Author Archive for burn magazine
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Michael Webster
New York
The mythology of New York is known to anyone who has watched more than a dozen hours of television or skimmed magazines in a dentist’s office. But like ancient Greece, New York is too big to have a single, central story; its myth is carried by its demigods, or what in show business they call types.
Take a type we’ll call the New York Tough Guy. Now, there are tough guys all over the world; wherever you live you probably know at least one of them, and so the term “tough guy” will call him, specifically, to mind. This guy you know who talked about knocking a guy out as if it were nothing, and looked as if he could do it, is a tough guy, for instance.
But link these terms to New York and the focus shifts. The New York Tough Guy, for example, may be someone you saw perp-walked on the cover of the New York Post. Or he may be some actor who mugged a character on a movie you saw that was set in New York. He may be an antique figure with cross-hatched stubble, a lantern jaw, and a black eye-mask like the Beagle Boys wear in Scrooge McDuck comics. Maybe he’s tough in something other than a physical way. Some people (certainly not you, sophisticated reader) think Donald Trump is tough. Some people (perhaps you, sophisticated reader) think Anthony Bourdain is.
In any case, this image you’ve conjured matches the term New York Tough Guy more than the authentic avatars you actually know because there is Tough and then there is New York Tough, which may or may not be real Tough but which is certainly real New York. You almost have to imagine the Tough Guy standing defiantly against a filthy brick wall at night, harshly illuminated by car headlamps, and probably wearing shades, because all the New York Tough Guys wear shades. (Doesn’t Jay-Z? Didn’t Lou Reed?)
I’m not saying these people aren’t real tough guys, though I do think if somebody came at them with a knife a few of them might not react totally in character. I’m saying the Tough Guy, the Fast Talker, the Big Shot, the Wise-Cracking Waitress, the Hard-Bitten Journalist, et alia, are mythic figures. By that I don’t mean that they’re fake, though they often are, but that their usefulness is not to be found in the real world, but in the dream landscape that explains New York to the world and to itself.
This is why you often see people move to New York and immediately start conforming to stereotype. The pressure, whether overtly felt or only dimly sensed, of being part of something as overwhelming as New York blows the mind of anyone who does not have a perfectly solid-state personality, which is to say most of us. So citizens psychically run for cover under the robes and aegides of the demigods of New York myth.
(Where do you think hipsters — that is to say, New York Hipsters — come from? New York magazine? Pitchfork media? They come from Patti Smith via Marlon Brando via George Cram Cook via Walt Whitman via Edgar Allan Poe via some ur-Hipster whom Peter Stuyvesant had to keep putting in the stocks for shirking.)
You and I could sit here all night identifying the constellations in the New York galaxy, but I wish to draw your attention to the least acknowledged member of the pantheon, who is nonetheless as important as any other: The Out-of-Towner.
The Out-of-Towner, aka The Greenhorn, aka The Rube, belongs to the mythology, too. His is a special role. Because one thing is true of all of the other New York demigods: They are Wised-Up. So they are all pretty evenly matched, and also extremely motivated to get over on one another. If they had only one another to deal with, things would quickly get ugly and stale — like the Manhattan of Escape from New York, an island of madmen with whom the rest of the world cannot deal.
The Out-of-Towner brings some air and light into the action. For one thing, he can be a victim, and replenish the ecosystem with whatever the wise guys can get out of him. He can be a foil, a straight man to set up their jokes and set off their unique qualities, and an audience to flatter the endless self-regard of the true New Yorker. And on occasion and with sufficient motivation, the Out-of-Towner can stick around and, if he has the moxie, become a citizen himself.
Indeed, every New Yorker who was not born there enters the town in this role, and struggles to divest himself of it. Why, for example, do New Yorkers respond so positively to being asked for directions? Because this offers them the chance to show that they’re not Out-of-Towners. (This is especially important in front of present Out-of-Towners.)
But there’s a catch. Every wise guy in New York is in perpetual danger of reverting to Out-of-Towner status. For one thing, the town is always changing — hot spots, catchphrases, top Filipino lunch places — and it’s a struggle to keep up. But more importantly, unless he has become so jaded that nothing at all matters to him anymore, the wise guy will always retain a touch of Out-of-Towner about him. The things that excited him before still excite him — though he has become of necessity very good at concealing it, lest he over-effuse and give his roots away.
All this is to begin to say what I like so much about Michael Webster’s “New York.” I do admire the formal schtick of shooting it all from the top of one of those horrible tourist double-deckers that strafe the streets (ah, there I go, sounding like a wise guy). But it’s more what the schtick reveals that pleases me. The tour bus passengers — sometimes cheaply plastic-slickered against rainy weather — seem anonymous, ordinary, like the opposite of the thing they’re observing. (And those few observed New Yorkers who notice them seem surprised but unimpressed.) But the New York vistas and tableaux that Webster sees are lovely, specific and suggestive at the same time; you could write novels about the five folks waiting for the Seventh Avenue bus, for instance, or just bask in their ennui. And the wonderful thing is, they are as available to those bus-riding Out-of-Towners as they are to anyone else. Like those two well-dressed Indian folks in the front row: They certainly look like they’re enjoying the scene. Maybe they, too, see in New York what we see. Or maybe — you know, we can hardly admit it, even now — they see more.
– Roy Edroso
Bio
Michael Webster is a photographer currently living in Brooklyn.
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Medford Taylor
Bulldust
I could hear the fatal thump of rabbits under the wheels of the big Land Cruiser as it hurtled through endless clouds of bulldust, up the Birdsville Track. Jock Makin, the Aussie writer, was driving us the 1,100 kilometers from Adelaid to Birdsville, into the ‘red heart’ of Australia.
In 1860 the explorers Burke & Wills died in the first attempt at this journey. Extremely jetlagged and disoriented, I secretly suspected this might be our fate as well. We did arrive in Birdsville, population 80, where I was welcomed by the entire police force…..Sgt Bob Goad. At the Birdsville Hotel/pub he revived me with the coldest most welcome ‘stubbie’ I ever drank and we remain friends to this day.
It began as a National Geographic story on the Simpson Desert and evolved into The Simpson Outback, life on the cattle stations at the edge of the desert. Once published, this story then led to a later one, Dog Fence. The Dog Fence, or ‘dingo barrier fence, stretches 3,307 miles across Australia’s interior and exists solely to stop dingoes, Australia’s wild dogs, from killing sheep.
Stuart Nunn was the manager of Anna Creek Station, the classic Aussie who, if this were a movie would be played by James Arness of Gunsmoke fame. Anna Creek was the size of Belgium and the last cattle station to muster cattle with horses. It’s all done with helicopters and dirt bikes now. After a huge steak from a freshly killed bullock, the ringers sat quietly around the campfire and talked of horses, cars, girls and dreams of yesterday and maybe tomorrow. I fell asleep in my swag on the desert floor under millions of low hanging stars to the sounds of Dylan’s Blood on The Tracks and Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
Some random thoughts about my great adventure in the outback:
Fred Brophy’s Boxing Troupe was the last of the old time traveling shows and the tent was 30 years old. On the Sandringham muster, John the cook asked me “is Africa in America or Ireland?” I was camped alone by the Rock of Ages waterhole, dinner was pork & pineapple curry and Cognac; and I awoke at 4:00 AM to the screams of a screech owl, so I went for a barefoot moonlight walk in the soft sand of the dried riverbed. Owen Pannycan is an Aboriginal stockman who claims to be 100 years old but admits he doesn’t really know for sure. I gave “Stretch” my new Swiss Army knife. He was the best ringer in the whole outback. I’m getting the ‘wearies’…….the truck won’t start……bad glow plugs…….and another puncture. The satellite phone is down and the story is in trouble back in Washington. Fixed my tripod with Superglue and gaffer tape and wait for a baby to be born in Quilpie but the baby is too slow…….gotta go. Not so happy birthday changing another flat on the Birdsville track.
Bushflies, bulldust and too many blown tires but ‘no worries mate’. The desert is uncluttered solitude and I’m learning to live alone quite well in this “clean well lighted place”. On Christmas Day at dusk on Kangaroo Island, I found a perfect magpie feather.
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Jeroen Hofman
Playground
My new project is called Playground. The Netherlands have several training facilities where members of the Fire Brigade, the Police Force and the Ministry of Defense are trained and prepared for a wide range of possible scenarios. Within the boundaries of these grounds it’s all just practice or ‘play’. Outside of them however, things are a lot more serious. My aim was to capture these facilities and the people who are trained there.
Bio
Jeroen Hofman graduated in 2002 at he Royal Academie of Arts in The Hague, the Netherlands. Since then he works as a free lance photographer on editorial assignments and non-commissioned projects.
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Laia Abril
A Bad Day
‘A Bad Day‘ is a multimedia piece that approaches the struggle of bulimia and that is the first chapter of an ongoing long-term project about Eating Disorders. Jo is 21 and suffers from bulimia, a kind of eating disorder. Her obsession is not about being thin; it’s about not gaining weight, in spite of the huge amount of food that she ingests every day. Bulimia has taken all her time and money, and also her passion: dance. ‘If I was not bulimic I would be dancing like before’ Jo says. ‘But ballet is about elegance and perfection, and I’m a crap person in the middle of chaos’. She doesn’t look overweight and she hates her body and can’t see herself in leggings in front of a mirror anymore. She also thinks that her addiction is ‘disgusting’. That’s why she never told anyone ‘ not even her boyfriend ‘ about it. For some reason, she decided to open herself to me.
The project started, after a deep research, shooting for few weeks in November 2010, when I spent my days with Jo in her house in Edinburgh. I woke up with her and listened to her saying: ‘I hope this is going to be a good day’. With her I went to the supermarket and watched movies in her computer. I also saw her going through daily crisis, eating and vomiting immediately after. She confessed to me that she self-injures herself, specifically small cuts in her legs and feet. I saw her good days turning into very bad ones and I saw Jo acting in public as if everything was absolutely fine. And this is actually what this illness is all about, pretending that everything is all right while it’s not. An apparent normality that makes bulimia one of the hardest disorders to diagnose and a devastating killer of female teenagers and young adults worldwide.
The lies and misunderstandings that surround bulimia are what convinced me to further develop this project. I would like my images to catch the contradictory feelings and behaviors that these girls have to go through day after day. My approach is going to be intimate and psychological and will leave in the back the more physical manifestations of the of the disease.
Bio
Laia Abril, 25, is a documentary photographer raised in Barcelona. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and studied photography at ICP in New York City. She began working on documentary projects in the Balkans, covering the 13th Funeral of Srebrenica and the Independence of Kosova, first for a Spanish NGO and then for Spanish newspapers. In 2009 and 2010 she was a finalist on the Ian Parry Award participating at the Getty Gallery in London first with her photo project about the young lesbian community in Brooklyn and then with the project ‘The Last Cabaret’ about a porno sex-life club in Barcelona. Her work has been featured in magazines including OjodePez, The Sunday Times magazine, DRepubblica, and COLORS magazine amongst others, and has been recognized with various scholarships. After spending two years at FABRICA (the Benetton research and communication center in Italy) she is currently working as a staff photographer, blogger and Associate Picture Editor for COLORS Magazine combining her freelance career and keeping developing her personal project.
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Monika Bulaj
Behind the Great Game
What lies behind the conflicts and power struggles vying for control of the oil resources of Western and Central Asia? The aim of this work – The Central and Western Asia Project - is to give voice to those who are the unwilling protagonists (and often victims) of that which Ahmed Rashid terms The New Great Game, in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian republics.
In Afghanistan, a country that was to be saved from itself, despite the millions of dollars in aid and the presence of military personnel, over half of the population depends on food aid for their very survival and the condition of women is still among the worst in the world. Pakistan, increasingly torn apart by civil strife, is the victim of American political myopia that has bred a hatred for the West and has rendered impossible any serious opposition to the extremists, undermining the very founding values of the Pakistani state: democracy, a secular educational system, a functioning civil society.
In the work that I did in this Region (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iran) I’ve tried to go beyond the facile geopolitical characterizations of this region and its inhabitants and bring to the light its invisible spaces: spaces that resist the political monochromes, populist rhetoric and imported understandings of radical Islam. There is another, hidden world here, ignored by the media: that of the Sufi, despised by the Taliban; that of Islamised shamanisms and pre-Islamic traditions; that of the various nomadic tribes and other religious minorities, such as the animists, whose sacred places have long been seen as a powerful threat to the dominance of Taliban Wahabite ideology.
I’m trying to bring to the fore also the condition of women: their struggles with depression and suicide, with the impositions of morality, their aspirations, their sexuality.
Bio
Free-lance photographer and writer, for GEO, East, National Geographic (Italy), La Repubblica, periodicals by Gruppo Espresso and Rcs, Courrier International, Gazeta Wyborcza. Born in 1966 in Warsaw, she has completed five-years studies in the Polish Philology on the Warsaw University. She has three sons and worked until 2002 as an actress and dancer. She has published books: ‘Libya felix’, Mondadori; ‘Figli di No?’ Frassinelli 2006 (minorities and faiths in Azerbaigian); ‘Rebecca e la pioggia’, Frassinelli 2006 (the nomadic tribe of the Dinka of South Sudan); ‘Gerusalemme perduta’ with Paolo Rumiz, Frasinelli 2005 (about the Eastern Christians); ‘Genti di Dio, viaggio nell’Altra Europa’, Frasinelli 2008 (researches in East Europe and Israel), Bozy ludzie, Bosz Editions 2011. More than 50 personal exibitions. Awards: Grant in Visual Arts 2005 from EAJC, Bruce Chatwin Award 2009 ‘Occchio Assoluto’, The Aftermath Project Grant 2010. Her book ‘Genti di Dio’ has just been published in a new and larger edition.
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Reneta Gancheva
Bango Vassil
Bango Vassil is the day when Bulgarian gypsies are celebrating the beginning of their new year. It is on the 14th of January. For them it is the most important day of the year. The legend says this is the day when St.Vassil saves their nation from being swallowed up by the Red Sea.
Traditionally, Bango Vassil is the day when all the family gets together. The oldest women cook, clean, and prepare the house and in the night all come to one house. When doing the housework, you have to be quiet and not to say a word.
The family I met was Vassilka and Vassil’s. Their nine sons, with their children and grand children, celebrated in this big blue room. There was only bird meat on the table. A lot of wine, rakia and other alcholoic drinks disappeared quickly. The feast continues for two or three days. This is the way the day goes. Everybody is happy and they enjoy their celebration!
Bio
My name is Reneta Gancheva. I am from Bulgaria and 18 years old. Now is my last year in Yambol’s language high school. I take photos for a small local media.
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Manfredi Pantanella
Leaving Rubbish
Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is one of the world’s largest cities, more than 25 million inhabitants which produces a lot of wastes.
Until today an ad-lib urban plan could not manage the situation, leaving the city flooding in the trash.
No chance. Luckily, Cairo has the Zabbaleen.
The Zabbaleen are a religious minority of Coptic Christians who have served as Cairo’s informal garbage collectors for the past 80 years. Zabbaleen means “Garbage people” in Egyptian Arabic.
Spread out among seven different settlements scattered in the Greater Cairo Urban Region, the Zabbaleen population is about 80,000. The largest settlement is in the village of Moqattam, better known as the “Garbage City”, located at the feet of the Moqattam Mountains, next to Manshiyat Naser, a Muslim squatter settlement where the 90 percent of the community of this region are of Christian faith followers. For the past decades the Zabbaleen have supported themselves by collecting the trash, going door-to-door, for almost no charges. The Zabbaleens currently recycle up to 80 percent of the collected waste, whereas only 25 percent is reused by Western garbage companies. Many sources agree that the Zabbaleen have created one of the most efficient recycling systems in the world, they collect up to 3,000 tons of garbage every day.
The government does not reward the Zabbaleen for their actions, but instead has created a privatized system of waste collection, which is threatening the socio-economic sustainability of the Zabbaleen community.
The Egyptian government announced its plans to modernize and ‘Westernize’ the city’s waste management system, claiming the Zabbaleen’s methods were backward and unhygienic. This is not entirely false. Although conditions are improving, diseases such as hepatitis are common. This is hardly surprising when rubbish, including sharp metal, broken glass, and hospital waste such as syringes, are all sorted by hand.
However, the Zabbaleen were joined by many international aid agencies in protesting that the only way to lift them out of poverty was to allow them to keep their jobs as the city’s rubbish collectors. In a country with a 10.8% unemployment rate and with 20% of the population living in poverty, they had a point.
The three European companies hired to clean up Cairo cost $50 million a year, and recycled at best 25% of the waste they collected. The companies offered to hire the Zabbaleen as collectors, but offered as little as a dollar a day, half what a Zabbaleen can earn working for himself. However, the privatisation system has failed, leaving the city with litter-strewn streets and the continued use of the unsanitary landfill sites. Some have claimed that all the new modernisation initiatives have done is inspire a new generation of street waste collectors.
Bio
Manfredi Pantanella was born in 1985.
He lives between Rome and Paris. He attended The “Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia” of Rome and the “Ecole Superieure de Photographie et d’ Audiovisuel” of Paris. He work on stories about subcultures and documentary photography.
He has worked as an assistant for Reza (National Geographic Fellow).
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Marc Shoul
Brakpan
Brakpan is a small town that lies on the East Rand of Gauteng, sandwiched between Boksburg, Benoni and Springs. A once-prosperous mining community, today there are pawnshops, roadhouses, mechanics, mini casinos and other day-to-day shops lining the two main roads that slice through the town. Brakpan is like going back in time; so many aspects of the town remind me of old images I have seen of South Africa. Despite all the changes in nearby Johannesburg, Brakpan still goes about its business in much the same way it did before. There is a lack of modern development. You don’t see Tuscan townhouse complexes or buildings with glass facades. It’s all very simple and straight forward – almost transparent, and this transparency can be seen in the people too. You won’t find any airs or graces, no fancy cappuccino shops, sushi cafes or organic goods in Brakpan.
The town does not seem to have benefited from its gold rush glory days, which spanned between 1911 until the mid 1950’s, and it now has very little to show for its’ past. Today, the once flourishing mining town only pulls out a small portion of gold compared to what it used to generate, and some disused gold mines now only sell rubble.
A second factor that has contributed to Brakpan’s sense of preservation is the development of Carnival Mall and Casino, which conveniently lies just off the highway a few kilometers away from Brakpan Central. All the major chains and retail shops have moved to the mall and, as a result, the town centre has been left untouched and undeveloped, stunting it economically and leaving its inhabitants with little opportunities.
And yet there are many faces to modern Brakpan. Young girls push prams while karaoke competition winners don’t get their promised prizes. Pirated DVD’s get sold on the streets, crippling the nearby video shops that rent out older movies. There is a sense of nostalgia that remains and is reflected in the buildings and in the people. This is a place where you can still enjoy school and church fete’s, rugby matches, old bars, sokkie jols, biker rallies, fishing and braaiing at the Brakpan Dam; all of which are a part of the local’s lives.
Here there is a peacefulness and relaxed country town feel, without the stress about what tomorrow may bring. The people of Brakpan live in the now but are still bound by the constraints of the past.
The images presented here are printed on Multigrade V1 FB Fibre matt photographic paper. Exhibition prints are 40cm by 40cm in size in an edition of 10.
Bio
Marc Shoul lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was born in 1975 in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa and graduated (with honors in photography) from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 1999. Since then, he has had several exhibitions of his work including group shows at the Arts Association of Bellville, Fusion (1999), Artscape, Mental Health, (2001) Cape Town, Month of Photography, Detour, (2002), Cape Town, Photo ZA, Obsess (2004) and Resolution Gallery, Faces (2008) in Johannesburg as well as at the World Health Organization TB exhibition in India (2004). Solo exhibitions of ‘Beyond Walmer’ were held by the Association of Visual Arts Gallery in Cape Town (2000) and Natal Society of Arts, Durban (2001). “Flatlands” a solo exhibition was also held at the Association of Visual Arts in Cape Town (2009) with help from the National Arts Council. Shoul was also featured in the AGFA Youth International Photojournalism Publication 1999. He also reached the finals of the Absa L’Atelier 2009. Flatlands showed at KZNSA in Durban, South Africa and Galerie Quai 1 in Vevey, Switzerland in 2010. Shoul was invited to hold a workshop at the Vevey School of Photography on the 2010. Shoul was also been included in After A at the Report Atri Festival, Italy, June 2010 curated by Federica Angelucci. Beyond Walmer is on show at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum June-August 2010. Brakpan (work in progress),Shoul has also been included in the Bonaini Africa 2010 Festival of Photography, Cape Town Castle of Good Hope and Museum Africa, Johannesburg. Brakpan (work in progress) was included in 10 a group exhibition at the PhotoMarket Workshop, Johannesburg, 2010. Brakpan in 2011 won the 1st prize at the Winephoto.
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum added “Beyond Walmer” to its permanent collection (2007).
For the last ten years, Marc has worked for various local and international magazines such as Time, Colors, Wired, Blueprint, Dazed and Confused, Design Indaba, World Health Organization, Mother Jones, Stern, Gala, De Spiegel, Financial Times Magazine, Monocle, Smithsonian and The Telegraph Magazine, He has also shot for many advertising clients and agencies.
He has recently completed a project named ‘Flatlands’ in the Johannesburg inner city. He is now working on a new body of work in Brakpan on the East Rand where he is exploring the city’s way of life and its people.
He is interested in exploring theams of social relevance and changes within his country and further a field.
Shoul works largely in black and white, using a medium format film camera and natural light printed on Fiber photographic paper.
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Una Fotografa
Caucasian Woman
Una, Nessuna, Centomila
No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names. This tree, tremulous pulse of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, wandering.
Luigi Pirandello, Uno, Nessuno, Centomila, 1926 (English translation One, No One and One Hundred Thousand)
Una is not The One
She doesn’t want to be you. Just anyone of you. Anytime, anywhere.
(You need to be Caucasian, but it’s not her choice. She cannot stop being Caucasian and doesn’t like too much of photoshopping.)
Una is not the photographer.
Not wanting to be an artist, she is part of the picture.
Not wanting to represent a whole life, she represents anyone’s life. Bits and pieces of it.
Una multiplies her identities and roles walking in and out her pictures.
She becomes mirror and model, photographer and subject.
Her work is unique because it is serial. And she dissolves in it asking you what do you want to do with her. And yourself, maybe.
Una is….. (please fill the blanks)
Veronica Fernandes, 2012
Project
The photography project Donna Caucasica (Caucasian Woman) aims to give a an ironic profile of the modern Western woman by combining each image with an extract taken from ‘The Woman’s Encyclopaedia’, a 20 volume work published in 1963 by the Italian Editor Fabbri Editori.
Borrowing from the language of stock photography (practically the only type of images featured in magazines), the project traces the stereotypical representation of femininity and, through the use of the self-portrait, gives a nod to the ‘profile pic generation’.
Bio
Una Fotografa is an Italian woman photographer in her thirties.
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Rian Dundon
A view from inside the other new China
This project re-examines China’s shifting cultural norms, economic transitions, and socio-political changes from within the context of its marginalized interior regions. Moving beyond the urban-centric/scenic/iconic structures, which dominate the current visual record of China, it considers the cultural dynamism of smaller provincial cities and rural prefectures far removed from China’s coastal metropole. These peripheral spaces, borderlands of China’s rural-to-urban transformation, are a crossroads for individuals finding their own place within a fluctuating and subjective cultural (and indeed physical) landscape. If economic growth has opened new avenues for expression in China so too have resultant ideological deviations affected the way people see themselves and their place in the world. This project looks to provide visual evidence of that reality by focusing on the differentiated actualities of life in an environment of sustained cultural flux.
In China’s interior provinces, where the full benefits of economic growth have yet to be realized, negotiating modernity requires hustling for a place within fresh modes of individualized experience and personal redefinition. This project traces its narrative across the diverse geographies of these liminal regions to witness how divergent notions of sex, desire, image, and identity coalesce to help shape a cultural reality not found in dominant media representations of China. Its images form a visual diary chronicling the interpersonal relationships of people living on the fringes of China’s social sphere and the vulnerability I see reflected in a generation of young people coming of age in a society set on fast-forward.
Bio
Rian Dundon (Portland, 1980) is an independent documentary photographer and writer from Monterey, California. His words and images have appeared in The Irish Times Magazine, New America Media, Time, Stern, Out, and Newsweek. Since 2005 Rian has produced several works of photography addressing social issues in China including urbanization, drug addiction, celebrity culture, homosexuality, migrant labor, and HIV/AIDS proliferation. His work has been exhibited at the Angkor Photo Festival, the FotoGrafia Festival, Caochangdi Photo Spring, The Camera Club of New York, and the New York Photo Festival. Rian is currently working on a series of photographs analyzing the impact of incarceration on prisoners in California. He speaks Mandarin Chinese and is a masters candidate in Social Documentation at University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Nicholas Calhoun
Existing is All
We never live in the same moments. Although, life may be repetitive with our daily rituals and the things we experience, they are never truly the same. But it’s this illusion that we create, thinking life is vapid, that pushes us to do the ‘unexpected’. Losing ourselves in the moments we tend to forget about the future and dip our toes in the past and experience life.
With boredom we ignite ourselves to experience agony and joy; we scar our selves and our lives, just so we can have a taste of reality. We grow older although not aware of where we are headed.
With only stories that were created to simply be told, we forget who we are. Knowing we exist is all we need to keep us moving along.
Existing is all we do, all we need.
Bio
I’m Nicholas Calhoun, I go by Conner though. I have lived in Raleigh NC all my life. There isn’t much to do here except pass time.
My inspirations come from where I live, and the people who surround me.
I use art to better understand who I am and the little things that people tend to not notice.
I’m still young and learning.
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Stacy Kranitz
The Other
My project engages with history, representation, biography, personal narrative, and otherness in the documentary tradition. Each year in Pennsylvania, 500 people come together to reenact the Battle of the Bulge. During the reenactment, I portray Leni Riefenstahl and behave with soldiers, as she would have. I am intrigued by the complex story of a woman with a problematic set of morals. My work aims to understand people beyond the constraints of good vs evil. I have inserted myself into the Nazi reenactor photographs to subvert the viewer’s instinct to dismiss these people as different from themselves. This allows me to reflect upon atrocity, delve into my own relationship with my Jewish heritage, and contemplate the camera’s ability to re-imagine history.
Much of our conception of history is based on images. Historical images have been filtered through media and propaganda. These images become history as generations pass. Images are the dominant force that shape the public imagination. My images of the reenactment are part of the deconstruction process by which images first represent and then replace history.
The next phase of this project will explore Riefenstahl’s life between 1962-1977 when she lived with the Nuba in Sudan. I will visit the same Nuba tribes to focus on the disjunction between her fetishized images and my own exploration of the Nuba’s complex modern reality. The Nuba were victims of genocide during a recent civil war and it has deeply impacted their culture. They were forcibly relocated to camps and Islamicized. Hundreds of thousands died from warfare and starvation.
My project asks how we live in a world where genocide takes place in continuum? It reflects on the history of the documentary tradition as it poses new ways of expressing identity in relation to ‘otherness’. This project deconstructs the notion of the photograph as document, its power as a tool of propaganda, as a witness to history and a call for change.
Bio
Stacy Kranitz studied film and photography at New York University. Her work focuses on the ways we express aggression and violence in our daily rituals, habits and pastimes. Additional themes in her work include the relationship between music and culture, the emotional growth of children and environmental racism. She is interested in the theoretical underpinnings that bind together the evolution of the documentary tradition. Her work looks to explore important social issues while commenting on this tradition and challenging its boundaries.
Her clients include Adbusters, Dwell, Elle, ESPN, Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, Fortune, Men’s Journal, Mother Jones, Metropolis, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, People, Rolling Stone, Spin, Vice, Wall Street Journal and Wired.
She was awarded a Young Photographers Alliance Scholarship Award and also received a Story Project Grant from the California Council for the Humanities. She has shown her work at galleries in NY, CA, LA and FL.
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ESSAY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT
Elena Perlino
A Sea of Light
essay foreword by Machiel Botman
“Let’s call it the yellow photograph for now: a street sign with half an arrow, a woman touching the sign and looking at where the arrow points. Behind it all a yellow sea of light, a colored landscape, cityscape that is too good to be true.
(who-ever said that things must be true)
Elena Perlino’s photographs are not carefully constructed images, all have the sensation of immediacy, as if she is passing by all the time. One might call what she passes by ‘little moments’ that, had she not been there, would have stayed unnoticed. In a world where everything is constructed, reality and fantasy, these ‘little moments’ escape us often, and when someone shows them to us we might not accept them.
Some make it easy for us, Richard Avedon’s Boy and tree in Italy is one of these beautiful floating moments, but all the same boy and tree are carefully orchestrated in a pose that we know, that we have come to accept. Perlino’s photographs are made of different stuff and at first glance one might say she does not make it easy on us.
The woman in the yellow photograph seems to accept reality as it is, by looking into the obvious direction where the arrow points. Someone who knows about clothes might tell us the woman is upper-class and waiting for a taxi. That’s where the truth begins and ends and begins again.
To me this woman is an immigrant, coming from yellow country, waiting to be collected to go somewhere else, somewhere where all is supposed to be better, where the sun always shines. Yellow country is still very much part of her, that’s where she is rooted, that’s where she is leaving behind those she loves, those she hates. Yellow country still follows her and I am afraid it always will.
Photographs like this always make me wonder. Where does the photographer come from, where does she go? Is Elena from yellow country, collecting proof some people are leaving? Or is she a future girl, pulling in people with invisible threads?
Good photography, like good writing, or good cinema, leaves the viewer free to do as he wants and in that way Perlino’s images, perhaps one more than the other, do not make it hard on us at all.
She has paved wide roads for us to walk on, with lots of light and exotic colors, with the presence of people, she is a people girl. There are gas stations staring at us with big eyes that look like lights, there is a man about to touch the cigarette to rid it of too much ash, there is a nude woman showing a muscle behind her skin, there are ghosts in the street, shit. But apart from what there is, we are free to make our own context, to decide what it all means. Until not very long ago, this would freak out the sensible world because this maker fits in no box. I hope dearly that by now we can accept these images as strong and beautiful gifts that need no explanation, that just need a little imagination.
My only worry concerns the messenger, the photographer if you like. She appears to be a lonely soul, detached from then and there – I hope she accepts these gifts as means to stop now and then, to get out and touch.”
Bio
Elena Perlino (b.1972) grew up in Piedmont, Italy. She graduated with a degree in History and Cinema from the University of Turin and attended at Reflexions Masterclass in Paris. Since 2003 Elena has been working on human trafficking and migration in the Mediterranean area. She was selected as a Nominee for Magnum Emergency Fund 2011.
Elena Perlino is currently running a photography project about Nigerian trafficking on Kickstarter.
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Sean Gallagher
China’s Fragile Forests
Natural forests cover about 10 percent of China, however few of these forests remain in a primary or pristine condition.
China’s forests are threatened primarily by timber collection, mining, unregulated harvesting of flora for traditional Chinese medicine and excessive development related to increased tourism. Reforestation efforts by authorities have also caused the proliferation of mono-culture forests, which have hampered forest recovery and negatively affected biodiversity.
In 2011, the UN’s official “International Year of Forests,” the forests of the southwest of China were classified by Conservation International as one of the world’s top ten most threatened forest regions.
This is the third chapter in a long-term body of work focusing on China’s environmental crises in the early 21st Century. The previous two chapters have focused on increasing desertification and on disappearing wetlands.
This work was funded by a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Bio
Sean Gallagher is a British photojournalist, currently based in Beijing, China. Graduating in Zoology from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England, his work now focuses on environmental issues in Asia, with specific emphasis on China.
He was the first recipient of the Emerging Photographers Fund in 2008 and is a 4-time recipient of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Travel Grant. His work has appeared with news outlets including Newsweek, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and National Geographic. His work on environmental issues in China was acknowledged as “some of the most striking images on display at the Copenhagen climate change conference”, by the BBC World Service in 2009.
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A VIDEO BY ROGER BALLEN I FINK U FREEKY by DIE ANTWOORD
Many of you may remember Roger Ballen here from his Boarding House essay, also published in Burn 01. Roger was also kind enough to interact with this audience. This is a very interesting example of a conceptual still photographer making a video. This video took 5 days of shooting, but was “years in conceptualizing”, says Roger.
“We had really clear concepts of what we wanted to do in our heads. We started with my photographs for ideas, and then mimicked them in the sets.” says Roger.
I have watched this a dozen times now, and see some new piece each time. Cannot get it out of my head.
-dah-
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Alvaro Deprit
Black Garden
Nagorno Karabakh / 2010 May.
Inside the narrow valleys of the Caucasus Mountains there is a country not appearing in the maps: Nagorno-Karabakh, which name – a mixed of Russian, Turkish and Persian languages – means Mountainous Black Garden.
This self-proclaimed republic is the result of a cruel conflict – 20 to 30 thousand victims – that started in the 1988, when its majority Armenian population started demanding the independence from the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.
People in Karabakh try to survive as they can.
The recognition of Kosovos independence by Western powers as the recognition by Russia of South Osetia and Abkhazia – two secessionist regions of Georgia – are the facts that made the Karabakhians think they could become a real country.
Bio
Alvaro Deprit, Madrid 1977.
Alvaro Deprit has been living in Italy since 2004 and divides his time between Rome and Istanbul. He studied German Philology in Germany and Sociology in Italy. A self-taught photographer, Alvaro has deepened his understanding of photographic languages by attending courses in Spain with Pep Bonet, Sheryl Mendez and Christian Caujolle.
He is particularly interested in the Turkish culture and its modernization, changes in post-Soviet South Caucasus, and immigration in Europe, which explores various forms of adaptation.
Alvaro has exhibited his photos in Rome, Barcelona, London and New York and has worked for Il Sole 24ore, Newsweek, Internazionale, Vanity Fair, Viva Magazine, ElPeriodico, Yo Dona, Glamour, Sette and Altair.
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