Delphine Renou | Ethiopian Donga

Photo © Delphine Renou-All Rights Reserved

"After days of car travel, I enter the territory of the Surma tribe...the small village of Turgit in the south east of Ethiopia..."

This is how Delphine Renou, a French photographer and video editor for a number of  television channels (Canal Plus, Arte, etc) starts her photographic essay in southern Ethiopia where she met with members of the Surma tribe.

Her interest in photography was evidenced on her first trip in Africa as part of a humanitarian mission to Benin, after which she decides to get into photojournalism. She travels to southern Ethiopia to meet the people Surmas, to Mongolia, Vietnam, Norway and Afghanistan.

Her photographic essay with the Surma tribe focused on the donga;  the Surma's stick fighting. Generally, the dongas are held so young men can find wives. The fights are held between Surma villages, and the fights have 20-30 people on each side. Many of these fights end within the first couple of hits, but can be dangerous with people dying from being hit. 

Delphine wanted me to feature The Eyes of A People,. a short film of Afghanistan that she and Remy De Vlieger produced. Here it is:

The eyes of a People - AFGHANISTAN - clip from DIGITAL MILL on Vimeo.

Christophe Legris | Buzkachi

Photo © Christophe Legris-All Rights Reserved

The Taliban banned the popular Afghan sport of buzkashi but it has returned with a vengeance. It is also a popular sport (or game) amongst the south Central Asians such as the Uzbeks, Hazaras, Tajiks, Kyrgyz,Kazakhs, Turkmens and Pashtuns.

The rules are simple but brutal, and are not dissimilar to the game of polo. Two teams on horseback endeavor to carry a slaughtered goat around corner posts, then back into the center circle in which it was first placed, all the while steering their horses away from the whips of the opposing side.

Here's a photo gallery featuring buzkachi by the French photographer Christophe Legris. He's a French and Latin literature teacher, a writer, a media producer and a promoter, living in Kabul after spending 9 years in Istanbul, San Francisco and New York and currently in Thailand.

His website has numerous galleries including Thailand, Afghanistan, New York and India. I also liked his gallery of the Kuchis,  who are nomads and semi-nomads in Afghanistan, who mostly keep sheep and goats.

For further buzkashi coverage, the trailer of Buzkashi Boys makes for compelling viewing.

Elissa Bogos | The Last Jew In Afghanistan

Here's a short video documentary by Elissa Bogos on Zeblon Simontov, the last Jew in Afghanistan while he observes the fifth night of Hanukkah alone in his deserted and dilapidated synagogue.

Simontov was born in 1959 in Turkmenistan, and lives in Kabul working as a carpet dealer. He's believed to be the last Jew in Afghanistan...and consequently is the last caretaker of the only synagogue in Afghanistan.

His wife and daughters emigrated to Israel, and when asked why he didn't, he's said to have replied "Go to Israel? What business do I have there? Why should I leave?"

This reminds me that a few years ago, I thought of photographing the last remaining Jews in Egypt. Starting off by photographing one of the ancient (and now restored) synagogues in Old Cairo, I was faced with obstacles by the policemen guarding it, who were uneasy at my presence taking pictures there, I quickly gave up. The synagogue was open to tourists, but there were some restrictions in photographing...at least, that's what they told me.

For a relatively recent article dealing with the remnants of the Jewish community in Egypt that was once one of the vibrant in the world, take a read of Josh Weil's The Last Jews of Cairo.

Elissa Bogos is a freelance photojournalist and videojournalist currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan.  Her photographs and video have been published in The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, EurasiaNet, The Huffington Post, The Montreal Gazette, Reuters, New York Daily News and in other media. In Afghanistan, she freelances for a variety of NGOs and private companies and has worked with the Associated Press, Tolo TV and Channel One TV.

2012 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest Finalists

Photo © Cedric Houin-All Rights Reserved

In Focus, the superlative photo blog of The Atlantic, features the winners of the 2012 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest in a much more satisfying format than the National Geographic. The finalists' photographs are shown in a 1280 pixel size; a size that will fill the largest monitors.

The winners consist of a group of 10 photos plus one Viewer's Choice winner. These images were chosen from more than 12,000 entries submitted by 6,615 photographers from 152 countries. The winners are from four categories: Travel Portraits, Outdoor Scenes, Sense of Place, and Spontaneous Moments.

First place went to Cedric Houin with the above photograph of the inside of a family yurt in the Kyrgyz lands of the Wakhan Corridor. We are told by the photograph's caption that the tribes living in the area are weeks away from any village by foot, and although located at an altitude of 4,300 meters in one of the most remote areas of Afghanistan, solar panels, satellite dishes and cellphones are prevalent.

It's not often that I agree with results of photography contests, but the judges' choice in this one is spot on. The richness of the reds of the yurt's interior, and the facial expression of the main protagonist along with the smaller details make a story out of that photograph. 

Cedric Houin is a French & Canadian documentary photographer, and a visual storyteller.

As for the Wakhan Corridor, it's an area of far north-eastern Afghanistan which forms a land link between Afghanistan and China. It's a long and slender area, roughly 140 miles long and between 10 and 40 miles wide. It also separates Tajikistan in the north from Pakistan in the south.

Elissa Bogos: Afghan Tea House Poets

"Let all the infidels become Muslims"

Here's a wonderful short (too short!) video made by Elissa Bogos in a tea house in Afghanistan on 11.11.11 for One Day on Earth.

I describe it as wonderful, not because of the unfortunate intolerance expressed by the old man towards the end of the clip, but because it's beautifully filmed, because of its ambience and because of the music. I wished the clip had been much longer, and that it tarried longer with the "poets" who recited traditional verses (and expressed their gripes), and that it lingered around the corners of the tea house.

Elissa Bogos is a freelance photojournalist and videojournalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan. She was the editor-in-chief of The Sakhalin Times, an English language weekly in the Russian Far East.

Her photographs and videos were published in The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, EurasiaNet, The Huffington Post, The Montreal Gazette, Reuters, New York Daily News and in other media. In Afghanistan, she freelances for a variety of NGOs and private companies and has worked with the Associated Press, Tolo TV and Channel One TV.

The Wakhan Corridor

The Wakhan Corridor is a slender area in the far north-eastern Afghanistan which forms a land link between Afghanistan and China. The corridor was a political creation of the Great Game, and a result of agreements between Britain and Russia in 1873 and between Britain and Afghanistan in 1893. It currently has 12,000 inhabitants, who live very much the same as their ancestors did centuries ago.

In 2011, inspired by an article published by the New York Times, Fabrice Nadjari and Varial, two 33 year-old authors, photographers and childhood friends, decided to embark on a journey in the Wakhan region. It is here that they decided to take photographs of the inhabitants of the Wakhan villages. The portraits made with their Polaroid cameras developed odd hues, and their quality deteriorated quite rapidly due to the altitude.

The photographers also produced the Traces of Time book project (to be published in May 2012) which they claim "presents a vision between a current and tangible printed reality that already ceases to exist and an uncertain present resembling the past. This is the perspective of travellers who steal a snapshot of life and leave behind a trace that could change the lives of those they've passed."

As is seen in the trailer (listen to the haunting soundtrack!!) above, the photographers convinced Ismaili children, young women, and housewives, opium smokers, village chiefs and simple peasants to pose for their Polaroid cameras.

The show Wakhan, An Other Afghanistan will be featured at the MILK Gallery, 450 West 15th Street in New York (May 18-23, 2012).

The Afghan Box Camera Project

Photo Courtesy The Afghan Box Camera

I was very glad to have stumbled on The Afghan Camera Box Project website a few days ago. For quite a while I had given up on posting anything to do with Afghanistan, since the photographs published in various media were either repetitive, unimaginative, stereotypical or plain silly....but this website touches on culture and photography.

The purpose of the Afghan Box Camera Project is to provide a record of the kamra-e-faoree (which in Dari and also in Arabic means 'instant camera') which as a living form of photography is on the brink of disappearing in Afghanistan. It's one of the last places where photographers continue to use a simple type of "instant camera" to make a living. The hand-made wooden camera is both camera and darkroom, and generations of Afghans have had their portraits taken with it, usually for identity photographs.

The project is the work of Lukas Birk and Sean Foley.

The railway station of the Cairo suburb where I grew up had a wooden camera photographer, and I recall (dimly, I admit) had a brisk business. I also came across a wooden camera photographer in Havana, Cuba who showed me how he developed the photograph he made of me.

Two of my friends, Divya Dugar and Frances Schwabenland have produced work on wooden cameras being used in Jaipur in Rajasthan, while Rodrigo Abd has produced Mayan Queens with a 19th century wooden camera of the indigenous women competing to become the National Indigenous Queen of Guatemala.

Darkness Visible Afghanistan

I occasionally post on projects that I believe ought to be supported by the public at large, and one such project is Darkness Visible Afghanistan by photojournalist Seamus Murphy, whose aim is to raise $10,000 to create a documentary movie based on his many years traveling and photographing in Afghanistan.

"My mission is to promote an understanding of this mysterious, complex and fascinating culture."

Seamus Murphy has been photographing Afghanistan since 1994. He published a book, also titled A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, as a chronicle of the country and its people over those tumultuous years. For two decades, Seamus has also worked extensively in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and most recently, America. He has won 7 World Press Photo Awards and a World Understanding Award (POYi) for his work from Afghanistan.

Of the book Darkness Visible, Afghanistan, Philip Jones Griffiths wrote that "Seamus Murphy was a poet with a camera who captured the essence of life in one of the oldest countries in the world. It is a humanistic view of a misunderstood country and a rare glimpse into the nation's soul."

Many of the documentaries on Afghanistan that I've read about are focused on war, on the Taliban and its excesses...so I'm happy to dedicate a post to Mr Murphy's project...a documentary that hopes to promote its culture, its history and its people.

Omar Mullick: See No Evil

Photo © Omar Mullick-Courtesy Foreign Policy Magazine

Foreign Policy magazine has featured See No Evil,  the work of Omar Mullick in Afghanistan, which was largely made with iPhones and using the Hipstamatic app. When Mullick's embed with the US Army ended, he proceeded to make trips in and outside of Kabul, documenting the lives of ordinary Afghans affected by the grim toll of war. The images in this gallery are from his travels during six weeks from March and April 2011.

Omar Mullick was born and raised in London, and studied politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in New York. He spent six years in fashion photography and the film industry, shooting music videos and commercials before turning to documentary photography. He has received fellowships and awards from the M100 Foundation, the Western Knight Center for Journalism, and the Annenberg Foundation.

Perhaps I'm old hat, but I'm still ambivalent about the fad of using the iPhone by photojournalists to document conflicts. My ambivalence is for purely aesthetic reasons...I'm still of the view that documenting conflicts (especially) needs to be as "pure" as possible, without being tainted by manipulative processing. An iPhone with Hipstamatic and similar software certainly produce interesting images and that, I suppose, is what counts for many photographers.

PS: I've recently noted that even David Alan Harvey seems to have a lot of fun with Instagram photography...but so far these are personal snaps.

Simon Norfolk: Afghanistan

"This current war is tragedy, is an imperial game, is a folly...

Following the welcome demise of Bin Laden, I thought it timely to feature photographs or a multimedia essay on Afghanistan. I didn't want it to be of the conflict, or some other cliches, so this short movie on Simon Norfolk's Afghanistan project seemed much more appropriate.

In October 2010, Simon Norfolk began a photo series of Afghanistan, influenced by the work of 19th-century British photographer John Burke. Norfolk’s photographs of "modern" Kabul is presented along with Burke’s original portfolios.

Norfolk is critical of the Afghanistan war and of journalists who report from the safety of armored compounds, and especially of photographers who travel around Kabul with a security details. He was told on his arrival that he couldn't photograph freely in Kabul except with bodyguards, but he did.

The accompanying audio is really wonderful. The Afghan music and songs are hauntingly beautiful, and the call to prayer (towards the end of the piece) accompanied by pictures of Kabul at dawn may give you goosebumps.

A welcome change from the depressingly unimaginative photojournalism work we see out of Afghanistan.

Matthieu Paley: Prisoners of the Himalaya

I've featured the extraordinary work of Matthieu Paley a number of times on The Travel Photographer blog already, and while my favorite is still his work on a Sufi festival honoring Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Pakistan, it's also this recent ongoing film project "Prisoners of the Himalaya" that is equally remarkable. It's a documentary film aimed at capturing the life of the last Kyrgyz nomads of Afghanistan.

Matthieu returned to the Afghanistan's Pamir mountains to cooperate in the production of his first movie, along with Louis Meunier (as Director of the project) and others.

When you finish viewing the above trailer, drop by the movie's main website The Roof of the World which gives you more background to the project, and lists the team members that were involved in its making. Also spend time exploring Matthieu's website, and his unique galleries. You certainly will not regret it.

Currently based in Istanbul, Matthieu photographs explore themes of remoteness and isolation in geopolitically sensitive areas, and his work has appeared in Géo, National Geographic Adventure, Newsweek, Time, Outside, Discovery, Vanity Fair and Figaro among others. He has collaborated on numerous books. Since 1999, he travels extensively throughout the mountainous regions of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Northern India and Central Asia.

His photographs have been exhibited in galleries in New York, Hong Kong and Munich, and his multimedia presentations were projected at festival such as the Perpignan Photojournalism festival, the Banff Mountain Festival, and MountainFilm in Colorado. He has lectured at the Royal Geographical Society and the Asia Society in Hong Kong, at the Grand Bivouac Festival in France as well as at the Vancouver Mountain Festival.

POV: Omid And Why We Will Never Win

Photo © Michael Kamber- Courtesy The New York Times

Michael Kamber is a well known New York City-based freelance writer and photographer for The New York Times. He worked in West Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean, covering conflicts in the Ivory Coast, Congo, Liberia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Apart from frequently-published photo essays in The New York Times, he also authors a journal of his Afghanistan experiences. Its entries began in December 2010 and appear on the newspaper's LENS blog.

His latest entry -along with over a dozen of his excellent photographs- is on yesterday's LENS blog under the title of Deeper Into Fathomless Afghanistan, and reading Michael's journal entries, I was compelled to leave a comment on the blog.

Here's one of the entries in Michael's journal that prompted my comment:

He writes:

Beside me, an Afghan, clearly an interpreter, introduces himself in accented English as Bob.

“What’s your real name?” I ask him.

“My name’s Omid. But on the first day at this job, the sergeant asked me my ‘terp’ name. I told him: ‘I don’t have a terp name. My name is Omid.’

”Omid is too complicated for us to remember,’ he told me. ‘From now on, your name is Bob.”

My comment on the LENS blog:

"It's too bad that the guy who uttered this insulting and ignorant nonsense to the interpreter hasn't realized that he's insulting Omid by his stupidity and arrogance. What if the roles were reversed, and the Afghan was to tell a Robert that this name didn't roll off his tongue easily, and he'd be called Mohammed from now on? How would Robert feel?

Omid's is entitled to be proud of his name...it probably has a long lineage...and since we are occupying his country, we ought to show immense respect to those who risk their lives for a few dollars a day and work with the US army. Learning how to pronounce their names is the civil and respectful thing to do. Omid is not a stray pet adopted by the sergeant.

My hat's off to Mr Kamber for quoting this and other statements in this piece...i'm sure he's as dismayed as I am by them."

Reading the other entries added to my long standing pessimism; we will never win. When we are unable (or unwilling) to respect people who help us by risking their lives, we will gain no allies unless we abet their corruption. They, in turn, view our presence in Afghanistan as a cow to be milked, and eventually will stab us in the back.

Another thing. Just look at the expression of the Afghan in Kamber's photograph above this post. He's holding a copy of a Chicken Soup For The Soul given to him by a well-meaning US charity. Who dreamed of sending a collection of "inspirational" platitudes (and in English) to Afghanistan? I obviously can't speak for this Afghan, but I bet he looked at the book with amusement, and eventually guffawed with his friends at the naivete of the Americans.

Chicken Soup For The Soul to change Afghanistan? The mind boggles.

Addendum:  I've received a few emailed comments on this post.

One from a frequent reader of this blog who suggests that my post came across as anti-military. That's incorrect. I am anti-war...especially wars that are unnecessary like the Iraq war, and those wars that devolved into aimless havoc and propping an unsupportable government, like the war in Afghanistan...and the least we -and our military- can do is respect those Afghans or Iraqis who work for us, at the risk of their lives.  I'm hopeful the individuals depicted in Mr Kamber's journal are the exception.

The other email comments from a handful of readers agreed with my point of view.

VII: Franco Pagetti: Afghanistan's Agony

The exciting VII The Magazine features Afghanistan' Agony, the multimedia work of Franco Pagetti which combines movies, stills in both color and black & white.

Although I'm getting tired of war stories and its imagery, Pagetti manages to infuse this work with his own personality as when he says (I paraphrase) in his Italian accent"...the only thing a photographer really wants...more than life, more than sex...more than anything...is to be invisible." Brilliant!

This multimedia piece provides a very realistic of what Afghanistan must be...it merges color stills with black & white images (which, in my view, are the best of the lot), aerial shots and movie footage.

Overall a very well done production, but if I had to point out a niggling issue, I'd say the decision to include the audio introduction of a muezzin's call to prayers is a lazy one. The Taliban, the insurgents, and the rest of the "bad guys" are fighting us because of a bunch of reasons. Take your pick: because we're occupying their country, because we're defending an unrepresentative corrupt regime, because we're getting in the way of various longstanding tribal and/or ethnic power struggles, and because we're tying to eradicate poppy cultivation...subsistence to many Afghan farmers.

It would have been smarter to find another audio clip to give the project the required sense of the place...perhaps a Pashto song, perhaps some ambient audio of Kabul's market chatter. Some readers might see this as nit-picking, but it's not. Avoiding religious cliches is a much more intelligent production effort and in this case, keeps it honest and neutral as it should be.

Franco Pagetti has covered the conflict in Iraq since January 2003. He has been a news photographer since 1994, and most of his recent work has involved conflict situations. His non-conflict news photography has included assignments in India, the Vatican City, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and his native Italy. In his “former life,” he was a fashion photographer for Italian VOGUE and taught chemistry at Milano’s University .

POV: FP Magazine: Talibanistan

Foreign Policy Magazine has featured an interesting photo/graphical essay on the war in Afghanistan. It's titled Inside Talibanistan, and effectively makes the point that our "enemies" are not a monolithic entity, but a combination of disjointed groups with different agendas and ideologies.

According to our media and politicians, who have the talent of diminishing everything down to simplistic terms in the hope of further dumbing down its viewers, listeners, constituents and readers, we are fighting against the "Taliban"...the problem is that the Taliban (as defined by our talking heads, politicians and their cronies) doesn't exist as such. 

In FP's feature, I've counted 10 groups ranging from Al-Qaeda to some group called Haqqani Network, and added up the estimated members of these groups. Most of them are obviously estimates, but a total of 100,000 seems to be a reasonable one. Possibly included in these numbers are insurgents fighting against an occupying foreign force propping up a deeply unpopular corrupt government....and others who want nothing but power.

To put this in perspective, here's Cost of War which runs a counter for how much the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing us. It's an estimated $1.1 trillion to date.

We would have been so much better off by creating jobs, building modern infrastructure, state of the art trains and airports, new schools, invest in medical research, in alternative energy sources...and taking on China's growing economic power. My politics are diametrically opposed to the Republican Party and its legitimate and illegitimate spawns, but this ad by one of its affiliated group did strike a chord with me....yes, it's obviously over the top but there's still a kernel of truth in it. We are losing ground very quickly to China.  (The video is via FP).