The NY Times: Sebastião Salgado

© Sebastião Salgado -All Rights Reserved
The New York Times seems to have caught a photojournalism bug these days. Its photographic offerings are getting better by the day. The recent launching of its LENS blog as well as the ever improving One in a Million multimedia series, have made it a must-go-to destination for photo journalistic fix.

It just published an interesting article entitled Back to Nature, in Pictures and Action on the famed photographer Sebastião Salgado written by Jori Finkel, as well as a gallery Nature, Nurtured of his photographs.

Mr Salgado is working on his epic environmental 8-year project named Genesis, and for which he travels to remote jungle and desert locations. He's photographing the most unspoiled parts of the planet, and visited the semi nomadic Zo’e tribe in the heart of the Brazilian rain forest, trekked desolate stretches of the Sahara, and spent two months in Ethiopia, hiking from Lalibela into Simien National Park to shoot the mountains, indigenous tribes and rare species of animals.

His goal for “Genesis” is to produce a total of 32 visual essays, which he hopes to display in major public parks as well as at various museums starting in 2012.

In my view, one of the best photographers of his generation, if not more. Quite a number of posts on this blog were on Mr Salgado and his photographs, such as Ethiopia's Nomad Warriors, and Amazon Tribes.

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The Guardian: Yemen

Here's a Soundslides presentation titled The Secret Life of Yemen, as featured by The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and narrated by Kevin Rushby. It doesn't credit the photographs, but they could be by Bruno Morandi, whose photograph appears on the accompanying article by Rushby.

The producer of the slideshow attempted to use the "flip-book" technique for a sequence of stills to convey dynamic movement, and the sound editing includes both Rushby's narration and a catchy Yemeni folk song...but no ambient sound.

I've always wanted to travel to Yemen, however its bad publicity is a deterrent. Will this slideshow change my mind and others?

Incha'Allah.

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VJ Multimedia Workshop

I'm not in the habit of advertising workshops that I'm not directly involved in, or knowledgeable about, but the VJ Workshop announces that it will provide a tuition-free multimedia shooting and production workshop for visual storytellers based in the traditions of journalism.

Their goal is to give back to the visual journalism community by educating a new generation of visual journalists in current practices and strategies. This year, university students and Visual Journalists who were laid off in the past two years will receive a tuition-free workshop.

The workshop is July 30- August 2, 2009 in Ventura, CA. The work will be displayed on www.vjworkshops.org and launched on August 2, 2009.

The individuals involved are Tom Kennedy (ex WaPo and NGS), Dave Labelle and others.

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Two External Backup Hard Drives

Having had the misfortune of frying two of my external hard drives a few weeks ago, I decided to take the example of TheLightroomLab, and get two OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 'Quad Interface' FireWire 800/400 + USB2 2.0 + eSATA of 1TB each, and restructure my backup storage system.

Yes, I'm eschewing all advice for a RAID system, DOBRO, and Time Capsule by buying these two behemoths, and doing my backups manually, and mirroring one with the other giving me two identical RAW vaults. The hard drives come with software called Data Backup 3 which is a utility to backup, restore and synchronize data with minimal effort. We'll see how it performs. These two OWC drives will be used for RAW only. The TIFFS, multimedia and all the rest of the stuff will remain spread between 3 Lacie drives.

Call me a dinosaur if you like, but that's my favored system. Copying almost 25% of my library of RAW images from DVDs onto a OWC hard drive is enough to drive one crazy, but I'm lucky that I religiously archived my images on DVDs.

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Jodi Hilton: Pakistan's Kalash People

With all the news of Pakistan these days, I thought I'd feature the work of a talented freelance photographer which documents the life of the Kalash people.

Jodi Hilton is a freelance photojournalist based in Cambridge, MA. She works for newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, People, TIME, The Guardian and others. In 2002, her Master's project Return To Eboli was published in the National Geographic Italy.

Jodi has a number of galleries on her website, but the one that attracted my attention is the one of the Kalash culture. The Kalash are an ethnic group of the Hindu Kush mountain range, residing in the Chitral district of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. They speak the Kalash language, a member of the Dardic family of Indo-Aryan. Non-Muslims, the Kalash adhere to their own religion, whose mythology and ritual strongly resemble those of the Vedic (Hindu) Indo-Aryans and the pre-Zoroastrian Iranians.

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Shiho Fukada: The End of Kashgar?

© Shiho Fukada/NYTimes-All Rights Reserved
One of my favorite photographers/photojournalists is Shiho Fukada, and she returns to the pages of The New York Times with photographs of Kashgar made into an audio slideshow titled A City and People At a Crossroads with the narration of Michael Wines (also author of the accompanying article To Protect an Ancient City).

Kashgar is a important hub on the Old Silk Road, a vibrant Islamic centre within Chinese territory, where over a thousand years ago, traders from all over Asia, sold and bought their goods on its streets. It is the largest oasis city in Chinese Central Asia and 90% of its population of over 3,000,,000 are Uygur. Kashgar’s Old City, is “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as wrote the architect and historian George Michell.

The article questions whether the Chinese government's policy to demolish the Old City and replace it with modern buildings is really because of its fear of earthquakes, or motivated by the desire to dilute the Uygur's identity by moving them elsewhere.

Some lovely photographs by Fukada of the Old City, especially the first one in the slideshow.

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Zekr or Soccer?

© Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Over at Photocrati.com , I wrote of my experiences in covering one of the Sufi ceremonies in a neighborhood of Old Cairo that is, shall we say...dodgy.

A few moments spent with its quirky denizens however, and I quickly realized that Cairenes never lost their warmth, humor and kindness.

I also concluded that soccer trumps religion, even among Sufis.

Read Part 1 of the Cairo Report here.

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Bhanuwat Jittivuthikarn: Tibetan Smiles

Photo © Bhanuwat Jittivuthikarn-All Rights Reserved
Bhanuwat Jittivuthikarn is an emerging visual artist who works in all cross-disciplines, including photography. He graduated from the School of Creative Art (University of Melbourne) with a combined degree in International Politics. Returning to Thailand in 2006, he joined SNF Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa Foundation, a grassroots empowerment organization in Asia. He worked on community development projects such as the Post-Tsunami Art Project in Thailand, a visual art training in Sri Lanka, documenting life of Tibetan refugee in India, and fund raising for an art project for young novices in Burma.

Between 5-18 January 2009, Bhanuwat traveled to Saranarth in India, to photograph 45 elderly Tibetan refugees, who were meeting the Dalai Lama for the first time in their life. His photographs of smiling and laughing Tibetans are a tribute to the fortitude of the Tibetan people; many of whom have lived in exile for so long.

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Canon 5D Mark II's Movie Exposure

I haven't posted much on what I call Soft Gear, so Eric Beecroft's heads-up this morning was a welcome one.

According to DPReview, Canon just announced it will release a firmware update for the EOS 5D Mark II allowing users to manually control exposure when shooting video. The new firmware will be available for download from 2 June 2009 on Canon Europe’s support web site.

(via Planet 5D Blog)

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Alia Refaat: Theyyam & Kathakali Exhibit

As I hinted earlier, another participant in my Theyyam of Malabar photo~expedition is about to step into the limelight. Alia "Coucla" Refaat is putting the final touches to an exhibit of her photographs of Theyyam ceremonies and Kathakali performances, and has issued the following press release:

“The Art of Kathakali & The Rituals of Theyyam,” an exhibition by Alia (Coucla) Refaat, an award winning and internationally recognized and exhibited commercial and travel/documentary photographer will be open to the public Thursday 18th June 2009 through Sunday 28th June 2009 at The Cairo Opera House, Music Library. The exhibition along with a reception will be held Thursday 18th June 2009 at 7:00pm inaugurated by his Excellency the Indian Ambassador Mr. R. Swaminathan, along with Indian Embassy staff.

The exhibit highlights two religious rituals and performances from the Kerala area of South India: Kathakali and Theyyam.

An extremely talented photographer from Egypt, Alia studied commercial, studio and portrait photography at the Speos photographic institute in Paris.

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