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Vicky Slater

Colourblind

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Alain de Botton wrote…..”Portraits can reveal sides of yourself that you are unused to seeing, over which you haven’t extended ownership….they can pick up on features that you don’t identify with and made no claim over….aspects of yourself that you don’t recognize and haven’t yet made friends with. Your character can be read from different angles, in different lights, through different lenses, through different lovers.”

It could explain why I can take a portrait of someone and think they look beautiful whilst they wrinkle up their nose and say it looks nothing like them. It could also explain some of my feelings about these photographs.

When I began this series it was simply an exploration of pinhole photography, something I hadn’t tried before. I soon found myself seduced by the saturated colours and the painterly qualities that pinholes could produce, all the time turning the camera on myself as  I was reluctant to ask someone else to give the amount of time that these pictures require. Obviously not being able to see through the lens, I couldn’t compose these long exposures so never really knew what I was going to get and there are many, many more failures than successes, especially as I am deliberately moving slightly during the exposure, to express a feeling of time and motion. And though I find it interesting how unfamiliar the images are to me, they are a “me” I don’t know…  it’s the colour, the abstractness and sense of passing time that keeps me making more.

Bio

Vicky Slater resides in Salisbury, Southern England with her husband and three children. She is passionate about photography, using mainly vintage film cameras and natural light. Whilst she loves all methods from pinholes to polaroids and digital to darkroom, she always finds herself returning to colour film and a medium format camera. Vicky is interested in the passing of time, memory, simple beauty and honesty, and has a headful of projects that she wishes to pursue, given the opportunity. She has had one solo portrait exhibition and contributed to many others. Her work has been published in various books and magazines, is part of many private collections, and has been merited with Fujifilm distinctions awards.

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Panos Skoulidas

Wandering in Greece

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…I lived half of my life in Grecolandia…& half in Los Angeles….
Half of my life i was dressed up in sheep-skin and half of my life in plastic…
Half of my life i was riding donkeys and half driving wild mustangs…
Half of my life i was staring mustaches and half staring at platinum blond highlights..
It wasn’t curiosity that brought me back…im not here anyways but i’m not there either…
Homer made it back to Penelope..Made it back to Ithaca…
but Homer was a lier in the end..He lied to please the king…
but Kavafis…ahhh Kavafis told the truth…Its all about the travel..not the destination…
it’s the doomed , the holy trip to that imaginary Ithaca…the El Dorado does not exist…
it’s the search for the El Dorado that counts…
When i left from the “sheep” city to find my “el dorado” i made it to the “plastic” city…
Half of my life i was believing in Homer…
Half of my life later i realized that there are no El Dorados..Its just a vast endless ocean ahead..
that leads nowhere but …but im not afraid anymore..i can accept it now..im not scared..
Things dont change..but we do..
Almost a month ago my boat decided to revisit…
Highway 61 Revisited as my good friend Bob Dylan said…
Above (essay) is what i saw..how i got connected with Grecolandia in the period of a month…
I’m riding a tired donkey once again…
I left my pirate ship back in venice beach to take a break…
Now im on the fast lane of that Grecolandia Highway 61 , speeding…on a slow donkey..
Reuniting, reconnecting with my family…

whats not to love?

Enjoy…because i dont know how long my “donkey” will last…

Bio

Panos Skoulidas bio,

or

the story of “Till Eulenspiegel”…

…According to the tradition, he was born in Grecolandia around 1300. He travelled through the Holy Roman Empire (Americanlandia , especially Northern US, but also the Low Countries, Bohemia, and Grecolandia. He is presented as a trickster or fool who played practical jokes on his contemporaries, exposing vices at every turn, greed and folly, hypocrisy and foolishness…With Eulenspiegel’s death occurs the entry of the embodied trickster-animus into the medium of things spiritual, the form of existence of pure spirituality so that the soul has seen through itself by way of its own spirituality and knows itself as living spiritual life: Eulenspiegel is still alive.The literal translation of the High German name “Eulenspiegel” gives “owl mirror”, two symbols that identify Till Eulenspiegel in crude popular woodcuts. However, the original Low German is believed to be ul’n Spegel, meaning “wipe the arse”.

Related links:

FOTOGRAFEVI agency

picasaweb.google.com/innerspacecowpanos

panajournal.blogspot.com

web.mac.com/innerspacecowpanos/Panoblogomania

web.me.com/innerspacecowpanos/VENICE_BEACH/ORGY_IN_VENICE

photofarts.blogspot.com

homepage.mac.com/innerspacecowpanos/iMovieTheater17

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4sXRxs_8qg

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Marcus Bleasdale

The Rape of a Nation

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The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is home to the deadliest war in the world today. An estimated 5.4 million people have died since 1998, the largest death toll since the Second World War, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

IRC reports that as many as 45,000 people die each month in the Congo. Most deaths are due to easily preventable and curable conditions, such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, malnutrition, and neonatal problems and are byproducts of a collapsed health care system and a devastated economy.

The people living in the mining towns of eastern Congo are among the worst off. Militia groups and government forces battle on a daily basis for control of the mineral-rich areas where they can exploit gold, coltan, cassiterite and diamonds.

After successive waves of fighting and ten years of war, there are no hospitals, few roads and limited NGO and UN presence because it is too dangerous to work in many of these regions. The West’s desire for minerals and gems has contributed to a fundamental breakdown in the social structure.

Bio

Marcus Bleasdale was born in the UK to an Irish family, in 1968.  He grew up in the north of England and initially studied economics and started work as an investment banker. Although he was a director in a large international bank he resigned in the mid 1990s and began to travel through the Balkans with his camera. He returned to study photojournalism at the prestigious London School, during which time he won the Ian Parry, Young photographer Award for his work on the conflict in Sierra Leone. He has established himself as one of the worlds leading documentary photographers concentrating on Conflict and Human Rights. He has been awarded many of the worlds highest honors for his work and continues to highlight the effects of conflict on society. He is a member of the photo agency VII. He lives with his wife Karin Beate in Oslo, Norway.

Related links

www.marcusbleasdale.com
www.anthropographia.org
www.viiphoto.com

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Marco Simola

Metro

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Metropolitan (Subway): “means of transportation, urban, on rails, characteristic of big cities; it joins the urban center with the suburbs and lies on a site that is proper to it, generally underground, on the ground or on an elevated surface”. (definition).

I define it as a place.

A place where people, all people without distinction, the poor and the rich, the doctor and the sick, the employee and the laborer, the commuter and the tourist, he who eats three times a day and he who eats every three days, he who takes a cruise across the Mediterranean and he who crosses in the hope of reaching Lampedusa (Italy’s southernmost island) meet and walk by each other several times a day, they brush past each other, sometimes talk to each other, sometimes say hello, sometimes recognize each other, other times ignore each other, run into each other, smell each other, like each other or disgust each other, fall in love with each other or break away from each other.

In this place where some are born and some die, some laugh while some cry, some play an instrument and others sleep. Here, life flows under artificial light, it flows fast.

Because they all have somewhere to go to, a final destination …. and, curiously, are always running late.

Bio

I’m Italian, 44 years old, and I’m based in Lima, Peru, since 2007.

I made these images between 2003 and 2005 in a period where I was working in Milan, and every day of the week I spent around 40 minutes on the tube in the morning and other 40 in the evening. After a while I noticed that people in the metro look different than when they are outside of it. In the metro many of the passengers seem to be bored, sad and afraid, looking at empty space in a sort of open eyes dream. I tried to catch the expressions, the movements, the thoughts of these persons. I’ve organized the presentation like a subway travel, from the entrance on the metro, the waiting of the train, the transportation, the stops, the arrival and the way out.

These photos where first published in October 2006 at Spazio 10 Gallery in Ivrea, Italy during a personal exhibition.

Related links

www.marcosimola.jimdo.com

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Jacopo Quaranta

Naomi

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Naomi was my neighbor, and the first person in London to say ‘hello’ to me. A strange woman, I thought… Yellow eyes, violent mood swings, desperate cries, and a lot of anger. She allowed me to photograph her.

She was always drinking and talking to herself: an internal monologue about war, rape, and her family who didn’t want her anymore.
Her dad had said ‘call me when you’re sober, otherwise don’t bother’. Only her older brother Thomas still passed by to take care of her.

She had a six year old daughter, who had been taken away, and now lived with her father. She had not been allowed to visit her since. She loved her, had her pictures on the walls… and looked at them all the time.

On April 23, 2008, Naomi died. She got hit by a van. Thomas sent me an e-mail:

‘Hi Jacopo. Naomi is dead. She died earlier today on Brixton road. She was hit by a Courier van and died instantly. I just thought you might want to know. I will post you details of her funeral to see if you can make it. all the best, Thomas Benjamin.’

Bio:

I graduated from a Technical Commercial high school in Rome in 2002. I have been involved in street theatre and experimental work by following the guidance of Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli. She has been an important figure in my development. With her guidance I had the opportunity to experiment with the theatre’s details, short backstages, and a reportage about her completed works.

In 2003 I joined the ISF-CI (Istituto superiore di fotografia e comunicazione integrata), where I took workshops with photographers as Antoine D’agata, Patrick Zachmann, and Letizia Battaglia. I graduated in 2006. In 2007 I spent a long time in London, where I made the project about Naomi’s life. Once back in Italy, I did an internship in the 10b Photography studio of Francesco Zizola and Claudio Palmisano, assisting with different work in the studio. I’m currently in New York attending a full year program in Photojournalism and Documentary photography.

Related links

www.jacopoquaranta.com

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Noah Addis

Sempre Jardim Edite

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The Jardim Edite favela, located at the foot of the landmark Estaiada bridge in an affluent section of Sao Paulo, Brazil, was once home to more than  550 families.  Most are gone now, as the government of Sao Paulo has forced them to leave their homes to make room for a new development.

Many of the residents of Jardim Edite came from the countryside, many from poor rural communities in the North, seeking opportunity in the bright lights of the city. They built their homes first out of scrap wood and cardboard and whatever else they could find, but over the years some of the homes have grown into reinforced concrete structures with running water and electricity.

The neighborhood was home to several bars and restaurants, a barber shop and beauty salon, a bicycle repair shop and several other businesses. Other residents supported their families working for businesses outside the favela, many worked long hours collecting recyclables to take to a nearby sorting facility.

City officials have long wanted to remove the ramshackle homes that make up Jardim Edite to build a modern housing development. In September of 2008, a court order sealed the fate of this tight-knit community when a state tribunal judge said the project could go forward and the occupants should be evicted.

An architectural drawing, posted in the window of a nearby building used as a base for the social workers, demolition crews and others hired by the government to work on the project, shows eight new buildings with a park in the center. Government officials declined repeated requests for interviews about the specifics of the planned development project or a proposed time frame for its construction.

Some residents, those who were previously registered with the city as official occupants of the favela, are eligible for rent subsidies or cash payouts if they leave their homes.  But these payouts are often not sufficient to find suitable housing , so many families end up moving to other favelas.  Meanwhile, the neighborhood, where some have lived for more than 30 years, is slowly being demolished.

—

This story will be part of a larger project focusing on life in the world’s urban squatter communities. While much is written about the crime and poverty endemic to squatter settlements, the realities of everyday life are often lost in the headlines. Many squatters are hard-working citizens who, through lack of education or poor job opportunities, are forced to work in low-paying jobs and do not earn enough to rent or purchase a legal home. The vast majority are not criminals and are merely looking for a safe place to live. As one squatter living under high-tension power lines in a favela in Sao Paulo told me, “my dream is to have a legal address”.

Bio:

Noah Addis is a freelance photojournalist based in Philadelphia, PA. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Drexel University in Philadelphia with a degree in Photography in 1997. He worked as a staff photographer for the Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark, NJ from 1997 through the end of 2008.

He has covered such stories as the growth of Christianity in Africa and the war in Iraq. Noah has won numerous regional and national awards including the New Jersey Photographer of the Year award three times. In 2001 he was the runner-up in the portfolio category of the National Press Photographer’s Association Best of Photojournalism contest and he has won General News and Feature awards in the Pictures of the Year International contest. His work has been shown in galleries in New York and Philadelphia.

Related links

www.noahaddis.com

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Roger Ballen

Boarding House

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“It is difficult to explain this place except that I think it exists in some way or another in most people’s mind.” –Roger Ballen

These photographs are like images from a waking dream: compelling and thought-provoking, with layers of rich details, flashes of dark humor, and an altered sense of place. Blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and art, my work is both a social statement and a complex psychological study.

BOARDING HOUSE is a space of transient residence, of comings and goings, of people sheltered in a place they are using for their immediate survival. Basic and fundamental, the structure is furnished with objects necessary for an elementary existence, decorated with evocative drawings, and littered throughout with animals. Remnants function there as physical symbols of events that have occurred in the space; broken pieces of a functional reality exist as the leftovers of scenarios that have been played out there. The altered sense of place of this temporary abode creates a sense of alienation, which acts as a jumping off point for the imagination to run wild.

Bio

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950. Since 1982 he has been living and taking photographs in South Africa.

His work is represented in many museums including Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ballen’s work has been recently exhibited in numerous museums in Europe and the United States.

Related links

www.rogerballen.com

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Imants Krumins

Etrouko the Book I

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“Etrouko the book I” ………. these are some of the images that will appear in the book, they are not photographs they are about photography.

I anticipate a book in print soon……….

Bio

………. lived most of my life in Australia

Exhibited on the Continent, The New World and The Old World………. No awards. no prizes, no commissions, no nothings etc

Author of some current Visual Arts textbooks

Music by Kevin MacLeod

Related links

www.imantskrumins.com

www.artouko.com

www.etrouko.com.au

www.iamparanoid.net

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Adam Smith

Fight Journal

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There is a moment before the fight when the rhythmic sound of warm-up punches and nervous chatter dissolves into a quiet stillness.

This moment only lasts a second or two. No one in the room says anything. There is nothing else to say.

Everyone knows what is about to happen. Months of intense training, sacrifice, pain, and fear will explode in a fury of disciplined aggression: A beautifully brutal storm of ugliness and heart.

They know that when it is over, the two fighters will stand in the cage, naked in their victory or their defeat. Each knowing the implication of the outcome: that had it not been for the rules, an instrument of mercy that stopped the fight, one could have killed the other.

This is Mixed Martial Arts.

Often referred to as cage fighting, it is one of the fastest growing sports in North America.

“Fight Journal”, shot over the last 12 months, profiles a group of professional and amateur fighters from the Pacific Northwest.

Bio

I am a freelance documentary photographer based in Seattle, Washington. I am primarily interested in using documentary photography to create anthropological records that show how people live today. Clients include Cole & Weber United, Tree Top Inc., Capella, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine, and Book-It Repertory Theatre.

I am also working on several long term documentary and fine art personal projects, of which Fight Journal is one.

Related links:

www.theadamsmith.com

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James Nachtwey

Struggle to Live – the fight against TB

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James Nachtwey has documented the resurgence of tuberculosis and its varying strains MDR and XDR in seven countries around the world. These countries include Cambodia, Lesotho, South Africa, Siberia, India, Swaziland, and Thailand. He has captured the lives of both patients and health care workers in the struggle against this ancient disease, which still remains very much a part of the present. Not only does TB remain a killer disease in its most recognizable form but it is mutating into even more deadly forms: multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extremely drug resistant (XDR) TB. While still a small subset of the TB cases, these new strains pose a grave global health threat. XDR-TB is a man-made catastrophe, resulting from too few resources being allocated for the proper diagnosis and treatment of TB patients in developing countries.

“Despite the fact that tuberculosis afflicts a huge number of people it’s not on the radar screen in terms of public awareness. Normal tuberculosis, if diagnosed and treated diligently, is very inexpensive and doesn’t take very long to cure. But if normal TB is not treated, it mutates and becomes 100 times more expensive, requires a two-year cure and a long stay in the hospital, which many of those infected cannot afford. The thought of XDR getting out of control is truly frightening,” says James Nachtwey.

Bio

James Nachtwey’s career as a war photographer began in 1981 when he covered civil unrest in Northern Ireland. Since then he has photographed more than 25 armed conflicts as well as dozens of critical social issues. He has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal, World Press Award, Magazine Photographer of the Year, and I.C.P. Infinity Award multiple times. He has been named recipient of the TED Prize, the Heinz Foundation Award for Art and Humanities, the Common Wealth Award and the Dan David Prize. “War Photographer”, a documentary about his work, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. His photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, among others. Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with TIME Magazine since 1984 and is a founding member of the photo agency VII.

Exhibition

Related links

jamesnachtwey.com
xdrtb.org
www.viiphoto.com

This presentation was made possible through the kind support of:

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Adrián Arias

Harvest of Man

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This story is about the everlasting relationship between man and land. I was always fascinated to see how such ancient labours have survived through the ages in such difficult conditions for their workers.

“Harvest of Man” is a portrait of the population of potato growers in the areas of Cot and Tierra Blanca de Cartago in Costa Rica, creating a link between the life of workers in the field and their family life. My intention was to use the camera as an excuse to get into the daily lives of these people. Each of the visits to the area led me in a particular way, putting aside preconceptions about this population. As a result, the photographic process is a testimony to the relationship I had with the potato growers.

Bio

Adrian Arias was born in Costa Rica in 1982. He currently works as a photographer of Colectivo Nómada in Costa Rica. He has worked as a contributor to Costa Rican newspapers and magazines, such as La Nación and Soho. He has attended photography workshops with Bruce Gilden, Antoine D’Agata, Kosuke Okahara of Agence Vu and Essdras Suarez of the Boston Globe, and participated in international exhibitions in Argentina, and Toronto and in various exhibitions of documentary photography in his country.

Related links

http://colectivonomada.com/fotografos/aarias/#portafolio

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david degner

Uighur Identity in Xinjiang

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The Uighurs of Xinjiang are one of 55 minorities in China, but they are ethnically and historically closer to the Muslim Turkic groups of Central Asia.  The Chinese government is trying to cement its hold on the resource rich Xinjiang by suppressing cultural and religious differences in schools and workplaces and by resettling millions of eastern Chinese into the wild western region.

Racism, language requirements and lack of education prevents many young Uighurs from getting contemporary jobs while their traditional roles as traders and farmers have become unprofitable. As Chinese influence increases, Uighurs must adapt to the Chinese way or be left behind economically.

I arrived in Xinjiang about 5 months before the Olympics and spent that time learning the area and making contacts.  There has been a longstanding separatist movement consisting of attacks on police and government buildings.  My plan was to be in Xinjiang during the Olympics in case something broke out.  A few weeks before the Olympics started I was in a rural area near Kazakhstan looking into reports of a torched police station.  While in the small town of San Gong the police picked me and revoked my Visa, kicking me out into Kazakhstan.

Bio

David Degner is researching his next project while shooting commercial and journalistic jobs in South Florida.
These photographs will be shown at the Christopher Henry gallery in SoHo in the near future.

Related links

www.IncendiaryImage.com

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Chloe Dewe Mathews

Hasidic Holiday: The Annual trip to Aberystwyth

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For over 20 years, British orthodox Jews have been holidaying in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth, for two weeks every summer. Each family rents a small house in the empty student accommodation on the hill, and a large yellow and white striped tent is erected on the campus as a temporary synagogue.

They arrive in large groups, followed by huge removals lorries, bringing all their possessions from home, including children’s bikes, cookers and fridges full of food. Around a thousand people make the trip each year and although the majority of families come from North London, there are many others from further afield – from Manchester, continental Europe, Jerusalem and New York.

The Jewish community have been going to Aberystwyth instead of other traditional English seaside towns, like Blackpool or Brighton, as somewhere quieter, less populated and surrounded by rural beauty.  Over the years, the community have developed a real affection for the area, with accumulated associations of the annual family holiday.

After a morning of prayer, family groups rattle up the funicular “cliff railway”, push buggies along the pier and spend hours in the playground next to the ruined castle. The visual landscape of Aberystwyth is briefly transformed. Men in long dark coats and brimmed hats wander along the promenade as young families set up on the beach. Fully clothed even when swimming, the sight of these large family units together on the beach rekindles the Victorian notion of traditional British seaside holidays. This is in marked contrast to the rest of the beach goers – dog walkers, hobbling pensioners, single parent families and 20 something students still up from the night before.

Despite the long-standing relationship with the town, there is little contact or exchange between the Jewish community and the local people. On one occasion a visitor enquired at the tourist office, “Why are there were so many people in Welsh national dress on the beach?” on another it was asked, “When do the Arabs arrive?” Perhaps they get relatively less attention than they would elsewhere, as the town is so isolated, with a small tourist influx each year. However, multiculturalism has only come to rural Wales very recently, so although moments of confrontation are rare, they seem almost inevitable.

This year scraps of paper with swastikas on them were found littering the road near the student accommodation and a group of youths in the town centre chanted nazi slogans as a Jewish man walked by.

Bio

Chloe Dewe Mathews is a freelance photographer based in London.

After graduating in Fine Art at the Ruskin in Oxford, she worked in the commercial film industry for three years. Both inspired and frustrated she turned to photography, as a more immediate and intimate creative process. Working with different people in their natural environment, enabled her to engage with the world more directly.

She has been published in the Times, the Independent and Dazed and Confused magazine, and exhibited in London, Birmingham, Buenos Aires and Berlin.

Related links:

www.chloedewemathews.com

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Igor Posner

Notes from Underground

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It started in 2006, a year when I returned to St. Petersburg for the first time in 14 years.  At the time I had no idea what I wanted to get out of this place, photographically anyway. I just knew that I wanted to immerse myself into its cold, gloomy winter and take pictures. Trip after trip as images started to appear I noticed that somehow the pictures started to reconstruct this city’s heavy, yet poetic soul, like captured by Dostoevsky, Mandelstam, Bely, Brodsky and others.

Excerpt from a personal diary (February, 2008):

“Leningrad creates a feeling of a lost and a haunted city, an open nerve, where little tragedies of every day life that seem universal are so acutely brought to surface…with its bars, streets, drunks, communal apartments this place creates a sense of an inexistent dream within an authentic nightmare, and yet paradoxically conveys a feeling of poetic nostalgia and melancholy.”

Images used in this slideshow are chapter fragments from a book project about St. Petersburg (2006-2009) – “Notes from Underground” (working title).

Music by Alfred Schnittke – In Memoriam II, tempo di valse

Special thanks to: Olya Vysotskaya, Anna Bocharova

Bio

Born in St. Petersburg (former Leningrad), Russia, Igor Posner moved to Los Angeles, California in the early 90s. Early work includes photographs taken in south-central and downtown Los Angeles, Tijuana, Mexico.  Igor returned to Russia in 2006, taking up photography full time.

In 2007, Igor moved from Los Angeles to New York City. At present, he lives between St. Petersburg, Russia and New York.  Currently he works on two series: first, about Russian immigrant communities in Brooklyn and LA, and second, about former Jewish ghetto settlements in Russia, Western Ukraine and Belarus.

Related links

igorposner.net

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Thomas Freteur

Abu Sakha…

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Mohammed Abu Sakha used to be a normal, cheerful kid, despite the violence he witnessed in the West Bank in 2004. In 2008, he joined the first Palestinian circus school, an organization that trains Palestinian children from various West Bank cities throughout the year. When summer comes, they hit the road, taking the kids for a Mobile Circus Tour.

“I feel circus brings me the chance to send my message from Palestine to the world”, he tells. “I don’t speak English very much so I can’t communicate with everybody outside of Palestine. Circus brought me that chance. I can use it as a expression tool to tell our stories.”

I followed Mohammed in August 2009 during a tour of the circus.

In the night of August 24th 2009, the Israeli Occupation army surrounded the house of Mohammed Abu Sakha in the old city of Jenin. His parents were told that they just wanted to talk to him outside, but instead they took him and put him into jail. At that point, Mohammed had just turned 18. He was accused of throwing stones at one of the Israeli attacks in 2004 during the second Intifada – at which point he was 13 years old.

Bio

In 2005, I was 25 years old and I shared the same passion about photo documentary with three friends. We founded the photographers’ collective “Out of Focus”, based in Brussels.  Since then, I usually work for local associations and NGO’s. I am also doing a personal project concerning circus around our world like the Palestinian Circus School. It’s more about daily life than shows, and more particularly about the use of art in conflict situations such as occupied territories.

For the two last years, I also coordinate with the collective specific exhibitions. We regularly spread our images out of their usual context by exhibiting in the streets and open spaces. An interesting way to generate reflection…

Related links

c.photoshelter.com/c/outoffocus

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Jérôme Brunet

Cops: Riding Shotgun with Texas Sheriffs

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When asked why I’m interested in law enforcement, I’m compelled to reply, “We all should be.”  The fact that we know so incredibly little about our ‘boys in blue’ all though we see them on our street corners and of course in more dramatized versions on television and in Hollywood, I’ve always been interested in the symbolic aspect of the modern day police officer; the man with the badge, gun and authority to dramatically change a persons life forever. Societies apparent answer to all life’s little and not so little problems. However bleak and insignificant a situation may seem, officers are constantly dealing with lost children, family quarrels, various assemblies of homeless and confronting each day, the violence and corruption humanity inflicts on each other everyday.

During the six months I spent with a multitude of Deputy sheriffs in El Paso county, south west Texas in 1997, I had the rare opportunity to follow and record the everyday activities of these men and women. I managed to capture a few strong moments of the out-of-the-ordinary happenstance’s of these law enforcement officers, people not unlike you and I who share varying difficult tasks ranging from the mundane routine of pages of paperwork to absolute, life threatening danger, ugliness, insanity which ultimately leads to an inevitable breakdown of values and morals. This is an account, albeit brief, of a police officers job description.

These ‘Wild West’ ancestors keep somewhat true to their past. The majority of the men and women I interacted with were primarily Hispanic. Because of their ancestry they were able to bring forth a much appreciated warmth and understanding that I and, I’m sure, the rest of the townspeople, who were also Hispanic, enjoyed and accepted openly. I was first impressed with the equipment used by the officers, with a ‘larger-than-life’ resemblance to the grandiose American lust for “bigger is better” with such names as Chevrolet, Harley-Davidson, Ray Ban, Smith & Wesson. However, as the weeks wore on I watched these officers who exuded obvious professionalism accomplish their missions ranging from routine I.D. checks to reports, endless hours spent on surveillance duty which sometimes ended up being hundreds of kilometers down dirt roads to the sudden adrenaline rush during a dangerous bust.

Murphy’s Law never became so evident until this project. A law explaining the fact that things have a tendency to happen when you least expect it or as one of the deputies so eloquently described it. “It’s when the shit hits the fan!”. After hours of uninterrupted patrolling with a K-9 unit on a grave yard shift, we pulled up to the local truck stop on the I-10 highway. Apart from the lonely truck driver stirring his coffee endlessly, only one table at the back of the restaurant was occupied.  All deputy sheriffs and one stray highway patrol officer.  You can only imagine what might go on in their minds as you sit at a table like this one. Conversations running from family life to pay cuts, shoptalk to the guy that got away. You would catch the odd lost gaze out the window into a universe unknown to most.  A place where many do not return.  It’s only after receiving your meal ordered off a menu mainly composed of picture that the dispatch calls out “to all available officers code 10-50″ — a hit and run victim.  As quickly as we had arrived, we leave our untouched food behind, bolting for the door.  With sirens blazing, an agitated dog shifts from side to side, tension mounts.  To the untrained eye, the scene looks like total havoc, lights flashing in every direction, flares are scattered across a four lane intersection, a small white object catches my attention, it’s a shoe roughly ten meters from where the victim is lying.  Paramedics surround the body trying to keep its pulse.  The feeling of helplessness overwhelms me as a medical helicopter lands directly behind us, and two doctors try to revive him, it is too late.  After a grueling hour of unsuccessful tries, the body is covered with a white sheet.  Time of the deceased – 4:30 am. To my knowledge, no one was arrested for this senseless brutal act.  It was only then that we returned to the uneventful truck stop. Just another day in the life of the deputy sheriff.

Certain photographs betray a mood of pending violence when an ordinary family quarrel may well end up in a blood bath. In this respect, the bullet proof vest worn under the shirt of all these cop’s is highly revealing, (which in some cases I wore myself). Besides, the repression of drug trafficking constitutes the major part of the work done by this border police force. Roads linking Mexico to the U.S., such as the I-10, are sensitive arteries of a flourishing contraband. Even though another deputy in a deep sigh, admitted to me catching only ten percent of the actual traffic, a task force made up of U.S. Customs, D.E.A., Texas and New Mexico police have seized over 30 kilos of heroin, 2 tons of cocaine and 75 tons of marijuana. Even though these quantities sound enormous, actually landing on a large bust was a different story, only luck and perseverance enabled me to land on what was to be one of US’s largest single drug bust in US’s history.  As a nervous Mexican driver arrives at the U.S. border and a routine check is made on his car, officers reveal neatly packed away in the trunk, 23.3 pounds of black tar heroin, estimated at 24 million dollars. This package is later revealed to the local press in Hollywoodesque fashion. I watch in amazement and think of the outcome of this Mexican peasant paid 1000 dollars to transport this load into the land of the free.

Texas, the second largest  state in the U.S. also boasts the highest rate of incarceration (700 for 100 000).  In an ultramodern county jail of El Paso, Texas, I witnessed different aspects of “the inside world”. Body searches, finger printing and delousing before the anonymous inmate dons the regulation blue overalls inscribed E.P.C.D.F. (El Paso County Detention Facility). On the top floor is the outdoor gym, from which you can admire the end of the Rocky Mountains and the beginning of the Sierra Madre into Mexico. Caged like lions, 40 federal prisoners await transport to a large prison. I am placed alone with one guard in this cage. Surprisingly enough, like a ghost, I hover through the crowd unnoticed, my heart beating for what felt like an eternity. Prisoners can only be exposed to the natural light of the gymnasium a sparsely granted privilege of only three hours a week. An afternoon spent with the elite S.R.T. (Sheriff Reaction Team) proved to provide more excitement. This team made up of tough looking officers is specially trained to counter an unlikely riot in the prison. I was presented a billboard full of makeshift weapons made by previous inmates, everything from hand sharpened spikes, to knives made out of tooth brush handles with razor blades attached to their ends. All used for assassination purpose by gang members thriving to in the “inside world”.

We will find in the police officers, goodness, honesty, corruption and brutality. In many cases we are the police, and like it or not we are responsible of their actions as much as our own. The more we know about them, the more we observe and tie ourselves to them, and the more this society will feel secure.

This testimony shares a few privileged moments into the life of these Texas and New Mexico cops, as well as revealing the true backdrop of American culture.

Bio:

A freelance photojournalist Jérôme Brunet was born in southern France and raised in Ontario, Canada. After obtaining his O.S.S.D. majoring in visual arts, he started his post secondary education in Paris, France, at the E.F.E.T. School of Photography, graduating in 1997. Jérôme Brunet has been published internationally in The New York Times, Financial Times, Forbes, American Photo, Rolling Stone, and Billboard. His client list includes Nikon, The Discovery Channel, Fender Musical Instruments and Gibson Guitars. Jérôme Brunet is currently working and residing in the Bay Area of San Francisco and is represented internationally by Zuma Press.

Photographs: Jérôme Brunet
Website:  www.jeromebrunet.com

Editor’s Note:

Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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Beso Darchia

Stigma

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The dire economic situation in Georgia has left the population of the country without any protection that would be provided by Government. Socially unprotected groups of society were among the ones most affected, their survival left to the mercy of foreign donors and the kindness of random people.

We live by the side of people who suffer from mental illnesses. Due to the lack of understanding of such illnesses, large parts of society have developed a sense of alienation towards the people who suffer from those illnesses. The social stigma remorselessly relieves mental patients of all their constitutional rights.  Abandoned by the friends and family, the “lucky” ones among them spend all their time at the deteriorating post-Soviet mental institutions; the rest may often not even have a roof over their heads.

There’s no official statistic regarding the number of people suffering from mental illness in Georgia. According to unofficial studies conducted by different research groups, there are about 400 thousand people suffering from different kinds and degrees of psychiatric disorder, about 10% of those in need of immediate medical care.

In Soviet Georgia (population: 5 million), the official number of people in psychiatric institutions was around 74 thousand. A study, conducted in year 2000, recorded 98 thousand of them. Current statistics shows that around 13 thousand people seek medical care in psychiatric institutions every month. Despite this statistic, latest polls in Georgia show that a visit to the psychiatrist is still perceived as a negative and derogatory act: 90% of the respondents would never recommend their friend or relative to visit a psychiatrist. Due to the lack of awareness among the parents, 99% percent of children with a mental illness never receive any medical care.

People with psychiatric disorders are a part of our society. Society should accept and accommodate them.

My goal and hope is to raise awareness about mental disorders in society. I hope to show that mental patients are regular human beings, who deserve to be treated with respect and care; that the society should not make them feel inferior, just because they suffer from an illness….

Bio

My name is Besik Darchia. I was born on 24th of September 1982, in Georgia, Tbilisi. I’m postgrad dentist, but have never been working by profession. By chance, three years ago photography became the main interest in my life: I accidentally found one of the photo sites and focused on portraits and photos on social life. I was inspired, that was stimulus to follow through and reflect the life surrounding me through photography.

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Jennifer Richter

California Overpasses

Remembering Views From The Road

These images encompass my love for traveling by car or motorcycles and they take me back to my childhood road trips taken with my family.

I can still hear the words “GOD DAMMIT” bursting from my father’s mouth as he unsuccessfully tried to bring order to six loud children ensconced in the family Volkswagen bus during the 1970’s. Or later, cruising around with him in our orange convertible Volkswagen beetle and on his motorcycle. It was the middle of summer, with the sun going down, eating peanuts, rolling to Steely Dan and Cat Stevens on 8 track tapes on the radio. I recall vividly and fondly the countless rides to the swimming pool in the summer with my mom. Wearing our handmade terrycloth, pullover yellow ponchos, we would point our toy kaleidoscopes toward the sun and experience so many bright colors shining out like fragmented architectural landscapes. Then gazing out the car window, a coveted position I had to eternally fight for, I would record in my brain all of the landscapes and architectural forms on the way to the pool.

With these overpasses I chose to shoot the straight image of them in the most dramatic way possible.  I then ascended to the next level and turned them into architectural surreal images that are interesting to me. My work engenders hope that the individual observer viewing the work would be able to view these structures in a new way even when driving these same highways in the future.

Riding in cars or on a motorcycle, and looking out the window and feeling the breeze on my face is a type of euphoria for me.  I would point out anything and everything I saw that was interesting or out of place to me.  Recently living in California, and seeing all the different overpasses brought elation of those sweet memories. When I photograph some of the overpasses, I see kaleidoscopes aglow and sometimes roller coasters; or I visualize the sensations and recall what it feels like to ride on one. It gives me new insights and I think that maybe the architects’ base some of their own ideas on what they remember or wish they could experience again.

My viewpoints have been built from the ideas from other Master artist works of the past, whom I have studied such as Dali, M.C. Escher,  (surrealism, places that don’t exists), Andy Goldsworthy (the idea of earth as art and design), and Architect – Frank Gehry, (clean abstract design), and photographers Michael Kenna, Edward Weston, Jerry Uelsmann, to name a few.

With the movement of Dancers and the sounds of music take me on a flight and speed that I have always enjoyed and to translate it in to a image is a daunting task and very enjoyable. The curves and sharp angles of movement that you can see visual in the overpasses this is one of the ways I visualize sound and movement in an image. They pull you in even as a small image or a ten-foot image into the unfamiliar but existing worlds.

The surreal viewpoint is something I have found to be very inventive, inviting, and engrossing images to view. The overpasses themselves are surreal in nature and very artistic on their own. They show the movement that grips my soul and I am able to see objects and faces of things within the images that are of dreams and unreal, but at the same time they are genuine, because the object in the image is a photograph of something real.

Bio:

Jennifer Richter is an emerging award winning fine art photographer, based in St. Louis, Missouri. She has been shooting photography since she was a child, but did not embrace her talent until she rediscovered it in college and her curiosity grew. Having moved to San Francisco, she furthered her studies in fine art photography. Jennifer has exhibited her work in numerous shows including Center of Fine Art Photography. She has participated in artists in residence program and taught workshops on photo in the local schools in St. Louis.  She is an artist who focuses on the compositional element of an image and the emotional response it elicits, and strives to bring greater awareness to the public through the lens of her camera.

Photographs: Jennifer Richter
Website: www.jrichterphotography.com

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Jonathon Bowman

Monkey Business

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I began taking photos at the monkey houses at the zoo, fascinated by the inner lives of our genetic relatives. I soon realized that what I found compelling in the photos I had been taking was the space that exists between the viewer and the subject. The plexi-glass that separates our lives from theirs is also a surface that records, in scratches and smudges, a history of the lives lived on the inside while reflecting back the glare of our own gaze.

These are records of the space between.

Bio

My interest in photography began while working in South Korea. I was looking, I think, to find a voice with which to express the cultural disconnect I was feeling.

Since returning to my home in Ontario, I have been seeking to make sense of what was once familiar.

These photos are a product of those experiences.

Charlie Mahoney

A Troubled Paradise

Climate change is a difficult subject to treat visually, because much of the expected damage is still yet to come. We just haven’t seen many direct victims of climate change…at least not yet. As a result, I wanted to find a story that had a human element to it. After extensive research, I decided to go to the Maldives because, if scientists are correct, it will likely be the scene of one of first humanitarian disasters due to climate change. The story also ties in to an interesting social-political situation. I hope you find it interesting.

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Beneath the outsiders’ vision of the Maldives lurks a troubled paradise- one shaped by 30 years of a brutal dictatorship. No one knows this better than Mohamed Nasheed, the nation’s new democratically elected President, who unseated Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the Maldives’ ruler since 1978, in a landmark election in October 2008. Nasheed was imprisoned thirteen times by Gayoom and was named an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience in 1991.

Nasheed is determined to secure liberal democracy in the Maldives, but the country is facing pressing challenges at home. Despite significant tourism revenue – the Maldives has South Asia’s highest GDP per capita – almost half of the Maldives’ population earns less than $2 a day. And Maldivian youth are in the middle of a heroin epidemic that may be one of the worst in the world. The legacy of Gayoom’s rule lingers, and the process of unraveling it will take time as entire political institutions, like a free press, an independent judiciary, and a multiparty legislature will need to be built from the ground up, emerging from the long shadows of three decades of tyranny.

As if all that was not enough, the archipelago nation faces a larger challenge. It could find itself submerged by a swelling sea. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body of scientists, forecasts that sea levels will rise an estimated 2 ft. (60 cm) this century, enough to inundate most of the country, many of whose 1,190 isles sit just 3 ft. (1 m) above the ocean. For a nation of so small a size, the new government’s task is monumental.

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Photos from this story were published as part of an assignment in Time Magazine (Asia Edition) and in Intelligent Life and Corriere della Sera Magazine.

Bio

Charlie is a photojournalist and multimedia journalist currently based in Barcelona, Spain. His clients and publications include Time Magazine, The Guardian, BBC News, GEO, National Geographic Traveler, Lonely Planet Magazine, The Times, The Independent on Sunday, The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHRC), the Council on Foreign Relations, Corriere della Sera Magazine, Intelligent Life, CS Monitor Weekly, 100 Eyes, The Telegraph, Financial Times, Global Post, Die Tageszeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau and De Standaard.

His most recent awards and nominations include the 2009 Environmental Photographer of the Year Award, the 2009 International Photography Awards, the Life category of the 2008 Travel Photographer of the Year, the 2008 PX3 Prix de la Photographie for photojournalism, the 2008 SOS Racism Photography contest and the new talent category of the 2007 Travel Photographer of the Year. He is represented by Bilderberg, Corbis and Cosmos.

He especially likes to work on stories of human interest and strongly believes that photojournalism can promote change by giving a voice to people who are all too often powerless to tell their own stories.

He has a Masters in Photojournalism from the University Autónoma of Barcelona and a B.A. in International Relations and Biology from Bowdoin College. Prior to his career in photojournalism, he worked in investment banking and equity management.

Related links

www.charliemahoney.net