China. The Taklamakan Desert. 2009

The ‘Sea of Death’ is the not-so affectionate name that has been given by the Chinese people to the Taklamakan desert, a desert of such epic proportions and intimidating size, that its name in the local Uygur language translates as ‘You can go in, but you will never come out’.

I visited the Taklamakan desert as part of my work on the issue of desertification in China for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in April of this year and this is one of my favourote images, that I’d like to share with you as this week’s ‘Photo of the Week’.

Photographing in the Taklamakan

The trees in the images are dead poplar trees, on the edges of the Taklamakan. As the desert moves, whole forests of trees are engulfed by the sand and huge swathes of land are reduced to no more than forest graveyards. It is an eerie and unnerving place, conjuring up the image of the aftermath of some epic disaster. Well, this is a disaster, an environmental disaster in China on the grandest scale. The significance of which is slowly dawning on people. This is where I have tried to come in by visually communicating the scale of this under-reported issue.

There are some interesting and exciting developments happening for this work at the moment that I’d love to share with you but I dare not talk about it, in case I jinx it. If and when these developments happen, the news will be out here on my blog first, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please spread the word about this issue.

David Alan Harvey Presents... (c) Brendan Hoffman

*UPDATE* For lots more photos from this great exhibition, please head here at brightyoungthings.com

This will be a very quick post, but wanted to show you the print of mine in the David Alan Harvey Presents… exhibition over at PhotoWeek DC at the moment. As you can see, the prints have been almost ‘strung-up’, hanging side by side clipped onto a metal or nylon string…can’t quite tell. It’s quite an interesting way to display the prints and I actually think it represents the ‘raw’ style that Burn is coming to be down for. A little different, loose, constantly changing.

Photo above is courtesy of Mr. Brendan Hoffman, Capitol Hill photographer extraordinaire. Next blog post will have more about him and our trip behind the scenes at the senate in DC.

FOTOWEEK DC

If you are in the Washington DC area this week, then you should make a beeline for the wealth of photography events they on this week as part of FOTOWEEKDC. I am slightly miffed as I spent the best part of last week in DC and had to leave just before all the events kicked off. Oh well, these things happen, but I am happy as two of my images will be featuring in two different events during the FotoWeek.

The first image is one from my series on desertification in China and it will be in the David Alan Harvey Presents… exhibition. For details of where to find it, please go here. As many of you will already know, this image was featured on David’s Burn magazine a few months ago. I actually bumped into David just the other day when I was in New York. He was passing through on his way to FotoWeek, but we managed to grab a coffee in his apartment in ‘the Kibbutz’ in Brooklyn.  He had just come back the night before from a workshop in Mexico, was off to FotoWeek briefly and then was heading back to Mexico again for another workshop. I thought I had a busy schedule, but David takes it to another level!

David Alan Harvey Presents...Desertification in China

My second image in FotoWeek DC will be part of the Critical Exposure Auction. Critical Exposure is an organisation that promotes young people to use photography as a form of empowerment and provides opportunities for them to change their lives using photography. I was approached last month to donate a print (see image below) to their auction, which will be held on November 12th. More details here. If you are around Georgetown at that time, please head down to support them and maybe even bid for my print!

Critical Exposure Auction | North Korea

What a busy few days it has been since I arrived in the US 5 days ago. I spent the first few days at Kent State University, where I gave a total of eight (yes 8!) presentations for my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, mainly to students enrolled in the school’s various journalism/photojournalism programmes. Even though it was rather intense, it was great to meet people such as Barbara Hipsman, Karl Idsvoog and Glenn Luther who apart from being lovely people, are also great journalists and are working on exciting things intheir various fields. I encourage you to check out their websites via the provided links. To see a nice write-up of my public lecture at Kent State, please go here.

Georgetown University

Last night I visited Washington’s Georgetown University where I presented to an environmental action group of students. Along with the Pulitzer Center’s Nathalie Applewhite, we presented Pulitzer’s new ‘Heat of the Moment’ Gateway (which you should definitely check out by the way, if you have any interest in global environmental issues) and got a good response from the students there.

American University

Today, I head to American University to speak to journalism students about my experiences working in China as a photographer. If the students are like those at Kent State and Georgetown, then it should be a good day. It’s a lot of fun talking about these climate issues and getting feedback from students who seem so keen and thirsty for information about these topics.

The Climate Institute

Finally, tomorrow I shall be speaking at the Climate Institute here in Washington, which is a public event. So, if you have time, please do come along, as I believe there are a few places left. Again, I shall be presenting my work on desertification in China and talking about climate policy. Hope to see you there!

Lots of things seem to happening at the moment and I am struggling to find time to write individual blog entries, so forgive me for including three subjects in one entry today.

Kent State Univeristy

First, I shall be heading the US on Saturday to speak at a number of events for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting who are bringing me to America to take part in a number of outreach programmes, aimed at highlighting their sponsored work and the issues they cover. As a result, I shall be heading to Kent State University in Ohio for two days on the 26th and 27th, speaking in a number of classes and presenting my work on desertification in China. There will be a public presentation I believe on the night of the 26th, from 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. in Room 340 in the First Energy Room at Franklin Hall, in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. If you are in the Kent State University area, please come by and say hello!

After Kent State, I shall be heading to Washington DC where I am scheduled to be speaking at the American University and Climate Institute. More details on those to follow later. Needless to say, I shall be updated this blog whilst on my travels in the US, so please check back for up to date info.

Heat of the Moment

The next piece of news is that my work on desertification in China has been featured on the new Pulitzer Gateway “Heat of the Moment”, a portal of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting highlighting their work on various climate issues. The subjects are incredibly diverse and it is well worth exploring many of the different topics. The Pulitzer Gateway is another source of outreach, mainly targeting students who will begin to log-in to the site to learn about Global Climate issues. In the next week or two, video interviews will be uploaded to the site and dialogue will begin between the journalists and students. It should be very interesting, so please do check back again sometime to see how it all developing.

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80AR9MzC-rs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

The above video is an episode of Foreign Exchange, a weekly American TV show dedicated to covering global current affairs, hosted by journalist Daljit Dhaliwal.

Last week’s episode was devoted entirely to the current global water crisis and featured heavily the work of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and its work on covering the issues surrounding this crisis across the globe.

As many readers of this blog will know, I was fortunate enough to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center earlier this year to continue my work on desertification in China. In this episode of Foreign Exchange, Jon Sawyer, the director of the Pulitzer Center, presents my work as part of the center’s coverage.

If you have the time, please do watch the entire episode as it is a fascinating insight into the work that the Pulitzer Center is doing across the world. As you watch, look out for John talking about my ‘China’s Growing Sands’ project, just over half the way through the half-hour programme.

I just noticed today that I haven’t had a new post up for 10 days! Wow. I have been quite busy of late, having just got back from a shoot in the Chinese city of Hangzhou where I teamed up again with the Globe & Mail’s Mark Mackinnon for a new story. More on that to come in later posts.

A lot of my work appeared online in various blogs and magazines this week, which was great.

Burn Magazine Logo

On David Alan Harvey’s magazine, Burn, he published a short selection of my images that I took from the recent trip I took to North Korea. David edited these images himself actually, sequencing them also in the way he saw best fit. If you read the dialogue, he offers a few insights into how he went about this and his thoughts on editing. As this work is quite new to me, I was more than happy for David to help me create a voice for this work. To see what he came up with, go here.

Resolve Logo

Also, over on the liveBooks’ blog RESOLVE (for whom I am a regular contributor) my final post about some of my experiences photographing desertification for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, went up this week. If you missed some my earlier writings for RESOLVE, please go here, here and here to see them.

Duckrabbit Logo

Finally and by no means least, the excellent multimedia website duckrabbit featured a short highlight of some of my recent work focusing on both my desertification work and that in North Korea.

I can’t encourage you enough to go and check out all three of the above outlets. They are all very exciting venues for photography online at the moment.

The International Photography Awards Logo

I’m very happy to announce that my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on ‘China’s Growing Sands’ has been awarded 2nd place in the Editorial: Environmental Professional category at the International Photography Awards 2009. This is the first prize recognition I have had for this body of work and I am happy that it can serve as another avenue to promote the issue and the message of the crisis the north of China is currently facing.

I was pipped to 1st place by the excellent photographer Ed Kashi, who I have mentioned here on my blog before. Like me, he is a regular contributer over on the Resolve blog and has been extensively covering the issues surrounding oil in the Niger Delta. I very much admire Ed’s work and I encourage you to check out more of his work here.

1st, 2nd and 3rd places in the Editorial: Environmental Pro Category

In choosing my photos for entry, I had to narrow down my whole work to 5 key images. You can see the selection that I went with in the picture below. It was a very tough choice but I decided to go for the ones which were singularly the most striking and which worked best together as a set of five.

The 5 images entered as 'China's Growing Sands' entry.

You can see all the images that placed in the competition here. Happy browsing. There are some great images in there!

Please find below, a selection of images from my exhibition opening this morning in the city hall of the the city of Wulanhaote, in Inner Mongolia as part of the International Conference of Science and Technology on Desertification Control (ICSTDC). The above image is the leading shot in the exhibition.

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The opening was a great success this morning with guests to the conference taking in the exhibit before the main opening ceremony. Today consisted of opening lectures from various Chinese and International scientists. The topics were as diverse as the speakers with talks covering subjects such as the history of desertification in China, agricultural ways to combat desertification, urban desertification and alternative energy sources from the desert.

I speak tomorrow morning here at the conference, presenting my 2 years of work covering desertification in China in a presentation titled “Desertification in China: A Photographic Journey.” I shall hopefully upload images and audio tomorrow from my talk.

I hope you enjoy the images of my exhibition opening!

My 'Representative' pass for the 2nd International Conference on Science and Technology for Desertification Control (ICSTDC)

After a 19 hour train journey from Beijing, I have finally arrived in the north-eastern city of Wulanhaote in Inner Mongolia. I’m here for the next 4 days to attend the 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology for Desertification Control – a gathering of some 200 people all linked by one thing – their interest in the fight against desertification.

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