Greg Cohen: Laos

Photograph © Greg Cohen-All Rights Reserved
Greg Cohen is originally from the East Coast, and is now living in Los Angeles. His biography tells us that he first picked up the camera in Tennessee in 1993, while living in the Smoky Mountain region. He has lived throughout the United States photographing along the way, and is now developing projects in central Africa and Southeast Asia.

I've chosen a photograph from Greg's portfolio of Laos to illustrate this post, but I urge you to explore the rest of his galleries...I stopped at one of his photographs in his India gallery of a young person (probably a girl because of the henna markings) with the most wonderful of expressions. It's #12 and was photographed in Cochin. In my view, an award winning candid photograph!

Greg Cohen

Dilemma: Keffiyeh or Krama?

The blogosphere (and cable news) are buzzing with the hilarious news that a bunch of ideologues forced Dunkin Donuts to pull an ad featuring a celebrity chef because she was wearing what was erroneously seen as a keffiyeh. The ideologues of course, consider the keffiyeh as a "symbol of violence and of anti-Israel sentiments".

This utter stupidity is compounded by the fact that the scarf is a traditional head gear worn by many tribal societies in the Middle East. The king of Saudi Arabia (currently our administration's best friend, our suppliers of oil and buyers of our government's Treasury Bills) wears one...the king of Jordan (another of our allies) wears one, as well as members of Jordan's elite military forces.

But setting this silliness aside...what are photographers and photojournalists to do now? Do we wear our keffiyehs (right) and risk being labeled as Arab sympathizers by xenophobes? What if we wore our krama (left) scarf instead? Would we be labeled as Khmer Rouge sympathizers? Oh my gosh, this is a "serious" dilemma, folks.

POV: Technogeek vs Luddite?

A recent email received from a photographer questioning technological advancements affecting our business made me think about how these made it so much easier for me to manage and operate my photo expeditions.

One of these tech advances is the blog, which can be harnessed, not only to tell the world of one's periodic musings, fantasies, etc, but to maintain a record of each photo expedition's experiences. This is true for me, as a photo expeditions leader, and for the expeditions' participants with their own blog journals.

For instance, while on a photo-expedition or on a solo photo assignment, I always carried a Moleskine notebook, in which I would scribble each day's events, filling it with notes, ideas, sketches and information. I still do that on occasions, but my current preferred method of maintaining a journal of my photo expeditions and assignments is in a private blog.

At the end of each day in the field, I devote an hour or so on my laptop to type up the day's main events, key points to remember, impressions and ideas, for eventual transferral to a blog. This creates a useful (and easily accessible) source of referral whenever I need it. My final verdict on each of my photo expeditions is also entered, and that allows me to refine and improve future expeditions.

I maintain yet another private blog in which I amass all sorts of useful and usable information; from affordable hotels in Delhi (difficult these days), recommended guides/fixers' names and contacts to exotic rituals and festivals. A sort of compendium that I can call on when I plan any of my photo expeditions.

Yes, it is sad that writing journals in longhand is on the wane...dusting off an old journal and reading its contents is romantic...but technological advancements are so practical and are such good time-savers that it's difficult to resist them.

Mahesh Shantaram: Shanghai

Photograph © Mahesh Shantaram-All Rights Reserved
Having seen my post on Justin Guariglia's Planet Shanghai a few days ago, Mahesh Shantaram reminded me that he was very recently commissioned to work on a photographic project featuring the urban culture of Shanghai.

Mahesh tells us" In these images, there are two streams of narrative running in parallel. In the background is the infrastructure story, for which Shanghai is reputed. In the foreground is street documentary photography that plays on some of the social observations I made during my eventful stay. Together, they put a human face to infrastructure development in one of the greatest cities of the 21st century."

He's right. His photographs have two strings running through them; the urban background and the traditional street photography with blurry characters. An interesting viewpoint.

Shanghai: Model City

Alessandra Meniconzi: Hidden China

I've written about Alessandra Meniconzi over a year ago, and consider her one of the best travel photographers I've come across. She's a travel photographer in a classic sense, and her work is pure travel photography with no ambivalence.

Her biography reveals that she was born in Lugano and studied graphic design. She specializes in Asian countries, and prefers the wilderness as well as documenting the daily lives of ethnic minorities. Her exploration of the peoples of the ancient trade routes required her to make several trips to Asia over a 10-year period to document the people and cultures of the "Silk Road", the 2,000-year-old trade route linking the Orient and the Occident.

Her new book "Hidden China" will be published in Fall 2008, and will be available from Amazon and other bookstores.

Alessandra's website features her superb landscapes and portraits of ethnic minorities. Here are her images of China. Her website would benefit from a facelift, but I guarantee you'll be spending a lot of time exploring her galleries.

Abbas: Soul Hunt: Magnum In Motion

Here's a multimedia slideshow featuring photographs by Abbas from the Magnum website. It's about pagan rituals, performed by the shamans of Siberia, the Voodoo in Haiti, the Dogon of Mali, the Shinto in Japan, and the Bari of the Amazon.

Having photographed the Indonesian traditional healers in Bali, I was naturally very interested in seeing this body of work. While I deem Abbas' work to be superlative, I have to say that this slideshow is disappointing. I fault its unimaginative production rather than the photographs...which appear muddy (is it the compression for the slideshow?). It is uninformative, and I had to visit the thumbnail page to read background information on the photographs, as the slideshow itself has no captions or narration. What it does have is a truly awful soundtrack. Too bad.

Abbas (he only uses his first name) is an Iranian photojournalist living in Paris, France. He has covered wars and revolutions in Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, the Middle East, Chile, Cuba, and South Africa during apartheid. He photographed the revolution in Iran, to which he returned in 1997 after seventeen years of voluntary exile.

His interest in religion led him in 2002 to start a new long-term project about the clash of religions, defined as culture rather than faith, which he believes are replacing political ideologies in the strategic struggles of the contemporary world.

Abbas' Soul Hunt

Canon 5D Mark II Book?

I promised myself I wouldn't add fuel to the fire, but members of the DPreview forums have seen a 5D Mark II Field Guide listed on Amazon. The book has a release date of November 10, 2008 and a price of $20. The author and publisher are the same as the ones for the 5D Mark I field guide, which you can buy now online or in a bookstore or camera shop.

The Photokina Fair is scheduled for the third week of September 2008, and it may be a logical venue for an official release for the Canon 5D Mark II...while the release date for the book is November 10.

I've taken a partial capture of the Amazon screen (above) just in case it's taken down.

Via Imaging Insider/1001 Noisy Cameras