Martin Parr
Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
The above image was taken at the Parthenon in Greece in 1991 and was part of my project about global tourism.
Up until last week I had always thought that the tour group was Japanese. However, when I was recently in Seoul and this image was used as a poster, one reason cited was the fact that the party of tourists was Korean.
So I feel it only correct that I apologise for this misrepresentation. All those times I have given talks and mentioned how the Japanese travel the world in groups… Canadian readers will understand the gravity of this, when you are accused of being American.
I spent a good few days in Korea shooting tourist activities. These days, people photograph one another so prolifically and with such enthusiasm that I often wonder whether they actually look at any of the things they are visiting.
Continue reading 'Korea, An Apology'
John Vink
John Vink/Magnum Photos
Nearly 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, evidence of their brutal rule is still being discovered. On May 5, villagers of Koh Sla, while digging the soil, stumbled upon a burial site dating from the regime. Some people started exploring the site, looking for jewelry which would have been left in the graves. About 120 corpses were unearthed.
On a small hilltop nearby, the remains of a separate body were found, wrapped in olive coloured plastic sheeting, which indicates this was not a civilian victim but more probably a Vietnamese soldier who died during the 1979 campaign by the Vietnamese army to push back the Khmer Rouge to the strongholds from where they would remain active until 1998. The bones were recovered by the Vietnamese on May 10th and repatriated.
Continue reading 'Secrets of the Soil'
Jessica Dimmock 2006 Recipient of the Inge Morath Award
Image from Jessica Dimmock's The Ninth Floor.
Last year, Jessica Dimmock received the Inge Morath Award which was established to encourage young female photojournalists. She shares with us how she found and completed her award-winning photo documentary 'The Ninth Floor' about several people in a New York apartment living with drug addiction, and why it's important to have an award only for women.
How did you find the subject of your photodocumentary?
I was studying at the International Center of Photography at the time. I was on the street fiddling with a digital camera because as of then I had not used one before. I was approached by a cocaine dealer who made it clear that he was a dealer. Over the course of the conversation he made it clear that if I wanted to follow him and photograph him I could. He took me to a variety of places - parties, people's apartments, the owner of an escort service. The last place he ever took me was the apartment where the project starts. He was arrested shortly thereafter, and I have never seen him since, despite trying to find him. But because he brought me to this apartment and made the initial introduction I went back with prints from my first visit. After that, and some slow starts, I was allowed to return at any time.
Learn more about the Inge Morath Award
Continue reading 'Inge Morath Award'
Frank Smyth for the Committee to Protect Journalists
Although war reporting demands physical proximity to a story, the risks that photographers and journalists face worldwide don't always involve bombs and grenades. Uncovering certain stories may be more dangerous, as illustrated by the many local journalists who are killed in direct retaliation for their work.
Cape Town, South Africa. Feb. 11, 1990. Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann was wounded by a rubber bullet when taking this picture during a police altercation with a crowd awaiting the liberation of Nelson Mandela. Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos
It's an unconventional memorial. A heavy slab of gray rock sits outside the elevators in the foyer of Reuters' Washington bureau. Propped up against a polished wooden stand, the face of the granite is hand etched with white letters to read:
In memory of Roberto Navas Alvarez
Reuter [sic] Photographer
Born 12 December 1960
Died March 18 1989
Shot while covering Presidential elections in El Salvador.
The small Central American nation was packed with foreign journalists. At least a dozen of them lived in San Salvador at the time, while a few dozen more had just parachuted in to cover national elections to be held the following day. Many foreign news organizations, especially the wires, hired locals to help report and take pictures.
Navas was a newly hired photo-stringer for Reuters, and he was giving his more established Reuters colleague, Luis Galdámez, a ride home on his motorcycle after a long day’s work. Things were tense, as leftist guerrillas were boycotting the elections being organized by the Salvadoran government and backed by the United States. Many Salvadoran Army officers complained that the foreign press in particular gave the Marxist rebels too much ink.
Continue reading 'Shooters at risk'
Chris Steele-Perkins
Jang Jum Dol was 14 and on the way to do laundry when she was taken by a Japanese man and told she was going to a factory to make money, but she was tied up in a house with an 11-year-old girl and then taken with some other girls to Manchuria. She tried to escape and was captured and beaten and kept at a sex station for the Japanese military which was surrounded by a wire fence. She had three children there and two of them died, the surviving girl had a weak heart. When she came back to Korea with her daughter after the war she was so poor they had to sleep in the streets. Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos
2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery within the British Empire. However, two hundred years later, it is estimated that 27 million people across the globe are still enslaved. To help raise awareness of this ongoing human rights crisis, Autograph ABP has commissioned nine Magnum photographers to document slavery as it exists around the world in the anniversary year of its abolition. A major exhibition of the work will open at the Royal Festival Hall in London in February 2008, and will include work on bonded labourers, child labourers, trade slavery, people trafficking, and domestic and sex slavery. Chris Steele-Perkins shares his experience of photographing "Comfort Women" in Korea for the project.
I am sitting in a fire station in South Korea waiting for an incident on the quietest day of the year - so it seems an appropriate moment to write something briefly as it was in South Korea at the end of last year that I did my work for the Slavery project photographing Comfort Women.
Continue reading 'Contemporary Global Slavery'
