Jason Florio | The Vodun Trail

Photo © Jason Florio-All Rights Reserved

I had a hard time choosing a photo essay out of Jason Florio's interesting and compelling work, but thought that his Benin: The Vodun Trail would suit this blog the best due to my own interest in featuring and documenting religious rituals.

The other photo essays that competed for my attention are The Ring (a photo essay on Muay Thai boxing in Chiang Mai) and Blackout Portraits-Mogadishu.

Benin is considered the cradle of vodun (one of its adaptations is voodoo) which is one of the ancient belief system essentially based on animism. Despite concerted efforts of Christian missionaries, this ancient belief system still has millions of adherents along West Africa’s former Slave Coast, from Ghana to parts of Nigeria, and especially in Benin. In 1996, Benin’s democratic government officially decreed vodun a religion, and ever since, thousands have openly practiced it. A significant percentage of Benin practice pure vodun. For more information, an article from the New York Times (with Jason's photographs) can be viewed here.

Jason Florio is a New York City based photographer and writer from London. He worked as a freelance photojournalist around the globe for publications including The New Yorker, New York Times, Outside, Liberation and The Times of London, working on stories that attempt to reveal the unseen and to provide an alternative point of view on people and places.

He spent the last 3 months of 2009 making a 930 km expedition by foot of The Gambia, West Africa to produce a series of portraits of African chiefs for which in part he was given fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society in London. His work on Afghanistan is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, as well as a number of private collections.

The Girls of Tết Trung Thu

A year ago, I was walking the streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter during my Vietnam North of the 16th Parallel Photo Expedition-Workshop, carrying my street photography gear: a Leica m9 and a Fuji X Pro-1. Hanoi's streets are replete with extraordinary life moments, ready for the taking by anyone with an interest to do so.

My group and I were there in late September just before the Mid Autumn Festival, which is known in Vietnam as Tết Trung Thu festival. Traditionally, this festival celebrates harvest and is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar. In recent years, it’s an occasion for young women (and men) to walk the streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter to show off new clothes, and to wear over-sized fake eyeglasses, and Minnie Mouse ears or antlers on their heads.

I thought it would be timely to feature a gallery of photographs showing the youthful, fun and innocent exuberance that envelops this time of year in Hanoi. The Girls of Tết Trung Thu was just added to my The Leica File (& X Pro-1) website, and is one of many featuring my work out of Vietnam.

The adorable young women parading the street were very keen to be photographed, and seeing my cameras, asked to be photographed, making the well known Asian ‘V’ sign and tilting their heads in a sweet way. 

Ninth Angkor Photo Festival 2013

The 9th Angkor Photo Festival is scheduled for November 23-30, in Siem Reap, Cambodia.It's longest-running international photography festival in Southeast Asia, will showcase the work of over 130 photographers, half of which are from Asia.

The week-long event will feature daily evening outdoor slideshow projections as well as 8 indoor and outdoor print exhibitions.

The 2013 Program is curated by the festival's program coordinator, Françoise Callier. In addition, Shahidul Alam (Director of Chobi Mela - Bangladesh) and Jean François Leroy (Director of Visa pour l’Image – France) will be its guest curators.

Some of the photographers who will showcase their work are Edwin Koo, Marylise Vigneau, John Vink, Patrick Aventurier, Kumi Takahashi, Gali Tibbon, Sankar Sarkar, Dina Oganova, Binh Dang, Abir Abdulla, Subrata Biswas, Antoine Raab and many others.

I was privileged to attend the Angkor Photo Festival in November 2011 and one of my photo essays The Possessed of Mira Datar was featured at the festival. It was an absolute delightful experience to be part of such an event, and the gracious hospitality of Francoise Callier and Jean-Yves Navel (the Festival Director) was instrumental in making it such success. I have no doubt that the festival in November 2013 will equally be as wonderful.

Tom Parker | Departures Magazine

Photo © Tom Parker-Courtesy Departures Magazine

I occasionally leaf through Departures; a luxury magazine for American Express card members, and enjoy seeing the photographs by various travel-commercial/editorial photographers, whose work is clearly aimed at high-end magazine publishing. It's somewhat different from mine, since many of the photographs are carefully staged, involve styling, set up, reflectors, etc.

The latest Departures issue features a spread of photographs by Tom Parker, and it showcases the beauty of Ethiopia. The issue is only in print for the time being, but take my word for it, the photographs are beautiful. In fact, most of the issue deals with Africa and the photographs that are featured were well worth my taking the time to enjoy and learn from them.

I constantly learn not only from the work of travel-commercial/editorial photographers, but (as I previously wrote on this blog) from fashion photographers as well. If you browse through Tom's work, you'll note a preponderance of vertical (aka portrait) photographs, which are favored by magazine publishers. Landscape (or horizontal) formats are more suited to story telling photo journalism (whether travel photojournalism or otherwise.

Tom Parker is an English photographer who relocated to Nepal to write for an independent newspaper. Working as a reporter for BBC Radio 4, he photographed for London newspapers. In 2004 he based himself in Sri Lanka for 3 years and covered the tsunami as a photographer, BBC radio journalist and writer.

He then moved to Mumbai and travelled worldwide as a photographer, and later was appointed photo editor of Condé Nast Traveller India, launching Asia’s first edition of the magazine. He recently returning to the UK and is currently a contributing photographer for Condé Nast Traveller India and Architectural Digest India.

His work appears regularly in international publications including Condé Nast Traveller, Condé Nast Traveler, Departures Magazine, Vogue, GQ, GEO, House and Garden, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, WIRED, Guardian, Independent, Marie Claire and others.

Jessica Antola | Ethiopia

Photo © Jessica Antola-All Rights Reserved

"...what consumed me were the people - strong 

and loud in dazzling technicolor..." -Jessica Antola

Ah, Ethiopia! The country which added so much to many travel photographers' portfolios with its myriad photo opportunities, its handsome people with varying physiognomies and ways of life.

Here's the Ethiopian portfolio of Jessica Antola. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in New York City after living and working in Paris, Portland and Rome. In her decade long photography career, she has photographed advertising campaigns for globally recognized brands, features for international magazines and three books. She also produced images portraying people, cultures and landscapes from locations including: West Papua, Antarctica, Tibet, and Myanmar.

She was featured in AFAR magazine, and if you drop by her interesting Tumblr blog, you'll see a delightful photograph of a Yali man in his traditional koteka or penis gourd in West Papua, Indonesia.

Constantine Manos | Leica & Magnum

Here's a Leica Camera documentary on Constantine ("Costa") Manos, the Magnum photographer known for his photographs of Boston and Greece.

Let me share a story about Costa Manos.

In 2000, I joined a street photography workshop in Old Havana with Costa Manos as instructor. It was one of the foreign destination workshops by the Maine Photographic Workshops, and probably the only workshop I ever attended. It was just after the Elian Gonzales custodial battle, which made authorized travel to the island more difficult than usual...but the workshop went ahead, and a small group of hard-core photographers made it (somewhat circuitously because of our US passports) to Havana.

It was still pre-digital world at the time, and for Costa to edit our photographs, we had to use color film and have it processed at local photo processing stores. Naturally, the quality left much to be desired, but the processing was fast and cheap. I had just returned from Nepal and India, and was quite full of myself...and super proud of the portraits of sadhus and Nepali women that I displayed to the group and for Costa's critique.

He took his time looking at my photographs, and probably seeing I was getting a little anxious, he told me something I have never forgotten:

"Your pictures are technically fine, but they're too simple...I want you to bring me complicated pictures; pictures that tell stories; pictures that I can look at for a long time..."

If there's only one piece of advice that guided my photographs since 2000, it was this. And it was then I began trying to complicate my photographs, to complicate my compositions. and to try to insert and build layers upon layers in them. Sometimes I succeed...and sometimes I fail. Most of the time, it falls somewhere in the middle....but I never forgot Costa's advice.

Photo © Constantine Manos-All Rights Reserved

The above photograph is hanging in my office, and I bought it from Costa during the Havana workshop.

Street Photography | NYC's San Gennaro's Feast

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

I chanced on Little Italy's San Gennaro Feast last weekend, and despite the incredibly packed crowds, I managed to make a few photographs here and there. It was lunchtime which explained the crowds moving at a snail's pace, ogling the menus of the full to capacity Italian restaurants with tables overflowing on Mulberry Street in Little Italy/Chinatown. The whole of Little Italy was blocked to traffic, so pedestrians were packed like sardines with little room to compose interesting frames.

I felt I had been transported to a filming shoot for The Sopranos, hearing exaggerated Italian American accents all around me; some inviting tourists into restaurants and others hawking mozzarella (pronounced something like 'muzarel') and cannoli, the famous Sicilian dessert. Many of those were actually waiters and restaurant staff from Mexico who occasionally whispered in Spanish to each other.

Absolutely no one cares about these details. It's here in the heart of what is left of Little Italy that the feast of San Gennaro is held every year, and which was expected to attract more than one million people from all over the world to participate in the annual Salute to the Patron Saint of Naples. Perhaps hyperbole, perhaps an overly optimistic forecast...but who knows?

A little away from the main bustle, on Mott Street, a restaurant singer was pleasing the crowd with old favorites, ranging from Domenico Modugno's Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (aka Volare) to Dean Martin's Everybody Loves Somebody. I waited for a song by the one and only Louis Prima...Just A Gigolo would've been just perfect...but I waited in vain, and anyway a woman singing anything by Louis would sound weird.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

On Hester Street, there was a crowd gathering in front of a stall, listening to the patter of a man dressed as a boxing or wrestling referee. From what I gathered, the attraction was the presence of Bruno Sammartino, who would be performing mock matches with anyone who dared. It appears that Mr Sammartino is an Italian-born American retired professional wrestler, best known for being the longest-running champion of the World Wide Wrestling Federation. I saw no one volunteering.

Unfortunately, I won't be in NYC this weekend for the grand finale of San Gennaro's Feast. It'll be packed if last week end is any guide...I'll have to wait for next year.

For more of my New York City street photography and more, drop by The Leica File.