Monthly Archive for May, 2009

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lori vrba – safekeeping

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Lori Vrba – Safekeeping

Safekeeping: the act of keeping safe or the state of being kept safe; protection; care; custody.

I’ve spent the last year exploring the desire to protect that which is, or is perceived to be, vulnerable or sacred. As a mother to three young children I am present not only to the maternal urge to lock away the sensuality of a young girl or the exposed emotions of an adolescent boy, but also that they, like all humans, have feelings, secrets, treasures, and relationships that are for safekeeping. Innocence, love, memories… even the earth itself is vulnerable. With this project, I am examining what we want to protect, how we do that and when it is simply impossible. I love exploring this idea with the camera, given that a photograph is, in and of itself, safekeeping: holding a parcel of time.

I work in medium format black and white film, which I process myself.  I print each image in a traditional wet darkroom on 16X20 fibre based paper, which I then tone in tea and selenium.


Photographs: Lori Vrba
Website: www.lorivrba.com

Published on May 6, 2009 by burn magazine. 79 Comments

dima gavrysh – uganda’s forgotten war

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Dima Gavrysh – Uganda’s Forgotten War

For over two decades a sectarian rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its infamous leader, Joseph Kony, have been waging a war against the Ugandan people and government, burning villages, mutilating civilians, and abducting children. Based in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the LRA has continued to terrorize northern Uganda since the late 1980’s, forcing millions of people to abandon their homes for dire conditions of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps.

The ongoing warfare became one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts and one of the most underreported crises in the world. The LRA has been known for particularly brutal mutilation of the civilians, and an uncounted number of people who survived an encounter with the LRA guerrillas had their limbs, ears, and noses cut off. Terrified by the prospect of being killed, abducted, or tortured, most villagers in northern Uganda prefer the squalid conditions of the IDP camps, and by the present time an entire generation has been born and raised in IDP camps and has never seen their own village. People in the affected area have been helped by Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), who provide health care, rehabilitate and run hospitals, battle epidemics, carry out vaccination campaigns, and offer mental healthcare, easing the existence for the refugees.

Children have suffered disproportionately in this conflict, and they are one of the most striking symbols of the violence in the region. Over 20,000 children have been abducted by the LRA during the conflict, for use as soldiers, porters, and sex slaves. An unknown number has been killed. As a result, every night tens of thousands of children stream into towns and centers of larger IDP camps to seek shelter for the night. Various humanitarian organizations set up shelters, such as the Noah’s Ark shelter in the town of Gulu, that provide a safe place for the so called “night commuters” to spend the night. As the darkness falls, slender shapes wrapped in blankets fill the floor of plastic tents that serve as communal bedrooms. Before the sun rises in the morning, children gather their belongings and return home, surviving another night.

A fragile truce was established between the Ugandan government and the LRA in 2006, and the 1.6 million people from approximately 200 camps began drifting toward home. The reports of various human rights violations, including killings, mutilations, abductions, and sexual violence are still not uncommon; however, as peace talks progressed in 2007 and LRA fighters left northern Uganda, people continued to return to their villages or smaller camps.

Photographs: Dima Gavrysh
Website: www.dimagavrysh.com

Published on May 4, 2009 by burn magazine. 229 Comments

michal daniel – in your face

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Michal  Daniel – In Your Face

Rules. “Don’t stare, don’t point,” said mom. 
”Ask permission before making pictures,” say others.

That’s not for me. I want to get as close a look as I can, right in your face if possible, without you paying me any mind. If I can make a picture while you’re doing what you’re doing, unguarded, even though I’m right there in your face, that’s my goal.

But working with a visible camera impacts the scene. Not only can it irritate people, overt camera use also alters the entire existing dynamic, often destroying the very moment one wishes to record, before it is recorded. So my intention is to record the moments, while leaving everyone be, without them feeling observed.

Hard to do. Few succeeded like Walker Evans did, his camera hidden under his overcoat, lens peeking through a button hole. But even Evans kept his distance and could not get in people’s faces without his intent being noticed.

In 2001, after a quarter of a century of trying to be invisible with a standard camera, I finally found the perfect photographic tool which I use to this day: a plastic digital camera that fits on a digital organizer. The camera and organizer are now obsolete and the camera’s highest resolution — 640×480 pixels – is today the lowest resolution on the market.

640×480.net is where I put my keepers.

“Don’t mind me, just organizing here,” is what I exude in the process of picture making.

The Eyemodule2 — or “eyemod” as I call it and its output — is small, silent, and doesn’t resemble a camera. It’s just a bump on my PDA. When I use it, I look like I have a reason to be holding it, staring down at it, in the palm of my hand — a reason having nothing to do with photography. I behave as if completely absorbed with digital organizing, paying no attention to the people I photograph. To them, I simply seem like any other self-absorbed pedestrian.

I do love the digital Brownie “personality” of this camera, its color palette, tight dynamic range, near pinhole depth of field and the softness of its cheap lens. When enlarged to wall size, the eyemod prints start to resemble watercolor paintings. But all that is secondary. Most importantly, the tool helps me achieve my primary goal: recording people’s unguarded public selves, from the nearest proximity possible, while unnoticed, and leaving them to continue, undisturbed.

In the introduction to Walker Evans’ book Many Are Called, James Agee wrote of our guards: “Only in certain waking moments of suspension, of quiet, of solitude, are these guards down, and these moments are only rarely to be seen by the person himself, or by any other human being.”

This is my collection of some of these unguarded moments.


Photographs: Michal Daniel
Website: 640×480.net
Book: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/32889

Published on May 2, 2009 by burn magazine. 146 Comments

crying communist by bevis fusha

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Crying Communist by Bevis Fusha


It has been some time now that numerous believers of Communism, from the former dictatorial regime, practice an annual ritual. Every October 16th, they gather and pay respects to the grave of former Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha. The grave itself is located in the city’s cemetery, together with common people’s graves. It has suffered vandalism continuously and now has been reconstructed with a cement block on top to protect it. The majority of the people who come to pay respects are members of the Communist party, former officers and officials, retired individuals. All of these individuals have a longing for the Communism era. The majority of these people show some psychological imbalance, which is seen in their humanizing of this historical figure that Enver Hoxha left behind. They speak openly and with passion about their belief that those times under his leadership were golden times and the best period for socialist Albania. None of them like the fierce capitalism that has prospered in Albania the last 15 years


www.bevisfusha.com
Published on May 2, 2009 by david alan harvey. 82 Comments

bullshit by michael francis mcelroy

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Bullshit by Michael Francis McElroy


From a series of portraits in Tuscarawas County, Ohio


www.mmcelroy.com


Published on May 2, 2009 by david alan harvey. 28 Comments

summary execution by richard mark dobson

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Summary Execution  by Richard Mark Dobson


Rhino poaching is on the increase in South Africa. As world demand for the horn increases in China and the Middle East (used in traditional medicine and to make dagger handles) the number of Rhino poached in South Africa in 2008 was close to 100. The dead animals include the critically endangered Black Rhino.

The rising death toll comes amid allegations that Mozambican authorities are not doing enough to crack down on known suspects and, in some cases, might be abetting poachers. Cross border incursions by poachers into South Africa’s Kruger National Park from neighbouring Mozambique, have been made easier with the formation of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (a total area of 35 000 square kilometres) which links the Kruger with the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique.

A recent report revealed that poachers killed at least 43 rhinos between January 2004 and July 2008 in the Kruger Park and around its border. More than 40 rhinos were shot there between January and the end of November last year.

In many cases Mozambicans, allegedly employed by Asian syndicates operating out of South Africa, are the prime suspects. The syndicates are said to provide their local recruits with high-calibre weapons. Crossbows are also used because they are silent.

As part of my recent GEO assignment on South Africa’s borderline, I was given permission to go foot patrol with an anti-poaching task force, whose job it is to search out snares and when possible apprehend and arrest poachers. It’s a difficult and dangerous mission.

Unfortunately after 2 days of walking in the bush with nothing more than my Nikon to protect me (oh and 4 armed rangers with R1 rifles), I had drawn a blank photographically. No pictures of snares, or dead Rhino or dead poachers for that matter, and I was left with the conundrum of how best to illustrate the plight of the Rhino in the Kruger.

This picture of a juvenile White Rhino presented itself a day later. Darted from a chopper and with a blindfold to protect its dilated eyes from the harsh African sun, this female was been relocated to another reserve. I thought the towel created a quirky element to the picture, and raised a WTF is happening here kind of a question. Summary Execution? This demands attention.

My reasoning being, once I your attention, then I guess I can go on and tell you about the plight of the Rhino in Africa.

Want to see more of my borderline pics…go to http://rmde.jimdo.com/french-geo-sa-borderline/

Published on May 1, 2009 by david alan harvey. 24 Comments