
World Refugee Day
- Post author By Stuart Freedman
- Post date June 21, 2011
- Tags 5x4, black and white, London, photography, photojournalism, politics, portrait, RAP, Refugee, reportage
Here’s a recent tearsheet from the May/June 2011 edition of the rather lovely German Magazine, Effilee with my long term piece about the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi.
Effilee is a food and lifestyle magazine who commissioned the images and a 5000-word piece from me. The English translation can be found under the Writings section of my website here.
The piece is called The Palace of Monkeys and Memory
It’s with great sadness that I heard this morning that the rather wonderful Indian artist MF Husain passed away during the night. I wrote about him last year as he’d taken Qatari citizenship but continued to keep a house in London. Doubtless those shrill self-appointed, hateful voices from the Hindu religious right will be celebrating his demise – and how brave they were from keeping a old man from dying in his own country. I remember him as a courteous and thoughtful subject, delightfully playful during the evening I spent with him in apartment in Mumbai a decade ago. A charming man and an astonishing talent.

I was intrigued to find in a copy of today’s Tehelka magazine an article on Raghu Rai, the rather wonderful godfather of Indian photography, where he says that “Shooting a portrait is like making love by surprise”. Now, to be fair, the article is, as they say credited to ‘as told to Yamini Deenadayalan‘ but nevertheless it does strike me as profoundly daft.
Unless of course I’m doing it wrong. On both counts…
It reminds me of ‘Swiss Toni’ of the Fast Show fame – a comic character – a rather sad second-hand car salesman with a natty line in shiny suits whose metaphor for everything in life is that “It’s like making love to a beautiful woman…”. His take on making a cup of coffee is here.
Here’s a recent portrait. I did nothing more than press the shutter. Honest.

I am delighted to announce that I am now represented in Italy by Luz Photo. Founded by some of my former colleagues from the sadly missed Grazia Neri agency they look after some excellent photographers. I look forward very much to working with them.
You can see my folio page here or click on the image below.
Those nice people at Wonderful Machine in the ‘States have just written a very nice blog post about me and my upcoming assignment in Delhi. Read the full story here.

I’m very proud to announce that I am now represented commercially by Wonderful Machine in America.
I have a varied folio that includes work portraits, corporate, food/drink, travel and institutional.
I’m looking forward very much to working with them. Here’s some screen shots of my online folio for them.
It’s amazing what you find in the ‘papers these days. I opened the Grauniad this morning and found a cover feature on The Word.
The Word was a ground breaking (in terms of taste and errr… editorial judgement) British ‘yoof’ television show that showcased music and heralded the ‘reality’ concept that you find everywhere on television nowadays.
I was assigned by the Times Magazine to do a feature about the show in the mid-nineties. I stumbled upon the trannies (or most of them) a couple of years ago and managed to scan perhaps a dozen. I put them onto my archive. And them forgot about them. Until this morning. Now, I suppose the hard working busy picture desk on G2 could have searched for them but instead, they simply ran an entire feature with screengrabs…
Here’s a bit of a selection…





