Содержание выпуска: September - October 2015 — Huck

APRIL 21, 2012: DEMONSTRATORS DANCE AND CHANT IN TAHRIR SQUARE AMONG TENS OF THOUSANDS WHO GATHERED TO PROTEST RUMOURED CORRUPTION IN THE ELECTION PROCESS IN THE WEEKS APPROACHING EGYPT'S FIRST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. BY AMANDA MUSTARD. Henri Cartier-Bresson talked long and hard about the ‘decisive moment’ – that magical sweet spot where the essence of an experience is captured and preserved for all time. His words have inspired generations of photographers to look for something universal in the madness that surrounds them; moments that will resonate long after they pass. But documentary photographers have a particular kind of mission. As storytellers that start and end with the truth, they’ve made it their life’s work to pick apart the things that confound us – conflict and inequality, politics and love; the actions…

My first experience of taking a photograph was at high school. After I left, I bought myself a present – a Kodak 104, amateur thing, no adjustments – and got really interested in photography, looking at Creative Camera magazine, photographic manuals, and a lot of magazines from overseas that featured Magnum photographers. Then when I went to art school I changed from a paintbrush to a camera and the paint became the film. “I don’t really think about the relationship with my subjects. It’s just like making contact with someone, there are different ways of exchanging information; sometimes it’s non-verbal, when you make eye contact with a person and make them feel like you’re taking them seriously. I pay attention to people. “Photography is always a collaboration, because you…

I would not have been able to do this project if I was white. As someone who grew up after 1994, when Mandela came to power, I am a born free: the same things the people I photograph are going through I have experienced personally and have witnessed for a long time. I am speaking from a place of seeking truth as a black person in South Africa. I do not know how other journalists or photographers would approach the subject. I only know how I went about it, basing it on conversations. I spent most of my time speaking with other born frees rather than taking photographs. That way I managed to learn from them, and they learned something from me, based on our experiences of growing up in…

I remember the moment when I first stepped inside the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas, with my camera. It was evening and I had passed through the various control points – the massive locked entrance, then more gates – and I was walking around inside the large prison yard entirely alone, with my Nikon F over my shoulder. “Getting inside the Texas prisons with a camera was my great coup in journalism. What I managed to do was unheard of at the time. I couldn’t believe it. I was also extremely happy, as if I was in a dream. I don’t think I took any pictures at all. I knew what lay ahead. The fox was inside the chicken coop and was going to stay there as long as he…

In 2010, Andy Bell – a producer from Panorama at the BBC – called me up and said, ‘Have you been following the news? Thirty-three Chilean miners are trapped underground – and they’re still alive!’ We’d worked together previously on a story in Dubai on slave labour. Panorama wanted to make a film around the rescue effort, and Andy invited me to join a small team – a fixer and assistant producer Alexander Houghton – to meet with the families and find stories before he and reporter Dan McDougall joined us. “When we arrived the rescue effort was gaining pace; the four of us ended up shooting the film over a frantic six-week period. Most press were focused on the rescue as a technical feat, but we wanted to focus…

When I moved from New York to London in 2012, I needed a parting gift. New York is the place where I found myself, where I became an adult, where I fell in love. It was, and always will be, my city. I wanted to pay homage. I had photos from my final nostalgia-infused month in New York and I had photos I took as I unwrapped London. So I began to combine them in a series of double exposures. Each composite was half New York, half London. Together, they represented my vision of home. Months later, that morphed into Echosight, a collaborative mashup project that invites photographers to produce composite images together. In the beginning, it was a creative playground for photojournalists. Inside the journalism bubble our motivations and…

A plan was set in place at the birth of democracy to repossess land, and return it to those from whom it was taken, but it doesn’t seem that anything has been done about it. Land is still a contentious issue among most South Africans. My goal is to understand the relationship land has to the people who occupy it. I feel that in order to comes to terms with something one has to fully understand it. The land issue in South Africa is very complex and things keep changing as time goes by. The problems of the past are now infused with economic and political challenges as well. I am more confused about the situation than when I first started this project. I have realised it is way more…

I first went to Nigeria in 2012, after many years of working elsewhere in Africa, planning to do a serious project about infrastructure in the continent’s biggest economy and a side project about Nigerian weddings. But, after I crashed my first wedding, my more serious plans fell to the wayside and I realised I could tell the same types of stories about inequality and power through the lens of weddings. One wedding led to the next, and from the megacity of Lagos in the south I began to wander towards the Muslim north of the country seeking out other nuptials. As I travelled north, I realised I was further and further out of my own element. I wanted to ground myself and centre my perspective by reading more. I asked…

My mom and dad never did what they really wanted with their lives. My father is a seaman and my mother an engineer. They are successful, but it was never their choice. When it was my turn to choose, I figured I hit the jackpot. I decided to become a journalist. At first I knew nothing about photojournalism. I'm from a small town in southern Ukraine, where there is no such profession. I got into photography in my first year at Kyiv University thanks to two senior students who are good friends now. It was a new world. I always loved telling stories that challenged people’s attitude, but telling stories in pictures was more exciting. When I was twenty, I got a job at an English language newspaper called the…

In the three years since Everyday Africa began, I’ve told the story many times: journalist Austin Merrill and I were in an elevator in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in a government building, on our way up to get our press passes. I saw a bit of simple symmetry in the elevator’s mirrored walls, and I wanted a photo – but it seemed foolish to lift a big camera out of my bag minutes before we would get official permission to work in the country, so I lifted my phone instead. Within a few hours, Austin and I were poring over pictures we had shot on our phones that day, and the name Everyday Africa popped into my head and stuck there. Within a few months, we had a popular Instagram feed…

I graduated from university in a small town in Northern Russia and suddenly realised I had not made enough pictures of my friends. I wanted to go back to that period of endless fun. But by that time, all of my friends had moved to other cities, so I met a group of young people and started to shoot them instead. “I wanted to show this special period in the lives of my ‘heroes’ – which is how I see the people I photograph – and that’s their youth. It’s a time when you want to feel everything. There is no goal. The most important thing is the process and your feelings; love and friendship are the main source of these feelings. To be able to take pictures of my…

South Africa is the original Wild West. For most of the seven months on the road all three of us felt out of our comfort zones, strangers drifting through the confusion. Our country is intensely diverse and the borders between cultures can be hard to breach, so we set off on our journey to find out what it means to be South African. Has Mandela’s vision of equality in a Rainbow Nation been achieved? We each come from different cultural backgrounds – Sean Metelerkamp (English), Wikus de Wet (Afrikaner), Sipho Mphongo (Xhosa) – and the access that we gained through each other was invaluable. Working together got us frontrow access to situations and conversations we would never normally experience. Access is almost ninety per cent of the mission in documentary…

I am South African; I retain the good, the bad, the weird and the wonderful within my blood and I see the hope, superstition, desire, regret, persistence and anger of this nation. My first ten years of existence moving up and down the beautiful coastline of this country was under white rule. I recognise the problematic nature of racial realities that afflict all South Africans and try to use my tools and skills as a photographer to evoke the absurdity of life in this magnificently puzzled country. I thrive on rejection. That kind of energy tells me they do not want me there for a particular reason. I must find out why. The barrier is the story. I have not tried to convey issues of race in any particular way.…

Despite boasting 7 billion people, our world has become small. We're all connected in one way or another. Yet this doesn’t mean we’re more community oriented – so much technology often makes personal relationships feel distant. Photography, in particular, can be a lonely profession – between planning, travel, editing and pitching, much of the work is solitary. So in 2014, we decided to form Koan Collective: Allison Joyce, Amanda Mustard, Cooper Neill and myself, Alex Potter. A Koan is a question or anecdote, used to inspire a deeper understanding of the world. What better way to deepen our understanding than putting our heads (and cameras) together? We are based all around the world, from Texas to Thailand, Bangladesh to Yemen, in areas where there are fewer opportunities to meet other…

I was never interested in pursuing work on the Armenian genocide. When I started this project, it was still just a vague historical narrative. I knew that, in 1915, the Ottomans initiated a policy of deportation and mass murder to destroy the Armenian presence. And that, by the war’s end, more than a million people were eliminated from what is now modern-day Turkey. But I had no idea of the personal toll the genocide exacted on my own family, or the sense of connection I would slowly come to feel through the making of this piece. “I am Armenian, but I was born in Moscow and raised in America. For most of my life, I struggled with my Armenian identity, partly because of the history one inherits. It is something…

When people see me they either think I’m black mixed-race or white, depending on how I’m wearing my hair. When I say neither, they ask if I’m Jewish. No. ‘Oh, you’re Italian or something?’ They never think I’m Latina. I guess I have very ambiguous origins, but people are always trying to put these different labels on me. “My parents are both Colombian. My dad is from Medellin and my mum is from Bucaramanga. Skin colour-wise, I’m super white, but I have dark features: my eyes, my eyebrows and my hair is really curly. My mother’s grandparents are Guané Indians and when my grandpa died, I found out that his grandfather came from Africa. My dad’s side has Spanish ancestry; they’re a lot more white-skinned and rosy-cheeked, which is where…

The fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of the War on Poverty seemed like a significant event, one that I spent a good deal of time thinking about. I tried to consider how much – or how little – had changed since 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson promised to tackle poverty across the United States. More importantly, I started questioning how I saw Appalachia, a region that has long been typecast as ‘America’s poorest’ and where I was born and raised. But to truly see, we must be willing to look – beyond the images already in our mind. Photography has been a powerful tool in developing, disseminating and reinforcing stereotypes (not just in Appalachia, of course). So it stands to reason, I thought, that photography could also be used…