life where I used to smoke this kind of cigarette. And thanks to the light aroma of the smoke, all the past comes back to me. It is the cigarette smoke that recreates the past days with a special spirituality. It barely touches my consciousness of having a palate. That’s why it gathers, transposes and evokes more intensely the hours that in me I died, and makes them more present while they are more distant, more misty while they envelop me, more ethereal when I materialize them. A mentholated cigarette, a cheap cigar veil some moments with sweetness. With which subtle plausibility of flavor-aroma I draw up again of the defunct decorations and I restore them the colors of their past, always so delicately eighteenth century in its malicious and weary detachment, and always so medieval in what it comprises of irremediably abolished.»

– Fernando Pessoa, 1982.

My grandmother Léone Vérité was born in 1937, in a place called Petit Bouloire, in the Sarthe region, France. Her father Gaston Vérité and her mother Berthe Bessière were born in 1898 and 1900. Berthe was a hidden child from a bourgeois family, unwanted, who was abandoned to the social service. Her adoption was cancelled when she cried out in fear at the sight of the woman’s hat who came to take her in, even though she had a good social standing.

Gaston and Berthe met while working the land, collecting vegetables and other crops. A hard rural life of chasing money through farming. They had five children: Pierre, Henri, Madeleine, Gaston and the last one, my grandmother.

At the age of 6 years old, in 1943, my grandmother Léone recalls the Second World War through strong and indelible memories: the sound of the boots made by the Nazi soldiers as they walked through the streets of the town of Saint-Calais where she lived. When the sirens warning of the bombing went off, she ran into a shelter with her brothers and sisters. She lost her shoes more than once on the way, caught up in the panic.

At the end of the war, with a mixture of fear and incomprehension, she witnessed the terrible punishment inflicted on two women who had collaborated with the German occupiers: the shaving of their hair in the public square.

At 15 years old as a market vendor in the Sarthe. There she met André Serret, born in 1935. The beginning of a teenage romance that will soon become serious. At 17, she had her first and only child, my mother Chantal. They got married in 1956 following the birth of my mother. At 58 years old, she retires following the footsteps of her partner. They travel around France with their camper van. One trip after another, the landscapes go by.

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 her husband André died in Tours. He was cremated and she kept his ashes in an urn. Léone’s brothers and sisters are long gone. Léone then came to live with her daughter, in a house located in Deuil-La-Barre, in the Parisian suburbs. She never lived alone. She doesn’t want to be alone. Or she simply doesn’t know how to be alone.

Thus begins another life where she must learn to discover this new home. An armchair, a bed, a garden… To make the reminiscences of the past cohabit with the elements of the present. “Why did he leave?” she regularly repeats about her late husband.

Léone now at 85 has only one specific request: to smoke cigarettes. Not a whole pack, but a few a day. That’s the one thing she wants to buy. No clothes, no books, no tickets for a trip. The wisps of smoke distract her as much from her concrete reality as from the evanescence of her memories.

The fact that she takes this moment for herself, to meditate on her inner thoughts or simply to escape elsewhere. All make it a pleasure. Not a guilty pleasure. A real pleasure. Because she used to hide from her husband. He hated it when she smoked, now she can do it freely. Alone but free.

As she smokes a cigarette, which has become both myth and substance, she sometimes looks at her age-scarred body and says that old French proverb: “Qui voit ses veines, voit ses peines.” / «He who sees his veins, sees his sorrows.»

What does it mean to get old ? When the time comes, everyone will have their own answer. We lose people, places, objects. But one thing can remain. We then live with it. Naturally.

AUTHOR BIOGRARPHY

Born in 1980, based in Paris, France. Formely graduated as an architect from the “Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris Malaquais”. His photographic work focuses on the mutual exchange of the organic, the intimacy and the natural landscape, on the divided but yet interlaced relation of fantasy and reality between the human being and its environment.  

Website: https://johann-bertelli.com

Instagram: @johannbertelli

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

by Sari Soininen

Transcendent Country of the Mind is a project exploring my encounters with alternative dimensions of reality and perceptions of otherworldly signs around us. It tells the story of a world that lives at the back of our minds.

In my early twenties, I experimented with LSD regularly and excessively, and eventually experienced an extended psychotic episode, which had serious consequences on my own life, but also profoundly changed the way I perceive the world and reality itself. During this time, I abandoned all my worldly possessions; I confronted the demons of Hell and was shown the wonders of Heaven; I travelled through time and space; I peeked behind the curtain of this dimension and – even today, having fully recovered – my understanding of reality has changed forever.

These photographs represent this perspective and offer others similar glimpses to what I found behind the curtain. Making this project years after the psychosis, turned out to be extremely valuable for my mental health. When I started this project, I only wanted to share my way of perceiving the world, as I felt like I had gained a new way of seeing due to the psychosis. However, as the project continued I understood it was more than that: it was a way for me to let go of this traumatic yet eye-opening experience. Now that the project is finished, I feel free: The incident does not define me as a person anymore.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sari Soininen (b.1991) is a Finnish photographer based in Bristol, UK. Her colourful otherworldly photography draws from philosophical thoughts and personal mystical experiences. Her interest is in providing the viewer with alternative ways of seeing the world and reality around them. Sari holds an MA from UWE Bristol (2021), BA from Lahti Institute of Design (2014) and she carried out exchange studies in Edinburgh College of Art (2013). After completing her BA degree Sari began a career in graphic design, event photography, and animation. In 2019 she decided to pursue fine art photography and started her masters. Sari is an emerging artist with her latest work published in FT Weekend Magazine, Fisheye Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Liberation Magazine. In 2021 her work was shown in various exhibitions and festivals in The United Kingdom, Finland, Italy, Denmark, Greece, and the Netherlands. She was nominated as PHMuseum’s Top 14 Graduates to Watch in 2021, and she is a winner of the BJP Fast Track Open Call 2021 and BJP 365 Edition. In 2022 Sari is getting her first book “Transcendent Country of the Mind”.

Website: https://www.sarisoininen.com/

Instagram: @sari_soininen/

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

by Alexander Bronfer

“Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections … and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

BIO

Born in the USSR (Ukraine), studied in St. Petersburg and lived in Lithuania. After arriving in Israel, I lived in a kibbutz in South Israel where I fell in love with the Dead Sea region and desert. After a serious illness in 2007, I decided to change my life and decided to devote my knowledge to environmental and suitability issues, seeing photography as a continuation of my efforts. Therefore my main interest in photography is environmental issues and human environmental interactions. Over the last four years I have been working on a book about the mystery of the Dead Sea and its ecological catastrophe. On top of that I spend a good amount of time on personal projects mainly in Eastern Europe and Armenia. 
I am a finalist of multiple international and Israeli photography festivals. 

Website: https://www.bronfer.com

Instagram: @bronfer

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

by Andrew Sullivan

Ronda, Spain – In southwest Spain, white-painted towns cluster around canyons and nestle in the shelter of hillsides. This is Andalucía, the sunburned land that has been home to diverse cultures for thousands of years. 

Paleolithic hunter-gatherers painted figures of animals on their cave walls. Romans battled Carthaginian armies to establish the Empire’s western reach. Barbarian Visigoths stormed into the Iberian Peninsula to supplant the Romans until a force of Arab-Berbers fought to create a Muslim caliphate there. They went on to build cultural monuments that have become World Heritage Sites. Civil war within the caliphate exposed vulnerabilities Christian armies exploited, cornering the Islamic culture in Granada. The Muslims held on until their defeat in 1492. That victory enabled the Spanish Inquisition to influence the entire peninsula, creating a homogeneous Catholic culture that led to the expulsion of 300,000 Jews. 

One of the iconic symbols of Semana Santa originated in the courts of the Inquisition. The capirote, the conical hood penitents wear in processions, was first used to humiliate those accused of heresy. Those trials, which involved torture and burning at the stake, were called “acts of faith.” 

Acts of faith are the essence of Semana Santa. Now they involve carrying the weight of a Paso, a large float decorated with wooden statues of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or saints, or marching in a procession dressed in a capirote as a Nazareno. Groups of women wear long black veils in the processions as a sign of their devotion.

n Ronda, a town overlooking a 100-meter deep gorge, numerous processions fill the streets as thousands gather to observe from sidewalks and balconies. On the bridge crossing the gorge,a procession stopped while a woman wailed a “saeta,” a religious song indigenous to Andalucía. Its exhortations sound like desperate flamenco, and its roots are thought to be Jewish, Arabic, or Roma.

On Thursday night inside Iglesia de Padre Jesus, incense thickened the air as the brotherhood of “Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno y Nuestra Señora de los Dolores” wrapped cloth tight around their waists, and covered their heads and necks with scarves made of cotton and abrasive sackcloth. The stocky men,  called costaleros, said last-minute prayers, and huddled up to encourage each other for their 4.5 hour procession supporting  about 100 pounds each. 

A marching band played triumphant songs with staccato drumbeats as the men, hefted the Paso down the church’s steps while onlookers applauded. The winding, narrow cobblestone streets challenged each group of costaleros. Despite the solemnity of the week, each feat of strength, teamwork, or act of faith was cheered.

Those weeks are sacred ritual mixed with spectacle. In Puente Genil, a town of 30,000 amid groves of olive, almond, and quince trees, biblical narrative forms its main procession. Almost 600 marchers wear handmade papier-mâché masks, each representing a figure from the Bible. The procession chronologically depicts the Old and New Testament. Cain and Abel, Roman legionnaires, the Apostles, and more climb a long, steep street to arrive at Santuario de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno. It’s a dizzying cavalcade that was first documented in the 17th Century. The mood is festive, and church officials once tried to ban the masked procession, saying it was irreverent. Participants drinking mojitos before the procession stood by the town’s tradition. “Here we celebrate the life, and resurrection of Jesus, more than mourn his death,” said David Reyna, a member of one of the brotherhoods that organizes the procession.

In Setenil de las Bodegas, a town known for building homes and streets into natural rock formations, a costalero stumbled on Saturday carrying one of the large Pasos down a church’s front steps. The front left corner of the structure lurched toward the ground. The man took the weight onto his back as his knees buckled. Anguished cries, gasps, and yells spat out of the crowd. The brotherhood righted the Paso and set it down to regroup. Men pointed fingers and exchanged shouts. A bell rang, the men shouldered the Paso and descended the street to the town below. The costalero who fell no longer stood at the front of his line. He shouldered the weight, second in line, tears in his eyes.

BIO

American photographer Andrew Sullivan moved to Mexico to teach and photograph in 2015 after covering breaking news and feature stories for The New York Times for almost ten years. Sullivan relocated to Barcelona in 2020, where he is now working on long term personal projects.

Website: https://www.andrewsullivanphoto.com/

Instagram: @andrewsullivan_bcn

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

Inside Venetians’ Houses   

by Marc De Tollenaere

Marc De Tollenaere was born in Libya, a few months before Gaddafi took power in a coup, from Belgian father and from once Italian region Istra refugee mother.

The lack of home and roots has produced a kind of vacuum inside him, a nostalgia, a subconscious desire to search. If it is true that photography is memory, then he photographs to remember what he has not been able to experience.

The thousand year old culture of the cities of art around the world is under pressure. Threatened by the invasion of hit and run tourism, by speculation and by the transformation of the urban environment. Neighborhood shops and artisans must give way to junk sellers of tourist items. Homes for families are transformed into tourist rentals, small hotels, landlords, bed and breakfasts. 

One, the individuality of the person; no one, the inhabitants who will survive in the cities of art, and fifty thousand, the number of residents remaining in Venice, which in 1951 numbered 174,808, and who are sounding the alarm to other cities of art in the world.  

These photographs bear witness to an era. They are fragments of a civilization in danger that will be studied, in a few centuries, thank to these “artifacts” of art. Each subject is depicted in the environment where he lives, his home. The fresco is formed by the sum of its details. A world that hands down a cultural heritage of ancient reminiscences.  

 

 

by Francesco Anselmi

Along a border at the center of the political and journalistic debate, “Borderlands” aims to develop a narration capable of going beyond the emergency perspective under which the US/Mexico border related issues are often presented and to vehicle the complexity of this 3600 kilometers long line that has been crossed by migrants and travelers for decades.

Immigration related phenomena have been absorbed by the population of border areas and it’s not an exaggeration to say that they contributed to shape the social fabric of these regions; depending on the areas, the solutions to the various issues are extremely different between each others, and can’t certainly be synthesized in the construction of a “wall”.

The idea of securing a border by putting up a fence is conceptually misleading as well, as sharp lines of demarcation might deceive about a non-continuity, truth is that border areas between US and Mexico can hardly be considered as parts of the two countries they separate, but have rather become as a country by itself.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Born 1984 in Milan, Francesco lives between Italy and the United States. He graduated at The International Center of Photography in NYC receiving the New York Times Foundation Scholarship. His work focuses on social issues and ongoing changes involving the western society, from Europe to the United States of America. In 2012 he started a long term documentation about the consequences of the Greek economical crisis, that led him to receive the Chris Hondros Fellowship Fund in 2013 and the Visura Grant for Outstanding Personal Project in 2016. A selection of his work was screened at Visa Pour L’image 2013/2015/2016/2019 in Perpignan, at Image Singuliere 2014/2022 in Sete, at les rencontre d’Arles 2014/2019 and exhibited at 2014/2018 Lumix Festival for young photojournalism in Hannover, at 2014 Venice Biennal of Architecture, at 2019 Photolux festival in Lucca, Italy, at Museo MAXXI in Rome, Italy and at Base Milano for the “Italian Panorama” exhibition in 2022. Francesco is among the 2014 and 2019 Leica Oskar Barnack Award finalists. In 2019 he received a Visa D’or at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, France

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

by Arthur Grace

When I landed at West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport just over 43 years ago, it marked the beginning of a 12-year exploration of life behind the Iron Curtain. As a photojournalist for Western news outlets, I had unique access to both daily life and historic events across what was then known as the Soviet Bloc.

In those days and in those places, “access” took on a very different meaning for people in my line of visual work. I learned quickly that often while I was busy observing what was in front of me, someone from state security was busy observing me. This person might be the amiable representative from the state press office who was required to accompany me on my rounds, or it might be a more sinister and covert presence in the form of a plain clothes secret police officer who at times would appear as if out of nowhere.

Once I understood the obstacles I faced in pursuit of reality-based photographs — whether of everyday life or of more newsworthy people and events — I soon adopted the countermeasures necessary to do my job: misdirection, distraction or outright evasion. Although I was occasionally reprimanded by my state provided “minder” and in a few instances detained by authorities, I was able for the most part to photograph what was actually happening on the ground and capture what a given situation really looked like. This necessarily evasive pursuit of factual imagery became the ongoing challenge of my photographic coverage in autocratic countries in the 70’s and 80’s.

Due to limited visa accreditations for Western photojournalists, very few gained entry in these countries at any one time. As a result, most of my photographs were unique for the simple reason that I was the only photographer present. Since only a tiny fraction of the images taken on assignment ever make it to the printed page, I filed away the unpublished negatives and transparencies, preserved in archival sheets and stored in binders waiting
for me to return to them.

The reawakening in recent years of autocratic behavior in some of the countries I covered decades ago made me realize that many of my photographs from the Cold War could have renewed relevance — that images once considered “out-takes” have acquired new meaning or importance with the passage of time. This volume contains a selection of the most representative images I shot from that era, organized in a way that helps provide context to the multi-dimensional reality of those times.

Even though these photographs can only offer a mere glimpse of the Cold War from one photographer’s perspective, I hope they can serve as an historical reminder of what autocracy looked like then … and could look like again in the not too distant future.

“Communism(s): A Cold War Album”

Book available here.

BIO

Arthur Grace began his professional career in 1973 as a staff photographer for United Press International. During his award-winning career in photojournalism spanning three decades, he covered stories around the globe as a contract photographer for Time magazine and a staff photographer for Newsweek magazine. His photographs have appeared in leading publications worldwide, including on the covers of Life, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Paris Match and Stern.

Over the past thirty years, Mr. Grace has published six critically praised photographic books: Choose Me: Portraits of a Presidential Race, Comedians, State Fair, America 101, Robin Williams: A Singular Portrait, 1986-2002, and Communism(s): A Cold War Album. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and abroad including the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and solo show at the International Center of Photography in New York and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Mr. Grace’s photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the High Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the National Museum of American History, among others. His color photojournalism archives are housed at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin.

Website: arthurgrace.com/

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

by Elliott Verdier

Of the bloody civil war (1989-2003) that decimated Liberia, its population does not speak. No proper memorial has been built, no day is dedicated to commemoration. The country, still held by several protagonists of the carnage, refuses to condemn its perpetrators. This deafening silence, that resonates internationally, denies any possibility of social recognition or collective memory of the massacres, condemning Liberia to an endless feeling of abandonment and drowsy resignation. The trauma carved into the population’s flesh is crystallized in the society’s weak foundations, still imbued with an unsound Americanism, and bleeds onto a new generation with an uncertain future.

Elliott Verdier’s photographic and sound work was spread over a two year period. The images were made over the entire country, from the diamond mines of Gbarpolu to the fishing harbors of Harper and through the immense slum of Westpoint. The analog photographs, made with a large format camera, offer two interwoven narratives, one in black & white and the other in color. In parallel to the photographs, recordings of men and women’s voices are added, be they victims or perpetrators, to recount their damaged fate. The dark and enigmatic monochromes are contextual images that establish the setting for the color portraits. These black & white images are a reference to the night that so often appears in witness accounts, a moment in time where the trauma becomes palpable. They distill a heavy atmosphere that spreads the suffocating silence over the country. From this silence, words emerge, transcribed onto fragile paper, to haunt the Liberian night with inaudible whispers.

BIO

Born 1992 in Paris (France). Elliott Verdier is a documentary photographer. He grows up influenced by photojournalism culture, but quickly questions his position as a witness and the subjectivity of his images. His work naturally steers away from hot news and favors the slowness of the large format camera. Driven by themes such as memory, generational transmission and resilience, he surveys territories and photographs with a certain intimacy, and dignity, the people who inhabit them. In 2017, he completed his first long term project, ‘A Shaded Path’, in Kyrgyzstan. He was helped by the French National Center for Visual Arts in 2019 for his second major project ‘Reaching for Dawn’, in Liberia. Elliott Verdier also collaborates with the press, especially with the New York Times, but also Le Monde Magazine and Vogue Italia.

Instagram: @elliott.verdier/

Website: https://elliottverdier.com/

Selection by Alejandra Martinez Moreno – Editor/Burn Magazine. 

“Here is a door behind which the hidden is revealed, enter and you will see not what one wants to see but what is” — writing on a big wooden cross, Kuloy village, Arkhangelsk region, Russia.

This project explores fading northern villages of Russia, the people who live there, the reasons they cannot adapt to the modern world and long for the past. The Mezen River flows through the Komi Republic and Arkhangelsk region in the northern reaches of Russia. Close to 1000 kilometres in length, the river, which freezes in October and thaws again in April, flows into the White Sea. Along its banks, a series of settlements are strung together, like memories of older days.

Life in the Mezen villages seems to have stood still, with its backdrop of centuries-old wooden cabins, ruined churches, and archaic crosses; people talk more about former times than about the here and now; the past seems more real than the present. Many of the locals became unemployed after the fall of the Soviet Union, and many of them left the settlements. Those who remain behind take care of themselves, just as their ancestors did before them: they bake, they hunt, and they fish. They feel abandoned, and live in a state of timelessness, caught between a past that is forever lost and a future that is anything but secure. Far from the big city and cultural life, the present shimmers like an inexistent star — somewhere out there, on television or in the pages of a magazine.

BIO

Emil Gataullin, born in 1972, based in Moscow, Russia. In 1999 he graduated from Moscow Surikov Institute of Art, majoring in monumental painting. He studied photography with one of the leading Russian photography ideologists and authors, Alexander Lapin, from 2003 to 2004. His work was published in GEO, LFI Magazine, The New York Times, Black+White Photography, FOTO Magazine, Schwarzweiss, Russian Reporter, Ogonek, Takie Dela among many other magazines and online media. His projects were shown in solo exhibitions in Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece and Russia. In 2016 his personal retrospective book “Towards the Horizon” was published by Edition Lammerhuber.

Website: https://emilgataullin.com/

Instagram: @emilgataullin/

Selection by Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno (@ale_jandram)

SEE FULL COLLECTION

October 17 – 23, 2022

The first ever Burn Magazine Print Sale is LIVE.

Our museum quality signed archival pigment prints are 6×9 inch image size on an 8.5×11 inch paper. Printed by Davide di Gianni in Rome. The full collection to be purchased from today until Sunday October 23, 2022.

“I am proud of the talented group of photographers we have published this year. It is rewarding to collaborate with this print sale and 20% of our sale goes to Doctors without Borders who provide medical humanitarian assistance to the people who need it the most” writes Managing Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno. 

“This collection of some of the best on Burn is done through the non profit Burn Foundation dedicated to grants, commissions, and educational opportunities for talented photographic artists as well as dedicated documentary photographers”. Alejandra adds.

See the full collection.

By Warun “Bearly” Siriprachai

“It’s such a stressful situation as flood levels in Bangkok are at a dangerous level.

Thailand had experienced a huge flood in 2011, almost all regions were submerged. Experts warning that Bangkok will be sinking in 25 years,In 2022 signs are becoming clearer.

Because of global warming results in heavy rainfall, flash flood hit many areas in Bangkok, Thailand. After the heavy rainfall and the water reached 1 meter high in some areas.

People can not do their normal activities, just living day by day with the fact that water flood is in their bedroom.”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Warun Siriprachai, aka ‘BearLy’

Being a film director is her childhood dream. She’s interested in art and drawing. She likes to look special, wonder, to make the pictures ask questions and interesting things.

Due to COVID-19 and situation in Asia,she did a project about shooting Bangkok during the lockdown situation. After this project came out. Can create understanding and the truth that happens for everyone to know in Thailand.

At this point, she’s aware that shooting photo is another way to tell the truth and help the society. She has passion to make a better society via her photos, so she started to do a personal project and become a journalist. She believes that a journalist can bring her to the places where no one can and bring the truth to the society and make a better world.

Thai photographer who has focused on various social issues in Thailand. She will make her first book next year.

Website: www.bearlywarun.com

Instagram: @bearly_warun

Selection by Managing Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno (@ale_jandram)

SEE FULL COLLECTION

October 17 – 23, 2022

The first ever Burn Magazine Print Sale is LIVE.

Our museum quality signed archival pigment prints are 6×9 inch image size on an 8.5×11 inch paper. Printed by Davide di Gianni in Rome. The full collection to be purchased from today until Sunday October 23, 2022.

“I am proud of the talented group of photographers we have published this year. It is rewarding to collaborate with this print sale and 20% of our sale goes to Doctors without Borders who provide medical humanitarian assistance to the people who need it the most” writes Managing Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno. 

“This collection of some of the best on Burn is done through the non profit Burn Foundation dedicated to grants, commissions, and educational opportunities for talented photographic artists as well as dedicated documentary photographers”. Alejandra adds.

See the full collection.

Photographs and text y Jérôme Sessini

In 2014 until 2017, I worked in the Russian-speaking regions of Donbass, in Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol… Russia was clearly supporting the pro-Russian separatists, and the Russian media was showering Russian-speaking civilians with propaganda against the Ukrainian government and against the Western media, but still, the russian-speaking civilians were paying with their lives. I photographed civilians victims of Ukrainian army artillery. I was guided by this feeling of revolt and injustice that I know too well, each time common people are killed, injured, torn apart, by wars that are beyond them… 

Every time I was coming back to Kyiv from the Donbass war zone, my Ukrainian friends asked me questions tinged with reproaches:

-“Why are you going to photograph these crazy people? (Russian-speaking Ukrainians), they want to be Russians so they can go to Russia!!”
– “But because they are victims of a war, civilians die under the bombs of the Ukrainian army..”
– “It’s propaganda! It’s the pro-Russian militiamen themselves who are bombing the civilians!”
In short, any discussion became impossible, I had the strong impression that there were two Ukraines, deeply divided and irreconcilable.

After 8 years of war, the Kremlin’s propaganda reaches its climax: “Our Russian-speaking Ukrainian brothers are victims of a genocide in the east of Ukraine, the country is a Nazi junta which exterminates the Russian-speakers.”

The unthinkable happens, Vladimir Putin’s army invades Ukraine, then follows murders, torture, rapes in Bucha, Borodyanka and in all the innumerable towns and villages which have the misfortune to find themselves in the way of the Russian tanks.

This conflict made me face an important examination of conscience. By testifying in 2014 to the condition of the Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine, did I feed Russian propaganda?

BIO

Jérôme Sessini is one the world’s most prolific and respected names working in the sensitive field of conflict zones and has been dispatched to war-torn countries like Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Libya for international publications. As well as reporting on the frontlines, he has covered social issues such as the drug-related violence on the streets of Mexico, the anti-government protests in Ukraine and indigenous minorities in Cambodia facing forced eviction. Through his work, he is constantly learning, adapting and evolving.

Since 2018, Sessini has been documenting the opioid crisis in the United States, where he has travelled to Ohio and Philadelphia to create intimate portraits of the people and places ravages by drug misuse. In 2017, Sessini travelled to remote villages in Cambodia with Samrith Vaing, documenting the life of indigenous minorities facing forced eviction. In 2016, Sessini documented the Kurdish Peshmerga offensive against Islamic State (IS) in the city of Bashiq before crossing the region to cover Iraqi forces pushing towards Mosul.

Website: https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/jerome-sessini/

Instagram: @jeromesessini/

Photo Essay edited by Managing Editor Alejandra Martínez Moreno.

Mea Shaarim is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem outside of the Old City’s walls. Even after almost 150 years of its existence, the neighborhood of “100 doors” remains unchanged, trying to isolate itself from modern life. With its overwhelmingly Hasidic population, streets of Mea Shaarim retain the appearance of pre-war Eastern Europe shtetls and life revolves around prayer and the study of Jewish religious texts. As it was in Eastern Europe, Yiddish is the language of choice for an everyday communication, keeping Hebrew as sacred language for religious purpose only. The neighborhood reminds me of a huge vessel, drifting over time using hanging laundry as sails, trying to isolate itself by closing their already non-existent  one hundred gates. 

Born during Soviet era in a small town in South West of Ukraine, narrow streets of Mea Shaarim “salted” with Yiddish over-street shouting, suddenly reminded me of my childhood – my grandma, my parents. During the nights when rare songs of modern time disappear in the dark, this resemblance is even more tangible and I started capture my feelings, reminiscences walking back in time like a boy catching butterflies sometimes using my Leica, sometimes using iPhone as my net which I held far back in our backyard. 

Thank you, Mea Shaarim! Thanks that you exist… Float on, sail in peace. 

Raanana, Israel (2022)

BIO

Born in the USSR (Ukraine), studied in St. Petersburg and lived in Lithuania. After arriving in Israel, I lived in a kibbutz in South Israel where I fell in love with the Dead Sea region and desert. After a serious illness in 2007, I decided to change my life and decided to devote my knowledge to environmental and suitability issues, seeing photography as a continuation of my efforts. Therefore my main interest in photography is environmental issues and human environmental interactions. Over the last four years I have been working on a book about the mystery of the Dead Sea and its ecological catastrophe. On top of that I spend a good amount of time on personal projects mainly in Eastern Europe and Armenia. 
I am a finalist of multiple international and Israeli photography festivals. 

Website: www.bronfer.com

Instagram: @bronfer

Photo Essay edited by Alejandra Martínez Moreno

Violence has become a familiar facet of Brazil’s identity, a tragic routine that affects all layers of Latin America’s biggest country. According to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, Brazil is the country with the most homicides in the world, registering almost 50,000 in 2020, and some of its cities have homicide rates similar to those found in civil wars. As in other parts of Southern and Central America, a large part of this violence and criminality can be linked to organized crime groups participating in drug trafficking. The murder victims are frequently young black men from poor urban areas who are constantly recruited by drug gangs. At the same time, the Brazilian military police, the principal law enforcement units dealing with gangs, has one of the highest fatality rates in the world. But this violence can be found in all social, races, genders and ages layers of Brazilian society.

It is a complex behavioral phenomenon of aggressiveness that dates back to the historical bases of the country that it is oppressed by extreme levels of poverty. In fact, Brazil remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. Intense and rapid urbanization led to unplanned and haphazard expansions of cities, creating vulnerable areas lacking basic infrastructure, public goods, or an effective presence of the state. These favelas and periferias are epicenters of violence, with the highest numbers of homicides and other violent crimes in the country. This ongoing work documents violence around Brazil, focusing on its northern and northeastern regions where a culture of violence born through impunity, weak state institutions and centuries of savage inequality, exacerbated by drug trafficking networks, have expanded greatly throughout these places in recent years. While most commonly known in popular culture for beaches, carnival, samba and football, Brazil remains one of world’s most violent countries, a tropical paradise of blood and sorrow.

BIO

Tommaso Protti is an Italian photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He started his photographic career in 2011 after graduating in Political Science and International Relations in Rome. Since then, he has devoted himself to photography and journalism focusing on themes of conflict, violence, environment and inequality. He received awards from the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, Picture of the Year International and the Getty Images Reportage Grant. His work was published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Magazine, National Geographic, Washington Post, Geo Magazine, Newsweek, Internazionale, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and other publications. He is a regular contributor for The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.

Website: https://tomprotti.com

Instagram: @tomprotti

Selection by Managing Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno 

Doctor Zaid and Mister Dhia together with their teams had travelled all over Iraq in the past ten years, from Basra in the South to Sinjar in the North, passing through Tikrit and the river Tigris. But their journeys were the most painful and challenging missions ever: guiding their team in excavating mass graves and exhumation of dead bodies.

From former Saddam Hussein’s regime until recent ISIS’s massacres, in the past 40 years the earth of Iraq has covered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people: missed from Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Saddam Hussein’s era, post-2003 conflicts, 2006-2008 civil war’s sectarian violence, 2014-2017 ISIS’s occupation in the country and counter-ISIS operations. Estimates run from a 250.000 to one million people missing from decades of conflicts and human rights abuses. It might be the world’s largest number of missing persons in a single country- the Iraqi desaparecidos.

The tireless Iraqi teams of Legal Medicine Directorate and Mass Graves Department reunite all the forensic anthropologists, doctors and experts who are uncovering mysteries and crimes against humanity, identifying the bodies to return to the families of the victims. Starting from 2019, they are accompanied by an international investigative team of the United Nations, which will help in collecting evidences to prosecute the criminals of ISIS’s violence, with their experience all over the world, from Rwanda to Bosnia, from Argentina to Cambodia’s massacres. Only ISIS’s mass graves are 202, while the number of former regime’s ones is unknown. The team’s passionate, humble and huge effort is making the history of Iraq, they will have to work still for so many years, but their hope is only one: that the next mass grave will be the last one.

AUTHOR BIO

Alessio Mamo is a Sicilian photographer based in Catania, Italy and a regular contributor for The Guardian and L’Espresso. After completing a degree in chemistry, Mamo then graduated in photography from the European Institute of Design in Rome, Italy in 2007. In 2008, he began his career in photojournalism, focusing on contemporary social, political and economic issues. Mamo covers issues related to refugee displacement and migration starting in Sicily, and then extending to countries in the Middle East. His pictures have been published in major international magazines such as TIME, The Guardian, Newsweek, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Stern, National Geographic, Geo, Polka, AlJazeera, The New Yorker, Internazionale and L’Espresso. He is also a contributing photographer with Médecins Sans Frontières and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Website: www.alessiomamo.com

Instagram: @alessio_mamo

Selection by Managing Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno

Why are most pictures of trans people in their rooms? What happens when they take to the streets and connect with people, especially in a very traditional society like Bolivia? Tam is a 23-year-old non binary dancer from Bolivia, living in Buenos Aires. This is the story about Tam’s return to hometown for the first time since transitioning during lockdown. 

We invite you on this journey out and about the streets of Cochabamba, where we challenge gender stereotypes, play with people, or simply wait and see what happens…. Tam says: “Trans non binary people exist in Bolivia, South America and the whole wide world. There isn’t just one way of being non binary, we are all unique, just like human beings. This is me.”

Tam’s family accepts them gender identity but sometimes fails to address Tam in the desired PRONOUNS (they, them). 

With social media is easy for Tam to meet up with diverse people in them hometown. The bonding is immediate and they chat about hardships and nice things of being different and free.

“Living away from home gave me the space to embrace those changes as they came, figure out how I wanted to present, and not worry about who I saw from high school at the local grocery story when I was trying out something new.” Tam says. 

This story was produced in partnership with @pulitzercenter.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Irina Werning is a freelance photojournalist who focuses on personal long-term projects. She is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Werning has a bachelor’s degree in economics, a master’s degree in history (Buenos Aires) and a master’s in photojournalism (London). She won the Ian Parry Scholarship (The Sunday Times Magazine and Getty) in 2006, the Emerging Photographer Fund – Burn Magazine (Magnum Foundation) in 2012, and a first-place Sony World Photography Award for portraiture in 2012.

Werning was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the nine Argentinian photographers you need to follow in 2015 and her book Back to the Future was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the best photobooks of 2014. In 2020, she was awarded the Emergency Covid Grant (National Geographic) and a Pulitzer Reporting Grant in 2021. In 2022 she won the World Press Photo Story category in South America.

Website: http://irinawerning.com

Instagram: @irinawerning

Selection by Managing Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno

“Niewybuch” gives an insight into the world of military camps, a phenomenon that has experienced a massive influx in Poland in recent years. In addition to being taught military basics, children and young people are playfully indoctrinated in obedience, fearlessness and patriotism. The young soldiers appear like play figures, their frozen facial features concealing any emotion. Between fake blood, drill and the unreserved use of weapons, the work raises the question of the emotional effects of military education and addresses the tension between a child’s search for adventure and the excesses of the Polish military cult.

Kepesz introduces us to the life on campus where children are placed and trained in bootcamps settings. Kids and teenagers are thought self defense, survival skills and shooting. Children are taught to use air rifles, and sometimes replica weapons like machine guns and grenades. Some of the kids are proud and happy to be at this school thinking it would provide them with job opportunities, and teach them important lessons like organization and obedience.

Natalia shares with us where the children live. “Each room had two bunk beds, with just the bare necessities and no real comforts. There is a kitchen on the premises, where the children go to eat three meals a day. Just like the military, the children had to gather before, and march in a line to the dining hall. Some things in the camps are prepared professionally, while others are simply improvised. Not all of the people who ran the camps were from the military. Some of them were young adults who saw it as an adventure or a survival.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

The Polish photographer Natalia Kepesz lives and works in Berlin. After graduating in cultural studies and art history at the Humboldt University Berlin, she studied photography at the Ostkreuzschule Berlin. She use photography as a means of self-expression –she makes pictures for herself, to identify with hidden qualities of her character, to better understand her reality, and to express her interpretation of the world around her. By photographing, she transforms her own childhood memories. Growing up was always accompanied by the urge to discover something else. Natalia Kepesz is a World Press Photo Contest 2021 Portrait Series winner (3rd Prize), a winner of Portraits- Hellerau Photography Award 2021 (Residence Prize) and exhibition winner of Belfast Photo Festival 2021 and Photo Israel 2021. She is Les Jours Prize winner of Les Boutographies – recontres photographiques de Montpellier 2021. She was shortlisted for Kolga Tbilisi Photo Award, the Loucie Foundation, Photo Taken Scholarship 2020 as well as Athens Photo Festival 2020. She placed third in the Münzenberg Forum Art Competition 2020. Her work has been exhibited internationally.

Website: https://www.nataliakepesz.de

Instagram: @nataliakepesz

Selection by Managing Editor Alejandra Martinez Moreno

A vast ice desert unfolds, inhospitable and enigmatic, with untouched beauty. In the regions of Kulusuk and Qaanaaq in Greenland, Yamalia in Siberia, and Norwegian and Finnish Lapland. Arctic Circle 66º 33′ where earth and sky become one. The fragile, wildly beautiful nature of the Arctic region, lives harmoniously with harsh conditions in one of the most inhospitable parts of the planet.

The infinite nature of the Arctic world contrasts with the insignificance of human life. An imposing silence pervades everything, providing a profound sense of peace and an awareness of being alive. Of being one more among all Earth’s beings. The Arctic’s inhabitants enjoy the serenity and simplicity associated with the origins of human life; they live connected to nature, far-removed from the rules that govern the industrialised world. Nature gives them everything they need. The shadowless, white landscape teaches us once again to look, to discover every detail of this untameable land. Where only by following the laws of nature can you survive. The White Line speaks of the Arctic region as the place to return to the original serenity and simplicity of the human being, it describes the white immensity of the Arctic and the peoples that inhabit it in harmony with nature.

BIO

Website: www.rosarodriguezsanchez.com

Instagram: @rosa_rodriguez_photo

Photo Essay curated by Alejandra Martínez Moreno.