Alixandra Fazzina: UNCHR Interview

This interview is really worth watching and reflecting on.

In July 2010, British photo-journalist Alixandra Fazzina was awarded the annual UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award as a recognition of her work documenting the often overlooked consequences of war. In this video by UNCHR, she speaks about the plight of the uprooted.  She traveled to some of the worst hit areas in Pakistan where she saw first hand the devastation caused by the floods, and reminds us that refugees are human beings too.

UNHCR cares for more than 40 million uprooted people.

Alixandra Fazzina, who's based in Pakistan, is a member of the NOOR foundation and photo agency.

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Update on the Fujifilm Finepix X100 Rangefinder

WIRED's Gadget Lab has blogged on Fujifilm's new details of its forthcoming X100, which looks like an old-style 35mm rangefinder but is really a hybrid because it sports a mix of an optical and electronic viewfinder.

For those who haven't seen my earlier blog post on this hot baby, it's a camera I want ....and it's a real shame that it's not available in retail stores until March 2011. What's the payback for having been really good all year if Santa can only deliver this in March or later???

In any event, the X100 has a 12.3MP APS-C sensor, and a non-removable 23mm (35mm equivalent) ƒ2 lens.  It has manual focus (contradicting one of my discussions with a fellow photographer a few days ago), and will cost about $1000.

WIRED seems to think that the fixed lens might be a drawback when compared to Micro Four Thirds cameras...I dont know. I have the Panasonic GF1 with the sweet 20mm f1.7mm lens, and I haven't felt the need to have another focal length when I use it.

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The Big Picture Blog: Best of 2010

Photo © Goran Tomasevic (Reuters)

Boston Globe's The Big Picture Blog is featuring the first part of three sets of photographs, which define 2010. The first set consists of 40 photographs...with some gems from Emilio Morenatti, Finbarr O'Reilly, while this one from Reuters' Goran Tomasevic is probably my favorite so far.

It shows U.S. Marines from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, protecting an Afghan and his child after Taliban fighters opened fire in the town of Marjah, in Nad Ali district, Helmand province on February 13, 2010.

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Sam Chadwick: Cuba & More

Photo © Sam Chadwick-All Rights Reserved

Sam Chadwick is a travel photographer and a Hell's Kitchen (NYC) resident where he works on a variety of photographic projects and planning his next photographic travels.

He started photography as a main means of documenting his 5-day ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro. Since then, he traveled to over 50 countries, creating a large collection of images of people, cultures and environments. In 2007, he reached the semi-finals of the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and his images have appeared on Reuters.

You can see his many galleries on his website, from Guatemala, Belize, Nepal, Costa Rica, East Africa and my favorite Cuba.

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The BBC Celebrates Sir Wilfred Thesiger

Wilfred Thesiger in Ethiopia 1934 (Courtesy The BBC)

For historical buffs and admirers of adventurers/explorers, here's a BBC feature that will please you.

Sir Wilfred Thesiger took nearly 40,000 photographs during his eight decades of travels throughout Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The BBC, in commemoration of his centenary of his birth, has featured an audio slideshow of his photographs.

Thesiger is best known for two travel books. Arabian Sands (1959) narrates his travels in the Empty Quarter of Arabia between 1945 and 1950 and describes the vanishing way of life of the Bedouins, while he Marsh Arabs (1964) is an account of the indigenous people of the marshlands of southern Iraq. 

From an article 'Gentleman Thrillseeker 'in the Independent newspaper:

Since 1930 Thesiger had documented his journeys in photographs, diaries, and letters to his family. Many of his finest photographs were taken, after 1945, in Arabia and Iraq; he took thousands more, just as fine, in the mountains of Asia, Morocco, Kenya and Tanzania. Thesiger's photographs have long been regarded as works of art in their own right; they also preserve a unique and imperishable record of vanishing tribal societies.

Thesiger was an intriguing man...to say the least. There are plenty of articles and opinions pieces about him and his life.

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National Geographic Photo Contest 2010

Photo © Chan Kwok Hung- Courtesy National Geographic

The National Geographic 2010 Photo Contest winners were announced. More than 16,000 photographs were submitted from around the globe, and 3 earned top honors in the people, places, and nature categories.

The winner in the People category is photographer Chan Kwok Hung of Hong Kong, who captured the photograph of an Indonesian farmer and his buffalo charging through the mud in a buffalo race called "makepung".

I also liked the photograph of a Xhosa boy crying during a circumcision ceremony by Robin Utrecht which garnered the Honorable Mention in the People category.

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Tatiana Cardeal: Ancient China

Photo © Tatiana Cardeal-All Rights Reserved

Tatiana Cardeal is a photographer, a visual artist (and a dreamer). She's a Brazilian independent photographer based in Sao Paulo, who spent her early career as an art director and graphic designer for international magazines. In 2003, she shifted her focus to photography and started to document social, cultural and human right issues where she made her mark.

Her particular interest is in South American indigenous people, but she just featured really terrific photographs of China in this portfolio which she titled Ancient China. I suspect that it's brand new as some of its captions are yet incomplete.

Clients and publications of her images include work with Amnesty International, Childhood Foundation, OXFAM International, Fundación AVINA, The UN Institute for Disarmament Research, Forum Syd, World Pulse and the medias The Independent, WOZ newspaper, National Geographic Channel, Deutsche Welle, and the magazines The New Internationalist, Courrier International, Max, Plenty, Tomorrow, Oryx In-Flight, AFAR, WIENERIN, Annabelle,The Big Issue and YES!

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Trances At Sufi Shrine (Denver Post's PBlog)

Photo © Manan Vatsyayana (AFP/Getty)

The Denver Post's Photo Blog of the week 12.10.2010 features an interesting photograph by Manan Vatsyayana (AFP/Getty) of an Indian devotee seemingly going into a trance to rid herself of evil spirits. This happened earlier this month at the Hazrat Shah Dana Wali Dargah in Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. It's north of Lucknow and about 200 miles from Delhi. Thousand of devotees from all religions visit the 650-year old shrine of Sufi saint each Thursday to seek blessings for their family and ward off evil spirits.

This is topical as I shall soon be traveling to Gujarat to lead In Search of the Sufis of Gujarat Photo Expedition™, during which our small group will photograph at various Sufi shrines in the area, and where trances and exorcisms frequently take place.

While I've seen devotees exhibit mild trances especially during qawalli performances at the shrine of Nizzam Uddin in Delhi, I also witnessed extreme displays of religious trances in Varanasi, the quintessential Hindu religious city. I spent a couple of days photographing at the dargah of the Sufi saint Bahadur Shahid, where trances and loss of consciousness by devotees were the norm. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims mingled and sought blessings from this Muslim saint, and some of them went into intense trances. I got the lead to the venue from a NY Times article.

To see more of these practices, here's an audio slideshow I produced and a stills gallery of my photographs at Bahadur Shahid.

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Jeroens Toirkens: Nomads

Photo © Jeroens Toirlens-All Rights Reserved

 Jeroen Toirkens is a Dutch freelance photographer who studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. His work mainly consists documentary photography for various clients like NGO’s and governmental institutions in health care and infrastructure. but he also initiated a project called Nomadslife, in which he documents the life of nomadic peoples on the Northern Hemisphere.

His website features a number of galleries of nomads in Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Finland, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and Greenland. These small nomadic cultures have unfamiliar names such as the Dukha,  Khalkh, Yoruk, Altai and Nenets while others such as the Inuits, Berbers, Kazakh and Sami are better known.

I liked the photographs of the Dukha, a small culture of reindeer herders living in northern Mongolia. Only 44 Dukha families remain, totaling somewhere between 200 and 400 people. They ride, breed, milk, and live off reindeer. Their way of life is endangered and they survive largely by selling their crafts to tourists and riding their domesticated reindeer.

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Samih Güven: India & More

Photo © Samih Güven-All Rights Reserved

Samih Güven is a Turkish photographer currently residing in Paris. Despite degrees in political sciences and Turkish language/Oriental civilizations, he practiced photography for over 20 years. His recent voyage to Asia is encouraging him to become a professional photographer, and to take up formal training in photojournalism.

He is also a founder member of a French collective called Phrawup.

Take a look at his India color portfolio from which the above photograph is taken, as well as those of Burma, China and Nepal to name but a few. His galleries are both in color, and black & white.

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Travel Photographer Of The Year 2010

Photo © Larry Louie/Courtesy TPoTY

 The Travel Photographer Of The Year Competition has named its winner for 2010, and it's Larry Louie with his wonderful black & white photographs of Djenne in Mali.

Larry Louie is a Canadian optometrist and a photographer, who is using his photography as a platform to highlight the work of an eye care charity, as well as other issues and challenges in a world facing rapid urbanization and globalization.

I'm glad that black & white photographs have won this contest...as I think color imagery is seen as a "sexier" form for travel photography contests. Readers of this blog will know that I'm going through my own black & white phase, so I'm indeed glad.

Having also seen the remaining entrants, I have to say another photographer considerably impressed me (and certainly the competition's judges) with his lovely work...and that is Richard Murai of the United States who won the World In Motion category.

Photo © Richard Murai-Courtesy TPOTY

Richard Murai teaches creative photography in Northern California, and is interested in documenting sacred sites of the world. He traveled to locations within India, Peru, Turkey, Egypt, Russia and across Asia and Western Europe. His sepia-like images of Bhuddist tsechu dancers are just ethereal.

I suggest you drop by the TPOTY website...there's quite a number of excellent work by travel photographers.

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Vincent Prévost: West Papua

Photo © Vincent Prévost-All Rights Reserved

 I occasionally receive emails from photographers such as the one from Vincent Prévost that make the work of maintaining The Travel Photographer blog feel really worthwhile.

Vincent tells me he's been a regular reader of The Travel Photographer blog for about 2 years, and that it has been a source of inspiration to him. He cites my two posts on Grenville Charles and Diego Verges, who documented tribes of West Papua,  as triggering his own photo expedition "Highlands Encounters" to this remote part of the world.

That's what this blog is all about...to inspire photographers to explore other unfamiliar areas, to try new techniques and to document endangered cultures.

He has been teaching French in South Korea since 2002 and is also a freelance editorial photographer who fuses fine art and journalism. While most of his work is in color, he also enjoys black & white photography, and travels with compact audio equipment to add a further dimension to his visual work.

West Papua is an Indonesian province that borders the independent nation of Papua New Guinea and forms the western half of the world's second largest island. The indigenous people of West Papua are of the same ethnic origin as those in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Ethnically and culturally, they are also related to other Melanesian peoples of the Pacific.

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Next Week on The Travel Photographer

What's on tap for the week starting Monday, December 13? Well, let's see....

1. The work of a Spanish photographer/photojournalist with an affinity for the Silk Road.
2. The diverse portfolio of a travel photographer...large images! I planned that one for last week.
4. The documentary work of a Dutch photographer featuring nomads to include those of  Mongolia.
5. The travel portfolios of a Turkish photographer of East Asia et al.

I'm working on a face-lift to my website (but not the blog)...it's being botoxed, liposucked, pulled, implants done, plucked and waxed...and may be announced at the end of the week....in time for the Xmas parties.

Details of my forthcoming photo~expedition may also be ready at some point this week...we'll see but what I can say is that it'll be in October 2011.

Plus the usual "shooting from the hip" posts and maybe, if the mood strikes, a timely rant.

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Female Imams In China

Here's a multimedia feature on Female Imams in China by Sharron Lovell, a freelance photographer currently based between Tel Aviv and Shanghai, and represented by Polaris. She prefers storytelling over single images, and has covered a number of issues in China from HIV/Aids, Islam and internal migration.

Sharron also completed assignments on Afghanistan’s first elections and the commercial sex caste in Pakistan. Her work was featured in National Geographic, The Guardian, Le Monde, Newsweek, Global Post, Politiken and various UNICEF campaigns.

NPR informs us that China has an estimated 21 million Muslims, who have developed their own set of Islamic practices with Chinese characteristics. The biggest difference is the development of independent women's mosques with female imams, something scholars who have researched the issue say is unique to China. In most of the Muslim world, women pray behind a partition or in a separate room, but in the same mosque as men.

It seems the Qur'an does not address this issue, and it's debatable whether the practice in the Arab world is reflective of true Islam, and not the result of patriarchal (misogynist) interpretations of religious texts.

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ROFL: So You Don't Look Like A Bozo?

Photo Courtesy PDN

Photo District News magazine has a section called Objects of Desire, which features photo related gear that photographers ought to drool over....at least, that's what they're supposed to do.

It's not a feature to really take seriously, but I sometimes drop by to marvel at what is being pushed...and occasionally what I see gives me a good laugh. 

But never as much as at the latest product featured which is the Lino Pro Field Jacket (as seen in the above photo)...a gawd-awful concoction of a jacket that's described by the PDN writer as one of the "snazzier" products seen at the Photokina show a few months ago.  Not only that, but he goes on to write that "this jacket is trim and form fitting so you don’t look like a bozo."

Er...no. Wearing this jacket would make me (and anyone else) look like a bozo, and deservedly so.  Not a single self-respecting photographer, photojournalist, serious hobbyist who would be seen dead in a jacket like that.  Whoever dreamed this jacket up hasn't a clue as to what photographers like and need to wear...or doesn't care...whatever they do/will is certainly not a $480 stylish padded shoulders jacket with a "full Italian" design . Moreover, the majority of photographers would spend $480 much more intelligently. So an object of desire? Um...not in the least. Imagine this Italian styled jacket in Helmand Province or in the favelas of Rio or even in the placid Thar Desert of Rajasthan !!!

I found the simplest and least flashy to always be the best option. A $45 safari jacket (with no logos) from a well-known sport outfitter is one of my favorites, as well as a durable black canvas jacket (unfortunately now no longer sold by GAP).  I've seen similar simple jackets worn by photographers in the field, and they certainly don't look like bozos....and they're happy they weren't fleeced out of $480.

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LATimes' Framework: Chhath Festival

Photo © Narendra Shrestha/EPA

 The Los Angeles ' Times large image photoblog Framework has featured a number of lovely photographs from around the world this past week. I liked this one by EPA photographer Narendra Shrestha of a Nepali woman staring while offering fruits and coconuts to the setting sun during the Chhath festival in Kathmandu.

The Chhath festival is observed by Hindus in India and Nepal, and it's performed in order to thank the Sun god Surya for sustaining life on earth, and to ask for the granting of wishes. The rituals include bathing, fasting and abstaining from drinking water, standing in water for long periods of time, and making offerings to the setting and rising sun.

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Next Week on The Travel Photographer

For the week starting Monday November 14,  apart from off-the-cuff posts, the following is in the pipeline:

1. A photographer's multimedia photo essay on the Sami people of the Scandinavian Arctic.
2. A photographer's gallery of his freshly-minted photographs of East Africa.
3. The work of a Vietnamese photographer of his homeland.
4. Another interesting edgy documentary on illegal emigrants from Central America.
5. Hard-hitting images from a photojournalist out of Haiti.

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Prantik Mazumder: Mexico

Photo © Prantik Mazumder-All Rights Reserved

 Prantik Mazumder is a self-taught photographer, originally from Calcutta, India, and moved to North America for his graduate studies. Currently settled in Ithaca, New York, he's pursuing a career in scientific research.

He traveled to Mexico in 2006 with his first digital SLR, and has images from New Orleans, Ithaca, Peru and Mexico. I particulalry liked the above picture made in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, because of its colors and composition...and for the graffiti.

The Revolucion signage with the graffiti asking the local police not be brutal while the woman is covering her eyes is a message in itself.

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WSJ Photo Journal: The Haj

Photo © Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

The Wall Street Photo Journal is one of the first of the large picture blogs to publish a photograph to commemorate the Haj (or Hajj, as it spells it). The caption reads "Tens of thousands of Muslim pilgrims prayed inside the Grand Mosque, during the annual Hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The Islamic pilgrimage draws three million visitors each year, making it the largest yearly gathering of people in the world."


I think the qualifier that it's the largest yearly gathering of people is appropriate since the religious gatherings of the Kumbh in India surpass it....however the Kumbhs are not yearly pilgrimages.

The Guardian newspaper's website has also featured a fresh slideshow of the Haj rituals. Some lovely images there.

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My Book: Bali Island of Gods Update 2

I've received the full version of my book Bali: Island of Gods from Blurb, and I'm happy with it. The variations in tone have been evened out, and the photographs are much better looking than in the sample I got last week. Phew!

I will have two versions of the book (82 pages of black & white photographs) on Blurb's bookstore. A large (13x11 inches) landscape hardcover version that'll be more expensive aimed at those who like me a lot, and a standard (10x8 inches) landscape hardcover version aimed at those who like me a little less. Those who are indifferent don't have to buy either...but wishing me luck with it would be nice.

Both versions will be available in a few days....and will be announced here.

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