Pause in our normal programming for a bit of an update on what I have been up to here in the Balkans. Lots has been going on and it seems like it will be continuing through the summer. And Scott and I have plenty of interesting things planned for dvafoto so keep tuned.

My long-term project about the relocation of Belgrade Roma “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” is currently featured in Lens Culture magazine. This project was also shortlisted by Anthropographia and was included in the exhibition at the New York Photography Festival and will continue to tour worldwide (a cool picture of the exhibition, snapped by a NY friend, is in the gallery above).

I’ve also published “Chapter Two” of this project on my Photoshelter Archive and included some images in the gallery above, so you can catch up on the project since my last post about the project on dva. I am continuing to photograph this story, following the families of the Gazela camp as they resettle around Serbia following the destruction of their community.

Lastly, thanks to friend Pete Brook at Prison Photography for writing about my work on this project in a post titled The Roma People: Matt Lutton building upon a legacy of wandering photographers.

I also have published on my archive a new gallery of work from Bosnia in an ongoing project called “This Time Tomorrow”. I will be following events in Bosnia closely as political and economic stagnation continues to slowly suffocate the country. Some tectonic shift will and must come to solve one of the world’s most entrenched political crises. Maybe tomorrow, but probably not.

I am currently focused on completing my book about Serbia in the aftermath of the Milosevic decade, titled “Only Unity”. My project was recently announced as one of seven nominees for the POYi Emerging Vision Incentive, a $10,000 grant for an emerging photographer. See some of the work and my (full) proposal at the POYi website. Congrats to the winner of the grant, James Chance and the other nominees.

I am also announcing for the first time publicly the existence of an tumblr sketchbook for this project: onlyunity.tumblr.com. Have a look if you want to follow me feel my way through this work. The latest news is that I’ve finished the first book dummy, which will serve as my university thesis, enabling me to finally graduate this year.

It has been a busy couple of months with a few interesting assignments, taking me from Budapest on a corporate job to a British international school in Belgrade for a UK newspaper. There is much to come this summer, including a trip to a Serbian winery connected to the royal family and projects to be featured in well known online publications. And of course focus on Dvafoto. I look forward to sharing this all soon, and I hope you are enjoying your summer (or winter, if you happen to be south of the equator).

We’re starting off the new year with a bang here at dvafoto. If you’re reading through the rss feeds, pop on over to the real deal to see the excitement. In addition to some exciting upcoming posts, we’ve completely redesigned the site.

You’ll notice the overall visual changes first. While the old site (image 2 in the slideshow above) was good enough, it was a stock wordpress template and has been popping up all over the place of late. It was cluttered, didn’t utilize the full width of modern computers, and was beginning to look dated. Mostly, I was just tired of it and thought I could do something that fit our visual content better. We also wanted a way to highlight posts from our archive.

Elsewhere on dvafoto - a random selection of links from the archive of dvafoto.com

Blogging is inherently a medium controlled by time, and that prevents old content from being newly discovered, regardless of whether it’s still relevant and interesting. Central to the new design, but hopefully not obtrusive to the site’s core purpose, we’ve added boxes with a random selection of photos and posts from our archive. You’ll see a couple such boxes in the main content flow on the front page, there’s one at the bottom of every individual post page, including this one, and there’s one on our 404 error page.

We’ve also incorporated Lens Blog-inspired image galleries, as you’ll see at the top of this post, in upcoming posts, and in a few in the archive, such as this post of my photos from the Rocky Boy Powwow in Montana. Rather than using a flash solution for the galleries, I integrated a jquery tool called Scrollable to use the customized rewrite of the existing wordpress gallery functionality. The result is a google-friendly sliding photo gallery easily managed in wordpress.
Read on »

Yesterday morning I saw a post on the Magnum Blog by nominee Peter van Agtmael, with some pictures he took out the window of buses in Africa. It immediately brought to mind my endless hours on the roads and rails of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. As it turns out, I’ve taken many more pictures from the train trips I’ve taken than the buses (probably because I was concentrating on sleeping and/or not getting sick while riding the buses), and I thus was inspired to dig through my archive (strange trips down the memory lane) and pull out some of those pictures that otherwise would not have seen the light of day. One of the original goals of the original incarnation of Dvafoto was for Scott and I to have an outlet for the pictures that we wouldn’t publish anywhere else.. the outtakes, the near-misses. So here I present a new set of images from the last couple of years on the rails. And sorry I don’t have, at this moment, any stories to tell from these pictures (like Peter)… I am rather exhausted from hours spent digging through harddrives… hopefully soon.

[caption id="attachment_774" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Between Sarajevo and Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. May 2007."][/caption]








If you pester me, maybe I can tell you about the 28hour trip I took from Moldova to Kiev with gallons of smuggled wine (not mine of course) hidden in the panels above my bunk in the ancient Moldovan train car, with two young Russian-Moldovan minors watching over my car with the bought conductor. It was a good time, actually, sharing dvds and me getting to practice my Russian. Thankfully the Ukrainian customs weren’t too thorough…

Looks like A Photo Editor beat me to this with a post earlier today, but M. Scott can attest that I first zeroed in on this comment by Alec Soth on the (newly revitalized) Magnum Photos Blog last night (Seattle time).

“When the photographers ask you why they should participate in such a thing, what’s the answer?”

What a great question Mike. Here is my thinking in a nutshell:

If Magnum is still around in ten years, I think it will be because Magnum has learned how to become its own producer. Rather than waiting for some new online magazine to rise from the ashes of print media, Magnum has the opportunity to become its own content-provider. But to do this, Magnum needs to learn how to work in quick-moving media like this blog. I see the Magnum Blog as a kind of training camp for things to come. (Such as InSight, but more on this later).

Beyond the ‘if we’re still around in 10 years’ sentiment (damn I hope they’re still around in ten years), Soth brings up an interesting point about the idea of an agency, or any group of photographers, getting together to produce the work themselves and provide their own outlet. Beyond being a really smart idea, it might just be the only way we survive as photographers in something like the model of the past. We can attest: it is damn, damn hard to get work out there.

In some ways, this is exactly what M. Scott and I are trying to do here with dvafoto… provide an outlet, develop our own audience. And not just for our own work, but to develop this for the work that we love and think needs to get out there. Reminds me of what our friends over at Luceo Images have also been talking a lot about this last week or so about collaboration and sharing and this is manifested in their own collective. Read for yourself at Kevin German’s blog Wandering Light, but also on the blogs of Matt Slaby and (coming full circle, huzzah!) A Photo Editor.