Tabla de contenidos para September - October 2016 en Huck

In 1955 a frustrated Robert Frank, disillusioned by New York City’s breakneck pace and Mad Men aspirations, set out on a road-trip across the United States to dig beneath the nation’s veneer. The images he captured – 28,000 frames whittled down to 83, and derided largely for their ‘sloppy’ imperfection – changed the course of history. Through Frank’s lens, the post-war truth of a society divided by class and race sprang to life as evocative, everyday scenes. The Americans inspired a new generation of documentarian: photographers who, to this day, still seek reassurance that their own search – for truth, or meaning, or some kind of understanding – will one day pay off. And yet, it took years for Frank to get there. “The eye should learn to listen before…

The roots of my photography lie deep in my childhood. I come from a family immersed in the arts: my mother was a sculptor and draftsman, my brother is a painter and my sister is an ornithological illustrator. As a child I visited museums regularly with my family and I suspect that those early viewings of de Chirico, Matisse and Braque still affect how I see. My father – a publisher, secretive writer and occasional photographer – taught me photographic technique as well as introducing me to a variety of photographic works, including the two photography books that initially inspired me: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment and Robert Frank’s The Americans. From early on, I was project-oriented. In college I produced a series of photographs of teenagers skipping class, following…

Until recently, the only stories coming out of Africa were negative. If you had a positive story, editors weren’t interested. I have been covering hard-hitting social issues since the ’90s, whether it’s famine in Ethiopia, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo or the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana and South Africa. The mission of the photojournalist tradition I work in is to highlight tough stories like these. But when you see the same things happening over and again, you get emotionally tired. You start to wonder if what you’re doing changes anything. A lot of journalists grow quite cynical by following the news cycle from story to story, from place to place. But I couldn’t stay sane doing that. I prefer to develop projects over the long term. While…

India is a complex society – and I was a rebel from a young age. It was just an inner calling: I didn’t want to conform to what the other women in my house were doing. I grew up in a very patriarchal Hindu home in Calcutta, where ritual dominated every aspect of our childhood. The function of religion is meant for congregation, to bring people together. But these rituals are actually tools of coercion over women. I experienced ritual-based violence as a mechanism of control in my own home. My grandmother was widowed young, and so was my mother. It upset me, seeing other women wearing beautiful bright colours, enjoying festivals, when my grandmother wore only white. I saw my mother fasting, even when ill, as a way of…

AUREL AND HOWIE Borowick are locked in an embrace. In the 2013 picture, the husband and wife look frail as they both battle terminal, stage-four cancers – pancreatic cancer for him, breast cancer for her. Their daughter, Nancy, is standing only a few feet away, her face hidden by the camera. This photograph is just one of the many images Nancy Borowick made of her parents between 2009, when Laurel was diagnosed, and 2014, when she succumbed – almost one year to the day after Howie’s passing. Borowick was still a student at the International Center of Photography in New York when she started photographing her parents. At that time, only her mother was sick and Borowick’s class project had a happy ending: Laurel’s cancer was in remission at the…

The act of staying alive is a protest. If you have to survive in a neighbourhood where there are drugs and crime, for me that is a protest. When a mother says to her child that he can’t play out on the street after a certain hour because she’s expecting the boys to be coming out, that’s a protest. The huge marches in Ferguson or Manhattan are a visible form of protest, but I’m looking at it in a more abstract way. For me, activism is a way of life. We’re all activists. Activism does not necessarily mean that your sole purpose is to shine light on the things that you believe in. Activism is care. I care about humanity. I don’t just care about black folk. I don’t believe…

I’ve always been drawn to the idea of rebuilding a life and starting over. It’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since getting into photography as a skateboarder travelling the world. My first solo trip abroad was to Norway at the age of 17, just after I graduated from high school. Ever since then I’d say I’ve been doing a trip every six months. At 20, I headed for Thailand. I remember being completely alone, just riding in the back of these red trucks from place to place. It dawned on me that you could go anywhere and get lost in a world you never knew existed. Three years later I decided to do the same on the Trans-Siberian Railway, recreating the path my ancestors once took. When my father’s…

I was in Egypt covering the 2011 revolution when, two days after Mubarak stepped down, my father passed away. I travelled home to Hong Kong for the funeral, to face all the complications that come from a sudden death. I remember being in an acupuncture session, covered in needles, when I got an urgent text. A tsunami had hit the coast of Tōhoku, Japan. Before I’d even seen a report, I knew I had to get on a plane. I’m used to covering war in places like Eastern Congo and Somalia, but what’s happening in Fukushima is more complicated. The tsunami triggered nuclear accidents at reactors controlled by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Residents within a 20km radius were evacuated, leaving 470,000 people displaced. Not only do you have…

Everyone has their own reasons for covering war. There are people who do this job because they like to live on the edge or because they’re running away from something. My reasons are more politically or sociologically driven. I remember walking into a Sebastião Salgado exhibition, seeing these wall-sized photos and being completely overcome with emotion. I had just started photography and was shocked that an image could have such an effect on me. Realising the power of a photograph to tell stories was life-altering. I thought, ‘This is something I want to do as a means of communication.’ It wasn’t until a few years ago, when I sat down to write a book and used my photos as a reference, that I began looking at my body of work…

My parents gave me my first camera around the age of six. Although I have many clear memories of framing scenes, and even set up my own darkroom at 12, I saw myself going into the sciences. But early on in college, I took a course on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni before leaving science behind. I left for Yale School of Art, thinking I’d go into film, but that route began to seem impractical and I was impatient. That’s when I realised that with photography, you don’t need to have a crew or command a lot of money. It’s more like being a poet, where you just have your piece of paper. In 1983, when I was 22, I decided to drop out after a semester and head for…

Iuse photography to examine and reflect on a legacy of representations of poverty. But I may not be the photographer you want me to be. I am not filled with a noble desire to show the world a certain type of injustice in hopes of remedying it. I’m not interested in a narrative of good versus evil. The photographs in my project, As it was Give(n) to Me, are meant to engage in a rhetoric established by the early missionaries to Appalachia – a mountain range in the eastern US – and then reasserted by photographers and documentarians for nearly a century. Seven years ago, I began travelling in large concentric circles through central Appalachia, meeting strangers, making friends and, sometimes, lovers. Along the way, I learned how the problematic…

There’s something quite strange about having a passport from a country that you’ve never stepped foot in. It’s like possessing an identity that exists through paper: not through experience but only in your mind. It’s similar to the way we connect to family photographs from before our time. My grandfather was an American citizen, a travelling jazz musician who, after a failed marriage with my grandmother, returned to playing the clubs of LA and San Francisco. Things didn’t quite work out as planned. He headed to Vegas where he slowly drank himself to death. At least, that’s what I believed. I never actually met my grandfather, Joseph ‘Joey’ O’Donnell. He died in the US when I was growing up in rural England. My family didn’t talk about him; it was…

For the past 16 years I’ve been constantly on the road, travelling back and forth across the US – from New York to California, from Alaska to the Mexican border. Through my work, which documents the country’s changing shape, I keep returning to the idea of how we incorporate ourselves into the landscape. But this work is no simple observation; it’s my life, my full existence. And it’s deeply personal, too. I’m a first-generation citizen here. My parents came in the 1950s from Greece for the same reason so many immigrants come to the US: to pursue the ‘American Dream’. They came hoping for better opportunities; that their children would not get stuck in the factories, where they had spent their own lives, but rather in the corporate offices. They…