Suggested – Camera Obscura

Roger Ballen interview

Fabiano Busdraghi — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 06:22:35 +0000

Twirling wires, 2001
© Roger Ballen
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Roger Ballen is one of my favorite photographer ever. His complex, beautiful and disturbing images are intense and powerful visions rooted deep inside the subconscious mind. Mysterious visions that last long time inside your brain, as vaguely unexpressed questions.

It was a great honor when Roger Ballen accepted to be art of CO-mag, and answer some question about his practice and vision.

Cat catcher, 1998
© Roger Ballen
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Fabiano Busdraghi: You studied geology and before becoming a full time photographer you worked many years searching for minerals in South Africa. Speaking about your double scientific and artistic experience, some times ago you wrote to me: “In order to create strong images one has to be a scientist and artist.”

Personally I’m extremely interested in this topic, because I’ve be a physician during some year before switching to photography. So many people I met in the scientific or art word, think as they are two completely distinct universes, while during centuries art, science, technique… where simply considered the same expression of the human knowledge.

Lunchtime
© Roger Ballen
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What is in your vision of the relationship between science and art? Why it’s important to be an artist and a scientist at the same time?

Roger Ballen: One might think of the artist/scientist analogy as the relationship between the conscious/subconscious mind. Whilst there are many overlaps, creativity has to be channeled through a part of the mind that is is rational and is able to make decisions based on experience. Nevertheless the source of creativity is based deep inside the subconscious mind.

Eulogy
© Roger Ballen
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Fabiano Busdraghi: It’s easy to see the analogy between searching deep underground and the subconscious exploration in your photographs. But I ask to my self if there is something else, something more practical and direct compared to this metaphor.

Do you think that the formal training typical of science influenced your photographic approach? What is the role of the scientific method in your images?

Fragments, 2005
© Roger Ballen
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Roger Ballen: My goal in many ways is to become a master of the medium of black and white photography. As each year passes I continue to learn more about the media and how to “express greater complexity in a state of purer simplicity”. I think my training in the field of geologist assisted me in appreciating the relationships between cause and effect which is fundamental to the scientific approach.

Fabiano Busdraghi: When they started, many of my photographer friends had a lot of artistic ambitions. After a while, -mainly because of economical constraint- they started some parallel commercial activity: weddings, advertising, etc. The problem is that little by little they become prisoner of the economical appeal of their commercial work. The resulting situation usually killed their creativity and all the their artistic ambitions.

Head inside shirt, 2001
© Roger Ballen
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You practiced photography as an hobby for many years and -as a consequence- yo wasn’t obliged to make a living out of it. Do you think that this kind of freedom was fundamental to find your way? Would you suggest to young photographer to have a parallel and completely distinct job to experience the same freedom? Or it would be better to concentrate uniquely on photography form the beginning?

Roger Ballen: I often explain to younger photographers that the field of art photography is one of the most difficult careers in the world. There are literally trillions of photographs in the world and billions of people taking photographs. In order to have any possible success in this business ones work has to stand out and have lasting impact over time.

Crouched, 2003
© Roger Ballen
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In life it is crucial to find the correct balance. Whilst “what might work for one may not work for the other”; I have stated that firstly one ought to photograph for oneself not the market, secondly that being an art photography requires the same discipline and dedication that one might apply to any other field and thirdly that it is crucial to have another profession to subsidize the costs of daily life.

Fabiano Busdraghi: Looking at your photographic production, animals are extremely recurrent: dogs, cats, ducks, birds, snakes… Some time ago I was reading an analysis of Pink Floyd songs where animals had a central part, especially concerning Syd Barret. In the book, the massive presence all kind of real or mythological fauna, insects, and animal sounds could even be interpreted as an early sign of Syd mental illness. Even if I’m not sure about this statement, I think the parallel between a band who often explored the dark side of our existence and your introspective work is evident.

Three hands, 2006
© Roger Ballen
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So, why so many of your photos are populated by animals? What is the importance of animals in your work?

Roger Ballen: For most of my life I have been fascinated by the similarities of animal behavior to human. A substantial amount of my imagery over the past decades has attempted to decipher visually the animality of the human being.

On another level, my images comment on the complex relationship between mankind and animals. It is quite obvious that this interaction is not one of mutual trust and benefit. Quite the contrary.

Scavenging, 2004
© Roger Ballen
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Fabiano Busdraghi: You have organized and diffused your work in the form of photo books. It seems to me that books are central in your production, and are the natural physical materialization of your work. Before exhibiting your work is so many galleries and museum, you already published several books, and it’s your book Platteland who drove so much attention on your practice and was a fundamental turning point in your life.

Can you explain why you have this fascination for books? What are the implication of having a photo book as the main objective? When you produce a new body of work, do you already think to it as a future book? Or after some year shooting new work, you “discover” a book editing all the raw material you gradually accumulated?

Caged, 2011
© Roger Ballen
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Roger Ballen: My career has revolved around the production of books namely Boyhood, Dorps, Platteland, Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, and Asylum. These projects have all taken approximately five years to complete.

All of the above book projects started with a word that eventually became the title to the future book. During the years that it took to complete these projects my goal was to define in a purely visual, subjective manner the meaning of the particular word. Each strong, successful photograph added another dimension to the project in progress.

A book, unlike an exhibition is permanent, it is something one can go back to over and over again. It establishes a level from which one can begin the “next climb”.

Loner, 2001
© Roger Ballen
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Gonzalo Bénard: I studied 12 years at a Jesuit’s school being an atheist since I remember myself, however, the very first photograph I knew from you was the most engaging portrait of God I ever seen. I have shown it in almost every master class I gave, as example of composition, conceptual photography, etc. But knowing you and your work, you’ve been always creating, projecting and representing your inner world, maybe as process of oneself knowledge. This photograph can be seen as an icon to a man full of faith and yet can also be an icon of a pure atheist, showing God as a nonsense dogma. The guy seems sleeping relaxed feeling protected yet giving the back to us, humanity; the dog seems asking “what the hell is going on here?”; the God himself as a wired puppet, a doll with a funny smile, and the whole environment as opposite to the golden church.

Where are the creator here? Where are you in this photograph?

Squawk, 2005
© Roger Ballen
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Roger Ballen: I have always stated that whilst some may find this image titled “Loner” disturbing; it is ultimately conveying a profound statement about the meaning and nature of the identity of God.

On a formal level the photograph is integrated by the fact that the eye of the dog is comparable to the doll, the dog and the man on the bed lie in the form of a cross, and the reverse spelling of the word God is Dog.

Untitled, 2009
© Roger Ballen
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Gonzalo Bénard: You often say that your photographs are a way to define yourself, your “psychological and existential journey”, however you do not come up on them, your real face/body is not visible in your work. Do you project yourself in the photographed beings – humans/animals? Most of your work has some kind of ritualistic mood, not coming up in the photographs yourself, are you playing the shaman, using others to project yourself in these rituals? Or going further if I may: are each one of your works a mask you use (or could use) being the shaman?

Roger Ballen: Like my photographs my being consists of endless fragments many of which I am oblivious of. Each photograph I produce reveals Roger Ballen’s mind through a camera. People fail to realize that a camera is fundamentally a tool of the mind; no different than a paint brush in the hand of a painter or a pen of a poet.

Ape skull, 2002
© Roger Ballen
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Gonzalo Bénard: Parallel yet not separated from your photographic blood you run the Roger Ballen Foundation, with which you add an important role in South Africa education for culture, with lectures, classes, workshops, dealing with people who might be a world future great photographer. Knowing by my own experience, teaching and doing workshops can be an amazing way to learn from the new ones. What do you give from you? What do you get from them? Being teaching an ex-change of minds in which everybody should learn from the others, what’s the most pleasant for you leading the Roger Ballen Foundation? Do you want to share a bit your experience on this?

Roger Ballen: The purpose of the Roger Ballen Foundation is to increase the aesthetic awareness of contemporary photography in South Africa. Unless the public becomes aware of the value of photography and begins to collect photographs it will be almost impossible for young artists to continue in this field without other forms of material support.

Deathbed, 2010
© Roger Ballen
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The Foundation has organized and supported master classes, symposiums, exhibitions, and lectures over the years all of which have been very well attended.

Gonzalo Bénard: as an art-photographer I know that a serious interview about our work can get one tired, specially when we feel we already answered most of the questions people do, and sometimes we ended up giving an interview thinking: “pity they didn’t ask about this or that as it’s important”… like the importance of having a left nipple to chat with the right one. Do you want to answer to yourself?

Gasping, 2010
© Roger Ballen
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Roger Ballen: Answering to yourself is the most important activity of an artist.

For more information and photos, please visit Roger Ballen website.

Possessed, 2009
© Roger Ballen
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Through the Green Door, by Marc McAndrews

Marc McAndrews — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 05:50:04 +0000

Text1 and photos by Marc McAndrews.

“Have you ever been to a brothel?” she asked.

It was August 2004 and “she” was the girlfriend of one of the bikers. They were staying in the motel room next to mine at the Cadillac Inn in Lovelock, Nevada and were on their way back from the Sturgis bike rally. We were trading stories when she began excitedly telling me about the Brothel Poker Run that takes place throughout Nevada every February.

By this time I had been driving and living in my van for weeks so I stopped into Lovelock to relax, shower and look over some of the photographs I had recently taken. The late summer sun in the desert is brutal, able to push past every form of shade. Even though the air conditioner was on full blast, my room was stagnant and sweltering from having been cooked all day. To get some air I went outside and sat in front of my room to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and watch the traffic go by.

The bikers were out front of their rooms as well, a few doors down from mine. At first it was just two of them, like a couple of off-color raccoons, their faces a patchwork of sunburn and bright-white, bare-skinned eye sockets, acquired by riding through the desert all day with sunglasses on.

We sat there silently drinking our beers in the late afternoon light until eventually, with the intention of asking to do their portrait; I bummed a light and offered them a beer in return. One thing lead to another, their friends joined us and a few days later I left them with a massive hangover. I don’t know at exactly what point it was that she asked the question, but like a moment of clarity, it’s one of the few lucid memories I have from our weekend together.

I had heard the Nevada brothels existed, but going to one hadn’t ever really crossed my mind. I was never a big fan of strip clubs; they felt desperate and depressing to me. The ones I had been to were rooms full of drunken men, yelling at the sight of a nipple, desperately throwing money at women who had no intention of sleeping with them. And prostitution? Well, I had always thought of it in terms of what one used to see on the seamier streets in NY or roaming the casinos in Vegas. The legal, sanctioned, and regulated sale of sex never showed up on my mental radar.

As I was leaving town I found myself thinking about brothels, wondering what I was going to find there. I had all these preconceived ideas: double-wide trailers in the middle of a barren, dusty desert, women with no pasts and men running from theirs, whisky soaked owners trying to hustle a buck off of someone else’s misfortune. Drifters, grifters, runaways—I saw all these people in my imaginary brothel. The insides were all dark and dirty, the air was heavy with smoke, alcohol flowed and drugs were a badly kept secret. It would be gritty and American and I imagined myself making formal 4×5 photographs of all of this.

But, really, what the fuck did I know? I had never even been to a brothel before. My fantasy was filled with scenes and characters more suited to a Nick Cave song than anything that had to do with reality.

When I got back to New York a few days later, fully recovered from my Nevada hangover but still suffering from an Ohio one, I immediately began planning my trip back West and flew out a few weeks later to do some scouting.

The first brothel I ever went to was the Bunny Ranch in Carson City. I didn’t call them, had no introduction, but just showed up early one evening with some tear sheets and a vague idea of what I wanted to do. To say I was a little on edge would be a pretty big understatement.

I vividly remember sitting in my van in the parking lot outside the brothel. I sat there for quite awhile, trying to get my nerve up, breathing hard and starting to hyperventilate. I was all calm and confident talking about it back in New York, but to actually be here about to try to talk myself inside was a whole other story. I kept thinking to myself, “Why the fuck did I tell people I was going to do this! What the fuck was I thinking!” All I wanted to do was turn around, go back to my motel room and hide under the covers and pretend this had never happened. I was completely, one hundred percent, out of my comfort zone.

Reluctantly, I stepped out of the driver’s side door, walked up and pressed the red buzzer on the gate. Trying to mask my awkwardness from whoever was watching me, I took a deep breath and opened the gate, concentrating on looking as relaxed as possible walking up the stairs. I opened the frosted glass doors of the entrance, walked through and…Holy shit, there were all these women standing there in lingerie, perfectly lined up under bright lights, smiling right at me. That veneer of calm and confidence never made it through those frosted doors. I just stood there blushing, fidgeting, unable to make eye contact, holding my tear sheets and my little notebook and my binder. I was totally confused, unable even to get my rehearsed greeting out. I felt so stupid, so vulnerable and so exposed.

A voice to my right asked me to “pick a lady” so, blindly, I lifted my arm and pointed out in front of me. I had no idea who I picked; I only briefly looked up from nervously studying the floor.

She took me gently by my free hand and began giving me a tour of the house. We passed through the bar, went down this hallway, down that hallway, past the doctor’s office, outside, then back inside. I tried to explain to her that I was a serious photographer; I was here to do serious things. “There was no need for a tour,” I assured her. We went all around the house until finally we arrived at her room where she closed the door and laid lazily across the bed. With seeming unconcern, she began fixing buttons on her top which I swear didn’t need any fixing.

She looked up at me and smiled, “So, what else can I help you with?”

“I just want to take pictures,” I stuttered in return.

Arriving back in NY a few days later I was convinced that all had gone well and the sought after permission was a done deal and so I bought another van on EBay and readied for another trip.

But life and work got in the way and it wasn’t until early the next summer that I was able to get back out on the road. Now usually when I leave on one of these trips I meander for a few days, maybe go down south a bit, explore the switchbacks of West Virginia or the tiny towns out in Indiana. This year I bee-lined straight for Nevada arriving a few days after, tired and nervous yet excited for the possibilities. I spent the day after I arrived resting to get my bearings and trying to think about what exactly I was going to do.

I woke up early the next morning, feeling ready and prepared. Leaving Carson City I headed east on Route 50 towards Mound House and The Bunny Ranch.

This time when I arrived I was prepared when asked to “pick a lady” and asked to see a manager. The doorwoman, who acted as a gatekeeper for drunks and creepy photographers looking to take pictures, asked if there was anything that she could help with. As the women in the line-up relaxed and began slowly drifting back to the parlor and their rooms, I explained that I was the photographer who was here a few months ago and had been given permission to take some photographs whenever I came back. Looking me up and down she took the folder of images I was holding, thumbed through them quickly and handed it back. Bluntly she told me they weren’t interested in any photographs and the manager wasn’t available, but I could call back later that afternoon if I wanted to talk to somebody.

Not quite sure what had just happened (was I denied or just stalled?) I made the drive back to Carson City and attempted to regroup. Hours later I was still nervously pacing my motel room, back and forth from concrete wall to concrete wall, staring at the phone in my hand trying to organize my thoughts. I needed to figure out what exactly I wanted to say to whoever it was I was about to call and talk to.

After a series of fumbled phone introductions I was finally transferred to someone I was told could help me. The woman I eventually spoke with on the phone assured me that I must have been mistaken, that she was the only one that would have been able to give me that kind of permission and she had no idea who I was. She was sorry, but she couldn’t help me. “Thank you and good-bye.”

I stood there in a state of shock from the abruptness and finality of her response; I had figured that I would at least be allowed to come in for a meeting to talk with someone.

I remembered seeing a sign for another set of brothels on one of my drives out to the Bunny Ranch, so after dinner I set back out for Mound House hoping I’d have better luck at one of these houses. I found them hidden down a small slope of a hill, past a few auto painting and machine shops. This was Carson City’s version of a red light district. Three brothels—the Kit Kat Guest Ranch, The Bunny Ranch II, and The Sagebrush—were situated on a large cul-de-sac parking lot. Closing off its far side was a junkyard that filled the surrounding acres with stacks and stacks of abandoned cars and buses.

Walking into The Kit Kat was a much different experience. Gone were the bright lights and line-ups of the Bunny Ranch, replaced by a lone bartender watching TV in an empty and dimly lit parlor. As I took a seat at the bar one of the women appeared from a side hallway and slid in close to me. Eyeing the folder resting in front of me she asked where I was from and who I was looking to see. Taking out my Polaroids and placing them on the bar, I began explaining to her that I was here to start a project photographing the brothels, a very serious project. Without even bothering to glance at the Polaroids she turned, disappeared into the back and returned a few seconds later with another woman and the manager on duty. We only spoke for a short time before the manager deferred to the woman who had originally approached me and then vanished back down the hallway. I was much more comfortable here and this time when a tour was offered I was able to accept without having to look down at my shoes.

The woman who took me around was tall and full-figured. I remember being struck by how at ease she was talking to a total stranger with half of her breasts spilling out of her top. Walking through the house we chatted about possible locations to shoot and who would be up for it. She promised to talk with the owners later that day, but assured me it was all going to be just fine. We sat back down at the bar and one by one she called the other women over to introduce me. They were overwhelmingly excited about the photographs and we made plans for me to return later that week to get started. I was in and I could tell this was going to be amazing.

When I returned to the house a few days later they knew who I was and were ready for me. But, instead of this being a positive thing, I was met at the door by a large bartender resting his hand on a small caliber pistol holstered to his waist. He buzzed me through the front gate but met me outside, closing the front door behind him. He regretted to inform me that the owner of the brothel, while appreciating my interest, had to decline my offer. I began to protest, but he quickly raised his hand and cut me off. He was sorry, he said. There was nothing else he could do.

And I needed to leave the property—immediately…

Later that evening I was having a few consolation drinks over at Mo and Sluggo’s bar in Carson City, thinking back on the past few days’ events and my brief foray into legalized prostitution. The woman with the overflowing breasts had made an off-handed comment that the brothels over in Elko would be worth checking out. She thought they’d be much easier to get into. I sat there mulling over her advice. I was becoming quite disheartened by the whole process. I had been in town for some time now and was getting stonewalled by one person after another. It was probably the whiskey, but I resolved to make the drive and give it one more shot.

The next morning at breakfast I looked over notes from my recent attempts, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. What could be giving them pause? What was keeping me from getting inside? I needed to re-calibrate, to be more certain in what I was trying to say. I needed a new approach, so I wrote out an introduction and recited it over and over again to my eggs and grits until it came out smooth and natural. After downing a pot of coffee, I got in my van and merged onto I-80 to make the seven-hour drive east out to Elko.

It was the middle of the afternoon when I finally arrived in town and pulled into a gas station to ask for directions to the closest brothel. Barely taking his eyes off of the black and white TV behind the counter the attendant pointed out the window, indicating a few blocks in that direction.

Situated on two streets in a residential section of town, the Elko brothels are located two blocks from the casinos and the town center. There are five brothel licenses available in Elko and all of these are taken with four of the houses open and operating—Mona’s Ranch, Sue’s Fantasy Club, #1 Geisha, and Inez’s Dancing and Diddling.

The brothels were sitting there innocently in the midst of modest single-family houses, their neon signs not yet lit up. Kids were outside playing, riding their bikes and chasing each other up and down the block. Parking half way between two of the brothels I gathered my things, recited my intro one more time and walked into Mona’s Ranch.

Like the Kit Kat there was no immediate line-up here, just a bartender casually wiping down the bar and smoking a cigarette. Stopping mid-motion, she leaned forward on the bar and watched me walk down through the hallway and out into the parlor. “You wanna drink or you just wanna see the ladies?” was how she greeted me. I opened my folder and went right into my prepared speech. This time it came out smoothly and easily; it felt honest and sincere with no stumbling. Dragging heavily on her cigarette she turned her head to the side without moving her body and called out into the back, “Caarlii!!”

Coming out smiling from the back hallway wearing cut-off jean shorts, a pink halter-top, and flip-flops was Carli. She walked up to the bartender, leaned heavily on her shoulder and, while never taking her eyes off me, asked, “So, who’s this?”

Carli was then the Big Sister at Mona’s Ranch. She had no problem with me photographing in the house, but wanted to check with the owner first. He had just bought the place and she didn’t want to make any assumptions. She invited me into the kitchen while she made the phone call. Just as she was dialing he walked through the back door carrying overloaded bags stuffed with groceries for the week. As Carli began to ask him about the photographs he interrupted before she could finish, “Sure, whatever, but he’s your responsibility.” And just like that, in a very unceremonious way, I had finally gotten access.

Sitting at the kitchen table Carli offered me a cup of coffee and gave me a quick rundown of what to expect at Mona’s: the women, the schedules, when they’re busy, what to do about customers, some basic ground rules for when I was shooting. For instance, if I was working in the bar and a customer rang, I had to break everything down and hide it all in a side room.

I told her my story and what my experiences had been so far. When I had finished she smiled so sweetly at me. Slowly, Carli reached across the table, placing her hand gently on mine. Shaking her head she seemed as if she was going to start laughing out loud at any second, “Listen Honey… you gotta relax…no one’s gonna hurt you here.”

Carli walked me down the hall and took me to my room. It was a good-sized room, much bigger than what I had back in New York. A bare king-sized bed sat in the center of the room, pushed up against a mirrored wall. Two worn end tables sat on either side, loaded with more condoms and lube than I had ever seen before. After bringing in some clean sheets, she introduced me to Whispers, who I’d be sharing a conjoined bathroom with. Then, after offering their assistance for anything I needed, I was left alone to get settled. That was to be home for the next five days.

While bringing my gear in from the van a pair of Lucite shoes caught my eye, sitting neatly on a staircase of flocked wallpaper and lit from behind by rope lighting. I went back to my room and got my camera and some lights, setting them up slowly.

I took a photograph.

For more photos and stories, please visit Marc McAndrews website.

From an essay by Marc McAndrews appeared in Nevada Rose, a 160 pages photobook about legal brothels in Nevada designed by Natasha Samoylenko and published by Umbrage Editions/Nan Richardson (Associate Editor: Antonia Blair).

Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard

Gonzalo Bénard — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 17:26:20 +0000

Oneness — Uncaged Nature, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Text and photos by Gonzalo Bénard.

Not even for one moment did I have a conscious break asking, “What am I doing here, naked among the sheep, trying to create a dialogue with these piles of wool when the only thing they know is how to bleat?”

Oneness — Chicken Head, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

I’m one of those people who have so called ‘difficult mornings’. A period of time between ‘waking up’ and ‘being awakened’. A period of time when the conscious remains inactive, so not filtered. It is in this period of time when we create, when everything flows through our subconscious as if it were free.

A few years ago I woke up from a coma which made my brain run out of oxygen. I was living in Barcelona at the time, right in the centre of the city, in a building much like any other. Surrounded by concrete. Concrete people. And windows looking on to more concrete.

Oneness — Conversations as a Bird, 2012
© Gonzalo Bénard
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Previously I lived and studied in Yolmo, in the Himalayas, with Tibetan monks in a monastic school of arts, dance and philosophy. This was many years ago. Maybe 15. I lost my chronological memory during my coma, and never worked at recovering it as I never found it necessary to live. Time just doesn’t exist. There is the past supporting the present to help build the future. And all of these, the whole life itself, is a collection of moments. Moments with no time. Making a single major moment called life.

Oneness — Deep Wooded, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
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In the same area where I spent summer holidays when I was a kid, and teenager, there was an immense field where I used to run free. Most times naked. Sometimes painting my body and playing Indians with my brother’s presence, after he died. It was the way I had to make him feel closer. We used to collect pieces of wood and sculpt them creating rituals of life, and rites of death. We used to perform ceremonials in nature, to nature. Acting like wolves. Birds. Trees. Wind. Feeling the elements. Earth. Fire. Water. Air. The air we could feel on our naked bodies. The cold waters of the river near by. The heat of the sun. On earth. Sometimes we used to steal a horse to ride free. As if the owner wouldn’t know that.

Oneness — feather, 2011
© Gonzalo Bénard
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Since a kid I had this connection with the elements, and with death. It has always been part of me, growing up with this. Talking with dead people who come asking for help, when they left unfinished issues in their life here. I’m used to listening to the elements. To creating dialogues.

After some years living in Barcelona I started feeling a need again for this. For nature. For the basic elements as I couldn’t find them in the concrete. I then had a motorbike accident on the highway going to a place where I used to find it. I needed more than a moment. I needed that time to connect life. With life.

Oneness — Feathered, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

When I woke from the coma I took finally the decision to find a wooden house in the middle of a forest near the sea, far from everything so I could find myself again. Fix lost puzzle pieces. Find memories lost. Knowing that I could only be successful if I were being me in nature. After this first re-encounter with me and nature, sometimes dancing nude under the moonlight being touched by moon beams filtered by the trees of the forest, I moved to the country house for a sabbatical year, far away, closer to myself.

Oneness — Garden Me, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

There I found my brother again. In nature. Where I left him the last time, waiting for me to play again.

If before the coma I had had an intense and immense fight between the subconscious and conscious worlds, the whole sabbatical year in the country side was a battle to fix the whole me.

Oneness — Horned, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
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I decided to stop.

To listen.

To feel.

To live.

Oneness — My Body Sheep, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

To create new boundaries so I could feel and understand them—so I could break them.

To feel nature and be a part of it; as a giant cactus can co-exist with a fragile flower.

To observe and learn how an eagle was building its nest in that tree, and how the kids were born there, and how they had the first lessons in flying free. And not falling down. Feeling the wind and going with it or through it.

Oneness — My Stoned Hand, 2008
© Gonzalo Bénard
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To create dialogues. Within and without the fences.

And no, I didn’t give up for a single moment when I decided that I would have a deep dialogue with the sheep walking around there. I listened to them bleating as if they were teaching me how to do the same. And I answered till I achieved dialogue. Naked with them on my four legs. I was happy. I was feeling part of nature again. I felt one of them. I broke boundaries to be in oneness again.

Oneness — Self-fish, 2008
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Then something happened as a welcome from nature; one of them gave birth next to me. So I helped the baby one to come out. I was giving life to life. Participating in Life. Living Life. Again.

I took the horses then, and ran wild and free. Feeling the winds and breezes, its breaths and heart beats. As oneness, or in oneness with the horse as if it were the horse taming me. The horse felt that I trusted her. And when you trust you receive the same back. When it’s honest and deep trust without questioning. Just being. I let the horse tame the man to become one with her. So she become one with me.

Oneness — The bird and the wolf, 2012
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

And the wood. The trees, the mud. The plants growing. The smell and all the senses renewed day after day. I started dancing again, dancing rituals of life. Dancing rites of death. Dancing stars and infinite skies. Feeling the mud underneath my bare foot. The air feeding the fire feeding the earth feeding the water feeding me. Dancing as air as water as earth as fire. Feeling the eagle’s wings, the wool’s warmth, the wolf’s heart, the horse’s power as a steady rock. Feeling myself in nature. As a wizard, a shaman, a boromatchi… a wise being feeling nature as it is. Without labels. Without boundaries. A hybrid of many lives.

Oneness — The Tamed Man and His Horse, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

With respect. In Oneness. Being honest. Being death. Being rebirth. Being alive. Being life.

Being love.

And Being One.

For more information and photos, please visit Gonzalo Bénard website or buy Oneness Blurb book.

Oneness — Voodoo Dance, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Interview with Aline Smithson

Fabiano Busdraghi — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 10:20:55 +0000

Interview with Aline Smithson, fine art photographer and curator of Lenscratch blogzine.

Fabiano Busdraghi: After working as a fashion editor with many master photographers, you become a successful photographer and artist. Today you are also the editor of Lenscratch, one of the most important photography blogs in the world, as well as a portfolio reviewer and curator for several magazines and galleries. Finally, you perform several educational activities in form of workshops and lectures.

© Aline Smithson
Please visit Interview with Aline Smithson for the full size image.

A current romantic cliché is that an artist should concentrate all his energy on artistic creation only. Personally I think an eclectic array of occupations makes life interesting and enriching, but -for example in my case personal- it’s easy to do to many things and never finish any of them. As a consequence, sometimes I’m afraid that too many different activities can somehow dilute artistic production. At the same time an interesting life, makes interesting art works possible.

Do you think that all your activities support and improve your artistic creation? Or all the different aspects of your professional and artistic life are just different manifestations of your love for photography? Or maybe your various experiences are simply the results of your eclectic interests?

Aline Smithson: Honestly, I am not sure that my activities support or improve my work… in fact, I think they hinder me in the sense that I have less time to make work and focus on myself. Truly, there are days that I just want to throw in the towel when I see so many amazing projects being created in the photography world. It’s inspiring and depressing to see:

how many photographers are making work these days;
how good so much of it is;
what one can achieve with an iPhone.

But none of that stops me from making work, or influences the work I make. I have a strong personal vision, but that doesn’t mean I don’t drool over work I see other photographers making.

My enthusiasm for photography, and my desire to understand and give back to my community is what drives all the things that surround the production of my own work. When I started writing my blog, it was going to be a place for me to share new work and ideas, but after a few months, I became bored with the idea of me, me, me and looked at it as an opportunity to learn about contemporary image makers, right along with the readers. And as an educator, I thought my students would grow from a daily dose of photography too.

When I feel like I have too many balls in the air, I clear some space—take a week with no distractions and clean my office, make some new work, read some articles and reboot myself. I wish we could have at least one day a week with no e-mail… it’s the e-mail that is beginning to kill me.

Fabiano Busdraghi: You have been quite successful in every field you explored. What do you think is the key of your success?

Aline Smithson: Hard work, not taking myself too seriously, being curious, kind, and professional. Saying thank you to every hand that has pulled me along. Celebrating those around me. Staying true to my own vision of the world. And did I say, hard work?

Fabiano Busdraghi: Personally, I think it’s very difficult to promote my photographic work. I enjoy every step in the process of creation, but promotion is something almost painful. Yet I understand is necessary. It’s a shame to close my photos inside a box or a hard drive, so I regularly force my self to make some promotion. When it happens, it seems to me that it takes all my energies and time, leaving no space for new creations. Recently, attending a lecture on young photography at Festival Circulations, I asked to all the present photographers, how they where able to find an equilibrium between creation and promotion. Everyone’s answer was that it is quite difficult, and extremely time consuming.

Do you agree with this statement? In your personal case, how do you balance diffusion and creation? In your opinion, how one young photographer should deal with promotional activities?

Aline Smithson: Promotion is like exercise… you don’t enjoy it, but you need to do it! I tell my students that they had better be making work that they will be happy to promote for the next 10 years. After you finish a body of work, you will be struggling to get it under the eyes of the photography world for years. After an intensive year in 2011 of exhibitions and travel, I have backed off submissions this year and now am only submitting to things where the juror or the venue is of interest. I am not jumping on all the varied bandwagons. One has to think of this journey as a long road, and we don’t need rush it or show up at every party. I slogged away for years, submitting, knocking on doors, attending portfolio reviews—none of what I have achieved has come without effort. But life gets in the way, and we can’t always have the same focus or energy to create and promote work, and once you make your peace with that, it feels more comfortable. I am in for the long haul, and if one year I’m in lots of shows, it’s fine with me to slow down the following year. We truly need time to NOT promote ourselves. I step in and out of the promotion place and the creative place all the time… you sort of get used to the rhythm of it.

But it IS a drag to have to constantly promote your work. You feel as if you are waving a flag saying, “Look at me, Look at my work”, and I hate that. But, the key is to surround yourself with a supportive community and when they wave their flags, you celebrate them in kind. As photographers, we are SO lucky to have the amount of opportunities available to get our work out into the world. There are amazing organizations like Center and Photolucida that totally support emerging photographers, and many many galleries and photo centers offering exhibition opportunities. Plus the on-line opportunities are endless. I’d suggest setting small goals… submit to something once a week… a small thing on-line, or one major thing a month. But spend the most time on making quality work.

Fabiano Busdraghi: How late-2000s financial crisis affected your practice? What is your business strategy during these difficult years? Do you have any suggestion for emerging fine arts photographers?

Aline Smithson: To be honest, there are very few fine art photographers that can actually make a living off of their work. Most are educators or work in some other field or are retired. I am teaching more and more, I have a stock agency, I have an agent that places my work into TV shows and movies, and I try to have lots of little venues to make money so it adds up to something. I am selling the same amount of work—actually selling well in Europe, but the galleries are drying up, and that is really, really sad. It’s time that we create a new template to selling work. It seems that the low and high end continues to sell, but the middle range is very slow. And technology has made everyone a photographer, so people are basically giving it all away.

Fabiano Busdraghi: I have been blogging with Camera Obscura during the last five years, and I still ask myself why I’m doing it. I know the answer, it’s not only to spread photographic culture, but above all my way to keep thinking and exercise my mind. A kind of brain gym. Anyway, the question is still important for me, and I like to ask the same thing to all the bloggers out there.

Can you describe why you decided starting your blogzine Lenscratch and why you still curate it today? Why blogging is an important activity for you?

Aline Smithson: I too often ask myself why I am carving out so much of my time to promote other people. On those nights, when I’ve had a cocktail or two and I’m just fading into sleep, I’ll remember that I didn’t write tomorrow’s post and force myself to do it. I have set a very high standard for myself by posting everyday—I may change that up in the future, but writing every day is truly, as you say, a brain gym. By writing daily, it becomes easier and easier. I remember once reading that soap opera stars had incredible memories as they had to recite pages of dialogue each day, and this feels the same.

I have also met or connected with hundreds of photographers through Lenscratch and when I can help them further along their road to success, it makes me very happy. I don’t want my photo journey to be a solo expedition, I want a band of merry makers along with me, and the blog has provided that. I have heard from photographers who have been working in isolation, what a remarkable thing it is to have someone take the time to really look at their work and who they are. That makes it all worthwhile.

Fabiano Busdraghi: Everyone will agree if I say that the Internet is a formidable tool to spread a photographic work to a really wide audience. But at the same time I have the feeling that is quite difficult to use it to convert the simple diffusion of the artist work in a concrete business. I mean, an art gallery exposition usually is visited by a maximum of a few hundreds visitors only, but often some of them will buy some prints. An on-line portfolio may be visited thousands of time every month, but how many visitors are interested in actually buying the artworks? Printed magazines generate money but most of the blogs are no profit. It seems to me that, even if Internet is perfect to spread a photographer name, this not necessary imply that it will be easier for him to sell his work and finally make a living from his art.

What is your opinion about this topic? Do you think is really useful for photographers to spend a lot of time and energy to spread their work on the Internet or is still better to make promotional work in the real word?

Aline Smithson: Well, ultimately, the work has to be stellar, and then it really doesn’t matter how the word gets out. In the commercial world, the pendulum is swinging back to physical promotional tools—postcards, etc, as art directors are tired of the flood of promotional newsletters and mailings. The Internet will get your work all over the world in a heartbeat—photographers I have featured have been contacted the next day by publications all over the world, showing interest in their work. That never could have happened by snail mail. We don’t even have a clue as to the amount of Internet opportunities these days—new magazines, blogs, and sales sites are starting up daily. We can spend our whole lives going down the rabbit holes of things to submit to or explore.

If you want to get your work into the world, the gallery show should not be the goal. Getting your work in a well-read magazine or blog will bring the eyes of the world to the work. And then think about galleries…

I am making sales because of that exposure. My galleries can also benefit from the exposure and my own self-promotion. My friend, Cole Thompson, sells directly from his site, and when I asked him who his collectors were, he said that most were photographers themselves. I think when Jen Beckman’s 20×200 started, every photographer I know was collecting work from that site. So all that exposure, geared to the photographic audience, pays off. We are supporting each other.

Fabiano Busdraghi: Another surprising aspect of Internet is the amount of available information and how this impacts our approach to information. I receive every day tens of post in my feed reader, and it’s difficult to find enough time and concentration to carefully read each of them. A well-known Internet behavior is that visitors tend to scan a page instead reading it. Sure, there is a lot of noise out there, and we have to find filtering strategies, but I notice that even the valuable information is still too abundant to be assimilated. In my opinion this problem determine a kind of cultural consumerism, and a tendency to superficially read every text, no matter the quality of the information inside it.

Do you agree with this description of Internet fruition? Is still valuable to write long and in depth analysis or it would be better just to tweet? What can be done to inverse this tendency?

Aline Smithson: I am one of those scanners. I hardly have time to read other blogs, and I’ve always been a person who is first drawn to the pictures before reading the article itself. I also think everyone has Attention Deficit Disorder. My children talk and text in a new language and the whole world is just looking for the next soundbite. Writing the blog is one of the few times during the day that I completely focus myself. Otherwise I’m doing a million things at once and not totally focused on one element. I sadly don’t have time to digest long, indepth articles, though I do read tweets… and I am fully aware that I am digesting the fast food of photography, and it doesn’t always make me feel good.

I’m not sure how to change it… Actually, I think it’s only going to get worse. I worry about the effects of all of this on our children. As someone who grew up without a computer, it feels like a tidal wave of technological pressure is always nipping at my heels. I know my children don’t feel that at all, and look at every new invention and app as something to relish.

Fabiano Busdraghi: I’m particularly interested in real life stories, anecdotes and behind the scenes. Can you chose some photos from your portfolio that are a bit special for you and tell their stories?

Harmony
© Aline Smithson
Please visit Interview with Aline Smithson for the full size image.

Aline Smithson: The image, Harmony, was created when I was in the throws of learning photography. One of my teachers told me that I needed to stake out what I was going to shoot and wait for the light. This is not always easy with small children underfoot. So, I was on a family vacation and was in the driver’s seat on the way down the California coast. It was raining and I passed a sign that said “Harmony” and knew it was make a great shot. I did a wild U-turn on Highway 101 and pulled over as my husband and children were all screaming at me. I jumped out with my toy camera and took one shot. I never followed that teacher’s advice again.

Lexie with a Peacock
© Aline Smithson
Please visit Interview with Aline Smithson for the full size image.

Lexie with a Peacock is an image that I thought about for a long time. I have always been enchanted by Lewis Carroll’s images of children, and I love the idea of color, texture, and exotic props all adding to the beauty of a composition. It also doesn’t hurt that I happen to own a taxidermied peacock. Lexie lives down the street and looks a lot like my daughter at that age; she also has that old soul quality that brings more substance to the portrait. What the viewer doesn’t see is that her mother, little sister, and a 13 year-old boy cousin from the Midwest, are sitting behind me thinking, “What is this woman doing!” In today’s photographic conversation, I think we have turned away from beautiful things and the desire to make beautiful work. I just felt like it was time to make some.

The Middle Fingers
© Aline Smithson
Please visit Interview with Aline Smithson for the full size image.

I can’t help it, but I like to be irreverent some of the time. This still life, The Middle Fingers, just made me laugh.

As much as I like to make work that has poignancy and meaning, I love to create something out of nothing, and images that are quirky. This image, Hugos in Hollywood, was created when I was visiting a friend staying in a swanky hotel before she attended the Golden Globes. I “just happened” to have 3 of my Hugo dolls with me and they were able to enjoy the remnants of her breakfast in bed.

Hugos in Hollywood
© Aline Smithson
Please visit Interview with Aline Smithson for the full size image.

And finally, I just loved this portrait of Elizabeth Taylor so much—the color and pose—that I wanted to figure out a way to celebrate it. It started me creating a little series of portraits in books I love, called Portraits of Portraits. And this one is titled, Roses and Liz.

For more informations, please visit Aline Smithson website or subscribe to Lenscratch, a blogzine dedicated to contemporary photography.

Roses and Liz
© Aline Smithson
Please visit Interview with Aline Smithson for the full size image.

The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous

Kalliope Amorphous — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:08:57 +0000

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

Text and photos by Kalliope Amorphous.

salivating thoughts on iron,
quickening their rust,
the last casts of a lantern,
write on the wind with dust

a cavalcade of letters,
an eraser made of words,
a ghost, a spectral face,
a nothingness that mutes
the originating space

transmuting vision to parchment,
which covers the eyes with its skin
and cages the heart as a tenant
in a house on the head of a pen

each testament a zombie,
each word a tribe of fleeting ghosts
I cannot paper nor pen their army
temporary implements
are most reluctant hosts
and I do not have the muscle
to wrestle bone from marrow
nor the compass for Euterpe’s angle
whose singing springs unfiltered
from the larynx of the sparrow.

(Excerpt from The Futility Of Words)

I am spellbound by that place which Artaud so perfectly described as “that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach”. My work focuses on the subconscious aspects of emotion and perception; the hidden reverie, the fleeting vision produced in dream; mute moments of despair, heartbreak, wonder or horror which are not expressed outwardly in our day to day lives, but remain a part of our inner worlds or end up pinned to the archetypes in fairytales and myths.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

Before I ever picked up a camera or stood in front of one, words were my primary canvas for painting these inner emotions or perceptions onto something tangible. As I have made my way from the written word to the still image, I have come to realize that the absence of words is a language of it’s own. I use myself as a “prop” for all of my images, which means that in addition to composing and capturing the story, I am physically immersed in it as well. I have come to embrace this process as a way of creating visual poetry.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

It has been said that the human face is capable of manifesting over 200,000 individual expressions, making it a canvas of myriad range for depicting the most dramatic to the most subtle of emotions. Through the slightest shifting of the eyes, the positioning of the lips or the flexing of the facial muscles, a new story is created. Further, there are the infinite possibilities of the body and it’s nuances; a gesture of the arm, the preening of the neck, the placement of the hands. As a photographer who also plays the role of model, I am driven by this seemingly infinite palette of possibilities for conveying the intangible aspects of emotion. Much like poetry, these images are personal renderings of inner landscapes, or of my perceptions of the potential inner landscapes of the characters that I create.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I enjoy blurring the lines between “self” and “other”. In the early stages of my work, I was very focused on character development and physical transformation. When I first began experimenting with self-portraiture, my focus was on attempting to create the most varied characters possible. I wanted to see how far and how drastically I could alter my own image, because I was not setting out to take autobiographical photographs. Those early photographs were very simple and theatrical. I rarely show them, but they represent the roots where this journey into conceptual self portraiture began.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

Having grown rather reclusive over the past handful of years, being the model, stylist and photographer became a natural progression. It was not something that I had planned, nor did I ever expect to be a “self portraitist”. I realize now that many elements of my life combined to bring me to this work. I had spent a lot of time in my youth in front of the camera as a model and it was there I realized that, from a photogenic perspective, my face has a very chameleon-like quality. Having a passion for makeup arts and theatrical styling, I am able to combine all of these elements in order to use myself as a prop for my photographs. I have always preferred working alone and I also come from a long line of artists with a history of keeping odd hours while creating. I half-jokingly blame my genes for my frequent 3 AM creative jolts, yet since I am the protagonist in all of my work, I am able to experiment with my ideas right away.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I turned the camera on myself not only because it happened to be a convenient evolution, but because I am drawn to this work as a practice in the deconstruction of identity; both self-identity and the perception of “other”. Through this work, I often end up empathizing with qualities and stories that I view as separate from myself. Yet, more often than not lately, I realize that I am sometimes a part of these stories on levels that are often entirely unconscious. My perspective is beginning to shift and it is becoming both horrifying and amazing in those moments when I realize that I have tried to tell a story and without my intending to, the story is my own on very subconscious and personal levels. With my Hypnagogia series for example, a lot of time went by before I realized and/or acknowledged that every one of those images is deeply personal in some way. This is not the case with all of my images, but I am allowing myself to recognize subconscious reflection in my work. I have experienced this sort of symbiosis in poetry before, but it never occurred to me that a still image could be capable of the same.

chewing the lips of twilight
with tongues of gold and azure,
candles strip their lungs of light
and tie them to a mirror

I no longer recognize a face
since they mistook the looking glass for skin
and all their ashen breaths erase
the space where eyes reflected in.

(Excerpt from Sentences)

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I had initially felt a very strong sense of vulnerability when my photographs were beginning to get published and exhibited. One of the stigmas attached to self-portraiture can be the idea of narcissism or vanity and in the beginning I struggled with the presentation of this work as self portraiture, because it is precisely the place of “stepping outside of the ego” that I work from. I had once considered not even referencing my images as self portraiture, but I had considered it far too long after my work became known. While trying to define my work socially and off-the-cuff without the images on-hand, I sometimes felt that the inquirer imagined that I spent my days photographing myself snapshot-style as “Kalliope” as they contemplated the size of my ego and/or delusional behavior. In retrospect, I laugh at those awkward attempts at explaining what I do and this is why “I am not a photographer or a narcissist. I am an artist with a camera.” is the first line of my artist statement.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I now embrace the act of creating self-portraiture and the word self-portrait. I realize that ultimately, these are personal and subjective expressions which are going to be viewed objectively once they are put out into the world. Like the objective lens in photography which gathers light to form something tangible, the most I can hope for as an artist is that my work may sometimes trigger an emotional response from the viewer or that they may be engaged by the story line. I often try to compose the scenes from the perspective of a voyeur in order to invite the eye on a journey through a keyhole, as if glimpsing a moment that perhaps should not be seen.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I have been writing poetry since I was five years old. Frequently veering off into other art forms (mixed media, performance art, etc.), I have always returned to poetry as my main channel. I write often and I have a large volume of poetry completed over the past year which I am currently revising. I see many similarities in the written word and still image when it comes to the projection of one’s own subconscious. Often, the understanding of what or why I am writing or creating does not dawn on me until the project is finished or abandoned. There is an almost mystical element to it and I have talked to many other artists who experience the same thing. For example, I spent a year working on a volume of poetry which I thought was about one subject only to find out it is about something else entirely.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

When I was younger, I engaged in different writing styles and was very enthusiastic about sharing and publishing it. For awhile now, writing has become a more personal endeavor. For some reason, the sharing of my writing began to feel too vulnerable. I have described it as the feeling of cutting open ones own veins in the town square. I am someone who has had to make great efforts to put my work out for other eyes to see, I think this is because on one level I feel the frustrations of never being able to accurately convey what it is I want to convey. We have all of these modes of expressing the intangible through art, but I think that some of us who have this almost crippling passion at times, can become frustrated by the limitations of the art itself. This subject itself runs through of a lot of my poetry.

Silence
the heart does not speak of beats
time and tide sway and dictate
the whittling of a day
in blue advances and retreats;
some day, we will be free.
we are mirrors broken,
all and one,
throwing crooked veins of light
against the sun.
in my garden bower,
a heliotrope throws itself to the ground.
I cannot tell you the taste of this;
love is an animal that eats the tongue and never makes a sound.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

The irony is that I am metaphorically writing with my own skin in my self portraits, because many of the themes that I write on seem to get subconsciously filtered down into the photographs. These themes are often dark on the surface, perhaps easily misconstrued as nightmarish, sad or morbid. But, the place I am coming from is usually very optimistic. I have a constant, sometimes painful awareness of the brevity of life, the passing of time and the fragility of the human heart. I am almost always compelled, both in the shoot and in the post-processing, to create characters who have a sense of timelessness about them. Some of my imagery may appear dark, and some of it is indeed intended to be nightmarish, but the majority of my themes are pointing to our mortality and the fragile nature of being human. I want to visually explore all of the aspects of being human and the masks we wear; beauty and beast, angel and shadow side. I do not view these photographs as images of myself. To me, they are just portraits from this strange theater of life, emotion and time.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

there is a space between the dream
where emptiness is sewn;
cold fossils drawn up by a seam
connecting earth and bone.

a ghost taps poems upon a rock
to bake their valleys in the heat;
small veins of milk, packed thick with chalk
casting white shadows on a sheet.

he mocks me by his flight.
time is heavy, flesh is rock,
blood is a lock built in the night
and set inside a clock.

from sanguine chambers banished,
a wrist draws a line of impasse
on the map of its own hand.

like this a life will languish:
a ghost inside an hourglass
suckling the bones of sand.

(Excerpt from The Sandglass)

Please visit Kalliope Amorphous website for more

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

Female drug addiction in Afghanistan, by Rafaela Persson

Rafaela Persson — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 10:55:30 +0000

Text and photographs by Rafaela Persson.

Flying in over Afghanistan on an early November morning of 2008, revealed a barren landscape with no greenery visible for miles. I went to Afghanistan intrigued by its people and culture, being something very different than the places I previously visited. What would it be like photographing here? Would I be able to get close to any Afghans? I like to spend extended periods of time with people I photograph. In Afghanistan many journalists seemed to use the 15 min rule: you never stay longer than 15 minutes in a place because that is how long it takes for someone with a cell phone to arrange a car to kidnap you.

I had an idea to photograph female drug addicts. Afghanistan is the world’s biggest producer of opium, from which heroin is derived. According to a study made by U.N. Drugs and Crimes Office in 2010, the rate of drug addiction in Afghanistan is twice the global average; Afghans have become the leading consumers of their own opium. Approximately one million Afghans, or eight percent of the war-shattered country’s total population is suffering from drug addiction, a 75 percent increase since 2005. What is even more alarming is that studies show that 50 percent of Afghanistan’s opium-using parents give the drug to their own children.

I began my project at a drug rehabilitation center for women and children. After the compulsory cup of tea with the director Dr. Toorpaikay Zazai, I was introduced to a twelve-year-old girl named Karima. She had a look of wisdom and tragedy at the same time, one that I would find in many afghan children making them seem much older then they where. Karima and I bonded in a second.

Five minutes later I found myself stuffed into a car with my fixer, driver, Karima and her family, the parents Mohammed, Jamila and the four kids including Karima who was sitting in my lap turning around every minute or so to look at me and caress my cheek. Her nine year old sister Mujadin, sat in her moms lap next to me and continuously kissed my hand for the approximately 30 min car ride.

This was my first meeting with Karimas family. It was Eid and the family had been given permission to go home for the holiday. During their refugee years in Pakistan the family had lived through many hard years and the mother Jamila was given opium tea by a neighbor to comfort her after the loss of a son in a car accident. Jamila, like many others female addicts in Afghanistan, was told that it was a kind of a medicine that would make her feel better. It did momentarily and that feeling got her hooked. Before long, Jamila would make the opium tea for her young children as well. The opium tea would make the kids drowsy and complaints about hunger and the cold would disappear. The family would come to rely on the tea for many years to come.

After the fall of the Taliban, Karimas family decided to move back to Afghanistan. Afraid to move back to their home province Kapisa, they decided to resettle in Kabul. For many years the family have been squatters in an unfinished apartment block built by the Russians in the late eighties. Standing approximately five stories, with pylons and rebarb sprouting from the roof suggesting is was intended to be higher, the cement brick building is situated on the main road to the airport. A staircase completely open to the outside leads me up to the third floor, where the family has taken over a one-room apartment. There is no electricity so the hallway is very dark, but the kids are familiar with the hallway and are able to lead me. A makeshift door has been put up to give them some privacy. Inside, plastic bags from various aid organizations have been cut up to cover the open window along with dark drapes to help with insulation. The room is dark and very cold.

The family quickly pushes me towards a sandali, a common heating system in Afghanistan where a coal fire is lit in a pot, put in a frame and covered by a big blanket that the family can all tuck their feet and legs under. As the sandali starts to heat us up, the family begins to tell their story. Throughout my almost yearlong stay in Afghanistan, I would visit many times with the family under the sandali to hear their stories over cups of green tea. Karimas family was not the only family I photographed but they where the ones that I became the closest to.

Drug addiction is the common link that led me to these families but what kept me shooting was so much more. Often I would finish a four-hour visit with one of the families and with only 10 frames on my memory card. Instead I would leave with thousands of images in my mind; images that I still see everyday. The stories I would hear from these women, ranging everything from what they where making for dinner to losing a child, worries for the future and their thoughts on western life intrigued me. They would often advise me on my own life, encouraging me to have children of my own. I realized I continued to visit them not only to photograph their addiction but because they had become friends.

Living in Afghanistan as an expat is not always so easy: the poor living conditions, constant threat of illness, the tense security situation, etc. But I always had the option to leave and every few months, like most other foreigners, I would do so. The families I photographed like many other Afghan families had no chance of escaping. Often when leaving after spending the day with them I would feel a sense of guilt because even though my life was not always so easy in Afghanistan, it was not comparable to their situation.

I did not follow the 15 min rule in Afghanistan. I never felt threatened while at my families. My fixer, an Afghan man in his late 30s, would often bring one of his young boys to work, and together we looked like a small Afghan family. I always dressed conservatively and never exposed my cameras before going inside the living quarters of the families. Once in a while, after some time had passed during a visit, my fixer would say I think it is time to leave and we would go immediately. I never questioned his judgment and never had any problems.

I am not sure if I was influenced by the Afghan women’s advice, but today I have a daughter of my own. I do, however, have a deeper understanding of the difficult decisions she must have made; the desperation these women feel when they cannot comfort their kids and the only solution they feel they have is to turn to opium.

Please visit Rafaela Persson for more stories and documentary photography.

General Butt Naked, by Ryan Lobo

Ryan Lobo — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 20:11:08 +0000

Text and photographs by Ryan Lobo.

I am in Liberia. Eric Strauss, Danielle Anastasion, Ryan Hill and myself are making a self funded independent documentary film called “The Redemption of general Butt Naked”. The film is now complete and has been invited to the Sundance film festival in Park City Utah and is in the running for best documentary feature at the festival.

We are telling the story of Joshua Milton Blahyii, also known as General Butt Naked, a former warlord who terrorized Monrovia for many years with his child soldiers, murdering, raping, cannibalizing, maiming and brutalizing thousands during Liberia’s civil war. Suddenly in the middle of the fighting and at the height of his power, Joshua claims to have had a revelation from God and laid down his weapons and renounced violence. Many years later, now a preacher, he returns to Liberia to begin “a crusade” to redeem his past. We are with him when he does so.

The American Colonization Society founded Monrovia in 1822 as a haven for freed slaves from the United States and the British West Indies. It was named after James Monroe, then president of the United States and was founded on the premise that former American slaves would have greater freedom and equality in “Africa”. The freed slaves brought with them Christianity and created Monrovia but did not integrate with local tribes which had dealt in slavery for a long time, selling their own people to slavers from Africa, America and Europe. The religious practices of the Americo – Liberians have their roots in the churches of the American south. These ideals influenced the attitudes of the settlers toward the locals and the Americo-Liberian minority dominated the native people, whom they considered primitives. The immigrants named the land “Liberia,” which means “Land of the Free,” as homage to freedom from slavery. Who the freed slaves enslaved and exploited was a different matter. A military coup in 1980 overthrew the president William R. Tolbert, which marked the beginning of a period of instability that eventually led to a civil war, which devastated the country’s economy, left 200,000 people dead, tens of thousands mutilated and most of the female population sexually attacked in some form or the other.

Many of Joshua Child soldiers live in Xolalli, a slum (now razed) that translates to “Where death is better than life”. Addicted to heroin and with intensely traumatic upbringings and histories Xolalli is where the most desperate, the most hurt and the most broken people reside, according to Joshua. We leave for Xolalli with Joshua and his wife Josie.

We walk in and Ryan films Joshua meeting with a lady whose brother he had murdered. We enter on foot and after awhile things go a bit out of hand. We had asked a few of the local guys to help us ask some of the slum dwellers to move downstairs to give us some silence and things get rough when the “helpers’” start yelling at people. Joshua apologizes at length and the lady accepts his apology. She tells us that she forgives him as it is the past and because he has earnestly appealed to her. Just like that. The previous time we had visited Xolalli it had been a little different. An excerpt from my journal.

“A woman emanates from the shadows screaming at him. She has a terrible scar on her face . She sobs that the general has killed her brother. She points her finger at Joshua and cry’s out not words but sounds of grief and horror at seeing him. Joshua says “I am sorry. I was not the person I am now, then I did not know what I was doing.” She calms down and puts her head in her hands as Joshua begs. Men silently surround us. I take a photograph. Finally, she places her hand on his shoulder as he touches her feet and leaves. I feel like I have witnessed something immense. Joshua tells the story of how he killed her brother and then ate his heart because he spoke French as one of the factions the general fought against then spoke French. People who have truly suffered do not seem to find it difficult to forgive. Out of suffering and sorrow endured seems to sometimes come a deeper understanding of forgiveness and the shortness of life. Or maybe it is just a terrible fatigue.”

We leave the interior room and I stay there while the rest go off. In seconds a group surrounds me. One says he will take the camera and smash it on my head if I take his picture. I smile. Things get worse. They push and walk me into a corridor. After awhile one says he likes my hat and shoes. They are high on heroin. One asks for money. I say I don’t have any. They get in my face. I am very afraid but pull off the nice guy, I am here to help you act. One guy looks like he has a machete in his pants. He does.

I am going to get robbed or worse I feel. They egg him on. I take his picture. I say that I will make them famous and put them on the cover of National Geographic. They like this and suddenly begin to pose with me. I am afraid but also calm. When I raise the camera I find myself automatically watching myself as well as the exposure and composition. I watch my fear from somewhere else and am almost amused at my own terror when I look at a photo I have taken. It’s all over my face. I find myself laughing. Thank God for digital.

I squeeze out and two guys in football shirts approach me and tell me about a sick child who needs my help. I think they want to get me away from the rest of the crew. I feel my insides implode. I rush off to where the rest of the crew and Joshua are further down the street. Crowds hem me in and push me. Guys are going wild and things are slipping out of control. I walk slowly to Eric and Eric says we have to leave. A riot is beginning and we are the focus of it. We leave, trying to walk calmly with yelling and screaming all around and the car is not where it should be. He has parked further up the road. A crowd follows and they are very angry. They ask for money like it is owed to them. The general is talking to them and he seems to keep himself between them and us. I decide to hit the first person that goes for me with the camera. I change lenses, as I don’t want to ruin the wide lens and replace it with the 35-70 as I walk.

They follow us on the road as we walk away screaming and yelling. “You come here like this and just leave man…show some respect, I want something from YOU.” Such a sense of entitlement. It was to be a recurring Liberian theme during the process of film making.

Joshua promises food for the people at Xolalli and on compulsion Eric, Joshua and myself stay behind and the rest leave in the car to buy rice. Later we walk back to Xolalli from the car, with Joshua and the rice that has just been bought. People are fighting and screaming. A tall guy warns me not to take photographs.

Guys come up to me and ask for money aggressively. Women are given food first and the lady whose brother Joshua had killed, comes to the front of the line shoving and screaming for her quota. Women fight and grapple behind me. I am hemmed in. A man is stabbed but I don’t see it and hear about it only later from Joshua. I talk my way out of some things. I stay close to the general but he has problems of his own being inundated with people.

He pauses in the middle of the chaos and is silent.

Joshua makes a phone call and in 5 minutes about 10-15 guys from the “forgiveness rally” land up. They help organize things and after awhile some of the young men go crazy and Joshua tells me to get into the car “now”. One of the guys is frothing at the mouth. Taking a picture now might not be the best thing. I put the camera on the floor and put my foot on it as they try to grab it through the window. They are all over the car running alongside it, banging on the windows and trying to grab at stuff. One jumps on the car as we drive off and hangs on for a while before dropping off. He shouts when he hits the road.

After this we go to the church to wait for Pastor Kun. I decide that if the UN pulled out, this place would go to hell very soon. I wonder at the systems people have faith in here. The church to some could be a refuge. They are no other functioning systems. No justice system or properly functioning rule of law. No trustworthy government, yet. We horse around in the church. Joshua jokingly tells me he will cut my d— off as his wife says I am cute. I pose for a photo with them and he suddenly lifts me up over his head. It is awkward, this new familiarity and I laugh as he lifts me because I really don’t know what else to do. He is incredibly strong and I imagine what his strength could have done to women and children in the days when he killed and tortured.

At night Joshua emails his mother some photographs I took at the forgiveness rally he had organized the previous day. I type for him on my computer as he dictates.

Dear Mom,

This is the rally for acceptance. We appealed to the society yesterday for every harm the child soldiers has caused. We took the blame because we were the ones who forced them to take arms. Now we do not feel better that the society accepts us and reject them. We appeal to their parents and relatives to please accept them and made them to confess their sins openly and appeal for forgiveness. Fifty of them are accepted by the church and they are trying to cater for them. The church in Liberia is not strong yet but they are trying. Mom it was touching yesterday when the society came embracing and accepting their children again. I wish I could put these guys in a home and get people to train them. I am feeling really good! Love you mom,

Joshua and Josie

Danielle chats with Joshua and asks how he felt when people were screaming when he killed them. Joshua said he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong and spoke of how he had been conditioned to do the same since he was 11.His father was a high priest of the Krahn tribe and he had taken part in many human sacrifices including those of children. He would swim out into rivers and drag swimming children into the depths where he would kill them. He said he initially thought that Jesus was just another powerful deity and that he had chosen Jesus, as he thought he was more powerful than his deity. Initially.

Joshua tells me about how spirits can latch onto vulnerable people. He tells me about his astral traveling and how he would lock himself in a room when he astral traveled because if his body was moved, his spirit would not have found the body again. He would astral travel and latch onto other people and tie up their spirits so that they would be comatose in the morning. He tells me of haunted houses where spirits would not believe themselves dead. And of the people he murdered then and about the scar on his forehead. About spiritual attacks on him and that they were actual physical attacks. I ask Joshua about his dreams and he says he recently had a terrible nightmare where the ghosts of people he had killed were trying to kill his children. He would carry them through a house trying to evade the spirits who wanted to kill them.

Today we are to film Joshua’s baptism. We meet Doug an Aussie preacher who is to do the baptism and drive down to the beach at 14th street. Doug according to Joshua has been preaching in Liberia for 51 years. Joshua considers him a mentor and a great man. He gives Joshua instructions to close his eyes and fall back into the sea. Doug reads from the Bible about how Paul persecuted the Christians but came over to Christ. Joshua listens carefully, slightly hunched and respectful. He is baptized. He suddenly runs into the sea and swims through the waves.

We head to the “Africa Hotel “post lunch to shoot the master interview. It is unbelievably hot. The building has been destroyed, cannibalized and abandoned. The jungle grows into rooms here. It creeps in.

The interview is cut short by rain. Joshua is asked questions about what he did and how he feels about his personal accountability. He says that he was in the control of spirits and his way of life then was all he knew. He would do anything for his deity. He felt all people belonged to his deity. He is not at all hesitant and does not blink when he answers.

A Journal excerpt.

“There is something dark here that is primitive, violent and expressed openly. Our so called humanity of the “west” sometimes obscures these dark parts of our nature whose existence we reject and thus allow for them to manifest in so many ways. This idea of an island, where we believe in judgment days and paradises, “end times” to misery and perfect countries for freed slaves. We want to believe in universal peace, justice and goodness. The truth is that our existences are circles of shadow and light, murder and forgiveness, peace and war. Our deepest most primitive archetypes come forth and are as much a part of us as we believe they are a part of our enemies. It will always be no matter the islands we imagine. Our history is more gigantic, more beautiful, and more terrifying than what we know of it.”

We drive back after the interview. I sit in the car with Joshua. Hours of recounting his crimes seem to have drained him. We head to the building by the bridge he once controlled and shoot Joshua recounting the battle. He tells us how the warlords he fought against Prince Johnson and Charles Taylor had all the food and how he would cut up human corpses for food. In the distance stretches the bridge so many people died upon. A child stands in the shadows. I take a photo of Joshua and the kid in frame. Joshua walks up to the child and says “strong man” and shakes the child’s hand. Ryan films.

“The banality of evil” is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt that was used to describe how the greatest evils in human history were not executed by psychopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and participated with the view that their actions were normal and ordinary. People do not have faith in systems that do not deliver justice and jail terms to perpetrators, no matter how good they might turn out eventually. However, disease, war and horror weren’t the only things that exited Pandora’s box. The last thing to exit was hope. If someone as atrocious as the general can attempt to redeem himself, regardless of whatever idea of justice prevails or its execution and regardless of the good or bad opinion of anyone, there is hope. Before he begs for forgiveness, he had to forgive himself. Healing comes with confession and then hopefully, forgiveness. Healing for all sides.

And that is hope. Maybe for all of us.

Please visit Ryan Lobo for more photos and stories.

“Zapatistas”, heroes from the last century, by Jon Guido Bertelli

Jon Bertelli — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 05:08:41 +0000

Don Galo
© Jon Bertelli
Please visit “Zapatistas”, heroes from the last century, by Jon Guido Bertelli for the full size image.

Text and photographs by Jon Bertelli.

Farewell my life, by Don Galo

I shall speak to the world and its people,
through poetry and poems;
although some cause great joy and happiness;
others cause pain, sorrow and sadness,
others cause displeasure, anger and rage.

It doesn’t matter! Such is time and life,
intricate with sadness and happiness,
anger and rage.

Farewell my life, my loyal partner;
I was a strong man, alluring and brave;
you gave me all you could offer,
thank you my life.

Day by day I’m drifting away from you;
seeking for a new joyful and eternal life,
of peace and happiness.

Farewell comrades of war,
my friends,
to you I bid this final goodbye,
farewell.

Original spanish version at the end of the article1

Mateo Zapata, son of Emiliano Zapata
© Jon Bertelli
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In the State of Morelos, during the Agrarian Revolution of the South, 1910-1920, Emiliano Zapata and his courageous fighters (men and women) battled fearlessly for the rights of their people against injustice, under the common cry of “Tierra y Libertad” (“Land and Freedom”).

I spent the greater part of the two years that I lived in Mexico, during the mid-late 1990s, in search of the last surviving Zapatista veterans from those distant years.

My search was focused in the state of Morelos, where the Revolution of the South started; Pancho Villa was the leader of the Revolution of the North.

While the “kid” of those photographed and interviewed was 99 years of age, most of the other veterans had surpassed the magic age of 100, survivors from the last century. Three of the veterans passed away a few days after I met them.

Zapata's grandson
© Jon Bertelli
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They were people who left their belongings behind to follow the heroic figurehead Emiliano Zapata. Finding refuge in the surrounding hills for up to 10 years and fighting guerilla warfare, dedicated to bettering the plight of the common man.

Their hardened character for survival was forged through years of battles, bloodshed and hardships.

Not only did they give up their own lives for their ideals, they even sent their own children to continue the fight.

Always friendly, they would welcome me into their homes, where they told me about their experiences and life during the revolution.
They talked with such passion about a past so close to their hearts, as if it were a part of their present. When I learned more about these intrepid people made frail and minute with the passing of the years, they reached dimensions of giants in my mind.

Most of the veterans whom I met, had been awarded for their bravery during the revolution with the medals of Merito Periodo Revolucionario and a few also with that of Legion de Honor.

Teniente de Caballeria Don Galo Pacheco Valle

Teniente de Caballeria Don Galo Pacheco Valle
© Jon Bertelli
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(Cavalry Lieutenant) Teniente de Caballeria Don Galo Pacheco Valle, joined the revolutionary forces of Emiliano Zapata in 1913, with his two older brothers and his trusted Mauser rifle. A survivor of many battles, he told me that the incoming bullets sounded to him like a swarm of bees and with a smile added that one of them bit off the lobe of his left ear. After the revolution he became a homeopathic doctor, a poet and the principal of a school in his small town of Cocoyoc. Even with the many years weighing on him, he was clear minded and still happily working as a homeopathic doctor when I met him. Not only a recipient of the Merito Periodo Revolucionario and Legion de Honor, but had also been honored by the state of California, U.S.A. He passed away in 2002; well into his 100s.

Don Vidal Paredes

Don Vidal Paredes
© Jon Bertelli
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Don Vidal Paredes, born in 1898 and passed away at the age of 100. His weapon of choice during the revolution was the favorite of many Zapatistas, the classic Winchester 30-30, because of its quick lever-action firing power. I visited him on several occasions and always found him waiting for me under a portrait of Emiliano Zapata, with his Winchester in hand and a medal proudly pinned to his chest. His usually jovial eyes would become stern and fixed when telling me about the suffering of those far gone days, transporting me back in time with him. My good friend Don Vidal, passed away just a few weeks after his 100th birthday.

Dimas Leyva

Dimas Leyva
© Jon Bertelli
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Dimas Leyva, born in 1892, loved life and singing corridos (Mexican popular narrative songs). A witness to the killing of Emiliano Zapata at the Hacienda of Chinameca, Morelos where his body was riddled by the many bullets fired by the soldiers waiting in an ambush.

When I first met Dimas, I found him sitting by the edge of his bed as he emerged in the darkness of the room, with only a faint light peeking through the slightly opened window. As soon as I told him that I wanted to photograph him, he quickly picked up an old print of his general, Emiliano Zapata, wishing to be photographed with him.
Being with his beloved general once again, filled him with such pride that the light in the room, appeared to concentrate on the two of them, like the spotlight on a stage.

Dimas passed away only a couple of days after I photographed him.

Cavalry General Pantaleón

Cavalry General Pantaleón
© Jon Bertelli
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When I was first introduced to Cavalry General Pantaleón, I was welcomed by his thunderous voice and personality. I noticed his long bushy eyebrows; each turned the opposite direction of the other, as it having a life on their own. He was known in town for his past as a Zapatista fighter, for his lively personality, his enjoyment to work on his small parcel of land and his afternoon visits to the local “Cantina” for some Tequila.

He invited me to take a seat in his small living room, where he told me about his ideals and the battles in which he participated in. As he told me, while the many photographs and busts of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, pieces of his revolutionary memorabilia adorning the walls, appeared to be looking down at us with consent.

Suddenly he stood up, lifted his shirt to show me a large scar running across his belly and with his characteristic laugh told me that nobody believed him, that at his age, he would have survived the recent operation of removing a bullet that had been lodged in his body since the revolution. With a firm tone he said: “Mira, … nadie me creyó, pero aqui estoy mas vivo que nunca!” – “Si señor!” (“Look, … nobody would believe me, but here I am more alive than ever!” – “Yes Sir!)

José Manuel Gabino Corona

José Manuel Gabino Corona
© Jon Bertelli
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José Manuel Gabino Corona, a quiet and noble man with the rank of a captain in Zapata’s infantry. Although happy to have survived the revolution, he was sad about his many young companions who had died at a young age during those dreadful years of the war.

Marcelino Anrobio Montes

Marcelino Anrobio Montes
© Jon Bertelli
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Marcelino Anrobio Montes, born in 1896. Marcelino fought and rode with Emiliano Zapata from the time he was just a young teenager in 1911, until the year when E. Zapata was killed in 1919. He had a severe and piercing stare that would only relax when his wife, a niece of E. Zapata was close to him, often with her arm on his shoulders or wrapped around him. Barely visible, their dog would follow them everywhere at a distance, guarding and keeping a watchful eye on them, aware of their fragility.

Benjamin Sanchez Medina

Benjamin Sanchez Medina
© Jon Bertelli
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Benjamin Sanchez Medina and his wife invited me into their home, located in the small town of Chinameca, only a few blocks from where Emiliano Zapata, betrayed by Colonel Jesús Guajardo on April 10th – 1910, was shot and fell lifeless from his majestic horse “As de oro” (“Golden Ace”). Benjamin said with a sparkle in his one good eye (he had lost sight in one), “El caballo de Zapata no era cualquier caballo!” (“Zapata’s horse was not like any other horse!”) Benjamin and his wife still looked like the perfect young couple in love.

Their many happy grandchildren surrounded us while their friends peeked through the window, wondering about all the attention surrounding the old and proud warrior.

Señora Angela Zamora

Señora Angela Zamora
© Jon Bertelli
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How can I ever forget the sweet and determined girl who followed Emiliano Zapata and his troops? She joined the Zapatistas at a young age, at first carrying provisions, helping with cooking, rolling cigars for Emiliano Zapata, loading the rifles and later actively participating in the fighting. She was one of the many women who fought courageously in bringing a positive outcome to the armed struggle that they were part of.

At first she did not want to have her photograph taken, believing the photograph would rob her of her soul. Fortunately I had brought a Polaroid camera with me, I told her that I would take her photograph and give her soul back. As soon as I handed her the instant photograph and after taking a good look at it her face lit up with a big smile, she promptly positioned herself toward the warm sunlight and consented to let me photograph her.

* * *

Medals
© Jon Bertelli
Please visit “Zapatistas”, heroes from the last century, by Jon Guido Bertelli for the full size image.

More than ten years have passed since I last saw my “Old friends”, they have left us to join their companions in arms and their “El Jefe” (“The Boss”, as he was also known) Emliano Zapata. I miss their quick wits and their positive outlook on life enjoying every minute of it, their strength and their noble ideals, which still echo through the hills of Morelos and across Mexico

I’m grateful to Zapata’s family members and the families of the Zapatistas who spent countless days with me looking for the veterans, without them this project would not have been possible.

Winchester 30-30
© Jon Bertelli
Please visit “Zapatistas”, heroes from the last century, by Jon Guido Bertelli for the full size image.

A special thank you to all my friends in the state of Morelos, they made my two years in beautiful Mexico a much more personal and special chapter in my life.

Please visit Jon Bertelli website for more informations and photos.

Adios vida mia

Hablaré al mundo y a la gente,
por medio de poesías y poemas;
aunque algunas causan gran gozo y alegría;
otras causan pena, dolor y tristeza,
otras causan molestias, furores y rabias.

¡No importa! Así es el tiempo y la vida,
compleja de tristezas y alegrías,
furores y rabias.

Adiós vida mía, mi fiel compañera;
fui hombre fuerte, magnético y valiente;
tú me diste de todo lo que tienes,
gracias vida mía.

Me voy alejando [de] ti, día tras día;
voy buscando una nueva vida feliz y eterna,
de paz y alegría.

Adiós compañeros de Guerra,
amigos y amigas,
de vos me despido para siempre,
adiós.

Terre des Oublis, by Steven Greaves

Steven Greaves — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:44:28 +0000

Text1 and photography by Steven Greaves.

The history of migration to Calais, France is a long, complicated and often violent one. Tears have been shed and blood has been spilled on the streets of this once-prosperous small town in northern France. Despite some media coverage, it is still Terre des Oublis- the land of the forgotten.

For those asylum seekers here, the United Kingdom (about 21 miles beyond the horizon) is seen as the Promised Land. Currently, most migrants are from war-torn Afghanistan or Sudan’s Darfur region. Many have paid large sums of money to get this far. Others have walked treacherous mountain passes or crossed vast deserts for the chance at freedom. Tales of woe- family members lost at sea, beatings by local authorities, running from gunfire- are commonplace. Many are here by choice; they seek a better economic future and the possibility to send money to far away families. Others are here of necessity; to remain in their homelands would assure their death or that of their families.

For the Sudanese population, the road leads up through Libya, across the Mediterranean and, usually, into Italy where an often hostile and racist local population awaits. Once there, the path leads to France. For the Afghans, most come across Iran, Turkey and, through the Evros border, into Europe. From there, they too make their way to France.

Calais is the staging ground for the final push into the U.K. and a perceived better life. To have made it this far without incident is rare. To make it to England from here, even rarer. They do so by stowing away on cargo trucks, oftentimes by clinging to axels. Others stow away on trains that ply the Channel Tunnel. Only the strong, persistent and lucky will attain the dream.

I began this project in early January, 2010 while the winds blew icy blasts down from the North Sea and snow settled on rooftops. Twinkling bulbs, green and red, illuminated the dark nights and trees stood naked in the glow. I have now seen the days grow longer and the trees budding. Children, no longer swaddled from head to toe, ride their bikes in dizzying circles and young couples walk through sun-drenched parks hand in hand. But, in the shadows, the migrants still wait their turn. They cling to a meager existence. It is one of boredom, frustration and a never-ending game of cat and mouse played out with local and national police forces.

Most of the Sudanese take refuge in an abandoned warehouse. Skylights, in checkerboard array, dot the roof and allow the sunlight access. Through broken panes, the rain often falls. Many of the walls are destroyed in places and the wind cuts through often carrying, with it, a chill. With no electricity, the nights are dark and the only light is that from numerous fire pits. The floor is destroyed in places and gaping holes await the unsuspecting; caution is required after nightfall. There is no access to running water or toilet facilities and basic sanitation is lacking. About 80 migrants and one solitary cat live amongst the decaying detritus. Continually hassled by local police (CRS), they sleep in tents, upon wooden shipping pallets or on filthy discarded mattresses. Most live in a state of fear and constant vigilance. To be caught here or upon the streets of Calais will result in arrest or worse, deportation back to the darkest of continents.

Until recently, the Afghan population had been sleeping and taking shelter under unused rail cars out beyond the city limits. Like the Sudanese asylum seekers, they faced daily visits from police forces, arrest and deportation. Many have worked for ISAF forces as translators or have otherwise collaborated against the Taliban. For this, death threats have been uttered and most have left Afghanistan in fear of their lives or that of their family’s. Now, the rail cars have been removed and their numbers dispersed upon to the streets of Calais.

Despite the conditions and the sense of hopelessness, these men go on. Within the suffering, they find a humanity rare to witness. I have seen in them uncommon resilience and mental prowess even as each day unfolds and England becomes more of a distant dream.

Steven Greaves documentary of illegal immigration from Afghanistan and or Sudan’s Darfur region.
Please visit Terre des Oublis, by Steven Greaves for the full size image.

It is a difficult world to penetrate. Migrants have seen cadres of journalists come through. Some come for a day or two, launching cameras into their faces. As the frames click by, there is little regard for their dignity. Others have come through, returned home and have published inflammatory stories bent on selling newspapers to an ever-increasing xenophobic public. There is also a fear of recognition. Their presence here is illegal and many are fearful that published likenesses will lead to arrest should they ever make it across the English Channel. The fear of recognition also extends to that of their family members. For many reasons- mostly pride- many asylum seekers tell their families that they are already in the UK, employed and are living comfortable lives. They fear that, if photographed, the realities of their plights will be exposed to those back home. Many prefer not to go through the hassle.

Initially suspect of my intentions, I was eventually invited into their world. For days I stood on the periphery and voyeuristically looked in. Endless smiles, cigarettes, shared cups of chai and patience has closed the distance between our two worlds. As the tensions evaporated and trust was established, the camera came out ever more increasingly. Hassan, from Darfur, and Malik, from Jalalabad, were invaluable. The bonds we formed paved the way for additional friendships and access to the rest of the community.

Their life is now my life and mine, theirs. I eat from the charity organizations as they do, sleep amongst the decay and spend countless hours staring into the flames. As the shadows dance on charred walls and silence settles in, I, too, think of a wife and loved ones left behind. I try my hand at dominos always destined to lose. Their card games escape me and laughter is frequent. We sit around and talk about home, families, their plights and the realities of life in Terre des Oublis. Unlike them, however, I do not run from the routine raids that have become ever more prevalent. I am white, moneyed and enjoy the privileges offered by my nationality. While they scramble into dark crevices, under moldering floors or over barbed wire fences and walls, I stand.

I can only bear witness and hope that my work will, somehow, strike a chord with those that hold the pens of power. This is, however, an ambitious and extremely unlikely conclusion. Through my civil disobedience, I have further gained their trusts. They have seen me struck by police batons, rocks heaved in my direction and gloved hands rough me up. I have stood firm, all the while touting the rights of the free press, not for me…..but for them. I cannot guarantee that my work will change the minds of those that view it. I cannot assure them that the laws governing this issue will be redrafted to allow for compassion and humanity. I can, however, promise them that I will stand with them for as long as I am here.

“Mehadeen, one cigarette!” “Mehadeen, how you?” “Mehadeen, you want chai?” It is Arabic for a kind of holy man. I am told that he is one who protects the faith and watches over the weak. It is a badge of honor, they say. “You good man, Mehadeen!” I do not ever forget the privileges I have been granted on the railroad tracks and in this abandoned warehouse somewhere in northern France. I am inspired by the courage of these men living in Terre des Oublis. I can only hope that my work shows their dignity, humanity, perseverance and strength.

Please visit Steven Greaves web site for more stories and photographs.

A shorter version of this articles is available on fotovisura.

Camila, by Veronika Marquez

Veronika Marquez — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:29:03 +0000

Text and photographs by Veronika Marquez.

One day while I was assisting the master of photographic reportage class, we were looking at a work that dealt with prostitution. Everybody was talking about the quality of the work, about how good the photographs were and what an adventure it must have been for the photographer to have been there.

I went through such an experience more than once. When I looked at those photographs the only thing I felt was anger, distress and impotence because those photographs were a lie for me, part of a reality captured through the eyes of a photographer who surely believed he was very good for just having been able to be there.

I understand that there are stories that deserve to be reported, however, this does not only happen in the lives of prostitutes; we are not all victims and not all of us were mistreated.

I knew this world, I spent several years in it, got to know about 400 girls and more than 20 places with different characteristics but I never came across somebody with the characteristics shown in these photographs.

Why always choosing the same face, why all prostitutes have to appear as wretched, why always show them as poor, why always this sensationalism to put these girls in situations of misfortune?

I could assure that these photographs are far cry away from what I experienced.

This was one reason that made me move away from the photographic reportage. I thought: the day that I would have to take photographs, let’s say of “gypsies”, I would go to live with them, eat with them and even have some gypsy friends, however, in my photographs only my view of them would be reflected, their reality passed through my filter with already preconceived social ideas. Certainly, a gypsy who would look at my work would not find himself reflected in it.

All this made me feel powerless because I realised how little we are able to know about others and how arrogant we are to think that we see everything.

In my capacity as a photographer that I am now, I knew that I had a story to tell. I knew that I could speak better of something that I really had lived through myself and that it would be better than just to intrude into the life of someone else with a view from outside.

Time passed and I continued making similar works avoiding thinking about it. However, there came a moment when I was confronted again with this issue and with more force. As a photographer I had to tell it.

My life was already “normal”, the past far behind me, when I started to brood a lot about the decision of changing my life again and of abandoning the supposed tranquillity that I had achieved. The challenge was to start to explore avenues whose ends escaped from my ultimate control. I was afraid of being rejected by the people close to me but I was aware that if they would really like me, they would accept me how I am, with my past and present, and that if persons would be left behind on my way, it was because it was meant to be like that.

This was how the decision was taken. I had to speak about it. There was no way back.

I knew, in principle, how to tell the story and wanted to avoid falling into a cliché.

It took me along time before starting to take my first photographs.

I spent one year thinking about how to tell it: I recurred to images of the past, was faced with many questions, relived my story from the very beginnings when I was 16 years old, and asked myself why I had done it.

There were many things to be told, I visited many places of which each had its own set of rules, and this is the strongest weapon for walking with security through these worlds. I had made the acquaintance of so many girls with their stories, and many men, and through them their women and children. It was impossible for me to show all of it in the photographs. I could have written a book but to make photographs proved to be more difficult than I had thought.

I still had access to places that I used to frequent, I could have used them, I could have included some sex or resorted to some strong images. In principle, this would have been the easiest thing to do, however, it would have meant, for my taste, to fall into vulgarity. I looked for something different for my work.

I spent hours thinking, reliving everything. Months had passed and “Camila”, my old nom de guerre, resurged from the past. Now she was there, past and present together.

So I started with some test photographs. I already had a clear conception: the two of us would be together. I realised this in my photographs.

I continued the dialogue with my other character, talking to her, talking to myself I realised that almost everything that I am know I learnt from that former life. Walking through dangerous worlds is like walking through the jungle without so many masks; everything is more humane, revealing the true nature of our existence. Camila had to learn as she went along how to deal with all sorts of people, with danger and adventure. Every day she learned through the contact with people how to resolve negative situations, and I preserved what was good for her.

Now we were two in the photographs and both of us were very much alive. Being there together the two of us as if we were friends – and we were friends – today, at my place, in Madrid or in Montevideo, made it feel as if all this time had served to find and to accept us.

I search for the framing, use a 50 mm lens to avoid deformations and mount the camera on a tripod. I measure the light where I imagine my girls would be. I had previously made performance photography, and had used in my photographs self-performance and self-portrait. So I placed myself as the person that I am today, Verónica, and then as Camila. Same scene, same person, with past and present, I combine them with Photoshop in order to obtain the final idea.

The first photograph I took was at Christmas.

The plant visible on the photograph can be seen a lot in Spain during this season. It was taken just a few days ago since I received it as a present. The photograph is simple: Camila and I are there at my place in Madrid, talking about our matters while I look after the plant.

There we are. Camila tells Vero things, most likely how she spent the last night and whom she met. Vero prepares a mate for them so that they can start a new day together.

I am aware that my photographs are subtle: a simple glance will not do. Nobody could know that this is self-portrait photography, that we are the same person. I use the same resource as in the press: the text modifies the look on the photograph.

This is also true for Camila. It is necessary to read this bottom of the page, to read this text in order to understand what the photographs are about.

The colours are bright, subtle, even a bit saturated. Everything is clean, in all photographs there is light because I want to pull Camila, this prostitute girl, out of the darkness.

Every photograph has its shadow, its space. Both girls are present in my photographs, and those who look at them cannot deny it.

I end my work with a video.

The technique used is the same as for the photographs: a tripod-mounted camera and off the action goes. I took different scenes, which I edited with a video-editing programme later.

I thought of it as being dance choreography. There was a script with actions that repeated themselves with their own times and rhythms.

I must admit that my original idea had been different. I do not remember how it was but I know that the idea of two screens did not exist. What came last was the script with the actions to be performed as if they were a choreography: putting on the makeup, arranging my hair and putting on the wig. The sequence consisted in dressing myself as Camila and undressing myself as Verónica.

I took the takes and returned with the material home. When seeing all the scenes separately, almost without thinking about it, the video was finished. I arrived with the material I had to the final composition almost by way of magic.

With Santoral del Sábado, a poem by the Mexican writer Jaime Sabines, I pay tribute to my old profession.

I read the poem of this video some time ago in Montse’s blog, a girl form Barcelona, who is still working as a prostitute, and fell in love with it.

I learned the poem by heart, rehearsed it as if it were a theatre monologue, and the body started to find a away of accompanying it. Tripod-mounted camera, two spotlights and off the filming went.

At present, when I show my work, people usually thing that I have realised my full potential as photographer. I honestly believe that the work of a photographer, as many other professions, can at times become degrading if we have to make the impossible to sell our photographs, when we are paid so little without taking into account the involved work. Instead, I should shout with Camila from the rooftops that I have never felt humiliated, unworthy or unfree in my previous profession. Quite the opposite, I was free of moral and aesthetic prejudice, free to spend my free time as I wanted.

Today, I am the same person with a new set of rules who acts in the same way as back then.

Please visit Veronika Marquez for more photographs.

A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova

Alexandra Demenkova — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:58:31 +0000

Natasha and Sergey, Unezhma, Russia, 2007
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

Following text1 and photographs by Alexandra Demenkova.

1.

I started to do my first photographic projects in Russia, in Saint-Petersburg and in the region, near the town where I was born. It happened naturally because of the fact that I didn’t have an opportunity to travel at the time, and it turned out to be a great advantage – I knew about the places which remain non-existant for most people, thus, in a way, I photographed a parallel reality. This became a continuous quest for exploration – meeting people who live hidden and unnoticed by society. One of the first places I went was an old people’s home.

Mental hospital in Peterhof, Russia, 2005
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

This experience was eye-opening for me. It made me realise a lot of things, it made me think how fragile this world of relative stability created by our families is, how thin is the borderline between health, both mental and physical, and sickness; the normality of everyday life and misery; freedom and lifetime imprisonment. In the stories and in the lives of the people I saw hope and despair; all the possible emotions and situations that I heard or read of, now were not on the pages of the books, on a television screen, on a theatre stage, but here they were, in front of me, real, the first-hand experience of life, without any intermediaries.

Garbage dump in Kingisepp, Russia, 2006
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

Then I was able to expand, to do some travels to different regions of Russia, to start realizing what a huge country it is and come to thinking what this component is, besides the territory and language, that unites us and is common for all of us. Sometimes it felt like there was none, as if I was on another planet, even if I was in a village two hundred km away from Moscow. I met people who never traveled outside their villages; they would dream of going to Moscow or Saint- Petersburg, but would never be able to realise their dream.

Mental hospital in Neppovo, Russia, 2006
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

2.

Since I was a child the most remarkable time was holidays, travels by train across the country. Not the ones with my mother, those were rather regular ones, we always went to the same place and met the same people – my grandmother, my grandfather, my aunt, my cousin. No, these were not real adventures. Real adventures were when I traveled with my father or my grandmother, my father’s mother. Then, I had more freedom. And there was more variety in our trips. We went across the country to various places, staying with different families all the time. Both my father and grandmother were really good with people. For me these trips were the first experience of communicating with strangers of different ages, normally, adults, and making friends with them. I would walk along the coach and talk to other travelers or go to the compartment of the train attendant and talk to her (normally, it would be a woman). And, surely enough, I was thinking, I would like to do this job, when I grow up.

Mental hospital in Neppovo, Russia, 2006
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

The trains, the railway stations, night stops, arriving to new places at night, eating there, sleeping in a new bed, these things filled me with happiness, curiosity and impatience. The sound of the train departing, changes in the rhythm of the wheels, made my heart beat quicker with new expectations.

As I was growing up, I believed, the childish freshness of perception and emotions would disappear, but, time after time, they proved to have remained the same.

Gypsies, Novosokol'niki, Russia, 2006
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

When we would arrive to a new place, a village, I, normally shy and quiet, would go totally out of control, sometimes scaring animals at farms where we stayed, and once misbehaving till the point that relatives asked my father not to bring me there anymore. And, however seriously I promised my father and myself to behave, I was hardly ever able to keep the promise. There was something in the air – the smells, the atmosphere of the whole trip that prevented me from being quiet and well behaved. I would have fun at village weddings along with everyone else, watch and contemplate, see situations occurring amidst this wild merriment and drinking. All this filled me with excitement and desire to blend with it and be part of it.

Gypsy chidren, Iskitim, Russia, 2006
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

3.

The places I go now come into being by chance – a conversation with friends, a childhood memory, a talk between some strangers…

I hear a name of the place that sounds as an invitation, which is full of mystery and seems to come from a fairy tale. Say, “Unezhma”, a word tender and scary at the same time – a disappearing village on the White Sea, a remote one; to get there one needs to walk across the woods the whole day, and in winter you can’t get there or out of there at all. Or, a mental institution in a village; people in my place would make jokes of it, but none of us would ever go there and see what it is like. These are the places that would suddenly become fascinating for me. They would provoke in me an irresistible desire to go there.

Gypsy children, Iskitim, Russia, 2006
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

You don’t know where you are going to sleep, whom you’ll have to share the room or even the couch with, if there would be any transport to get there or if you’d need to walk. Likewise, if you would be accepted, assumed to be a friend or an enemy, received as a stranger or as a fellow human being. You don’t know if people would trust you or be rather suspicious. You don’t know for how long you’d be able to stay there, or, for how long you’d want to stay. If by the time you’d leave you would be tired and longing to go away, or regret that you, presumably, are leaving forever, and would never see the people again, if you’d forget them and live on as if you never knew them, continue your own life just the same way as you did before, visit new places, whereas they would always stay there, till the end of their days, carry on their life with the very few changes, until they would die some of age or illness, others of drinking surrogate alcohol or in car accidents…

Funeral feast, Asureti Georgia, 2007
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

But, sometimes, a phone call that seems surreal, a voice of a gypsy girl who accompanied me in one of the villages and who is going to marry soon, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, but, surely, long before she turns twenty, appear to be a small thread that connects us.

But, otherwise, there is an invisible thread that connects us forever; it is memory. And this thread, this connection exists even if there are no phones or computers or e-mails, no way to communicate at all. And, it seems impossible that there are places not connected with the outer world in any way.

Two buckets of water, Unezhma, Russia, 2007
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

You may feel sorry for the people who live like that, in the everlasting poverty and without hopes for changes, but you feel happy that such places exist and you see that people who live there give each other and their children all their care and human warmth, instead of having computers as their best friends and scarcely talking to each other as it often happens in our homes. They are still able to gather around the table and talk for hours, and then, as there is no electricity and as you are far away from well lit with electric light cities, you can watch the stars, millions of stars, and feel that you are part of the universe.

A boy getting out of the water, Kastornoe, Russia, 2008
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

Progress is a good thing, of course, and poverty should disappear once, and there should be left no places like this, but how great it is that that there are thousands of small and godforsaken places on Earth of which we never heard of and which we would never visit, but they exist, lost in space and time.

Maybe, once, they will become less poor, they will have houses with electricity and running water, and refrigerators, and microwaves, and many other things that we normally have, but would it make them any happier?

A shepherd and a horse, Krasnaya Dolina, Russia, 2008
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

4.

For me photography became a means of dealing with people. It is one of the forms of communication and comprehension. I go to places and face situations which I wouldn’t encounter otherwise, without my camera. Sometimes I ask myself, what could be another capacity of mine that would allow me to meet the people, that could serve me as a licence to enter their lives, and I don’t find any answer.

Romka and Dimka, Kastornoe, Russia, 2008
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

Sometimes I feel like a magician, sometimes – a worthless person who bothers them without any reason. In any case, I am glad that photography has happened to me; I became more than a spectator at the same time remaining only a spectator.
I think photography suits my temper a lot – I like the fact that every single picture is created in a fraction of a second.

When I photograph I feel much better than when I don’t. It is as if I start to feel the firm ground under my feet, or I forget that it’s not there at all. I believe, this explains everything.

Please find some more great photographs on Alexandra Demenkova website.

Woman in the field, Strugi, Russia, 2007
© Alexandra Demenkova
Please visit A parallel reality, by Alexandra Demenkova for the full size image.

Already published on the paper magazine “Kaze no Tabibito”, 2010 №6, vol.40, “Find the root”, Eurasia Travel Co., Ltd.

Life Lessons: The Journey Within, by Izabella Demavlys

Izabella Demavlys — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:00:15 +0000

Text and photographs by Izabella Demavlys.

Last year I made a huge shift from fashion photography towards documentary work. After years of struggling and trying to find my voice within fashion, I suddenly realized that it was not my calling. My fashion work couldn’t engage the viewers in any way. It was not changing any perspectives or behaviors, inspiring or making any meaningful points.

In the fall of 2009 I made the drastic decision to travel to Pakistan to meet women whom had survived brutal Acid attacks. After having been involved in the fashion world for years, listening and observing people ideas about beauty, I went to Pakistan in search for my own vision of what that word really meant. My viewpoint being that beauty isn’t merely about appearance, but the triumph of personal struggles, the radiation of inner strength and accomplishments throughout life.

Lately I’ve been challenged with a lot of questions about my work. My introverted personality combined with the difficulty of expressing my artistic feelings aloud is in direct contrast with the work I am doing today. Being a photographer focusing on sensitive subject matter, one needs to not only visually express oneself in a remarkable way, but also be able to articulate their viewpoints verbally and in writing. During my fashion years I could hide behind beautiful images and not being forced to say a word. Today I have to be able to speak openly about my work.

Excerpt from my interview with Paul Schmelzer, Eyeteeth, March 22nd, 2010:

“I was going around in circles for many years making meaningless work. Meaningless and uninspiring for others and for myself. When I saw a story about a young girl, an acid burn victim working as a beautician in Pakistan last year, I immediately thought, “this is a person I need to meet”. I thought this woman stood for everything I wanted to express with my work.”

In recent years we have seen more acid attacks being brought to our attention. Acid attacks are a common phenomenon in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh as well as other countries in South Asia. Stories about acid attacks have also recently surfaced in England. Last year in Pakistan the government introduced the, Pakistan Acid Prevention Bill, which will bring harder convictions on the attackers and regulations on the sale of acid.

The attacker is usually a family member; an abusive husband, relatives seeking revenge or the cause could be a refused marriage proposal. In other cases, attackers are no more than strangers on the street. Most of the attacks are done on women and if they are not killed, they are scarred mentally and physically for life.

Local as well as international NGO’s offer these women reconstructive surgery, therapy and psychological help. But the amount of victims exceeds the amount of help offered.

The first acid burn victim I met in Pakistan was Saira. I didn’t know where to look at first. At first I was ashamed of just wanting to stare at her, because it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before in real life, but after being accustomed to her scarred face, I embraced her courage. Watching her body language in communication with translators, I felt the radiation of her inner beauty.

An interviewer asked me recently, challenging my idea of these women being an inspiration to me and trying to convey that to others, “But don’t you think they see themselves as victims? I would be furiously bitter and angry.” Of course they see themselves as victims and I’m not trying to take that away from them. But what I also want to emphasize is; how are these women dealing with life today? Are they still ashamed? And are they still bitter?

Would you be bitter for the rest of your life, or would you at some point come to terms with it, determined to move forward and focus on the present and future?

In a world where beauty is mostly seen as something we carry upon our faces, how would you come to terms with living with a severely scarred face for the rest of your life?

“I cannot possibly think of getting married now. I could not face an abusive husband. I don’t want people to pity me. Right now I want to stand on my own feet and earn a living. Every person wishes that he or she is beautiful but in my view, your face is not everything. Real beauty lies inside a person, not outside.”

Saira, acid burn victim, The National, June 1, 2009

Some of the younger victims were still very traumatized by the attacks. Raffat, another burn victim that I photographed was only seventeen. Attacked by her own cousin after refusing to marry him, he took revenge on her while she was asleep only nine days before her wedding. At first she was calm but her fragile facade broke down when we sat down to talk about the night of the attack. I wish that she one day becomes as brave as Saira and eventually finds her way to deal with the horrifying situation that changed her life.

Most of these women showed me enormous amounts of strength and a willingness to keep on living. This is something we can all learn a great deal from. Some people go trough tremendous amounts of pain in their lives and still carry on. With awareness of current events and stories like these, we can hopefully learn to embrace our own lives and become more grateful. Common pettiness and complaints about one’s own cushy life is something I cannot tolerate after meeting with these women.

Moving back to my thoughts on beauty.

The Western world’s idea about beauty that I believe a lot of women struggle with is this: instead of accepting oneself, becoming a spiritually enriched person through meaningful activity, work and good health, a lot women often focus on shallower pursuits, especially younger women. How many TV-shows have we seen where young women fiercely compete in becoming supermodels? Everyone wants to be beautiful, like Saira mentioned before, but without being able to reflect anything from the inside. What do you have then?

In the end, who have you inspired and with what? What have you accomplished? Is being pretty an accomplishment?

My travels to Pakistan were not merely a shift towards documentary work, or a shift towards more understanding and empathy for other peoples’ circumstances of life. It was also a beginning towards a life lesson in self-expression, which will not only come through my photographs but also in expressing emotion through my language and voice.

This lesson in communication and expression is one that my work has required me to acknowledge, nourish and evolve with both personally and professionally.

Please visit Izabella Demavlys homepage.

White Sea Black Sea – travels on the Border, by Jens Olof Lasthein

Jens Olof Lasthein — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:09:20 +0000

Grigoriopol, Transnistria 2006
© Jens Olof Lasthein
Please visit White Sea Black Sea – travels on the Border, by Jens Olof Lasthein for the full size image.

Text and photographs by Jens Olof Lasthein.

I was born three years after the Berlin Wall was built. My childhood was marked by the division of Europe, the sharp line between East and West. External political conflict shaped inner mental boundaries that had to be confronted – who are they; who are we?

I travelled through Eastern Europe for the first time in the summer of 1984. At the age of 20, I had long wanted to see what life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the part of Europe I could only fantasise about growing up in the West. I didn’t doubt that the media image of a uniformly grey, comfortless world wasn’t the whole story, but I had little idea what to expect instead.

Transsylvania, Romania 2001
© Jens Olof Lasthein
Please visit White Sea Black Sea – travels on the Border, by Jens Olof Lasthein for the full size image.

I travelled the way I always did in those days: by hitch hiking. Highways were practically non-existent, so drivers had no trouble stopping to pick me up and I made my way at a slow but steady pace. Afterwards, I still wasn’t sure if I knew the answer to my question about what it was like on the other side, but at least I had met many Eastern Europeans.

There was Dora, quiet but somehow intense, whom I met in a Budapest restaurant when she left her telephone number on a napkin. Later I would live with her in Kazincbarcika, and I can still see her before me as we waved farewell outside the petrochemical factory where she worked.

There was the frightened silence in Sibiu when someone whispered “Securitate!” And the German woman, Gerda, who didn’t waste time worrying about the secret police but invited me in for dinner, serving smoked blubber in her dirt-floored kitchen. There was Kapika and his friends from Zaïre who lived in a student dormitory in Cluj, laughing uproariously at everything while preparing a feast from bits of meat, some onions and a few tomatoes. Handsome Kapika, who had a child with one Romanian woman and was having an affair with another.

Odessa, Ukraine 2006
© Jens Olof Lasthein
Please visit White Sea Black Sea – travels on the Border, by Jens Olof Lasthein for the full size image.

There were the two East German girls I met out on the puszta, Hungary’s semi-desert steppe, where we spent a night camping out under the stars. Awakened by lightning, we set out walking through a dark and rainy night toward huge gas flames shooting into the sky – a factory out in the middle of nowhere. The guard couldn’t believe his eyes when we showed up at the gate, but he was kind enough to let us in to get dry.

There was the old man, so fat it was a wonder I could get both myself and my backpack into his Trabant, which had to stop every other kilometre to let the spark plugs dry.

There was Bogdan from Krakow, who picked me up in Czechoslovakia. He was one of the few people who consented to speak Russian, the only language we had in common. Most people refused, even though everyone learned it in school. He invited me to visit him in Poland, where he took me on a tour of the enormous Nowa Huta steelworks. A year later, Bogdan’s wife Halina wrote me a letter to say that he had died in an accident with the same Polski Fiat in which I had hitched a ride, leaving her alone with two small children.

Kaliningrad, Russia 2007
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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There was the party in Katarina’s tiny apartment, where we squeezed together in her bed and sofa, enveloped in thick cigarette smoke, with Paweł Orkisz, always the life of the party, playing his guitar and alternating between his own songs and interpretations of Okudzhava and Vysotsky.

There was the Gypsy shepherd, who woke me early one morning as I slept under a tree, and had me watch the village cows while he ran off to buy a bottle of palinka brandy with my money.

There was Andrzej, whom I met at a café in Warsaw and who perhaps regretted inviting me home because his boyfriend Ryszard, a film photographer who always bought the drinks when we went out to bars, took a liking to me and spent most of the night trying to seduce me.

Tiraspol, Transnistria 2006
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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And there was the charcoal burner Karoly, who had fled from society to live in the Bükk nature preserve, where I was regaled with warnings of the coming downfall of civilisation under the crushing weight of individualism and consumerism.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. I remember the depressing sight of a Marlboro delivery lorry backing into Potsdamer Platz to bestow the long-deprived East Berliners with specially produced mini-packs of cigarettes. On the flip-top was printed: “Marlboro, the taste of freedom and adventure.”

A couple of years later the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and when I travelled to St. Petersburg in 1993, Russian society was just climbing out of the rubble of a collapsed system.

The years since then have seen new boundaries rise up between Europe’s east and west, and this is the borderland I have visited most recently, from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Isolated moments and fragments from these travels make up the images and tales in my book, White Sea Black Sea.

St. Petersburg – Tallinn, 1993

The train slows, finally coming to a stop. Outside is – nothing. I look questioningly at the jovial conductor with whom I am drinking tea and vodka in his tiny compartment.

“Hurry”, he says, pointing to a small station building with a light shining in one window.

We’ve come to the new border between Russia and Estonia.

St. Petersburg, Russia 1993
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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Suddenly the tracks are overrun by people trying to be first into the little structure. Chaos breaks out, with yelling, swearing and jostling. Industrious men try to push through the crowd with bundles of passports. It’s impossible to know which window to go to, but it’s obvious the right decision has to be made quickly. Even though I’ve abandoned all courtesy and joined in the shoving, I’m pushed further and further towards the back.

Now the ticket checker is beside me, gesturing for my passport. He disappears, and a sense of unease falls over me. Then I see him, over by the entrance, with a distressed look on his face. He furiously waves me over, pressing my passport into my hand and running ahead of me to the train. We’re barely aboard before the whistle blows and the train begins to chug away. Everyone who has failed to get the required stamp is left behind, watching us disappear into the night.

Arkhangelsk, 2005

“Come on! We’ll do it like we did in school!”

The two festively dressed gents on the quay look surprised as a half-naked man who has just climbed out of a motorboat dances around them with clenched fists. They try to ignore him, but it’s no use. He won’t give up. Finally, one has had enough and beats him to the ground with several quick blows and a well-aimed kick to the head.

Five minutes later the underwear-clad man is back, going after the other partygoer with renewed energy. But this guy is no worse than his buddy. A crunch, and then a thump as the back of the drunk’s head hits the asphalt.

Arkhangelsk, Russia 2005
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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Arkhangelsk. The very name rings of permafrost, darkness, endless forests and icy wastelands. But now it’s a new town. I walk for days on end, and when my legs won’t carry me any longer, sometime after midnight, I futilely attempt to close out the sunlight with a bedspread over the window. By 7 o’clock I give up and pull on my shoes again.

There’s electricity in the air. The throngs of people crowding the beachfront walkway never seem to want to go home, choosing instead to take a stroll over to the unknown soldier’s eternal flame, or the go-cart track wedged between the pier and the disco boats. The annoying whine of two-stroke motors doesn’t stop until well past midnight. The scent of sjasjlik – grilled meat on a stick – hangs heavy in the warm evening air. The midnight sun perches stubbornly on the distant horizon, refusing to drop below the arms of the river delta.

Kaliningrad, 2007

The girls look about the same age as my daughter, maybe 11 or so. Like young girls everywhere, they try to look older with make-up and high heels, short skirts and silver belts. A torrential rain is falling, and the ancient drainage system – a holdover from the time when this seaport was known as Königsberg – doesn’t have a chance of carrying away all the water. We stand in a doorway to keep out of the downpour, but when the girls see puddles grow into lakes they can’t hold back any longer. They run out into the street, laughing and shrieking.

Kaliningrad, Russia 2007
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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Shoes come off, and on, and off again – the girls can’t get enough of this. Now they’ve discovered that the road at the bottom of the hill has turned into a river that cars can barely get through. There, soaked to the skin, they completely forget the limitations that make-up and heels place on older girls.

Sofiyovka, 2005

The air stands still between the houses, and the puddles are evaporating under a strong sun. The only sound is a distant hammering and the clucking of a few hens and geese behind a fence. A bread truck breaks the near-silence, pulling in on the patch of dirt to deliver crates of newly baked loaves to a shop in what I thought was a ghost town.

Laughter and loud voices. An engine starts and a dented old car tears away in a cloud of dust. Outside the youth centre, Aleksandr wonders if I’d like to come inside. Light falls in through ragged lace curtains in chilly rooms that might have once served as a pioneers’ meeting hall. A wood stove, a few chairs and a disassembled motorcycle are the only furnishings apart from a three-legged pool table with one corner propped up by a chair.

Sofijovka, Belarus 2005
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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Aleksandr selects a cue, and with a crushing break shot sinks one ball. He moves to the other side of the table; I step around in the opposite direction. We have stopped speaking, and a curious tension builds with our slow movements around the table. Aleksandr ponders his next shot, sights along the length of the felt surface, changes his mind, goes back, aims carefully and shoots. He seldom misses.

Straightening his back, Aleksandr circles the table looking for a shot. He’s also moved into the right place for my shot – with a camera. “Stop,” I say. He looks up, and my lens pans slowly over the scene. When the motor stops humming, he cracks another ball into a corner pocket. Now whenever I like what I see through the viewfinder I just say “stop” and our eyes meet over the table for a long exposure, and then the game continues. I don’t know how long this goes on, but when I step outside into the hard sunlight it feels like I’ve been holding my breath for a very long time.

Stolnitsy, 2004

Alisa looks through the gate towards the high barbed-wire fence cutting across the main street a few dozen metres from her house. Has the neighbour on the other side come home yet?

Stolnitsy was once an ordinary Hungarian-speaking village under the dual monarchy. Then came World War I, and Stolnitsy became part of eastern Czechoslovakia. Nothing strange about that; borders in this corner of Europe have been moved fairly often during the course of history. But things got more complicated by the time World War II was over. The village was still Hungarian, but the Yalta Agreement gave the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union. Stolnitsy was split down the middle, right over the main street, with barbed wire, mine fields and a guard tower.

Stolnitsy, border between Ukraine and Slovakia
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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And that’s how it remains when I come to visit Alisa. The mine fields are gone and the old guard tower stands empty, but the cruel wire fence is still there, patrolled now by Ukrainian border guards on this side and Slovakian EU soldiers on the other. So when Alisa wants to have a cup of coffee with her nearest neighbour, they stand on either side, giving the wire a respectful distance, shouting and gesticulating, both of them speaking Hungarian.

Chernyakhovsk, 2007

The boys are taking turns on their shared bicycle, sprinting around the block and spraying gravel when they brake. I commend the exquisite spoke decorations – red and orange plastic shooting stars. Now one of the lads is climbing along the gas pipes running over our heads. It’s obvious he’s done this may times before, but I can’t help feeling a bit anxious as I watch him balance up on those narrow tubes.

Chernyakhovsk, Russia 2007
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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The boys appear to be on their way someplace else, but they can’t seem to pull themselves away. I shout good-bye and begin walking away. One of them comes running after me.

“Have you got a bicycle at home?” He lights up when I say yes, sure I do. He kneels by his bike, pulling loose two plastic beads and a bright orange shooting star.

“Here you go,” he says proudly, and the two of them disappear between garages and wash lines.

“The Zone”, 2005

Bragin is an unassuming little town in Belarus, close by the border with the radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl. There are five exits from the traffic circle just south of the municipality, one of which features a guard shack and a boom. To the left, oddly, a parallel road runs straight into the Zone.

Esenyi, Chernobyl Zone, Belarus 2005
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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Climbing out of the car a quarter-hour later, I can’t see the asphalt for the thick covering of leaves. Buildings are only partially visible behind the trees and bushes that have grown up unattended over the last two decades. A rusty sign points the way to what once was a side road. Roofs and walls have collapsed, and through a broken window to what must have once been a medical clinic I see a rusted gynaecology chair. There isn’t a sound.

I stop outside a school. The memorial to the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 looks lost and helpless. Suddenly, as if the projectionist had switched to the wrong reel in the middle of a film, the silence is broken by singing and laughter. Confused, I stumble out of the bushes and very nearly collide with two quite drunk ladies on bicycles. They laugh heartily when I ask if anyone actually lives around here, and point down the road before re-mounting their bikes. I drive in the direction they indicated.

Behind a high fence a dog is barking, high-pitched and angry. Strangers don’t often pass this way and when the gate opens and the dog comes bounding out, his excitement is so great he’s got an erection. Leonid and Vladimir have lived here all their lives. They don’t know where else to go, so when everyone else evacuated after the nuclear accident, they and a handful of other families simply stayed put. They grow their own potatoes and shrug off stories about radioactive uptake. Ivan comes by leading a horse and wagon loaded with planks. The red sun is low in late afternoon sky, and he’s already well and truly drunk. He slaps the horse’s rump and staggers off along the lonely road.

Back in the semi-darkness that has fallen over Bragin, I find what may have once been a better restaurant. On the menu is pork chops and potatoes. While I eat, the other guests are arguing over a bottle of vodka. One of the men pushes angrily away from the table, falling off his chair. His woman stumbles off in disgust.

Volhovshina, forbidden radioactive zone, Belarus 2005
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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Julia is a cancer physician at the local hospital, where I pay a visit to her tiny apartment. She’s gorgeous, and I’m more than happy to sit and chat while we drink Champagne – until her mobile phone suddenly rings. A fearful look crosses her face. No time for formalities now – the police have found out that I’m here and she shows me a back way out of town.

I travel a good distance northwards before stopping. In the darkness, under an impressively starry sky, the tension lets go.

Kegostrov, 2005

Stepping ashore from the riverboat that morning, I see the rusting hulks of old ships, lying where they’ve been drawn up on land and never put to sea again. I return to the wrecks at the same time two boys come riding up on their bikes. One is a couple of years older than the other, and both are named Alyosha. I feel an expectant, almost reverent tension in the air when I walk up and say hello. I need to be careful; it’s better to say too little than too much. I begin taking pictures, letting the tension build and keeping the boys’ gaze locked in mine.

The younger one is a little reserved and can’t seem to relax, but the older lad seems to possess an instinctive sense of self-worth. He opens up his rucksack to show me the day’s big find: a crow! It looks like one wing is broken, but it’s a living crow, which the elder Alyosha takes in his arms and pets before placing it on his shoulder. It flaps a bit, but stays put.

Kegostrov, Arkhangelsk, Russia 2005
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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Using this panorama camera requires a fairly slow pace – each frame has to be wound forward – and we soon fall into a close, almost meditative co-operation. Each time I change film rolls, the older boy alters his pose, moves the bird, and asks with his eyes if this looks good. After a while the younger Alyosha falls into the game as well.

By the time I leave, they’re deeply into their own game: back and forth between the boats, up to the cabin, down in the hold. The crow has no choice but to follow along, occasionally being thrown into the air in well-meant but tortuous attempts to get him to fly.

Later that day I run into the older Alyosha in the garden in front of his house. He’s digging a grave for his bird.

Grigoriopol 2006

Heading north out of Grigoriopol, I happen to look down a small side road towards the river and see a man swimming with a goose under his arm. What a photo! I run, but just before I get there he releases the goose.

It turns out to be an old ferry dock. But the other side of the Dniester is now enemy territory. The barge no longer runs, instead lying rusted on the riverbank. The afternoon sun is warm, and the place has a strange atmosphere. Suddenly a horse-drawn wagon comes careening at high speed down the bank carrying Ivan, Grigorij and Ljuba – father, son and daughter-in-law.

Grigoriopol, Transnistria 2006
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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The plan is to wash some rugs and the horse, but first on the agenda is a picnic. As the watermelon is sliced and the vodka glasses are filled, they tell me of their friends and relatives on the other side of the river, in what used to be the same Soviet republic but is now another world – Moldova. They almost never see them any more. But they can live with that; they’d never consider moving from their breakaway republic.

Now it’s time to wash down the horse, and Grigorij rides him bareback, far out into the Dniester’s swirling currents. Next is a swim among the river’s geese, more vodka and cigarettes as afternoon turns to evening and we say farewell.

Much later, with darkness now fallen, I feel a twinge of melancholy as I cross the border at Dubăsari, leaving Transnistria, the last Soviet republic.

The new eastern edge of the European Union is not the sharp, merciless border of the Iron Curtain, but it remains palpable for everyone on both sides. Whether this new demarcation is an absolute one remains to be seen – and it’s up to us to decide how much we will allow it to affect our inner boundaries.

Every time I travel to the east, I re-live my first trip back in 1984. As foreign as the world on the other side may be, there’s always a strong but indefinable sense of coming home.

For more photographs please visit Jens Olof Lasthein website.

Arkhangelsk, Russia 2005
© Jens Olof Lasthein
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A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar

Sankar Sridhar — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:07:39 +0000

A Changpa family on the move. The tribe's movements are dictated by the season and women and children lead the migration while men follow while herding their sheep goat and yak. Since good quality Pashmina grows only in extreme cold, the nomads keep to altitudes of about 17,000 feet above sea level where, despite daytime temperatures of 40C, the glacial winds allow enough nip in the asir for the prized goats to grow their undercoat.
© Sankar Sridhar
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Text and photographs by Sankar Sridhar.

The invitation to contribute to this blog has come at a time when a needling regret was just beginning to surface yet again. It has been nearly a six months since Urghyen passed away. I learnt about it when I had gone to visit him. I was told that his daughter, Nyima, has married and moved to her husband’s household. She’ll never walk the old trails again. To find her in the maze of mental maps criss-crossing the high-altitude desert that is the Changtang will be a mammoth task. I don’t know if I ever will get to meet her again. A relationship seven years in the making has ended, just like that.

Urghyen and, to a lesser degree, Nyima have been instrumental in helping me love Ladakh, the trans-Himalayan desert in the northern tip of India that shares its border with China. For a long time, it was only for Urghyen that I retraced my steps there, a zero-carbon-footprint journey necessitated by the roadlessness of the land he called home. He made me love him, and the Changtang, enough to throw away my job, twice, so I could live his life.

A recent picture of Urghyen, taken in January 2010.
© Sankar Sridhar
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Yes, my journeys into this Himalayan shadowland have culminated in a book that has done well in the market. Yes, I had been visiting Ladakh for four years before meeting Urghyen and Nyima. Yes, I have made many journeys in Ladakh that have not involved meeting Urghyen. But truth be told, much more than images and the odd award, and books and travelogues in magazines, I thank Urghyen and Nyima for teaching me how to love a region written off time and again as desolate, harsh and lifeless.

If I have grown to be content with what I have even while living in the city, where flaunting material possessions comes second only to the necessity of acquiring them, it is in no small measure for Urghyen. And he must be given complete credit for instilling in me the courage, the faith even, to get up and going solo across Ladakh, a land of emptiness on such a grand scale that I have seen trekkers break down and cry because they have lost sight of their team behind a sand dune or a mountain pass.

Winter on the Changtang. Even though the region receives very little snowfall, everything liquid freezes. Here Changpas and horse share the same water from a thawed pool in a frozen stream. The thumb rule among the tribe in such situations--never collect water from downstream.
© Sankar Sridhar
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Urghyen was a Changpa, a nomad of Tibetan stock who moved into India’s Changtang plateau across the unmanned borders several decades ago. I met his daughter, Nyima, while heading to a roadhead to begin a trek. Upon my request, she had taken me to he home, and there, Urghyen invited me in and later accepted me as family. He even gave me a name — Thamo, which meant “The Thin One” in Ladakhi. Over time and many travels, much of which was with Urghyen and his flock, I began to realize what a wonderful a life they led. There will be many who would disagree — many Changpas, after all, have almost no access to modern medicine, schools are not much heard of, and they live in eternal migration with their sheep and goats and yaks, moving from one pasture to the next. Rain is a rarity in these places, and temperatures soar to 48C in summer and dip to -45C in winter.

Survival is hard work in winter and entails walking as much as 20km a day to collect shrubs that can be used as fuel. The hearth in a Changpa rebo (yak-hair tent) burns through day and night during the seven months of winter. Droppings and wood make up the fuel sources.
© Sankar Sridhar
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But Urghyen never found any reason to complain. He was bolted to the Changtang with firmness as astute as that of a believer. This land, where only the hardiest of species survived, was his home. And he loved it for the way it was, living true to the faith he followed — Buddhism. And he lived well, he said. “I breathe clean air, I have all the space I want. People in the city need all the medicines they can have because they are unhappy. Happy people stay healthy.” And as for education, he knew and had passed down to Nyima all the knowledge that was needed to survive in these high plains. He knew where water was to be found in each season. He knew prime grazing patches. He knew how to help a goat deliver a kid and keep them safe from predators. He knew where the 90kph winds would not rip apart his tent. He knew which clouds would bring rain and which would only raise false hopes.

Water kicked up by gusty winds freeze midair on the Changtang during extreme cold snaps, when temperatures can fall more than 10C in seconds. If such cold snaps come frequently, Changpas head to lower altitudes (around 15,000feet above sea level), as seen in the picture, to ensure their livestock's survival.
© Sankar Sridhar
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He was happy with his tent, his flock of pashmina sheep, and the traders to whom he would sell the fine undercoat that goes into making the much-sought-after fabric for shawls and stoles.

Being a nomad was a lifestyle he cherished, faults and all, quite like we do our ways of life. It was an acceptance, a happy acceptance, not a helpless surrender as many may point out. And in my time with him (on and off, much, much more than two years), he convinced me enough to respect his way of life rather than consider him an oddity because he lived in a manner far removed from what I was used to.

Availability of water remains the single-most important prerequisite for the choice of a Changpa camping ground. Often, pastures don't come with it. Changpas make the most of the cool dawns to head out to graze their sheep and goats, sometimes over 8km one way.
© Sankar Sridhar
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I don’t know when, but the Ladakh that began as only a mountain-grit region of peaks and altitude transformed into a living, breathing land, and I, a traveler without an agenda. Somewhere during my travels I let go of the map, the trekking trails, the urge to get to a place with a name by evening. There was no hurry, no destination to get to. I lived in the faith that when I ran out of rations, I’d find help. More often than not I did. Over time, like Urghyen, I feared not about getting lost, but about being found. In the past seven years, the only signs of humans, other than the Changpas, I have seen on my travels have been the litter mindless trekkers intent on bagging bragging rights have left behind.

The vagaries of weather show on the face of three-year-old Trinley. The scorching sun, extreme cold and whiplashing winds, not to mention the singeing heat of the hearth, all conspire to lend the Changpa the weathered, wisened look at an early age.
© Sankar Sridhar
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As the army has built more roads into its heart and magazines and newspapers have touted Ladakh as the ultimate adventure destination, so too has the level of litter increased along roads and trekking trails. Empty beer bottles, cola cans, polythene bags and a whole lot more crowds trekking routes today. Each time Urghyen came across another stash, his eyes would give away the hurt he felt at the defilement of his home.

Urghyen has seen, as have I, the sudden bureaucratic decision to demarcate part of the Changtang as a national reserve, off limits to the Changpas. The reason? Man-animal conflict. It was strange that in the entire range of the animals that inhabit Ladakh, they have dealt with the Changpas, and the Changpas with them, ever since either can remember. Urghyen had moved, but never understood how someone who might never have visited Ladakh decided the Changpas are doing the terrain more harm than good, while fuel-guzzling SUVs offroading on the same terrain caused no damage to the environment or wildlife.

For a tribe that counts its wealth in heads of goats, every birth brings added anxiety. Here Lamho warms an orphaned kid with love even as she prepares lunch for her family.
© Sankar Sridhar
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It was on a day when he was depressed that he asked me to take pictures of his people, his home, and show it to “my kind” in the city so they could learn to love the impressive and fragile land. When you love someone or something, he would say, you’d be willing to give up your life to protect it.

No newspaper or magazine would be very keen on recording the passing away of a nomad. And not many would spare space for personal emotions. Even without Urghyen, I find myself drawn to this part of the Himalayas, ploughing ever deeper and away from trekking trails to discover new landscapes that would have made even Urghyen stop a moment more and appreciate it.

Yaks are the only animals truly suited to survival in the extreme temperatures. So much so, the Changpa drive the yak to higher altitudes even as winter sets it. The animals roam freely in herds and are rounded up again post winter.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

The images in this series are part of a collection that Urghyen has seen, and appreciated. There are some recent ones as well, which he might gaze upon now and smile. They are an attempt to set the community of the Changpas in context with their environment and lifestyles, through the seasons. Urghyen felt some images could make at least some people ponder on the frailty of the balance in the Himalayas and goad them to be better hikers and mountaineers. I, too, can only hope that the images that brought a smile on the face of Urghyen — a man as used to the majestic landscapes much as we are to our surroundings — will have the same effect on admirers of the mountains.

And to my friend Urghyen, a man who measured distances in hours and time by the length of his shadow, who knew neither blog nor internet nor computer, I say this: Thank you for the giving me the gift of lack of direction, the greatest possession I shall ever have on my forays into the abode of snow.

For more great photographs and stories about Changpa nomads life in Ladaks please visit Sankar Sridhar homepage and blog.

A flock grazing sheep take on the look of a celestial constellation on an evening on the Changtang. In the foreground is the roof of a house, complete with fluttering Buddhist prayer flags. More and more Changpa are embracing a sedentary life, egged on by the government which wants them to join the mainstream. As of 2008, only 1,500 families remained rooted to their traditional ways. Urghyen's was one of them.
© Sankar Sridhar
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Innocent X, by David Paul Lyon

David Paul Lyon — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:52:23 +0000

Text and photographies by David Paul Lyon.

Perhaps the most formative experience of my life, surpassed only by the birth of my son transpired at the impressionable age of fifteen while on a family visit to the Des Moines Art Center in Des Moines Iowa. It had been a rainy Saturday when my parents, sister and I had piled in the car and traveled into the city to take a look at the current exhibition of work by Chuck Close.

Neither of my parents had a significant interest in the arts. My fatherʼs interests mostly revolved around outdoor activities like hunting and fishing and my mother spent her free time either garage sale hunting or shopping at the local mall. In hindsight it is clear to me that the visit revolved around the passionate interest that I had shown in art for the previous couple of years. Even at that early age I was committed to following a career as an artist. At that point however I was, as one can imagine still directionless and in the exploratory stages of even settling on a medium.

After having taken a diligent look at the temporary exhibition of work by Chuck Close of which I had been duly impressed we entered the gallery of the permanent collection. Back behind the display of Jeff Koonsʼ “Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Double Decker” I saw the painting that for me changed everything. Francis Baconʼs “Study after Velazquezʼs Portrait of Pope Innocent X” hung in what I felt was a forgotten corner of the gallery. What I saw and felt in that moment was for me an epiphany.

Francis Bacon – Pope Innocent X
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Until that point, despite my passionate interest in art I had seen nothing more transformative than what was embodied in that work. The haunting ghost-like image of a screaming pope painted on an untreated canvas with obscuring streaks of paint stopped me dead in my tracks. Iʼm not sure how long I stood before that painting, but for me it felt as if time had stopped.

Velasquez – Innocent X
Please visit Innocent X, by David Paul Lyon for the full size image.

The title of the piece was as well for me deliciously blasphemous. “Pope Innocent” struck me as the perfect left jab to the gut of the Vatican. Only years later did I find out that Diego Velezquez original painting was of the actual Pope Innocent X. The original portrait by Velezquez that the study by Bacon is of, now strikes me as even more sinister than the painting by Bacon. Pope Innocent X, painted by Velezquez, sneering from his papal throne in what was likely a more flattering portrait than how he actually looked is a chilling work of art. The irony of the title of Francis Bacon’s painting however, was not lost on me. This was still a couple of decades before the Catholic Church sex scandal emerged, but even at this young age and despite having the good fortune not to have been abused in any way by a member of the clergy, I nonetheless knew that something with the Catholic Church was amiss.

To my fatherʼs dismay, at the age of about thirteen years old, two full years earlier, I vocally raised my doubts about the validity of the Catholic Church and Christianity as a whole. The hypocritical position the church as well as itʼs members took on exclusion based on a persons prior experiences, sexual orientation or cultural background as well as the church members own hypocritical actions outside of that brief moment when Mass was being held, struck me as a complete dismissal of the human values Jesus Christ taught nearly every time the Scripture was cited.

In the attempt to get me to change my mind my parents sought the help of the Monsignor who oversaw our parish. Monsignor Schwarte was an extremely intelligent and well traveled man who had been a missionary in Africa for several years whom I respected immensely. Through our discussions about his travels and experiences, myself citing the inevitable fact that there are so many people from so many different cultures around the globe, that to have all of them to subscribe to Christianity is a futile effort and the churches position that those who follow any other doctrine are doomed to eternal damnation was a direct contradiction to what I felt a humane and just God would allow. Over the course of several weeks and many extensive discussions with Monsignor Schwarte and contrary to what my parents had hoped for, my position against the church as well as exceptionalism of any kind at this time became permanently galvanized.

Soon after having seen “Study after Velazquezʼs Portrait of Pope Innocent X”, since these were still the days before the internet became a part of our daily lives, I attempted to research the work of Francis Bacon in both our school and public library but yielded no results. Many years later when I was in my early twenties I chanced upon an exhibition of his work at the MOMA on a visit to New York City. Besides being struck by the consistent intensity of his paintings what surprised me the most was what the artist said regarding that series of pope paintings which was that it was “an excuse to use these colors, and you canʼt give ordinary clothes that purple color without getting into a sort of false fauve manner.” Francis Bacon, who also surprisingly resembled Mickey Rooney more than the dark angel I had always imagined him to be, said this in my opinion to be perceived as nonchalant and to avoid attempting an earnest explanation of his actual motivations.

In the subsequent years following the experience of seeing this, for me formative work of art and as the memory faded from itʼs immediate vibrancy, I chose photography as my artistic medium and subscribed myself to the doctrine called straight photography endorsed by another significant influence, Edward Weston. After finishing high school I enrolled at the Art Institute of Boston and passionately studied the Zone System, developed by Ansel Adams and learned the basics of the archival printing process. When I had reached the point where I felt I had a solid knowledge of the medium of photography and after having seen the early work of Mike and Doug Starn, I left the Art Institute because I felt the funds I would need for tuition would be better spent creating a significant body of work.

In the following years I created a technique using Polaroid film that was deliberately unconventional. I continued to enroll sporadically in photography courses during that time but since the general faculty reaction to my efforts were between cool and dismissive I ceased to seek their approval and rather made a radical attempt to distance my work from what their perception of art photography was.

Within a few years, after having attempted to live in Barcelona, Spain I found myself living in Munich, Germany. During the eleven years that I lived there being represented first by Cynthia Close formerly of Artworks1 and subsequently by Brigitte Woischnik formerly of Foto Factory2, I achieved moderate success as an artist as well as a commercial photographer making photographs commercially for magazines and advertising agencies as well as exhibiting my photographs and selling them to private collectors. The photographs that I sold to collectors were Cibachrome reproductions, mounted on aluminum plates and coated with Auto lacquer of the polaroids that I made regularly. Despite being unconventional in process and very well executed as well as beautiful, they were however universally accessible and in retrospect, generally unchallenging.

I had another epiphanic moment during this time after having delivered a commissioned series of prints to a private collector in Mannheim. She informed me that she was withholding payment of the series, which was for me a significant amount of money, because there were a few small blemishes in the auto lacquer on a couple of the prints. These blemishes were tiny and only visible in direct reflection of a light source. After having traveled to Mannheim in frustration to remedy the blemishes, on my return to Munich I decided to embark on creating a process that, rather than trying to create a mirror like print of an imaginary world, would be instead its own object with scars and blemishes an integral part of itʼs own aesthetic.

As fortune has it, about the time that I was closing in on a new process I had the opportunity to present my work and early attempts at this process to Rolf Müller who produced a magazine at the time for Heidelberg Press called HQ3. This magazine focused on a particular theme and featured photographs revolving around this theme. The particular theme he was seeking work for was “Reste” or “Leftovers”. Having recently been shown a book on the subject of the Mummies of Palermo by a friend, I expressed my wish to travel to Palermo Sicily, photograph the mummies and produce a series for HQ with my newly developed process. To my astonishment, he without hesitation agreed.

When, after exhaustive preparation, I finally entered the door to the catacomb a Capuchin monk solicited a donation to the monastery which I duly paid. Although photographing in the catacomb was permitted, I felt the unspoken expectation that it was to be minimal and worked while I was there as quietly and imperceptibly as possible. Arriving as soon as the catacomb opened in the morning I would take advantage of the first couple of hours before the rush of tourists would arrive. After three mornings of photographing it was made clear to me by the monks that I was no longer welcome regardless of how generous my donation was or how many postcards I bought. My work there however was complete. Rather than focusing of the impressive mass of the couple of thousand mummies on display, which had primarily been how I had seen the catacomb represented, I instead, had concentrated on them individually and attempted to make as intimate of a portrait as possible of each mummy I photographed. After returning to Munich with my film, developing and contact printing it, I needed several weeks to completely digest what I had made. Magazine publishing not being conducive to artistic digestion made it necessary for me to produce the first few prints that were published in HQ in 1995.

Unsatisfied with the initial prints published in HQ which I nonetheless stood by and still consider to be of the standard represented by a magazine whoʼs initials stand for high quality, I then took the process even further by working in larger scale on the prints, employing as well for the largest of the prints canvas embedded with photographic emulsion. What changed for me at that time was the approach I took toward handling the photographic material. By freeing myself from the confines of concerning myself with dust on the negatives, perfect rectangles and blemishes of the surface of the prints I focused my attention entirely on the overall aesthetic and impact of the print. I no longer tried to dry the prints so they would be entirely flat or worried that my fingerprints would appear on the surface. Through exhaustive experimentation with various combinations of toners I finally found the processes that would do justice to those negatives.

After having completed the “Mummies of Palermo” print series I was entirely changed. I began applying the approach I had taken to all of the photographs that I made. I remember a conversation with Jörg Badura, a photographer who was also represented by Foto Factory at the time warn me that by taking this radically different approach to my work I ran the serious risk of alienating my present clientele. As a business decision he was entirely correct. The commercial work I made at that time began to diminish and the handful of private collectors who supported my work waned in interest. Even Brigitte Woischnik, owner of Foto Factory, who had been a avid supporter of my work thus far began referring to me as her “special” photographer meaning, I believe, unpredictable. She among others found that they could no longer relate to my work. Even Daniel Blau, who runs an art gallery in Munich, son of Georg Baselitz, in explaining why he was reluctant to exhibit my work declared “People donʼt buy photographs of dead children!” It was at this point that I was entirely sure that I was on to something.

In the following years the commercial photographic projects I was commissioned became largely tormenting since, with the exception of a small handful of clients, namely Dagmar Murkudis of Marie Claire Magazine who granted me full creative license with every project I created for her, I was expected to produce photographs that were against my very core principles of aesthetic and content. Not only could I not relate to the products I was photographing, I was becoming increasingly embarrassed that I was producing these photographs. I decided then that I should move to Paris to find a more receptive audience than what Munich had to offer.

After living in Paris for nearly a year and enjoying moderate commercial success producing photographs that I stood entirely behind, with the help of Dominique Veret, a committed advocate of my work and close personal friend, I was introduced to then stylist Charlotte Flossaut and found myself photographing a collection of clothes designed by Jeremy Scott, a conceptual fashion designer. Upon realizing that he had intentionally designed clothes for anorexic models that a normal thin girl could not even fit into, I entirely lost my stomach for commercial photography of any kind. Soon thereafter I returned to Munich and decided to support myself by other means than commercial photography.

In the years since this time, having moved back to the United States my work has developed immensely. Freed of the expectation of commercial photographic production I now enjoy the possibility of completely digesting the content of my work before printing it and making no provisions whatsoever toward itʼs commercial viability. I photograph what I am earnestly drawn to, whether its a small object, a person or a landscape and am confident that my approach to my work is unique and entirely, unashamedly honest. I remain exceptionally proud of my artistic accomplishments on the whole. The experience I gained by living and working in Europe for so many years and having worked for the several fine publications that have featured my work during this time has given me the confidence to turn my back entirely on commercial photography and focus my creative attention exclusively on producing the work that moves me most. I strive to create work that has a timeless impact and will hopefully remain touching to the viewer for many eras to come and not be “old news” as soon as the next issue of a magazine is released.

My work, at its best, I see as a reflection of the viewer. Similar to a Rorschach test, I believe that the viewer makes their own associations with what they see in my work, especially in the abstract prints and extracts from it what stirs just below the surface of their own personal consciousness. Although my work is conceptual in nature, I still feel that it doesnʼt dismiss the visceral experience of the individual viewers own personal associations and emotions. If I havenʼt yet achieved the goal of producing the impact on the viewer that I felt decades ago in front of Francis Baconʼs “Study after Velazquezʼs Portrait of Pope Innocent X”, I nonetheless feel that Iʼm well on my way.

Please visit David Paul Lyon website.

ARTWORKS is now defunct and Cynthia Close is currently the executive director for Documentary Educational Resources that focuses on promoting independent documentary films.
Foto Factory closed their doors over a decade ago and Brigitte Woischnik is now a freelance literary editor for books mainly regarding the history of fashion. Most recently for a book about Lillian Bassman & Paul Himmel.
HQ Magazine was a project run by Buro Rolf Müller for Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG from 1985 until 1998 and hasn’t got much web presence but is known and regarded amongst the German design circles. The principle designer for that project was Mark Holt.