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6 Months Blogging!

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

It’s a small milestone for the Sean Gallagher Photography Blog today (well, yesterday, technically)…we’ve hit 6 months blogging! I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to everyone who has stopped by, read what I’ve had to say and commented on some of the pictures, videos and articles that I’ve posted.

The most popular post over the past 6 weeks has been the video that I shot and produced in North Korea, here. It’s been popular on my YouTube channel too, getting nearly 1000 views, as of today.

The most popular page on the blog has been the WEEKEND WORKSHOPS page, which is getting a lot of interest. We are just about to announce our workshops for January, so please stay tuned, they will be posted any day now!

Thanks again for stopping by. As you know, we’re on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube so stop by and see us there as well. Here’s to the next 6 months…at least!!!

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YouTube Channel

Friday, December 4th, 2009

YouTube

YouTube

I haven’t announced this officially but I now have a YouTube channel! As I have started to produce more video work and multimedia over the past few months, I obviously want to get this work out to as many people as possible and YouTube seems to be the perfect venue as it is possible to upload multimedia content, even without video.

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I currently have 5 entries on the channel; ‘Inside North Korea Parts 1, 2 and 3′, ‘China’s Growing Sands’ for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and ‘China’s 60th Anniversary Preparation in Hangzhou’, for the Globe and Mail. By far the most popular video so far has been Part 1 of Inside North Korea which has nearly 1,000 views. A modest amount.

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I have embedded a couple of the videos here on this blog entry but please go to the channel here to subscribe and have a look at some of the videos and spread the word to others who you feel may be interested in the work I am doing.

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FotoWeekDC | David Alan Harvey Presents… & Critical Exposure Auction

Monday, November 9th, 2009

FOTOWEEK 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!

Desertification in China

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

Critical Exposure Auction | North Korea

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North Korea Image in TIME Magazine

Friday, November 6th, 2009
TIME Magazine Tearsheet | North Korea

TIME Magazine Tearsheet | North Korea

It has been a whirlwind couple of weeks for me as I near the end of a 2-week trip to the US, which has involved talks at Universities, NGOs, an Emmy party, lots of meetings and pounding the streets of New York with my portfolio in hand.

So, when I checked my email the other day, I got a pleasant surprise when I learnt that one of my recently taken North Korea pictures was chosen to run in this week’s TIME Magazine. I haven’t had a picture in TIME before, so I am obviously very happy. It’s an image taken in Pyongyang, outside the mausoleum which houses the embalmed body of the former North Korean Leader, Kim Il-Sung. Technically he is still the leader, as he was given the title of ‘Eternal Leader’ upon his death, I believe. 

The issue with this photo runs tomorrow (or today, depending on your timezone). Go pick up a copy!

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Inside North Korea on The Digital Journalist

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
The Digitial Journalist

The Digitial Journalist

In case you missed it earlier this week, the Digital Journalist published a dispatch of mine in their October 2009 edition. The dispatch is titled “Inside North Korea” and recounts some of the experience that I had when I was shooting in North Korea. You can read the dispatch on their website here, or just scroll down to read the text below.

This isn’t the first time I have contributed dispatches to the Digital Journalist, having two other dispatches published for them in the past year. The first was published in December 2008, on the subject of homeless communities in Mongolia. You can view that story here. The second story on “Abandoned Cities” was published in June 2009, as part of my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting earlier this year. To read that dispatch, please go here.

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Last month, I got a call from the Globe & Mail’s Asia correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, asking me if I was free in early September for a shoot. “Sure,” I said. I had been working with Mark a lot recently and was keen to work with him again. “I’m thinking of going to North Korea,” he said. “North Korea? Okay, I’m in,” I nonchalantly replied.

As our bus trundled across the bridge over the Yalu River that separates China and North Korea, my initial nonchalance had well and truly disappeared as we slowly approached the most closed nation on earth.

Click to continue »

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News This Week: Images on Burn Magazine, RESOLVE and Duckrabbit

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

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

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

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

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.

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Inside North Korea | Video #3 | On the North Korea/China border

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
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This is the third and final installment of mine and Mark MacKinnon’s short videos from our trip in North Korea.

This third video focuses on the Chinese city of Dandong, which lies on the North Korea/China border and offers a startling contrast between the two sides of the Yalu river. Whilst the city of Dandong thrives, fuelled by the economic boom in many of China’s cities, the North Korean side is devoid of life, except for the odd fishing boat and abandoned building.

I hope you have enjoyed this set of three videos. In case you missed the other two, please find the first one “Inside North Korea” here and the second, “The Arirang Mass Games” here.

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Inside North Korea | Video #2 | The Arirang Mass Games

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

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The above video is the second short-video by myself and the Globe & Mail’s Mark Mackinnon from our assignment in North Korea. The topic of this video is the Arirang Mass Games which are held in the May Day stadium in Pyongyang.

In case you don’t know, the Mass Games are a gymnastics, dance and song spectacular that showcase North Korean history and culture. Using hundreds of participants, mostly schoolchildren, the games are an imposing and impressive sight which symbolise the power of the masses working as one in North Korea.

Apart from the huge overtones of propaganda, the show is actually quite breathtaking. My personal favourite part of the event are the hundreds of schoolchildren who provide the backdrop to the whole spectacle. Holding up books containing pages with different colours, they all open and close the books in unison to create the unbelievable moving backdrop.

If you missed the first video, you can view it here.

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Photo of the Week | 07.09.09 | North Korea

Monday, September 7th, 2009
NORTH KOREA. A family huddle together in Kaesong city near Panmunjom, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. 2009

NORTH KOREA. A family huddle together in Kaesong city near Panmunjom, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. 2009

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ comes from North Korea. I wanted to post a photo from NK as last week’s POTW but I held off as I was waiting until the Globe & Mail, who commissioned the shoot, published the  images on their website.

Throughout my journey with the G&M’s Mark MacKinnon, we were whizzed across the country from site to site, trapped in our own oversized minivan which could of held about 15 people but was strangely reserved only for us two. We spent a lot of time in this van and it was from this viewpoint that I was able to gain many of my shots from the country, capturing glimpses of normal life between the government approved sites.

This week’s POTW is one of those photos and for me captures a very brief slice of normal North Korean family life, with the subjects completely unaware a picture is being taken. The children huddling in the shade of their mother’s umbrella. The father, crouched nearly out of sight. The other passers-by. This is was one of the hardest pictures to get. A normal picture. An insight. A brief glimpse.

To see more of the pictures from the series, please head to the Globe & Mail’s website here and to view our first of three short videos about North Korea and our trip, please go here.

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Inside North Korea | Video #1

Saturday, September 5th, 2009
YouTube Preview Image

As some of you may already know, last week I was on assignment in North Korea. Forgive me for not giving a hint of this exciting assignment beforehand, however myself and Mark MacKinnon from Canada’s Globe & Mail, for whom I was working, wanted to try and keep this as quiet as possible until (a) we made it out safely and (b) the work was first published on the G&M website.

Well, we are now back in Beijing and are happy to show the first of three videos shot from the trip. This is the first video I have ever shot, all done on a very touristy camcorder as not to raise suspicions, but I’m very happy with the results, especially considering the conditions we were working under i.e. being watched at all times by our government minders.

Needless to say, this was the most eye-opening photo-assignment and traveling experience I have ever had and possibly the most nerve-wracking. Fresh off the back of the story of Euna Lee and Laura Lin, American journalists who were caught crossing the China-North Korea border, being sentenced to over 10 years in a labour camp and then subsequently being ‘rescued’ by Bill Clinton, Mark and I were obviously a little nervous about heading into the country. Would Bill come and rescue us too if something went wrong?!

I will be posting plenty more about our trip into North Korea, however please sit and enjoy the first installment of videos from the ‘Hermit Kingdom’. To read Mark’s excellent articles and diary entries from the trip please go here and to see more of my images from the trip, please go here. Scroll through day-by-day to see the images from each day in chronological order.

*Update* 09/09/09 To view video #2 “The Arirang Mass Games”, please go here and the view video #3, “On the North Korea/China border”, please go here.

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