These strange and disorienting photos are by Richard Mosse of Eastern Congo. Here’s the New Yorker Photobooth blog’s explanation of his process:

Mosse used Aerochrome, an obsolete technology, to create an alternative image of the complex social and political dynamics of the country. The film, designed in connection with the United States military during the Cold War, reveals a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can perceive. He aims “to shock the viewer with this surprising bubblegum palette, and provoke questions about how we tend to see, and don’t see, this conflict.”

“I saw this soldier lingering as his commanders talked nearby, and became intrigued by his character; his posture seemed cocky yet vulnerable. His gaze defies the camera,” Mosse wrote. “I knew the vegetation would turn bright pink, and I felt this imposition on his masculinity to be a kind of double violation.”

Generally, I don’t like “gimmicky” photos. Fish eye lens drive me crazy, over saturated images can hide poor composition, and stylization can trump content. But I really like these images. As a photographer interested in Africa, I’ve seen a billion of photos of Eastern Congo. Few stick with me but these ones do. They utilize an alternative process for a purpose and a reason. And in my eyes, they do so successfully.

Readers — do you like these photos? Or do you think they don’t say all that much?

One of the things I started to think about when I was taking the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul was the idea that photography isn’t just something I want to do when I leave my house and go somewhere to take photographs.

Instead, I want to document the world around me.

After I left Istanbul I went to Tel Aviv to visit my grandmother. She’s always been a strong woman and a role model to me. When I was a kid she read to me for hours on end. The Ramona books were my favorites. Until a couple of years ago, she still went on archeological digs around the Mediterranean, worked in the archives to a museum about the diaspora in Tel Aviv, and attended lectures regularly.

Now, she’s still healthy and active. But she has Alzheimer’s, and I know things will only get worse and not better. She’s still the strong woman I remember, but the problem is all that she doesn’t remember.

As most of you probably already know, on Sunday night a series of bombs went off in Kampala at crowded locations where people were watching the World Cup. Over 70 people are already dead and a similar number are injured. Many are pointing fingers at the al-Shabaab.

My heart and thoughts are with everyone who lost someone, and with everyone in Kampala and elsewhere who no longer feels quite as safe.

I found Jason Florio’s work when checking out the winners of the New York Photo Festival. His work stood out among the other projects immediately, and I soon found myself checking out an extended version of a Short Walk Around the Gambia on his homepage and behind the scenes stories on his blog. Definitely worth your time and bandwidth.

As part of PRI’s package about Liberia, Jason Margolis went to the Ducor Hotel and recorded some audio and I produced this slideshow with his piece and my images.

Those of you who read this blog regularly are probably sick of me posting about the Ducor Hotel, but I guarantee this will be my last post about it.  I’m sad about that though. I’ve been out of Liberia for a couple of weeks, and while I was gone they cleared the building of the last couple of squatters and have started renovating the building.

That makes this piece my swan song for the Ducor. Maybe one day when it’s a new fancy hotel I’ll have a swim in the pool. But I’ll missing playing with the kids racing down the rough tile on flattened out jerry cans.

If Alexis Okeowo tried to sell me a mixed tape for $100, I’d buy it. Probably for more. Check out this amazing video by Baloji that she linked to yesterday.

That’s the first paragraph of the short story that won the 2009 Caine Prize, a beautiful and sad meditation on life in a refugee camp, used tshirts, and other things. A lot of great short fiction by African authors is available on their website. Definitely worth your time.

I’ve now been to Harper, a small town in southeast Liberia, twice. Visually, it’s a fascinating place. I hope to keep going back there to continue this documentary project. See more images on glennagordon.com.

Liberia’s past and future have been and continue to defined by an antebellum American power structure transported to Africa. That all went up in flames – literally – during Liberia’s civil war in a way that has eerie similarities to the American south and our Civil War.

Harper is an amazing place. It’s a two day drive (or one hour flight) from Monrovia, and was once the capital of an autonomous state called Maryland, the original home to some of the freed American slaves who later founded Liberia.  Now, all that’s left of that power structure is vestiges of burned out mansions, a stone mason temple filled with stagnant water, and tributes to a small town boy who made it big, former President Tubman.

Liberia’s story is very much about its relationship to America, and how freed Americans slaves created a social hierarchy here that was an underlying factor in the two decades of destruction and war.

The visual remnants of that legacy in Harper are decaying every day and will soon disintegrate. As they disappear, so too does evidence of an important part of Liberia’s past. I hope to document this place as it is now, and before a new generation of Liberians won’t be able to know where they came from, and subsequently, where they are going.

I love blogging – I love the instant feedback loop, the way this space has become a scarp book for my web wanderings and a vanity press for all that unpublished (and occasionally published) work, and being part of an online community of people who care about and think intelligently about different issues on this vast continent.

But I also have this other website that is ultimately even more important to me than this blog. And that’s www.glennagordon.com – a portfolio of my work as a photographer and journalist. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve uploaded a ton of new content. There’s a new section of my multimedia work, new tearsheets, and new photo essays and stories.

I hope you’ll all take a look. Thanks.

Taken from here and here.