Pictures of the Week: August 19, 2013

Another week of brilliant images from The Denver Post

The Denver Post Pictures of the Week brings together a collection of images, chosen among thousands, of the strongest photojournalism from around the world.

An Egyptian woman tries to stop a military bulldozer from hurting a wounded youth during clashes that broke out as Egyptian security forces moved in to disperse supporters of Egypt’s deposed president Mohamed Morsi in a huge protest camp near Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in eastern Cairo on August 14, 2013.

The operation began shortly after dawn when security forces surrounded the sprawling Rabaa al-Adawiya camp in east Cairo and a similar one at Al-Nahda square, in the centre of the capital, launching a long-threatened crackdown that left dozens dead.

 

A Yemeni youth holds a poster of Egypt’s ousted President Mohammed Morsi after climbing a lamp post during a rally supporting Morsi in Sanaa, Yemen, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013. Arabic writing reads, “We are with the legitimacy.” Egyptian authorities on Thursday authorized police to use deadly force to protect themselves and key state institutions from attacks, after presumed supporters of the deposed Islamist president torched two local government buildings near the capital in the latest of a series of apparent reprisals to follow a bloody crackdown on their protest camps. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

Culinary Specialist First Class Jason Burba, bottom right, listens to Capt. Robert N. Geis as he addresses the attendees of the change of command ceremony at Naval Air Station Oceana, Friday, Aug. 16, 2013 in Virginia Beach, Va. Captain Robert N. Geis was relieved Friday of his position as Commanding Officer of NASO by Captain Christopher W. Chope. (AP Photo/The Virginian-Pilot, Rich-Joseph Facun)

Families celebrate the release of 11 Palestinian prisoners from an Israeli jail in the Mikatah compound on August 14, 2013 in Ramallah, West Bank. Israel announced that 26 Palestinian prisoners will be released, 15 to Gaza and 11 sent to West Bank, as part of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. (Photo by Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)

Spanish bullfighters wait for the start of a bullfight during the festivities of San Roque, patron saint, in the village of Penafiel, Spain, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013. In August hundreds of villages around Spain celebrate their patron saints, with bullfights, music and party on the streets. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

see more pictures from this week in August here

Pictures of the Week: August 12, 2013

It may seem strange that we feature pictures of the week from months before, but great pictures are always great. The news stories that they illustrate, like the story lines in The Archers, just keep repeating themselves. The people, countries, wars, floods, festivals just keep rolling on exchange one natural disaster or war for another and sadly the stories are the same, awful, desperate. It is the images that stay with us and fortunately organisations like the Denver Post show us the very best pictures that inform and scandalise us for not doing more.

The Denver Post Pictures of the Week puts together a collection of images, chosen from thousands, of the strongest photojournalism from around the world.

An Indian youth dangles from a power line before diving into the floodwaters of an overflowing Ganges river in Allahabad on August 6, 2013. The monsoon, which covers the subcontinent from June to September and usually brings flooding, accounts for about 80 percent of India’s annual rainfall.

A supporter of Egypt’s ousted President Mohammed Morsi chants slogans during a protest outside Rabaah al-Adawiya mosque, where protesters have installed a camp and hold daily rallies at Nasr City in Cairo, Egypt.

An Indian youth dangles from a power line before diving into the floodwaters of an overflowing Ganges river in Allahabad on August 6, 2013. The monsoon, which covers the subcontinent from June to September and usually brings flooding, accounts for about 80 percent of India’s annual rainfall. AFP PHOTO/ SANJAY KANOJIA

TOPSHOTS
Hundreds of Indonesians wait to receive “zakat”, or alms, given to poor people during Ramadan at a tabacco factory of Gudang Garam, Indonesia’s biggest clove cigarette manufacturer, in Kediri in East Java province on August 6, 2013. Each person received 10,000 (1 USD) or up to 20,000 rupiah (2 USD) cash from company in a tradition of giving charity to the poor during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan. AFP PHOTO / M. ANDIKAM

In this photograph taken on August 7, 2013, an Indonesian man with his son pray after offering flowers on the dried volcanic mud for family members who died during a volcano eruption in Sidoarjo in eastern Java island, as Indonesians mark Eid al-Fitr with pilgrimages to cemeteries to remember their dead. The May 2006 disaster killed 12 people, displaced nearly 50,000 and buried 13 villages. AFP PHOTO / M.ANDIKAM

TOPSHOTS
A Bangladeshi passenger (R) climbs on top of a train as other passengers (R) look on from a compartment window as they rush home to their respective villages to be with their families ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, in Dhaka on August 8, 2013. The Eid al-Fitr, the biggest festive Muslim event, marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan. AFP PHOTO/Munir uz ZAMAN

See all of the images from the first week of August on The Denver Post here

Related articles

• Eid Al-Fitr around the world 2013 (ishraqfataftah.wordpress.com)
• Pictures of the Week: August 2, 2013 (oxfordschoolofphotography.wordpress.com)
• Editor’s Choice Picture of the Day – August 8, 2013 (thestar.blogs.com)
• In pictures: Bihar floods (bbc.co.uk)
• Indonesian volcano spews towering column of smoke (terradaily.com)

ABANDONED IN SYRIA: Q&A WITH JOHN WREFORD

So if you follow us regularly you will know that our man in Damascus, John Wreford is now our man in Istanbul. In this article with NATHAN THORNBURGH he tells us something about his life in Damascus before he was able to leave and about where he needs to be now.

….[It started when] I was about to leave for a short trip for Cairo. I have residency in Syria, and to leave you have to get an exit visa. When I went to the immigration office to do it, I discovered my name was on the computer. In Syria, that’s a euphemism for being wanted by the secret police. I spent the next three months trying to leave.

Eventually, I got permission. It’s ridiculous, these lists. They didn’t tell me what it was. One suspects that they were worried I was working as an undercover journalist. They gave me permission to leave, and according to the stamp in my passport, it allows me to go back. But there’s a big risk. You need little excuse these days to lock someone up. The handful of foreigners still left in Damascus are all having trouble……..

R&K: And Istanbul is now full of your Syrian friends?

JW: Yes. It’s actually quite amusing. I lived in the old city of Damascus, and I had a small photo gallery, with a friend, in the touristy area. I knew everyone. As the war went on, a lot of them left, and it was all new faces in my neighborhood. But a lot of the people working in the tourist industry, selling carpets and so on, they’ve all come here to Istanbul. When I arrived here, it was just like walking around old Damascus, saying hi to all the old familiar faces……..

©John Wreford

…..JW: For the last two years I lived in Syria, I’ve not been able to photograph anything, and this of course is frustrating. As a photographer, as a journalist, Syria is something personal. If my situation had been different, I would’ve done it differently. I would’ve come in through the north and photographed the Free Syrian Army.

But I was already in Damascus, and I felt it important to stay, to understand what was going on, to be part of it. The media has often gotten it very wrong, or just not reported things. There’s a lack of attention paid to ordinary Syrian people living their lives.

As a photographer, the most natural thing would be to photograph the most dramatic fighting. But living there, I feel like it’s a small part of the story. It’s important and integral, but it’s not the whole story…..

©John Wreford

R&K: We’ve been reading a lot about the fall of Homs and the government’s new momentum. Are people worried they’ve lost?

JW: This is my issue with the media. It always needs a new headline. At the beginning of war, there was a lot of attention on refugees, and then it just stopped. It was the same at the beginning of the Iraq war: attention at first, but two years later nobody cared. But after two years of being a refugee, the story is considerably worse.

But of course the media needs to move on to something different. With Syria, you have the taking of a town, the back and forth of the opposition and the regime, the changing face of the opposition and so on. For the Syrians, though, it doesn’t really affect them……..

Read all of this interview with John Wreford here

 

Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East

An exhibition in Edinburgh (London in the Autumn) and talks on BBC Radio 4 by John McCarthy about the early work of Victorian photographer Francis Bedford.

Egypt

In 1862 Albert, Prince of Wales, toured the Middle East. At the time it was still predominantly controlled by the Ottoman Empire. As he travelled, his photographer Francis Bedford kept a detailed photographic record of the trip. In this series John McCarthy revisits the scenes of Bedford’s photographs – Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Greece. He considers how the immediate physical, political and social landscape has evolved during the intervening 150 years.

Some of Bedford’s photographs are of widely known locations – the Pyramids at Giza, the Mount of Olives, the temples at Baalbek, the Acropolis – others are of remote hilltops and apparently random buildings, scenes without any obvious significance. Both however hold fascinating and unexpected tales and insight.

The series will reflect on the rise and fall of empires – the Ottoman, British and French all play their part in these stories. They are now all gone, but the world’s powers still seek to influence the politics of the region.

In each episode John McCarthy focusses on two of Bedford’s original photographs, revisiting the sites and taking his own pictures of the same scenes today.

In the opening programme, John travels to Egypt to consider pictures of the Prince’s party gathered in front of the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre at Giza, and a broader Cairo picture taken from a key minaret in the city.

This radio series coincides with a major exhibition of Bedford’s photographs by the Royal Collection, currently showing at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh….Go here for the John McCarthy Radio Broadcast

Cairo to Constantinople

Friday, 08 March 2013 to Sunday, 21 July 2013  The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh

In 1862, the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) was sent on a four-month educational tour of the Middle East, accompanied by the British photographer Francis Bedford (1815-94). This exhibition documents his journey through the work of Bedford, the first photographer to travel on a royal tour. It explores the cultural and political significance Victorian Britain attached to the region, which was then as complex and contested as it remains today. 

The tour took the Prince to Egypt, Palestine and the Holy Land, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Greece. He met rulers, politicians and other notable figures, and travelled in a manner unassociated with royalty – by horse and camping out in tents. On the royal party’s return to England, Francis Bedford’s work was displayed in what was described as ‘the most important photographic exhibition that has hitherto been placed before the public’. See all the details of the exhibition here

Francis Bedford

Francis Bedford (1816-1894) Bibliography

…..Bedford began to photograph as an amateur sometime around 1852, with the intent to aid himself in his lithographic work. His book, The Treasury of Ornamental Art, has been described as “probably the first important English work where photography was called into play to assist the draughtsman.”
But Bedford also began to pursue the creative aspects of photography as well.
The 1850s was a period of enormous growth for photography in England. Frederick Scott Archer had just perfected the wet-collodion process and photography, though still difficult to use, suddenly became both more accessible and far more useful in a wide variety of ways. Archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, geologists, art and architectural historians, scientists and learned men of every stripe were realizing that photography not only facilitated their studies, but that accurate, exact, and exactly duplicatable visual records made it possible to expand the dimensions of their respective disciplines beyond levels impossible to reach before photography’s invention….read more here

 

The Masks We Wear

We wear masks for many reasons: for fun, for protection, or to make a statement. In turbulent public settings, obscuring one’s face can protect an individual from retaliation while evoking fear and uncertainty in others. Donning the mask of a cultural, political, or religious figure can lend that person power and further his or her legacy. Those who wear masks to protect their faces from environmental hazards may also end up sending a message of caution to outside observers. In many cases, though, masks play a more lighthearted role, allowing the wearer to take part in a festival and become someone (or something) else for a time. I’ve gathered here a few recent images of people wearing masks, covering their faces for a wide variety of reason From The Atlantic

An Egyptian boy wearing a Guy Fawkes Mask holds bread, a symbol of poverty, during an anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstration in Cairo, Egypt, on March 22, 2013. Thousands of protesters from different areas of Cairo marched on Friday to express their rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi’s rule. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Protesters wearing masks perform during anti-austerity and anti-graft protests in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on January 11, 2013. More than 5,000 Slovenians gathered in the center of Ljubljana on Friday to protest against a corruption scandal that threatens to bring down the government. Slovenia’s anti-corruption commission said earlier this week that Prime Minister Janez Jansa had been unable to explain the source of some of his income in recent years. (Reuters/Srdjan Zivulovic)

A man dressed in traditional Perchten mask performs during a Perchten festival in the western Austrian village of Heitwerwang, some 90 km (56 miles) west of Innsbruck, Austria, on November 23, 2012. Each year in November and January people dress-up in Perchten (also known in some regions as Krampus or Tuifl) costumes and parade through the streets to perform a 1,500 year-old pagan ritual to disperse the ghosts of winter. About 15 hours are needed for a woodcarver to sculpt each demon mask which is made from stone pine wood with goat horns attached. (Reuters/Dominic Ebenbichler)

An Afghan woman receives winter supplies at a UNHCR distribution center for needy refugees at the Women’s Garden in Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 2, 2013. (Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

Protestors wear orange prison jumpsuits and black hoods on their heads during protests against holding detainees at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay during a demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on January 8, 2013. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

A Bahraini boy takes part in a demonstration against the killing of a Shiite protester during clashes with Bahraini police, on February 22, 2013 in the village of Daih, West of the capital Manama. (Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)

Utterly fascinating, go and see them all here

Pictures of the Week: May 4, 2012

Pictures of the Week is a Denver Post Plog that gathers the strongest photojournalism from around the world. See the full set herePakistani Abla Zahir, 6, sits on the ground holding her brother Yaseen, 1, while waiting to receive a ration of rice during a donated food distribution at the Beri Iman, a shrine of famous Sufi Saint Beri Imam, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Friday, May 4, 2012. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)

People are silhouetted on the ‘OCBC Skyway’ linking the Supertrees, ranging from 25-50meters serving as vertical gardens in the nearly completed Gardens By The Bay just next to Singapore’s busy financial district on Monday April 30, 2012 in Singapore. This is part of the city-state’s efforts to bring and nurture greenery within the city and capture the essence of Singapore as a tropical city.(AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

Nepalese female devotees pull the chariot of Hindu deity Rato Machhendranath through a street in Lalitpur, Nepal, Friday, May 4, 2012. The chariot festival of Rato Machhendranath, regarded as the rain God, is one of the oldest and longest festivals celebrated in the Katmandu valley. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Activists from various trade unions affiliated to the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) raise slogans during a rally to mark May Day in Katmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, May 1, 2012. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Egyptian soldiers raise their batons at a protester during clashes outside the Ministry of Defense in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, May 4, 2012. Egyptian armed forces and protesters clashed in Cairo on Friday, with troops firing water cannons and tear gas at demonstrators who threw stones as they tried to march on the Defense Ministry, a flashpoint for a new cycle of violence only weeks ahead of presidential elections. (AP Photo/Ahmed Gomaa)

See more….

Cairo Divided

An unique text and photo essay explores Egypt’s sprawling metropolis as it undergoes one of the most dramatic transformations in its history. Released as part of a new project bringing writers and photographers together on in-depth works, it is available for free in a one-off newspaper format – order details are below.

For fourteen centuries, Egypt’s capital has risen within a pair of stubbornly-persistent natural boundaries – the Moqattam clifftops to the west, and the Saharan desert to the east. Now for the first time Cairo is bursting its banks, sending boutique villas and water-hungry golf courses tumbling into the sand dunes, and reshaping the political and psychological contours of the largest megacity in Africa and the Middle East.Amid an uncertain tide of political change, the controversial ‘satellite cities’ project is dramatically transforming peripheries into new urban centres and consigning old focal points to a life on the margins. Against the backdrop of national revolution, photographer Jason Larkin and writer Jack Shenker collaborated for two years to produce ‘Cairo Divided’, a free hard-copy publication exploring the capital’s rapidly-mutating urban landscape.

Jason Larkin is a documentary photographer and part of the Panos photo agency in London. Previously based in Cairo, his career has seen him shooting for international periodicals across the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the prestigious PDN Arnold Newman Portraiture prize. He is currently based between London and Johannesburg – http://www.jasonlarkin.co.uk.

Jack Shenker is a London-born writer who has reported from across the globe, with work spanning Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Gaza and the Mediterranean. Since 2008, he has been Egypt correspondent for the Guardian, and his coverage of the 2011 Egyptian revolution won the Amnesty International Gaby Rado award for excellence in human rights journalism. He is currently based in London and Cairo – http://www.jackshenker.net.

Hard copies of ‘Cairo Divided’ are available at no cost beyond postage and packaging fees. Full details here

Olivier Laurent writing in the BJP has this to say

Jason Larkin: Cairo Divided

Cairo Divided © Jason Larkin.

Divided is a two-year investigation into Cairo’s social and architectural changes, self-published for the first time in its entirety in newspaper form.

Jason Larkin had been working for two years on Divided when he and journalist Jack Shenker decided to publish it in newspaper format. “We never thought about how it was going to end up,” Larkin tells BJP. “Jack was writing long essays, but when they were published in The Guardian or other titles, they were condensed. We thought it would be nice to publish unabridged essays.”

Divided is the story of how the megacity, Cairo, is turning itself inside out. “The project started when I was living very close to the American University of Cairo,” says Larkin. “I remember when the university announced it would be moving to the outskirts of Cairo, a lot of people were surprised. The university sees a lot of students from abroad thinking they would be studying in Cairo, but instead they’d find themselves in the desert.”

Larkin checked the situation out for himself, visiting the construction sites of these huge, new compounds. “There was a lot going on, but no one was speaking about it in Cairo,” he says. “I started investigating, and found these huge developments.” Quickly he realised that once completed, there would be a massive exodus of people from the city to the outskirts.

But these new cities lacked “all the bits they need to function as normal cities,” he explains. “There are huge compounds, ministries, headquarters, office blocks, but no social housing.” The poorest and working classes wouldn’t be able to move to these new towns, in effect dividing Cairo’s population, he says. “I was alarmed by that. I wondered how Cairo was going to change when people start to move there.”

His images, with Shenker’s essays, have now been released in a 32-page newspaper self-published by Larkin in association with Panos Pictures. “There were many reasons for choosing this format – the first one was because of the elections in Egypt. I really liked the idea of coming out with something free that I’d be able to pass on to universities or people learning the politics or the language of this country. I thought it would be a great way to reach people. Egypt is in a very complicated situation and I think a lot of the time people miss out on the real context of what is going on. They are just hearing the daily news. I thought it would be great if people were able to pick up a copy of Divided and have a better understanding of what is actually going on in Cairo and in Egypt.”  ..….MORE

Cairo Divided © Jason Larkin.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/2127269/jason-larkin-cairo-divided#ixzz1sahvwaok
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Pictures of the Week: February 3, 2012

more from The Denver Post

Supporters shout slogans in favor of independent candidate Gurpratap Singh Tikka, fourth from left on the rooftop, as a Cessna aircraft (unseen) drops his election campaign leaflets on the last day of campaigning for upcoming Assembly elections in Amritsar, India, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

Italian harbor workers stand near a lighthouse at the entrance of the port of the Tuscan island of Giglio, Italy, as in the background lays on its side the grounded cruise ship Costa Concordia, Thursday, Feb. 2, 2012. Bad weather conditions forced the temporary suspension of the recovery operation of the capsized cruise ship Costa Concordia. The ship contains about 500,000 gallons (2,400 tons) of heavy fuel and other pollutants, and fears are growing that those pollutants could spill out, damaging a pristine environment that is home to dolphins, whales and other marine life

A man dusts shop mannequins displaying wigs in a hair and beauty store in Brixton on February 2, 2012 in London, England. The hair and beauty sector has fared well despite the harsh economic climate which can be attributed to people treating themselves to a little affordable luxury. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

An Egyptian protestor throws away a tear gas canister fired by security forces during clashes near the Interior Ministry in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. A volunteer doctor says police and protesters angry over a deadly soccer riot have clashed for the second day in the Egyptian capital, and that one man died in the latest violence. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)

A child runs past a wave protection dam covered in ice as the waters of the Black Sea are frozen near the shore in Constanta, Romania, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2012. The death toll from Eastern Europe’s severe cold spell has risen to 79. Temperatures have dropped as low as minus 32.5 C (minus 26.5 F) in some regions, causing power outages, traffic chaos and the closure of schools and nurseries. The weather is so cold that some areas of the Black Sea have frozen near the Romanian coastline.

………..MORE

2011 Best Photos of the Year Part 1

So it is that time of the year when different organisations choose their best photos of the year. Depending on the reason for the organisation the choice will often be skewed to reflect it’s purpose. The Denver Post has some of the very best photo galleries on the web, every week they show wonderful, inspiring, inventive and eyecatching images so any roundup of the year they produce will be one worth looking at in detail. This year the DP Captured pblog has a best of in 3 parts and this is part one, share this gallery with your friends on facebook or elsewhere, get more people interested in fantastic photography. See all of this gallery here

A Guastavino Company spiral staircase at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, on Jan. 25, 2011. The Guastavino Company was founded by the Catalonian architect Rafael Guastavino y Moreno, who arrived in New York 130 years ago. The domes and arches built by the Guastavino Company are everywhere in New York, but you have to look for them. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

An anti-government protester reacts before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was to make a statement February 10, 2011 in Cairo, Egypt. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak made a statement in which he refused to step down, defying expectations that he was preparing to resign. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Ball kids dry the court with towels after rain stopped play during the match between Samantha Stosur of Australia and Flavia Pennetta of Italy during day one of the Federation Cup tie between Australia and Italy at Domain Tennis Centre on February 5, 2011 in Hobart, Australia. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images

Murray and Kelly James look at their destroyed house in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011. A magnitude-6.3 temblor collapsed buildings, caused extensive other damage and killed dozens of people in the city. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

An injured anti-government protestor rests in a house in Tahrir Square after clashes with supporters of President Hosni Mubarak on February 3, 2011 in Cairo, Egypt. The Army positioned tanks between protesters who had been battling with supporters of President Hosni Mubarak for the second day in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

See all of this gallery here