wintertime is coming
Photographer: Ulf Fågelhammar
25 October 2007
24 October 2007
21 October 2007
invited guest: Emmanuel Smague - Iraqi Kurdistan
Kurdistan: the largest ethnical group worldwide without a nation. 45 million inhabitants living in 5 countries : Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia (the Yezedi community).
I went to autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq in April 2006 for two reasons: first was to discuss a musical exchange project with the Kurdish minister of culture, and second to display a photo exhibit called « World Portraits » at the Arthur Rimbaud cultural center in the citadel of Erbil.This region has been autonomous since the intervention of the coalition in 2003. Then of course, the Kurdish know that the Americans have not come for their sake but have been following their own agenda. Beside the oil stake, the United States have been planning to set up military bases in Kurdistan: Iran is close by.The Kurdish people thus have this opportunity of existing and opening themselves to the world. Some have been dreaming of a united Kurdistan, others would like to see Turkey join the European Union. If they were oppressed, the Kurdish also are a tough people. The civil war raging between the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) and the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) - two political parties now sharing power in the autonomous government - has come to an end, but tensions remain.
Following a music tour with a Breton band in November 2006, a tour welcomed enthusiastically by the population, I went back at the end of December by myself to take pictures. Along with a friend of mine who also is an interpreter, I went through refugee camps of Kurdish people who fled Turkey or Syria, through yet another one in the soccer stadium in Kirkuk, and finally through the martyred city of Halabjah. And there was much pain there, as each face showed suffering, the affliction over the loss of a family member. And everywhere the same complaint : " the government has not been doing anything for us".On December 30th 2006, the execution of Saddam Hussein is played over and over on television : the tyrant is instantly turned into a martyr. Yet his mock trial felt like a mascarade to many. Even though all feel nostalgic over the former economic situation, none feels sorry for his death. Yet there has not been a frantic reaction: a feeling of frustration remains that he was not condemned for the wrongs he did unto the Kurdish population.
My last journey in December, 2006 has been particularly ached. This photographic work would have never come true without the presence of my friend interpret, who has been able to keep his cheerfulness and his humour, in spite of distressing visits. 
A difficult return ... all the more so since last news are absolutely dramatic. Last month, peaceful Autonomous Kurdistan was under two deadly attacks in Erbil and in Makhmur : the referendum concerning the return of Kirkuk to Kurdistan, which would take place before the end of 2007 according to the disposition of the Iraqi constitution, risks to spread war to Kurdistan. Indeed, considering the Kurdish repopulation of this city (which had been arabized by Saddam), the referendum would end in this fastening. Now, Arabic and Turkmen oppose wildly to this. All the question is to know if the incomes of the petroleum of Kirkuk will be profitable to the federal State or to the Autonomous Kurdistan.The risks of unrests in the Kurdistan are real and imminent if the Kurds do not give up to this referendum for a negotiated solution with the two other communities (Shiite and Sunnite) on the incomes of the oil of Kirkuk.
Indeed, if they do not give up to it, in view of the financial stake and the current balance of power, goodbye to peace; without talking about the fact that United States could, once again, leave them left to their own devices.
Ankara is afraid that the incorporation of Kirkuk into the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous zone may give to the latter sufficient financial means to proclaim its independence, a situation which could, according to the Turkish authorities, encourage the secessionism of the Kurds in Turkey. Therefore, Turkey threatens at the moment, more than ever, to intervene militarily if necessary.
Mr Barzani, current president of the autonomous Kurdistan refuses to put back the referendum, considering that there is "a kind of plot against the Kurds" to delay this consultation, planned to be held before the end of 2007.text and photos © by Emmanuel Smague
invited by Marcin Górski
20 October 2007
19 October 2007
16 October 2007
15 October 2007
go ahead
Indiana Harbor Belt RR, switchman demonstrating signalwith a "fusee"-
used at twilight and dawn - when visibility is poor. This signal means
"go ahead." Calumet City, Ill.
Delano, Jack, 1914- photographer.
CREATED/PUBLISHED
1943 Jan.
In the roundhouse at a Chicago and Northwestern Railroad yard, Chicago, Ill.
Delano, Jack, 1914- photographer.
CREATED/PUBLISHED
1942 Dec.
Have a look at more of Jack Delano´s colour photos at the FSA site
(see F links) A true pleasure.
invited guest: Howard W. French - Disappearing Shanghai
les bouteillesThe photographer is an inescapable romantic, a connoisseur of mortality; someone who hopes or dreams that he can stave off oblivion by trapping light through the judicious use of a dark chamber, access to which is controlled by something whose Chinese name I adore — the kuai men, the fast gate — or shutter.
It's fleeting moments we're after, and when one stops to think about it, what else is our world constructed of?
I came to this appreciation of things right here in Shanghai, where I moved nearly four years ago. The discovery was gradual, the product of short walks, and then longer walks, and finally walks that one wished wouldn't end, but alas always did, with the failure of the light at day's end.
What I discovered here was a secret world, accessible through discreet little alleys and back streets that look deceptively drab at first glance. You set out down these paths, though, and on lucky days what opens up for you is a world of magical illusions; places that appear and reappear, on subsequent visits, as if they had been served up from another age, suspended in amber, frozen and preserved for all time.
But of course it is not frozen, much less preserved. It is a world that is fast disappearing, a place of unavoidably brief and tragic loves. No sooner than you think you've learned and memorized every single face, and worked out every nook and cranny, these places are steamrolled, demolished — gone and lost forever. And in Shanghai, the process of which I speak is happening like a train of cascading dominoes — hence the title of this modest attempt at a tribute, Disappearing Shanghai.
The rhythms of life in the little worlds I've documented here, the songbirds and the crickets lovingly raised in their cages, the street markets and the foods, with their smells and colors that change so suddenly and so crisply according to the season, the eternal tending of laundry from long bamboo poles, the wildly screeching bicycle brakes, the lusty throat clearing, the world weary lounging about on beach chairs and in pajamas, the very appearance of the people's faces, weathered by a century of immense and often brutal change, like the old man in the faded Mao suit I saw on a street corner this afternoon looking for the life of him like an apparition lost amid the onrush of the new — It is all on its way out. It is all being swept away.
I sometimes feel it is wrong to mourn this fact, for after all, what is history? What are cities — that most fantastic achievement of mankind — if not engines of ceaseless change? Another Shanghai is rising up fast and one day it will disappear too, won't it? Not, of course, before throwing up its own portraitists, its own poets, its own bards.
Yes, I know all this in a bookish sense. But I can also look around me, and my eyes tell me it is not true. There is no way the world in creation will have anything like the texture of the one it is replacing. Go ahead, call me a sentimentalist, but I know what the camera knows, and more.
The old Shanghai, the disappearing one that seems so scarcely cherished by its own nostalgia-free denizens, is the product of a wave of globalization that preceded the word. It is a world of taxi dancers and sing-song girls, of pedicabs and "coolies," of financiers and speculators of every stripe, from every shore. Of big capital and cheap labor. Of gangs and guns runners and drugs; a place of intrigue of every kind.
Most of all, though, it was a world of industry and of big time shipping that drew people here by the millions with the hope, if not exactly the promise of their first salaried job.
That is the kind of enterprise and bustle that created the neighborhoods that populate my images, and now they are making way for something new and altogether different.
The loss is incalculable, and yet it cannot be avoided. Pause, please. Take stock. Breathe it in. It won't be here for long, and you will never see it again.
It's fleeting moments we're after, and when one stops to think about it, what else is our world constructed of?
I came to this appreciation of things right here in Shanghai, where I moved nearly four years ago. The discovery was gradual, the product of short walks, and then longer walks, and finally walks that one wished wouldn't end, but alas always did, with the failure of the light at day's end.
What I discovered here was a secret world, accessible through discreet little alleys and back streets that look deceptively drab at first glance. You set out down these paths, though, and on lucky days what opens up for you is a world of magical illusions; places that appear and reappear, on subsequent visits, as if they had been served up from another age, suspended in amber, frozen and preserved for all time.
But of course it is not frozen, much less preserved. It is a world that is fast disappearing, a place of unavoidably brief and tragic loves. No sooner than you think you've learned and memorized every single face, and worked out every nook and cranny, these places are steamrolled, demolished — gone and lost forever. And in Shanghai, the process of which I speak is happening like a train of cascading dominoes — hence the title of this modest attempt at a tribute, Disappearing Shanghai.
The rhythms of life in the little worlds I've documented here, the songbirds and the crickets lovingly raised in their cages, the street markets and the foods, with their smells and colors that change so suddenly and so crisply according to the season, the eternal tending of laundry from long bamboo poles, the wildly screeching bicycle brakes, the lusty throat clearing, the world weary lounging about on beach chairs and in pajamas, the very appearance of the people's faces, weathered by a century of immense and often brutal change, like the old man in the faded Mao suit I saw on a street corner this afternoon looking for the life of him like an apparition lost amid the onrush of the new — It is all on its way out. It is all being swept away.
I sometimes feel it is wrong to mourn this fact, for after all, what is history? What are cities — that most fantastic achievement of mankind — if not engines of ceaseless change? Another Shanghai is rising up fast and one day it will disappear too, won't it? Not, of course, before throwing up its own portraitists, its own poets, its own bards.
Yes, I know all this in a bookish sense. But I can also look around me, and my eyes tell me it is not true. There is no way the world in creation will have anything like the texture of the one it is replacing. Go ahead, call me a sentimentalist, but I know what the camera knows, and more.
The old Shanghai, the disappearing one that seems so scarcely cherished by its own nostalgia-free denizens, is the product of a wave of globalization that preceded the word. It is a world of taxi dancers and sing-song girls, of pedicabs and "coolies," of financiers and speculators of every stripe, from every shore. Of big capital and cheap labor. Of gangs and guns runners and drugs; a place of intrigue of every kind.
Most of all, though, it was a world of industry and of big time shipping that drew people here by the millions with the hope, if not exactly the promise of their first salaried job.
That is the kind of enterprise and bustle that created the neighborhoods that populate my images, and now they are making way for something new and altogether different.
The loss is incalculable, and yet it cannot be avoided. Pause, please. Take stock. Breathe it in. It won't be here for long, and you will never see it again.
the reader 
strung out
moving out
five golds
favela
eye of the storm
dozing
crepuscle in pjs 
beachedHoward W. French is a Senior Writer for The New York Times, who has spent most of his career in journalism as a foreign correspondent, working in and traveling to over 100 countries on five continents.
He is currently the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, which began in March 2004, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
Howard is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2004 and cited as a non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers.
Howard has had a lifelong interest in photography, first taught to him by his father, who built him his first darkroom somewhere around fifth or sixth grade.
Since then, as a journalist, he has had the pleasure of working alongside a great many highly skilled and generous professional photographers, eagerly learning from them as he has gradually, steadily honed his own art.
Howard’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is currently the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, which began in March 2004, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
Howard is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2004 and cited as a non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers.
Howard has had a lifelong interest in photography, first taught to him by his father, who built him his first darkroom somewhere around fifth or sixth grade.
Since then, as a journalist, he has had the pleasure of working alongside a great many highly skilled and generous professional photographers, eagerly learning from them as he has gradually, steadily honed his own art.
Howard’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia.
More of Howard's work you may see at his website
invited by Marcin Górski
14 October 2007
Motiv #13 Public
Motiv #13 Public is published in February 2008. The editors want
contributions for the coming issue.Deadline is 1 December.
Read more about it.
"Motiv is a photo gallery in a magazine format, a meeting
place for photographers, artists, writers, viewers and readers.
The content ranges from documentary and journalistic photographs
to more conceptual work. Motiv is as light-hearted and
sensitive as it is analytical and topical. Founded in 2004,
Motiv is published three times a year. Each issue has a new
theme: a way of scrutinising what photographic
stories there are to tell. Since # 9, Motiv is bilingual:
Swedish and English."
place for photographers, artists, writers, viewers and readers.
The content ranges from documentary and journalistic photographs
to more conceptual work. Motiv is as light-hearted and
sensitive as it is analytical and topical. Founded in 2004,
Motiv is published three times a year. Each issue has a new
theme: a way of scrutinising what photographic
stories there are to tell. Since # 9, Motiv is bilingual:
Swedish and English."
13 October 2007
high school boys
Benjamin Franklin High School, New York, New York.
High school boys growing physically fit through exercise.
Perlitch, William, photographer.
CREATED/PUBLISHED
1942 Oct.
REPRODUCTION NUMBER
LC-USW3-024640-C DLC (b&w film neg.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
