One of the world’s oldest cities, Kashgar serves as both the spiritual and political capital of traditional Uighur culture.  Since 1949, the modern People’s Republic of China has exerted strong control over the region, and Kashgar has been particularly hard hit.  Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a province covering 1/6th of China’s territory holds a majority of the country’s oil and gas reserves.  Long at odds with the Uighurs’ sometimes bloody quest for independence, the Chinese government has insituted a program of subsidized migration and settlement in the area by Han majority Chinese.  In so doing, the government hopes to develop a stable and robust economy whose purpose is the exploitation of the region’s natural resources and to overwhelm the local ethnicities.  Whereas the Uighur population of Kashgar was previously as high as 90%, government settlement efforts have changed the city’s demographics to less than 70% Uighur, and the percentage is still dropping.

At the heart of Kashgar is the so-called Old City.  Of tremendous historical value, the twisting alleyways and haphazardly built houses clump together and spring out of the city’s terrain in an organic and natural way.  After sporadic uprisings and fighting between Uighurs and Hans, the Beijing-controlled municipal government has unveiled plans to completely renovate the Old City. Uighur families who’ve lived in the same location for, in some cases, hundreds of years will be uprooted and resettled in cookie cutter apartment blocks built according to contemporary Chinese building standards.  Notwithstanding the individual upheaval of this process, the redevelopment of central Kashgar will radically transform the nature of daily life in the Uighur community.  The alleyways of the Old City create a naturally closed and safe neighborhood structure in which children can play and neighbors interact without fear of outsiders or traffic.  These alleyways also lead to central streets, arteries for the community on which Uighur-owned businesses thrive.  All of this will change as the government imposes redevelopment on the Old City, though not everyone is convinced the change will be bad.

In his home not far from the Grand Bazaar, 60-year-old Mohmat* cries as he describes his life.  Hans moving into the area have taken his job and his house is soon to be demolished.  Unable to afford medicine, he smokes marijuana to relieve the pain in his liver and legs.  Pages of the Koran hang on the walls of his bedroom.  At once blaming China’s central government for his problems, he also sees some sense in the policies.  His house has no plumbing and little electricity.  With the new apartment buildings, his family would enjoy a marked improvement in their quality of life.  Still, without a more systemic overhaul of city and state policies, and clear protection for Uighur employment and religion, he sees the development of the Old City as a small step toward much needed reform in Kashgar.

Others are more optimistic.  On a bus from Kashgar to Hotan, a man named Askar* approaches me.  A Uighur living in Urumqi, the provincial capital, his english is great and he’s eager to talk.  ”I am hopeful,” he says of the future of Xinjiang.  He worries about the transformation of Kashgar, but sees it as a necessary step in the progress of the region.  His own life has changed dramatically, too.  His first career was working as a newspaper journalist, but it felt to him like a deadend job.  He spent hours upon hours teaching himself english in libraries and has been an Amway representative for the past year or two.  Amway, of course, being the multi-level marketing scheme made popular in the US in the 1970s.  ”I will be the president [of Amway] in 7 years,” he exclaims hopefully.  His trip to Kashgar and Hotan, in fact, was to set up more Amway franchises.  The business, he tells me, is an exciting opportunity, a way to live the American dream in a place that couldn’t be more different from the suburbs where Amway was made popular.  The promise of a better of life offered by the company, and which is never achieved by the overwhelming majority of Amway representatives, provides Askar with a goal far removed from the problems facing Kashgar and the Uighurs.

More photos from this story are available for license at M. Scott Brauer’s archive.

*only first name given over concern for safety

Friend of dvafoto Andrew Spear directed my attention to the work of Daniel Shea last month, specifically his project Removing Mountains.

Coal, the number one energy-based resource domestically, is often extracted through a process of mountaintop removal mining. Through this process, mountains are literally blown apart to efficiently access coal seams. The physical overburden is pushed into the valleys and streams below, leveling a once dynamic landscape. Through this violent process, coal is eventually extracted, processed, shipped, burned and then distributed through electric grids to much of the United States. Simply turning on the lights suggests a complex matrix of ecological, industrial, and human implications. (link)

Shea is also funding the travel for a related (and also terrific) project called “Plume” entirely though a print sale on his blog, and still has some prints available at great prices to help fund the exhibition of the work later this year in Kentucky.

But don’t stop with just having a look at this project; Shea has a number of other impressive works on his website. And see Pete Brook’s post and interview about Shea’s Baltimore Project over on Prison Photography. Also cool: Shea did a terrific interview with Alec Soth for Too Much Chocolate last year.

Theatre of War from Richard Mosse on Vimeo.

We’ve posted a few times about Richard Mosse’s work, most recently about his Pink Soldiers and earlier about a related project to this video, “Breach”. It is great to see how is vision and passion for “classical history paintings” translates into a solemn and measured video piece.

Found via A Photo Student’s tremendous post full of wonderful photographer-related videos. It’ll take me to get through all of that good stuff, and I’ll probably be finding other gems to post here too. (just check out the Winogrand interview!)

I just got word from previous dvafoto interviewee Molly Landreth that her project with Amelia Tovey, “Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America” has been funded to 130% through the website kickstarter.com. Their project page is still online where you can learn much more about the project, the funding model offered by kickstarter and a great video about their work. In total, they had 355 backers and raised $12,568 to fund the next stages of their work. Be sure to go back and read our interview if you haven’t already.
Congratulations, I cannot wait to see what is produced and how the final web presentation comes together.

Childhood
by Zeljko Naic

These images were made during two years of therapy that I have prescribed myself, in order to release the tensions and deal with complexes haunting me since I was a child. My first memories are of colorful balloons that I was playing with and a black dog’s nose sniffing my face. I also remember a man in soldier’s uniform leaning over my cradle.

My father left us when I was eight years old. My mother, trying to bring food to the table, worked low-payed jobs long after her retirement. But she could not replace him in every respect. Many things I have learned the hard way, or have never learned. When I was sixteen, the war came. Society collapsed.

Once again I felt abandoned, this time by my fatherland. People suddenly became strangers, caring only about the barest survival. The first casualty was morality, and future became irrelevant. Not that I blame them, really. They didn’t know better.

Without proper guidance, without a role model youths can only do so much with their lives. And the accumulated incapacity of individuals to make significant progress can only form a retarded society. I need to further explore these problems on both my personal and societal levels, in order to find catharsis and be able to better bring up my own children.

Today we introduce a new feature, the Dvafoto Galleries. In addition to linking to photos we find around the world that we have decided to publish some of this work directly on Dvafoto, soon in a special section of the site. The first in this series is my good friend Zeljko Naic. His work stands out in the exciting Belgrade photo community because of how extremely personal and long-term his commitment is to the work. We hope you enjoy it and leave any reactions or comments below

One of my favorite local blogs Belgraded.com posted this video and story earlier this week. On May 15, 2010, the night of the Museums in Belgrade, Italian photographer Luca Donnini wheat-pasted an exhibition of his work on an alley near one of the main squares. He posted them at around 0230am on Saturday morning and by 0900am that same morning the whole “show” had been torn down by police and city cleaning crews. Quite a bummer, as this looks like it would have been a beautiful installation. See the video for the whole scenario. (Possibly NSFW due to some nudity in the photographs)

But this is even more interesting on a local Belgrade level because it could be considered what Belgraded calls “Police Vandalism” of the artwork. For me, its offensive that the city will respond within hours to clean up a “legitimate” piece of street art when they’ll turn their backs for weeks or months when horrible, dangerous homophobic graffiti (example and story here) are thrown all around town. Very wrong priorities here.

But on a happer note, I am so pleased to see that someone is doing guerilla photo exhibitions like this, especially in my own Balkan city. Taking it to the streets, doing it yourself, damn inspiring. See my post which kicked off my obsession with this idea: Taking photos back to the street and a recent post about Simon Norfolk’s outdoor exhibition at Guernsey Photography Festival. Or to JR’s massive “Women are Heroes” exhibition in Paris which takes this to the extreme (direct link to the video) .

The NYTimes Lens blog just posted a piece including the words and images of Velibor Božović, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in Sarajevo. In the interview Božović said some things that have really echoed with some earlier thoughts of mine: is it possible for a photographer to photograph as someone else? In other words, to photograph in character? Actors can assume new personalities and do things (on set a least) that they would never say or do in their personal life. Does this, can this, should this apply to photography?

“[Hemon and I] spent hours talking about what these guys would do and about Rora — what would he really photograph,” Mr. Božović said. Through their conversations, Mr. Božović would discover that Rora possessed aesthetic tastes and instincts that drastically differed from his own.

This did not always sit well with him. One photograph he took still leaves him feeling uneasy. At a sidewalk café in Lviv, Ukraine, he sneaked a shot of a woman’s bare legs from underneath a coffee table.

“I simply would never do that,” he said. “But Rora would do that kind of thing.”

This is a proper book club post because Božović’s comments are referring to the book that he made with his friend, the writer Aleksandar Hemon called The Lazarus Project. In it there are two characters traveling through Eastern Europe (Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine) in search of certain historical events and this is exactly what the author and his photographer friend, Božović and Hemon, did in real life. This curious parallelism is found often in Hemon’s books, which I count amongst my favorites of recent years, especially his first: The Question of Bruno. This mixing of first person narrative, of fiction and real experience, even to the point of having a character named Hemun that fits biographical features of the real Hemon, work incredibly well at playing the tensile strings of fragile immigrant identities. But what about doing this with photographs and blurring the line of who is the photographer? Does the biography of a photographer matter? Does it matter if they exist at all in a non-fiction world?

Interesting ideas for me.

Be sure to look at Božović’s work, especially the whole Lazarus Project set on his website and the Stone Sleepers project which we’ve previously written about on dva. Word is that he is traveling to Russia at the moment, I hope for some nice new secret project. Can’t wait to see it when he’s back.

Along the lines of Ed Ou’s project we just posted about, photographer Chien Chi-Chang recently has published a Magnum in Motion presentation of his project “Escape from North Korea”, on assignment for National Geographic. He followed the paths and stories of men and women escaping from North Korea into China, Laos, Thailand and eventually South Korea. This is the project we’ve been waiting to see on this topic. You should have a look.

You should also visit Chang’s photos on the Magnum site if you haven’t seen his work before. He’s a special one, and he even came out of Seattle.

Photographer Aaron Huey has been doing great stories for years, especially with his work on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In this recent TED talk he describes the long lines of history and bad faith that has led to what he calls the genocide of the Sioux people in and around Pine Ridge, alongside a slideshow of his work. Affecting, and shows the great lengths journalism and informed photographers can go.

(h/t Melissa Lyttle and APAD)

I met Molly Landreth at a small workshop with photographer Jonas Bendiksen at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle in January 2007. There was a mix of aspiring photographers as well as amateurs, some great work and some that wasn’t going anywhere. There was no doubt about Landreth though; she was showing the first wonderful portraits from a series that was to become Embodiment. Since then I’ve been following her work and the creative ways that she has been taking to develop, fund and show her project. This Spring I was reading about her latest push to raise money via Kickstarter.com which coincided with a number of awards and exhibitions of the project. We’ve been overdue for featuring Landreth’s work and insights so we invited her for a dvafoto interview. We hope you enjoy and consider supporting her project, and then be inspired to find innovative funding for your own work.

how did you decide to focus on one project for such a length of time?
Embodiment began as a purely photographic endeavor in 2005-2008, as I photographed friends and acquaintances to better understand my own place within the queer community as well as a chance to create beautiful representations of people I loved and respected. I had no idea that I would be starting in on a five year (or more!?) project that would one day include subjects from all over the country, an international collaborator, in depth video interviews and a innovative multi-platform outreach plan. I would have been terrified to even begin!

how is the work completed? how are you finding subjects?
I use a 4×5” camera to set up my photographs, Myspace + hundreds of key word searches to find project participants and a lot of deep breathing to work up the courage to barge into peoples lives and ask them to be open, honest and beautiful in front of my camera. It is a totally strange and insanely rewarding thing to do. My collaborator, Australian video artist Amelia Tovey, captures not only the story behind each portrait, but the process of creating the portrait itself; revealing the way a photograph and a personal history can unfold. Last June we went on a month long trip around the country to gather new footage; it was one of the most inspiring and rewarding adventures I’ve even been on. New work from Embodiment includes multi-media portraits of: a transsexual woman (who, before transitioning) served as a special units paratrooper during the Vietnam War, a gay evangelical preacher in Garland Texas, a bi-racial lesbian couple in Mississippi, a young Hollywood personality in Los Angeles, a teenage transgender boy living and transitioning in rural Wisconsin, and self-proclaimed Hillbillies living deep in the Ozark Mountains. It’s really exciting.

do you have concurrent projects going on? do you show other work or is your emphasis solely on Embodiment?
Right now Embodiment is a full time job so the only other shooting I’m doing is freelance & commercial work. However…I’m really excited about the day where I can finish this project and starting something completely different and new. I have three other concepts which are in the development and research stages that I’m super excited about digging into.

are you working editorially at all, outside of this work?
For outside work, I do a lot of commissioned portraits as well as some consulting with other art photographers to assist them with their project development. I would love the chance to work editorially as well but I think being in Seattle is a little limiting in terms of those opportunities. …prove me wrong someone!

where are these images being seen?
Photographs and video installations from Embodiment are currently being exhibited in New York, Portland, Germany and Italy, with more multi-media exhibitions and artist talks in Los Angeles, England, and Australia later this year. Reaching the widest audience possible, including the vastly spread out community that Embodiment seeks to represent, is a fundamental value of this project. We understand that many of our subjects and our audience live in under-served communities who do not have access to these traditional exhibition spaces but for whom the Internet is widely available. So, with help from the money that we raise from our current fundraiser on Kickstarter.com, Amelia and I will reinterpret this vast body of work into an intimate and widely accessible on-line experience with portraits and stories released as weekly episodes. We aim to launch the website in late 2011.

what has the reaction been from the queer community, from your subjects or anything more organized, about your project? what is your goal, your mission statement, if any?
Our goal for this project is really basic. Explore what it means to be queer in America today and make complex and beautiful portraits in the process. The reaction from LGBTQ communities and allies has been incredible. I get letters all the time, especially teenagers from non-typically “gay friendly” areas, thanking us for making the work. Many people say that it’s the first time they’ve seen representations of queers that they can relate to and be proud of. It’s really amazing to be a part of that.

where does this fit on a continuum of ‘journalism/art/advocacy’, and what are your thoughts on these labels? I’m seeing a lot more projects that blur these lines, and often it is the more interesting work that does it. Is it important to you, or your subjects, or your audience (do you think), how you contextualize these photos?
I want this work to be a part of all of that! By creating work that would only fit into one of those categories I would really put constraints on what is possible. It’s a blend of lots of different methods of working…which in itself is a little queer. It’s not about defining or explaining one thing or another but rather it’s about raising questions and opening up new opportunities of expression.

what has been your strategy for funding this work, and how has it changed over time? What is the next step in this process, what more do you need to ‘finish’ the work, and what form do you think that will take?
To date, this project has been made possible with the support from The School of Visual Arts (New York, NY) and with grants from The American Consulate (Germany), Humble Art Foundation (New York, NY), and Artist Trust (Seattle, WA). I am also a recent recipient of a Kodak Film Grant through the fantastic blog “Too Much Chocolate” (Portland, OR) and we have recently been granted fiscal sponsorship from Seattle based “Three Dollar Bill Cinema.” Right now Amelia and I are attempting to raise $10,000 dollars (and beyond!) with the help of the fundraising site Kickstarter.com. We have 65 days left to raise the money and have already reached 77% of our goal. (Update: Since this interview Landreth and Tovey’s project has reached their original goal and they’ve readjusted their sights for 200% of their original funding). For each level of sponsorship (even just a $5 donation) you can get prizes in return like signed prints, road trip mixes, homemade postcards, etc. It’s a great way for friends and project supporters to make a big difference in the success of the project. Most of our project backers are queer youth from all over the world who just totally understand the need for this type of work and are willing to give what little money they have to support it. It’s pretty awesome. With the 100% that we’ve raised we’re going to hire a website designer to create the site which will host the project and the weekly “episodes” and it will also pay for the time we need to take to edit all of the footage. If we raise 200% (which we really want to do!!) we will be able to head back out on the road and create more work to share with all of you; including a gay/lesbian rodeo in Colorado, a lesbian sorority in Memphis, and many more really interesting communities and individuals.
To see our promotional video, donate or learn more about the future of this project please visit our page on Kickstarter.

Thanks to Molly and Amelia for showing the work, I look forward to posting updates on the project from here. It will be great to see the final website presentation with their combined efforts.