07/13
2012
2012
The folks over at Guatephoto just sent me a message about their 2012 festival – looks like a great event! Definitely worth checking out and submitting – deadline is August 31.
I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
This blog is named after a found object — a plastic lion that was in a crate of discarded items a friend and a few other artists had gathered. I sat on their roof in Nakasero, Kampala back in 2006, sorting through the crate. On that day, I was looking for something. “You are lost!” Ugandas say. But, on that day, I’d found this discarded kid’s toy, made in China on the cheap, that somehow ended up in East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint-chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
The folks over at Guatephoto just sent me a message about their 2012 festival – looks like a great event! Definitely worth checking out and submitting – deadline is August 31.
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of our world’s newest country — the Republic of South Sudan.
The new wires were in full swing. We’re swimming in photos of crowds with flags, individuals with flags, President Salva Kiir, and other festivities.
None of these images tell viewers anything other than what the South Sudanese flag and president look like.
Resorting to short-hands like, “it’s so complicated!” does little other than condemn photographers who had a couple of hours to take the pictures their editors want to see. Of course it’s complicated, but what does that complication actually look like?
Perhaps in a different media economy, we’d have seen more work highlighted in mainstream outlets by some of the photographers who have spent the last year documenting the new country and the years prior in the contentious region.
For viewers who want more than flags and festivities, here are some other options well worth your bandwidth.
Pete Muller – Into Existence: South Sudan
Trevor Snapp: Birth of a Nation
Sarah Elliott: Welcome to South Sudan
Dominic Nahr: Sudan’s border wars
Shannon Jensen – 193rd Country
Tim McKulka: From Khartoum to Juba
Adriane Ohanesian: South Sudan’s Occupation of Heglig
New post up on Guernica Daily about the always interesting Andrea Stultiens.
In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.
Amazing images from space, microscopes, and life slowed down.
The brilliant Teju Cole, blogging for the New Inquiry on about iconoclasism, the power of images and the destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu:
Images are powerful. They can bring people into such a pitch of discomfort that violence ensues, and iconoclasm carries within itself two paradoxical traits: thoroughness and fury…. iconoclastic movements is that they are never about theology alone. They include politics, struggles for power, the effort to humiliate an enemy, and a demonstration of iconoclasts’ own neuroses. Behind iconoclastic bravado is a terror of magic, a belief in dead saints no less than that of iconophiles and, crucially, a historical anxiety that, in the Timbuktu case, is about presenting the bona fides of Ansar Dine to its Wahhabi models in Saudi Arabia and to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
That which doesn’t speak dumbfounds. After all, who can tell what such objects are thinking? Best to destroy the inscrutable, the ancient, if one is to truly usher in a pure new world. So, the invaders continue their work in Timbuktu with enthusiasm and good cheer, smashing pots, breaking bricks, rattling at the doors of the mosque. It takes a lot of work to silence silent objects. But already it is clear that not only the people watching from behind the gate are consumed with fear.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day… Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon.
Digital Diary: Talking about Death Online
when it comes to talking about death and grief in a non-abstract way — that is, when dealing with the loss of a family member, a partner or close friend — it gets much, much trickier. It doesn’t have an appropriatereaction face, a photo that you can reblog, a hashtag…. It’s endemic of a larger problem in the way we are encouraged – and discouraged – to express and present ourselves online. This is more than trying to decide how carefully polished you want your online image to be. It’s about the way social software is slyly engineered to get us to participate– we are encouraged to brag about our lives, and present ourselves as living our best lives each day and year. It’s not built to handle sadness or any deeper or more complex emotion than that.
Great new work by Joe Penney from Mauritania.
Football’s Lost Boys — Nigerian footballers stuck in Istanbul
In a hypothetical universe where I had £5000 that I had to spend on one object, it would definitely be a print of Paula Scher’s amazing map.
In her TED talk, Scher talks about play and politics, solem work and serious work, growth, change, and the inevitable question of what’s next.
Five feel good minutes of universal connected’ness. Highlights include North Korea, Solomon Islands, and Matt’s own backyard.
Blurred faces from Syria that remind us of better times.