NY Times: Afghan Terrain

Image Copyright © Tomás Munita/NY Times-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times has a slideshow of Tomás Munita's excellent photographs that accompany an article describing a $40 million experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. The objective is for the anthropologists to understand subtle points of tribal relations, and explain these to the combat troops.

As an example, one of the anthropologists identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one Afghan village, whose lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, and drove the young men to join well-paid insurgents. As a consequence, the US military developed a job training program for the widows.

It's clear that no one has any idea if this experiment will work long term, but at least it's a constructive step and hopefully may yield some results. The Afghans are justifiably suspicious of Western influence (aka interference), be it from Russia in the 80s or the United States, so I'm not holding my breath.

Whatever the long term outcome is, this experimental program is certainly intellectually and morally more in sync with our values as Americans than the thuggish and xenophobic behavior that we read about so often these days.

Here's The New York Times' Human Terrain

Alexandra Boulat

Image Copyright © Jerome Delay/AP-All Rights Reserved
It is reported that photojournalist Alexandra Boulat, one of the founding members of the VII photo agency, died last night in a Paris hospital. She was 45. Boulat suffered a brain aneurysm last June while living in Jerusalem, Israel. She was later transferred to Paris.

Boulat was one of the most talented photographers of her generation. She was born in Paris in 1962 and was originally trained in graphic art and art history, at the Beaux Arts in Paris. She was represented by Sipa Press for 10 years until 2000. In 2001 she co-founded VII photo agency. Her news and features stories were published in many international magazines, above all Time, Newsweek, National Geographic Magazine and Paris-Match. She received many International Awards for the quality of her work.

Among her many varied assignments, she reported on the wars in former Yugoslavia, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan at the fall of the Taliban, and women's condition in the Islamic world. Other large assignments published in National Geographic include country stories on Indonesia Albania, and Morroco.

CS Monitor: A Village in Ghana

Image Copyright © Peter DiCampo/CS Monitor-All Rights Reserved
Although the northern Ghanian village of Wantugu has high-tension power lines in place since 2000, its people are still lacking one key element: electricity flowing through those wires and into village homes. For most people in developed countries, living without electricity is unthinkable, but in Wantugu it is the norm, rather than the exception.

Even without electric power, the 3,500 inhabitants of this rural farming community are active after dark, with young people get together to study English homework or the Qu'ran, while others gather to watch a film on the only TV in the village.

The feature is photographed and reported by Peter DiCampo, who has used the Soundslides quite effectively. You'll see that he's effectively created motion in some of the pictures of the Ghanaians' dance (two-thirds into the feature) by adding virtually identical photographs of a dance scene and keeping the time delay between these to the minimum of a second... using the same flip-book technique I used in The Dancing Monks of Prakhar slideshow. I also liked the audio soundtrack that accompanies DiCampo's slideshow.

Here's CS Monitor's Wantugu village

Bali: Spirits Dance!

Image Copyright © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
I've put together a slideshow of some of my photographs of Bali's indigenous dances such as Rejang, Arja and Kecak. Some are candid photographs, while others are of dancers I hired to pose for the members of my Bali photo-expedition in July.

I decided against adding any sound recordings made while the dancers' performances...gamelan and kecak are somewhat repetitive, and I wanted to show the images on their own with no distractions.

Bali: Spirits Dance!!

Cambodia: Pchum Ben Festival

Image Copyright © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
One of the most important religious observances in Cambodia will start on October 11th. Prachum Benda, known colloquially as Pchum Ben, is the period during which the Cambodians gather to make offerings to their ancestors. The observance usually lasts an entire lunar cycle, constituting the fifteen days that ancestral spirits are given to visit their living relatives.

Although Cambodians believe that most living creatures are reincarnated at death, some souls remain trapped in the spirit world. So each year, for these fifteen days, these trapped souls are released from the spirit world to search for their living relatives, meditate and repent. Pchum Ben is for the living relatives to remember their ancestors and offer food to those unfortunate enough to have become trapped in the spirit world.

I also learnt today that the upper level of the Angkor Wat temple has been closed by the authorities because of the volume of tourists. The stairs are too narrow to accomodate the traffic of visitors, so it'll be no longer possible to get to the top of the temple.

Podcast: The Art of Tea

This is not really about travel or editorial photography...well, maybe it is. Jennifer Sauer, a photojournalist and photographer, decided to document the most intriguing tea lounges and tearooms in the San Francisco Bay Area, and to introduce you to the world's top tea experts, who explain how to judge quality teas, and explored tea cultures from around the world in a book titled The Art of Tea.

In this podcast (courtesy of The Digital Story via Imaging Insider), Jennifer tells us how she thought of her project, how she put her photographs and text together...and gives us tips to publish such a book in the current publishing environment. It's well worth a listen.

Podcast (mp3)

News Update: Myanmar

Image Copyright © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
According to the Reuters, the U.N. envoy met with Myanmar junta chief Than Shwe and detained opposition Aung San Suu Kyi today, hoping to halt a bloody crackdown on the biggest democracy protests in 20 years.

Although the streets of Rangoon are quiet, it's reported that raids on homes by pro-junta gangs are being carried out looking for dissident monks and civilians. The number of dead is unknown but is estimated at much higher than the figure reported by the government.

It is also reported that about 4,000 monks have been rounded up in Rangoon over the past week and are being held at a disused race course and a technical college, and would soon be sent to prisons in the far north of the country. Sources say that the monks have been disrobed and shackled, and that they are refusing to eat.

Klavs Christensen: Women of Chah Faleh

Klavs is a Danish photographer who picked up photography as a hobby after graduating from The Royal Academy of Music. He started work as a freelance for various Danish magazines and organizations, and his work is based on social and cultural issues in his local neighborhood of downtown Copenhagen.

A few years ago he decided to do more work on stories of international interest but still with a focus on cultural, social and political issues. These have taken him to Iran, Egypt and Syria. He began working with WpN in January 2007.

I found his photographs of masked women from the village of Chah Faleh in south Iran to be most interesting. Many women in this region of Iran wear different kinds of masks. The tradition of these masks goes further back than the time when Islam came to Iran, but in this part of the country (especially in the villages) the tradition has been adapted as a part of hijab.

The traditional masks are black, some with gold. Within the last 30-40 years, the coloured masks started to show up and today they are subject to fashion. Klavs tells us that most of the women wearing the masks are doing it because of hijab, but some wear them only to protect their skin from the getting tanned by the sun.

Klavs Christensen

Print Space (NYC)

A couple of weeks ago, I had some of my Bali and Bhutan photographs printed at Print Space, and chose to have them done on its Chromira printer. I had read that the Chromira exposes photographic paper or film at 300 pixels per inch (ppi) in 36 bit color using Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), and using ZBE's proprietary Resolution Enhancement Technology, the image is sharpened to a visual resolution of 425 ppi.

What I like a lot about the large prints I got is that, unlike large format inkjet output, there here is no "dot pattern", and there are no inks used that can smudge or fade.

I can vouch for the extremely nice staff and attentive service. I just walked in, asked a few questions and got my large prints the following day, and I'm absolutely delighted with the results.

Apart from the Chromira 30 for digital C-Print output, Print Space offers a wide range of features and options to help make professional B&W fiber, RC, and Color C-prints. It also offers dip'n'dunk C-41 film processing, and drum-quality Imacon 848 & 949 scanner rental.

Print Space (212 255 1919) is located at 151 West 19th Street NY 10011 (8th floor).

Print Space

Jonathan Hanson: Mexican Life

Image Copyright © Jonathan Hanson-All Rights Reserved
Jonathan Hanson worked for the Santa Fe Workshops after attending graduate school for commercial photography at Ohio University. In Santa Fe he he worked with photographers Jay Maisel and Arthur Meyerson who influenced his eye for color and light. He then moved to San Miguel in Mexico where he studied Spanish and Mexican culture. This paved the way for his skill with the use of bold color, composition and the subtleties of body language.

As TTP readers probably know by now, I like highly saturated colors in photographs, photographs with a lot of shadows and I always try to introduce motion blur in images that need it...so it's not a surprise that I chose Hanson's photograph of this yellow and black street scene for this post.

Hanson's website is flash-based, and his Mexican Life portfolio is "filed' under Essays. Another great photograph with shadows is the one with turquoise and pink walls and cotton candy.

Jonathan Hanson

New York Times: Gaza's Youth

Image Copyright © Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times sometimes has an intellectual and moral spine (I think it's vestigial, but that's an argument for another post), and it did the right thing this week by featuring a multimedia slideshow on the plight of young Gazans who pay the price for Israeli security. Narrated by Steven Erlanger in an appropriate compassionate voice and intonation, and produced in collaboration with Cornelius Schmid, it features still photographs by Ali Ali, Amir Cohen, Emilio Morenatti, Edi Israel and Shawn Baldwin.

Here's how the accompanying article starts:

The three Abu Ghazala fathers were in mourning, in the Palestinian way, sitting with their relatives recently in a shaded courtyard, open to the fields of watermelon and eggplant in which their children had died. Israeli fire has killed 18 Palestinian youths in Gaza recently. The children — Yehiya, 12, Mahmoud, 9, and Sara, 9 — were tending goats and playing tag on Aug. 29 when an Israeli shell or rocket blew them apart.

Dangerous Ground