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© Poulomi Basu
The border areas between India and Pakistan are dangerous and in many areas lawless.
Indian women have very recently become part of the military response to arms dealing, drug smuggling and people trafficking.
“On September 2009, India’s first ever batch of women soldiers of The Border Security Armed Force were deployed in these infamous borders of Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir as the country’s first line of defence,” says Basu.
Poulomi Basu spent time with the young women (aged 17-25), both Hindus and Muslims, at boot camps, homes and on the front-line documenting their “transformation from women to soldiers.”
Basu believes these women are not only fighting their enemies but also the military tradition and the attitudes of a patriarchal society. Less than 1% of India’s 1.2 million armed forces are women.
To Conquer Her Land is about new forms of stress – related to combatant life – that has never existed for Indian women before in history. Basu says To Conquer Her Land wrestles with “intricate issues of conflict, psychological warfare, class, youth, gender, love, peace, the concept of home, an undefined idea of patriotism, and the strength of the mind.”
The series is a beguiling mix of fine art portraiture, B&W documentary images and PJ style theatre-of-war shots. The mixture can be quite disorienting; blurry B&W akin to Japanese art photography interrupted by delicate double and group portraits in colour. Basu even goes all Robert-Capa on us!
© Poulomi Basu
ALSO WORTH A LOOK
Photographer, Rachel Papo’s Serial #3817131 follows young Israeli girls through the mandatory military service.
Papo and Basu’s work have things in common, although Papo’s work is concerned with her own biography. Papo says, “Serial #3817131 represents my effort to come to terms with the experiences of being a soldier from the perspective of an adult. My service had been a period of utter loneliness, mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all. Through the camera’s lens, I tried to reconstruct facets of my military life, hopeful to reconcile matters that had been left unresolved.”
“Images à la Sauvette (The Decisive Moment) is a monograph of Cartier-Bresson’s best work, but it has overriding unifying factors that elevate it into a great photobook. The first is the concept of the ‘decisive moment’ itself, which defines the elegance of Cartier-Bresson’s imagery… No one achieved it more often or better, but allied with it was Cartier-Bresson’s thoroughly clear-eyed view of the world-astute, non-sentimental, beautiful, profound… Images à la Sauvette is one of the greatest of all photobooks”
Parr & Badger, The Photobook: A History, Vol. I, p.208
Last year, I mentioned the time I found one of the greatest photography monographs of all time in a bin full of donated books at Seattle’s Books to Prisoners program.
Well, now it’s up for sale on eBay. At $850 (or buy it now $1,300) it’s an absolute steal.
So, if you’ve got some spare change and fancy covering the postage on 400 packages of books to US prisoners, then pop on over and buy it.
Says Trolley Books:
The Arabic version of Alixandra Fazzina’s latest book A Million Shillings – Escape from Somalia (Trolley, 2010) was officially launched last Friday the 14th of January at the government buildings in Aden, Yemen, by António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Whilst the English version of the book keeps getting much attention and critical acclaim, both by the media and official institutions, it is hoped that the Arabic version will help it reach an even wider audience across the world, and to continue to advocate for the cause of these people who deserve a better treatment and better conditions, both at home and in the receiving countries.
The case for why this important book should be published in the language of the lands which it describes is as huge as my embarrassment that it had never, would never have, occurred to me.
My embarrassment is compounded by the fact that I rarely ever think about photobooks published outside of the English language.
FURTHER READING/VIEWING
Book review: A Million Shillings: Escape From Somalia by Alixandra Fazzina, Sean O’Hagan, the Guardian.
Gallery: A Million Shillings: Escape From Somalia, Alixandra Fazzina photographs of refugees and migrants from civil war-torn Somalia, the uprooted people who risk all to cross the Gulf of Aden in search of a better life.
Exodus, British Journal of Photography article on the work of photojournalists covering migration. Details extreme danger of Fazzina’s work in Somlalia.
Review: A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia by Alixandra Fazzina, by Wayne Ford.
A Million Shillings also made it on to Sean O’Hagan and Colin Pantall‘s Best Books Lists for 2010.
© Alixandra Fazzina
“It was everything: kidnapping people, shelling civilian quarters, bombs, torturing, electrical shots, killing in the streets or killing in the prisons. And I did not think that what I was doing was bad.”
– Testimony of a perpetrator of crimes featured in ‘Lebanon’s Missing‘, a film by Dalia Khamissy
When Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit came across Dalia Khamissy‘s work from Lebanon, he was hooked and worked to present her work as a radio documentary combining Khamissy’s commentary with her photographs and film footage.
Ben hopes it will be the first of many such collaborations/presentations with the BBC World Service.
In my email inbox, from Ben:
Today, [Lebanon’s Missing] the first documentary and photofilm was published. It will be played worldwide seven times on the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4.
It’s about the estimated 17,000 people kidnapped during the Lebanese civil war and never seen again. It’s a genuinely brilliant presentation by Dalia, with some great photos and video for the film (which is really meant as a teaser for the documentary).
Few know about the Missing in Lebanon, which is why I think it’s an important story to be heard. Not because the broadcast will change anything dramatically but because memory is resistance against the same atrocities being repeated.
Please take five minutes to watch the film and, if it moves you, download the podcast of the documentary. Dalia deserves enormous respect for this work. It was a brave story for her to take on.
Hopefully, the BBC will commission more programs of this nature, which would be great for photographers working on important stories who would like to reach a genuinely large audience.
I hope so too Ben, and I hope the duck magic becomes a permanent fixture on the World Service wires.
FURTHER READING
Conscientious: A Conversation with Dalia Khamissy
Following up on yesterdays activities, the Guardian has produced this video about Richard Nicholson‘s series Analog.
Nieman Labs reports:
“Starting in February, The Atlantic will have a new section on its website: In Focus, a photography blog featuring “photo essays on the major news and trends of the day.” Editing the site will be Alan Taylor, who’s moving to the magazine from the Boston Globe, where, for the past two-and-a-half years, he edited Boston.com’s celebrated photo-essay feature, The Big Picture.”
The incredible thing about this story is the figures it detailed. The Big Picture had 8 million page views per month. That is an incredible number of eyes on an incredible number of images. Rather naively, I’d never imagined that scale of internet image distribution … and I don’t really know what it means.
Jeremy Ramsden © Richard Nicholson
I was pleased as punch to feature Richard Nicholson‘s project Analog today on Wired’s Raw File.
When Nicholson began the project in 2006, there were 204 photo printing labs in and around London, printing images from film stock to paper. By 2009, only six remained.
Nicholson: “Each image was made in total darkness. I would switch off the lights, open the camera’s shutter, and then walk around the darkroom illuminating the scene with multiple bursts from a handheld flashgun.”
See the 12 image gallery and read our full interview: Photo Enlargers Loom Like Dinosaurs of the Film Age [Here’s a free tip. Click the view all button to see everything on one page.]
Considering the objects of extinction, it’s no surprise that there are many photographers composing photographic obituaries of the analog craft. Kindred projects to Nicholson’s Analog include Michel Campeau’s Darkroom, John Cyr’s Developer Trays and Robert Burley’s The Disappearance of Darkness.
IF YOU’RE IN LONDON
Analog — The Last One Out, Please Turn On the Light is on show at Riflemaker Gallery, 79 Beak St., Regent Street, London W1F 9SU, until March 11. E-mail: info@riflemaker.org.
© Maja Daniels
You may have noticed that I like to talk not only about prisons but also about other total institutions.
Maja Daniels‘ Into Oblivion photographed on a Protected Unit of a French geriatric care institution “attempts to create a discussion about our institutionalized, modern way of living as well as the use of confinement as an aspect of care.”
Many of the images in Daniels’ series feature patients at the door to the secured wing:
“Ruled according to the “principle of precaution”, residents in the unit can circulate freely within the secured area but due to a lack of activities and a limited presence of carers in the ward, the locked door becomes the centre of attention for the elders who question the obstruction and attempt to force it open. The daily struggle with the door, damaged due to repeated attempts to pick the lock, can last for hours.”
Prison Photography 