This was a very interesting year for me, definitely the busiest since I moved to Belgrade, Serbia in February 2009, filled with lots of travel and some interesting assignments. Notably I had the chance to visit Africa for the first time, on assignment in South Sudan, and received the Burn Magazine Emerging Photographer Fund Grant for my ongoing project “Only Unity”.

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A woman in tears as her family and city workers rush to pack their belongings in to city trucks during the razing of the Belville camp in New Belgrade, in an area underneath the New Belgrade train station. April 2012.

Residents leaving the Belville camp in New Belgrade on the morning of its destruction by the Belgrade city government. Many residents were moved to container homes at the edge of the city. April 2012.

Walking through flooded cattle grazing land near the town of Maar, South Sudan in Jonglei State along the Bor-Panyagor road. September 2012.

Flying above the Nile River and beginning of the Sud on a flight from Juba to Bor, South Sudan. September 2012.

South Sudanese Police Service Captain John Arway in the offices of the Commissioner of East Twic County, Dan Akoi Jurkuch. September 2012.

A Nile River fishing camp in Terekeka, South Sudan. September 2012.

Along the Bor-Panyagor road in Jonglei State, South Sudan. September 2012.

SSPS patrolling along an impassible dirt road near the Jonglei canal, 9km from Panyagor town. September 2012.

Arriving in Juba, the capitol of South Sudan, on a flight from Bor. September 2012.

The River Wye near Symonds Yat in the Forest of Dean. England. January 2012.

A brass band plays for a floating riverboat party on the Sava River in Belgrade, Serbia. October 2012.

A rowdy crowd gathers outside of the incumbent Democratic Party offices in central Belgrade after opposition leader Tomislav Nikolic was declared the winner of the Serbian Presidential Election. May 20, 2012.

Boys playing with a toy gun and campaign balloons in the central square of Veliko Gradiste before President Boris Tadic arrived for a campaign event. April 2012.

Tomislav Nikolic, center, during a standing ovation at the Serbian Progressive Party congress in Belgrade. He was elected as the President of Serbia days later. May 2012.

Serbian President Boris Tadic sits for a moment along the Danube River in the Eastern Serbian town of Golubac following a campaign event. April 2012.

A slava (Orthodox saint's day) celebration organized by the far-right group "Obraz" at the Bogorodičina Crkva in Zemun. November 2012.

A boy fishing in the Danube river in Veliko Gradiste, Serbia. April 2012.

The construction of a new seawall in the town of Makarska, Croatia. December 2012.

Girls wait in their family's car as city workers pack their belongings in the Belville camp during the eviction by the Belgrade city government. April 2012.

Milan Andjelic herding sheep in the village of Cenici near Knin, Croatia. He and his mother are some of the few remaining Serbs in the area. December 2012.

Sveti Sava Cathedral in Belgrade, Serbia. February 2012.

The Kozara movie theater on Terazije street in Belgrade caught fire during renovations. May 2012.

Bulldozers razing the Belville camp in Belgrade in an area underneath the New Belgrade train station. The residents of the community had been relocated earlier in the day. April 2012.

I started the year in England, then was in Sarajevo for a story about the 20th anniversary of the start of the war there. My mother came to visit me in Belgrade in April, but our trip was interrupted by Presidential elections in Serbia, which I covered for the Wall Street Journal. That assignment led to one of the strangest days of my career, when I photographed both Serbian President Boris Tadic and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani hours apart in the same TV studio (see the WSJ article about Giuliani in Belgrade).

Soon after I was documenting the destruction of the Belville Roma settlement. My friend Darko Stanimirović and I handed out disposable cameras to residents of the camp so that they could document the eviction themselves. We published a multimedia piece at Newsmotion.org with these community pictures alongside Stanimirović’s audio recordings, a text by Alan Chin and some of my pictures as “The Sound of Barking Dogs: The Eviction of the Roma from Belville”.

In September I was in South Sudan reporting a story about the future of the Jonglei Canal and the issues of water rights for the youngest country on the planet. The project was commissioned by Austrian magazine 2012, an interesting one-year-only magazine published by Red Bull Media House. I have included a few images from the project here, but for now the only other pictures online are the tearsheets from ’2012′ which you can see on the clips section of mattlutton.com.

I also spent a total of four months in the United States, and was able to finally visit the area of the former Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia to document the remnants of Serbian life there. I was invited to be on the jury of the Organ Vida international photography festival in Zagreb, and was a speaker and juror at the “Foton” Makarska Photo Days Festival.

The biggest news of the year for me though was the Burn Magazine Emerging Photographer Fund Grant, which I received in June for my project “Only Unity”: Serbia In The Aftermath of Yugoslavia.

The response to the project has been very exciting, and I’m eager to finish the work this year. If you would like to know more, have a look at one of the interviews I did last year following the announcement: “Award-Winning Project Documents a Fractured Serbia” with Pete Brook at Wired’s Raw File blog, “Picture Story: Holding up a Mirror to Serbian Nationalism” in PDN Magazine (subscribers only unfortunately, see what it looked like in print here), and my chat with fellow EPF-finalist and friend Ian Willms on “BOREAL Spotlight: Matt Lutton, “Only Unity””.

You can have a look at my previous year-end posts on Dvafoto: 2009, 2010 and 2011. If you’d like more regular updates about my work, feel free to sign up for my occasional newsletter.

Thanks again everyone for continuing to follow Dvafoto and supporting all of the photographers we feature here. I wish you all a fun and successful 2013!

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Some of the photographers from the SEE New Perspectives masterclass at the opening exhibition in Sarajevo, October 2012.

SEE New Perspectives Exhibition Opening in Sarajevo, October 2012

In 2010, fifteen young South-East European photographers and three masters met in Berlin for the SEE New Perspectives masterclass, organized by World Press Photo and Robert Bosch Stiftung. After the first meeting in Berlin all of the photographers were given a grant to photograph a story within the region but outside of their home country.

The resulting projects are now being exhibited in Belgrade, Serbia (on display until December 14 at the ARTGET gallery on Trg Republike) after debuting in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in October. The show will soon move to Zagreb, Croatia and Berlin, Germany. The exhibition features an interesting concept of displaying oversized “magazines” each devoted to one photographer’s project, with only one image from each project along with the photographer’s name on the wall.

You can see all of the stories produced in the masterclass on the SEE New Perspectives website as well as more information about the organization of the project.

The photographers are:
Andrei Pungovschi, Romania
Armend Nimani, Kosovo
Bevis Fusha, Albania
Dženat Dreković, Serbia
Eugenia Maximova, Bulgaria
Ferdi Limani, Kosovo
Jasmin Brutus, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Jetmir Idrizi, Kosovo
Marko Risović, Serbia
Nemanja Pančić, Serbia
Octav Ganea, Romania
Petrut Calinescu, Romania
Sanja Jovanović (née Knežević), Serbia
Tomislav Georgiev, Macedonia
Vesselina Nikolaeva, Bulgaria

And the Tutors are:
Regina Anzenberger, Austria, artist, curator, photographer’s agent, gallerist
Silvia Omedes, Spain, president at Photographic Social Vision Foundation
Donald Weber, Canada, photographer VII Agency

I asked my old friend Jasmin Brutus, a Bosnian photographer who was part of the masterclass, to paraphrase the statement he gave at the Sarajevo opening which expresses his feelings about the years-long masterclass project: “We [the participating photographers] all returned with nice small toolbox which our employers will never know how to utilize. So, I think experience in the masterclass is very useful for my personal projects and for my job is almost useless. I gained new skills and my old skills got enhanced. But, for me the most important thing is that I met a group of really great people and great photographers.”

Congratulations to my friends from around the region who were able to take part in this interesting project and many of whom were able to produce terrific photo stories that may otherwise never have seen light or been published. I encourage you to explore the work published on the SEE New Perspectives site or peruse the photographers’ own websites linked above.

The video below features interviews with all of the photographers about their work and experience in the masterclass:

SEE New Perspectives from Balkan Photographers from World Press Photo on Vimeo.

Hipstamatic

“Stories have always been a large part of what Hipstamatic is about. We have an opportunity to let photographers do the stories they want to tell, so we will be giving out grants to these photographers, so they don’t have to find publishers to finance their work.” -Lucas Allen Buick, CEO of Hipstamatic publisher Synthetic, speaking to BJP

This is an exciting development. Hipstamatic, the photo filter app for iPhones (iTunes store link), has announced plans to offer grants in support of photojournalism. We’ve written about the use of Hipstamatic and other iPhone filter apps in photojournalism before. There’ve been a few significant bodies of photojournalistic work produced on the iPhone: Damon Winter’s A Grunt’s Life, Michael Christopher Brown’s work from Libya, parts of the Basetrack project, VII’s iSee exhibition, and Ben Lowy’s iLibya and work from Afghanistan, among others.

There are scant details on how these photojournalism grants will work, but as BJP reports, they could be monthly or quarterly and will involve an application and judging process. The grants will be managed through the Hipstamatic Foundation, an educational arm of the company designed to support photographic storytelling.

Ben Lowy, incidentally, has been posting iPhone images frequently on his tumblr, including recent work from Libya produced on a grant from the Magnum Foundation, and he’s involved at some level with the forthcoming Hipstamatic photojournalism grants. Lowy has entered a partnership of sorts with Hipstamatic to release a Ben Lowy Lens, which will be sold under the company’s GoodPak program to provide funding for the photojournalism grants.

Make sure to check out Tumblr’s storyboard blog for an interview with Lowy about his current iPhone work. They’ll be publishing his Libya photos daily over the next week.

By the way, if you click through our links to buy anything here, we get a small cut of the sale. It’s a way for us to keep the lights on here at dvafoto. Thanks to those of you who have clicked through us in the past!

In recent months the Alexia Foundation has been very busy with new social media presence and a gorgeous new website that shows off all of the terrific projects and photographers they have supported over the last 21 years. The Foundation was founded in 1991 and has awarded $700,000 in grants to fund over 128 projects by both professionals and students.

This year’s winners include Justin Maxon’s When the Spirit Moves, Kathryn Cook’s Memory of Trees and Katie Orlinsky’s Innocence Assassinated: Living in Mexico’s Drug War. Past winners include Matt Eich (2008), Balazs Gardi (2006), Marcus Bleasdale (2005), Francesco Zizola (2004), Ami Vitale (2000) and Melissa Lyttle (1999).

The Foundation has also just announced a new $25,000 grant called the Women’s Initiative “to provide resources for a photojournalist to produce a project that illuminates any form of abuse of women in the United States but with global significance.” The deadline is August 15, 2012.

“The Alexia Foundation’s main purpose is to encourage and help photojournalists create stories that drive change. While our traditional grant guidelines put no limits on the subject matter for grant proposals, a few proposals about women’s rights in the last few years have been so powerful that they have compelled the Foundation to create a grant specifically on the issue of women’s abuse. Because this issue is so shocking and deplorable – but continues partly because it is so often unseen or ignored – the Foundation will provide a $25,000 grant so a project can be produced that will illuminate the horrors of what is happening, often invisibly in our own communities.”

Kamerades is a new collective of photojournalists based in Belgrade who have come together to help develop independent photography in Serbia and to work on group projects documenting contemporary stories. They are currently working together to photograph the Serbian presidential and parliamentary elections, which will take place on Sunday May 6, 2012. These six photographers are contributing their own hard-edged and sardonic vision of the Serbian electoral process and how it reflects Serbian society. They call the project “Dirty Season”.

I think it is an important step for this group and Serbian photography in general to work on such collective projects, with financial support, and to have a community of like-minded photographers working together to get photographs published in their own voice. It is not easy, especially not here, but I admire their energy and efforts. With this in mind I had a few questions for the Kamerades crew about their formation and backgrounds. Given the timeliness of their new project with the elections this week, I chose not to show a portfolio of their work but this current electoral group project which I am so excited about. It is an incredible portrait of Serbia during this election cycle.

Kamerades is Saša Čolić, Nemanja Jovanović, Milovan Milenković, Nemanja Pančić, Marko Risović and Marko Rupena. As a group they regularly post to the Kamerades Blog including updates to the Election story, which they present without captions or credits.

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So how did this group of photographers come together? Where did you meet?

Jovanovic: Marko Risovic, Milovan Milenkovic and I participated in a photography lecture supported by World Press Photo back in 2009. That was the first time that we showed some of our work to a group of people larger than three. I was swept by Marko [Risovic]’s Legionnaire story for example and one thing led to another. Milovan suggested that we meet and talk about doing “something” for Serbian photography, even if it means taking only baby steps. After two years of meeting in various pubs and places that would be too generous to call restaurants, speaking and inviting over 20 people to join us, this is what came out of it.

Pancic: Milovan Milenkovic and Nemanja Jovanovic initiated the idea that after our work when we have free time, we can meet at the pub and discuss our work. At first point it brought together a large number of photographers, but over the time there were six of us remained and those were the most persistent ones. During this period, which lasted some two years, we have become a collective. It’s started to affect in a positive way to all of us as photographers, but we also became close friends. In the end we decided to launch a website that allowed us to show our work to the public.

What backgrounds as photographers do you have? Freelance, agencies, newspapers?

Jovanovic: Probably every possible background you can think of! In Serbia, you don’t get a paycheck doing and specializing in only one kind of photography.

Risovic: All of the guys in Kamerades collective were working for Media outlets at some point. At the moment few of us are trying to freelance. In Serbia. Can you imagine?

Pancic: Some of us are working in the agencies, some try to be freelancers, and some in the press.

Was there a moment when this group came together and decided that it was time to work collectively? What was it? What gave you guys the idea to work together?

Jovanovic: Yes. The idea was not so clear in the beginning, but it was there all along. From start we were determined to “push each other forward” and to try to do what we like for no other reason. No money, no awards, fame or glory were important, only escaping our everyday routine which included participating in the inevitable decline of journalism, photojournalism and photography in Serbia. The collective came as a logical solution.

Risovic: Being colleagues, working next to each other for years, we were silent witnesses of degradation of photojournalism in Serbia. We realized that sitting and despairing doesn’t lead us anywhere. So, we decided to pursue some action, and besides hanging around, talking and drinking in the pubs, we tried to be constructive. As Nemanja said before, it was a process, but it was clear from the very beginning that we all have common goal.

How did the website come together? What are you hoping to accomplish with the website (that is, to sell work? to share pictures? promoting yourselves, promoting Serbia, just looking bad-ass, etc.)? Where did the design and logo come from?

Jovanovic: It took some time. We are not experienced in that kind of stuff, so we were learning the basics, step by step. We were lucky enough to be 6 people with completely different interests, knowledge, personalities, approach in photography, but we somehow clicked perfectly together, and it resulted in the fact everybody got their part of job. Mostly Sasha who whipped and pissed off rest of us (or, took the piss out of the rest of us), and Milovan who did logo and design details after approximately nine million e-mails and discussions about the same issue. Also, we had a lot of help from friends, like our colleague Darko Stanimirovic who did the website. A lot of people gave different advices, Matt Lutton among them [ed: happy to help guys!], Donald Weber from VII agency and our friends photographers, designers and editors from Serbia and abroad.

Selling our work is every photographer’s job of course, but with this portfolio we mostly seek attention and hope to sell something in the future, maybe to get some assignments that would suit our style/wishes. And looking cool is one of the goals, of course! We are pretty much terrible musicians and we couldn’t be rock stars, so we took cameras. Chicks love it!

Pancic: As I said before, the website has come as a result of our meetings during the past two years. One idea that keeps us together is that we want to show our work to world around us, we believe that as a collective we have a better chance to get more publicity and through joint actions provide us new projects. Logo design came from a smart push by Milovan Milenkovic, multitalented and good looking guy.

Risovic: Basic thing that bothered us from the beginning was the fact that when you simply google documentary photography and Serbia together, you don’t get any of the serious websites with representative work. There are great documentary photographers and photojournalists in Serbia. Believe us! We hope to change this with our website. And to look badass, it goes well with the fame.
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moving forward – a call for help from This Wild Idea on Vimeo.

“On New Years Eve, $6000 in gear (and damage) was taken from my truck. Most heart breaking is that these folks found both of my external drives. Every single image created for the past 5+ months was lost. After spending 3 days hitting in the streets – passing out flyers, talking to the Police, knocking on doors, going to every pawn shop, scouring Craigslist…we have to move on!” -This Wild Idea help page

We last spoke with Theron Humphrey when This Wild Idea was a 30-day lark of a project. He drove around for 30 days and met and photographed a new person each day. It was a great idea, and after a very successful kickstarter campaign, This Wild Idea turned into a year-long project. Humphrey had been on the road for 5 months when tragedy struck on New Year’s Eve. Thieves broke into his pickup in Jackson, Mississippi, and stole his gear and drives. Cameras, lenses, computers, and (most saddening) his last 5 months of work on the project were gone. As Humphrey told a local news report, word on the street is that everything was sold for “40 bucks and some crack.” He’s borrowed some equipment, but he still needs your help to keep the ship afloat.

Donate to help keep This Wild Idea on the road.

In recent weeks a few interesting and worthy fundraising campaigns have come across our radar that I wanted to share.

Grozny, the capital of war-torn Chechnya, is a melting pot for changing Caucasus society that is trying to overcome a trauma of two recent wars and find its own way of life in between traditional Chechen values, Muslim traditions, and globalization. Our project is inspired by Thornton Wilder’s book Theophilus North. It centers on the idea of nine cities being hidden in one. We applied this concept to Grozny as nine “levels of existence” hidden within the city.

More information can be found on their website, Grozny: Nine Cities.
Notable rewards for help in supporting the project: Postcards and signed prints. As of publishing there are 39 days left to sponsor the project via Emphas.is.

Newsmotion is a new concept of journalistic website put together by a very talented team of independent writers, journalists and producers, including Julian Rubinstein, Todd Gitlin and their photo editor Alan Chin, in partnership with the People’s Production House. A pre-launch of the site is now online at Newsmotion.org and includes a preview of a story I worked on with Gitlin and Serbian activist Srdja Popovic about Non-Violent Resistance while both were in Belgrade last May. Visit the Kickstarter campaign.

Newsmotion is an innovative platform for civic media, public art, and original documentary reportage. We are harnessing the power of independent voices, technology, and collaborative storytelling to help the critical issues of our time engage new audiences and find new solutions

Recent events—including the uprisings in the Middle East and the Occupy movement—have shown that individuals and communities with access to technology are able to get their voices heard. A collective vision for the future of civic media is already being realized in revolutionary ways—Newsmotion is our contribution to this movement.

Notable rewards: Books written by contributors, limited editions of “The Occupied Wall Street Journal” and the Yes Men’s special edition of The New York Times, an invitation to the famous Winter Gumbo party on December 27 in New York City (be sure to check the details and offers on this, it has been a hit in the past). Deadline: there are only 10 days to go, finishing on December 29, 2011.

FOLK is a new documentary film by Sara Terry about “singer-songwriters who are working just under the radar of mainstream American music, their lives playing out in a vibrant sub-culture that few people know about.” Visit the Kickstarter campaign.

Part music documentary and part road trip movie, FOLK lets our characters’ lives and their songs do what singer-songwriters have always done: amplify the themes that resonate across our cultural landscape – whether it’s re-defining success in the face of failure, trying to find wholeness in an increasingly fragmented world, or struggling to make sense of the trials and triumphs that make us all so human.

Notable rewards: Special edition DVDs, downloads and CDs from the project, limited edition prints and posters or even songs written about or for you by the musicians in the documentary. There are 15 days left, ending on January 3, 2012.

UPDATE (1/2/12): We’ve very happy to be able to say congratulations to the team behind Newsmotion for reaching and exceeding their Kickstarter goal and funding the next stage of the project. As well, Sara Terry reached beyond her fundraising goal for the documentary FOLK. There is still about a day to contribute if you want to be part of the founder’s community. The Grozny: Nine Cities campaign has 25 days left and could still use your support.

Our friend Pete Brook of Prison Photography is still on the road, in the middle of a 12-week trip around the United States reporting on prisons and photographers. He funded the trip with a very successful Kickstarter campaign, which you should visit for a wealth of information about his project and the photographers and prisons he will be visiting. While he is publishing regular and remarkable dispatches and podcasts from the road, I also recommend this short documentary produced by Seattle photographer Tim Matsui as a nice behind-the-scenes peek at what Brook has been up to and the substance of his project.

Donald Weber has a new book of his work in Ukraine and Russia, to be released in Fall 2011 by Schilt Publishing. We asked him to give us a preview of his pictures and book dummies alongside his ideas on publishing and developing projects. As part of the funding for the project Weber is currently selling collector’s editions and a special advanced version of the book via the Interrogations Book website. Weber is a VII Network photographer from Toronto and often teaches workshops, and is hosting on July 21st and 22nd 2011 a workshop on grant writing in Berlin. Dvafoto previously interviewed Weber in December 2008 when he was living in Kiev and in the midst of the photography and travels that would become this book.

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The first book dummy for "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

The first book dummy for "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

The first book dummy for "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

The first book dummy for "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

A revised book dummy for "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

A revised book dummy for "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

A revised book dummy for "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Third draft of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Third draft of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Third draft of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Third draft of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Final dummy of "Interrogations" by Donald Weber

Could you introduce the work featured in your new book Interrogations
Following an exploratory trip to Chernobyl in 2005, I soon returned to the abandoned site of the nuclear disaster and spent the next seven years in Russia and Ukraine photographing the ruins of the unstoppable storm we call history. Traveling and living with ordinary people who had survived much, had survived everything, this project begins to see the modern State as a primitive and bloody sacrificial rite of unnamed Power.

Interrogations is the result of my personal quest to uncover the hidden meaning of the bloody 20th Century. In dialogue with friend and writer Larry Frolick – whose own ancestors had been decimated in the final months of WW II – I insistently and provocatively address questions both to the living survivors and to the ghosts of the State’s innumerable victims, resurrecting their final hours by taking their point of view, and performing a kind of incantatory meditation over their private encounters with Power.

The policemen, working girls, thugs, dissidents and hustlers who inhabit these pages are all orphans of a secret History; the outlines of our collective fate takes shape in this epic work, expanding our awareness of what it means to be an actor in today’s dark opera.

How did the idea for a book of this work come about? How did it change over time?
Stalin famously said, “I am not concerned with how the court of History will judge our current deeds.” I found this a fascinatingly provocative statement, and one that goes right to the heart of who I am as a photographer. I began seeing my role as that of the court of History, another somebody who could examine the deeds of History and present it to an audience. I am much more concerned with making pictures about something rather than of something. As I delved deeper and deeper into my work, I became inspired by the writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Varlam Shalamov and Vasily Grossman, all artists who reveal the incantatory slogans of History and their dark meanings.

So, I started to investigate and examine not just the subject matter I was interested in, but the methods of how best to present that work. I felt these writers to be an inspiration and thus the ideas of the book really began to reveal themselves. I see the role of a photographer not just as a creator of visual narrative, but also a communicator of ideas and people and places and subjects that can be explored much like a novelist explores certain themes. With this in mind, a book was the only obvious way forward.

I cannot say I set out to photograph what I photographed, in fact my original ideas were quite different then what you see in the book. I am an instinctual photographer, I rarely travel with a plan in mind, I prefer moving through a space not just intellectually but through my stomach and my heart. It’s only when I start seeing things, talking to people, getting involved and gaining a little knowledge about the place do the real ideas begin. It’s the same in editing, I lay a bunch of small prints on the floor and I just sit surrounded by them on the floor, the pictures reveal themselves and the places they want to be.

I had a great discussion with Teun van der Heijden, the designer of the book, back in January when we were starting the layout. He wanted the book to be the entire series of Interrogations, as did Maarten Schilt and a few others. I think my ego was a little hurt – I thought, I have spent 6 years in Siberia and Ukraine, wandering in some pretty dark places, and suddenly all this work will never be seen? But then I had a realization that because I spent these six years, these years of frustration and toil and a lot of personal sacrifice, that I could go and make this Interrogations series, that this experience allowed me to get to where I really needed to be. In the end, it’s not totally Interrogations literally, but also a very beautiful “prologue” of the spaces and people that inhabit the interrogation room, the conditions that could foster this type of treatment. I couldn’t be prouder of the direction it has taken.

The title refers, of course, not only to the confrontation of a vast uniformed apparatus and its trembling subjects as a historical set-piece, if not a ritual public ceremony, but, more cogently, to the role of the photographer in the 21st Century as an eye-witness and social critic. The answer, of course, lies in the work itself. The work either satisfies our instinct for truth, or it doesn’t. Fieldwork is the crucible of ambition.

How did you go about getting in to the process of having it published? How did you find a designer and publisher to work with?
I made an initial list (I am an inveterate list maker) of all the publishers I wished to work with. I examined their back lists and looked for books that matched not just the conceptual values of my work, but also the physical values of a book that I admire. From there, I sort of whittled the list down to about seven publishers that I felt would make a good partner. I initially trained as an architect and so I was used to collaboration; in fact one of the things I loathe most about a lot of photography books, is essentially they just become monographs of the photographers greatest images. A book should have plot and character, foreshadowing, knowledge, conflict and redemption, all the ingredients that make up a good story, but also be socially engaged, say something. I always asked myself “What do you want to say?”
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Jason Eskenazi, author of one of my (and many other peoples’) favorite photography books of all time Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, is working on a new project and is asking for our support via Kickstarter. As usual there are a number of rewards for helping to fund the project, including signed copies of the hard-to-find Wonderland at the $100 level.

I want to understand the contemporary dilemmas of our civilization by seeking modern equivalents to the East/West dichotomy. From the mythic Trojan War, to the split of the Roman Empire, to Islamic control over Western Europe, to today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, human history has been plagued by successive waves of both territorial and cultural conquest across the Eurasian divide over the course of 3000 years. This ancient world spanned the same locales where many of the world’s crises are now taking place.
…
I will do this by creating a companion to my published book Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith (recently reviewed on National Public Radio and winner of Best Photography Book by POYi) where I interpreted the former Soviet Union as a story about childhood maturation – from childhood fairy tales to adult mythology. And like mythology, this new story, The Black Garden, centers on the nature of duality. Does it arise from out of our imagination or does it have a physical geographical basis? I will investigate the influence of ancient Greek ideals and myths, as well as eastern views, in our modern time by photographing today’s current events within our the vast geographical and mythical world known to ancient Greece: from Southern Italy to the Indus River in India in order to see contemporary dilemmas within a historical, journalistic, and artistic light.

Eskenazi has a great proposal (I think we could even study it as a good example of how to write our own) and already has an interesting set of photographs (and a book dummy) to kick this off. I hope it reaches full funding and that we can all see the results of the new project soon. I’m looking forward to having the new book on my shelf.