The Gift of Photography

By Joe McNally


Is one that is given, or accepted, freely. As a shooter, you can be the recipient of many gifts over the years: The grace of someone?s time, the whimsy of their expression, the fleeting emotion of their eyes the lens traps, forever.
Behind the lens, you are a gift giver as well. You honor someone?s humanity, beauty, or spirit. You wordlessly transact, and that transaction, fixed in pixels, becomes the stuff of memory. Nobility can be enhanced, or conferred, upon someone who has never been so recognized. If done properly, at least occasionally, what transpires within the mundane mechanics of a shutter clicking or a light flashing becomes a certain kind of poetry, the legend of both the subject and the shooter. When the house is burning down, and all the people and the pets are out safely, what does someone often save? The photo album. Continue reading “The Gift of Photography”

Return to Arles

by John G. Morris
August 2006

Arles is the mother of all photography festivals. It was founded 37 years ago by photographer Lucien Clergue and two other Arlesiens. Lucien was recently elected to the Academy of Fine Arts at the Institut de France, the first photographer to be so honored.
In 1980 I went to Arles to project the work and the words of W. Eugene Smith. You could have heard a pin drop in the great old Roman amphitheater. After we moved to Paris in 1983, my wife Tana and I went to Arles almost every year, the last time in 2002 when the great Czech photographer Josef Koudelka took over the town. Thereafter, it seemed, Arles to me was overshadowed by the photojournalism festival at Perpignan called Visa Pour l’Image.

ARLES, FRANCE: First-day audiences at the 2006 Recontres d’Arles festival of photography look at the exhibition of photographs taken in North Korea by Phillipe Chancel.

Dirck Halstead

Continue reading “Return to Arles”

Chobi Mela talks

Some of the highlights of Chobi Mela VII presentations


Pablo Bartholomew (India) in conversation with Munem Wasif and Shahidul Alam Continue reading “Chobi Mela talks”

Change the world, one photo at a time.

2013 PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards


A stone crasher worker. Jaflong, Sylhet, Bangladesh. January 18, 2008.?Photo: Khaled Hasan/Drik/Majority World?MWC000752

THE ACTIVIST AWARDS ? next submission period opens October 1, 2013

The PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards?identify outstanding work done by photographers in collaboration with nonprofit?organizations worldwide and awards prizes ranging from $2,000-$15,000. In previous years, work was submitted on behalf of 435 nonprofit organizations from 88 different countries. Continue reading “Change the world, one photo at a time.”

The Big Picture

Winners: National Geographic Traveler 2013 Photo Contest

On May 10, 2013?The Big Picture?featured some of the thousands of images that were entered in the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Magazine Photo Contest. The winners have been chosen. Their images follow. (The winners gallery is also available?here?as well as the complete contest and all its entrants?here. You can see the editor’s picks and can download wallpaper images for your desktop or your smartphone.) The winning images will appear in the Dec. 2013/Jan. 2014 issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine. (NOTE:?The captions are written by the photographer.)?–EDITOR’S NOTE: The Big Picture will post again on Wednesday, August 7.?(11 photos total)


First Place: Dig me river
I was in Manaus, Amazonas, during the Brazilian Aquathlon (swimming and running) championship. I photographed it from the water and my lens got completely wet, but there was so much energy in these boys that I just didn’t worry about that.(Photo and caption by Wagner Araujo/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest) Continue reading “The Big Picture”

Meta-narrative: Fred Ritchin on the future of photojournalism

By Fred Ritchin in British Journal of Photography

balazs-gardi-bending-the-frame
Photographer Balazs Gardi co-created the experimental media project Basetrack, which documents the deployment of the 1st Battalion, Eighth Marines, at Combat Outpost 7171 in Helmand, Afghanistan. Image ? Balazs Gardi / Basetrack.org
Ensuring the future of photojournalism rests in more complex narrative formats, believes Fred Ritchin, who spoke with Laurence Butet-Roch ahead of the release of his new essay, Bending the Frame Continue reading “Meta-narrative: Fred Ritchin on the future of photojournalism”

Establishment Earthquaker

?By Manik Katyal Emaho Magazine

Emaho got into a free-wheeling t?te-?-t?te with the legendary award-winning Bangladeshi photographer, Shahidul Alam to pry beyond his politics

Manik: In all your past interviews, you have mentioned how photography happened to you, so I will not ask that question, but what is photography for you? And your relationship with politics?
Shahidul: I am a very political animal and the reason I took up photography was because of my political position. Being concerned about the social situation in my country and globally, I happened to stumble into photography and discovered what a powerful tool it was; which happens to be the only reason why I practice it. I am fond of photography, I enjoyed images but at the end of the day that for me is not the point of the exercise. I continued to use photography in whatever way I can. Largely because, I see the strength of the medium and I recognise the potential. Having said that I think ? I have said this before ? that if tomorrow it ceases to effective, I?ll have no qualms about giving it up and taking something new.

My early experiments in figurative photography, the only available male nude, was me. Kingsbury. London. 1980. ? Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World
While my male friends were perfectly happy to photograph women in the nude, when I asked if I could photograph them, they became very coy. So it had to be self portraits! Kingsbury. London. 1980. ? Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

Continue reading “Establishment Earthquaker”

Wresting the Narrative From the West

By JAMES ESTRINNew York Times
As far as Shahidul Alam is concerned, he does not live in the third world or the developing world. While the photographer’s home is in Bangladesh, a decidedly poor country, he thinks of himself as residing in “the majority world.”

Boy playing with home made ball, in shelter built for earthquake victims in Pakistan. ? Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World
Boy playing with home made ball, in shelter built for earthquake victims in Pakistan. Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

Most people today do not live in Europe or North America, or have white skin. Yet the world’s economy and media are dominated by a handful of Western countries, and the reporting on developing nations is not always done by people who know their subjects well. Continue reading “Wresting the Narrative From the West”

Work in progress

a Delhi Photo Festival workshop with?Munem Wasif

In partnership with?Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Delhi Photo Festival invites photographers who are currently working on a long-term project, a work in progress, to apply for a workshop to be held in New Delhi from September 22 to 26, 2013.

Munem Wasif
Munem Wasif?? Sarker Protick

Participants will?not?shoot new work during the workshop. Instead participants will produce/continue a body of work before coming to the workshop as it is important for any photographer working on a long-term project to realize that beyond a certain point, his or her work can take many directions and forms.

The resulting work may be presented as a slideshow at the Delhi Photo Festival on Sept 30, 2013.

WHO SHOULD APPLY

The workshop is open to any photographer with an ongoing, long-term project or body of work, irrespective of age, gender or genre of photography. It is meant for someone who is interested in pushing their work beyond their comfort zone, in sharing ideas and working in a group.

HOW TO APPLY

Send an email to?delhiphotofestival@nazarfoundation.org?with ?WORKSHOP APPLICATION: Work in Progress? written in the subject line of the email and attach the following:

??20 to 40 low-resolution JPEG photos from a long-term project you are already working on and intend to continue working on in the workshop.?(Please note that each photo should be 800 pixels on the longer side saved in a zip folder. Maximum size of the zip folder should not be more than 5 MB).

??A Brief description of your project?(not more than 300 words)

??A Statement of Purpose explaining why you are interested in this workshop and what you hope to learn from it?(not more than 300 words)

??A CV or a short biography

??Proof that you need scholarship, if you are applying for the same.

COURSE STRUCTURE & WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

Online Interactions: 27 Aug to 21 Sept

Workshop in New Delhi: 22 to 26 Sept

After the students are chosen, in the days leading up to the workshop, Munem Wasif will begin working with each participant online – reviewing works and giving them feedback through platform such as Facebook. Students will follow the instruction and upload their work online.

During the final 5 days of the workshop, that will take place at Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi from September 22 to 26, 2013, Wasif will show his work and explain his working process. The next few days will be spent doing group reviews and editing where everybody will have to present their work and talk about their experience. Finally the participants will be given assignments to present their work and think about its final form. Though the workshop will encourage participants to focus more on the process of experimenting and pushing personal limits than on its final outcome, the resulting work promises to be exciting.

About Munem Wasif

Having grown up in a small town Comilla, Bangladesh, Munem Wasif?s dream kept changing from becoming a pilot to a cricket player and then a photographer. But none of these choices made his father happy. Later he shifted to comparably a big city Dhaka. He found his graduation in photography from Pathshala a life changing experience, which made him aware of his stories, gave him a photographic voice to photograph the dying industry and afflicted workers of jute and tea, excluded people and disrupt lands due to environmental change and salt water, a nostalgic city of love, Old Dhaka.

Wasif prefers to photograph his known people, therefore his country Bangladesh, just to start from the inside of a story. He never finds it a problem to be treated as a storyteller of humanistic tradition, classical in photographic approach, as long as it shows compassion and his emotional experience for the people he photographed. With an outlook of a traditional narrative style, he starts from the opposite of clich?s, when he looses his control from one direction of a story, and allows himself to grow in different directions, like branches on a tree, yet with the same root of humanistic approach.

Wasif won ?City of Perpignan Young Reporter’s Award? (2008) at Visa pour l?image. Prixpictet commission (2009), F25 award for concerned photography from Fabrica (2008), Joop Swart Masterclass (2007). His photographs have been published in Le Monde, Sunday Times Magazine, Geo, Guardian, Politiken, Mare, Du, Days Japan, L’espresso, Lib?ration, Wall Street Journal and many others. He had exhibitions worldwide including, Musee de elysee & Fotomuseam Winterthur in Switzerland, Kunsthal museum & Noordelicht festival in Netherlands, Angkor Photo festival & Photo Phonm Phen in Cambodia,?Whitechappel Gallery in England, Palais de Tokyo & Visa pour l?image in France and Chobimela in Bangladesh.

Since 2008, he is represented by Agence Vu in Paris. He was one of the curators of Chobimela VII, International Festival of Photography. Currently he is working on his upcoming book on Old Dhaka, which will be published from France in September 2013. Currently he is teaching documentary photography in Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka.

www.munemwasif.com