Monthly Archive for February, 2010

[slidepress gallery=’marcosimola_metro’]

Hover over the image for navigation and full screen controls

Marco Simola

Metro

play this essay

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

Marco Simola

[slidepress gallery=’noahaddis-semprejardim’]

Hover over the image for navigation and full screen controls

Noah Addis

Sempre Jardim Edite

play this essay

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

Noah Addis

[slidepress gallery=’rogerballen_boardingroom’]

Hover over the image for navigation and full screen controls

Roger Ballen

Boarding House

play this essay

“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

Roger Ballen