Daniel Berehulak: Kashmir

Photo © Daniel Berehulak-All Rights Reserved
Daniel Berehulak is based in New Delhi, working for Getty Images News Service and covering the South Asia region and beyond. He joined Getty Images in 2002 in Sydney and relocated to London as a staff news photographer in 2005. Daniel’s work is regularly published in major newspapers and magazines worldwide, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Stern, Time, Newsweek and many more.

With his image (the B&W version) of a Kashmiri girl mourning the death of teenager Zahid Farooq during his funeral on the outskirts of Srinagar, Daniel was awarded First Prize: News Folio of the Year in the Press Photographer's Year 2010, which is the only competition to showcase the best photography used exclusively by the UK media.

I recommend not only his arresting (and recent) photographs of Kashmir, but also his lovely medium format work in the gallery titled I-ncredible India....especially the photograph of the two Muslim boys reclining on some blankets in an Ahmedabad storefront.

My thanks to Eric Beecroft for the heads-up.

Bali Photo~Expedition™: Two Weeks To Go!

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
I've started to think about gear packing for the forthcoming Bali: Island of Odalan Photo~Expedition™, which is to start on August 1.

A brief stop-over in London, then it's a grueling 16 hours aggregate flight time from Heathrow to Bangkok, and onwards to Denpasar to reach it on July 28. This will give me a couple of days for a personal project, and to meet the rest of the participants.

I am tempted to ditch my preferred combination of the Domke shoulder bag and a non-name messenger bag in favor of my older Lowepro backpack. The reason? I want to take my old workhorse of a camera: the Canon 1D Mark II along with the 5D Mark II, as well as my Panasonic GF1. Also included are my whole panoply of lenses; the 70-200 2.8 IS, the 28-70 2.8. the 17-40 4.0 and the 24 1.4, a ATR6250 Stereo Condenser mic and my Marantz audio recorder, and a couple of hard drives to keep my Macbook Pro 13" company.

And if the winds blow in the right way, I may even get a Holga to photograph some of the odalan ceremonies, emulating my friend John Stanmeyer's Island of Spirits.

That's a lot of gear, and I can't fit all that in the Domke-Messenger bag combo I often use. My shoulders will complain, my back will be sore....but I have to have that amount of gear with me. When will I have the guts to rely solely on the Panasonic GF1 with a couple of lightweight lenses? Probably when my shoulders cave in...that's when.

So over the coming week, I will try out various packing permutations to determine which one I'll use. Only then will I decide what to pack in terms of clothes...and if I don't the time for that, ah well...Bali is sarong-country!

Photojournalism From SE Asia

For those who are hard-core fans of South East Asian photojournalism, OPEN-i hosted a live webinar a few months ago which featured work from photographers living and working in South East Asia, and who discussed the challenges and rewards of working in that region.

The webinar (moderated by Paul Lowe) is unusually long (about 105 minutes), and the acoustics are not great, but it offers insight into the work and working conditions of 4 photographers/photojournalists.

Jack Picone - Thailand
Justin Mott - Vietnam
Veejay Villafranca - Philippines
Rony Zakaria - Indonesia

OPEN-i is a global online community of practice for the professional photojournalism industry where members can discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the industry in live webinars and online forums.

Amy Johansson: Lethal Leather

Photo © Amy Johansson-All Rights Reserved
Amy Johansson is a Swedish photographer, who's currently about to move from her Bangladesh base to attend an international photojournalism course at the Danish School of Media and Journalism . After completing a degree in fashion design, Amy worked as a designer for several years, until moving to Dhaka as a product developer.

Upon her taking up photography, she rapidly won awards and has been represented in numerous galleries and exhibitions, such as the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait exhibition at the London National Portrait Gallery in 2009.

Amy attended the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop last year in Manali (India) where she won the emerging photojournalist award, and also attended it in Istanbul two weeks ago.

She recently co-produced an audio slideshow titled Lethal Leather on that industry in Bangladesh, its medieval conditions and its lethal toxic consequences on its workers. It's a joint project between her and journalist Gabrielle Jönsson.

The Travel Photographer: Updated Website

I updated The Travel Photographer website with a new slideshow of more recent photographs made during my 2009-2010 trips, and added details of my planned In Search of Sufis Photo~Expedition™, which will be the first scheduled for 2011.

It's well on its way to being sold out, as I am restricting it to only 5 photographers.

The In Search of Sufis Photo~Expedition™ is not for first-timers to India, nor is it for photographers expecting choreographed photo-opportunities. This trip will be the quintessential fusion of travel photography and photojournalism, and aims to merge the visual with the intellectual.

It's structured for photographers interested in multimedia story-telling, interested in exploring the existing syncretism between Sufism and Hinduism, interested in documenting traditional ways of life of Gujarati tribal societies, and documenting Sufi rituals that include exorcisms and trances.

Andy Spyra: The Shadows of Srebrenica

Photo © Andy Spyra/Courtesy FP Magazine-All Rights Reserved
I don't think of Foreign Policy magazine as one to feature top notch photojournalism, but it unfailingly does.

Its latest feature is on the 15th anniversary (if we can call it an anniversary) of the Serbian army entering the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in the days that followed killing 8,000 Bosniac Muslim men and boys. The Srebrenica genocide was the largest mass murder in Europe since the end of World War II, and the country is still recovering from the war that ended 15 years ago.

The Shadows of Srebrenica is a collection of black & white photographs by the incredibly talented Andy Spyra, and is a powerful reminder of that era, and also reminds us that many of those responsible for this genocide have yet to be apprehended, especially Ratko Mladić.

Amongst the many powerful images, I thought the one above was the most evocative, with the hand and the shadow on the pavement.. Its caption reads: "At the gate of the Srebrenica cemetery, Mehmedovic gestures toward a memorial marker with the number 8,372, though no one knows precisely how many Bosniaks were killed."

Andy Spyra is a freelance photographer currently based in Hagen, Germany. After school, he traveled to Central America and South East Asia where he took up photography. He subsequently studied photography at the Fachhochschule Hannover. He‘s currently pursuing personal projects in the Balkans.

Pierre Claquin: Surviving Dreams

Photo © Pierre Claquin-All Rights Reserved

Photo © Pierre Claquin-All Rights Reserved

Whilst attending my Introduction To Multimedia class at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop (Istanbul), Pierre Claquin divulged that he had been a photographer at the age of 16 through a younger brother who owned a Foca camera and let him use it. Matters progressed, and Pierre graduated to an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, then a Nikkormat...and he stayed with Nikon ever since.

Pierre also divulged that he had produced a photographic book titled Surviving Dreams: The Struggling Circuses of Bangladesh, which documents the few remaining circuses in that country. Very few remain, struggling against bureaucracy, corruption, prejudice and financial difficulties. The book, of some 158 pages of which about 120 are black & white photographs, examines the origin and history of the circus in Bangladesh, as well as the realities of the performers' lives.

As to his choice of black & white, Pierre says" "I used black and white film for this project because, especially in the case of circuses, it is very easy to be distracted by colors."

I enjoyed the book immensely, and you can buy the book Surviving Dreams by contacting Pierre Claquin by email: lalbandor at aol dot com

One Day On Earth: Participate!!!

One Day on Earth Participant Trailer from One Day On Earth on Vimeo.

On October 10th, 2010, thousands of people from every nation around the world will film their perspective and contribute their voice to one of the largest participatory media events in history. The event will result in a feature documentary and online video archive that will showcase the diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that can occur in one day on earth.

The more people are involved, the more accurate and comprehensive a record of the planet that is created....so check it on One Day On Earth

Dilla Djalil-Daniel: The Istanbuli Silversmith

Photo © Dilla Djalil-Daniel-All Rights Reserved

Photo © Dilla Djalil-Daniel-All Rights Reserved

Photo © Dilla Djalil-Daniel-All Rights Reserved

Dilla Djalil-Daniel is a photographer currently living in Jakarta, and attended the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul.

She participated in Andrea Bruce's class, and chose me to review one of her portfolios of the Cap Go Meh celebration in Singkawang, West Kalimantan. Naturally, this captured my undivided attention on account of her colorful images of the unusual rituals and trances.

Dilla traveled around the world for her photography, especially in Asia and has a large portfolio that ought to be shown on her own personal website, which I urged her to have.

Her project in Istanbul for Andrea's class was documenting a day in the life of a traditional silversmith in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar whose name, Kennedy, is definitely nontraditional. It seems his parents named him after the US president after he was shot in Dallas. Many of the silversmiths in Istanbul are ethnic Armenians.

Here is a selection of her images which were part of the students' projects shown during the last evening of the workshop. Somewhat of a departure for Dilla, as it was shot in a photojournalistic style and in B&W.