Reem Al-Faisal: The Holy Cities

Photo © Reem Al-Faisal-All Rights Reserved

An email newsletter from The Empty Quarter Gallery introduced me to Reem Al-Faisal who's a Saudi photographer. She started her career in 1994, and has exhibited her work in various galleries in Saudi Arabia, showcased at the Opera House in Cairo and at the University of Art and Design in Beijing. She also showed her works in various galleries in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands, and in exhibitions at the Arab World Institute and the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris.

Her photographs are in various public and corporate collections such as The National Museum of Seoul, Korea, and Sakakin Center in Ram Allah, Palestine.

Interestingly, Al-Faisal is also one of the first women to be granted permission to photograph in the holy cities of Makkah and Al-Medinah. This is certainly an unusual privilege.

Many of us involved in the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop lament the dearth of Arab female photographers, and being introduced to the work of Reem Al-Faisal is very welcome.

Luminous Lint also has many of Al-Faisal's photographs.

Katharina Hesse: Human Negotiations (& Interview)

Katharina Hesse is a photographer who currently works in China and Asia, and has been based in Beijing for the past 17 years. She graduated in Chinese and Japanese studies from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris.

She has recently uploaded some of her gripping photographs of Bangkok's sex industry unto a 6 minutes-movie which she titled Human Negotiations (above), and during which she also talks about her project in a Skype-interview with Elisabetta Tripodi, and which appeared on the blog e-photoreview.

Human Negotiations is an experimental two-year collaboration between Katharina and writer Lara Day, using images and text to explore the lives of a community of Bangkok sex workers. I cannot begin to fathom how Katharina managed to gain the trust and confidence of her subjects to such a degree...and she says as such in her interview, and that the most important task in her project was to gain the trust of the sex workers and their clients. All serious photographers agree with her advice, since only full and complete mutual trust gained over months and months can make such intimate projects possible.

Katharina's has an impressive background. Not only is she a self-taught photographer (always a huge plus for me), but she initially worked as an assistant for German TV (ZDF) and then freelanced for Newsweek from 1996 to 2002. In 2003 and 2004 she covered China for Getty’s news service. Her images were featured in numerous publications such as Courrier International, Der Spiegel, D della Repubblica, EYEmazing, Zeit Magazin, Glamour (Germany), IO Donna, Die Zeit, Marie-Claire, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, Neon, Newsweek, 100Eyes.org , Reporters without borders(yearbook 2010, Germany), Stern, Time Asia, Vanity Fair (Italy/Germany), and Wired (Italy) among others.

Katharina's photographs of Xinjiang, Kashgar and Urumqi are probably the best I've seen of that region....so go to her website after you watch the above movie.

Cathy Scholl: Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat

Photo © Cathy Scholl-All Rights Reserved

Cathy Scholl is a photographer and a participant in my Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat Photo~Expedition, which took place earlier this year between January 23 and February 7, 2010. She has traveled to India no less than 13 times, as well as to Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma.

Her photographs were exhibited in galleries throughout Southern California. In addition to winning awards, her work was selected to hang in juried exhibitions curated by leading experts in the field of photography, such as Arthur Ollman, founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.Cathy is also an active member in the Burn magazine community, which is curated by David Alan Harvey

Photo © Cathy Scholl -All Rights Reserved

Following her participation in my photo~expedition, Cathy continued to Haridwar where she also photographed at the Kumbh Mela. I chose these photographs made during the photo~expedition from her blog More Than Just A Pretty Picture...an appropriate title as Cathy's style is more inclined towards documentary travel photography, and she eschews cookie-cutter travel photographs.

Photo © Cathy Scholl -All Rights Reserved

The top photograph is of a Gujarati villager and her child, made in one of the countless villages we visited during the photo~expedition. The middle photograph was made in Baneshwar, during a pind daan ceremony which extends for about a week, and during which the tribal people of Rajasthan and Gujarat come to remember their dead....notice how Cathy framed the characters in this photograph.

The third photograph was made in a grain distribution room in the village of Poshina, where tribals and villagers receive their subsidized rations.

Wink Willett: Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat

Photo © Wink Willett -All Rights Reserved

Wink Willett was on the participants in my Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat Photo~Expedition, which took place earlier this year between January 23 and February 7, 2010. Due to conflicting time demands, it took a while for him to upload his photographs of the trip, but he finally got them on his website. Here are those I chose to showcase:

To kick the post off, the above photograph is of an elderly Gujarati Rebari with his wife in the background. This is a spontaneous portrait, made whilst the man was greeting someone else.

Photo © Wink Willett -All Rights Reserved

The above environmental portrait is of two Wadha girls with their goats. The Wadha tribe near Bhuj are traditionally involved in the production of wood charcoal, and are extremely poor. Yet, they take enormous pride in their homes (mostly huts with thatched roofs), the cleanliness of their living quarters and use brilliant colors to spruce them up.

Photo © Wink Willett -All Rights Reserved

The photograph above is of two traditional Rabari shepherds which was made in the south of Rajasthan. The Rabaris are nomadic shepherds, cattle and camel herders, and the men commonly wear white, golden earrings, white or red turbans and carry a big stick in the hand. They wear dhoti and short double breasted waist coat.

Photo © Wink Willett -All Rights Reserved

During the photo~expedition, we spent a few days in South Rajasthan to photograph at the Baneshwar Mela; an annual religious gathering when event tribal people indigenous to the area converge to the confluence of two rivers. It is there that they remember their dead and cleanse their sins by bathing in the ice-cold water.

Wink Willett is an international banker, and brings to his photographic style the lessons he learned from his many overseas senior postings. Check his website for more of well composed travel photographs.

Justin Guariglia: A Leica Interview

Photo © Justin Guariglia-All Rights Reserved

Justin Guariglia has had a lifelong passion for documentary photography and Leica M cameras that eventually led to a distinguished career as a magazine and travel photographer.

He currently lives in Taipei, and was recently interviewed by the Leica Camera Blog, in which he says:

"Of course, one cannot travel without money, and that is how I discovered photojournalism. Even back in the late 1990s, unlike today, there was still a good amount of work available—a shoot here, a story there, a portrait needed…so magazine work became the way to pay my bills and to travel and see the world, but I always came back with lots of personal images that editors usually never saw. At that stage National Geographic Traveler and Smithsonian magazines ran short stories on distant countries, and that helped pay my way to see the world."

Naturally the interview lauds the qualities of Leica versus other brands of cameras, and highlights how unobtrusive it is in comparison to the large DSLRS currently used by many other photographers. Justin's lenses consist of a 24mm f/2.8, a 35mm f/2, and a 50mm f/2, although he tries to only carry the 35mm f/2 Summicron.

For Leica fans, there's also a Leica contest with the grandiose name of In The Footsteps of the Great Explorers, which calls for adventurers and travel blog writers to submit their entries, and travel with Leica from mid-January 2011. A very fancy website!!!

Justin Guariglia's interview via The Click

Roberto Boccaccino: The Flagellanti

Photo © Roberto Boccaccino-All Rights Reserved
Roberto Boccaccino's work on the "flagellanti" was featured in the New York Times' Lens blog, but there are more photographs on Boccaccino's website where he titles his photo-essay as Doomsdays.

Out of his many lovely photographs of this photo essay, I chose the one above as the one that I prefer because of Roberto's use of layers.

Roberto Boccaccino is a freelance photographer. Most of his work is focused on social and geographical storytelling, and he was published by Italian and International magazines such as Foto8, Private Magazine, IO Donna, Stiletto, Euroman, etc. He recently attended the Advanced Visual Storytelling course at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus.

The Doomsdays photo essay is about a traditional penitential rite in the southern Italian town of Guardia Sanframondi which is held every seven years. It is the largest self-punishment ritual in the Western world, and is locally known as the “Riti Settennali di Penitenza”.

The ritual starts in the week following the Assumption, when more than a thousand men (and some women), dressed in white and wearing hoods to hide their identities, beat their chests and flagellate their backs with sharp instruments, as a sort of mortification and an act of penance. The practice is also followed in Latin America and the Philippines.

In Islam, it's the Shi'as who have a similar rite which is practiced during Ashura, the 10th day of the month of Muharram in the Islamic calendar, when devout Shi'as commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad at the Battle of Karbala, by self-flagellating and beating their chests.

Thaipusam is a Hindu festival celebrated mostly by the Tamil community, when devotees may also practice mortification of the flesh by piercing their skin, tongue or cheeks with skewers.

Greg Vore: Rickshaw Wallah

Photo © Greg Vore -All Rights Reserved
Greg Vore is a New York City-based photographer, and attended three colleges: Duke, The New World School of The Arts in Miami and The North Carolina School of The Arts. He started his photography career assisting in New York City for 6 years, after which he opened a studio on the north side of Williamsburg where his commercial work has been on still life. He completed catalogs and packaging imagery for Kate Spade, Bumble and Bumble, Waterworks, Henri Bendel, Martha Stewart, Intel, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Creative Recreation and others. This work has appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, New York Times T, The New Yorker, Domino and Lucky magazines.

His travel work has been featured in the Communication Arts Photo Annual, PDN’s World In Focus issue in the extreme exploration category and by National Geographic and CITY magazines.

Here's Greg's Rickshaw Wallah gallery, which features a number of rickshaw pullers (or wallahs) which must have been photographed in Kolkata. Using a simple white backdrop for portraits of rickhsaw wallahs is incredibly effective, especially those that retain some of the natural background. Others are photographed in the "field" so to speak. To underscore how hard these wallahs work, a photograph of calloused hands is added to the gallery.

Also take a look at Greg's other galleries including his India and Africa photographs.

His rickshaw gallery brings memories of the excellent Dominique Lapierre's City of Joy (book and movie) in which Hazari and his family re-locate to Kolkata with hopes of starting life anew, but he ends up pulling a rickshaw. The fabulous Indian actor, Om Puri, delivered an unforgettable performance as Hazari.