FotoFreo 2010 Projections 2
This evening is dedicated to AK Kimoto.
A.K. Kimoto
Tariyak : The Dark Secret
Opium Addiction in Badakhshan, Afghanistan
In the remote North-Eastern province of Badakhshan in Afghanistan, opium and heroin addiction are ravaging isolated mountain communities, and the staggering numbers are only getting worse. In some places, it is said that 70% of the population use drugs in some form, from hashish, to raw opium and refined heroin powder. It is not uncommon to find three generations of a family smoking together behind closed doors.
Traditionally, Opium was used as a cure-all, the magic medicine that could work wonders on anything from back pains to headaches to the nagging cough that every one has during the brutally cold winter months. The residents of Ishkashem, on the Tajikistan border say that it was never a problem before. Now, the situation is changing. In Ishkashem, it is said that at least 50% of the population are addicted to opiates. Isolated villages at higher elevations are said to have an unbelievable 70-80% addiction rate. Children are born into addiction every day, and thus, the cycle is perpetuated.
Music: Peter Gabriel - Wall of Breath - Passion
Biography
After a successful career in the I.T. sector, A.K. decided to pursue his passion for travel and photography by moving to South-East Asia. Shortly after his arrival in Indonesia, a strong earthquake and tsunami devastated the Sumatran coastline around Aceh and a few days later he accepted his first assignment to cover this tragic story. Over the following years, A.K. worked with various international NGOs to document the recovery efforts in Aceh, and on many social issues in the region.
His most recent work focused on the lives of Afghans who try to lead a normal existence while conflict and violence threaten their survival.
Jens Olof Lasthein
White Sea Black Sea
A visual journey along the eastern border of the European Union
http://www.lasthein.se/
Curated by Françoise Callier Program Coordinator Angkor Photo Festival
Steven Siewert
Sydney’s Rockabillies
The 1950s was an exuberant decade that saw the birth of rock and roll, new fashions and social mores, and a breakaway generation who became known as teenagers.
At the turn of the 21st century there are some for whom the ‘50s never died.
Steven Siewert has spent five years documenting Sydney’s Rockabillies, a vibrant subculture who live and breathe an era that predates their earliest birthdays. The boys dress for cool with stovepipe jeans and slick quiffs, while the women wear dazzling cocktail frocks by night and colourful vintage dresses by day. From gigs to festivals around Australia to entering people’s lives and homes showing how this small community express themselves with such passion for the past in the modern world.
Music: Rockabilly Fever – Wanda Jackson
Denis Dailleux –/ Agence VU
King's sons – Egyptian Portraits
Music: Passion: Peter Gabriel: Passion
Biography:
Born in 1958 in Angers, France Denis Dailleux ives in Cairo. With the sensitivity he is noted for, Dailleux’s photography appears calm and incredibly demanding. It is lined with permanent doubt and coloured by the vital personal relationship he maintains with those he frames with his camera. His passion for people, for others, has led him to develop portraits as his favoured method of representing those he wishes to get close to. And this he did, with Catherine Deneuve as well as anonymous subjects from the slums of Cairo, with the same discretion he expects from others, without complaint, hoping things will come right. So, patiently, he constructed a unique portrait of the capital of this Egypt with which he has such a loving, passionate, relationship. A combined of black and white of exemplary classicism and colours of a rare subtlety, an absolute alternative to all the tourist cliches and cultural stereotypes which clutter our thoughts.
The pictures come from the new book of Denis Dailleux « King’s sons, Egyptian portraits », 80 pages, 25X25 cm, Editeur Gallimard, 2008.
Contact in Australia :Isabelle Rouvillois Australian agent, Sydney. Mob : 04 05 51 39 30 i.rouvillois@free.fr
Blair Barclay
“I ease my foot off the clutch and say good bye. Grandad gives me a smile and starts walking back to the house. I honk as I start down the driveway, I see him in the rear vision mirror, he doesn’t turn around, just raises his hand.”
With these photos I wanted to show the life of a man who is important to me. The moments I have captured may not be grand or spectacular, but they are I feel none the less important. I hope to of captured here quiet moments that easily slip away and disappear, as the road bends.
My Grandad, Clem Derrett was born in 1920, growing up in the depression and fighting in World War 2. He now lives alone on a small farm an hour outside Christchurch (NZ).
Music: Simon & Garfunkel - Old Friends (Bookends)
William Daniels
The Bad Air - the documentation of Malaria in Third World Countries
The French term Mauvais Air means bad air, and stems from the original meaning of the word Malaria, from the Italian "mal aria". This goes back to the Romans, who believed that bad air from the surrounding swaps caused the disease. The pictures were realized over two years spent in Calcutta, Uganda, and on the border between Thailand and Burma. Mauvais Air portrays people in their everyday struggle against the disease. It is usually the poor and weak that are ostracised in their fight against an atrocious fate. Their voices are hardly heard in our superficial times – their lonely and hopeless fight is often carried out in silence. And all this despite the fact that Malaria prevention and treatment could easily be provided. Political commitment and public interest is indispensable. William Daniels’ work is focused on social (for example street urchins in the Philippines) and humanitarian affairs (such as the Tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and Indonesia). The pictures presented here have received several awards, including the ‘Espoirs Francois Chalais’ for young reporters, the World Press Photo third prize, and an Honourable Mention as the UNICEF photo of the year. William is 32 years old and based in Paris.
Curated by Françoise Callier Program Coordinator Angkor Photo Festival
Vidura Jang Bahadur
The Chinese Community in India
I returned to India in December 2005 after spending over three years in China. My initial interest in the Chinese community here was a personal desire to interact with them, a way to bridge my years in China and subsequent return to India. Over time, I began to document their lives to better understand the community.
Even though they had a presence in India for over 200 years, they started settling permanently after the Communists came to power in China, in 1949. In 1962, during the Sino-Indian border conflict those suspected of having links with China, were interned in Deoli, Rajasthan. Scarred by the memories of this era and the subsequent struggle for survival, several chose to leave India.
Many who remained were forced to start life afresh. This period brought with it significant economic and social change within what was once a closed community. The results are more visible among the younger generation. Posters of Indian film stars share space with calendars and masks imported from Hong Kong, photographs of ancestors in every home to images of Jesus Christ, all reflect the transition within the community.
Even though they still share a bond with China, India is a part of their lives and identity. To many Chinese here, India is ‘home’.
Music: Chinese Canon - Bliss
Biography:
Born in Lusaka, Zambia, Vidura lives and works in New Delhi. A self-taught photographer, Vidura initially worked in cinema, making the shift to photography only after moving to China in 2001. His interests lie in exploring ideas, drawing from his own experiences and journeys, experimenting with storytelling, form and format.
His ongoing projects include, a series on the Chinese community in India and a project on his grandmother and her friends- all fiercely independent women in their 80’s.
Sumit Dayal
Demystifying Kashmir
In the tales of Ghosts who want to be set free, what holds them back is memory. There is a certain grip about my childhood memories from Kashmir and a past I must unfold to know who I am.
Every year in the summers, my parents, my brother and I would travel to Kashmir and spend time there with the rest of the family. My Parents moved to Kathmandu in the 70’s and continue to live there today.
Winding alleys with latticed houses, soothing green meadows with horses grazing, gondolas floating to the sound of Azans (call for prayer). It was the fairy tale childhood of the eighties that has drawn me back to Kashmir.
In January 2009, after seventeen years I returned home.
Here I search for the experience of being in a space as described in T.S Eliot’s famous lines:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Music: Mychael Danna - Good Indian Girls - Monsoon Wedding
Biography:
Born in 1981, Sumit grew up in a small traditional neighborhood of Katmandu where his family continues to reside. In 1992 he was sent to a boarding school in New Delhi, where Sumit spent the next twelve years completing his high school and college education. His exposure to a confluence of cultures from an early age gave him the ability to speak five different languages and provided Sumit with a unique perspective on the struggles and opportunities in South Asia.
In 2006 Sumit graduated from the Documentary & Photo Journalism program at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Sumit has been working as a freelance photographer since March 2007 and has traveled extensively in the past year covering stories in Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Bhutan. His work documents disappearing cultural traditions and the changing landscape in South Asia. In January 2009, after seventeen years Sumit returned to his motherland Kashmir. He is currently working on his first book there.
Sumit is represented by Prospekt agency in Milan and is based out of New Delhi.
Pawel Jaszczuk
Salaryman
If a coworker senior to you (sen pai) wants to go drinking after work, you go. Hang out with colleagues and clients at outdoor standing bars in Shimbashi. Karaoke in Shinjuku, cigarettes, sake or shochu everywhere. Its already midnight and the salaryman is not thinking of the last train. He collapses after a night of heavy drinking. Some manage to get to a capsule hotel, others make it to a taxi. The rest give up and make themselves as comfortable as they can, wherever they fall.
Music: Then the Substanceless Blue – Akira Rabelais
www.paweljaszczukgallery.com/
Anoek de Groot
The 'SEFTON DEVIATES CLUB'
The Deviates are a group of men who have organized strip shows since 1991 in houses and garages throughout western suburban Sydney. As George Kenny (one of the founders) said: "First of it, it doesn't matter, if you are rich or poor, clean toilets, or are the prime minister, all that is required to be a member is to like seeing strip-shows where beautiful girls get naked".
Music: Sexy: The Black Eyed Peas: Elephunk
www.anoekphotography.com/
Christian Poveda / Agence VU
La Vida Loca
The maras are groups of youths similar to the gangs of Los Angeles and have spread terror throughout Central America. Here we see life in suburban districts of San Salvador, the daily routine of members of an invisible army, a scourge that is blindly destructive, attacking the principles of democracy and spelling death for youths with no future. The maras could be compared to “marabundas”, Amazonian ants that devour everything in their path.
The Maras can be recognized by their tattoos – from head to foot. These gangs of youths are heavily involved in drugs and arms dealing and have gradually spread across Central America. According to an inquiry published by a local police force in 2003, there were some 70,000 maras, mostly in Honduras (36,000), Guatemala (14,000) and El Salvador (17,500), the three countries with the highest crime rates in Latin America, after Colombia.
Over a quarter of the population of El Salvador is now living in the United States, and young Latino immigrants in Los Angeles have now exported LA gang culture (globalization gone wrong?). They have set up the two main gangs which are now rivals in Central America: Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and Mara 18 (M18). Each gang has its own coded language, rituals, tattoos and hatred for the rival gang. There are no ideological or religious differences behind this “fight till the death” that started in the slums of Hispanic barrios in Los Angeles in a now forgotten past, but the battlefield is clearly moving south. Every week a federal plane leaves Texas or California, bound for San Salvador, deporting around one hundred detainees, chained to their seats. Though most are illegal immigrants, arrested after a routine road check, 2% to 5% are mareros (gang members) who have stood trial and served their sentences in the United States and are then deported. This may have contributed to the expansion of MS and M18 gangs in Central America, but it cannot explain the scale of the phenomenon.
In El Salvador and the general region, years of war have left deep scars, and violence is endemic. Some 400,000 firearms are still held in the country and are sold for next to nothing. Drugs and prostitution have spread along with the rapid liberalization of the economy, destroying the social fabric. In 2007 alone, 4000 homicides were reported in this country which has a population of only 5.8 million; an average of eleven deaths a day, and three-quarters of them are marero revenge killings.
The first crackdown on the maras was launched in the winter of 2003, in Honduras, by President Ricardo Maduro (whose son had been kidnapped and murdered by a gang of local thugs a few years earlier). Adopting the “zero tolerance” policy of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York, he passed legislation with provision for mara gang members to be given 9 to 12 year sentences simply for belonging to a gang. Thousands of youths were arrested because of their tattoos or for loitering on the streets. Months later, the President of El Salvador, Francisco Flores, passed similar legislation and launched Operation “Mano dura” authorizing armed forces to patrol the streets with local police.
This repressive operation has no doubt helped reassure the local population, but its effectiveness remains doubtful. In less than a year, 16,132 suspects were arrested, but fewer than 807 cases were investigated, because of lack of evidence. The “anti-mara legislation” was subsequently declared unconstitutional as it violated a number of international conventions. And it did nothing to help solve the ongoing problems of poverty and domestic violence; it only made the groups of youths even more isolated. Unlike the guerrilla generation of the 1970s and 1980s, the disillusioned youths of today have rejected any ideological stance; they simply express their rebellion through violence – extreme violence.
La Vida Loca shows life as it is: youths who suffer, defy us and look down on us; youths who resent and dislike us. Here is their experience of existence in a thankless world, yet it is a world where they simply want to find their place. So violence bursts forth, like a thunderbolt striking granite. To understand the hatred these youths feel for mainstream society, we need to see what is behind it. It is hatred felt by people who have never had anything; it is hatred born of exploitation, oppression and daily humiliation. This is not inter-generational conflict, but an anthropological confrontation.
For the governments, the worst offence is not being attacked, but being humiliated by the maras. Repression, in the form of “Mano dura” and “Super Mano dura”, is a response to the violence of the maras but provides no answer to their social and financial problems. Physical domination can offer nothing in return. So, like cornered animals, this lost generation responds with pessimism, revolt and death. Communication impossible!
Music: Killing in the Name Of: Rage Against The Machine
Biography:
Christian Poveda
was both a Photographer and filmmaker, with French and Spanish heritage, born January 12, 1955. His political involvement during the Vietnam war in the 1970’s allowed him to experience the power of images and the influence they can have over certain events. This is what inspired him to become a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. His entire work is dedicated to extraordinary political and social situations. Christian Poveda has made16 documentaries which have been presented at some of the most prestigious festivals and including "La Vida Loca" launched during The International Film Festival of San Sebastian 2008.
Christian Poveda died 3 September 2009, in Salvador. He was shot dead in his car.
Contact in Australia :Isabelle Rouvillois Australian agent, Sydney. Mob : 04 05 51 39 30 i.rouvillois@free.fr
Munem Wasif / Agence VU
‘Salty Tears’
In the Satkhira district of Southwest Bangladesh, the salt content in rising sea levels is laying waste to the land. Munem Wasif documents the desolation, offering testimony to the effects of global warming.
Music: Allah Hoo: Mychael Danna: Monsoon Wedding
Prix Pictet 2008
Work produced with the support of Water Aid
Bio: Munem Wasif was born in Bangladesh (1983), graduate of Pathshala. Wasif started his photographic career as a feature photographer for the Daily Star, a leading English daily of Bangladesh. His photographs have been published in numerous national and international publications including Le Monde, Himal Southasian, Asian Geographic, Photo District News, Zonezero, PDFX12 and Daily Star.
In 2007, he was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in the Netherlands. He won an "Honorable Mention" in the All Roads Photography Program by the National Geographic Society for his extensive work on Old Dhaka. His work is exhibited worldwide including the Anchor photo festival in Cambodia, the International Photography Biennial of the Islamic World in Iran, the Fotofreo festival of photography in Australia, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Japan and the Getty image gallery in England.
Recently he was selected as one of the 30 emerging photographers by Photo District News, USA. In 2008 he received the F25 Prize from La Fabrica and the City of Perpignan Young Reporter Award at the occasion of Visa pour l’Image festival. In 2008 he won the PrixPictet commission to document a water project in Bangladesh.
www.munemwasif.com/
Contact Agence VU in Australia :Isabelle Rouvillois Australian agent, Sydney. Mob : 04 05 51 39 30 i.rouvillois@free.fr
Paula Bronstein / Getty
A Fragile Peace – The Afghan Story
Biography:
Paula Bronstein attended the University of Colorado, where she Majored in Fine Arts / photography. Then Majored in photography at the Salzburg College in Austria before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts, major in photojournalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
Paula started her career as a photographer in 1992 with the New Haven Register and then the The Hartford Courant newspapers. Paula then went on to work for one year at The Chicago Tribune and in 1997 she worked for The Register Guard in Eugene, Oregon. During this time Paula was affiliated with several photo agencies such as BlackStar till 1994 and then Gamma Liaison and Tony Stone Images; which have both been absorbed by Getty Images.
In 1998 Paula choose to go freelance basing herself in Bangkok, covered news and feature stories throughout region. Paula has been a staff photographer for Getty Images since June 2002, and has been awarded numerous honors for her work, which appears daily throughout the world’s media.
Louie Palu
Alpha Company of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Battle Landing Team (BLT) 1/6
Music: Karandrou: Eternity and a Day: No.6 Borders
Special thanks to:
Isabelle Rouvillois Australian Agent, Agence VU, Sydney i.rouvillois@free.fr
Françoise Callier Program Coordinator Angkor Photo Festival
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