In The Shadow of Everest At RMA

Photo © Tom Wool-All Rights Reserved
The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City is showing the photographs of Tom Wool in an exhibition In The Shadow of Everest, which runs until July 26, 2010.

Coming from a fashion photography background, Tom Wool has devoted himself to work for humanitarian organizations. Using a medium format Hasselblad, he photographed Tibet's Rongbuk Valley and its inhabitants in May 2001.

The valley stretches about 30 miles from the base of Mount Everest on the north side, and is home to some 3,000 Tibetans. It's considered sacred, with deep religious connotations to the Tibetans. The valley is home to the Rongbuk Monastery, the highest of any in the world at 17,000 feet above sea level.

MSF's Starved For Attention

"this year 195,000,000 children will suffer from malnutrition"

and so starts “Starved for Attention” the extremely well produced multimedia campaign by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and VII Photo which exposes the neglected and largely invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition.

The campaign aims to present a series of multimedia documentaries of still photography and video from the well-known photojournalists at the VII Agency, such as Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer.

The first multimedia reportage is titled Frustration and is by Marcus Bleasdale, who narrates it out of Djibouti.

Bookmark this website, since the remaining reportages will be featured over the course of the coming months.

For more background on the project, JournalismNow features an interview with Ron Haviv, which touches on his work in Bangladesh for Starved For Attention.

One Million Visitors!

I'm immensely gratified that since inception in mid-January 2007, The Travel Photographer blog has now received a total of 1,000,000 visitors!

What originally started as a lark has taken a life of its own, and The Travel Photographer blog seems to have its comfy little place place amongst other photography blogs. A million visitors is a drop in the ocean for blog behemoths, but for this one-man blog, it's enormous.

I sometimes hesitate in calling it a blog, because in reality it's more of a compilation of photo-essays, galleries (my own but mainly by others), multimedia, occasional geo-political rants and diatribes (some serious others downright silly), opinions (some ridiculous and others touching a nerve or two) and whatever else took my fancy.

However, nothing is more gratifying that getting emails from photographers expressing appreciation for being featured on The Travel Photographer....and responding as best I can to requests for advice and guidance virtually every day.

I hope the best is yet to come as Sinatra and Bennett told us....but in the meantime, I've got to run...I can hear my blog yelling "Feed Me!".

Talking With Our Hands?

All Photos © Neal Jackson-All Rights Reserved
I just stumbled on this collage of photographs made by Neal Jackson during the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop (FPW) in Manali last June.

It appears that some the FPW instructors are fond of using their hands whilst conducting their classes....virtually the same gestures and mannerisms!

From the top left is Michael Robinson Chavez, top right is Ron Haviv, bottom right (in red) is Ami Vitale, and bottom left is Tewfic El-Sawy (The Travel Photographer). Click on it for a larger version.

The 2010 Foundry Photojournalism Workshop is scheduled for 20 – 26 June in Istanbul.

The Travel Photographer's Statistics

For some reason, my earlier post on this got deleted...

So here it is again:

I thought a little trumpet blowing would be appropriate this Sunday morning...so here goes.

The Travel Photographer blog is ranked 1st when searching using Google for "The Travel Photographer" (it's sort of obvious, but it's still cool)...

Using Google, it ranks 2nd when searching for "Travel Photographer" which is really phenomenal.

And it ranks 4th when searching for "Travel Photography" which is really really phenomenal.

I also found out that the blog has over 1300 feed subscribers!

The 602nd Google Follower

I noticed that my list of Google Followers have now grown to over 600 people! This list is distinct from my Twitter and Facebook followers and/or friends, Feed subscribers* or from my subscribers to my newsletters.

To commemorate this milestone, I've chosen to feature the 602nd Google Follower whose name is Christina Saull, a photographer from Washington, DC based photographer who works on media relations for a health non-profit organization. She also authors another blog Life Through The Lens.

I'll be featuring the 700th (or so) Google Follower as well...so keep following The Travel Photographer!

*I've checked...I've got twice the number of feed subscribers of PDN...go figure!

Jehad Nga's Turkana in NYC

Photo © Jehad Nga -All Rights Reserved
The beautiful work of Jehad Nga, one of my favorite photographers, is on show at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery on the Upper East Side in New York. The exhibition runs from May 13 to June 16, 2010, and is timed to coincide with the New York Photo Festival. Limited edition prints are priced from $2,800-$10,000.

The UK's Daily Telegraph also featured Jehad's Turkana work. I scratch my head in puzzlement that a UK daily would feature news of a photographic event (and images), while our own newspapers have not. Perhaps I've missed it...?

For background on Jehad Nga and the Turkana images, check my earlier post here.

RESOLVE Blog: 3 FPW Instructors Talk

liveBooks recently got an update about the impressive lineup of instructors for this year’s Foundry Photojournalism Workshop happening from June 20-26 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Some of them spoke to Miki Johnson of livebooks' RESOLVE blog.

Ron Haviv's favorite aspect of the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop is "Watching the growth of the students in such a short period of time".

Ami Vitale's is "Watching students grow in the short span of the workshop is incredible".

And mine is "the mutual camaraderie and unfettered sharing of knowledge, information, and support between instructors and students/attendees".

Read the rest on RESOLVE.

Jonathan Maher: Venice

Photo © Jonathan Maher-All Rights Reserved
It's not often that I feature European travel photography, so I thought I'd break the mold today by featuring the work of Jonathan Maher on Venice and its Carnival.

I've not been to Venice during Carnival yet, but know a number of photographers who've been and returned with splendid work. I visited Venice a few years ago, ill prepared for its acqua alta season, and still recall walking in soggy shoes.

Jonathan Maher is an English travel photographer currently based in Italy. His work is principally based around travel and documentary projects and themes. His biography describes his style as being "reductive" or narrowing the frame down to the critical and essential components.

Aside his work in Venice, Jonathan has travel galleries of Namibia, India, France, Italy and Asia.

Foundry PJ Workshop: Instructors Line Up

What more is there to say?

Foundry Photo~Journalism Workshop: Istanbul

The Foundry Photo~Journalism Workshop 2010 is in Istanbul, and if your dream is to be coached by some of the best photographers and photojournalists available, do it now!

The roster of instructors reads like a Who's Who in the world of photojournalism: Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario, Jared Moosy, David Bathgate, Jon Vidar, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Rena Effendi, Ron Haviv, Andrea Bruce, Ami Vitale, Kael Alford, Adriana Zehbrauskas, Henrik Kastenskov, Stephanie Sinclair, Guy Calaf and Tewfic El-Sawy.

The courses currently offered are FROM VISION TO LIFE: Documenting social issues outside the mediaʼs agenda setting; Transitioning to the new world of Photojournalism; Formulating a Photo Essay; Photographing stories; Intimacy and Empathy in Storytelling; Capturing Cultures – Communicating Without Boundaries; The Essential Guide to Backpack Journalism; Introduction to Multimedia Storytelling, and many more.

Here's another thing...photographers like Dhiraj Singh who attended a class at the 2009 Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in India was awarded Honorable Mention (Feature Audio Slideshow) in the National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism 2010 for an audio slideshow made during that workshop.

Yes, dreams come true when you attend the Foundry...so get on it! There are still a handful of places available.

VII Magazine

Photo © Ashley Gilbertson-All Rights Reserved
The announcement that the VII Photo Agency launched VII The Magazine has already been reported and blogged about for a few days already. The magazine is a syndicated online publication with photo stories and interviews with VII photographers.

The beta version of VII The Magazine is presented in the Herald Scotland newspaper, and in Lens Culture.

The first issue of the magazine features multimedia slideshows of projects by several VII photographers, as well as interviews with Jessica Dimmock and Ashley Gilbertson about their projects featured on the site.

I was particularly interested in Ashley Gilbertson's interview, and struck by one of his statements:

"If you show me one more picture of a soldier kicking in a door, I'm going to blow my head off."

I sense Ashley speaks for, not only war photographers, but for many of the sentient public who's been subjected to repetitive and unimaginative visual (and intellectual) presentations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who's had (if they're anything like me) enough of the same stereotypical coverage which passes for cutting edge reporting in our media. I call it the stagnation of war photography...the same scenes over and over, perhaps from different angles...and with no back story. In fact, if I didn't read the captions beneath these images, I wouldn't be able to tell if it was in Iraq or in Afghanistan...or whether they'd been made yesterday or a year ago. Stagnation.

Ashley's powerful and poignant photo essay The Shrine Down The Hall, which shows some of the empty bedrooms of the over 5000 U.S. military personnel killed in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, rammed home the horrors of war much more effectively than seeing (and hearing) yet another photo essay by a gung-ho war photographer following US soldiers in an Afghani village, rounding up "Taliban" members (or whatever the caption writer decides they are), covering their heads with potato sacks while pointing guns at terrified women.

We need to see more work like Ashley Gilbertson's and much less of the kicking of Afghan or Iraqi doors....please.

MoMA: Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photo © Henri Cartier-Bresson-All Rights Reserved
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is showing Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century" this coming Sunday April 11, 2010, and the exhibition's website is truly a delight.

Henri Cartier-Bresson began traveling in 1930, at the age of twenty-two. For nearly half a century he was on the road most of the time, and the geographical range of his work is notoriously wide. Photographs of Asia (many of which are of China), North America, Japan, Africa, Europe, USSR, Middle East are shown arranged in themes, or chronology.

The New York Times has a review of the exhibition by Holland Cotter who, in the article titled A Photographer Whose Beat Was the World, writes this rather flowery sentence:

"The third and crucial constant in his career was, of course, a camera: in Cartier-Bresson’s case, a hand-held Leica, as neat and sleek as a pistol. Whether he was traveling as a journalistic eye for hire or sauntering through Paris of an afternoon, the camera went too."

I find it impossible to decide which is my favorite Henri Cartier-Bresson's photograph, but the one above of these Indian women in Srinagar (Kashmir) photographed in 1948 has always impressed me. Is it because none of their faces are visible, or is it because one of them appears as if she's holding a couple of clouds in her outstretched hands? It's described as Muslim women on the slopes of Hari Parbat hill as they pray while the sun rises behind the Himalayas, and was taken during a period of terrible violence in Srinagar. Magnificent.

Update: The New Yorker Magazine has an article/review on the retrospective at the MoMA.

From the article/review, I learned that the French title of HCB's best-known book, “The Decisive Moment, was “Images à la Sauvette”, which means “images on the fly". The French title implies something done somewhat furtively, and has much less gravitas than the English title.

The Big Picture's Holy Week

Photo © REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi-All Rights Reserved
The Boston Globe's The Big Picture features photographs of the Holy Week, which starts on Good Friday, when Christians observe Jesus' crucifixion. Holy Week commemorates the last week of Jesus' life.

Many of the photographs show what Christian penitents do to commemorate the crucifixion, either by reenacting it or be causing bodily harm to themselves. It reminds me of the Muslim Shi'as self flagellation during the day of Ashura, in mourning of Hussein ibn Ali's death, which is equally gruesome.

In the above photograph, the caption reads:

"The blood-covered leg of a penitent, resting on a bloodied step during a procession through the streets in the town of Verbicaro, southern Italy on April 2, 2010. The penitents, called "battenti", or beaters, hit their legs with a "cardillo" (a cork with attached pieces of glass) and walk, bleeding, in groups of three through the streets, stopping in front of all the churches and chapels in the town. The tradition began in the thirteenth century and serves as penitence for Christ's death."

Penitence for Christ's death? The mind boggles.

The 500th Google Follower

I saw that my list of Google Followers have now grown to 500! This list is distinct from my Twitter and Facebook followers and friends, or from my subscribers to my newsletters.

To commemorate this milestone, here's an introduction to the work of Karina Joseph, who is my 500th Google Follower.

Karina Joseph is a freelance photographer working in Mumbai, and from what I've seen of her excellent photographs on Flickr, specializes in commercial photography. She also does street photography, as can be seen in this following photograph.

Photo © Karina Joseph-All Rights Reserved
I will keep an eye on my Google Followers, and whenever possible I will post the work of every 100th follower.

Dog Meets World: A Worthwhile Project

Giving a personal photograph to a stranger is one of the best, easiest and kindest things people can do for one another. It is an incredible vehicle for person-to-person diplomacy.

Dog Meets World Founder, Carolyn Lane

In late 2008, Dog Meets World was founded to fulfill a dream to photograph the children of the world. To seek children in their own settings, print their image to keep for a lifetime. The dream of Dog Meets World is to empower travelers to make real connections to people in other cultures, in essence to become photo-diplomats. A picture makes anybody a "somebody".

DMW is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. So get involved and join the movement!

Ramadan: The Month Of Fasting

Photo © Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images-All Rights Reserved
The Islamic month of Ramadan started while I was in Bali, and while the majority of the island's inhabitants follow Hindu traditions, there were indications that its Muslim communities were observing it, especially in areas such as Semarapura.

Many of the newspapers' photo-blogs such as the Boston Globe's The Big Picture, the WSJ Photo Journal and the like have featured images of Ramadan observances around the world, but the one I liked the most was from The Sacremento Bee's The Frame.

In the above photograph, Indonesian women pray during the first night of Ramadan in Jakarta on August 10, 2010. The fasting month of Ramadan, which started on August 11, is the ninth month of the Muslim Hijra calendar, during which the observant abstain from eating, drinking, and smoking during daylight and, in the evening, eat small meals and conduct evening prayers.

I also read that President Obama has recently positively weighed in on the issue of erecting an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan, but has then waffled on his stance following criticism from his detractors, from conservatives and from the illiterate xenophobes who, incidentally, do not live in Manhattan or even in New York.

Much as has been said and written about this issue, but two of the most repellent are these: the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” but which now blatantly discriminates against American Muslims, and Newt Gingrich who squawked that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington”, making the analogy between Nazism and Islam.

President Obama should be reminded that he said this on the inauguration of his presidency:

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth."

Peter Turnley: The Williams Club (NYC)

On March 11th at The Williams Club in New York City, Peter Turnley will step out from behind the camera for a "show and tell" on the images that have made him one of the preeminent photojournalists of our times.

The event titled Man With A Camera: An Illustrated Conversation With Peter Turnley is sponsored by the Williams Club and the Jeffrey O. Jones '66 Journalism Fellowship, which was established last year by a group of friends, classmates, and family of Jeff Jones, to honor his memory and celebrate the profession he practiced with distinction over the course of his lifetime.

Peter Turnley has photographed world conflicts in the Balkans (Bosnia), Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa, Chechnya, Haiti, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq (2003), the Gulf War (1991), and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Foundry Photojournalism Workshop's Stats

It's been almost a month since the wrap-up of the very successful Foundry Photojournalism Workshop (FPW) in Istanbul, which achieved an impressive degree of multi-ethnicity amongst its participants...a veritable United Nations of photojournalism.

According to Neal Jackson, FPW Istanbul was attended by about 130 photojournalists (excluding instructors) from 41 countries.

The largest contingents were from the United States (30), host country Turkey (15), India (8) and Romania (7). Notably, 8 Middle Eastern countries were represented, fielding 16 photojournalists including 1 from Palestine/Gaza.

A tremendous achievement by all concerned; its founders, its staff, its instructors and its participants....and Istanbul.

Mark Coughlan: Ardh Kumbh Mela

Photo © Mark Coughlan -All Rights Reserved
A number of photographers (and others are still on their way) have attended the Ardh Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, despite the restrictions on those who didn't have a Journalist visa and press credentials.

I am told that the restrictions were only applied on the main bathing ghat, and that there were ample opportunities to photograph the spectacular characters who attend such religious gatherings, and who I described (during the Maha Kumbh Mela in 2001) as "ascetics, mendicants, mystics, beggars and charlatans".

Mark Coughlan has just posted his work from the Haridwar Kumbh Mela on his website Image The Earth, which documents the fervor of the devout Hindus who traveled for miles and days to attend it, as well as the colorful characters that make the Kumbh Melas what they are.

Mark is a photographer, backpacker, and world traveler based in London. He has traveled to Myanmar, Mongolia, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Bolivia among others. He tells us that he likes his photographs to be of vivid colors...he succeeded with his perfect portrait of the sadhu.