Umbra SumusAmateur Photographer Magazine recently asked me what image that I’ve made, had had a profound effect on me. I told them about photographing a deeply disturbed boy forced to commit atrocities by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Here’s the full piece …
There was some inevitability about it of course but after thirty years, The Independent Newspaper has decided to close the print edition(s) and move online. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked on quite a few stories for the excellent Sunday Magazine picture desk that was Victoria Lukens and Susan Glen.
Susan, now a respected photography consultant is featuring some of the Independent’s work on her site and has just published my story about the mental landscape of war amongst child soldiers in Africa, The Lord of the Flies
You can see the full set here
My agency, Panos Pictures just sent through a recent tearsheet from the magazine of Le Monde – M that featured five stock images of mine on a piece about the Cafe Riche in Cairo. Sadly however, I just learned that the café is currently closed – perhaps permanently – because the manager and co-owner Magdy Abdel-Malak passed away on 2 May.
I made my original story – about the Cairo Ahwas a couple of years ago (the original tearsheet from the German Effilee Magazine is here) writing about the changing political significance of these cafés during the recent uprisings.
Always nice to have something like this re-used, especially in the context of somewhere as historically significant as the Riche – but that is tempered by the uncertainty of its future.
Today is the International Day against the use of Child Soldiers, a United Nations sponsored campaign which aims at the universal ratification of the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict.
I spent a couple of years in the late 1990’s looking at the mental landscape of war amongst former child fighters in Africa in a series called The Lord of the Flies
Here are some images.
Yesterday was Martyr’s Day in São Tomé and Príncipe, the island nation that I visited last year on assignment for Conde Nast Traveller Magazine. I’ve posted quite a few favourite images from that assignment before (here, here, here and here) but I thought I’d show a little set of images that didn’t make the magazine cut – but that I liked …
There’s a bigger selection on my website here
This year is the 25th anniversary of the photojournalism festival held every year in Perpignan: Visa pour l’Image. In 1998 I had a show there with a two-year body of work from Africa called The Lord of the Flies. Since then, some of my work has also been projections but that first show was a really special moment and meant a great deal to me. I remember that I arrived in Paris to see the enigmatic founder of Visa, Jean Francois Leroy clutching a box of fibre prints under my arm. After he saw the first three images he stopped and said, “OK, you have the exhibition…” I was so shocked that I thought he was joking and I told him so. He assured me that he wasn’t and we signed a contract there and then. I walked around Paris that day at least a foot taller. It marked a turning point in my career and the first real recognition that I was on the right path professionally.
Subsequently, I’ve had an uneven relationship with Visa. I think it’s true to say that I find the whole networking aspect pretty uncomfortable and certainly it seems to bring out the worst in terms of ego in some people in the industry. Because of that, I haven’t been since the demise of Network. It might well be said that the exhibition selections also conform to a very rigid view of the world and of photojournalism. As I am writing this however, it occurs to me that although that certainly is problematic, I’m probably more on the side of Visa than I am of the narcissistic trend in what I’d call personal reportage about/within the world. I mean by that a self conscious style – a bleed from the art world that I see a good deal now. This is generally medium format, generally about close focus on objects and a melancholy that seems to me like a teenage angst. “Oh the world is so terrible/Oh, but it’s so beautiful/I’m so original and important” In a funny way, despite the protestations of ‘artists’ who photograph like this, stylistically it has more to do with them than what they purport to be photographing. I wouldn’t shoot The Lord of the Flies in the same way now (I probably wouldn’t shoot it in black and white for a start because of the connotations I think that has in terms of the West reporting Africa now) but serious stories that never get anywhere near a magazine do have a home at Visa and I hope that that continues. If nothing else and despite all its faults, Visa does stand for an engagement even if that is a little blunt and simplistic. The selection is purely down to Leroy and good luck to him. As he says in a very interesting interview with Time here, “You can like my taste or not, but at least you can see that there is a strong line”. He is also – absolutely correctly – critical of young photographers who have no idea of the heritage within the industry in which they are working. As Leroy points out “It’s very difficult to do a reportage about prostitutes in India, if you’re not familiar with the work of Mary Ellen Mark”. The internet generation may have more cameras and more opportunity to take pictures but they seem to have, according to Leroy, very little ability to tell stories. I agree. A random set of images are not a photo essay. This is worth quoting in full:
“It’s not because I have a pencil that I’m Victor Hugo or Shakespeare. It’s not because you have a camera, that you are a photographer. There is currently a trend in photography to cover specific communities, like poor people in Ohio, or very poor people in Connecticut, or really, really poor people in Arkansas etc. Where is the story? The other favorites are: my mother has breast cancer, my father has Alzheimer’s, my brother is a schizophrenic. I know these kind of stories. It’s personal, yes, but I’m not sure it makes good work”
Crucially for me, when Leroy is asked about advice for young photographers, he says “Work, work, work. Read everything done before you”. I couldn’t agree more. One’s work, although unique, is in a continuity; a flow of humanity and journalism gone before that is bigger than each of us but one that by adherence to an ethical framework, should be there to bear witness not simply to suffering but a better world. That multi-faceted, outward-looking storytelling is what is sorely lacking in much of visual journalism today and what Visa – with all it’s problems, it’s cliches and idiosyncrasies – is still largely about. Personally, I can’t stand the ‘Scarf and Leica brigade’ with their egos and delusions about being heroes but at least that tradition (although I’m the first to admit it needs a re-invigoration) is about reporting and not about photographing dying flowers as metaphor. In a world where print media and funding have almost disappeared, at least Visa is still there.
Here are a couple of images from my show at the Couvert des Minimes, Visa Pour L’Image all those years ago.
Here is a recent tearsheet from the wonderful Effilee Magazine for whom I wrote and photographed a really unusual piece about the Ahwas (coffeehouses) of Cairo. I wanted to write about the situation in Egypt without watching people fighting and using the prism of the Ahwas allowed me to examine protest and the way that the Revolution has evolved through them. The piece is an historical look at the heritage of the coffee houses and their resurgence after years of political repression. Under Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, dissent and free thought were controlled. Networks of informers and secret policemen used cafes as an access point to the Arab Street. Novelists and poets like Naguib Mafouz still patronised them but had to write and speak in metaphor. Despite this coffeehouses had and continue to hold a significant rôle in Arab (and specifically) Egyptian literature and culture.
The Revolution of 2011 was sparked at least in part by the killing of a young man by the security forces outside an Ahwa that was used as an internet cafe. The cafes have become political again and, in this work, I’ve tried to explore the downtown splendour of the Art Nouveau, Cafe Riche that is home to a new generation of political activists, the street cafes of the Bourse (Cairo’s Left Bank during the Revolution) as well as a survey of Ahwas less well known – simple backstreet cafes and those of the Zaballeen (the Christian minority). Interviews include (amongst others) political commentator and Booker Prize nominated novelist Ahdaf Soueif, Arab Booker nominee (also head of Al-Dar publishing house) and flâneur Makkawi Said and Max Rodenbeck, the Economist’s correspondent and author of the encyclopaedic, ‘Cairo, the City Victorious’. Currently, a new Egyptian soap opera called Coffee Shop is attracting very negative attention from Egypt’s secularists about the way women are (or actually not) portrayed within the programme. The debate goes to the heart of what society was being created under the Morsi government.
Here’s the tearsheet:
