Afterlight

Only four images in this set but an interesting idea

By Jan Kriwol
see the others here

A Nomadic Life: By Photographer Hamid Sardar-Afkhami

From the excellent Anthony Luke blog comes this photo essay

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami is a professional photographer as well as a scholar of Tibetan and Mongol languages who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. After moving to Nepal in the late 1980’s and exploring Tibet and the Himalayas for more than a decade, he traveled to Outer Mongolia. Seeing the opportunity to create a single important collection concentrating on the last country where the majority of the population are still nomads, Sardar-Afkhami set up a mobile studio camp. With his arsenal of cameras of different formats, he mounts yearly expeditions into the Mongolian outback to document her nomadic traditions.

see all the images here

Giles Duley: ‘I lost three limbs in Afghanistan, but had to go back … ‘

Photographer Giles Duley was nearly killed after stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan. Back home, fighting for his life in hospital, he made himself a promise: to return to Kabul to complete his mission of documenting the savage toll that war takes on civilians……..

This is his story. From The Guardian

A few months earlier, I sat in the searing heat of Sudan with Gino Strada, the charismatic chainsmoking surgeon who set up the Italian NGO Emergency, discussing the plight of civilians caught in the Afghan conflict. I was visiting their project in Khartoum, documenting their groundbreaking Salam Cardiac Centre. Over dinner, Gino told me about the work Emergency was doing in Kabul. I had shied away from Afghanistan because I felt so many great photographers were already working there. I’ve always said that if I get somewhere and there’s another photographer there already, I’m in the wrong place. My main interest has been the untold stories of human suffering around the world. However, as Gino explained, with his typical Italian passion, about the plight of civilians caught up in the years of conflict, I realised it was a story I had heard little of. So I resolved at that point to go and document Emergency’s work there, and I made that promise to Gino……….

Seven-year-old Ataqullah at the Red Cross limb-fitting centre in Kabul. A year before, while walking to school, he’d stepped on a landmine, losing an arm and leg. Photograph: Giles Duley

While on this embed, one cold morning in February 2011, I stepped on an IED (improvised explosive device), which had me fighting for my life in intensive care for the next two months and left me a triple amputee with only one arm intact……….

Giles Duley with Afghan boy Sediqullah at the Emergency hospital, Kabul. Sediqullah’s hands were damaged when he played with an unexploded fuse. Photograph: Neil Bonner/Minnow films

Read all of this moving and powerful story here If you can’t read there will be a documentary on the tv Walking Wounded: Return to the Frontline will be shown on Channel 4 at 10pm on 21 February

The Observer’s 20 photographs of the week 10.02.2013

The best photographs in news and culture from around the world over the past seven days

A sheep looks out from its snow covered shed in Penistone, South Yorkshire. Snow and gale force winds returned this week to parts of Britain Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

Gale-force winds battered the seafront at Seaham harbour in County Durham this week, as winter returned with a vengeance Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

Cosmic clouds and stellar winds seen in an image provided by Nasa of LL Orionis and the Orion Nebula Photograph: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/HA/EPA

See the rest of the twenty here

Colour Run, Olympic Park, Sydney

Runners cheer after they finish the Colour Run at Sydney Olympic Park

Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Reuters

Man Ray Portraits Exhibition London

We recently featured  Man Ray in one of our blog posts here and now there is an exhibition of his portraits at The National Portrait Gallery

Man Ray Portraits is the first major museum retrospective of this innovative and influential artist’s photographic portraits.

Born Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, Man Ray initially taught himself photography in order to reproduce his own works of art. In 1912 he began to change the signature on his paintings from ER to Man Ray, and the Radnitzky family adopted this shorter surname.

Man Ray’s earliest photographs date from around 1916, when he documented his own Dada self-portrait and made portraits of Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray’s support and promotion of avant-garde artists was formalised in 1920, when American patron Katherine Dreier invited Man Ray and Duchamp to establish the Société Anonyme, America’s first contemporary art collection.

Focusing on his career in America and Paris between 1916 and 1968, the exhibition highlights Man Ray’s central position among the leading artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements and the significant range of contemporaries, celebrities, friends and lovers that he captured: from Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso to Kiki de Montparnasse, Lee Miller and Catherine Deneuve.

Featuring over 150 vintage prints and key works from international museums and private collections, the exhibition also demonstrates Man Ray’s use of revolutionary photographic techniques and early experiments with colour, as well as surveying his published work in leading magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair.

7th February until the 27th May NPG  Full details of the exhibition can be found here