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Lisa Wiltse

The Mennonites of Manitoba, Bolivia

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The Tranquility of the Mennonite settlement of Manitoba in eastern Bolivia was transformed into fear and confusion when, this past June, suspicions were confirmed that at least 100 women and girls were raped by members of their community. The accused, ranging in age from 18 to 41 years old, targeted the women in the community’s homes. They sprayed a narcotic substance that rendered the women unconscious and then raped them. Now many teenage victims fear they are unable to marry because the Mennonite community requires that its women remain virgins until marriage in order to retain the respect of their peers. These events have shaken this conservative colony to its core. Manitoba is located about 152 kilometers (94 miles) northeast of the city of Santa Cruz with a population of about 3,000. Horse-drawn buggies, farmhouses with manicured lawns and fields planted to the horizon with soybeans and sorghum. Mennonites have tended to lead quiet, dedicated, religiously inspired lives. They are known for their espousal of non-violence. Their European features and distinctive clothes separate them from other Bolivians. The Mennonites settled in eastern Bolivia’s farmlands more than 50 years ago. They came from Mennonite colonies in Canada, Russia, Mexico, Belize and Paraguay, looking for a better life. They live simply, dress plainly and refuse to use many modern conveniences. They trace their spiritual ancestry to a 16th century European preacher named Menno Simons, whose followers became known as Mennonites. Today, some 60,000 Mennonites call Bolivia their home. Their colonies are broad expanses of land given to them by the Bolivian government. This is where they live and work, sheltered by the government’s promise of freedom of religion, exemption from military service, and the privilege of running their own schools. These images capture the Mennonites of Manitoba in their everyday lives, now struggling to erase a recent painful past and continue to live their lives separate from the outside world. I aim to produce photo essays that are intimate yet strong in narrative, and that gives voice to those previously overlooked. The remote colonies seen down dusty roads are off the beaten track, and, once there, difficult to enter and fully understand. I hope to bring a greater understanding and awareness to these communities.

Bio

Lisa Wiltse was born in 1977 in Connecticut, and graduated from the Art Institute of Boston with a BFA in photography. In 2004 she moved to Sydney, Australia where she worked as a staff photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2008, she decided to pursue her freelance career and in 2009 moved to La Paz, Bolivia . She has traveled extensively, focusing on documenting everyday life in marginalized communities in places such as Bangladesh, Uganda, Philippines, and the USA. Her work has been recognized by POYI’s, the National Press Photographers Association, the Sony awards, Magenta’s Flash forward photographer is a recipient of The Walkley award in Australia. She was selected as one of eight photographers for Pour L’Instant in Niort, France in 2009. She has recently been awarded The PDN Emerging Photographer award and selected as an exhibitor for the 2nd Lumix Festival for young photojournalism in Hanover, Germany. Her work been published in The Fader, TIME magazine, GEO, Internazionale, Private Photo Review, The Sun Magazine, Marie Claire, The Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald. She is currently a contributor with Getty Reportage.

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Emily Berl

Our Boys

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Everyone in Strawn, Texas knows Friday night means football. Located approximately 80 miles west of Fort Worth, Strawn is a small community with a population of around 700. Strawn high school estimates they will have only 39 students in the 2010-2011 school year. Without enough players to field a traditional 11-man football team, Strawn plays a variation of the sport called 6-man football. Unlike 11-man football, all players on a 6-man team play both offense and defense. Although the fields is slightly smaller than a traditional 11-man field, the fact that there are less players leaves more room to run, resulting in a much faster, higher scoring game. While many outsiders see 6-man as an inferior version of the sport, a demotion of sorts, the residents of 6-man towns take great pride in their teams. During the playoffs, towns with populations in the hundreds can draw fans in the thousands. Winning a 6-man state championship, as Strawn has done in 2003 and 2008 is considered one of the highest honors in the state. While 6-man is played across Texas, and in several other states and Canada, the sport is most prevalent in tiny west Texas towns where populations have been steadily declining due to migration to larger cities. In Strawn, the school is the center of the town and football represents the school. People see the kids of Strawn as their future, because if the school disappears, the town essentially disappears as well. People in Strawn see the football players as “our boys.” When one of the players needs something they can’t afford like lunch for a long bus ride, a uniform, and even x-rays, the town will find the funds to get them what they need. The boys in Strawn grow up knowing they are expected to play football, but at the same time, most grow up waiting for the day they get to play on the team, and in the spotlight. In Strawn and many other towns like it, football is a piece of Americana passed down through the generations. It is an ever-present way of life, a source of pride that binds the community together, and it’s what you do on Friday nights. When I first arrived in Strawn, I knew virtually nothing about the place and absolutely nothing about 6-man football. But soon, I was welcomed into the community with open arms. The people of Strawn let me into their lives and for that I am forever grateful.

Bio

Emily Berl was born and raised in Washington, DC. She graduated from Boston University where she studied photojournalism and art history. She is currently a freelance photographer living in Brooklyn, NY.

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www.emilyberlphoto.com

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Elena Perlino

Des Corps Dans la Ville

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Prostitution is legal in France, but soliciting customers is not. The immediate consequence of newly passed laws against passive soliciting has changed the sex trade. Large concentrations of utility vehicles serving as accommodation crowd the nightly streets of the city suburbs. The shaking and bouncing vans leave little doubt as to the activities going on inside.

In Lyon, prostitutes from Brazil, Portugal, and Cameroon, as well as transvestites from Algeria, have largely been ousted from their usual haunts in the Perrache station neighborhood. Candles on the dashboards of surreal rows of white vans dimly illuminate the women’s faces. An open door means available, a closed door means busy.

The Rhone and Saone rivers outline the area for sex trade. Police controls, waiting for clients, drugs and alcohol, all evaporate by the quickly arriving dawn. The mix of people you meet is far from any stereotype. Fear and loneliness are felt but so is the intimacy of a well-tuned microcosm. Fernanda for example, a Portuguese prostitute in her sixties, not only receives old clients but also stitches their worn clothing on occasion.

Cassandra and Sylvie, two Algerian brothers, unfolded a whole new view on this subject for me.

Upon their yearly return to Algeria, their skirts, high heels and wigs are abandoned, and they slip into the role of heterosexual Algerian men, living with their families.  Algerian law prohibits homosexuality or transsexual conduct, which is severely punished by imprisonment, not to mention the social stigma.

Conseil Régional Rhône-Alpes has commissioned the project and a series of images was exhibited at the Biennal Septembre de la photographie, Lyon, 2006 - Des corps dans la ville.

A selection of images will be part of Le Mois de la Photo in November 2010, Paris, France.

Bio

Born 1972 in Italy, Elena Perlino currently lives in northern Italy.

After receiving her degree from the faculty of arts at the university of Turin,  she discovered  serious photography at Toscana Photographic Workshop in Italy. In 2003  she was selected for the Reflexions Masterclass, directed by Giorgia Fiorio and Gabriel Bauret in Paris, which gave focus to her work.

Today she works as an independent photographer on assignment for editorial projects and cultural institutions and develops personal works.

Her clients include D di Repubblica, Io Donna, GQ, Max, Specchio, Elle, Grazia, Glamour, Anna, Rockstar, and Tauchsport among others. Her pictures have been exhibited and awarded in Bosnia, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the USA.

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EPF 2010 Finalist

Alexander Mendelevich

Weariness

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I am looking for fineness and perfection in humanity. It is interesting for me to expose it through drama, the drama of  being. I am trying to find these  moments in ordinary things that fill our lives, like our emotions, events at work or with family, happiness or unhappiness in relationships, good food with the man you love or lonely supper on a holiday. Thousands of things in our every day existence, things which make us sensual. Staged photography gives me more control to make the occurring more sharp, to build reality on the set like a sculptor, when you can feel every detail, where 1/60 sec. of exposure is transformed to something permanent. It’s like to try to compress all of life in one regular situation and to turn emotion and feeling into an object.

Bio

I was born in Pyatigorsk, Northern Caucasus, Russia on 07/12/1979. After high school and three years of studying Economy and Management, I moved to Israel. I served in the army as an ambulance driver and then finished my B.F.A. at the Jerusalem Academy of Arts and Design in the photography department.

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Alexander Mendelevich

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Julien Coquentin

Strange Rain

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Once again—the sky saturates us with is deluge—accompanied by its loud burst of thunder—we’ve grown accustomed to. How long has it been raining on this city? Mute and indifferent to what has become familiar—we are only sure that the storms have transformed our city and us. It is a strange sensation –living in a gorge –an atmosphere is chronic with humidity as we find ourselves with the sons of the months—embracing the brute infernal noise. Our consciousness compelled us to lie down come nightfall. Wrapped in cloth –we are become saturated by the grounds unceasing stream of humidity, Surrounded by walls of scaling paint—an atrocity; this climate. We all seek release from this fate…as assimilation into the grey void –paled our smiles—–now a blur… evanescent. Self-preservation…means accepting ones fate. We knew that. Kinship of shared experiences found us drawn to each other…creating units of our making. Yet…forced into communities driven by the dying light equated –not genuine fraternity—but mocked relationships with all the defects of hypocrisy. This morning –the church found the entire city in attendance for the sermon. So as to conceal the sound of the thunder—an investment had been made to install a large sound system—affording all to hear. Suddenly, the sound of the rain ceased—leaving the acoustics of the auditorium amplifying the voice of the priest, which filled the church. Bewildered chatter halted to a whisper. A ray of sun light had caused the audience to divert their attention—and one by one they streamed out of this forced shelter. bedazzled by the magnificence of this light, our astonishment intensified… It was this day I knew what silence meant. To be present and yet so far removed

Bio

I was born in France in 1976 but now live in Montreal, Canada, where I practice the profession of nursing at night. I never studied photography, I’m just in love with images, shadows and raindrops, gray light and stories … I do not have an expanded curriculum vitae and I walk every day in my city with camera in hand…I am a passer concentrated…photography has eaten my mind for the past three years…

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EPF 2010 Finalist

Jukka Onnela

Of Obsessions

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Night or nighttime is the period of time when the sun is below the horizon. The opposite of night is day. The disappearance of sunlight, the primary energy source for life on Earth, has dramatic impacts on the morphology, physiology and behavior of almost every organism. Some animals sleep during the night, while other nocturnal animals including moths and crickets are active during this time.

“My goal with these photographs? Even saying that sentence is like listening to a junkie bumming money from his mother…  …the shit that my brother poured out of his mouth when he was an addict was unbelievable. I remember this one Christmas Eve when he called to my mother that he needed three thousand euros, or otherwise “some men” would kill him. I can’t remember if my mother gave him any money, although usually she did give some”.
-Excerpt from a recorded conversation, Helsinki, 2007

“Sometimes I have this insect like feeling. It usually comes after a long manic phase .”
-K. In a bar 2009

Mania is generally characterized by a distinct period of an elevated, expansive, or irritable mood state. People experience an increase in energy and a decreased need for sleep. They may indulge in substance abuse, particularly alcohol or other depressants, cocaine or other stimulants.Their behavior may become aggressive.

“I love my mother but I think it’s not an oedipal thing”.
-K. 2009

“When the depression really hits everything turns into yellow and grey. I don’t know why, but the colours remind me of the year 1984. My grandfather died that year. “
-Excerpt from J’s monologue. 2007

“Your moral, economical and religious values have created this enormous vacuum around you. All your ideas and acts are stained by these twisted values, or more likely by the lack of them.”
-M. 2009

I document my surroundings, the people who inhabit it and the situations, that I somehow consider to be significant, by using recorded conversations, texts and photographs.

Bio

Jukka Onnela (1977) lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. He is one of the founding members of an European photography collective, Collective Smoke.  His work could be described as personal documentary.

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EPF 2010 Finalist

Michael Christopher Brown

China

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I feel most alive while on the road. As a result, I am often drawn to photograph people in a state of transition. Fifty years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the construction of Americas Interstate Highway System, which helped open the Heartland and West and create a culture that would eventually spread around the world. China is experiencing a similar boom in industrialization and culture and I am currently driving around the country, photographing along the expanding road network. While the final form of this project remains unclear, while crossing the country I can only continue to listen, record and grow.  A loose approach, using small film cameras while often photographing without looking through the viewfinder, has enabled me to focus less on the lens and more on having an experience.

Bio

Raised in Washington State, Michael moved to New York and began working as a freelance photographer in 2006. His clients include GEO, Time, National Geographic Magazine, Smithsonian, Fortune, The Atlantic and ESPN The Magazine, among others. When not on assignment he might be found driving around China in his modified bread van.

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Michael Christopher Brown

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Kerry Payne

Left Behind

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In a small Australian town on June 12th 2001, my father, Myles Hilton Bean took his own life, aged 60. It was a decision I had no say in, but one which would alter me and the way I viewed the world forever. In the years that followed I encountered many social stigmas and outdated taboos associated with suicide. Whilst outwardly I functioned brilliantly, inwardly I was broken. I felt completely alone; haunted by emotions common in suicide bereavement — guilt, regret, anger, a sense of failure, shame, abandonment and utter confusion all hung in heavy layers over the expected feelings of grief and mourning.

Because I never spoke of what had happened, I prolonged my healing unnecessarily. Each year, 1 million people worldwide die by suicide — more than in war, terrorist activities and homicides — making it the tenth leading cause of death in the world. For every person that dies by suicide at least 20 more will attempt to do so, yet despite the high rate, little attention is paid to the phenomenon.

At least 90 percent of people who kill themselves have a diagnosable and treatable psychiatric illness – such as depression, bipolar depression, or some other depressive illness. In many cases, it is a treatable, preventable tragedy. Although most suicides are caused by mental health problems, mental health-care allocations often comprise less than 2 per cent of national health budgets. Greater attention must be given to suicide prevention, such as increased funding for research, help lines and mental health facilities.

I will continue this work and by sharing my story and those of my fellow survivors, it is my hope that others will learn from our experiences, speak up about their own, and seek comfort and support in the knowledge that they are not alone. We are many. The silence, secrecy and stigma that surrounds suicide has to end and if my work prevents a single suicide or helps one survivor avoid the many mistakes I made, it will give some meaning to a loss that nine years later, I still struggle to make any sense.

*If you or somebody you know is in crisis call 1800-273-TALK (8255) [USA]

thank you Dad, for the love you gave me in your life and the purpose you have given me in your death..

Bio

1969. Australia. I am a traveler and the urge to roam and my love of photography are happy companions. A reformed corporate world entrepreneur I now spend my days pursuing and documenting stories that matter; preserving my own version of history (with a small ‘h’) for the curious few who follow. I’ve had the honor of learning from some of the world’s most inspiring and generous photographers and I count my blessings every day to have discovered my passion so early in life. Some never do.

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website: www.kerrypayne.net

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EPF 2010 Finalist

Justin Maxon

When the Spirit Moves

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I’ve heard people say that since America has it’s first Black President in office, we have transitioned into a post-racial society.  If he can succeed, then all people of color can do the same.  This supposed land of the free is at liberty to those that have the wealth to buy it.

Those living in Chester, PA, USA, grow up in an environment where forces everywhere are against them; where gravity seems to be stronger and less forgiving. It is a place where pollution alters cognitive development, violence and crime are commonplace, poverty is oppressive, jobs are virtually non-existent, and people with nothing take from others who have little

If you walk these streets, you pass people in a trance, who speak without being heard. You see children with shallow eyes, with scars deep. Ghosts are everywhere, fading from neglect. There is little for people to grasp a hold of for support, to deliver them through. People are forced into carrying this burden of weight and thus are required to be strong to withstand it.

I was besieged while witnessing the issues weighing heavily on the lives of the people in this community. In experimenting with multiple exposures, I’m attempting to speak to the complexities I felt were so tightly woven into their lives.  With out this approach, my work would not begin to unfold the many consequences that have come out of their collective struggle. In this process of layering interrelated moments next to one other, I’m cautious not to bend or manipulate reality beyond recognition, for the benefit of my own aesthetics or ego. I want these moments to be believable and not just passed off as artistic representations of the truth.

This project is an attempt to bring awareness to the issues that plague many inner city Black communities, like Chester, throughout America. Mostly importantly though, it’s an attempt to show the resilience and strength that is present in these communities.

Bio

Justin Maxon (1983) was born in a small town in the woods of northern California. Nothing but trees and hippies sorta thing. He first got into photography at an early age, but then only took pictures of mountains and other woody features.  Today, Maxon is mainly interested in pursuing long-term projects that examine the complexities of human struggle, where he seeks out the hope always present in the shadows of life.

Maxon has received numerous awards for his photography, from competitions like UNICEF Images of the Year, POYi, and NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism. He won first place in the 2007 World Press Photo Daily Life Singles category, along with winning the Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year at the 2008 Lucie Awards. In 2009, he was named one of PDNs 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch.

His clients include TIME, Newsweek, Mother Jones Magazine, Fader Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR.

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Razon Collective

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EPF 2010 Finalist

Kate Stone

At the Seams

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In “At the Seams” I used photographs of domestic interiors and common architecture to construct impossible, uncanny spaces that evoke a feeling of hesitant curiosity, a nervous desire to explore the room, to peek around the bend or to see what lies behind the door at the end of the hall. Our acceptance of photography as reality makes these images hard to understand, especially for those who know the original place. At first glance the rooms and buildings in these photographs appear real. Upon closer examination, however, something is clearly wrong. Doorways are misplaced and once rigid walls are twisted and torn. Distorted perspective creates incongruent angles and improbable shadows. These spaces are literally falling apart at the seams.

Bio

Kate Stone received her BA in photography from Bard College in 2009 and currently lives and works in Chicago. She was recently a recipient of the Tierney Fellowship and her work has been shown by The Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Photo Review, ARTribe NY and Eleni Koroneou Gallery.

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EPF 2010 Finalist

Dima Gavrysh

Insha’Allah

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I took a photograph of Captain Harris, the commander of Combat Outpost Tangi, in Afghanistan’s Wardak province, as he was waiting for a helicopter to take him to the funeral of one of his soldiers. While he was covered by a cloud of dust, he seemed lost and overcome by his surroundings  the photo turned out to be truthfully despondent. His people are hated by the locals. He hates to lose his people to IEDs. I bet he hates the role he is assigned to play in winning hearts and minds of the locals, and he probably doesn’t believe in it even if he tries.

The photographs I shot through a night vision device had a quality reminiscent of early silver gelatin process and modern video games at the same time. In the first picture of my portfolio, the soldiers portrait acquired a GI-Joe-like quality, with the humanity taken out of his appearance. He looks like a war robot, a part of greater military machinery, and not as an individual human being. There is uneasiness and despair mixed with confusion. No one knows the right way to fight this war and when it is going to end, if ever. All of it looks like some huge experiment, where a civilization is being pushed forward through warfare. It doesn’t seem to work and yet we try.

Bio

Dima Gavrysh is a Ukrainian-born, New York City-based photojournalist. He started his career in the mid-90’s in Kiev, Ukraine. For the past 10 years, he has worked with major news agencies such as Associated Press, Agence France Press, European Press-Photo Agency, Gamma-Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg News.

Dima’s work has been published in magazines and newspapers worldwide including The New York Times, Time, People, Paris Match, Independent, Marie Claire, Stern and Newsweek.

Awards:
AI+AP (American Photography + American Illustration): published in 2008- 2010 yearbook.
2010 PDN Photo Annual Contest: Photojournalism.
International Photography Awards ? Lucie: honorable mention: 2008-2009.
XVIII Eddie Adams Workshop participant: winner of an internship for the Washington Post.com: 2005

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Emile Hyperion Dubuisson

Siberia, the Far North

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I went to Siberia without a camera. I bought it there. I was eighteen. Before being there, I never photographed. After shooting these images, I did not photograph again for more than ten years. For my first experience, I was assistant director on a long-term documentary film project shot in Russia. After few months of traveling all over the country, we landed in Siberia. The film was hard to make because of the weather conditions, and I started exploring the landscape by myself. I am here in this unreal set, on the north part of the polar circle and practically no light; it’s the middle of the winter, the coldest time ever. No one strolls for pleasure. Excursions are limited to the necessary. A few furtive silhouettes stirred in the dim light around the wind-swept encampments half-buried in snow. What did I shoot? I don’t even remember. I was not a photographer and survival took all my attention. These frames now appear to me to hold a deep intensity. Is it the reminiscing to that long-ago time when photographing was for me a totally instinctive and free act?

A few weeks later, we went back to Moscow and I started to process the film… My lack of experience and the absence of notice on the film, made the development very random. Half of my films were blank, the other half almost translucent. I decided to store the negatives. I left photography. Right after, I went back to Paris and start working as an assistant and then a cinematographer on feature length films for ten years. It’s only after coming in New York to study photography at the International Center of Photography in 2006 that I decided to look at the negatives again. The curiosity and the new technology help me to discover what was behind. Very quickly, the images from Siberia kept my attention and I realized how they were important for me. They signify the beginning of my photographic endeavor and that first step onto which I could build. A random chemical process, an unconsciousness of the image, and a lot of chance came together to create a series that is at once constructed and magical, consistent and surreal. To my now professional eye, these images of Siberia resonate. Diving back into this work from the past, I am rediscovering a part of my innocence. While structuring these images I have discovered unexpected meaning.

Bio

Emile H Dubuisson was born in Paris. He attended the International Center of Photography in 2007, furthering his knowledge of photography. Prior to that he studied cinema at Universite Paris 8 in France. His work reflects disciplines of both fields. Dubuisson is currently working as cinematographer on a feature length film.

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www.emilehyperiondubuisson.com

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EPF 2010 Finalist

Matt Eich

Carry Me Ohio

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Once known for its bounty of coal, salt, clay and timber, Southeastern Ohio was stripped of its resources by the mining corporations that thrived from the 1820s to the 1960s.  When they had mined all that they could, the corporations left, leaving the communities with little but their cultural identity, which is a product of poverty.

For the past three years I have been documenting the people of this region as they attempt to recover from the aftermath of extractive industry. In photographing their daily life, I’ve explored the culture of the area, as well as on the crippling poverty that threatens to extinguish it. The foothills of Appalachia have been my home for the past five years. I met my wife here and our daughter was born here. Now, the same lack of opportunity that has plagued the residents of Southeastern Ohio for decades has forced us to move.

Rampant unemployment, poor housing conditions, drug abuse and sub-standard schools have left many families here in crisis. In 2006, Athens County, one of the poorest counties in the state, had a poverty rate of 27.4 percent and a per capita income of just $14,171. With the economic downturn of the United States these numbers have only gotten worse.

In this series of images I show the isolated and trapped residents of Southeastern Ohio. From Hercules the German Shepherd, chained to his house in the snow to Timmy, asleep on the couch, trapped in his body and requiring around the clock care from his family. Despite their bleak surroundings there is still a sense of whimsy and beauty in the lives of the region’s occupants. They opened their homes to me and this is my love song to the place I once lived.

Poverty is more than the lack of monies; it is the deprivation of opportunity and has a lasting emotional resonance for the individuals who live within its grasp. These images strive to remember a forgotten place and a unique time in American history.

Bio

Matt Eich (b. 1986) is a freelance photographer and founding member of LUCEO. His work is rooted in memory, both personal and collective and he strives to approach every photograph with a sense of intimacy. Matt’s images focus on his own back yard, often exploring communities, the issues they face and their sense of identity.

As a student Matt interned with National Geographic before returning to Ohio University to complete his degree. While finishing school Matt began working for clients such as Newsweek, Mother Jones, TIME, The FADER, Smithsonian, More and Apple. His accolades include POYi’s Community Awareness Award, The Magenta Foundation’s Bright Spark Award, the Joop Swart Masterclass, a Juried Fellowship at the Houston Center For Photography and being named one of PDN’s 30 in 2010.

Matt and his family now live in Norfolk, Virginia where he works on long-term projects while compulsively documenting everything around him.

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Prabuddha Dasgupta

Longing

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“Longing” is my ongoing personal journal of memory and experience, based on everyday experiences…family, friendships, places known, spaces occupied, journeys remembered… At the centre of which stands a vital love story that became the pivot of my life six years ago… Elements from this love story appear as recurring motifs… Establishing the lexicon, which seeks to hold the journal together. All this is seen not in the context of specific time and place but through the personal, unfixed gaze of dream and memory.

The intent is to create an oblique, non-linear narrative, which seeks to evoke through the selective memory of my experiences, a journey of the viewer’s own.

The work in its infancy, with a different edit was shown at the Bodhi Art Gallery in New York in 2007-2008, and a selection of images from it were shown in a group show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London as part of “Where Three Dreams Meet” an exhibition of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi photography. The show opens at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland on June 12th.

Bio

Prabuddha Dasgupta is a self-taught Indian photographer, whose work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group shows. He is the author of 3 books, and the last one “Edge of Faith” (Seagull Books), a portrait of the disappearing Catholic community in Goa, India, was published in September 2009. He lives in Goa, India.

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www.prabuddhadasgupta.com

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Kate Elizabeth Fowler

My Secret South

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This is a collection of images gathered throughout years of exploration in my home state, Virginia. Several of them feature my two traveling companions, biggest supporters, and best friends, Jackie Picariello and Robert Scott.

As a child I remember adamantly stating that I was not Southern, as it was my belief that the South did not begin until you had reached Georgia. In order to maintain this belief I had to disregard Richmond’s status as the former ‘Capital of the Confederacy’ and ignore my grandmother’s insistence in calling me “Katie Belle.î

To me, the South represented a shameful period of American History that I did not wish to be associated with; it represented the dislocation of families and cultures due to the presumptuousness of Western civilization.

It was not until my teenage years that I began to realize the beauty of my rich and troubled heritage. Many afternoons were spent driving down dirt roads with “no trespassing” signs searching for the remnants of forgotten homes.

The intricate tapestries of these strangers’ lives fascinated me. I found a strange comfort in my familiarity with the old houses and their belongings. The smell of dry wood and old paint, the light through aged and distorted glass, soft green grass of a large yard, and the frame of an empty barn; the landscape of my childhood.

I began to love these old homes and their fragments of lives once lived. Naturally, this love came with the fear of loss, and I began to see the temporary nature of these properties. As years passed I would return to find the homes gone; torn down by man and nature; segmented into lots for strip-malls and housing developments.

It was almost out of necessity that I began to photograph my explorations, collecting memories of a time passed and almost gone. For me, these images provide a memory of the beautiful mystery contained in Virginia’s soft hills; a memory of the people who tended the land and loved their homes.

At this point in time I find myself living in Finland, one of the Northern-most countries in the world; a country uniform in its cold white landscapes and modern architecture, founded on the principles of equality. In this safe and fair land I find myself longing for the diversity of my home and its healing wounds. I am able to see just how far we’ve come and to appreciate the beauty of our struggle.

Bio

Kate Elizabeth Fowler was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1988. She is attending Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts for Photography and Film Studies.

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www.kateelizabethfowler.com

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Davide Monteleone

Northern Caucasus

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Northern Caucasus is a mix of stereotypes as well as surprises. For centuries it has been a country of political, religious, military and expansionist rivalry, a struggle between opposing states, and also between allied states. Ever since the beginning of the 19th century, this region has been part of the tsarist Russian Empire, later absorbed by the Soviet Block.

With the 1991 radical transformations involving the entire Warsaw Pact coalition, and the storm caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union,  new and ancient disputes resurfaced, and in some cases worsened, and revived political and economic aims of supremacy in the area.

This project takes into account the regions in which these disputes are not over yet, or may be apparently concluded, as intermittent fires under the political rhetoric of normalization and pacification. I intend to investigate with without prejudices such reality, beginning with the daily life of people living in the Northern Caucasus, who never reached their coveted independence and are still suffering the ramifications of the Russian Empire during the colonial age. They are divided between the claim for independence and the pride for their diversity, economic subordination, the historical-political and mental affiliation, the condemnation to an eternal geographic position in a limbo limes, and the elaboration of a new post-soviet identity. My goal is to go further away from the bird’s eye view of the geopolitical analysis, gliding down to a low altitude to find the details of such a complex world, with the aim to give a new key to the present day Russian Caucasus.

I’ve been working from Chechnya to Dagestan, from Northern to Southern Ossetia, just after the war in August 2008, all the way to Abkhazia, from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea coasts, crossing geographical and political borders. My interest isn’t to cover the news that brought the region back under the international floodlights, but to carry on a considered path by making notes of the tracks left behind.

Bio

Born in 1974, Davide Monteleone spent the first 18 years of his life moving to various cities of Italy because of the work of his parents. After graduating, he studied engineering and then stopped to move to the U.S. and after that to England. Is here that he discovered his interest in photography and journalism. Back in Italy in 2000, he completed his studies in photography and journalism and began working with the major Italian magazines. At the end of 2001 he moved again, this time to Moscow, where he lived until 2003 working as correspondent for the photo agency Contrasto. This choice proved to be determining for his career. He started working regularly with major national and international newspapers such as D, Io Donna L’espresso, New York Times, Time, Stern, and the New Yorker. Since 2003 he lives both in Italy and Russia, where he is pursuing long-term personal projects and continues his editorial work. He published his first book Dusha, Russian Soul in 2007.

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Davide Monteleone

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Emerging Photographer Grant 2010 Finalists

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This is a short preview of the essays of our 13 EPF finalists……their complete essays will be published on Burn in the coming weeks……the jury: Bruce Gilden, Michael Nichols, and Alessandra Sanguinetti

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Pete Pin

The Ave

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“My whole take on the Telegraph life is, basically, my life is very simple: I sit around all day and I spare change for hours for alcohol which I use to compensate for the fact that I live on the streets everyday.” Coconut, then a 16 year-old street kid (transcribed from an audio interview).

Since the late 1960’s, Telegraph Ave – a four block commercial strip on the south side of the University of California in Berkeley, CA – has been a magnet for street kids, travelers, and runaways like Coconut. Arriving for several days, weeks, or sometimes years, the young transients sleep on the street, in various shelters scattered across the city, or secretly in the numerous squat houses scattered on the south side of Berkeley. They come for a multitude of reasons: broken homes, a defunct foster care system, or simply a desire to travel and be disengaged from society.

“Telegraph is a family, it is home” Coconut confided, “I love this place.” The portraits presented here are part of a larger and evolving project on the young transient population in Berkeley mixing studio with street shots. As a student at Berkeley, I was always dismayed at how the transients were ignored and dehumanized by others.

My rationale for the studio shots were to strip the subjects from their environment with the aim of enabling the viewer to empathize with the subjects first and foremost as human beings. All of the subjects came into my makeshift studio exactly as they were on Telegraph. The street shots – currently a work in progress – in turn provides the context. In the course of working on this project, I at times fully immersed myself on Telegraph; I have slept on the street, under bridge overpasses, spent time in squat houses, and even hitchhiked with a group of young travelers with nothing but the clothes on my back. I have been exceptionally fortunate to have been given a glimpse of their reality. In many ways, these photographs – the subject matter, the aesthetic, the minimal lighting, etc., are also testament to my state of mind at that period in time; I was overcome with a lack of direction, was deeply depressed, and felt “unchained from the sun” after leaving graduate school to pursue photography. As such, in an admittedly exceptionally limited way, I related with my subjects. The decision to leave a PhD program to pursue photography was improbable and professionally suicidal as I had just purchased my first camera only a year prior. These photos were taken within a month of leaving academia and, concomitantly, less than a year of taking my first photograph.

Bio

Pete Pin was born in a Red Cross refugee camp in 1982 following the Cambodian genocide and immigrated, along with his family, as a refugee to Northern California in the mid 1980’s. He attended inner-city high school in Long Beach, CA and dropped out as a junior to work full-time. With the generous emotional and financial support from patrons at his place of employment, he was encouraged to return to academics and received his BA in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, graduating magna cum laude with high departmental honors and was the recipient of the Outstanding Honors Thesis Award by his department. In the summer of 2008, months before embarking on an eight year PhD program in the social sciences at Berkeley, Pete purchased his first camera with the initial intent of pursuing photography as a hobby. Within a year of graduate school, he abandoned his PhD program to focus on photography full-time. The Ave is his first sustained project. He has received no formal artistic or photography training and is entirely self-taught. Pete currently resides in San Francisco, CA.

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Zisis Kardianos

Feast day

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“Memory demands an image”
Bertrand Russell

Rituals and traditions represent a very strong manifestation of the Greek way of life. It can be sensuous, surreal, mysterious and always loaded with the indelible sparkles of memory. I look at these traditions not as isolated events but as part of the life and spirit of my place. As photographer, I am allured by the idea of traveling. Going to different places, often without fixed ideas, just hoping for a prolific encounter with anything I may happen to stumble across. But since this is not always possible, I have to take advantage of what is around me, even outside my doorstep. I have to try to understand it and articulate it in a meaningful way. I am not very good in elaborating on an intellectual idea with the camera. I feel the camera as part of my heart, an extension of my intuition. I’m not sure about the documentary nature of these photographs, but for sure it is undermined by my responsive approach. It’s a rather subjective experience, constructing metaphors of my own narrative, through which I try to awake memories and to identify my cultural origins.

Bio

I was born in Greece in 1962. I studied sociology and in 1985 I enrolled in a two year photography course in Athens. I have recently attended a workshop with Nikos Economopoulos, one of the photographers I greatly admire. I am an amateur with some occasional publications of my work that subsidize my income together with my freelance travel writing.
I consider myself a street photographer more than anything else. I relate to the world by taking pictures and I give back slightly altered something of what I have been given.
It’s an emotional exchange and the highest reward I can expect from photography.
“Feast day” was not conceived as a series until much later when I felt I had a lot of singles with a common thread. The images were shot in my home island Zakynthos and other towns of south-west Greece, between 2006 and 2010.
A different edit has been first published in Geotropio magazine. The series has not been completed.

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Brian Shumway

Black Girl

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“Modeling is an addiction.” Johanie, 24, aspiring model

Black Girl is a portrait series on young black women in the New York City area who aspire to be models.

Even as little girls, many women dream of becoming a model. The glamour of strutting along the runway with cameras flashing, being a spokesmodel for the latest line of make-up, or being plastered on billboards in Times Square can be too enticing to ignore. Shows like America’s Next Top Model, which can shoot a model to stardom almost instantly, and easy accessibility to professional photographers through numerous modeling websites make this dream seem more realistic and attainable than ever before. Indeed, everyday countless girls around the United States and the world are actively pursuing this dream.

There is, however, a huge segment of aspiring models who will find attaining their dream disproportionately difficult. They are black women. We all realize, at least in some way, that the mainstream modeling world is white-washed, especially at the high-fashion end. At the February 2010 New York Fashion Week, a whopping 85% of all models used on the runway were white, just 8% black (see jezebel.com/5476920). This is in no way representative of New York City’s, the United States’, or the world’s population. On the ground level, where women are just starting to put a portfolio together, the reality is quite different than Fashion Week’s. In doing this project, I used a modeling website to contact models. I found that, despite so few black professionals, nearly three-thousand young black women (just within 50 miles of my NYC zip code) are striving to attain their dream, or at least their interpretation of it.

Despite the odds and a stark downturn in the fashion, advertising, and magazine industries, these aspiring models have high hopes and remain steadfast. They work hard, often juggling school, work, relationships, and family (some are even mothers) to find a few hours a week to squeeze in a shoot, or perhaps two if they’re lucky. Using an approach that is part anthropology and part fantasy, the women photographed are a cross-section of real people who want to do every kind of modeling, from runway, high-end fashion, print or commercial work to eye-candy and artistic nudes. Their interests are varied, as are their looks and beauty, but this one dream ties them all together. Behind that dream are fundamental human issues that touch upon identity, body, beauty, sexuality, race, and the drive to be recognized in a culture obsessed with fame and celebrity. I hope that these portraits can in some way contribute to their pursuit.

Post Script:
The portraits here I feel represent how the models wanted to look. For each shoot, we would talk about possible ideas and outfits before or during the shoot. Many of the models were open to shooting everything from high-fashion to lingerie, and some even nude. She would bring different things to wear, try them on, see how it looked, and we (or I, or she) would say yea or nay. None of the models are wearing something they didn’t want to wear (or any outfit they felt to be demeaning) or suggest wearing themselves. The pictures give us a glimpse into how the models understand fashion, modeling and themselves as a model-in-the-making.

Bio

Brian Shumway is a New York City based photographer. He has worked for publications like Time, Newsweek, Smart Money, Reader’s Digest, and XXL. His work has been awarded and exhibited throughout the United States. Please visit his website to learn more.

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www.brianshumway.com