Monthly Archive for November, 2011

Mikolaj Nowacki – Odra

Wroclaw, Poland. Children play by the Bartoszowicki weir.

Mikolaj Nowacki

Odra

Odra is the second largest river in Poland. Its waters joins three countries: Czech, where it starts, Poland and Germany. I grew up on the banks of this river in the communist era playing with my best friend on boats and on a landfill of anchors, observing barges that transported coal. I often dreamed of jumping on such a barge and going to the unknown. When I was a teenager I often walked many kilometers along the river searching for rare species of birds as an amateur ornithologist. At that time, Odra was just a beautiful sewage – a mixture of water, fecal and toxic, irritating chemical substances.
Now, after 22 years of post-communist transformation  Odra is slightly cleaner but barges became a rarer view.
This project is a continuation of my fascination in this river. Through these photographs I want to explore people’s connections with Odra and to explore its natural beauty. I want to share my impressions with viewers hoping that this story will somehow increase peoples need of protecting this beautiful river.

 

River Odra near Wroclaw, Poland in winter. A small bay where current cause rotation of ice particles.
Captain Czeslaw Szarek (on the right) goes out with his ship from a river shipyard’s bay.
Maneuvers after entering a sandbank.
Szczecin, Poland. A river sailor Zbyszek Laskowski comes back to his ship with food. Due to a strong wind the ship had to be anchored in a wild place.
From the left: sailors Piotr Karpacz, Czeslaw Szarek (Captain), Zbyszek Laskowski rest in the ship’s kitchen after a day of flowing down the river.
Wroclaw, Poland. A students’ party on a pleasure boat.
Wroclaw, Poland. Andrzej, a homeless man burns out an isolation of copper wires to sell them.
Captain Czeslaw Szarek looks angrily at his ship’s crew working with an anchor.
Wroclaw, Poland. Eight with coxswain, the crew from Wroclaw’s Technical University train hard before annual competition with another university. This crew won the race.
Wroclaw, Poland. Eight with coxswain, the crew from Wroclaw’s Technical University take out their boat of the water after their training.
Wroclaw, Poland. Barges full of coal are unloaded by the banks of the city’s power station.
Wroclaw, Poland. A pleasure boat.
Wroclaw, Poland. A man struggles to open the door to his block of flats during the flood.
Szczecin, Poland. Czeslaw Mazur a mechanic onboard an icebreaker “Wilk” (Wolf) observes other icebreakers in action.
A break at work on a ship. From the left Czeslaw Szarek, Captain, Piotr Karpacz, sailor.
River Odra near Wroclaw, Poland.
Wroclaw, Poland. A barmaid finishes her day of work on a pleasure boat.
Wroclaw, Poland. River shipyard.

 

Bio

Born in Wroclaw, Poland in 1972. Graduated at the Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics at the University of Wroclaw. Received Master’s degree in Law in 1997. Finished post graduate studies; his doctoral thesis covered International Space Law. He renounced law and discontinued his doctorate for photography. Mikolaj is a freelancer cooperating e.g. with “National Geographic Poland” and “Newsweek Poland”. Since 2006 he participated in numerous workshops with National Geographic photographer Tomasz Tomaszewski. In 2010 he became a student of the co-founder of VII agency Antonin Kratochvil.

 

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Mikolaj Nowacki

Published on November 30, 2011 by burn magazine. 25 Comments

RIO ROCKS

 

 

 

I am just getting rolling in RIO.  I have just been here a bit over a week and starting to get into a rhythm. I mean you gotta get a beat going. You can’t just be “working”. Disaster. You have to be living it. That is for work that means something to you. RIO means lots of things. RIO is hedonism, it is war, it is sex, it is fun, it is pain, it is ballet, it is good surf, it is family life, it is about being lost. And more more. Enough grist for the creative mill for sure. Anyway, I am immersed. For three more weeks.

Join me:  www.theriobook.com    yes, you gotta get in for a buck99    For one thing there is some stuff i just could not show gratis on the net anyway. Listen, I don’t pay for info on the net either. This is not information. This is something that many of you can use. And amigos, it is as close to free as we could make it. For sure right now the hottest living it right now blog going. Cheapest demo workshop on the planet. Plus if you meet me in person, you know damned well I will buy the beer!!

Oh yes, almost forgot, this buck99 gets you a 10% discount on the book.

Please know that this is not any kind of crowd funding for myself.  I was on my way here anyway. Already had many weeks of funding earlier from NatGeo (story coming  2012). I am now simply using the tried and true old Magnum model of just GO. Don’t ask for an assignment. Make one. Do it.  And I just wanted to experiment with a pay wall. Perhaps as a model for others in the future. Quien sabe?

The pictures above shot in the last few days. I post several times a day. Answer as many questions as possible. My reporting to this audience IS THE ART of this part of my next book ONE NIGHT IN RIO  scheduled for spring of 2012. That is like right now. Every aspect of this is right now.  Check it out.

The surprise might be that the “making of” could become its own little book. Comments from the audience et al.

Anyway, pop on in, I have no clue what will happen next….All I know is that something either crazy, or poignant, or hot WILL happen.

 

cheers, David

Published on November 29, 2011 by david alan harvey. 46 Comments

Juliette Mills – Brothers

Juliette Mills

Brothers

This is the story of my life with my two boys since moving to a special place where we all feel closer to nature than ever before. It’s a magical garden where we can fly. It’s a place where the boys can be free. Where they run, climb, wade through a giant pond and hide in a bamboo forest. Where we walk through long grass and beneath ancient trees to catch the school bus. It’s a place where they can watch ferns unfurl and tadpoles grow their legs. Where our day begins and ends with the resident song thrush singing his heart out and ends with the call of the Tawny owl interrupting our bedtime story.

And beyond the garden fence is a vast moorland to explore, where they can climb to the top of a huge tor and feel the strength of wind or the sound of silence. Where they can sit and watch wild ponies play and the sun going to bed.  The images also show a bond between two brothers growing day by day. This reminds me of the importance of family and fills me with recognition and gratitude for all my parents and siblings gave me growing up and continue to give.

At a time when half the world’s population is becoming urban and knowing less and less about nature, and in a country where less than 10% of all children play in woodlands, countryside or heaths, I want to show with this work the importance of the natural world in children’s lives, for health on all levels, as well as cognitive development and creativity.

But most of all this is simply the story of two brothers, just living.

 

 

Bio

Juliette Mills (born London 1972) is a British photographer based in Dartmoor, South West of England and has been taking pictures since a child. She grew up in a private zoo, surrounded by endangered species, with parents fired by passions for conservation and music, and she developed a love of travel and wildlife via her gallivanting father mixed with an appreciation of home and family through her rock of a mother. She graduated from Kings College London with a degree in French & Spanish, where she specialised in South American cultural identity and spent time living and studying in Paris and Buenos Aires. She went on to study film and photography in the UK.

After working freelance for several years shooting wildlife & travel and writing for magazines, she had her first solo photographic exhibition in London in 2001 – a collection of wildlife portraits, and has exhibited since in local galleries in Devon. Having children and moving to the countryside provoked a change in direction towards documentary work, with subjects closer to home. And the experience of a workshop in Oaxaca alongside some special people, had a huge effect on her way of working, inspiring self-belief and a much freer, more immersed approach to her work.

She works freelance and has several long term projects in progress.

 

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Juliette Mills

 

Published on November 26, 2011 by burn magazine. 63 Comments

ONE NIGHT IN RIO

 

The above collage represents my first week in Rio reporting for  theriobook.com  For those of you who do not know, I am in Rio de Janeiro on assignment for my own book. The final chapter of my work here for the last couple of years on and off. While most of us do have an aversion to paying for information on the net, I think this lowest possible fee is for something tangible for many of you.

In fact a very low cost one month “workshop” where I am interacting with this audience while I finish up the shooting and am doing the major thinking about title , layout, and the overall feel for the book. Those of you who are interested in the photo essay and book making will benefit most. If you join us you will receive a 10% discount on the book which debuts in May of 2012.

While I am now self assigned this time in Rio, I was here prior on assignment for NatGeo Magazine which will also be published in 2012. All of the combined work from this NG assignment and my own subsidizing will be ONE NIGHT IN RIO. This now feels like I am in the process of making my best work, albeit will be controversial for some.

Why controversial? First it will not look like things I have done before. Stylistically looser. Second, some of the subject matter will be a bit edgier than my norm. Why change? Because I feel that photographers should never get stuck in their own parameter. Repeating is creative death. Besides RIO just feels loose. It feels like the collage above, which is a layout technique I never would have used for Divided Soul for example. I am NOT saying the above is the layout. I just know the layout will not look like Div Soul either. Maybe a combo. Maybe a tabloid. Thinking thinking.

ONE NIGHT IN RIO is a diary. Not fiction. Yet not a catalog of RIO either. Just one story, just one feeling. A representation of one night out that changed this author forever.  Done 99% with iPhone so far.. Join me for the final build out of  this essay. I have been here now for a week. I have three weeks to go. The work has just begun.

Published on November 25, 2011 by david alan harvey. 26 Comments

Beach Cowboy

Below an exerpt from: www.theriobook.com…..new title for the book is ( i think)  One Night in Rio …building the last chapter now

T-shirt vendor Everton Alves is known only as Cowboy on Copacabana Beach. The gold cow is part of an international street art project where the locally decorated cows are later auctioned off for charity benefit. There are 59 cows spread around Rio. Cowboy also writes songs and sometimes sings to his mostly tourist customers. He lives in Pavao-Pavaozinho, a favela that spills right down the hillside into Copacabana. Everton says “I live two minutes from here”

This is good old fashioned street photography. The kind of photography that can never be repeated and never be predicted. What not to love? I swear this kind of simple totally random spontaneous moment “discovery” of something you were not even looking for , is the secret of life as far as I am concerned. These kinds of surprises keep one young. Eager. Responsive. I do not know where this picture falls in my overall portfolio from Rio. Yet it is a keeper for now. Nothing so damned significant about it. All the journalism about it, is in that graph above.

The pleasure here is aesthetic and personal. I enjoyed meeting and to spend time talking with  Everton . Of course I bought a T-shirt. I needed one, he needed to sell one. I will meet him in the hood. Wanna know how I get where I go? This is how

Published on November 23, 2011 by david alan harvey. 13 Comments

Francesca Mancini – Asylum Seeking Refuge

Francesca Mancini

Asylum Seeking Refuge

This is the story of a young man aged twenty, this is the story of a man aged thirty, this is the story of a boy. This is the story of someone who, out of necessity or choice, is compelled to fight a system and to pay the consequences: forced escape.
He leaves everything behind. Family, home, girlfriend or often a wife and children, sometimes a good job and a bit of money. He has to say goodbye to the sweetness and the colours of his homeland for ever.
He leaves everything, otherwise they will kill him.
He’s an Iraqi, Eritrean, Nigerian. A Somali, Afghan or Kurd.
They have told him that he believes in the wrong god.
That land, where his people have always lived, does not belong to him.
They have ordered him to kill for a cause, whatever it might be.
So he escapes.
Convinced that his life is worth more. Knowing that he is young, that he can, and wants, to do anything: any kind of work, even the most humble, to have another chance, a new future, no matter where. He comes to Italy to forget.
The one thing, the only thing he’s looking for is a new system. To try and simply be what he is: a young man of twenty, a man of thirty, a boy.

 

 

Bio

Francesca Mancini made her debut as a professional photographer when she was 24, shooting her first international reportages on war refugees in the Balkans and southern Italy, and in Kosovo immediately after the war, and on the effects of pollution on the environment in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
After studying photography for three years in Rome, she worked for the Italian press and published her photos in leading daily newspapers.
From 2007 to 2008 she worked as a freelance between Kosovo and Serbia, documenting the social and political changes in the region and the difficulties linked to Kosovo’s independence.
In 2009 she started a project on political asylum seekers in Italy, which was published in the book Rifugiati by Christopher Hein.
Mancini’s photos have been published in Le Monde Magazine, The Independent, Newsweek Japan, Epsilon, Internazionale, L’Espresso, Panorama.

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Prospekt

 

Published on November 22, 2011 by burn magazine. 19 Comments

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LANCE ROSENFIELD

photographed by Candy Pilar Godoy

HEY AMIGO…MISSING YOU HERE IN RIO….THIS IS A TOTALLY CRAZY SHOUT OUT FITTING FOR THIS OCCASION

Since you cannot be with us today, please join us theriobook.com

YOU are a star there right now. Anyway, behind the scenes today in Rio we are thinking of you. Hope I did not embarrass you. Again

 

Abrazos, Roberta, David, and Renata

PRIME

Lance Rosenfield

Published on November 22, 2011 by david alan harvey. 33 Comments

Three Things ALWAYS With Me

I take a camera everywhere. On assignment of course and to the grocery store too. Everywhere. In my camera bag, in a little waterproof bag that contains my passport etc, are the three items pictured that I would never go anywhere without.

A poker chip. Yes a Harvey family designated set of poker chips for our late night family reunion poker games where I always lose. My son Erin had these made for us.

A golf tee. From my father’s last golf shot. When my brother Gary and sister Patricia went out with my father Alan, we knew it was his last game. On his final drive, I picked up the tee and have held it for the last ten years since his death.

A faux carabiner. Yup for keys etc. I use it for clipping the aforementioned bag to my camera bag. So I don’t lose it. A little gift that became a big gift from my son Bryan that has become the oldest of my good luck talismans for over 25 years.

Superstitious? No , just sentimental. Couldn’t travel without these super precious items.

What does this have to do with my photography?

Everything.

Join the happening right now with me real time adventure in RIO and you will find out why theriobook.com

Published on November 19, 2011 by david alan harvey. 26 Comments

RIO IN 14 HOURS

This is not much of a picture to be posting on BURN. It is only a “proof of location” picture. Yup I am at gate D16 in Miami over where everybody gets life power by plugging in their mobile devices. I am one of them. On my way to Rio and only now officially announcing my one month long reportage. My final book chapter for Rio. Two years in the making. Ok now seated on plane and I will have to turn phone off soon.

Go please to: www.theriobook.com

All should become clear..Next picture on that site upon landing.

See you soonest in Rio

Published on November 17, 2011 by david alan harvey. 67 Comments

Tomasz Lazar – Theater of Life

Tomasz Lazar

Theater of Life

In 2008 we began working on the long term project entitled ‘Theater of life’. Themes are the changes occurring in our society under the influence of culture and technology, which are increasingly present in our everyday lives.

Historically, Platon developed the notion of Theatrum Mundi – Theatre of the World. Place where a man is only a puppet, an actor whose role is to play its normal role on stage of life. Planned by the powerful being known as the creator (Demiurg, God). At present, the place of this being has been taken by mass media.  Mass media, with which we have to deal every day. They have increasingly greater impact on us, our life and behavior. People under the influence of mass culture that comes straight from the television or the Internet, get lost in the border of two worlds: the real world in which they live and the world created by the media.

Topics touched upon in his essay can best be seen in most developed countries. Places where people use more and more technology, areas in which technology, the media have the greatest impact on people. Therefore, a further stage of the project is to travel to places like Tokyo (Japan), New York (USA), Las Vegas (USA), Hong Kong and Sydney (Australia). As well as to further develop this theme in my home country and the countries adjacent to it.

 

 

Bio

I was born in Szczecin(Poland), 31th march 1985. Studied Information Technology at Westpomeranian University of Technology. During my studies I discovered photography . After several months I discovered that it is my passion and that is what i want to do in my life. After three years I decided to begin photography studies at the European Academy of Photography. I studied under the guidance of Tomasz Tomaszewski, Lorenzo Castore, Michael Ackerman, Isabel Jaroszewska and others. Since December 2010 I started being apprentice in the biggest studio in Poland – Makata, to develop my capabilities with using artificial light in practice. I was also involved in various workshops, like with Tomasz Tomaszewski on photojournalism and photo edition. At present, I am planning to expand on my photography knowledge by studying at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava (the Czech Republic).
Currently I am working on a project titled Theatre of life, whose task is to move aspects of everyday life and cultural changes taking place in society as a result of the development of media and technology in the world.
I am interested in mainly the impact of various factors on human life (such as culture, technology). I get pleasure from every moment of being with people and the possibility of taking pictures.

 

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Tomasz Lazar

Published on November 16, 2011 by burn magazine. 46 Comments