At the precipe of motion

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Apni kisher chobi tolen? Just what is it that you’re taking a picture of? It’s a question a photographer is commonly asked. It happens particularly when a lens is pointed at nothing in particular. At least nothing that one considers significant, or photographically meaningful. That a photographer might find joy in capturing the fleeting, the ephemeral and the insignificant is difficult enough to explain. When one photographs ‘something’ that does not necessarily have a material presence, or is visible in some tangible form, then explaining it becomes more difficult still. I am not even getting into the ‘why are you doing it’ syndrome. What you are doing, is difficult enough to get across. This is a dilemma in a profession where one is seen as a communicator. Reaching out to an audience is part of what a photographer is generally meant to be doing. In a medium known as the most ubiquitous art form, which prides itself in being the most accessible to the person in the street, part of the exercise is in people being able to ‘get it’.

Jean-Philippe PERNOT however, rejects the notion of the photographic truthsayer.  Neither does he attempt to search for the decisive moment. It is ambiguity that he thrives in, the most tangible part of his work being the metaphor. Even while depicting the female nude, he stays away from a classical representation of beauty, rejecting form for energy. Playing with space, bending time. His finished frame is always work in progress. Is his work beautiful? It is the wrong question to be asking. For in this work, one never arrives. These are still images depicting perpetual motion. Slices of time layered as an onion. A silent scream, tethered down anger. A violence that is sometimes quiet, and always disconcerting. For it is not the ‘what’ of the photograph but the ‘why’ that leaps out of every frame. A muffled scream that struggles to free itself from its binds. A coiled rage that seeks neither solace nor release, staying forever in a state of flux.

PERNOT walks at the precipe between the still image and cinematic motion, blurring the edges, blending one with the other. His photographs may be painted with light, but the hues in his canvas are from a palette of raw emotions. It is not the content of his frame that moves me, but what his images aspire to that fire my imagination.

Shahidul Alam

The exhibition is open at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts till the 2nd September. 12pm – 8 pm
House 275/F, Road 16 (new), Dhanmondi. (stone’s throw from Drik)

Photography is Not a Crime

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Photography is Not a Crime

It’s a First Amendment Right

By Carlos Miller

The Homeland Security Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department has published a “Terrorist Awareness Guide” where it advises citizens to be on the lookout for people taking “inappropriate photographs or videos.”

And no, they are not talking about perverts shooting up the skirts of women.

They’re talking about people taking photographs of surveillance cameras and other things that are plainly visible to the naked eye.

Here is an excerpt of what the pamphlet says:

Maybe you are at a National Monument and you
notice a person nearby taking a lot of photos. Not
unusual. But then you notice that he is only taking
photos of t he surveillance cameras, crash barriers at
the entrances, and access control procedures. Is that
normal for a tourist? Absolute not!

The following should cause a heightened sense of
concern:

•       Unusual interest
•       Surveillance
•       Inappropriate photographs or videos
•       Note-taking
•       Drawing of diagrams
•       Annotating maps
•       Using binoculars or night vision devices

It should be noted that Detective Bustamante of the same homeland security bureau was one of the officers who responded to our first Metrorail incident where we were “permanently banned” for taking photos.

Bustamante proved pretty clueless of the law when he informed us we needed a permit to photograph anything within the Metrorail, regardless if we were shooting commercial or not.

Read the entire document below. The portion on photography is on the second page in the right-hand column circled in red.

Terrorist Awareness Guide MDPD-PINAC

Chobi Mela VI submission deadline extended till 14 August 2010

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Dear Photographers,

It appears that the extremely large number of incomplete submissions may have been caused by the server having problems coping with the very large number of entries. As such we have decided to extend the deadline for one more week.

Dhaka is six hours ahead of GMT. The best time to upload is between 10:00 pm to 06:00 am Dhaka time.

In case you still have problems uploading, please send a mail to Mostafa Sorower and we will provide you information to submit via FTP. Alternatively, please send mail by yousendit.com or some similar method with a mail to Mustafa and we will download it from here.

Best wishes,

Shahidul Alam
Festival Director
Chobi Mela VI

Viewer or voyeur? The morality of reportage photography

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Do you look away from images of real-life horror, or look closer? A series of shocking photographs from Somalia asks disturbing questions about the ethics of bearing witness

Sean O’Hagan

Monday 8 March 2010 14.23 GMT

Farah Abdi Warsameh's Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December. Photograph: AP

“To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do,” writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, “and pictures taken out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.”

Sontag goes on to describe the context in which Eddie Adams took what was arguably the most shocking image of the Vietnam war: the moment in which a South Vietnamese police officer executes a Vietcong suspect by shooting him point-blank in the head. She points out that the picture was both authentic and staged – “by General Loan, who had led the prisoner, hands tied behind his back, out to the street where journalists had gathered. He would not have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it”. Wearily, Sontag concludes that “one can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-spectatorship”.

I was reminded of that final quotation when, a few weeks ago, I navigated the winner’s gallery of the World Press Photo of the Year website. There, amidst the many dramatic images of conflict, death and destruction, was a series by an Associated Press photographer, Farah Abdl Warsameh, entitled Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December. The four images are shocking in a way that even the most graphic war reportage seldom is any more. The first shows the victim being buried up to his neck in earth. The second shows a group of men, their faces concealed by headscarves, raining rocks down on his head. The third shows his bloodied torso being dragged out of the soil. The last shows the men hurling large rocks at his prone and lifeless body to finish off their gruesome ritual. There are no captions; we are left to guess the context.

One’s immediate instinct on coming upon the photographs is to recoil in horror, which is what almost everyone I showed them to did. A colleague described them as “a kind of pornography of suffering”. (The Sunday Times ran the series last week in their Spectrum section devoted to the World Press awards. Many readers were outraged and appalled.)

Last week, in a blogpost for Foto8 magazine, the veteran picture editor, Colin Jacobson, wrote that “the rather disgusting pictures … raised some interesting ethical matters”, which is one – somewhat understated – way of putting it. More problematically, Jacobson said that “obviously there was collaboration between the photographer and those carrying out this gruesome death sentence”. Perhaps. But what kind of collaboration? Unlike the shooting of the Vietcong suspect, the dreadful execution of the Somalian man would seemingly have gone ahead at that time had the photographer not been present. (Other images from the series, not included in the World Press selection, show an audience of villagers who had gathered to witness the execution.) On that level, the photographer did not collaborate with the killers, though he almost certainly gained permission from someone to shoot the stoning. He also shot every stage of the killing in all its protracted and torturous barbarity. What it takes to do that, and at what personal cost, only he can say.

Images as extreme as these beg so many questions about the morality of reportage. Did the photographer, one wonders, have any communication with the victim in the time leading up to the event? Would our reaction to the photographs be different if we knew that the condemned man granted the photographer permission to bear witness to his dreadful death? Would it be different if we knew that the photographer risked his own life to travel though strife-torn Somalia to bear witness, which, as one of the respondents to Jacobson’s blog points out, was probably the case. Does such extremity diminish us or enlighten us? Or simply shock us into a kind of impassioned helplessness?

Part of the complex power of these photographs comes from what Sontag calls the “provocation” inherent in all images of real suffering. The first of many questions they ask is: “Can you look at this?” Perhaps Sontag comes closest to articulating the moral dilemma at the heart of extreme images of suffering when she writes: “There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”

The Great Imitator

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A fllm by Atul Loke, the talented photojournalist from India.

By the mid 1960s, Charlie Chaplin – the man George Bernard Shaw called ‘the only genius to come out of the movie industry’ – was well into the twilight of his 75 year career. Having directed, produced, acted, edited and written sound scores for hundreds of films going back to 1914, Charlie Chaplin was a world-wide superstar. But it wasn’t until 1966 that a young Ashok S. Aswani, now an Ayurvedic practitioner form the town of Adipur in Gujarat, first laid eyes on the man that was to become his hero.

Ashok was cycling to his job as a typist when he saw a poster for the film The Gold Rush – the film that Chaplin himself said he would most like to be remembered for. ‘I was wonderstruck. I found his dress and look fascinating. How does the man bend his legs like that?’. Ashok got off his bike and gaped at the poster for 10 minutes.He forgot about his job, bought a ticket and went in. ‘A whole new world of cinema opened up for me. The music, the technique, the photography was all so different! And I thought, is Chaplin an actor or a magician? I fell off my seat laughing in the darkness.’ That day, Mr Aswani watched all four showings of The Gold Rush. He was fired later that day. ‘I lost my job, but I gained Chaplin.’Returning to Adipur in 1973, Dr. Aswani formed the Charlie Circle, a society dedicated to the appreciation of Charlie Chaplin. He became an Ayurvedic practitioner, handing out free Chaplin DVDs to patients as part of his holistic remedies.

Over time the Charlie circle has grown. More than 100 people gathered in 2010 for the most recent celebration of Charlie Chaplin’s birthday, even though temperatures in Gujarat rose to over 46 degrees.
There were girls and boys, men and women, all parading through the streets of Adipur dressed up like Chaplin’s legendary tramp character – toothbrush moustache, bowler hat, scruffy black suit, cane and that familiar gait, so lovingly taught to members of the Circle by Dr. Aswani.

Every day members of the Charlie Circle meet at a photo shop to discuss Chaplin and watch his movies. Dr. Aswani also teaches members how to act and walk like Charlie, all under the watchful gaze of a life-size Charlie Chaplin cutout. ‘When Chaplin died in 1977, I was devastated. I wept like a kid. I feel he should still be alive. He was the greatest man on the Earth. He was a good musician, good director, good editor, good actor, good writer, good mime artist,” Dr. Aswani says.

Mrs. Aswani says how people refer to her husband simply as ‘The Charlie doctor’. ‘He loves Charlie, he gets up and it’s all Charlie. He never tries to be Charlie. It’s just in him.’

Tracing Freedom

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In late 2008 and early 2009 the Norwegian photographer Tom Hatlestad spent four months driving overland between Norway and Bangladesh. Along the way, he asked a hundred people to define freedom. Some of them are featured in this exhibition. Tom began dreaming of making an exhibition of photos and statements on perceptions of freedom after hearing that the theme for the 2009 Chobi Mela international festival of photography in Dhaka would be ‘Freedom’.

Freedom of movement – Tom has always loved to travel freely, and has visited some 50 countries to date. As a Norwegian citizen, he is also privileged in being able to travel to most places without problems. However, freedom of movement is actually less now than it was 50 years ago, mostly due to international politics and increasing levels of tension. With closed borders in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Burma making the northern and southern routes impassable, Tom drove the only remaining overland route between Norway and Bangladesh: Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Nepal and India.

Freedom of thought – Driving ten hours daily for 102 days evokes a type of meditative state and a sense of freedom from domestic concerns. Tom’s Land Rover was not only a rolling studio with its own photo backdrop, but also a canvas for exploring his personal challenges on route. From its safety, he could differentiate real external barriers from those which were mostly in his head.

Freedom to congregate – Tom talked to people from around 30 different countries and from all walks of life and social standings. They include the head of the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet, a world renowned violin maker, a Nobel Peace laureate, authors and activists. But it wasn’t easy to meet people of different ages, genders and nationalities – in some countries women just aren’t allowed to talk to strangers, in others Tom’s passport was confiscated and he had to follow a military escort.

***

Tracing Freedom is a project in cooperation with the Nobel Peace Centre. Tom hopes that these portraits of freedom encourage you to reflect upon the freedom you experience in your own life, country and neighbourhood. Ultimately, he wants Tracing Freedom to help inspire a more open-minded and generous spirit in relation to our acceptance of other people’s attitudes.

***

Tom Hatlestad’s base is in Tjøme, Norway, from where he is currently planning his next Freedom Track journey. Tracing Freedom is supported by Høyanger Næringsutvikling, Sparebanken Sogn og Fjordane and Fond for Lyd og Bilde.

Scroll down this link to see a description of Tom’s trip to Bangladesh

Prix Pictet Jury

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The Prix Pictet, the world’s leading prize in photography and sustainability. will judged by an internationally recognised panel of experts led by Professor Sir David King, Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford. Other members of the judging panel include Shahidul Alam, Photographer, Curator and Founder of the Drik Agency in Bangladesh; Peter Aspden, Arts Writer for the Financial Times; Michael Fried, Art Historian and Critic; Loa Haagen Pictet, Pictet & Cie’s art consultant; Nadav Kander, Winner of the second Prix Pictet; Christine Loh, CEO of Civic Exchange, Hong Kong; and Fumio Nanjo, Director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
Launched in 2008 by the Geneva-based private bank Pictet & Cie, the Prix Pictet has rapidly established itself as the world’s leading prize in photography and sustainability. The prize currently plays to a global audience of over 400 million.

As Kofi Annan, the Prix Pictet’s Honorary President, wrote in his recent forward to Earth – the book of the second Prix Pictet, ‘together, these photographs by the artists shortlisted for the Prix Pictet highlight the beauty of the earth we share. But they also expose the damage, deliberately or carelessly, we are inflicting on our own environment. So these images are a celebration and a reminder of the urgent need to change our ways.’

The Jury look for photographs which best contribute to public awareness of issues involving sustainability. The subject matter is not tightly defined, nor is the technique used by the photographer. The judges are simply looking for original contributions that will, in their opinion, best use the resources of photography to communicate issues concerning the topic of the prize. No distinction shall be made between artistic merit and success in communicating the message.

Sir David King

Professor Sir David King (Chair)

Professor Sir David King is the Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford. More…

Shahidul Alam

Shahidul Alam

Shahidul Alam is a photographer, writer, curator and activist. More…

Peter Aspden

Peter Aspden

Peter Aspden is the Financial Times’ arts writer. More…

Michael Fried

Michael Fried

Michael Fried is a poet, art historian, art critic, and literary critic. More…

Loa Haagen Pictet

Loa Haagen Pictet

Art historian and Curator of Pictet & Cie’s Art Collection. More…

Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander is recognized as one of the most original and highly regarded photographers of our time. More…

Christine Loh

Christine Loh

Christine currently holds the position of CEO and co-founder of Hong Kong think tank, Civic Exchange. More…

Fumio Nanjo

Fumio Nanjo

Director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. He is also an art critic and a lecturer at Keio University, Tokyo. More…

Dreams

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What of the photograph made out of nothing? What about painting with light? Is it photography? Surely if we can paint with light we can paint with dreams, create the morning mist or the afternoon glow. Is it fake? Hardly. Whatever else may be false in this tenuous existence of ours, imagination is not. All that we value, that we strive to uphold, all that gives us strength, has been made of dreams, and we must dream on. If pixels be the vehicle that realises our dreams, be it so.

These words had been written as one of the forewords to the upcoming book and CD by the celebrated Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer. I hadn’t met Pedro then, but we knew of each other and had shared correspondence. I had been somewhat surprised that I was being asked to talk about digital technology. I later discovered it was partly because of my unfamiliarity with the digital medium that Pedro had asked for my take on this new technology. Our friendship grew and we went through the entire gamut of snailmail, telex, fax, email. Later on a visit to Mexico, I the Bangladeshi Luddite introduced Pedro the digital guru, to Skype. In this new landscape ‘the way it used to be’, is no longer a reliable frame of reference, and the boundaries of our zones of comfort are continuously eroded. We helplessly grasp what is fleeting. It is in that ambiguous unsteadiness that our medium triumphs.

Pedro opened one of our festivals, and conducted workshops at Pathshala. We have remained the closest of friends. In between, we’ve changed how the theme of our festival gets selected. After an intense debate of the last day of Chobi Mela V in February 2009, the suggested themes were collected. Later they were put online and more themes invited. There was an online discussion, followed by an online poll. The theme that won by far the most votes was “Dreams”.

To be taken back to the theme of dreams nearly two decades later is perhaps no accident. We are essentially storytellers. The transaction from analogue to digital hasn’t changed the fabric of storytelling. Today the tools are different. Our dreams differ of course. From the need of the activist to speak out against unlawful killings, to the artistic aspirations of creating a visual aesthetic, to the conceptual goals of a certain engagement through a particular visual form.

For are not all photographers dreamers? We paint with light, to hold on to the ephemeral. We play with tones to arrest the fluidity of the transient. We play with form to navigate the edges of our borders. We tug and pull fleeting elements in a never-ending search to redefine what we know and discover what we don’t. It is a restless search, for even in the stillness of a timeless image, the soul wanders, looking for new meaning. Old contact sheets, reworked digital files, uncoupled layers and translucent paths, vintage prints, digital composites all blend seamlessly in the curator’s relentless choreography, in a festival of light and darkness.

As dream merchants, we create images that confront us with horrific facts, and allure us with magical metaphors. We seek a society where love songs are cherished and curiosity celebrated. We conjure up a mystical world, through light and shape and dancing pixels. We toy with perceptions and juggle facts. We trade in the currency of dreams, and flirt with an elusive reality. So to turn to dreams after ‘Differences’, ‘Exclusion’, ‘Resistance’, ‘Boundaries’ and ‘Freedom’ is perhaps to return to what holds us together in the face of all our obstacles, the foci of all our longings. To realise our dreams is perhaps the ultimate paradise.

So we invite dreamers and wanderers and the soulful troubadour, to ignite our imagination. To provoke and goad us out of our slumber. To fly in the wings of our wishes, and glide in the sea of hope. To enchant and entice and mesmerise. To take us on flights of fancy, to fling us in the face of the storm, to hurl us into unchartered journeys, to rejoice in the recklessness of passion, to singe in the heat of rage, to float in the weightlessness of love. To dream.

Shahidul Alam
Festival Director

Online submission at: Chobi Mela

Land of the Free

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The Russian, Eastern & Oriental Fine Art Fair, an annual summer event in London’s Mayfair, displays fine art spanning the last 1,000 years. This year, works from Iran, India, China, Korea and Vietnam will be on display for the first time.

Among the more striking contemporary works is a set of photographs by Dhaka-born Shumon Ahmed. Ironically entitled Land of the Free, it comprises seven images detailing the experience of Mubarak Hussain, the only Bangladeshi to have returned from Guantanamo Bay.

The fair takes place on June 9-12 at the Park Lane Hotel. All images copyright of Shumon Ahmed, courtesy of the fair.

The story of Guantanamo Bay’s prison camp is as a horrifying one. In this place of torture, people became guinea pigs in a vast experiment of methods to crack the human soul. Mubarak Hussain Bin Abul Hashem is the only Bangladeshi to have returned from Guantanamo, after five years of imprisonment. © Shumon Ahmed

Whilst under US army custody, Mubarak was known as “Enemy Combatant Number 151”. © Shumon Ahmed

Mubarak still remembers how the US army brutalised him with the aid of an attack dog over and over again, while his hands were chained behind his back. : © Shumon Ahmed

Deeply traumatised from his experience in Guantanamo, Mubarak kept silent most of the time after returning home; to help him resettle into a normal life his family insisted he marry. He became the father of a baby girl in 2008. © Shumon Ahmed

There have been allegations of torture, sexual degradation, forced drugging and religious persecution committed by U.S. forces at Guantánamo Bay. Former Guantánamo detainee Mubarak Hussain was freed without charge on December 17, 2006, after five years internment. Mubarak has claimed that he was the victim of repeated torture while he was in Guantanamo Bay. © Shumon Ahmed

The abuse was “systematic”, with frequent beatings, choking, and sleep deprivation for days on end. Religious humiliation was also routine. © Shumon Ahmed

“On 17th of December, 2006, a special US Air Force plane flew Mubarak back to Bangladesh after failing to get any evidence of his alleged terror links. Bringing the story of his shattered past into life visually for the first time was an extremely difficult yet critical challenge for me. But it was crucial to vividly exhibit the human cost of the ‘Land of the Free’s’ ill-conceived and violently executed ‘War on Terror’. Which, like for so many others, changed the life of a Bangladeshi named Mubarak Hussain forever.” © Shumon Ahmed

Death Traps: Tales of a Mega Community

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By Abir Abdullah

Vice Principal Pathshala

(Abir was a student of the first batch of students of Pathshala)

A fire broke out on 03 june 2010 night at about 9pm after the electrical transformer at Nawab Katra in Nimtali in Dhaka City burst into flames that raced through several apartment complexes, feeding on flammable chemicals and plastic goods in a string of small shops lining the street beneath, fire officials said. Dearh toll rose to 119 while many are struggling in the hospitals for life.

Fire is an ever present death threat for the entire community of Dhaka city. From homes and workplaces to shopping malls and public spaces, a lack of building codes and fire protection have created a situation where residents are living in a continual death trap. And due to lack of training and proper rescue equipment for the fire service authority, fire accidents are responsible for the destruction of assets and homes as well as lives. The widespread lack of equipment and protection means fire deaths affect nearly everyone, from working class to middle class, and even the elites.

I have been documenting the important issue of fire risks faced by residents of Dhaka for the last couple of years. Through my work, I have seen civilians risking their lives to save others in rescue operations. Firefighters with lack of training and proper rescue equipment are also part of the rescue operation, bringing injured and panicked victims of fire to safety. I believe my photo essay will raise awareness, and hope that it will act as a catalyst for the authorities to take prompt action to save the life and property of an entire community. I hope it will help the policy makers and administrations to consider how Dhaka city has become the ‘second worst’ livable city in the world. I want to show how reversing the trend of inefficiency and neglect by the authorities can help bring an end to the needless loss of many lives in the peaceful, beautiful city of Dhaka.

–
Abir Abdullah
Photographer
european pressphoto agency b.v. (epa)
Bangladesh Bureau
Mobile: 8801715105546

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