I’ve been traveling and working a lot lately around Serbia in the last month, hence my lack of interesting posts, and I am taking off in a few hours for the Visa pour L’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France. I’ll then be back in the United States (Seattle and New York City) from September 6 through October 24, before returning to Belgrade. If you’re in Perpignan and want to meet up, be sure to send me an email or track me down. Same if you’re in the States.

I also wanted to share a couple of places where my work has been published recently:
The New York Times Lens Blog published a feature about my project in Bosnia “This Time Tomorrow” to coincide with the 15th Anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in July. Please have a look at the nice piece that James Estrin put together.

The Sunday Times Magazine in London also published three pages of my project “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, about the destruction of a Roma community in Belgrade. The article and web gallery are behind their paywall but you can see clips on my website.

I look forward to getting back to regular posting and sharing some of what I’ve been up to soon. Happy end of summer everyone!

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).

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.

A dirty Unix joke made it into a photo in the May 11 New York Times story about a group of programmers working to compete against facebook with an eye toward privacy and openness. Let this be a reminder to photographers to always check their backgrounds. Admittedly, this is hard to notice for the untrained eye.

The seemingly ordinary Unix operating system commands down the left side of the photo: “TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT.” Each is a command that will work on most Unix operating systems, including OSX, but most users have no familiarity with them; taken in this order and without operators and files to make the commands valid, the sequence vaguely resembles the order of a sexual encounter. The photo is still visible on the website accompanying the article, albeit with the joke cropped out.

“I am ashamed of you and your management colleagues [at the New York Times]. I still have the highest regard for your editors, writers, and photographers. Your statements have the feel of events in Florida during the last election with lawyers and persons of authority depriving people of what was theirs. You are expending huge amounts of highly paid time to deprive freelance photographers of their property and consequently of income for the minimal amount of profit that will be generated by this mean-spirited policy. It is not acceptable. You use your muscle in words in a court of law because you are lawyers. I will use my muscle in words in the court of public opinion because I am a communicator.” -George Zimbel in a 2001 exchange with a New York Times Co., lawyer

George Zimbel’s website is a treasure trove of vintage photography and stories of the days of photographic yore (check out the blog). Via The Photo Brigade, I see that Zimbel has published a 2001 exchange with a New York Times Company lawyer when trying to reclaim a vintage print that the Times claimed it owned. It’s an interesting look into some of the unexpected and strange legal hoops freelancers sometimes need to jump through.

“Some amateur photographers said, basically, good riddance to the pros. Some professionals said that they were struggling; others thought the story overstated the problem.” -NYT’s Pros and Amateurs Debate: Is Photography in Trouble?

The New York Times has a short followup with reader mail regarding yesterday’s article on the difficulties facing professional photographers.

The NYT Lens Blog posted today some of the only unembedded conflict photography from Iraq or Afghanistan that I can remember seeing in awhile (can you think of other examples? send them my way). Moises Saman was on assignment for the New York Times in the town of Marja in the aftermath of a recent offensive. It is strong work and provides something of a different view of the conflict there, though quite a few images do feature soldiers in the field. The perspective though, as the photographer is not working with them, is an interesting wrinkle and Saman explains how he got some of the images in the accompanying text.

This piece on Lens is a nice counterpoint to a piece published a few days ago with NYT Photographer Tyler Hicks who was embedded with a US unit which was conducting the operation/offensive in the same town days before Saman arrived. I think it is great that there are two angles on the same story by the same publication, especially from the perspective of being with and outside the military. I hope to see more, especially from the ‘outside’ perspective. I wonder how they played off of each other in the actual editions (online and print) of the paper. Again, anyone know?

Must see, especially if you’re into good design. The Society of Publication Designers and their wonderful blog Grids interviewed The New York Times Magazine’s Design Director Arem Duplessis in December about the magazine’s redesign, which launched last June. As with many people the NYT Mag is a beacon in the industry for me, though I don’t get to see the print edition much abroad. It is great to catch up with their smart presentations and ideas.

(Did you know that their end slug is actually the dot from the “i” in the logo? And Dan Winters does medical illustrations in addition to great photography? Awesome.)

Of all the words and pictures I’ve seen from Haiti over the last week this interview with New York Times Staff Photographer Damon Winter on the NYT’s Lens Blog is the most heartbreaking and provoking. In light of our recent discussions I think this is an important read for context and understanding of important work being done by photographers and news organizations on the ground. Winter is a class act and wonderful photographer, and this situation and what he has seen (as with everyone in Haiti) will likely haunt them for a long time. Important to remember, even as we assess how the world is reacting to and speaking about this disaster. The images are disturbing, but such is this reality.

The New York Times’ blogs keep getting better and better. Everyone knows Lens, but perhaps At War isn’t as well known. Formed out of the now defunct Baghdad Bureau blog, At War is “a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.” There’s always something interesting to read or see, from the above seized pictures from Pakistan’s restive Waziristan to Franco Pagetti’s grandmother’s gnocchi recipe as served to Ashley Gilbertson for a birthday to a translator’s perspective on speaking with a would-be suicide bomber to downtime on patrol with Afghan and American soldiers.

A number of photographers currently contribute or have contributed to the blog (that list isn’t up to date), and the archives are worth a look: Peter Van Agtmael, Tyler Hicks, Christoph Bangert, Michael Kamber, Johann Spanner, Ashley Gilbertson, and Joao Silva