So I am quite surprsed the stats have gone up over the last 4 months! How ironic to think that the blog is more viewed when its creator is taking care of it anymore.

For those who wonder/wondered/are wondering, I am still very much interested by photography yet have expanded the interest to other visual art forms, in particular painting, architecture, cinematogrpahy and interior design.

I also recently realized I enjoy more being passive than active. This may mean I may end up being a collectionneur - but not until my boss give me a few extra bucks for my time in the office!

On a recent trip to Japan - Sunrise over tokyo

Unfortunately, it will continue for a while longer. As some of you may know, I have taken more professional responsibilities recently and a fresh academic objective regrettably means I will have even less time to dedicated to the blog.

This comes at a time where I recognize the readers count potential is promising: regardless of the poor update rhythm, the last 6 months have been the best in terms of unique page views.

I sincerely hope now this pause will not become definitive.

Keep your ‘photographic’ eye open.

The project, patronized by Medicos Del Mundo – a Spanish NGO – was awarded this year by a World Press Photo for best story.

Yet for the photographer, the portraits – beautifully created with a blend of night, flash and long exposures – were not enough. So he recorded his subjects’ testimonials.

I selected 3 pictures for this post, as an invitation to go through the more than 30 portraits available here.

Djimi Elghalia - Vice president of the Saharawi Association of Victims of Grave Human Rights Violations Committed by the Moroccan State (ASVDH), pictured near El Aaiun city, in Moroccan controlled Western Sahara

I was born in Agadir, Morocco in 1961. My family were among many who fled the climate and social conditions in Western Sahara to look for work in Morocco. A lot of Saharawis used to stay at our home and because of this my grandmother was arrested in 1984. She was sixty. We never saw her again. In 1986 I moved to El Aaiun for work after I graduated in agriculture. The next year I was arrested along with five hundred others for trying to organise a demonstration on independence before a big United Nations visit. They held eighty including nineteen women. They interrogated me and used physical and psychological torture. They would put chemicals in my hair which made me faint. I was electrocuted on the arms and back and was bitten by dogs. Later they would laugh and say that there are no dogs and I must be imagining things. It was the same thing you see in Iraq but here we have no media attention to show it.

I was released in 1991 along with three hundred and twenty four people, some of whom had been held since the invasion, seventy eight were women. It was because of pressure from international organisations like Amnesty International. From 1994-98 we, the victims, tried to engage in the field of human rights but we faced a lot of harassment. In 2005 we established the Saharawi Association of Victims of Grave Human Rights Violations Committed by the Moroccan State (ASVDH) . The Moroccan authorities prevent the association from working despite the court allowing us to work. We work from our homes using the internet and we host international visitors but still Morocco harass us and now foreigners are not allowed to visit us.

We have a conviction that we will achieve independence but it depends on international pressure, our case it very just and fair. It [pressure] will come from the allies of Morocco, like France, the US and Spain. We have no direct contact with Polisario but we share the same gaols. As a defender of human rights we are all about a peaceful solution. Whether the Polisario want to go back to war is up to them but as a civil society we are calling for a peaceful solution and this will come from international pressure

—

Mohamed Lamin Slot - Ambulance driver, pictured in the desert near Rabouni refugee camp, Algeria

I was born in El Aaiun camp in 1983. I grew up here, we got accustomed to it. I studied in Algeria for six years. I started working as an ambulance driver in 2005, it is a great job and I like it. There is a lot of tiredness but I like to help people. It took one year to train in first aid, it was very difficult at first, you remember many bad things like blood and injuries but now it’s normal for me. We never rest there are always emergencies, maybe there are eight or nine cases per day. I work from Saturday to Friday and work the whole week even sleeping in the hospital, then I have the following week off. I get almost no sleep during that week. The hardest thing is when people die on the way to the hospital, you wish you could have got them there but you couldn’t.

Over time I know the best routes between the camps. I once got lost in the sand storm with a patient, we were very afraid. I was carrying an old man to Auserd [refugee camp], the storm came after sunset so we could not see anything, I was careful and found the tracks, eventually and we got there in the end. To drive here you must know the tracks, it takes practise, different tracks go to different camps so you have to know the right one. There is one road built by the Algerians but it only goes from Rabouni to Twenty Seven [of February refugee camp] and Smara [refugee camp], it is a big help for us. Dakhla [refugee camp] is the worst place to have an emergency, it is very far, there is a road but it doesn’t reach it. There is one ambulance per camp with two drivers. Its not enough.
We expect a lot and wish for many things but we haven’t seen tangible results. Peace is very nice but it’s better to back to war. No one wants to die but it’s too long to wait. We are born here and are now grown up, it’s too long. We are not of any importance to the United Nations.

—

Brahim Mohamed Fadin - Pictured in sand dunes near Smara refugee camp, Algeria

I don’t like to be in the refugee camps, I know that the Algerians receive us and help us for many years but I want to be free in my own country. I am in High School in Algeria and Saharawis always get the best grades there. We are learning for our people, we learn to spread our history and in Algeria we can do that. I’m studying maths and my goal is to be a engineer. I wish I could help my country, its needs a lot of specialists. I would rather live in the camps than live under moroccan control.

Everyone seeks for peace and the white flag. I like war only if it brings peace and I am prepared to give my life if it would give us real peace. I don’t like war in the Sahara because everyone knows the Sahara is a peaceful place and I want Saharawis and Morroccans to live peacefully as states like Algeria and Mauritania, as friends. It is my point of view that it was better to keep fighting to free our land than to stop and let others take our resources. If we gain our independence we will be one the best states in the world because we are known for our solidarity and friendship and hospitality. Life taught us a lot because of everything, all the suffering, there are no people like us anywhere in the world.

—

Source: New York Times’ Lens blog.

Related Articles

• Morocco must leave Western Sahara | John Hilary (guardian.co.uk)
• Morocco and Western Sahara (barthsnotes.wordpress.com)
• The Imperial Sultanate of Morocco & The Western Sahara (moorishwanderer.wordpress.com)
• Ghosts of the Sahara (thedailybeast.com)
• Sahara talks inch forward but no progress on status (reuters.com)
• Western Sahara: The last colony in Africa (africaunchained.blogspot.com)

Holga D is a digital camera inspired from the extremely popular cult of Holga and other toy cameras of its kind.

Even though it’s a digital camera, it retains the qualities and simplicity of the original Holga camera and brings back the joy and delayed gratification associated with good old analog photography.

At the moment this is only a concept and you can find out more here.

Philippe Ramette scours the world alone – seas, deserts, mountains, seabed – carefully observing it and placing himself in meditative positions which defy gravity and logic. His work is “an invitation to experiment: with weightlessness, with perception, with falling”.

Discreet and seemingly unflappable, he possesses a devastating wit, combining profound thinking on art and the human condition and making him one of the greatest contemporary artists, in the same vein as Duchamp, Dada and Michaux – mixed with a touch of Buster Keaton.

Ramette is a meticulous and mischievous thinker who takes language literally and makes us sway from the rational to the irrational.

Exhibition: Each of Philippe Ramette’s performances is the subject of a photograph representing the work itself.

- FrenchMay.com

From 28 April to 29 May 2011 – Avenue of Stars, Tsim Sha Tsui – Free Admission

The Conversation

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Tinta!

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Impromptu Christmas tree

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Altophobia

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I wear heels bigger than your dick!!

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My accessory on four legs

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I I TTTTTT I I II IIII I II I III IIIIIII III

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Vanishing smell

Vanishing smell

Canon has announced the EF 8-15mm f/4 L USM, the world’s first fisheye zoom lens to offer both ‘circular’ and ‘full frame’ images.

- dpreview.com

It delivers 180° diagonal angle of view images for all EOS SLR cameras with imaging formats ranging from full-frame to APS-C, and provides 180° circular fisheye images for full-frame EOS models.

- canon.com

All is said. This is one I’d be happy to get in my bag.

Links:

• Canon U.S.A. official page
• Available mid-May, for US$ 1,399 at B&H

Here is a selection of my favorites yet make sure you visit the complete set here.

It is not the first time Jeff Bridges carry his Wide-Lux camera on sets, and the website also features shots taken on Tron:Legacy and other recent movies starring the ‘Dude’.

Related Articles

• 5 Things You May Not Know About Jeff Bridges (men.webmd.com)
• Jeff Bridges On Hailee Steinfeld: ‘True Grit’ Co-Star ‘Mature’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• LOL: ‘True Grit,’ Subtitled (slashfilm.com)

The complete winners list and credits are available on the official website of the foundation.

For some obscure reasons and as far as I recall, I had never heard of Bill Cunningham until the Khaki Chronicles and the Sartorialist posted (respectively here and here) the trailer of the upcoming movie about the photographer. Instant buzz in the very narrow man-fashion blogosphere, the story and the character of this man intrigues me.

Bill Cunningham New York poster

Now I need to find a way to catch the movie.

Related Articles

• It’s Time to Get Excited for Bill Cunningham New York (observer.com)
• Bill, Please (style.com)
• Bill Cunningham New York (coolhunting.com)

We all perform.

It’s what we do for each other all the time,

deliberately or unintentionally.

It’s a way of telling about ourselves

in the hope of being recognized

as what we’d like to be.

- Richard Avedon

• http://www.younggalleryphoto.com/photography/burdeny/burdeny.html

David Burdeny

Related Articles

• One Photographer’s Harrowing Journey to the World’s Most Remote Active Volcano (treehugger.com)

His career started in illustration but he made the right move with photography (and later cinematography), having worked for the most important fashion magazines and brands such as Dior and Bulgari among others.

Links:

renehabermacher.com

John Lee Hooker

Seliger is well known already for his portraits of celebrity and worked for publications such as GQ & Vanity Fair. He also also a big experience in movie production and direction, having made several shorts for musicians.

Kurt Cobain

Heidi Klum #2

Leonardo Di Caprio

Keith Richards

Christopher Walken

Giorgio Armani

Bull Rider

WTC #1

• Mark Seliger’s website
• Mark Seliger on the Young Gallery website (with a short biography), which represents the artist and from which all pictures here were borrowed.

Mark Seliger

Gifted in several ways – his unique family background, his self-admitted luck, his creativity of course, and multi-polar passions – Beard uses photography as the foundation for works ranging from collages to film-making or acting. His personal life takes such a part into his creations, differentiate the two would be a tedious challenge. He brought fashion and supermodels into African landscapes as much as he brought Africa’s nature to the West, in a complete new way.

Tour d’horizon of his career and his life in a couple of dates, books, locations, wives and style.

Peter Hill Beard was born on 22nd January 1938 in New York. Raised in a wealthy family, from his great grandfather – at the origin of several industrial successes during the late 19th century -, to his mother, figure-skating champion, and his step-grandfather, tobacco industrialist. His father was working in New York City for a financial institution.

Early on, Beard takes up photography – with a Voightlander camera given to him by his grandmother, probably in 1945 – and at about 10 years old, he starts making collages. These 2 forms of expression will quickly blend together.

In 1955, Beard takes his first trip to Africa. South Africa first, then Hluhluwe and iMfolozi parks, Bechouanaland (now Botswana), Gorongoza Park (Mozambique), Madagascar and finally Kenya. Some of the pictures taken that summer would later end up in “The End of the Game“, his trademark book and masterpiece (keep reading).

Back in the U.S., he starts studying pre-med at Yale, before switching majors. He would later say:

It soon became painfully clear that humans were the disease, so I decided to major in art.

After his junior year at Yale, Beard would return to Africa in 1960 and on the way read Karen Blixen‘s Out of Africa, whom he would meet and photograph a few years later. On this second trip, he met key persons within the African parks’ administration and surprisingly enough, went on hunting with some of them. He also admitted shooting animals himself.

Introduced by Karen Blixen, he worked at Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, during which time he photographed elephants and rhinos, and continuing his collages. First published in 1965,”The End of the Game” documents the hunting practices and the hunters in Africa.

During this period, he acquires land (~ 182,000 square meters) near Ngong Hills in Kenya and calls it Hog Ranch. Karen Blixen is among his neighbors and Hog Ranch is from then his home base in East Africa.

In the late sixties, he participates on a study of elephants and hippopotamuses population and until 1968, study crocodiles for the Kenya game department. From this latter experience Beard will publish “Eyelids of Morning– The Mingled Destines of Crocodiles and Men” in 1973.

Beard was arrested in 1969 by the Kenyan police for “assault and wrongful confinement” of a poacher at Hog Ranch. Years before, Beard punched a suni (small African antelope) poacher on his property, after some arguments. The incident did not make wave for a long time but eventually came back. Beard would eventually be condemned to 18 months and lashes but was released after 10 days in the hole and spared the lashes…

Though going back to the U.S. several times, notably purchasing the Montauk Mill estate, the early 70′s are also spent in Africa, culminating with the photography of dead elephants in Kenya.

Truman Capote would eventually collaborates with Beard on “It Shall Soon Be Here”, a book about the Rolling Stones’ tour “Exiles on Main Street” in 1972. The book was never actually published.

In 1977, Beard updates “The End of The Game” and prepare his first major exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York City: a mix of photographs, elephant carcasses, burned diaries, taxidermy, African artifacts, books and personal memorabilia.

A few months earlier, his property of Montauk Mill burns down, turning into ashes years of diaries, souvenirs and original works. The property was an essential meeting point for the jet-setters and Studio 54 fans, had Andy Warhol as a neighbor and received the visits of all the must-seen New-York and U.S. scene of the time. Peter Beard’s social life is in full part of his legend, cultivating the paradoxes of a raw life at Hog Ranch with an all-luxury American lifestyle.

Beard’s milieu consisted of Andy Warhol, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwill, Truman Capote, and Bianca Jagger who all lived and rented houses in Montauk and Manhattan, NY in the 1970s and 1980s. Beard also had a close relationship with the late painter, Francis Bacon (painter). He photographed Bacon and was also the model for several of Bacon’s paintings. Beard was traveling with and photographing the Rolling Stones on the infamous Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America.

- from Wikipedia

Mick Jagger, 1972

Truman Capote in Montauk, 1972

Mick Jagger, Catherine Deneuve and Andy Warhol at Montauk, 1975

Beard married Minnie Cushings in the 1967, then to Cheryl Tiegs (top picture below) – to whom he refers as ‘wife number 2′ because of a funny divorce term – Beard finally marries Nejma Khanum (bottom picture below from 2007). Their daughter, Zara Sophia Beard, was born on 22 September 1988 in New York City.

In 1996, he was skewered and trampled by an elephant. Nonetheless, Beard traveled back to France for his first major retrospective ‘Carnets Africains’ opened at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.

In 2004, “Zara’s Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa“, written for his daughter is published. Taschen would re-edit it in November 2006, followed with a revised edition of “The end of the Game” and a limited Trade Edition

Unpublished cover for Zara's Tales

Finally in late 2008, The Pirelli Calendar 2009 is published. Shot in Botswana a couple of months earlier, it is my opinion the most accomplished work Beard produced. A perfect mix of the three pillars of his career: Africa/elephants, women & commercial work.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he now lives in the South of France, while his 3rd wife Nejma and daughter Zara are staying at the Montauk Mill, which is on sale for about US$ 25 millions!

Selected works:

Links & Interestingness:

Still from the movie "Hallelujah the Hills", 1962 (now the frontpage of peterbeard.com)

• Taschen’s Limited Edition Book
• Thames & Hudson Photofile
• “Peter Beard l’Africain” by Pierre Assouline, in French, Gogole translation here. Comments there worth a passage.
• 2008 Interview for the National Post
• Peter Beard on Arcadja
• Making of the Pirelli Calendar
• Blog post about Taschen’s edition of Peter Beard retrospective in 2 volumes (in Chinese… ; translation by Gogole here)
• Dan Eldon shared some of the traits of Peter Beard: a passion for Africa and images. It’s too bad an angry crowd in Somalia took his life, but rightly so, his mother still found the resources to publish a part of his scrapbooks.

Excerpt from Dan Eldon scrapbook