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Richard Renaldi: “Think about our relationships to strangers”

Timo — Sat, 08 May 2010 09:34:46 +0000

He is one of the important emerging photographers in the USA: In our interview Richard Renaldi talks about his fascination for full body portraits, his current exhibition in Hamburg and the special challenge of photographing strangers with each other.

Flare: You’ve specialized in full body portraits – what fascinates you about it?

Renaldi: I was drawn to try to photograph people how I thought they actually appear to us upon an initial meeting. This led me to frame them in a way where they were not parts or fragments to be used as compositional elements in a photograph, but rather as a whole person, from head to toe. Often when we meet someone for the first time we look at the whole package, their height, weight, dress, feet, hair, etc. Photographing them as full bodies felt appropriate to me.

Flare: How do you take your pictures – do you make appointments with your models or do you just ask them on the street?

Renaldi: The majority of my subjects are photographed on the spot.

Flare: How do you get a muslim woman wearing a burqa to pose for you on the streets of New Jersey next to a fire hydrant (a photo from the book Figure and Ground)?

Renaldi: I just asked kindly. She was very nice. She was also a Black American Muslim, so I believe that she was coming from a different cultural point of view. By the way that is a chador she was wearing not a burqa.

Flare: For your project Touching Strangers you photograph strangers with each other. Is this a special challenge?

Renaldi: Very much so. It takes a lot of tenacity and patience to make those portraits happen. The reason why I started the project in the first place was because I found group portraiture to be a challenge and of great interest. I thought about how I could push that situation of photographing strangers together and that is when the idea of them touching each other came to me.

Flare: What ist the idea behind Touching Strangers, what is its special appeal?

Renaldi: I’d prefer the viewer to project onto the images what they see and feel about this situation. That said, at the heart of it I am making artwork that is trying to bring people together and get us to think about our relationships to strangers and our growing disconnection from each other due to technology and mobility.

Flare: In Figure and Ground every picture seems to be made in perfect light. How do you accomplish that?

Renaldi: I use all available light and shoot primarily in open shade.

Flare: For your book Fall River Boys you portraited the teenagers of the small town Fall River in Massachusetts in black an white. Please explain this project and why you did it.

Renaldi: Fall River feels cool and gray. I had been wanting to shoot a project in black and white and this seemed like the perfect fit. Black and White also subtly refers to days since past and in many respects Fall River had it’s day over a century ago (it had been the largest cotton milling town in the United States in the late 19th century.)

Flare: Starting May 8 your pictures from Figure an Ground und Fall River Boys will be exhibited in Robert Morat Galerie in Hamburg. Why should people visit the exhibition?

Renaldi: To experience the works from the vantage point of seeing prints on the wall in a gallery, which is a wholly unique, and different experience than looking at images in a book or online. Additionally, to see the beautiful chromogenic prints up close and in person.

Pulitzer Prize: An American teen soldier

Timo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 07:34:54 +0000

It’s an intimate portrait of an American teen soldier: Photographer Craig F. Walker accompanied the young Ian Fisher. He watched his recruitment, his deployment to Iraq and his return from combat – for 27 months. For his work Walker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Walker won with his project “Ian Fisher: American Solider” the Pulitzer Prize in the “Feature Photography” category. The photograph posted above is only one form his project. A detailed version of the project with 83 photographs and a multimedia project can be viewed on the homepage from the Denver Post, Walker’s newspaper. When they found about the prize, Walker and Fisher celebrated together.

With a photograph of an unusual rescue Mary Chind from the Des Moins Register won the Pulitzer Prize in the “Breaking News Photography” category. Her photograph shows construction worker Jason Oglesbee, reaching out for a women’s hand in foaming water. Firefighters failed in the attempt to save the woman from a river. So Oglesbee, who was
working at a bridge nearby, was let down on a rope from a tower crane and saved the woman. She and her husband had an accident with a boat, her husband died in the floods.

The Pulitzer Prize is one of the most prestigious US-awards for journalists, authors and artists. It was established in 1917. 2010 was the first year in which the jury awarded a prize to an online publication.

DSLR Music Video: Saturday Night

Timo — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:16:11 +0000

Nowadays you can shoot brilliant videos with digital SLR cameras. But often audio remains to be a huge challenge. Photographer and musician Sebastian Niehoff doesn’t have that kind of a problem. The 29 year old shoots music videos with his Canon 5d Mark II and imports the audio from a sound studio recording. His first video “Saturday Night” from the Band King Size Clan shows the result.

However, we at Flare cannot quiet agree on the video. Timo (friends with the photographer) says: “Great images, interesting change between color and black and white, funny guys – a great debut, especially for a self-taught person.” Ole disagrees: “Way too fixed, too heavy on photos, hardly any variety – and awful music.”

Lucas Wahl: Blind family

Timo — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:37:09 +0000

→ Slideshow: 10 Photos

„Saltu and his wife Parameswory became blind in their childhood. Parameswory’s mother tried to scratch an infection out of her eye using the prickly piece of a pumpkin skin when her eyeballs burst. Their parents set up an arranged marriage for both of them. They live in a squatter settlement in central Kathmandu, Nepal. Begging is their only income and is mostly done by Parameswory. She often carries her baby Manjila with her to gain more profit – less than a dollar a day. This money has to be enough to sustain the household.“

Lucas Wahl was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1984. He focuses on social issues and daily life stories that he photographs with his panoramic camera. Wahl is member of Kollektiv 25.

Iran protest picture wins World Press Photo Award

Timo — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:25:36 +0000

→ Slideshow: 20 Photos

The jury of the World Press Photo Contest has selected a photo by the Italian photographer Pietro Masturzo as the World Press Photo of the Year 2009. The picture depicts women shouting in protest from a rooftop in Tehran. Jury chair Ayperi Karabuda Ecer said: „The photo shows the beginning of something, the beginning of a huge story. It adds perspectives to news. It touches you both visually and emotionally, and my heart went out to it immediately.“

The winning photograph is part of a story showing the nights following the contested presidential elections in Iran, when people shouted their dissent from roofs and balconies, after daytime protests in the streets. The story as a whole was awarded first prize in the category People in the News. The jury gave prizes in ten themed categories to 63 photographers of 23 nationalities from.

Andy Spyra: Palestine in Panorama

Timo — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:15:10 +0000

→ Slideshow: 9 Photos

„Although it was my first time in Palestine I immediately felt familar with the prevailing situation: Soldiers, weapons, checkpoints, raids, oppression, frustration and the invisible presence of this thin layer of fear that hovers over everday life of the palestinian people – all this led to the same feeling of helplessness as in Kashmir. But still, the Westbank is a visually and emotionally interesting place full of diversity and energy where history is still being written.“

Andy Spyra, born 1984, works as a freelance photographer. His Kashmir series „Valley of Tears“ has been awarded multiple prizes. Flare already published his Report from a crisis region: A bloody day in Kashmir and the interview „Mut, an die eigenen Geschichten zu glauben“ (in German language). Watch more pictures on andyspyra.com.

Chris Burkard: The California Surf Project

Timo — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:31:03 +0000

→ Slideshow: 22 Photos

More than 1300 kilometers coastline and dozens of waves: Photographer Chris Burkhard and surf pro Erik Sonderquist traveled along the California Pacific coastline in an old Volkswagen bus. The result is the book The California Surf Project – a surf-road-trip-diary and an impressive portrait of California’s coastline.

California adjoins Oregon in the north and Mexico in the south. In between Highway 1 runs along much of the Pacific coast. Along that legendary route surf pro Eric Soderquist surfed California’s waves – always on his side, photographer Chris Burkhard. In an old Volkswagen T2 bus they traveled the highway and brought home a stunning photographic travelogue.

Their book The California Surf Project contains more than 200 photographs. They show surfer on the waves, fog over wooded coastline, trucks on the highway, details in the spindrift. The photographs’ atmosphere is consistent and harmonious. They never get boring because of the composition of surf-, road trip-, landscape- and detail shoots. As a little foretaste Flare shows 22 photographs (just click on the picture above),

Aside to the photographs The California Surf Project contains little texts about each station of the trip. Not a must-have, but fascinating nevertheless. In addition the book contains a DVD that is, compared to the book, disappointing. It shows that the focus of the trip was surfing and photography, not filming. The California Surf Project is available in Germany at Amazon for approximately 24 Euros and in the US for 35 $.

Links:
Hompage of The California Surf Project
Review of The California Surf Project on surfline.com

Camping in Kabul, Part V: Milker, golf ball and kalashnikov

Timo — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:21:47 +0000

A guest in Absurdistan: In the fith and final part of “Camping in Kabul” travel journalist Michael Obert learns three things: First, aid organizations are like cows drinking their own milk. Second, Afghans are the world’s best golfer. And third, having a German passport you even get served a Pepsi from a guy carrying a kalashnikov.

Establishments like the Latmo count among the many refined venues for the absurd, with actors who play their own audiences: employees of the countless registered aid organizations in Kabul, consultants with daily fees of a thousand dollars, bodyguards and other trigger happy security ninjas with perfect six packs. There are supposedly as many as 15.000 foreign civilians currently in Kabul, more than the US Army has stationed in the whole of Afghanistan, and three times as many as the 4800 Nato led troops, who are supposed to provide order and security in the capital.

Sitting by the pool, I get to talking to Rahraw. He is half Afghani with an Italian passport and works in radio. He says it’s a sad fact that most of the foreigners who live and work in Kabul don’t come any closer to the city than armored limousines, security services, and barbed wire allow. “But how are you going to help someone you never meet?” Rahraw asks, frowning. “How are you going to do something for someone you don’t know – or when you don’t know anything about the way they live or what they think or how they feel. Someone whose fears and joys are foreign to you?” Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghanis´ expectations of the international community have been high. But many fail to find visible results. They characterize the aid organizations as “cows that drink their own milk.”

Also the lifestyle of many foreigners in Kabul arouses the anger of the people: freely available alcohol, brothels disguised as Chinese restaurants, parties. Later that evening, Rahraw invites me to such a celebration. The music is loud – house, techno – the bar has a wide selection: South African Shiraz, French Bordeaux, cans of beer cooled in a barrel of ice water. And Johnny Walker Red Label, the same bottles that the merchants in the bazaar will later fill with cooking oil.

Forty, maybe fifty people dance on the well-lit terrace, as devout Muslims in the surrounding houses try to sleep. Their neighborhood is pitch-black. Only the spire of a minaret floats in the night sky – a luminous eye, admonishing. Somehow threatening. “Not safe here,” says Rahraw and points to the wall around the garden that’s barely three meters high. “For a rocket, no problem.” He’s right. The dance floor is an easy target for terrorists. It’s probably the most dangerous spot in all of Afghanistan.

But nobody thinks about it. We’re the international community, the world as guest in Absurdistan. We work for the United Nations, for governments, for editors, for aid organizations. We come from Europe and America as well as from Ethiopia, Columbia, India, and Turkey. We drink. We dance. We laugh. Should we be sad instead?

“We’re happy about everyone who comes to help us,” an Afghani art professor tells me a few days later. “But everyone should behave according to the customs in our land.” Integration. We attach a great deal of importance to it in Europe.

When the beer is empty, I leave. I wheeze the entire night. The Kabul-cough. I have to get out. Out of the city. Breathe. See a little nature: trees, water. The next morning, I take a taxi to a place that one would hardly expect to exist beyond the ravaged edges of this city: the Kabul Golf Club. “We get golfers from absolutely every country,” explains Afzal Abdul, my golf instructor, in traditional Afghani garb. “Just none from China, Russia, Pakistan. No French, or Greeks, or Koreans. We also don’t get any…”

Who are the best? “We Afghanis,” Abdul says in all earnestness.

The golf course belongs to a former warlord. It’s the only one in Afghanistan. The landmines were removed, three soviet tanks and a rocket launcher taken away. The only thing missing now is grass. The nine holes are barely distinguishable from the surrounding, dusty, sunburned hills; the greens are not green but black, designed with a mixture of sand and motor oil. The highlight has to be the bombed-out army bunker after the first hole. Two rounds cost ten dollars. One year’s membership, sixty. I leave it – much to the amusement of my instructor – at a couple of amateurish hits and wander up to Qargha Lake.

On the shores of this immense reservoir, a surprisingly idyllic landscape awaits. Afghani families have made themselves at home on platforms in the water. Protected from the wind by billowing curtains, they sit on rugs and smoke water pipes. Pakistani music drifts out of loudspeakers. Colorful paddleboats lie on the shore.

There comes a point when I can’t accept every invitation to have tea anymore, so I walk a little further along the shore and sit down on a lonely bench. I enjoy the clear lake air. Breathe. Without this scratching in my throat and lungs. Off in the distance, a motorboat draws a line of spray across the silver gray surface of the lake. Behind it rises the jagged ridge of the Hindu Kush. Its silhouette dissolves into a reddish haze. Moments of peace, of beauty. For the first time on this journey, I have the feeling that I’ve arrived, that I want to stay. Ah, Afghanistan!

I only notice the men after they’ve crowded around the bench I’m sitting on: six long bearded Pashtuns with AK-47s. They wear traditional Afghani garb and are scowling at me. Are they bandits? Some warlord’s soldiers? Taliban? “Passport! Passport!” barks their spokesman, a giant with a scar slashed across his right eye. I give him what he wants. The Pashtuns crowd around my passport to study it. Almost 200 countries produce passports. My life now seems to depend on whether I have one of the right ones.

All at once, the Pashtun slaps the passport shut, calls to a man walking along the shore with a vendor’s tray and orders Pepsi. A can for everybody. Even for me. He gives me my passport back and says, “Germany good! Germany very, very good!” They take me over to the street and insist on calling me a taxi. Because there are bandits here. Finally, a car comes. The Pashtuns stroke their guns and shake my hand. I get in and the taxi takes off – back to Kabul.

Camping in Kabul, Part IV: Osama bin Laden of the Bird Bazaar
Camping in Kabul, Part III: „Watch out, dude!“
Camping in Kabul, Part II: „Every hippie loved my super Payan Camping“
Camping in Kabul, Part I: Afghanistan – hot off the presses from Lonely Planet

Michael Obert, born in 1966, is a German book author and journalist who writes for Geo, Stern and other periodicals in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well for Courrier International (Paris), The Journal (New York) and Himal Southasian (Katmandu). He reports mainly from Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia, and has written books on the Islamic world. Obert currently lives in Berlin. „Camping in Kabul” was also published in his book „Die Ränder der Welt“.

Camping in Kabul, Part IV: Osama bin Laden of the Bird Bazaar

Timo — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:12:02 +0000

At Kabul’s Bird Bazaar travel journalist Michael Obert experiences the unbelievable – he meets Osama bin Laden. He learns that by now in Afghanistan the synonym for all evil is “Guantanmo”. And finally Obert has to answer himself the question why he didn’t think of bringing a bathing trunks.

Perhaps it’s the silence that wakes me up the following morning. Friday, the Islamic Sunday. The traffic that normally rumbles by my window in the Mustafa, today produces only a soft murmur. In the blue morning sky, doves glide peacefully over the city. Then, something strange happens: As if in response to a hidden signal, a flock of forty, perhaps fifty birds makes an abrupt right turn toward the south. A split second later a dull boom jingles the crystals on the lampshade in my room.

When I arrive in the breakfast room, other hotel guests are crowded in front of the television. Breaking news: CNN shows rubble lying around, clouds of smoke rising. A suicide bomber has hurled himself into the middle of a convoy. In Kabul, Afghanistan. The doves, the boom – still, it seems as if the news is coming out of some far away place. It’s only then that I start to feel goose bumps crawl over me.

Later the same day, I meet Osama bin Laden. In the Bird Bazaar in Kabul, behind the Pul-e-Kishti Mosque, in a narrow side street, little more than a dirt road, crammed with the booths of traders: There are hundreds of cages, chirping at every pitch, the sharp smell of droppings. The ground is littered with grain and seed. Thrushes, canaries, and parakeets, favored for their songs, puff themselves up. Partridges and pigeons ruffle their feathers. Flies, dust, and down ride a current of oven-hot air through the bars of the cages out into the street.

A bird dealer offers me a budgie imported from Germany: a thousand afghanis for it, roughly twenty dollars. He sees that I’m not interested but invites me anyway into a cave-like back room for tea. “Allow me to introduce myself, I’m Osama bin Laden”, he says and points to a second man holding a finch between each of his fingers. “And this here, this is Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban.” They double over with laughter. The most wanted man in the world, who in Kabul is called simply “OBL”, pours me a tea and yells in the direction of the other bird dealers out in the street, “And all of them – al Qaida!” Big laughs. “They all belong to al-Quaida!” The birds join in.

Is this gallows humor? Sarcasm? Ridicule? Difficult to say. In Kabul, jokes about the protagonists of the crisis in Afghanistan are popular. As I’m leaving, the bird dealers inform me that in Dari and Pashtu, the two most important languages in Afghanistan, a new Spanish word has come into use of late: Anything that one perceives as horrible or unbearable is called “Guantanamo”.

Beneath an enormous pack of cigarettes with the slogan “Enjoy the taste of America!” I flag down a taxi and head out of the pulsing downtown into Western Kabul – into a completely different world. It’s quiet. Dead quiet. Whole districts, destroyed in the civil war by feuding Mujahidin, lie in ruins. Houses that have almost become stone and desert again remind me of an archeological dig.

On a hilltop above the field of rubble, the Darul Aman Palace once flaunted its neoclassical magnificence. Now it’s a shot at, bombed out, and burned up shell of its former glory. Afghanis in rags, despite the danger of landmines, rummage for anything usable. In an archway blackened with soot, emaciated youths shoot heroin into their arms with rusty needles. A young woman clings to life in the delirium of some horrific skin disease that eats away her face.

Not more than 10 minutes later, I have to ask myself, how, when I was packing for Kabul, did I somehow forget to think about swim trunks. On Street 4, in the part of the city called Qala-e-Fatullah I find myself in L’Atmosphére again, yet another of Kabul’s parallel worlds. The “Latmo” is, according to the brand new Lonely Planet, one of the most beloved international meeting places in the city, a place for the young and the beautiful, a place one simply has to have experienced as a visitor.

Next to a swimming pool in a secluded garden, foreign bathers are able to relax, laying their bulletproof vests aside, for a moment, next to tropical cocktails, sun creams, and the newest Vogue. Two American women glide through turquoise green water. French people slurp Pastis. Journalists sit in the shade of pomegranate trees, typing stories about the attack this morning in their laptops in swimming suits, occasionally sipping a gin and tonic… heavy explosion… sip… one dead, countless injured… sip… terror, al-Quaida, Taliban.

An army helicopter flies in from the west and circles around the pool, the only place in Afghanistan with a lot of half-naked women. The pilots prefer to cruise the Latmo on Friday, the Muslim Sunday, when the most beach babes are out. Afghanis? They have to remain outside. Because of the ban on alcohol for locals – so the owners claim.

Camping in Kabul, Part III: „Watch out, dude!“
Camping in Kabul, Part II: „Every hippie loved my super Payan Camping“
Camping in Kabul, Part I: Afghanistan – hot off the presses from Lonely Planet

Camping in Kabul, Part III: “Watch out, dude!”

Timo — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:01:56 +0000

Since the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001, camping is back in. This time behind reinforced concrete, sandbags, and barbed wire. Travel journalist Michael Obert asks himself if the tourists are self-destructive adrenaline junkies – and meets a German soldier who can hardly cope with meeting an unarmed fellow countryman.

At the end of 1978, the hippy-dream came to an abrupt halt. Under cover of night, fighter jets flew in over Kabul, some of their bombs falling scarcely 100 yards from Karimi’s campgrounds. On the next day, the hippies were gone. The communists staged a coup and seized power. When Islamic forces rose up against them, the Soviets moved in. There followed three decades of war, and civil war, that reduced the country to rubble. And now, finally – Karimi takes off his cap puts it over his knee – we’ve come full circle.

Since the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001, camping is back in Kabul. This time behind reinforced concrete, sandbags, and barbed wire. White Toyota Landcruisers (the most visible sign of the presence of international aid organizations in conflict areas of the world) pack the streets of downtown Kabul at noon. The United Nations and its retinue of do-gooders have landed on Kabul – and with them the harbingers of globalization: speculators and tourists. The freaks are back on Chicken Street.

Tanya and Richard, for example. Tanya is a nutritionist from South Africa, Richard a political scientist from Australia, both in their early thirties. I get to know them during lunch in the Herat, an Afghani restaurant. Richard wears a full beard, the local style of longshirt, and traditional, loose-fitting short pants. Tanya, white clothes and a headscarf. They came to Kabul via Pakistan on their yearlong trip through Asia, traveling over the Khyber Pass and through the tribal lands in an overfilled minibus. “Afghanistan has fascinated us ever since university,” she says beaming. “This trip to Kabul is something we’ve dreamed of for a long time.” Are they crazy? Self-destructive adrenaline junkies? Over the course of our conversation, it becomes clear that they are genuinely interested in Afghanistan and wanted to see with their own eyes what it’s like here.

Later, Alan joins us. He’s Irish, in his mid-fifties. He’s backpacking through Central Asia, having arrived in Kabul via Tajikistan. “The media always shows the same images,” he says as he takes grilled pieces of lamb from a skewer and puts them onto his plate. “Suicide bombings, kidnappings, these video messages from al-Qaida. And then you’re standing in front of the vegetable stand in the bazaar, you want a couple of tomatoes, and the guy is smiling at you. And all of the images you’ve got through the media just suddenly fall away and all that’s left is the interaction between two human beings – as human beings.” That alone, he tells me, makes all of the risks of traveling to Afghanistan worthwhile.

And the risks are considerable. The official warnings from governmental organizations all over the world make it sound as if any foreigner who so much as sets foot on Afghani soil is as good as dead: “…the threat of terrorism or criminally motivated acts of violence…” “…terrorist attacks throughout the country…” “…armed robbery in Kabul, even during the day…” “kidnappings” “…interurban travel only in armed convoys…” This afternoon, as I make my way down to the bazaar surrounded by a stream of Afghanis, there suddenly appear in front of me several armored cars. Above, a soldier cowers behind a machine gun. It’s then that I notice the flags on the sides of the car and understand: These are my countrymen. These are Germans.

Just identify yourself, say anything. “Hey. How’s it going?” I hear myself saying. “You okay up there?”

The man takes his hands away from his weapon, shoves his sunglasses up onto his forehead and calls out, in a Berlin accent – horrified, “What… man, what the hell are ya doin’ down there? You can’t just… just run around here like that.” The convoy springs back into motion, and the soldier calls out as it pulls away, “Hey, just take care of yourself!” I have the feeling the soldier experiences Afghanistan from the perspective of a prisoner. Maybe he can’t imagine in his armored world that out here, there are also completely normal, peaceful Afghanis.

A few minutes later in Zarnegar Park: On a bench, in the shadows of a pine tree, a bearded man sits in traditional Afghani clothing – simple, cream-colored – with his two small boys. In front of the bench, standing in the dust, is a plastic leg. The foot is hidden in a brown, woolen sock and a leather sandal; the rest is a bare, shiny, white. A leg without a body. The man sees me looking vexed, smiles, and with a gesture, invites me to sit down. The boys slide over. I sit. Nobody really seems to know what to do next. We continue to sit in silence. Then, without any introduction, he says the following to me in English: “It happened in my house.”

During the civil war, Qasem, who owned an electrical appliance store, fled, like many Kabulis, to Peshawar in neighboring Pakistan. Under the strict control of the Taliban, the security situation quickly improved. He came back and cried tears of joy, he says, but when he got home, he saw his house in ruins. He went inside to see if anything could be saved – that’s when the mine exploded that tore off his leg.

Again, we are silent. Afghanistan is littered with millions of landmines and unexploded munitions. No one knows exactly where they are. Every year, they claim hundreds of Afghanis’ lives, among them many children. Qasem leans back against the bench seat. Beneath his robe, the stump of his leg slips out. It has healed well. He takes his cap from his head and hangs it on the prosthesis as if on a hat stand. All at once, he says, “Do you see the trees, the sky, the birds, the rose blossoms around the fountain?” Then after a while: “I could have died. Instead, life has given me two sons.”

Camping in Kabul, Part II: „Every hippie loved my super Payan Camping“
Camping in Kabul, Part I: Afghanistan – hot off the presses from Lonely Planet