Angkor Photo Festival Program 2011

I take great pleasure in featuring the 7th Angkor Photo Festival Program Preview which is to take place in Siem Reap from November 19 to November 26, 2011. This well established event is the first photography festival held in Southeast Asia and for 2011, will exhibit the work of 110 photographers, out of whom 60 are from Asia.

The 2011 list of exhibiting photographers includes Andrew Biraj, Pep Bonet, Paula Bronstein, Marco Di Lauro, Tewfic El-Sawy, Siddharth Jain, Yuri Koryzev, Liz Loh-Taylor, Wendy Marijnissen, Erica McDonald, Palani Mohan, and many more.

My photographs from the photo essay The Possessed of Hazrat Mira Datar will be screened during the festival.

Angkor Photo Festival will hold 12 exhibitions, 7 evenings of slideshows, free workshops for 30 Asian photographers, and a lot more. It's curated by Francoise Callier in consultation with a 9-member international committee. The program is coordinated by Camille Plante and Jessica Lim.

For the PDF Press Release which also contains sample photographs of the exhibits and screenings, click here.

If you haven't considered attending the Angkor Photo Festival, I encourage you to do so. It's an unmissable photography event.

Andrés Lofiego: Con La Tierra

Andrés Lofiego attended Maggie Steber's class at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Buenos Aires, and chose me to view his portfolio of black & white stills. He also showed its multimedia version of these stark images, with a throbbing sound track. The multimedia is co-produced with Martin Cossarini.

Con La Tierra, Andrés' photo essay examines the injustice committed by various industries and corporations such as the oil & gas industry, the farming and mining industries against the natives peasants who, for generations, were born, lived and worked in, and died on their ancestral lands. The photographs are of the Mapuches who were evicted from their their lands in Neuquen (Southern province of Argentina), the farmers of Santiago del Estero (Northeastern province) and the people in Quebrada de Humahuaca.

"But these people, the men and women of the land, work to get informed, peacefully resist and build a world wide enough to embrace all cultures."

Photo © Andrés Lofiego-All Rights Reserved

Andrés Lofiego is a photographer/photojournalist who lives in Buenos Aires. He began studying  photography about a decade ago, focusing on reality and social issues. He worked of visual projects covering the recovery of factories in Argentina after the crisis of December 2001, and published a book titled "No Trespassing, A Look from the Self-Managed Work" in cooperation with the workers of the print shop "Chilavert". He is currently documenting land disputes between farmers and corporations in Argentina.

Maggie Steber: Photographer, Educator, Speaker...

Two of my favorite (and insightful) moments at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Buenos Aires were when I had the good fortune of having breakfast with Maggie Steber, and then walking with her to the Motivarte school, where we were meeting our respecting classes.

I thought I'd share with my readers what most have missed by not being at the Foundry this year. No, it's not Maggie speaking during that event (I believe this will be coming in the next few weeks), but of her addressing attendees during the 15th Joop Swart Masterclass in which she talks of her career, along with an overview of her work. This is not a talk that you will want to rush through...quite the opposite. Take your time, and absorb as much as possible from a renowned professional in all the senses of the word. Candid, articulate, funny, wise, interesting and perceptive...that's how I'd describe her. So bookmark or save it, because I know you'll enjoy it.

"How can nature or God or the fates or the universe do this to a country that has borne far too much sadness?" 

Maggie Steber worked as a documentary photographer in 60 countries. Her longtime work in Haiti received the prestigious Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant and the Ernst Haas Grant as well as a book publishing support grant from Kodak. A contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine for 4 years, she has worked through several press agencies as well the Associated Press in New York as a photo editor. She served as Assistant Managing Editor of Photography and Features at the Miami Herald from 1999-2003 and guided the photo projects to become Pulitzer Prize finalists twice and a third time as winner. Her work for National Geographic has included articles on Miami, the African slave trade, the Cherokee Nation, soldiers' letters, and Dubai.

In 2007, she received a grant from the Knight Foundation to design a new newspaper prototype through the new Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami. In 2010, for the 3rd time, she was invited as a Master Teacher at the World Press Photo Foundation’s Joop Swart classes.

Finally, you ought to view Maggie's photo essay on The New York Times' Lens blog entitled No End Of Trouble. Ever , which includes her reflection on Haiti's misery.

World Press Photo At The United Nations

For the 8th consecutive year the United Nations is hosting the World Press Photo Contest winners, the world’s largest contest for photojournalists. This year's exhibition contains 177 photographs related to 2010 news events from all over the world. This year, 5,691 photographers from 125 countries submitted a total of 108,059 images.

The international jury selected an image by South African photographer Jodi Bieber as World Press Photo of the Year 2010. The picture shows Bibi Aisha, 18, who was disfigured as retribution for fleeing her husband's house in Oruzgan province, in the center of Afghanistan.

Admission to the Exhibits is free and the galleries can be viewed daily between the 5 – 28 August, 2011 from 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Visitors’ entrance closes at 4:45 p.m.

PlanetPic Does Ramadan Images

Photo © Daniel Berehulak - AFP/Getty Images

PlanetPic is the new photo blog of GlobalPost, and has impressed me by its variety and the large size of its photographs.

It's one the first large photo blogs that featured images from around the Islamic world on the occasion of Ramadan. Sundown on July 31st marked the beginning of Ramadan, the month when Muslims all over the world are supposed to go without food, drink, smoking and abstain from sex from sunrise to sunset. It is intended for Muslims to purify themselves and concentrate their minds on Islamic teachings.

At sunset each day, Muslims break their fast with a meal known as Iftar, which many start by eating three dates. This holy month, sees a spike in charity, and it is not uncommon to see people marking Ramadan by giving food to the homeless.

As a footnote, I see that the Governor of Texas has backed a prayerapalooza in Houston today, and since he claims he will be fasting all day, I wonder whether he's considering joining the millions of Muslims in their fast. Just sayin'.

The Travel Photographer Is On PhotoVerse

I am pleased that Photoverse will be including The Travel Photographer blog on its application. Photoverse collects information from multiple news sources and blogs related to photography, pools them and presents them to you in an easy to read scrollable list. It enables you to  choose the view you want to see, be it from a single news source or blog or a time-sorted collection from multiple sources that you can select. All pages are rendered locally within a web view so that you never have to leave the application.

Photoverse also allows you to share any interesting article you read via Twitter, Facebook or email. It even allows you to bookmark articles for later perusal.

Photoverse is a utility application developed for the iPad, iPhone by photographers for photographers and is available from iTunes. All i need to do is to get an iPhone!

Omar Mullick: See No Evil

Photo © Omar Mullick-Courtesy Foreign Policy Magazine

Foreign Policy magazine has featured See No Evil,  the work of Omar Mullick in Afghanistan, which was largely made with iPhones and using the Hipstamatic app. When Mullick's embed with the US Army ended, he proceeded to make trips in and outside of Kabul, documenting the lives of ordinary Afghans affected by the grim toll of war. The images in this gallery are from his travels during six weeks from March and April 2011.

Omar Mullick was born and raised in London, and studied politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in New York. He spent six years in fashion photography and the film industry, shooting music videos and commercials before turning to documentary photography. He has received fellowships and awards from the M100 Foundation, the Western Knight Center for Journalism, and the Annenberg Foundation.

Perhaps I'm old hat, but I'm still ambivalent about the fad of using the iPhone by photojournalists to document conflicts. My ambivalence is for purely aesthetic reasons...I'm still of the view that documenting conflicts (especially) needs to be as "pure" as possible, without being tainted by manipulative processing. An iPhone with Hipstamatic and similar software certainly produce interesting images and that, I suppose, is what counts for many photographers.

PS: I've recently noted that even David Alan Harvey seems to have a lot of fun with Instagram photography...but so far these are personal snaps.