Q: Why broadsheet?
A: We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is to do what the internet can’t: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet–15″ x 22″. Then we unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do.” -McSweeney’s FAQ on the one-shot San Francisco Panorama project

McSweeney’s, whose lists you should know, is producing a one-time-only 380-page newspaper to be distributed in San Francisco, to McSweeney’s subscribers, and in bookstores across the US. The teaser pages of the San Francisco Panorama are beautiful, and the list of contributors reads as a who’s who of contemporary American writing, design, illustration. The photography is top notch, too. Can’t wait to see one of these in the flesh.

The photographic dictionary is dedicated to defining words through the literal, figurative, and personal meanings found in each photograph.” -The Photographic Dictionary

to wit: alligator, fascination, mermaid, urine.

I wanted to share my latest project which I shot over two weeks in March, which I probably hinted at in some earlier posts. This Time Tomorrow: Post-War Bosnia at the Crossroads is my attempt to describe a complex feeling that is settling in around Bosnia about its hopes for a prosperous future.

I have been introducing these pictures with this text:

Bosnia is facing a growing challenge to efficient and prosperous survival as time advances with a peace treaty functioning as a constitution. We read more and more often news stories about Bosnia’s instability and ill-prospects for a unified future with two ‘entities’ – the Federation and Republika Srbska – butting heads amongst entrenched political and ethnic divides. Citizens and the economy are inching toward a precipice prepared by political interest and ineffectual international oversight. War is not going to be the answer, but innocent people will suffer just the same.

But here is the longer version (with informative links!) that I hope will more fully explain the situation in Bosnia today:

For almost fifteen years since the Dayton Agreement the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has stayed together through one of the world’s most complex political arrangements. Bosnia’s constitution, which mandates two ‘entities’ (consisting of the Federation of Bosniaks and Croats and the Republika Srbska of Bosnian Serbs), is an annex to a peace treaty. Further, the EU’s High Representative gives the international community final veto power over the country’s tripartite presidency. It is obvious to most observers that this inefficient and corruption-rich system cannot exist indefinitely. In recent months politicians from all sides are protesting frequently about the untenability of the current arrangement as a challenge to their sovereignty (as an ethnic group, an entity or, rarely, as the whole nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Old tensions remain, there are divided cities where one ethnic group doesn’t cross an invisible line for lingering fears, real or imagined, of conflict.

I hope these images can communicate the tensions that remain in Bosnia with high unemployment, political stagnation, a looming economic catastrophe and a pessimistic outlook on the future. Old interests and battles, frozen in 1995, remain relevant for much of the population and distrust is high. How will this nation, and the international community, reform and reconstitute one of the world’s more clumsy attempts at nation building?

This is a strange project for me, and of course I’m thankful for all the positive reviews so far, but I can’t quite wrap my head around these pictures. Maybe its the ephemeral thesis, trying to capture this feeling I was talking about, and I’m not convinced the pictures are successful in that vein. Of course they’re also a bit too focused on the Muslim portions of Bosnia, where I was living and where most of my friends are, but the ‘idea’ remains. I look forward to your feedback, questions or suggestions.. I’d love a conversation here on Dva.

Many thanks are due to my friend Jasmin Brutus for hosting me in Sarajevo and Dado Ruvic (who I just wrote about here on Dva) for showing me around Zenica. Two wonderful men and photographers, thank you both!

Apologies for the lack of posts on my part in the past week and a half. Had an abrupt trip to Yunnan Province in southwestern China. Part vacation, part work; I continued my ongoing project on China’s zoos, shot some work that will likely end up in my China Everbright project, and did short projects on agriculture, development of rural areas, and how China’s ethnic minorities fit into it all. There’s a teaser shot above, but it might be a while before I get through everything I shot over the past few days…

One of my major weaknesses is photography books, to the point where my mother won’t let me store any more at her house. Mostly they’re not rare, and plenty were off bargain racks from used stores. Sometimes I seek them out, more on this in a second, other times I just stumble upon gems. My first real photography book was Black Star: Sixty Years of Photojournalism… and it eventually led to an internship at the agency Black Star.

So it was with conflicting emotion earlier this week when I was at the half-price book store in Seattle, thumbing through the mix-and-match photo section, when I came across a little christmas miracle. Certainly, its rare to find photojournalism books on shelves like these, much less really good ones. Of course.. if a books is really good or rare it surely isn’t going to be on a marked-down shelf. But here was a less-than-pristine copy of a book I hadn’t ever seen in person, and I had to have it. Jean Gaumy’s masterpiece Men at Sea was $8.

Especially since I’m about to leave Seattle for an extended time, indefinitely really, it really makes no sense for me to buy any more big books for myself. I still haven’t figured out how to bring my library with me, or if that is even a smart idea. So I was wandering the store trying to figure out an excuse to take the book home. Then it hit me: I should give the book to my brother, a young fisherman, for Christmas.

Both he, and a dear family friend who has worked on boats his entire life, adore the book. Beyond terrific pictures the story, the design, the accompanying documents and illustrations create an amazing piece. The friend, Bob, was especially impressed with the photographer’s understanding of life on the boats. A good compliment.
It has got me (and Scott, when we discussed this) about the ‘cross-over’ quality of certain photographers and projects .. that get non-photographers and photography fans excited. Maybe this is an exaggeration, but it seems that most of the photography that is popular with a wider public is incredibly cliche, cutesy or photoshopped. It makes me so happy to see something like this work making people excited.
As Scott told me: ‘I was just going to mention that Heidi’s cousin (not a photographer) has that book. I don’t often see really good photo books in non-photographers’ collections, but I’ve seen that one in a few places.’

And it has me obsessed anew with Gaumy, especially with this work. Incredible dedication and vision. And what a visual signature.

Oh, how about some of those books that I haven’t found yet. These would be in the category of searching out in every store I go to (looking for that deal) or on site like bookfinder.com. Beaufort West by Mikhael Subotzky, Belgrade Belongs To Me by Boogie, Off Broadway soon to be released by some Magnum fellows, No Man’s Land by Larry Towell, Americans We by Eugene Richards (oh this is a dream) and of course some Telex Iran and Farewell to Bosnia by Gilles Peress. Someday. (I swear I enjoy books from photographers outside of Magnum! these are just the dream ones off the top of my head..). The holy grail though might be Insomnia from Antoine D’Agata.

If you’re into books too, there are a couple of great places to read reviews and see what’s coming out … firstly 5b4 and then Buffet by Andrew Phelps (who himself is a photographer, I’ve got to look more at his work). And don’t forget Dashwood Books in New York. Mecca. When I finally self publish I See A Darkness, I’m headed there first.

Have you found any good photo books for gifts? Or any suggestions on things I should be lusting over?

Here is a bit of a Dva scoop: A few days ago I was poking around the local Craigslist and found this posting, of a local photographer trying to find subjects for a photo essay on the economic downturn via a classified ad. I still don’t know quite what to make of it. On one hand (as Scott suggested to me) it might be a good way to reach out to your ‘target audience’ of people feeling the economy, some of whom might be searching for jobs on the web. But on the other, it oozes laziness and/or incompetence to me. It does seem like this photographer’s heart is in the right place .. but given their portfolio is mostly fashion and they’re approaching subjects in this (novel but impersonal) way, I don’t like it. Most likely, they’re just not used to the process of negotiating access (surely, one of the harder things we do) and resorted to the equivalent of yelling out in a crowded room.

It appears the Craigslist community didn’t like it either: the post was flagged for removal soon after I found it. What do you think?

I received an email from my good friend Jasmin Brutus from Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina a few minutes ago, and I loved the story and pictures and wanted to share here. With his permission, an excerpt from his work documenting the Bosnian National Sitting Volleyball Team. (Before Serbs start badmouthing me or Jasmin, let me assure you we say this with wry humor and not derision!)

there is a joke here in Bosnia..
a Serb and Bosnian were arguing about who has better sports teams…and Serb said..
we have great football team, great handball team,
great volleyball team, great water polo team…
What do you have?
And Bosnian said..we have sitting volleyball team..
they are European and world champions..and
they won gold medal at Paralympics…
Then Serb asked him…
Yeah…you have..but who made that team…

Bosnia and Herzegovina has population about 4,5 million, and there is about 30 sitting volleyball clubs.
National team won four times European champions, two times World champions, won silver medal in Athens, gold medal in Sydney and silver medal in Beijing at Paralympics.

Cheers!

Jasmin

Congrats to Jasmin for continuing to work on this important project; I promise to post more as he releases it!

I promised to post a short edit of my project documenting China’s urban zoos a couple weeks ago, and it’s taken me a bit longer than expected to get it up here. Here it is, finally.

China’s zoos are just about the most depressing place in the world. Once beautiful, once majestic, the animals are, in some cases quite literally, wasting away in their cages. I’ve seen animals with open, festering sores (the puma below), a cow whose overgrown hooves looked skis (pictures couldn’t be made), muzzled animals performing for screaming fans or posing for photographs (the bear below), and countless animals either listless and unkempt in their filthy confines, or angry and frustrated, pacing back and forth in their too small cages.

The zoos are enormously popular. From Beijing in the north to Sanya in the south, and many places inbetween (Hefei, Shanghai, Nanjing, Qingdao, Tianjin, and elsewhere) the conditions of the animals are uniformly awful. But the crowds pour in. Ticket prices are low, sometimes less than a dollar and never more than 5 dollars per person, it’s a cheap and easy way to entertain children and the family for the day. Just as in the rest of the world, the zoos offer the only chance for the Chinese population (majority urban, as of this year) to come face to face with the wide wild world outside of the cities. In China, again much like in the rest of the world, the development of these cities is a major reason that these animals’ habitat is disappearing. There are greater problems in China, surely, but the zoos serve as stark contrast between China’s once great wilderness and its now great cities.

 

 I started going to zoos when I first moved to China in fall 2007, mostly due to an episode of the excellent radio show Radiolab about the development of zoos from the Roman Coliseum to now. China is by no means the only culprit in the horrible treatment of captive animals. Abuse in zoos and circuses is widespread, and the world’s leading zoos only started housing animals in habitat-style cages in the 1970s, starting with a gorilla enclosure at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. China’s well behind the curve on the refurbishment of their urban zoos, but there are glimmers of hope.

 

In many of the zoos, the most active and most popular animals now live in enclosures approaching a habitat. The zoo in Hefei, Anhui Province, where the chimpanzee picture at the top of the post was taken, recently opened a large, open grassy and rocky area for their tigers. Pandas often have open play spaces, and macaques and other small monkeys usually live in so-called “Monkey Hills,” which resemble playground jungle gyms. But more often that not, the animals in these zoos spend the majority of their time in small, dirty concrete and iron boxes.

 

I started photographing the project in black and white, but quickly switched to color when I saw the conditions of the cages. The chimpanzee picture at the top, for instance, relies on the color difference between the warm glow of a heater and the cold, snowy landscape outside. The bright color of peeling paint on the walls of an empty macaque enclosure would lose its impact in black and white. The animals’ vibrant fur contrasts strongly against the drab concrete.

 

 

Two major themes in the work, reflections and iron bars, came about as efforts to illustrate the animals’ captivity. The bars offer a literal metaphor to prisons and jails. In many western zoos, these iron bars no longer exist, but in China, they give the animal something to fight against. A bear wraps its claws around the fencing, or a cheetah tries to stare down visitors only to have its eyes, the very weapon of its ferocity, blocked by the cage. In the picture of the Pere David’s deer with cut antlers, the bars strip the animal of its identity, just as when its antlers were removed.

The reflections give the viewer the chance to see what lies beyond the cage and, in fact, beyond the frame of the picture. Whether a desolate snowy landscape, luscious foliage, or the crowded press of tourists, the animals are often far removed from even their most immediate surroundings. This is both good and bad. The glass (partially, in the case of the raccoons) prevents the crowds from feeding junk food to the animal or throwing water bottles at them, but for others it means they can’t reach their source for food and other necessities.

 

As I wrote above, the conditions are slowly improving. Here’s hoping that they’ll continue on the path toward adequate and humane facilities for the animals.

photos and words (c) M. Scott Brauer. Contact Scott for licensing: scott dot brauer at gmail dot com.

I strongly believe that one is not ‘better’ than the other. They are different. And I think most photographers should use both, and it should depend on what kind of project they are working on and what they are trying to say. I switch between the two all of the time .. my Kosovo work is shot digitally and my long-running projects on Homelessness and New York City are shot on good old Tri-X film, all in 35mm format.

So, the question is, Which am I going to use for this project?

As I mentioned in this interview with Rachel Hulin for Nerve.com, I try hard to think about which medium I want to work in when starting a new project. To quote from the interview,

“When I shoot black and white things are dark and gritty, very much intentionally, and they compliment and draw things out of the subject matter. As I move forward I am approaching new stories that don’t have this feel to begin with, and it wouldn’t be natural to cloud it under an arbitrary choice of color vs. black and white. I want everything to compliment each other – tones, composition, and everything else. For me, longer and slower stories are ripe for the way I work with film but the faster pieces almost demand we shoot digital. And, for me, digital means color these days, as I’m still trying to get something that looks ‘right’ for me in grayscale (back to that feel that compliments), something that matches or surpasses what I get shooting black and white.”

I was referring there more to the choice between color and black and white, but this more or less amounts to the choice between film and digital for me. I think I’ll always have the mantra hammered into me as an intern at Black Star back in 2005… to paraphrase, ‘If you want it black and white, shoot it black and white!’. Meaning, of course, shooting it ‘right’ the first time, on black and white film. This applies to so much in photography (I also was smacked then in to learning to not crop pictures .. get it right when you click the shutter .. and this has stuck with me remarkably well except for extremely rare circumstances when I break from my rule .. like below on this post!): get it right the first time and don’t rely and get dependent on photoshop ‘fixes’.

As I mentioned rather furtively earlier on DVA, I’m starting work on a new project called ‘Graceland’, about America today and the stories we’re missing or ignoring due to the election cycle and wars. My original thought was that this project had to be shot on film, in color, and in a new format for me, 6×7.

A lot of things went in to this decision … I wanted something that looked new, and stood out from, the work I have done before. I’ve been shooting the color digital (Kosovo) and gritty black and white film (Homeless, I See A Darkness) for awhile, and wanted something that stood out from that work both in ‘feel’ and ‘impact’. I felt a larger negative, in a new perspective and format, would accomplish that. I also was interested in exploring how medium format (which I haven’t shot since ‘05) would change my approach to photographing, and how that would impact how the pictures looked, and were interpreted. I’ve been looking a lot at art-editorial shooters lately (hard to define or give examples off.. think Ziyah Gafic, Mikhael Subotzky, Simon Norfolk, Alec Soth and Alessandra Sanguinetti, amongst so many more) and I wanted to explore. So, I started shooting test rolls on a rented Mamiya 7 and eventually took one to my first real shoots of the project, the Boeing Strike and Lt. Madrazo’s funeral.

Partly as a backup, partly for ‘deadline’ sake (I was thinking of immediate turnaround for news publications), I also shot digital at these events, and it has turned out to be a lucky blessing. After getting my 220 film back and spending time and money getting it scanned, I was rather underwhelmed. Maybe I wasn’t giving it enough time to push myself with a new piece of equipment requiring a different method, but my first few rolls did not have that feel that I was looking for.. that new thing that would really distinguish this project from my other work. There wasn’t hardly anything different between the film and digital except for the format (35mm vs. 6×7). The color, perspective, depth and much more importantly how I was working with the scene were not changed from everything I had done before. Why is that? I can’t really say.

There is more backstory to getting this Graceland project, which I hope to get to at some point, but suffice now to say that it has been a struggle to find funding and outlet for the work. To date, wholly unsuccessful. So when it came time last week to get ready for a shoot in Eastern Washington at an apple orchard I had to decide whether or not it was worth it to continue shooting film (at $35/day rental for the camera, $10/roll (20 pictures) for film plus $11 per roll developing, and 15min per frame to scan) on an unfunded project. Given my apprehension about whether or not this new format was impacting the final product, it was a clearer decision to go strictly with digital. In many ways, I felt I had to: the investment, in time and money, in shooting film was not paying off. An experiment that failed my assumptions, but I must still go forward, as I believe in the story (as M. Scott said after reading a draft of this, he thinks of these debates are concerning ‘packaging, rather than substance’. of course, but the packaging must be considered and utilized to its fullest extent. I quote, paraphrasing again, Paolo at the Oslo Magnum workshop, “We’re photographers. Aesthetics are all we have got”, meaning, I think, that we’re working in visual medium and have to grab our audience in the most efficient and important ways, and that will be done visually)

So, I might have to toss, or crop (something I do only as a final, regrettable resort), some of the medium format frames to fit in to the new edit, but I’ll be able to work more cheaply and certainly quicker. I wish I could have pushed the 6×7 further, and I hope to try it (or square! can’t wait to work with it again) again soon.. probably when I get some funding behind me.

So when I headed out last week to photograph the apple farm and its migrant workers, I only had my digital camera with me, shooting in my ‘normal’ way. “Graceland” will now be some extension of the method of my Kosovo work, for better or worse. We’ll have to wait for a while longer to see how it all looks together. For another post is that crazy process of conception to individual days and shoots to the final production of a story. I’m always amazed at how it works out.

(maybe you could guess, this last picture is a loving nod to my favorite Eugene Richards book, “Americans We”. The best link is to go to his webpage, go to ‘Books’ and click to see the spreads. I hope I can one day accomplish something as important as this book, in the same way that Richards dedicates his book to Robert Frank)