Breaking News: 2011 Foundry Photojournalism Workshop

Eric Beecroft has just announced that the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop will take place in mid July 2011 in beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina!

The tuition is $500 for regional students (Mexico, and all countries south to Tierra del Fuego; including Caribbean nationals, and $975 for non-regional students. Early registration is available for a non-refundable $100 via Paypal only. The early registration guarantees a spot and places the payer in the front of the line for class choice. Scholarships will be announced shortly.

The instructors' line up include:

Kael Alford
Walter Astrada
Andrea Bruce
Michael Robinson Chavez
Tewfic El-Sawy
Ashley Gilbertson
Ron Haviv
Henrik Kastenskov & Poul Madsen (Bombay Flying Club)
Jared Moosy
Maggie Steber
Ami Vitale
Adriana Zehbrauskas

PBS Features "Starved For Attention"

PBS' Need To Know is featuring a Starved For Attention slideshow with 19 large photographs by Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer.

It's based on the extremely well produced multimedia campaign by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and VII Photo which exposes the neglected and largely invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition.

As an aside, I also noticed on Need To Know an article by Kavitha Rajagopalan on the buffoonish remarks made by Palin on the plans to erect a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero.

All I have to say is that it is New York and its inhabitants who suffered on September 11, 2001....and it's they who have the voice in this.

No one else.

Stephen Alvarez: Maya Underworld

Photo © Stephen Alvarez -All Rights Reserved
As readers of this blog know, I'm a proselytizer of large photographs for websites portfolios, and have made this preference very obvious through various postings and with my own photographic galleries. I cannot understand photographers who still exhibit dinky small photographs on their websites...in my view, they're not taking proper advantage of the medium.

So it's with pleasure that I feature Stephen Alvarez's Maya Underworld, a gallery of 22 large photographs for a story originally published by the National Geographic Magazine, and which showcases the religious rituals and ceremonies of today’s Mayan peoples in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. This is but one of Alvarez's of sensational galleries, so take a tour of his website as well.

Stephen Alvarez is a photojournalist who produces global stories about exploration, culture, religion, and the aftermath of conflict. He has been a National Geographic photographer since 1995. His work won awards in Pictures of the Year International, Communications Arts and was exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image International Photojournalism Festival.

Pablo Corral Vega: Andes

Pablo Corral Vega is a photojournalist from Ecuador whose work is published in National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, the Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times Sunday magazine, Audubon, the French, German, Spanish, and Russian editions of Geo, and other international magazines.

His work has been exhibited in Perpignan, Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca, Tokyo, Seville, Washington, D.C., and Houston, and he has published six books of photography: Tierra Desnuda, Paisajes del Silencio, Ecuador: De la Magia al Espanto, Ecuador, Andes and Twenty Five. For the book Andes, published by the National Geographic Society, famed Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa wrote twenty short stories inspired by the photos.

It is Andes that I choose to feature today on the pages of TTP.

Kent Kobersteen, former Director of Photography for the National Geographic Magazine wrote the following text about Corral for his book "Twenty Five":

"Pablo Corral Vega brings to his photography great passion, an unparalleled aesthetic, and a high degree of concern for both his work and his subjects. (He) is a world-class photojournalist, and in my opinion one of the finest Latin American photographers working today." "

There's no question that Pablo Corral Vega's work is incredibly beautiful, and his imagery of the various cultures depicted in Andes is passionate, emphatic and in many cases, superb. The photograph of the man and the shadows is certainly one of those.

I also greatly enjoyed Pablo's video work showing the same places he photographed for the National Geographic. Yes, I recommend viewing Pablo's personal view of this musical genre and its associated sensuous dance form. But be careful...after viewing the video, you will want to book your flight to Buenos Aires, and spend the rest of your life in these cafes and restaurants, immersed in tango atmosphere.

My thanks to Eric Beecroft for the heads-up.

NYT: Colombia's Displaced Indians

©Moises Saman for NYTimes-All Rights Reserved
Here's an audio slideshow "Colombia's Displaced Indians" with photographs by Moises Saman, and narrated by Simon Romero (also the author of the accompanying article) concerning the misery affecting the indigenous population of western Colombia caught in the crossfire from a new breed of criminal armies is pressing deeper into the jungle, fighting with guerrillas who have been long in the Chocó region for control of the cocaine trade.

The objective of these groups is dominance over coca-growing areas and routes to ship cocaine abroad, predominantly to the United States.

The narration is rather flat in parts, but the photographs are really powerful.

NY Times: Panama

Image © Tara Todras-Whitehall/NY Times-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times featured a short slideshow of photographs of the Kuna Indians. It appears that the San Blas islands have remained little-known by tourists for many years, but that it may not remain that way for long.

New York Times' The Kuna Indians of the San Blas Islands on Panama’s Caribbean coast still believe that each person has a good and a bad spirit, and that after death the good spirit needs help to get to heaven. They number about 35,000 and the majority live in the San Blas Islands, and on the mainland in the Madungandi reservation, while a small percentage live in the capital city, Panama.

The Kuna women wear wrap around skirts and hand-made blouses known as "molas", while the men wear traditional Kuna shirts. The women also paint their faces with a homemade rouge made from achiote seeds, and usually wear a nose ring and paint a line down their nose.

They grow plantains, bananas, and avocados, and other fruits, as well as corn, and tubers.

New York Times' San Blas Islands

More (and better) photographs of the Kuna Indians: Global Photographic

One Shot: Sune Wendelboe

Image Copyright © Sune Wendelboe-All Rights Reserved
For this One Shot feature, I chose this image of an Embera woman with her child amongst the hundreds of exotic photographs on Sune Wendelboe's website Global Photographic. He's a peripatetic traveler and his website lists dozens of countries he visited and photographed over the course of 12 years. It's an incredible trove of travel imagery, landscapes and ethno-photography, which will impress even the most blase of travel photography enthusiasts. Unfortunately, Sune's biography is conspicuous by its absence on the website...it would've been very welcome.

As background to the above photograph: an estimated population of 15,000 Emberá indians inhabit the Darien rainforest of Panamá. This tribe along with the Wounaan were formerly known as the Choco because they emigrated from the Choco province of Columbia in the late 18th century. Nowadays, they have largely abandoned their traditional hunting and farming, and cater to the tourist trade.

(Thanks for the heads up, Eric.)