A Site That Honors, Displays And Discusses Documentary Photography
©Rena Effendi
GO TO: http://www.fiftycrows.org/index.php#s=0&p=0&a=2&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&at=1
Displacement. A world wide problem. When the Grid comes you got to move no matter that there is no good place to go to from the bad place you have become accustomed to. It looks the same in Azerbaijan, Mexico DF, Lomas del Poleo, Chicago…wherever.
Rena Effendi takes us into the rarely seen inner Azerbajian, to the mahalla neighborhood in the capitol city of Baku.
©Victor Sera
GO TO: http://www.fiftycrows.org/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=1&a=7&p=0&at=3
This is a photo essay on the lives of the undocumented as they navigate between their homes and their country chosen for work.
In some ways the “landscape,” of this document has changed since it was photographed in the 1990’s. The immigration interdiction efforts by the United States has reduced the number of migrants and, more recently, the lack of jobs in the U.S. due to the faltering economy has reduced it even further. The personal plight for migrants in the U.S. has changed for the worse, making any return to the mother country impossible due to the danger of the return journey.
This document, however, is still quite valid. The existential delemna of home and heart weighed against stomach and uprootedness is ongoing, worldwide and, as this work shows, problematic.
©Olivier Jobard
GO TO: http://mediastorm.org/0010.htm
This is an uplifting story of “one man’s willingness to abandon everything – his family, his country, and his friends – in the hopes of finding a better life abroad.”
This Mediastorm produced slide show of Olivier Jobard’s masterful photo essay, follows Kingsley from his home in Cameroon, through Africa and, eventually ending in the land of the “Holt Grail,” Europe.
The journey is not without its dangers and indignities for Kingsley, but another amamzing journey is Jobard’s herself.
East Side Stories/© Joseph Rodriquez
SEE: http://www.josephrodriguezphotography.com/index.php#a=0&at=0&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=5
Rodriquez goes where everyone else tries to stay away from: East LA.
This is a strong documentary of the gangs of East LA that goes beyond the dramatic into the intimacy of humans who live in a situation.
SEE: http://www.american-pictures.com/gallery/index.html
Note: Jacob Holdt’s photographs of hate and racism demonstrate the fact that the emphasis in documentary photography is on the word documentary. Sometimes Holdt’s images are a little soft focused or grainy or whatever else one considers technically “flawed(as were Hine’s, Riis’s and every other documentary photographer who was/is worth anything) ,” but, never does his work not deliver the goods: truth simply spoken.
Holdt used this camera
[ http://www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Canon_Dial_35 ]
to record over 20,000 images of “hate, racism and “white hate groups.”
He does not consider himself to be a “photographer,” but, rather, an observer, a participator, a witness. Check his site out. It is an incredibly disturbing -and eye opening- view of America. To my mind, Holdt presents a more thorough document than the two year event of Robert Frank and his Guggenheim sponsored “Americans.”
Here is presented Holdt’s Opus: a fairly unknown collection of his massive look at America’s underbelly.
Jacob Holdt’s Vagabond yearsArriving in America with only $40 for a short visit, a young Dane, Jacob Holdt ended up staying over five years, hitchhiking more than 100,000 miles throughout the USA.
SEE: http://www.nbpictures.com/site_home/movie.php
GO TO: Menu>Portfolio>Simon Norfolk>Portfolios
This is an arresting and strangely beautiful look at the eerie landscape left by war.
Norfolk, a trained photojournalist, turned away from the live action kind of document and approached the look of war by pointing himself at the aftermath of war as it manifests itself on the landscape. His work from Afghanistan and Iraq tells another story of war and, like all war photography is a combination of destruction, unbelievable moment and twisted beauty.
SEE: http://www.nbpictures.com/site_home/movie.php
GO TO: MENU>FEATURES>CURRENT AFFAIRS>IRAN’S YOUTH
This photo essay is of the youth of Iran. Kai Weidenhofer, who is a Middle East specialist gets to the truth of the matter: it’s a small planet, so what’s the big deal?
Jonathan Torgovnik
SEE: http://mediastorm.org/0024.htm
Here is a quintessential insight into the drive to do documentary photography, a chilling portrayal of the challenges of working within difficult environments and of turning horror into hope. Listen to Jonathan Torgovnik talk about rape, murder and redemption in Rawanda.
Moody, not edgy.
Sincere.
Image maker.
In his words, “It’s kind of hard to put into words what I do.”
SEE: http://mediastorm.org/0023.htm
A documentary project on Displacement…in the “Heartland!
This photographer shows how “progress,” comes to everywhere and the displacement is not limited to indigenous people either. In the end it is the interests of Capital weighed against the interests of Labor that is the issue of land appropriation and displacement.
Let this documentary speak for itself.
