ShahidulNews » Photography

Frank Fournier at Pathshala

Shahidul Alam — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:16:58 +0000

Omaira Sanchez (12) is trapped in the debris caused by the eruption of Nevado del Ruíz volcano. After sixty hours she eventually lost consciousness and died of a heart attack. Photo: Frank Fournier

Pathshala, the South Asian Media Academy takes pleasure in inviting you to the presentation of Frank Fournier in Pathshala.

Frank Fournier is a French photographer. He originally studied medicine before becoming a photographer. He moved to New York and became a staff photographer at Contact Press Images in 1982 after joining the office staff in 1977. His portrait of Omayra Sanchez, a 13-year-old trapped under the debris of her home, won the 1986 World Press Photo award.

Frank is currently in Bangladesh to conduct a workshop on international reporting at Sylhet in the north east of Bangladesh. He is one of three international photographers, the others being Greg Marinovic (Kolkata), and Philip Blenkinsop (Kathmandu), who will be lead trainers in workshops involving photographers in Bangladesh (organised by Pathshala), India (organised by Drik India) and Nepal (organised by Photo Circle). Pathshala tutors Munem Wasif (India), Tanzim Ibne Wahab (Nepal) and Debashish Shom (Bangladesh) who along with Per Anders Rosenkvist of Oslo University College (OUC) in Norway, will provide mentoring throught the workshop.

Pathshala has been actively collaborating with OUC for over six years, and students from Bangladesh, Nepal and Norway have been involved in exchanges supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Frank’s presentation follows talks by David Burnett (December 2011) and Pep Bonet (January 2012) and is part of the regular teaching programme at Pathshala.

The schedule of the presentation:

Date: February 04, 2012
Day: Saturday
Time: 6.00 pm
Venue: Pathshala (Room # 1)

Dhaka 9 to 5

Shahidul Alam — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:13:49 +0000

Le reportage de Caroline Gillet :

Reportage on Wahid Adnan and Bangladeshi photojournalism on French Radio.

Dhaka commuters on double decker bus. Photo Wahid Adnan/DrikNews

Le Bangladesh serait le pays où l’on trouve le plus de photojournalistes. Si c’est vrai, c’est en grande partie grâce à Shahidul Alam qui a lancé là-bas une école pour former les jeunes à la photographie. Pour que le Bangladesh se regarde dans les yeux, pour qu’on arrête de le regarder de loin, d’en haut. Pour ne pas laisser aux ONG le monopole de l’image. Rencontre avec Wahid Adnan, un jeune photojournaliste bangladais et avec son professeur, Shahidul Alam. Un reportage de Caroline Gillet

Pour voir les photos de Wahid Adnan – et sa série “Dhaka 9 to 5″:

Wahid Adnan © Wahid Adnan – 2012

If It Bleeds

Shahidul Alam — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:54:05 +0000

“Weegee: Murder Is My Business” Through September 2. International Center of Photography, New York.

Weegee’s photographs are as much about Weegee as they are about crime.
By James Polchin

Weegee strikes again
Body of Dominick Didato, Elizabeth Street, New York, August 7, 1936.

In the fall of 1978, the International Center of Photography mounted the first retrospective of Weegee photographs. Reviews of the show were positive, though the reviews often centered on debates about the artfulness of Weegee’s tabloid images. The New York Times critic began with the very conundrum of this tension between art and news photography: “It is always faintly alarming to see the photographs of Weegee on exhibition at a museum or gallery. They were not made for exhibition but to be reproduced in tabloid newspapers.” Despite this beginning, the review affirms Weegee’s importance in American photography, and argues that his work influenced later artists such as Diane Arbus and Garry Winograd.

Just a few months before this retrospective opened, John Berger published his essay “The Uses of Photography.” In the essay, he makes a crucial distinction between private and public photography:

In the private use of photography, the context of the instant recorded is preserved so that the photograph lives in an ongoing continuity. (If you have a photograph of Peter on your wall, you are not likely to forget what Peter means to you.) The public photograph, by contrast, is torn from its context, and becomes a dead object which, exactly because it is dead, lends itself to any arbitrary use.

For Berger, public photographs — these dead objects — float in a stream of images such that the subject of any particular photographed moment or event turns into a generalized reality absent of context. Like much of his writing in this period, Berger’s concerns were directed to the political force and ethical values of photojournalism.

This moment in the late 1970s also saw the publication of Susan Sontag’s collection of essays On Photography. In it, Sontag presents her focused critique that photographs have created a “chronic voyeuristic relationship” to the world around us. There was no better example of this critique than Weegee’s tabloid images of urban street life and crime scenes, all of which appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies. His revival emerged within these new, critical views of our image culture, and discussions of his work have often been enmeshed in these debates. Though his photographs haven’t changed since the 1970s, our relationship to them has.

Weegee: Murder Is My Business engages a different approach to the photographer’s archive. Eschewing concerns about art, the show focuses instead on the self-invention of Weegee amidst the rise of tabloid newspapers in the 1930s and ’40s. In a show whose title contains “murder,” it is not hard to think of his images as dead objects. But in the context of Berger’s ideas, I began to rethink exactly what the word “murder” refers to.

The title echoes Weegee’s eponymous, first gallery show in 1941 at the Photo League, which presented his tabloid photographs of crimes and gang violence. It is tempting to contemplate the many analogies between camera shots and gun shots — a revolver looms overhead in the entrance hall, aimed at a wall-sized photo of Weegee, camera in hand. What is so unsettling — and constantly compelling — about Weegee’s work has little to do with the actual murders he framed, or even how they provoke our chronic voyeurism. In wandering this show, with its focus on Weegee’s self-promoting vitality and the many displays of actual tabloids that published his work and created the aura of Weegee, I began to understand why his work has remained so engaging and debated. His images destroy so many of our sentimental ideas about photography itself.

The show presents a finely curated collection of photographs of the chaos of urban life, from fires to accidents to corpses and, throughout, the crowds of onlookers who revel in the scenes of destruction. Weegee, who made a career photographing the gangland crimes and gruesome tragedies of New Yorkers for the tabloid press in the 1930s and ’40s, had a certain irony about his work, and, as this show makes clear, a way of exploiting our fascination for murder.

Police officer and lodge member looking at blanket-covered body of woman trampled to death in excursion-ship stampede, New York, August 18, 1941

The first gallery recreates the small studio and apartment that Weegee rented at 5 Center Market Place, just across from police headquarters. The disheveled space looks more like an abandoned subway station than a photographer’s studio. The bed is here. The small side table. Shoes at the ready. And above the bed a recreated collage of news clippings and tear sheets of the photographer’s work, yellowed and fragile as so much of the room appears. Near the recreated room hang photographs taken of the actual room, Weegee lying on the bed, cigar in hand, next to a radio and alarm clock. While patrons were clearly intrigued by the studio recreation, it mirrored a kind of mimetic diorama that one might encounter in a Disney-inspired exhibition. While the curators refrained from a wax figure of the photographer, I did wonder if they had fallen too deeply for Weegee’s self-promotion antics.

These photographs were part of Weegee’s consistent self-promotion. He was not the kind of photographer to stay behind the camera. The first gallery, “Photo Detective: Weegee and the Art of Self-Invention,” presents a number of his self-portraits in the studio and at crime scenes, holding his iconic Speed Graphic camera with the large, bulbous flash. These were the cameras that would shoot a blinding light at the subject, the flash hot and intense. The effect was to create brightly lit subjects against a nearly black background, a film noir aura similar to a deer caught in the headlights.

Unidentified photographer, “On the Spot” (1938)

In one self-portrait, Weegee lies on the floor of the paddy wagon, his camera pointing at us as we look inside the car. Clearly taken by someone else (a police officer, perhaps), the image looks more Hollywood publicity photo than crime shot, with Weegee playing the role of both voyeur and criminal.

One intriguing set of photographs show him posing as a criminal in each stage of an arrest. He was hired by the newly launched Life magazine to picture for them the actual police procedure. As his reputation and success grew in the 1930s, he began to stamp his photographs on the back with a circular seal that read “Credit Photo by Weegee The Famous.”

Born Usher Ferllig to a Jewish family in a small village in what was then Austria (and is now part of Ukraine) in 1899, he and the family immigrated to New York 10 years later, settling in the overcrowded immigrant tenements of the Lower East Side. The working-class streets and neighborhoods would eventually be the world he captured for the tabloid press, turning an eye away from the often photographed grander of the city’s rising skyline. His photographs lack the quite certitude of Paul Strand or the lyrical frames of Edward Weston. Weegee’s New York is one of chaos and confusion, of narrow streets and tenement buildings, of people caught in mid-action, recovering from an accident, fainting at the news of a love one killed. These are spectacles of theater, where one murder scene looks similar to another, where the crowd in Hell’s Kitchen nearly mirrors the spectators in Brooklyn.

As his ambitions to be a freelance photographer grew, he took on the moniker Weegee, suggesting both his work in a dark room as the squeegee boy, but, more likely, connoting the a mystical aura of the Ouija board that was gaining popularity in the 1920s for its supposed power of foresight. He was often at a crime scene before the police, a reality made possible by his special police radio. He once claimed that Time magazine paid him by the bullet. His famous 1945 photography book Naked City, which turned him from New York tabloid photographer to a noir poet of the urban chaos, contains a photograph of a receipt from the venerable magazine listing “Two Murders” and the payment of $35.00.

But the bodies of gangland killings are really not what engages us most about Weegee’s “murder” photography. Rather, it’s those photographs of spectators, of those left behind, of family members and neighborhood kids and girlfriends, whose reactions are caught in flat white light in a moment of curiosity or pain. Weegee’s photographs lack a story. They give us a moment, a flash of light with a headline. “At an East Side Murder” captures a standing crowd along the sidewalk opposite from Weegee’s camera.

“At the East Side Murder” (1943)

You notice the few faces staring back at you much more than you notice those straining necks and varied emotions of the onlookers getting a glimpse of the body, which must be quite near Weegee. In these images, with their ambiguous captions, the murder scene becomes a stage upon which Weegee captures the reactions of the audience. He was in love with spectators. Naked City is filled with close-up shots of onlookers in Harlem jazz clubs, in Greenwich Village bars, or in a famous series of photographs of a young girl’s reactions at a Frank Sinatra concert. These spectators illustrate a generalized public. Weegee suggested that the image and the street life blurred into one, writing in the introduction to Naked City, “[A] photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.” Like walking through the city, his photos can easily slip between places and even years, for they represent an idea of the city instead of documenting a condition of its being. We can take pleasure in looking, in looking at those others looking. We can be captivated by the “life” that he presents us in all its arresting uncertainty.

Weegee knew that everything becomes theater in the tabloid press. He captioned his images to fit the dramas. “Balcony Seats at a Murder” presents a long shot of two buildings with their residents huddled on the fire escapes and open windows looking down as long-coated police detectives stand around the entrance to the “Italian Café” in Little Italy. The entrance is blocked by the body of man, his legs stretched onto the sidewalk, half hidden from view.

“Girl jumped out of car, and was killed, on Park Ave” (1938)

Consider the most famous of these spectator images, “Their First Murder.” Captured in 1941, the photograph presents a closely framed group of school children pushing and pulling against each other, looking off to the body of Peter Mancuso, gunned down on the sidewalk as he was walking with a newspaper. But we don’t see Peter. We only see the reactions. The faces range from the anguish of the victim’s aunt in the center, to utter glee on the face of a blond boy on the left, to confused concern by two boys in the back. But it’s the girl in the foreground, staring up with knitted brows and projecting a look of concern and contemplation, that unsettles us. Weegee’s photographs often contain someone in the crowd staring back at him — back at us — and reminding us that these photographs are more about the act of looking than the subject we are looking at.

“Their First Murder” was reprinted many times. The exhibition usefully displays its publication in both tabloid press and later in an article in U.S. Camera that noted the photograph was part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Action Photography” exhibition, where curators called it the “greatest news photograph of the last 10 years.” Throughout, the show makes a careful effort to give context to the publication of Weegee’s work, displaying pages from tabloids and offering touch-screen monitors to explore more precisely his works and history. Soundtracks permeate the galleries. Jazz and polka music mix with the sounds of a passing elevated train and the haunting screams of 1940s police sirens. With the recreation of his studio and the touch-screen displays that playfully present history as an interactive effort, the galleries evoke more a natural history exhibition than a photography show. But such elements underscore how much this show wants to draw viewers back to the era, to give context to these images that so often float about in our visual record of mid-century New York.

The heart of the show is a partial recreation of Weegee’s exhibition at the Photo League in 1941. This strange show-within-a show further invites visitors to imagine the experience of Weegee’s work as it was viewed at the time. The Photo League was a small, progressive group dedicated to social documentary photography. Members turned their cameras toward the destitute and working-class of the city, capturing the specific realties of the margins of the city. While Weegee resisted a political position in his photography — he was keener on profits than political ideas — the Photo League directors appreciated the social diversity and working-class hardships in his images. The centerpiece of that 1941 show was a display of murder photographs, framed on large white boards, with drawings of revolvers in the corners, each dripping with red nail polish that Weegee applied for dramatic affect. Elements of blood and wounds in the photos themselves were also highlighted with red nail polish, turning the images from chiaroscuro to an arresting horror evoking more sensation than artistry.

Eventually, the Photo League’s support faded, for Weegee’s work lacked a documentary stance. But these shows secured for him a reputation beyond tabloid journalism and encouraged him to complete Naked City. It was this book that brought his work to a national audience, with positive reviews in major city newspapers. It also marked the end of his work as a crime journalist of the mean streets of New York. He briefly left New York for Hollywood. He experimented with films and photographic effects, but nothing afterNaked City compares to his work as a photojournalist.

Weegee’s appeal today rests in how his images reflect our contemporary notions of photographs as intangible objects of ephemeral moments. Our photographs are mostly public now, dead objects, as Berger would say, that offer a generalized account of life, found on Flickr pages, online profiles, tabloid websites. Weegee’s scenes of murder and mayhem engage us and haunt us because they fit well with our way of looking: a collage of the strange and surreal, photographs where context is often stripped away, leaving us with images that swirl in the stream of hundreds of other images, each a flash of joy or tragedy echoing other, similar images. A belief in a photograph’s uniqueness evokes a kind of sentimental nostalgia when the digital archive of our lives and the lives around us accumulates with rapid speed. Weegee’s images teach us this. I suspect they feel more contemporary to us then they did in the 1930s and ’40s. Like those haunting faces in the crime scene crowds, which beckon us with their stares, our continuing fascination with Weegee’s murders suggests all that has changed in the simple act of looking. • 27 January 2012

James Polchin teaches writing at NYU and is the founder and editor of the site Writing in Public.

All photographs © Weegee/International Center of Photography.

International Conference on Photography of India

Shahidul Alam — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:27:34 +0000

International Conference on Photography of India

Inauguration of Exhibitions – Pradyumna Vyas, Director, National Institute of Design

1700 hrs T S Satyan – Recorder of Life, Beauty and Truth, Aquarium | NID & Tasveer
1730 hrs Travelling Light, Foyer | Maria Kapajeva
1745 hrs ‘+91’ Graduate Students Exhibition, Old Canteen | Richa & Soumyadip

1st February 2012
0900 hrs Registration
0930 hrs Inauguration & opening address | Pradyumna Vyas, Director, NID

1000 hrs Session I Photography and Photography Education

1130 hrs Tea Break
1145 hrs Session II Photography and Photography Education

Sunil Gupta Photographer, Curator | India
David Moore Central Saint Martin College of Art& Design | UK
Peter Sramek Ontario College of Art & Design University | Canada
Deepak John Mathew National Institute of Design Ahmedabad

1300 hrs Lunch Break
1400 hrs Session III Connecting the World – Collaborative Projects and Exchanges

Lucida Photographer’s Collective | India
Maria, Peter & Chinar Collaborative Project | India, UK, Canada, Brazil
& Finland
Andrew Bruce & Shilpa Gavane Academic Exchange | NID-UCA
Nayantara Photo Circle | Nepal
Maniyarasan R & Rahul SR History of Indian Photography | NID

1530 hrs Tea Break

1545 hrs Session IV Photography and Practice

2nd February, 2012
0930 hrs Session V Photography and Research

Esa Epstein Sepia Eye | USA
Sabeena Gadihoke Researcher, Jamia University | India
Anusha Yadav Photographer, Researcher | India
Johny ML Art Critic, Curator & Writer | India

1100 hrs Tea Break
1115 hrs Session VI Photography and Dissemination

Abhishek Poddar Gallerist | India
Aditya Arya Photographer, Researcher | India
Radhika Singh Gallerist | India
Prasant Panjiar Photojournalist | India

1300 hrs Lunch Break
1430 hrs City of Photos/Three Women and a Camera (Documentary @ Auditorium)

Inside Out III (Closed session at Board Room exclusively for delegates)
1400 hrs Photography Education in India, UK and USA- Perspectives

1700 hrs Tea Break
1715 hrs Concluding Session (Auditorium)

Speakers Profile

Nayland Blake
Nayland Blake is an artist whose mixed-media work has been variously described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender. Among his most famous pieces are a log cabin made of gingerbread squares fitted to a steel frame entitled Feeder 2 (1998). When it went on display at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, visitors furtively nibbled off bits and pieces of the cabin’s interior walls, while the smell of the gingerbread filled the gallery.Another well-known work is Starting Over (2000), a video of the artist dancing with taps on his shoes in a bunny suit made to weigh the same as his lover, Philip Horvitz. The suit was so heavy that Blake could hardly move as he took choreographic directions from Horvitz offstage.Gorge (1998) is a video of the artist sitting shirtless being hand fed an enormous amount of food for an hour by a shirtless black man from behind. In 2009, a live version of Gorge was staged in which audience members fed Blake.

Dr. Deepak John Mathew
A design teacher and a practicing photographer lives and works in India. Deepak John Mathew is teaching at the National Institute of Design (NID). He has an experience spanning over 20 years in professional photography, painting and graphics.He holds a master’s degree in Fine Arts (Graphic Arts) from the M.S. University, Vadodara and has a PhD in Design Education from the Center for Advanced Studies in Education, M.S. University, Vadodara. He has been instrumental in designing and developing the dual postgraduate program in Photography Design. He also set up the Photography Design discipline and started an International Postgraduate Certificate Program in Photography at the institute in collaboration with University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. Deepak has curated a number of exhibitions at NID, including those featuring the works of famed photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Anne Maniglier, and Raghu Rai. He has received many awards including the Commonwealth Fellowship for Photography (2011) and exhibited his works at many international and national exhibitions and has authored several papers. He has written a book called, Principles of Design through Photography. He has also been contributing to various NID publications. He has been invited as visiting faculty, lecturer, external evaluator, mentor, and advisor to various universities and institutes all over the world. Besides photography, Deepak’s interests include history of art, color&form, and illustration.

Sunil Gupta
Born in New Delhi, and growing up watching Bollywood films in all their glorious colour, Sunil Gupta moved to Montreal with his family in the late 1960s, where his interest in photography began to develop. From the mid-1970s he lived in New York, where he studied photography at the New School for Social Research under Lisette Model. At the end of the 1970s, he moved to London to continue his studies at the West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham, and the Royal College of Art, London. He was involved in the founding of Autograph (Association of Black Photographers) in London, and he also set up the Organization for Visual Arts (OVA) to promote a greater understanding of questions regarding cultural differences and their incorporation into the sphere of fine art. He works as a photographer, writer and curator out of London and Delhi

Sabeena Gadihoke

Sabeena Gadihoke is Associate Professor of Video and Television Production at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia University in New Delhi and is also an independent documentary filmmaker and cameraperson. Her book Camera Chronicles on India’s first woman press photographer, Homai Vyarawalla was published in 2006. She is currently working on her dissertation on a cultural history of photography in India during 1945-1970.

Radhika Singh
When Radhika Singh set up Fotomedia in 1988, it was the first photo-library in Delhi to store, promote and market photographs. Radhika Singh had no experience in running her own enterprise. What she did have were three degrees — a B.A. in English, an M.A. in Social Work, an M.Phil in Sociology — and stints in modelling and theatre.She has an M.Phil in Sociology, been a model, is active in theatre, has dabbled in social work and is a successful entrepreneur. But for someone with her range of interests, Radhika Singh is a remarkably focussed woman. In less than 10 years, 42-year-old Singh has taken her outfit, Fotomedia, from an oddball little venture to a still-unusual, but profit-making, enterprise.

Neeta Madahar
Neeta Madahar received her MFA from the Museum School at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2003. As a British citizen of Indian descent who has lived and worked in the U.S., Madahar constantly refers to themes of migration and transition throughout her work. Madahar’s thesis project entitled Sustenance gained immediate interest and was shown at the Arles Festival curated by Martin Parr in 2005, followed by shows in Boston, London, and Germany. In this project, Madahar examines the complexities of the domestic environment through her exploration of the various bird species that gather to feed at her home in Framingham, Massachusetts. Using a large-format camera, Madahar juxtaposes contrasting ideas of familiarity and strangeness, belonging and migration, and prolonged routine and repetition.

Karen Knorr

Karen Knorr, an American was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and was raised in San Juan Puerto Rico in the 1960s. She finished her education in Paris and London graduating from the University of Westminster in 1980 with a first in Photography and Filmic Art. Karen has taught, and lectured internationally including The Sorbonne,Paris, Goldsmiths College, London,Harvard University and The Art Institute of Chicago in the U.S.After graduating from the University of Westminster in the mid 1970’s, Knorr exhibited photography that addressed debates in cultural studies and film theory concerning the “politics of representation” practices which emerged during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Karen Knorr is currently Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham, Surrey and lives in London.

Anna Fox
Anna Fox first gained attention for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher’s Britain, originally commissioned by Camerawork and The Museum of London. She is best known for Zwarte Piet (1993-8), a series of twenty portraits taken over a five-year period that explore Dutch ‘black-face’ folk traditions associated with Christmas. The images of costumed revellers, posed in the manner reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture, have been widely exhibited internationally. Other projects have included The Village (1992), a multi-media collaboration with the writer Val Williams, examining the experiences of rural women, Country Girls, a collaboration with singer/songwriter Alison Goldfrapp portraying a fairytale nightmare vision of life in the country for young women, and Friendly Fire, which records the leisure activity of paint-balling in the manner of war reportage. More recent publications include Cockroach Diary and My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (2000), which deal with autobiographical narratives and were designed as miniature, limited edition books. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and she is now Professor of Photography at the University College of the Creative Arts, Farnham and has been part of the UCA team who have worked with Dr Deepak John Mathew to develop the PG Diploma in Photography Design at NID.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew
Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is Professor of Art (Photography) at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, Rhode Island. Matthew’s recent exhibitions include Sepia International, New York City, the RISD Museum, Newark Art Museum, Newark, NJ, 2009 Guangzhou Biennial of Photography, China, 2006 Noorderlicht Photo Festival in Netherlands and the 2005 Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal Photo Biennale in Canada.Among the list of grants recently supporting Matthew‘s work include the John Gutmann Fellowship, MacColl Johnson Fellowship, Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Fellowship and the American Institute of Indian Studies Creative Arts fellowship. Her work can be found in the collection of the George Eastman House, Fogg Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Center for Creative Photography and the RISD Museum among others. Matthew’s work is included in the book BLINK from Phaidon, that according to the publisher celebrates the quality and vision of today’s 100 most exciting international contemporary photographers and the upcoming books The Digital Eye by Sylvia Wolf and Self-Portraits by Susan Bright.

Pablo Bartholomew

Pablo Bartholomew is an independent photographer based in New Delhi, India Represented by Gamma Liaison for over 20 years, he worked as a photojournalist recording societies in conflict and transition. His works have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Business Week, National Geographic and GEO, amongst other prestigious magazines and journals. Pablo Bartholomew at the age of 19 won the World Press Photo award for his series on Morphine Addicts in India (1975) and the World Press Photo of the Year for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy(1984).

David Moore
Based in London, David Moore has been a practicing photographer since 1989 after graduating from West Surrey College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including group shows in 2010 at the Thessaloniki Photo-Biennale and Les Photaumnales in Beauvais, France. The Last Things, a publication and touring solo exhibition, travelled to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Belfast Exposed, Impressions Gallery Bradford and UH Galleries, Hertfordshire, 2008-09. Moore’s work is held in public and private collections including Nuffield College Collection, Oxford University; the Ranstad Collection, The Netherlands; and, the Ministry of Defence Art Collection, London. David Moore is currently Senior Photography Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College, London.

Abhishek Poddar

Abhishek Poddar is the director of Bangalore based gallery, Tasveer. Dedicated to promoting and showcasing photography in all its forms, Tasveer has created a network of galleries between Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Since its inaugural show in October 2006, over 100 exhibitions have been held and the also gallery organizes lectures, workshops and other educational activities, both in India and abroad.
Nandini Valli

Born in 1976, Nandini Valli was raised in Chennai, India where she continues to live. She completed several degrees before entering the field of photography. After an 18 month apprenticeship with a leading commercial photographer in Chennai, Nandini decided to pursue a B.A Honours in Photography from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, UK (now known as the Arts University College Bournemouth). This is where she realized she was more suited to producing art photography as opposed to commercial photography.

Anusha Yadav

Anusha S. Yadav, born in London, is a Mumbai based Urban Documentary Photographer. She was bought up London and later in Jaipur, Rajasthan India. She graduated in Communication Design from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 1997. Anusha’s interest in photography began while still at design school. Subsequently, she attended University of Brighton to study photography for a semester.After thirteen years of a successful career in graphic design and advertising, Anusha began working as an independent editorial and documentary photographer in 2006 in India. Since then she has photographed several well known personalities and significant events all over the country.

Johny ML

Johny ML is a Delhi based art critic and curator. With twenty years of experience, JohnyML has done several national and international art projects successfully. Founding editor of www.mattersofart.com and www.artconcerns.com, JohnyML has initiated and executed projects like Finding a Lost Culture and Tradition (FALCAT 2009), Vibrant Gujarat (2009), Video Wednesdays@Gallery Espace (2009), Expressions at Tihar (2009). He has curated several shows and directed documentaries on contemporary artists.

Prasant Panjiar

Prashant Panjiar is a self-taught photographer. A post-graduate in Political Science from Pune University, India, he worked on photographic projects focusing on peasant movements and other social issues through his college and university days. His first self-financed project that received acclaim was his work for a book on banditry in the Chambal region of Central India. As one of India’s senior photojournalists and picture editors, Panjiar is actively involved in guiding young photographers. He is one of the three senior photographers who select and mentor young documentary photographers for National Foundation of India’s fellowship programme. Panjiar served on the jury of the World Press Photo Awards in Amsterdam in 2002, the China International Press Photo Competition in 2005 and the Indian Express Press Photo Awards.

Shahidul Alam

A photographer, writer, curator and activist, Shahidul Alam obtained a PhD in chemistry at London University before switching to photography. He returned to his hometown Dhaka in 1984, where he photographed the democratic struggle to remove General Ershad. A former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the award winning Drik agency, the Bangladesh Photographic Institute and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, considered one of the finest schools of photography in the world. Director of the Chobi Mela festival and chairman of Majority World agency, Alam’s work has been exhibited in galleries such as MOMA in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Albert Hall in London and The Museum of Contemporary Arts in Tehran. He has been a jury member in prestigious international contests, including World Press Photo, which he chaired. An Honorary Fellow of the Bangladesh Photographic Society and the Royal Photographic Society Alam is a visiting professor of Sunderland University in the UK. He recently set up a media academy in Bangladesh.

Vivek Vilasini

Born in 1964, in Trishur, Kerala, Vivek Vilasini trained as a Marine Radio Officer at the All India Marine College in Kochi, and then obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Kerala University in 1987 before turning to art and studying sculpture from traditional Indian craftspeople. Vilasini’s work has been exhibited in several solo shows including several editions of ‘Between One Shore and Several Others’ at Birds Gallery, Trivandrum, Arushi Arts, New Delhi, Sumukha Gallery, Bangalore, and the Visual Arts Gallery, ‘In Focus: Contemporary Indian Photography’ at Crimson – The Art Resource, Bangalore, in 2009; ‘Re-Claim/ Re-Cite/ Re-Cycle’ presented by Latitude 28 at Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2009; ‘Metamorphosis: Change and Continuity in Indian Contemporary Art’ at PAC Gallery, Phyllis Weston-Annie Bolling Gallery and the Krohn Conservatory, Cincinnati, in 2009; ‘Bapu’ at Saffronart, Mumbai, in 2009; and ‘Who Knew Mr. Gandhi?’ at Aicon Gallery, London, in 2008. The artist lives and works in Bangalore.

Peter Sramek

Peter Sramek studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Minor White and has taught at the Ontario College of Art & Design University in Toronto since 1976, currently serving as Chair of Photography. In 1978, he became a founding member of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centres. His work incorporates silver photography, digital imaging, handmade books and video installation. Represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery, he is included in collections such as the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Library of Canada, Musée Carnavalet (Paris), MOMA (NYC), Art Gallery of Hamilton, Toronto Archives and Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Recent solo exhibitions include the French Institute of Prague and Gallery 345 (Toronto). Sramek’s black and white silver photography currently explores European historical sites and incorporates rephotographic strategies, working from historical archives. His handbound artist’s books are in various collections, notably the National Library of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is currently recipient of a Google Research Award to develop an online/mobile presentation of his rephotographs of Paris street views made after photographs by Charles Marville between 1865 and 1877.

Magi Viljanen

Artist and photographer Magi Viljanen has created a long and respective career as an art and commercial photographer. Her photography original and stand out from the mainstream in a refreshing way. As a photographer Viljanen is unprejudiced and has chosen challenging themes many times during her career. Bravely she has tried different methods and materials in her works. “I think art is meant to move something in a person, and at its best art affects those things that people may have become numb to. I don’t see myself as a subjective artist but as a part of something common, and that is way I work. I am a documentary photographer and I think that art that makes a statement is important.” The work of Magi Viljanen is easy to approach and touching in its way to show the truth and representation of life. All the viewers can integrate with some aspect in her pictures. Her works brings the reality of others in front of us allowing us to see true stories from this world.

Lucida

Lucida is an independent photographers’ collective based out of New Delhi. It aims to develop and support a range of independent and critical photographic practices that focus on research and education. Lucida endeavors to influence photographic thinking through a design oriented approach in photography services.

Esa Epstein

Esa Epstein established sepia EYE in September 2009 which is dedicated to showing a spectrum of modern and contemporary photography and video work from Asia., During her tenure as the Executive Director and Curator of SEPIA International and The Alkazi Collection (1995-2009), Esa Epstein has published eight titles on modern and contemporary photography including: Atul Bhalla: Yamuna Walk (sepiaEYE & UW Press, 2011), Jungjin Lee: Wind, essays by Eugenia Parry and Vicki Goldberg (Aperture/SEPIA, 2009); Ketaki Sheth: Bombay Mix, preface by Suketu Mehta (Dewi Lewis/SEPIA, 2007); and Vivan Sundaram: Re-take of Amrita, essays by Vivan Sundaram and Wu Hung (SEPIA, 2006). In her former position, Esa Epstein has helped build an impressive collection of Indian photography and, along the way, has offered her expertise to both private and public collections. Esa Epstein continues to offer institutional planning and arts management through sepia EYE.

Maniyarasan R

He is a freelance professional photographer with a Bachelors degree in Architecture from the SPA New Delhi, and a Masters in Photography Design from NID Ahmedabad, where he worked as an Associate Faculty after his post graduation. He strongly believes that every challenge presents itself with a bundle of opportunities, if only we have the creativity, innovation and an eye for detail. His main interest apart from architectural and heritage documentation lies in capturing the essence of pure human emotions, and the sanctity and joy of weddings- moments that bind people together. Through his visual documentation, he has been on a constant endeavour to capture the context of ‘life’ in relationship to time, space and emotions. Besides, he was nominated as the ‘Wedding photographer of the year’ for two consecutive years, conducted by Better Photography and Kodak for the years 2010 and 2011.

Rahul S Ravi

Rahul S Ravi completed his Master’s in Photography Design from the National Institute of Design (NID), which is internationally acclaimed as one of the foremost multi-disciplinary institutions in the field of design education and research. A literature graduate and a graphic designer by profession, he was a passionate practicing photographer before joining the course at NID. A humanist eye drives his photography and his documentation has a conceptual approach to it. His photographic projects try to bring in focus socio-cultural issues that have been at times overlooked by the mass media. These very qualities in his work “Indian Jewish identity” made him the Second Indian to win the prestigious Tierney fellowship. He is currently working as a Teaching Associate in Photography Design at National Institute of Design (NID) Ahmedabad.

Maria Kapajeva

First time Maria visited India as an exchange student coming to NID and returned later as a visiting lecturer and coordinator. Together with her personal project about Indian young women, Maria will present the results of two collaborative international projects such as Collective Body and Travelling Light show. Maria Kapajeva is Estonian photographer based in the UK who works for Photography course of University for the Creative Arts (Farnham, UK) and at the same time studies at University of Westminster (MA Photographic Studies course).

NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati

NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati graduated from Mt Holyoke College, Massachusetts with a degree in International Relations and Studio Art. She went on to the SALT Institute of Documentary Studies, Portland, ME to study Documentary Photography.

NayanTara came back home to Nepal in 2006 and began working as a freelance photographer and multimedia producer. Her work focuses on intimately documenting her country- ‘the New Nepal’- and its dynamic transformation from the world’s last Hindu monarchy to a new democratic republic.

In 2007, NayanTara co founded photo.circle; a photography collective that has created a platform for emerging and professional photographers in Nepal.

Upcoming photo contests and residencies

Shahidul Alam — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:04:29 +0000

Dear friends of photographyONLY ONE WEEK LEFT

DANISH DIGITAL 2012 will close for registration of entries on 4 February.

DANISH DIGITAL 2012 is an international salon of photography organanised by Fotoklubben Negativ, Roskilde, Denmark, under patronage of FIAP (2012/007) and under PSA recognition. Further, DANISH DIGITAL 2012 is recognised by Society of Danish Photography and by United Photographers International (UPI).

There are three sections – monochrome, colour and nature.Altogether there are 75 prizes to be won! For full conditions of entry and for entering DANISH DIGITAL 2012, please visit www.danishdigital.dk.

Looking forward to receiving your entries.

Best regards

Exhibition Committee

DANISH DIGITAL 2012

OPPORTUNITY

Culture Lab & ISIS Arts Residency Programme

Call for Applications

Deadline: 17.02.2012

Culture Lab and ISIS Arts are excited to be launching their second joint, open call for a Resident in 2012. Proposals are invited from practitioners and researchers from across the spectrum of creative art, design and technology to undertake research in Culture Lab for a minimum of 3 weeks between 1 April – 14 December 2012.

Nortd, Lasersaur, (Culture Lab and ISIS Arts residency artists 2011)

An interest in one of the following topics is desirable but applications are also invited from candidates with other interests:

- Data Visualisation / Interactive Visualisation

- New Ways of Interaction and Communication

- Audiovisual and Sound Interfaces/ Biofeedback Applications

- Digital Fabrication

- Social, Cultural and Ethical Practice of Emerging Technologies

You would have use of Culture Lab’s research facilities and equipment, a fee of £2500 (to include travel, accommodation and materials).

Based at Newcastle University, Culture Lab http://culturelab.ncl.ac.uk, is:

- A centre for creative inquiry in the broadest sense of the term

- A world class research facility for experimentation in interactive media

- A university resource to incubate and facilitate interdisciplinary activity

- A leader in the region’s cultural ecology, providing knowledge for a digital society.

Based in Newcastle City Centre, ISIS Arts is an artist led, visual and media arts organisation, which runs an international programme of commissions, residencies and events. ISIS Arts’ core ethos is to support artists to facilitate international and inter-cultural exchange and to engage as wide an audience as possible in dialogue with artists and artworks. Actively seeking out and engaging with artists of all backgrounds and cultures to produce work that explores identity and challenges prejudice, creating projects of international relevance and local significance.

What we will provide:

- Access to Culture Lab’s highly sought after research facilities which range from an 8-camera motion capture system to a professional standard recording studio and Digital Fabrication Lab. Access to ISIS

Arts studio spaces for visiting artists

- Integration into Culture Lab’s community of research staff and students, and ISIS Art’s regional community of artists and practitioners

- A budget of up to £2500 to offset costs of production, living expenses, travel and accommodation

How To Apply

Please submit, via email, to Sarah Greenhalgh (Sarah.Greenhalgh@newcastle.ac.uk) the following:

- A project proposal (up to 2-sides of A4), detailing residency activities and proposed work plan for minimum 3-week period (which can be consecutive or non-consecutive weeks). Include in this document how the residency will further the artistic/research direction you have proposed, as well as a description of a proposed format for public presentation at the end of the residency.

- A budget detailing your proposed use of up to £2500 residency grant.

- Work sample, submitted via a link to a website (Please do not submit attachments via email).

- The dates you would prefer to undertake the residency.

- A curriculum vitae, outlining recent work, exhibition, performance and research activities.

For full details about this opportunity and how to apply please visit the ISIS Arts website: http://www.isisarts.org.uk/opportunities

Dear All and one!

Google+ is only a few months old, but the photography community is already thriving on it. More than 3.4 billion photos have been uploaded to the platform in the first 100 days from far-away places to up-close faces. Seven days left for Google Photography Prize submissions!

Some great prizes to be won:

10 finalists chosen by a jury of renowned photographers will show their work at Saatchi Gallery, London for two months in 2012.

Categories: Me; Food; Travel; Fashion; Action; Street; Sport; Night; Sound/Silence; Point-of-view

How to submit photos?

1. Submit your photos to Google+

2. Fill out the submission form at: http://www.google.com/landing/photographyprize/submission.html

Wish you best of luck!

Abdullah Al Razwan (Nabin)
Programme Coordinator
Pathshala South Asian Media Academy

The $15,000 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture.
Adobe presents the Breakthrough Photography Award to celebrate artists creating compelling works through digital imaging. An award of $1,000 prize and Adobe® Creative Suite® 5.5 Master Collection will be given to the winner.
The Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund cash award to one professional and one student winner.
The Sony Emerging Photographer Award to one emerging photographer who will receive a Sony camera and a $1,000 cash prize.
Ten winners will receive a Nielsen Photo Group membership which includes; subscriptions to PDN and Rangefi nder magazines, a PDN PhotoPlus Expo Gold Expo Pass, a PhotoServe portfolio and discounts on WPPI and PDN contests.
PDN Editor’s Choice Award: one winner will receive a full-page self promotion ad in an upcoming issue of PDN.

Win for Jashim Salam

Shahidul Alam — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:24:48 +0000

Jashim Salam wins Honourable Mention at FCCT Photo Contest:

A boy crossing water in an inudated road during a heavy tidal surge in Chittagong,Bangladesh. Photo Jashim Salam

Jashim Salam is a Chittagong, Bangladesh-based photographer working for DrikNEWS, an international news photo agency, since 2008. He is also studying photojournalism in The South Asian Media Academy and Institute of Photography. His work focuses on social documentary such as profiles of migrant workers, handicapped people, and climate-change refugees. His work has been published in The Sunday Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Better Photography, CNN, Photojournale, National Geographic online, Reuters, and many others. He is the recipient of many awards including the Jury Special Award in the 6th Humanity Photo Awards.

Clever Conceptual Photo Manipulations That Tell a Story

Shahidul Alam — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 05:38:37 +0000

By Sonali Vora

Editor’s note: Storytellers have always been inventive people. While evangelists fight over whether original pixels are intact in a modern photograph, it is worth looking at how people have embraced the new technology to create compelling images that amuse, provoke and occasionally push us into action.

35 Magnum Photographers Give Their Advice to Aspiring Photographers

Shahidul Alam — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:53:42 +0000

35 Magnum Photographers Give Their Advice to Aspiring Photographers

by ERIC KIM on SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

Bill Reeves, a passionate photographer who is fortunate enough to have Magnum photographers Eli Reed and Paolo Pellegrin as his mentors, told me about a blog post that Magnum had a while back regarding advice to young photographers. It was put together by Alec Soth, who has done a series of fascinating projects such as his most popular, “Sleeping by the Missisippi” which was done on a 8×10 view camera. An interesting excerpt that Bill put together about Alec is below:

Alec writes up lists of things to shoot. Some normal objects, like suitcases, and others more weird, like unusually tall people. He would tape this list to his steering wheel, and be reminded to shoot those things when he saw them. When he found someone to shoot, he would talk to them, and from that conversation find the next thing to go looking for. An example is he did a portrait of a guy who built model airplanes, and then a portrait of a hooker. The link? She had airplanes painted on her nails. He then went to photograph Charles Lindberg’s childhood home, which led him to photograph Johnny Cash’s boyhood home and so on and so forth.

I found the advice that these Magnum photographers is golden–and have shared it here to spread the love and knowledge. Keep reading to see their inspirational images and advice. You can also download the free PDF here.

Abbas

It was many years ago that I took two young Bangladeshi photographers. Mahmud and Shehzad Noorani to the offices of Magnum in Paris. Abbas was then chairman of Magnum. I remember how generous he had been, walking us round every nook and cranny of the office, telling stories that lay behind the great images. It had a lasting impact on the youngsters who have both gone on to become fine photographers. Abbas has since visited Pathshala numerous times. Asked what advice would you give young photographers, he provides an answer typical of the man:

Get a good pair of walking shoes and…fall in love

» Abbas’ Magnum Portfolio

Alec Soth

What advice would you give young photographers?
Try everything. Photojournalism, fashion, portraiture, nudes, whatever. You won’t know what kind of photographer you are until you try it. During one summer vacation (in college) I worked for a born-again tabletop photographer. All day long we’d photograph socks and listen to Christian radio. That summer I learned I was neither a studio photographer nor a born-again Christian. Another year I worked for a small suburban newspaper chain and was surprised to learn that I enjoyed assignment photography. Fun is important. You should like the process and the subject. If you are bored or unhappy with your subject it will show up in the pictures. If in your heart of hearts you want to take pictures of kitties, take pictures of kitties.

» Alec Soth’s Magnum Portfolio

Alex Majoli

What advice would you give young photographers?
I would advise to read a lot of literature and look as little as possible other photographers. Work everyday even without assignments or money, work, work, work with discipline for yourself and not for editors or awards. And also collaborate with people not necessary photographers but people you admire. The key word to learn is participation!

» Alex Majoli’s Magnum Portfolio

Alex Webb

What advice would you give young photographers?
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards — recognition, financial remuneration — come to so few and are so fleeting. And even if you are somewhat successful, there will almost inevitably be stretches of time when you will be ignored, have little income, or — often — both. Certainly there are many other easier ways to make a living in this society. Take photography on as a passion, not a career.

» Alex Webb’s Magnum Portfolio

Alessandra Sanguinetti

What advice would you give young photographers?
I could use some good advice myself…but first thing that springs to mind is Bob Dylan’s’: “keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.”

» Alessandra Sanguinetti’s Magnum Portfolio

Bruce Gilden

What advice would you give young photographers?
My advice: “Photograph who you are!”

» Bruce Gilden’s Magnum Portfolio

Carl De Keyzer

What advice would you give young photographers?
Give it all you got for at least 5 years and then decide if you got what it takes. Too many great talents give up at the very beginning; the great black hole looming after the comfortable academy or university years is the number one killer of future talent.

» Carl De Keyzer’s Magnum Portfolio

Christopher Anderson

What advice would you give young photographers?
Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after. Don’t be in a rush to make pay your rent with your camera. Jimi Hendrix didn’t decide on the career of professional musician before he learned to play guitar. No, he loved music and and created something beautiful and that THEN became a profession. Larry Towell, for instance, was not a “professional” photographer until he was already a “famous” photographer. Make the pictures you feel compelled to make and perhaps that will lead to a career. But if you try to make the career first, you will just make shitty pictures that you don’t care about.

» Christopher Anderson’s Magnum Portfolio

Chris Steele-Perkins

What advice would you give young photographers?
1) Never think photography is easy. It’s like poetry in that it’s easy enough to make a few rhymes, but that’s not a good poem.
2) Study photography, see what people have achieved, but learn from it, don’t try photographically to be one of those people
3) Photograph things you really care about, things that really interest you, not things you feel you ought to do.
4) Photograph them in the way you feel is right, not they way you think you ought to
5) Be open to criticism, it can be really helpful, but stick to you core values
6) Study and theory is useful but you learn most by doing. Take photographs, lots of them, be depressed by them, take more, hone your skills and get out there in the world and interact.

» Chris Steele-Perkins’ Magnum Portfolio

Constantine Manos

What advice would you give young photographers?
Try not to take pictures, which simply show what something looks like. By the way you put the elements of an image together in a frame show us something we have never seen before and will never see again. And remember that catching a moment makes the image even more unique in the stream of time. Also, try to do workshops with photographers whose work you admire, but first ask around to make sure they are good teachers as well as good photographers. Taking good pictures is easy. Making very good pictures is difficult. Making great pictures is almost impossible.

» Constantine Manos’ Magnum Portfolio

David Alan Harvey

What advice would you give young photographers?
You must have something to “say”. You must be brutally honest with yourself about this. Think about history , politics, science, literature, music, film, and anthropology. What affects does one discipline have over another? What makes “man” tick? Today , with everyone being able to easily make technically perfect photographs with a cell phone, you need to be an “author”. It is all about authorship, authorship and authorship. Many young photographers come to me and tell me their motivation for being a photographer is to “travel the world” or to “make a name” for themselves. Wrong answers in my opinion. Those are collateral incidentals or perhaps even the disadvantages of being a photographer. Without having tangible ideas , thoughts, feelings, and something almost “literary” to contribute to “the discussion”, today’s photographer will become lost in the sea of mediocrity. Photography is now clearly a language. As with any language, knowing how to spell and write a gramatically correct “sentence” is , of course, necessary. But, more importantly, today’s emerging photographers now must be “visual wordsmiths” with either a clear didactic or an esoteric imperitive. Be a poet, not a technical “writer”. Perhaps more simply put, find a heartfelt personal project. Give yourself the “assignment” you might dream someone would give you. Please remember, you and only you will control your destiny. Believe it, know it, say it.

» David Alan Harvey’s Magnum Portfolio

Donovan Wylie

What advice would you give young photographers?
Never stop enjoying it. Try and not “look” for pictures but keep yourself always open and allow yourself to be stimulated by whatever hits you. Work towards a goal…book, exhibition… but more importantly work towards finding your own voice, your subject and your application. Accept that your work is more about you than what you represent, try to bridge that balance, without resorting to photographing your feet! In other words try and translate personal experience into a collective one, it is very possible and I think the key quest of any art form…(study the book “Waffenruhe” by Michael Schmidt) – study all the great photographers and love doing it, start at the beginning, look at early American, and German, then French, then take a close look at artists using photography in the sixties, Rusha etc. Don’t get bogged down in theory, but respect it, read Robert Adams on Photography, in fact embrace Robert Adams generally and you will learn a lot. Read literature, especially early Russian, French and modern American, (and Irish, Joyce), the journey literature has taken as an art form in terms of description and representation is very similar to photography. Don’t rely on style for the sake of it, if you have your own subject, you can adopt other peoples styles if it helps, and visa versa, if you photograph something every one has, then adopt an style, execution, that can only be yours, eventually you will achieve both, your own voice will come through, but it can take time. Study the book ‘How You Look at It’…Important essays there will help you. Always try and be honest with yourself… for example, is the idea of being a photographer more exciting to you than photography itself, if this is true think about becoming an actor…………………..if you genuinely love photography don’t give it up. Understand and enjoy the fact that photography is a unique medium. Respect and work within photography’s limitations, you will go much further.

» Donovan Wylie’s Magnum Portfolio

David Hurn

What advice would you give young photographers?
Don’t become a photographer unless its what you ‘have’ to do. It can’t be the easy option. If you become a photographer you will do a lot of walking so buy good shoes.

» David Hurn’s Magnum Portfolio

Dennis Stock

What advice would you give young photographers?
Young photographers should learn their craft well and don’t expect to make a constant living at taking pictures. But they should FOLLOW THEIR BLISS. Find time to pursue themes that indicate their concerns, big and small. Above all when shooting, MAKE AN ARTICULATE IMAGE.

» Dennis Stock’s Magnum Portfolio

Eli Reed

What advice would you give young photographers?
Stop talking theory when a camera is in their your and do not over-think the image. Lose the ego and let the photograph find you. Observe the life moving like a river around you and realize that the images you make may become part of the collective history of the time that you are living in.

» Eli Reed’s Magnum Portfolio

Elliott Erwitt

What advice would you give young photographers?
Learn the craft (which is not very hard). Carefully study past work of photographers and classic painters. Look and learn from movies. See where you can fit in as a “commercial” photographer. Commercial: meaning working for others and delivering a product on command. But most of all keep your personal photography as your separate hobby. If you are very good and diligent it just may pay off.

» Elliott Erwitt’s Magnum Portfolio

Lise Sarfati

What advice would you give young photographers?
Read a lot and create your own universe. Learn how to construct and create a series. Do not be impressed by other works. Try to innovate or simply to be yourself.

» Lise Sarfati’s Magnum Portfolio

Martine Franck

What advice would you give young photographers?
My advice to photographers is to get out there in the field and take photographs but also if they are students to finish their course, learn as many languages as possible, go to movies, read books visit museums, broaden your mind.

» Martine Frank’s Magnum Portfolio

Harry Gruyaert

What advice would you give young photographers?
Be yourself, Don’t copy anybody.

» Harry Gruyaert’s Magnum Portfolio

Hiroji Kubota

What advice would you give young photographers?
Study the works of the greatest photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz. Try to travel to many parts of the world and understand what a diverse world we live in.

» Hiroji Kubota’s Magnum Portfolio

John Vink

What advice would you give young photographers?
Don’t stop questioning yourself (it’ll make you less arrogant). Push. Push, scratch, dig… Push further… And stop when you don’t enjoy it anymore… But most of all respect those you photograph…

» John Vink’s Magnum Portfolio

Jonas Bendiksen

What advice would you give young photographers?

Throw yourself off a cliff. Figuratively speaking, I mean. Photography is a language. Think about what you want to use it to talk about. What are you interested in? What questions do you want to ask? Then, go for it, and throw yourself into talking about that topic, using photography. Make a body of work about that.

» Jonas Bendiksen’s Magnum Portfolio

Larry Towell

What advice would you give young photographers?
Be yourself and look outside of yourself.

» Larry Towell’s Magnum Portfolio

Mark Power

What advice would you give young photographers?
Although there are far more people trying to ‘be photographers’ than there were in those heady days of 1980, there are also far more opportunities. Gone are the days, thankfully, when a commercial assignment, or even a picture in a newspaper, can damage the chance of gallery representation.

Yet what is clear is that a number of ‘good pictures’ are no longer enough; today it has to be about ideas, and about the intent of the work. If you have something to say, and even better you have an innovative way of saying it then opportunities are out there.

I sense that photography is concerning itself with real issues again. For some time much of photography seemed to be about itself, and while this was fine, and interesting in some cases, it’s not what photography is really good at. Understand this by familiarising yourself with the rich and wonderful history of our medium. Be proud of it, what it has, and what it can, achieve. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. Be inspired. Try and copy, if you like (because no one can).

Find a subject you care about. Something that moves you. Something which stirs your rawest emotions. And then have patience.

» Mark Power’s Magnum Portfolio

Martin Parr

What advice would you give young photographers?

Find something you are passionate about, and shoot your way through this obsession with elegance and you will have potential great project.

» Martin Parr’s Magnum Portfolio

Mikhael Subotzky

What advice would you give young photographers?
Stick to one project for a long time. And keep working on it through many stages of learning, even if it might feel finished. Its the only way to break through what I think are some vital lessons that need to be learnt about story-telling and how to combine images.

» Mikhael Subotzky’s Magnum Portfolio

Olivia Arthur

What advice would you give young photographers?
My main piece of advice for young photographers who have just come out of college is to get away from the ‘hubs’ of photography like London and New York. There are so many photographers touting their portfolios round in places like this that people end up fighting to do jobs that are not what they really want, just to make ends meet. It’s the kind of environment that doesn’t fuel anyone’s creativity (well mostly anyway…). My advice: go out and do the things they really want to before getting tied in…if they don’t take the risk at the beginning they’ll find it much harder to come back and take it later on.

» Olivia Arthur’s Magnum Portfolio

Paolo Pellegrin

What advice would you give young photographers?

I believe photography – like many other things one does in life – is the exact expression of who one is at a given moment: every time you compose and release the shutter you give voice to your thoughts and opinions of the world around you. So other than the obvious patience (photography is a complex medium, a voice which requires time to develop) and perseverance and the necessary humility when dealing with others, I would recommend working to become a more developed and informed individual, a more knowledgeable and engaged citizen. This will translate into a deeper more complex understanding of the world around you, and ultimately into a richer and more meaningful photography.

» Paolo Pellegrin’s Magnum Portfolio

Patrick Zachmann

What advice would you give young photographers?
You have to fight for beeing a photographer! More seriously, my advice for young poeple is to go to exhibitions, to see books and try to do a personal project which they feel they have a unique approach of it because they are close the subject and need to express and understand urgently things about it.
Photography has something to do for me, like with Diane Arbus, with oneself through the others and with unconsciousness (sorry for my English: I mean “l’inconscient”) a psychoanalytic approach. I will answer to a third question because it’s linked with above: why did you become a photographer? I became a photographer because I don’t have memory. It took me quite a long time to understand that trough my personal researches (“Inquest of identity or a Jew in search of his memory”, “Chile. The roads of the memory”, “My father’s memory,” etc…), I was looking for the “missing” pictures. Making my book “Inquest of identity”, I found out that my aunt-my father’s sister who was a Nazi camp survivor- had at her home a picture of my grand-parents deported and killed in Auschwitz that my father never showed to us. Thanks photography, I met my father’s parents that I never knew. That’s what I like with photography. It helps me to understand myself and the past through the present.

» Patrick Zachmann’s Magnum Portfolio

Peter Marlow

What advice would you give young photographers?
Be yourself, get up early, and don’t try too hard, as whatever is trying to come out will come eventually without any effort, learn to trust your instincts and don’t think about what others will think or about the process too much. Work hard but enjoy it.

» Peter Marlow’s Magnum Portfolio

Steve McCurry

What advice would you give young photographers?
If you want to be a photographer, you have to photograph. If you look at the photographers’ work you admire, you will find that they have found a particular place or subject, and then have dug deep into it, and carved out something that is special. That takes a lot of dedication, passion, and work.

» Steve McCurry’s Magnum Portfolio

Stuart Franklin

What advice would you give young photographers?
Follow your heart and never give up.

» Stuart Franklin’s Magnum Portfolio

Susan Meiselas

What advice would you give young photographers?

Dig in and follow your instincts and trust your curiosity

» Susan Meiselas’s Magnum Portfolio

Thomas Dworzak

What advice would you give young photographers?
Try live something intense, at home, abroad… it does not matter. It has to be passionate. And once you know the basics forget about photography.

» Thomas Dworzaks’s Magnum Portfolio

Thomas Hoepker

What advice would you give young photographers?
Avoid all photo schools and courses. Most will give you lofty ideas and twist your mind in one direction. Find your own way to photography, nobody will ask you later if you have a diploma. Visit as many museums as you possibly can. The images you see (painted, drawn, etched or photographed) will stay with you for the rest of your life. They will help you to discover good pictures in real life. Suppress any silly ambitions of becoming a great artist. Being a good photographer is difficult enough.

» Thomas Hoepker’s Magnum Portfolio

Trent Parke

What advice would you give young photographers?
To photograph what is closest to you and the things that you enjoy and have an interest in. Make the whole process as fun and least difficult as possible.

Regarding this document, You can download the PDF here.

Credit: Magnum Photos Blog

via Bill Reeves

Tango

Shahidul Alam — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:59:01 +0000

Photographs and text by Pablo Corral Vega

Life is not life without poetry. I’m talking about the license we give the world to touch us, change us, wound us, carry us away, lift us up, drag us down, save us, expose us, wrap us in warmth, strip us naked.

Uno, Enrique Santos Discépolo’s beloved tango, says, “Filled with hope, we seek the path our dreams have promised our desires. . . The struggle is hard, and it is long, but struggle anyway, and bleed for the faith that drives you on. Through the thorns we crawl, and in our thirst to give our love, we suffer and destroy until at last we see that we’ve no heart anymore — the price of a punishment we undergo, a kiss we never receive, a love that left us low. . . ”

When we live with poetry, we risk our heart, our feelings, our peace. We risk our mind, our skin, our bones.

The tango is the music of immigrants — Italians, Spaniards, Germans — who came to the area of the Río de la Plata in the late nineteenth century. They had left everything behind — it’s only natural that the tango is filled with nostalgia. But it’s not an unredeemed nostalgia; quite the contrary. It’s a nostalgia that is transfigured by an embrace, that finds harbor in the dialog of bodies. The music and lyrics of the tango are pure nostalgia, but the dance itself is all sensuality, presence, exchange. Redemption.

Nostalgia and sensuality need one another and nourish one another. It’s a virtuous circle: to overcome nostalgia one must declare the triumph of the senses, assert the concrete importance of the here and now. And afterward, the senses — when one is fully alive —become the source of nostalgia.

When I went to Buenos Aires for the first time, the tango shows seemed so false to me, the sensuality so exaggerated, the gestures so lacking all poetry that I thought the tango was dead. About that experience I wrote this:

“It’s raining, and it’s been raining since the moment I arrived. Abandonment is made of rain, of unceasing processions of rain, of unexpected seasons of rain, of narrow slits of sun through the rain. Abandonment is made of sad love affairs, of love affairs marked by silence, of love affairs that try to stay afloat despite all the rain. No, it’s not that all love affairs are sad, or that rain shapes our destiny. No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the fact that this long, profound abandonment is made of other, smaller abandonments, of words never spoken, of gestures of tenderness that were never born, of impossible embraces.”

Driven by the rain, nostalgia penetrated my bones. And then the tango took me by storm, so to speak — another sort of storm. I met Tito, a street poet, a vendor of wine and shoes, a loco who danced tango every night of his life. With him, I wandered through the Buenos Aires night. I discovered that the tango is alive in hidden, private places that the tourist never sees. It’s a world with its own laws. In the milongas — the places where people go to dance — the pimps and housewives, the lovers and the grandparents still together after all these years, the marginal males and the gay divorcees, the powerful and the nobodies, the young and those who can’t bear to grow old are all still to be found. All in the same place, playing their juxtaposed roles, actors in a delicious comedy that’s reinvented every night. They all laugh and pretend they aren’t dying. But when they step onto the dance floor, they do so with devotion, in silence, as though in that embrace their entire destiny were on the line.

Fernando Gavito, a friend of my friend Tito’s, was one of those devotees. Considered the greatest tango dancer in Buenos Aires, when he stepped onto the dance floor everyone that looked at him held their breath. His slow, deliberate movements challenged the law of gravity; they defied every notion of balance that one had ever entertained. I remember one night at the Club Gricel, shortly before his death. Mariana, his dancing partner, leaned against him, held up by nothing more than Gavito’s forehead and the tips of her own toes. It was an act of absolute surrender. The slightest error would have brought them both tumbling to the floor. That photograph has become, for me, the absolute definition of eros: I surrender to you with absolute certainty; you are my balance.

The most revealing definition of tango comes from the old men of the night: tango is embrace. More than music, more than the poetry of the old-time language of lunfardo, more than the constant flirting and the overwhelming presence of the senses, it is the embrace that expresses our humanity — more than any other thing we do. When we embrace one another we rescue one another from abandonment, we identify ourselves as members of our species. An embrace is a powerful, alchemical tool: it turns sadness into sweet. We are the species that embraces, that takes in, that touches, that swathes, that protects. The tango turns an embrace into human poetry.

Homai Vyarawalla: India’s First Woman Photo Journalist

Shahidul Alam — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:46:17 +0000

Biographer Sabeena Gadihoke’s book on Homai Vyarawalla tells the story of India’s first woman photojournalist who passed away on January 15 2012.

First published in Parsiana, April 21, 2006.

Getting the three of them together for a photograph was a task. The launch function was over and Homai Vyarawalla, Sabeena Gadihoke and Shernaz Cama were dispersed over the Lalit Kaka Akademi grounds in New Delhi.

Guests wanted to meet them, arrangements had to be fine tuned and a self effacing modesty caused them to be inaccessible. Finally they posed for the cover photo with smiles of good cheer.

For over six years the trio had toiled to bring to print the remarkable career of India’s first woman photojournalist of national fame, the 92-year-old Baroda resident who still drives a car, is a do-it-yourself carpenter and starts her day with a broom, sweeping her small apartment.

India's first female photojournalist, Homai Vyarawalla (center), seen with other press photographers at a photo session with Indira Gandhi in Delhi. Homai Vyarawalla/Alkazi Collection of Photography

Vyarawalla’s down-to-earth mannerisms, her ease with talking to people and answering questions endeared her to all present at the function. And her biographer Gadihoke and the person who initiated the subject for the book, Cama, not only complimented Vyarawalla’s presence but added considerable warmth and bonhomie to the event.

Indeed as the chief guest Ambika Soni, minister of tourism and culture for the country observed on February 25, 2006 after inaugurating a photo exhibition of Vyarawalla’s work and the launching of the book India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla the evening was “a celebration of their association” and she thanked the organizers for calling her to join in the happy occasion. The book is published by the Parzor Foundation in association with Mapin Publishing.

To become “icons” such as Vyarawalla, «women have to work harder» than men, observed the vivacious minister and confidante of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi. Gandhi was scheduled to attend the function but was unable to do so.

At a question and answer session on February 26 chaired by noted jurist Tehmtan Andhyarujina, Vyarawalla modestly told the gathering «that it took me 30 years to realize they (the photographs) had value (and that too) because they told me.» Many of the original prints and negatives were lost or discarded over the years.

Vyarawalla had been part of India’s historical transition from colonial rule to independence, photographed monarchs and nobility, presidents and prime ministers all the while assuming it was a job, a living but one that she enjoyed immensely.

When photographing the high and mighty, Vyarawalla would try to catch them unawares. «When people know you’re taking their picture, the body language changes. I would wait in a corner till I found somebody interesting … Nehru knew (people were taking his picture) but acted as though he didn’t … if he saw me around (he) knew I would photograph him.»

Mahatma Gandhi, she related was exceedingly annoyed with her as she used flash bulbs to which he was averse: «He ladki (“girl”)», he barked, «tu mujhe andha banaigi our phir jayagi (“you will make me blind and then go”).»

She recalled the visually and hearing impaired Helen Keller greeting her with a namaste — «That was culture.»

But with the changing times and a more aggressive media, the equation changed. At one function an organizer barked: «keep those bloody photographers out … (people) had no idea how to behave in a cultured society … I didn’t want to be called “a bloody photographer”. Enough is enough.» She decided to quit the profession in 1970.

Did she want to take it up again? asked a member of the audience. «If you want to stop, stop it for good … I started taking interest in gardening.»

What about digital photography? She noted: «it was very advanced», but was baffled by all that could be done to alter the image. «You can’t tell a genuine from a fake. There could be misuse of the technology. I liked the old times when everyone was genuine.»

All her life she had been in the company of men. She believed women were interested only in jewellery, servants’ problems, etc. But in Pilani in Rajasthan where she moved to be with her son Farouq she found the stereotype did not hold true. «I met intelligent women.»

As Gadihoke notes in a letter dated June 26, 2003 to the noted portraiture photographer Dayanita Singh published in the souvenir brought out for the exhibition: «(Homai) has left … photography far behind. Now it is Homai the engineer, Homai the architect and Homai kabariwalla (old goods dealer) who preoccupy her more. She wants to tell me about the water tank that she has repaired or the money she saved repairing her TV headphone or tips in the kitchen. She loves watching the afternoon soaps (Bhabi and Kumkum are her favorites … about mother-in-law and daughter in law problems) and a program called Khana Khazana. Yesterday she repaired my chappal with glue and has asked me to keep some rubber solution with me in my bag always in case I ever need it.»

Gadihoke’s 232-page volume priced at Rs 2,750 tells about the women she greatly admires and features around 450 striking and technically perfect photographs replete with history and spanning a century. «The genesis of the book lies in Three Women and a Camera (1998), a documentary I made of three women photographers including Homai», states the author. The book tells of Homai’s nomadic upbringing as she travelled with her father’s Urdu drama troupe from Navsari to Singapore, Ceylon, Malaysia, Burma to Bombay.

: Homai, aged 16, cooking.

When a child «I was not allowed to go to meetings to see all the big people. I didn’t know (that one day) I would meet all these people.»

«I was 13 and going (to Grand High School) with the mathabanu made me feel like an old woman …while going out I would also fold up my sudreh into my blouse. I had to remember to let both these items show when I got back home.»

Strapped for finance the doughty girl earned scholarships by offering tuitions to students in the junior classes. She met her husband-to-be Maneckshaw in 1926 at a railway station and as Gadihoke narrates, «Homai owes her initial interest in photography to Maneckshaw. In days prior to any formal training in the subject, both were self-taught…»

«Only a few people attended their wedding … the entire cost (of which) came to Rs 200 … we didn’t want mother’ to be burdened with expenditure but the real reason was that neither of us liked the elaboratetamasha (show) that accompanied Indian weddings.» In the evening they went to Chowpatty Beach and atebhelpuri. “«That was our wedding reception», she notes.

Bombay provided a good ground for aspiring photographers in the 1930s. Their photos appeared in The Illustrated Weekly of India and the Bombay Chronicle (both now defunct). During World War II the couple were employed by the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Publicity office. They lived in Connaught Place in Delhi.

: Maneckshaw and Homai in 1931.

Sharing a camera with her husband Maneckshaw, nursing her infant son while developing film, having her photographs appear under her husband’s name in case the magazine would not carry a photo shot by a woman, Vyarawalla took it all in her stride.

«I never thought myself to be different» being a woman in a man’s profession, she observed. The only girl in her class at school, Vyarawalla recalled in her working career then there was «no gender bias … no embarrassment.» Even the work at home was “distributed fifty-fifty” between herself arid her husband.

«God helped me all the time … I was destined to do things.» When asked if she frequented fire temples, Vyarawalla pointed to her heart and said her spirituality resided within.

Partition and independence saw the country in a state of turmoil and Vyarawalla was around to capture the historical event barring perhaps the most momentous one. «On the 30^th January 1948, Homai was to cover the Mahatma’s prayer meeting at Birla House. Armed with a colour movie camera, she had just stepped out of the office when Maneckshaw called her back. He said that he would accompany her the next day with the still camera. This decision was to cost them dearly. Within a few minutes he returned with all the blood drained from his face. “I said, what has happened?” He replied, “Gandhiji has been assassinated!” As the news of the assassination spread, international agencies and newspapers started to call them for images. It was possibly the most important picture that she had missed in her life», notes Gadihoke.

Maneckshaw passed away in 1969 and his body was cremated at the Nigambodh Ghat. «Throughout our married life, my husband and I ate from the same plate. It always made reconciliation easier when we had our little differences! After his death, my son and I shared the same plate and when he got married, he shared the same practice with his wife.»

Thirteen years later Farouq died of bowel cancer. «I know that if things are going to happen in a particular way, you can’t stop them. This knowledge has helped me carryon with life. Try your best and leave it to God. But don’t give up trying. Even now if someone tells me of a death, it doesn’t affect me. I am not heartless, but it doesn’t affect me, because everyone has to go. There is only one certainty in life, and that is death. So why make a fuss about it. Some go early, some go late. I prayed for my husband to go when I saw his eyes turn blue. I would rather have him dead than suffer blindness and disability. I did the same for my son. My mother was al ways afraid of being alone in her death … but she didn’t have to be. All three of us were there and we were holding her in our arms when she was dying. So some are destined for one thing and others are destined for another.»

Gadihoke tells the story of a vibrant and courageous woman’s life and times with depth and understanding. Her writing is shorn of any pretension or mauldin sentiments. It’s a woman’s story told by a diligent biographer, neither of whom asks for anything in return. Telling the story well is reward enough.

Article by V. Sundaram

Kainaz Amaria on NPR Blog

ShahidulNews » Photography

Frank Fournier at Pathshala

Dhaka 9 to 5

Le reportage de Caroline Gillet :

If It Bleeds

Weegee strikes again Body of Dominick Didato, Elizabeth Street, New York, August 7, 1936.

International Conference on Photography of India

International Conference on Photography of India

Upcoming photo contests and residencies

Win for Jashim Salam

Jashim Salam wins Honourable Mention at FCCT Photo Contest:

Clever Conceptual Photo Manipulations That Tell a Story

35 Magnum Photographers Give Their Advice to Aspiring Photographers

35 Magnum Photographers Give Their Advice to Aspiring Photographers

Abbas

Alec Soth

Alex Majoli

Alex Webb

Alessandra Sanguinetti

Bruce Gilden

Carl De Keyzer

Christopher Anderson

Chris Steele-Perkins

Constantine Manos

David Alan Harvey

Donovan Wylie

David Hurn

Dennis Stock

Eli Reed

Elliott Erwitt

Lise Sarfati

Martine Franck

Harry Gruyaert

Hiroji Kubota

John Vink

Jonas Bendiksen

Larry Towell

Mark Power

Martin Parr

Mikhael Subotzky

Olivia Arthur

Paolo Pellegrin

Patrick Zachmann

Peter Marlow

Steve McCurry

Stuart Franklin

Susan Meiselas

Thomas Dworzak

Thomas Hoepker

Trent Parke

Tango

Photographs and text by Pablo Corral Vega

Homai Vyarawalla: India’s First Woman Photo Journalist

Biographer Sabeena Gadihoke’s book on Homai Vyarawalla tells the story of India’s first woman photojournalist who passed away on January 15 2012.

Weegee strikes again
Body of Dominick Didato, Elizabeth Street, New York, August 7, 1936.