photo of the week
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Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
A Giant Salamander in Wuhan Zoo. 2008
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way that it treats its animals” – Mohandas Gandhi
In March of 2008, I was travelling down China’s greatest river, the Yangtze. Passing through the city of Wuhan, I happened upon the city’s zoo one day and was shocked by the conditions in which the animals were being kept. As a result, I returned to the city a few weeks later in order to photograph the various animals in an attempt to convey the appalling conditions in which they were living.
China has a mixed record in the way in which it treats its animals. From the use of animal parts for Chinese medicine to the new conservation efforts to protect tigers (as a result of this year being the year of the tiger), it seems confusing whether animals are valued or not. Maybe attitudes are changing. A quick trip to the zoo in Wuhan will certainly dispel you optimism for change however.
In this week’s ‘Photo of the Week’, a Giant Salamander is kept in the zoo’s aquatic house in a cramped and shallow pool. As visitors pass the pool, they throw coins in an attempt to make them land on top of the Salamander. This is done supposedly to bring the visitors luck and fortune.
To view more images from this series of animals such as crocodiles, lions and bears and the awful conditions in which they live in, please visit my portfolio site and follow Index>China>Lockdown-Inside China’s Zoos
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Tags: asia, china, photo of the week, photography workshops, the environment, wuhan
Monday, March 1st, 2010
Cadres | Beijing | China | 2007
This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ was a shot taken as part of the ‘One Night in Beijing’ shoot for the Immersion Guides to Beijing in 2007. Exactly one year before the beginning of the Olympic Games in Beijing, photographers all across the capital were commissioned to head out onto the streets to capture images that represented the city at night.
It was an interesting shoot and the result was a very nice book which showed off many of the eclectic pictures captured from that night. The above picture from a club in the city didn’t actually make the final edit but I always liked it due to the intense colours and the contrast between the Long March Cadres on the wall and the revellers dancing.
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Tags: asia, beijing, china, on assignment, one night in beijing, photo of the week, photographing people, photography, working in china
Monday, February 15th, 2010
White Cloud Temple | Baiyun Guan
On Saturday night, the skies lit up with fireworks above most Chinese cities, signifying the start of China’s most special holiday of the year: Chinese New Year.
For the next week Chinese families will spent most of the time eating, drinking, visiting family members, catching up with old friends and heading to many of the temple fairs that are taking place. This week’s ‘Photo(s) of the Week’ come from the White Cloud Temple in Beijing. This Taoist temple is over a thousand years old and is one of the locations for Beijing’s most interesting celebrations during this special week.
The photo at the top is of people rubbing chinese characters, in order to gain luck, fortune, prosperity etc. from the character of corresponding meaning.
White Cloud Temple | Baiyun Guan
The second image is taken within the grounds of the temple and is of two young girls, dressed up in their finest new year clothes.
We’re very excited to be returning to this temple tomorrow for our special Chinese New Year Photography Workshop where students will have the chance to capture the unique celebrations at this special temple. I wish all readers of my blog a happy and prosperous new year of the Tiger! 虎年快乐！
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Tags: asia, baiyun temple, beijing, china, chinese new year, photo of the week, photographing people, photography, photography workshops, weekend workshops
Monday, February 8th, 2010
St Mark's Square | Venice | Italy
This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ is one that I have dug out of my archive from possibly the most photographed city of all time…Venice, Italy.
I made the obligatory photographers/travellers pilgrimage to this city for a short weekend break and was overcome, mostly by the hordes of visitors there at the same time as me. Luckily, I had a good friend who was a local, who was able to steer me away from some of the more heavily visited areas.
When you visit a place like Venice, which is photographed constantly, it is sometimes hard to create something that is perceived as unique or different. You try to avoid visual cliches that have been reproduced by hundreds of other photographers before you.
Whilst I was happy with a lot of my photos, my favourite photo actually came from the most visited part of the city, St Mark’s Square. As anyone who has visited the square will know, it is normally inhabited by large numbers of pigeons all vying for the food which tourists happily feed them. This one girl donned in a cat’s mask, patiently waited in what almost seemed like a trap for the unsuspecting avian residents. Did she catch any? I can’t remember but it was fun to watch as she created this visual idiom before me.
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Tags: europe, italy, photo of the week, photographing people, photography, piazza san marco, st mark's square, street photography, venice
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
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.
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Tags: asia, china, china's growing sands, desertification, photo of the week, photography, pulitzer center on crisis reporting, the environment, the taklamakan, xinjiang
Monday, November 16th, 2009
Charlotte, poses for a photo, during a break between classes. 2007
*This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ is an image from my story on the Bethel Training Center for Blind Orphans, currently being featured on the Photophilanthropy website. Below is the extract which supports the story. To see more images from this story, please click on the Photophilanthropy link.”
“I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden.” – Helen Keller, Blind and Deaf US Writer.
There are around 500,000 blind and visually impaired children in China. As a result of China’s strict one-child policy, children born with physical or mental disabilities are regularly abandoned as parents strive to have their only child born ‘normal’ and well.
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Tags: asia, beijing, bethel, china, education, health, inspiration, photo of the week, portraits
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Diwali celebrations in Trafalgar Square, London. UK. 2004
A friend of mine reminded me this weekend that it was the Hindu festival of Diwali this week. In case you don’t know, Divali (or the Festival of Light as it is also called) is a celebration held over 5 days by Hindu communities throughout the world. Lights are lit, fireworks are set off and families come together for this important day.
Diwali celebrations in Trafalgar Square, London. UK. 2004
This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ comes from Diwali celebrations, not in India, but in London. I took them in 2004, during my one year paid internship at Magnum Photo’s London office. I remember having only been at Magnum for a couple of months when this festival came about. Having been inspired day-in-day-out (as I was for most of the year) I headed out onto the streets to try and capture some of the colour and fervour that surrounded the festival on the streets of the UK’s capital. I’d like to share five of those images with you taken during celebrations in 2004.
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Tags: britain, diwali, london, magnum internship, magnum photos, photo of the week, street photography, the festival of lights
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Pedestrians in downtown Hong Kong. 2008
This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ takes us to Hong Kong. I first visited Hong Kong in November of 2008 and was completely taken by this unique and exciting city. 155 years of British colonial rule have obviously left a lot of British influence and I immediately felt at home in what was a place that seemed to have the feelings of both China and Britain, blended together into a unique anglo-sino melting pot.
The above photo was taken on one of the main shopping streets on Hong Kong island. I like this image for one reason really, the colour. I often look for singular colours in images in order to simplify the picture. Whilst out wandering the streets, my attention was obviously caught by the radiating neon signs that jumped out from the shop window. Having seen such a situation, I then decided to stand and wait for pedestrians to walk past in order to create an image with an interesting composition. I didn’t just want a straight shot of the window. I wanted to somehow convey the movement and dynamics of Hong Kong in the one frame.
After returning to my computer and looking closer at this image, other elements started to reveal themselves to me. The condensation on the window for example, running in streaks vertically down the glass. The way that the shapes and lines of the two people’s faces seem to fit together like a puzzle, in a way that reminds me of two continents that were once joined but have slowly separated over time. It’s always great to discover more elements in an image that you don’t realise are there when you first capture it.
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Tags: china, hong kong, photo of the week, photography, street photography
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
A Japanese child, perched on his mother's bike. 2003
I was trawling through my archive today, looking for images to accompany a presentation that I am giving as part of my workshop tomorrow. As I looked through my ‘older’ files, I stumbled upon many of my images that I took while I lived in Japan between 2003-2004. I had just finished University and I was quite unsure about what direction my life was taking. Having been dabbling in photography for a year or two, I decided to take myself off to Japan in order to experience a completely alien culture to my own and see what it brought out in me photographically.
At the time I did not work as a professional photographer. I was on the JET programme, an initiative run by the Japanese government that brought native English speakers to the country to teach schoolchildren. I was based in the small and little-known town of Himeji, on the coast, south of the larger cities of Kobe and Osaka. My main school was in Himeji itself, however for two days of the week I would get on a boat and head out to a small group of islands off the Japanese coast to teach in a school that served the small archipelago.
My daily commute involved a 20 minute bike ride to the local docks, a 25 minute speedboat ride and then another 20 minute bike ride to the school. Not the worst way to travel to work! On one of my commutes whilst cycling on the small islands, I stopped at a small junction and saw this young Japanese buy perched on his mother’s bike. Using my small Minolta Dynax 5, loaded with my favourite film at the time, Fuji Velvia 50, I snapped this one frame of the boy.
I love this photo, as it is one of the first portraits that I was truly happy with and it takes me straight back to my experience of living and working in Japan. The islands (called Ieshima, by the way) were a unique place, and like Japan, hold a special place in my memories living, working and travelling in Asia.
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Tags: japan, photo of the week, photographing people, photography, portraits, street photography
Monday, September 28th, 2009
CHINA. Beijing. A young girl plays in the destroyed remains of hutongs (traditional homes) in central Beijing near Tiananmen Square. The hutongs are being destroyed to make way for new developments aimed at modernising the city for the 2008 Olympic Games. 2006.
This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ was taken in 2006 as part of a story that I did on the destruction of the ‘hutongs’ of central Beijing. For those of you who aren’t aware, the hutongs are a maze-like series of homes and dwellings that used to dominate central Beijing. I say used to because many of them were destroyed in the run-up to the Olympic Games as the city strived to modernise in anticipation of all the visiting eyes that would be looking upon the city.
Whilst the hutongs were arguably a backwards way of living and inefficiently used space, they represented an relatively unchanged age of Beijing that dated back hundreds of years, even as far back as when the Mongolians ruled the capital. Controversy arose also during the destruction of the hutongs as reports emerged of forced evictions and residents not being given adequate compensation.
During my first trip to Beijing in 2005 (sponsored by a grant I received after completing my internship at Magnum Photos) and during 2006, I documented the destruction that had been taking place in the center of the city. You can view more of the images here, at the website OpenDemocracy.net.
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Tags: beijing, china, hutongs, magnum photos, photo of the week, photography, working in china
