Amira Al-Sharif: Call For Photo Backers

Amira Al-Sharif was born in Saudi Arabia and currently lives in Yemen. Both of these are extremely conservative societies, and being a female photojournalist is practically unheard of. Amira has had to struggle for an education, and is the first person in her family to graduate from university.

She attended The Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul last June, and was the only representative of her native Yemen to be there. She not only loves photography and photojournalism, but is a talented photographer. She attended Stephanie Sinclair's class...possibly one the toughest of the workshop, and did well.

She has just been accepted at the International Center of Photography in New York City, and will soon begin a photography project there documenting lives of young American women seen from her perspective.

Through Kickstarter, she needs backers to fund her project...will you please be one of them?

It doesn't have to be much...and you'll feel really good when you back her up.

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Reem Al-Faisal: The Holy Cities

Photo © Reem Al-Faisal-All Rights Reserved

An email newsletter from The Empty Quarter Gallery introduced me to Reem Al-Faisal who's a Saudi photographer. She started her career in 1994, and has exhibited her work in various galleries in Saudi Arabia, showcased at the Opera House in Cairo and at the University of Art and Design in Beijing. She also showed her works in various galleries in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands, and in exhibitions at the Arab World Institute and the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris.

Her photographs are in various public and corporate collections such as The National Museum of Seoul, Korea, and Sakakin Center in Ram Allah, Palestine.

Interestingly, Al-Faisal is also one of the first women to be granted permission to photograph in the holy cities of Makkah and Al-Medinah. This is certainly an unusual privilege.

Many of us involved in the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop lament the dearth of Arab female photographers, and being introduced to the work of Reem Al-Faisal is very welcome.

Luminous Lint also has many of Al-Faisal's photographs.

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Western Digital iPad App

Hmmmm.....that's interesting.

Western Digital announced a free photo viewing application called WD Photos for the iPad that works with its line of external storage products like the My Book World Edition, My Book Live, and WD ShareSpace.  The app is said to allow the user to access up to 285,000 images placed in a shared folder.

The advantage in this is that saved images can be accessed using the app from anywhere through a web connection. The benefits to photographers are obvious...for instance, while traveling I could show my portfolio to anyone in the world on my iPad using this app. The app has pinch and zoom functionality,  and the images can be viewed in 1024 x 768 resolution on the iPad.

However,  wouldn't it be phenomenal if the iPad could connect to a portable external drive, on which I could download my travel photographs as I made them in the field? Once the photographs were saved on the portable drive, I could then use this app to access them (at least the jpegs) through a web connection.

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NPR: Tibet 100 Years Ago

Photo Courtesy Bonhams

NPR's The Picture Show recently reported that a part of Tibet's history recorded through old photographs was auctioned in London. The photographs (consisting of 70 platinum prints and 2 folding panoramas) were taken by British political officer John Claude White during a 1903 British mission to Tibet, and were sold for £38,400 (or about $60,000).

I love news like that because it fuses history (military), Asia, adventurism and photography. John Claude White was part of the British expedition led by Francis Younghusband who, under orders from George Curzon, was to settle disputes over the Sikkim-Tibet border. In reality, the expedition was to establish British hegemony in Tibet, and morphed into an invasion and occupation of Tibet. This was one of the many chess pieces in The Great Game between Great Britain and Russia to control Central Asia.

Younghusband is subject of a well-documented biography by Patrick French, titled The Last Imperial Adventurer. A fascinating man (comparable in my view to Sir Richard Francis Burton...another incredible adventurer), Younghusband is said to have experienced revelatory visions in the mountains of Tibet, toyed with telepathy in Kashmir, and eventually espoused a sort of atheism, even though he was brought up as an Evangelical Christian.

I always think photojournalists (especially those who work in Iraq and Afghanistan) to read up on history instead of believing the crap we see on television...they'll have a better grasp of what's still going on. The Last Imperial Adventurer is one of those books.

I know...I may be wasting my breath.

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Jean-Marc Giboux: Holy Men

Photo © Jean-Marc Giboux -All Rights Reserved

Jean-Marc Giboux started his photographic career in 1988 in Los Angeles where he was a correspondent for the Gamma-Liaison photo agency covering news, social issues and cultural trends for European publications.

In 1997, Giboux was awarded a grant from Rotary International to cover the progress of the worldwide polio eradication programs, traveling in India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ethiopia, Yemen, Mali, Niger, to name but a few. He also covered the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan for Doctors without Borders, and this was featured in an exhibition touring the USA and Europe from 2004 to 2006.

Currently residing in Chicago, Jean-Marc continues to collaborate with Doctors Without Borders, CARE, WHO, UNDP and the Rotary Foundation.

In an interview with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jean-Marc told the interviewer that funding was the most difficult part of his photography career. Outside of a major grant he got from Rotary to shoot the polio project and a couple of excursions with Doctors Without Borders, his projects are mostly self-funded.

Among his many humanitarian photo galleries, Jean-Marc has a gallery of portraits devoted to Hindu holy men...or sadhus. I assume that these were made while covering the Aardh Kumbh Mela in Hardiwar earlier this year. Have a look...they're made in sepia and in a square format.

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How Many Arms Do I Need? And WTF?

I just read in WIRED's Gadget Lab that Zoom will launch a new Flip-like recorder that records beautiful audio for about $300. Stores expect it soon.

Zoom is the Japanese company that manufactures the various audio recorders that are popular with many multimedia producers, and which recently announced the affordable H1 Handy Recorder that I posted about here.

The plethora of useful (and others not so useful) products and gear aimed at multimedia producers, photographers, and videographers is incredible...but how do we carry and operate all this stuff?

And in the WTF? Department, here comes the Leica M9 Neiman Marcus Edition limited to a only 50 units. Engadget reports that it's "wrapped in a brown ostrich leather trim this time around, and it comes paired with a chrome-finished Summicron-M 35mm f2.0 ASPH lens", and costs $17,500.

A bargain. A trifle. A bagatelle.

I used to say (tongue-in-cheek like) that only orthodontists could afford the high end Leicas...but for this one, only hedge funds honchos need apply.

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My Work: The Bali Trilogy

I'm glad to present Bali: The Trilogy; a three-part audio-slideshow (based on a chaptered SoundSlides platform), which consists of black & white documentaries of Balinese ceremonies.

The Melasti ceremony is an all important Balinese tradition of purifying temple deities in the waters of the ocean, the Ngaben is the Balinese tradition of cremating the dead, while the third is Tajen, the ancient tradition of cockfighting, technically illegal but still practiced on the island (and elsewhere in Indonesia).

This above link will not work on iPads (by the way, about 6-7% of my daily readers view this blog on their iPads, and I think this percentage is growing every day), however the following links will allow iPad owners to watch the individual audio-slideshows on their devices:

Bali: Melasti Purification Ceremony
Bali: Ngaben Cremation Ceremony
Bali: Tajen Cockfighting Event

A word about the choice of black & white;  I'm not sure if I'm entering a sort of black & white phase in my photography work, and this is its manifestation...or whether I've been influenced by the likes of John Stanmeyer and others...or whether it's a contrarian reaction to the surfeit of color I've witnessed when attending these ceremonies last month...or whether it's because the Balinese believe these ceremonies inherently involve spirits and dark forces...I don't know. It just felt better.

Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy these audio-slideshows.

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