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Good news at the beginning of a new decade and my second year of being some kind of freelance photographer.
As already written in the news section, I've won a Film Grant,
sponsored by
Kodak
and
toomuchchocolate
as well as being shortlisted for the
Anthropographia Awards for photography and human rights.
Everythings fine here in the middle East: i'm still not sick from all the kilograms falafel and humus i eat each day
, the coffee is a wonderful substitution for espresso and some sunshine and photoprizes makes it a wonderful trip so far.
My little family just arrived a couple of days ago and i virtually converted from a photographer to a tourist for the next three weeks, so I'll slow down my shooting a little bit.
so expect the next blogentry to be in color with shots from sunsets and weirdly coloured vegetables in busy market streets :-)
cheers
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some frames with the horizont panoramic cam.
nice toy, although it makes things sometimes quite difficult here in israel as people are not used to it.
especially when a bearded guy aims at them with it...
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the wall, seen from abu dis
abu dis
the wall near the checkpoint between bethlehem and jerusalem
jerusalem
jerusalem
jerusalem
aizarya, just as abu dis seperated by the wall
praying jew at the wailing wall
the checkpoint between bethlehem and jerusalem
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first set of images from israel
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I've recently been spending quite a lot of time in the forest, walking with little Vasco while we both get exited by all the empty trees.
It's been the first time I've witnessed the changing of the seasons so closely; in Hanover there is just nothing like what one could call a forest, at least not in walking distance...
I've finaly bought myself a Horizon panoramic camera and will take it with me to Jerusalem to where I'm heading by the 15th of December,
in a couple of days.
Some already know, but the indian government denied my visa due to, well, say some little diplomatic mistake
and i'm currently looking for a new field of focus as it seems like Kashmir is no longer an issue for me in terms of photography and travelling.
God or Shiva knows if and when they will allow me to go back to Kashmir.
I already miss it...
In Jerusalem I'll have a look around and have no fixed story yet, i'm just curious to see the place and it's people.
It's the place where all three major monotheistic religions meet and i suppose it's a special athmosphere in this kind of place, maybe like Varanasi, which i'll try to capture.
It's HOLGA - time: weird athmosphere, weird camera...
keep checking the blog, i'll update it with some new stuff from the city of faith...
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been to berlin to attend the opening of an exhibition from ostkreuz, normally (in)famous for typical german, desaturated medium-format photography...
a friend of mine,
phillipp maubach,
made his final exam as well, fortunately with 35mm and in bw.
i might be a bit blinkered when it comes to german photography...
an angel..overlooking berlin
berlin dome
a heart, below the angel...berlin can be so poetic
j*
j*
phillipp
ostkreuz #1
ostkreuz #2
memorial to the murdered jews of europe
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i just came back from a great sailing-trip with
Multihull Charter
around the southern shore of mallorca, spain.
amazing weather, people, light, food (which used to stay inside most of the time) and sometimes i even managed to take a frame.
i'll stay in germany 'til sunday and if the indian embassy will send back my visa quick enough i'm off to kashmir for the next six weeks.
if not, you might see me getting hopelessly shitfaced somewhere in hagen...
cheers,
a*
the sea around the southern coast of mallorca
harry and michael navigating our ship, the cariro 3
j* in porto colom
back in the harbour of palma
a catamaran in the open sea
again, the harbour of palma
the alps on the way back. could be afghanistan, eh?!
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i've spent some time in the balkans: shooting, drinking krushka and meeting great people.
one of them is matt lutton, check out his website.
below some frames i've taken during editing sessions, in berlin, trainride across germany and babysitting.
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just got the news my kashmir-work has won in four non-pro categories at the international photography awards and if i wouldn't be so dead-tired i'd be pretty exited about it...
i was waiting for the results for days and now that i've got it i feel a bit queasy about it. was submitting my images in the non-pro section kind of cheating?
do i am a pro, now? what defines a professional then?
well, at least it was the much needed kick in the ass to bring myself back to work on my hp:
i'm currently updating the story-section with the new images from my last trip to kashmir!
and below you'll find some more stuff from vasco &co. nothing special, just a couple of frames for a more sophisticated family album... ;-)
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back in Hagen, propably one of the most boring and uninspiring cities in germany. boring people, boring architecture, boring light...
difficult to calm down again after being two months in a conflict zone with lot's of stuff going on each and every day.
currently the closest thing to any kind of action is a double espresso in the morning...
there is this proverb: home is where the heart is and i reckon that's why i'm still here. despite enjoying the comforts of life in germany, of course...
tired and unable to do any kind of proper work, i hardly find the time to go through my kashmir-stuff. find it difficult to make a decision in which durection all this should develop one day:
information or interpretation
i might have to go back to find it out...
Home sweet home...
local newspaper #1
local newspaper #2
vasco leander:
the reason why i'm not sleeping,
not working
but still feel quite happy ;-)
...
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back in hagen, home or hometown, i'm not sure...
Hannover - Street
Hannover - Skate
Hagen - J*
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i'm finally back in germany and after a couple of days of being overwhelmed by the level of public organization, security, tidiness and punctuality ;-), i'm getting used to it again, even when the idea that i could eat for three days in kashmir for the amount i have to pay here for a coffee still haunts me...
despite that i'm fine and starting to work on my kashmirstuff, although i'm struggeling really really hard to make an edit out of the bunch of images i got from the last five weeks....
my semester in university is now almost over without ever having really started for me, thanks to the getty and canon grant which enabled / forced :-) me to go back to kashmir to continue my story over there. the more time i spent over there the more i think about making a book on kashmir, although i'm currently pretty far away of having enough material to do that, not to speak of the missing of some important parts of the story.
but....the idea is there...somewhere...
attached some stuff from my first days here in germany...friends, wine and again, some street. i bought a fixed 28mm and had to do some testhots ;-)
best, andy
showing work...
milos
friends
linden, hannover, germany
shot from the inside of a abandoned former shopping complex in hannover. it's a lovely building, highly photogenic and it reminds me pretty much on the old mughal castle in kashmir.
only the bulletholes are missing...
skateboarding @ night
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srinagar, 08.06.2009
my last days in srinagar and i got a cold. after one month of almost 24/7 photographing my body seems to be at the end of his resources and now i have to pay the bill for not listening to the signs of exhaustion...
but today the kashmir government again imposed curfew, so there's little to do anyway, except hanging around in the garden and sipping chai while lokking at the himalaya. not so bad...
but yet i feel a little bit fed up with srinagar right now: there's hardly any area i have't seen in the city and the visual overkill from the first few weeks is almost over. additional to that i'm no longer exited by all the protest and stonepelting, it's getting kind of boring and when i go there it's most of the time just for enjoyment and to see meet some of the guys and/or the other photographers.
right now there're two non-local photographers working here with me: zack canepari (www.canepariphoto.com) and sumit dayal, (www.sumitdayal.com) first from the us and the latter from somewhere between kashmir, delhi and nepal. check out their work!!!
below you'll find some more images from the last days, of protest, daily life (despite the former) and some private pics as well.
001:
002:
Scene in the Jamia Masjid, the biggest Mosque in Kashmir.
003:
Scene during the Idgah-Chalo, a march to the biggest Martyr-Graveyard of Kashmir.
004:
005:
A kashmiri women praying in the living room.
006:
Potrait of a women covered with the Hjab.
007:
A burqa covered women walking in the empty Jamia Masjid in Srinagar.
008:
View from a bridge in downtown Srinagar.
009:
Muba, my fixer, friend, translator and part-time mum with some of the kids of Srinagar.
010:
Sousia. beautiful :-)
011:
crossing jehlum river...
012:
The shah family, who lives since 40 years in the ruins of an abandon mughal-castle.
013:
Fishermen on dal lake, in the backround the lower himlayas
014:
In a madrassa
015:
Playing games during curfew
016:
Shah family
017:
Srinagar
018:
Due to the strikecall by the seperatist leaders many daily life goods like vegetables are getting more and more expensive, while so far at least the price for rice hasn't changed. But as most of the traffic is suspended, it's becoming more and more difficult for the common people to come to the supply-centers for rice.
019:
A kid runs his kite in destroyed building in downtown Srinagar.
020:
021:
A burqa-covered women is leaving the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar.
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srinagar, 30.05.2009
the boy died on tuesday due to his injuries from last friday. i was on the way to kupwara, the last "town" before the border to pakistan when i got the news. i rushed back to shoot the funeral, but at the time i arrived at the martyr's graveyard the body was already buried and only a crowd of azadi-shouting kashmiris was left. no reason to shoot that again, i think i already have thousands of pictures of shouting and screaming boys and men. it's what you see here almost everyday and though it's still fun to shoot is from time to time it's getting more and more boring.
yesterday i spent some time with the mourning family and followed the procession to the graveyard, part of a muslim religious ritual which always takes place on the 4th day after the funeral...again and again, so much suffering, so much screaming, so many tears...
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Srinagar, 23rd May
Yesterday was tough...
what started as a quite normal friday in kashmir ended up in a mess, with one guy propably dead.
after the friday prayers the stonepelting stared as usual but i wasn't in the mood to shoot that shit again, so i wen't for a walk around the city. the sound of exploding grenades drove me back to the protestsite where the kanjang was in full swing, with lots of angry boys shouting "azadi"(freedom) slogans and throwing stones at the security forces. they fired back with shockgrenades and teargas and so it went on and on until one of the police-guys shot a teargas-canister stright at one of the guys - directly in his eye.
at that time i stood only ten meters away from that guy, i could even see the canister - and what it did to the boy....i just can't forget the scene:
all the blood, how his body collapsed, the canister still in his eye.
i felt paralyzed for a eternity, although it might have not been longer that a second, then everything happened very quickly....the other boys got the body, all shouting "allah akbar", running to the mainstreet, getting into the back of a truck, blood and tears everywhere, hospital, next hospital, the family arrives, breakdowns, trying to photograph what's happening....
since leaving the protestsite it's no longer about thinking: at this point it's just a mere reflex to press the shutter and when i finally rode back home i couldn't have said if i got anything...
i always feel numb when i come back from this kind of situations, unable to realize all the things that happened so quickly. and also unable to answer the question why i'm doing this...if it makes any difference, if photography or my photographs are able to stop all this...or at least to raise awareness ? kashmir is not even a war, it's 'only' a conflict..
but when only conflic's can cause so much pain, how must it be in a war, where this happens to thousands of people ? thousand times this suffering and pain, all the grieve and screams and tears: i'm just unable to comprehend that...
i atually wanted to write about some other things, about the time in a centre for mentally and physically challenged children in the north of the valley, about how much i enjoy kashmir when sitting alone on a riverbank somewhere in the mountains bordering pakistan,
about the relativity of winning a photoprize and my life today when i would have been born in kashmir some 30 years ago...
but today it seems so pointless to write about all that...
the photos below are a first edit for my application for the w. eugene smith grant, so some pictures from my last trip are included as well. if you have any suggestions, just let me know.
despite all the things already mentioned,
all the best
andy
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srinagar, may 15th
the last couple of days were quite depressing, with no good shots at all and a constant feeling of being tired, despite enough sleep. just bought some nescafe, but that doesn't seem to work out either...
the following 25 frames are from the last four days, in which i made a short-trip near to the line of control to shoot the elections (or better the election-boycott) over there, some street in srinagar and finally a health-camp set up by an local ngo (koshish, which means effort in urdu) i used to work with already last year...they were makking some kind of basic health-care reserach - and treatment camp as the government simply isn't able to do that on it's own...
Srinagar, May 16th:
despite the standstill regarding the project everything is fine out here: my urdu is getting better each day and some fruits and i'm well off again, altough i missed the fridayprayers in the jamia masjid and with that propably the weekly rocks-and-teargas-session in downtown.
but i'm a bit tired of shooting this stuff every friday and i want to focus on other issues which might display other, mayybe more private aspects of the conflict. so i'll leave srinagar on monday, heading north (back)to kupwhara where a kashmiri ngo is working on conflict-and health related issues.
all the best from K
a*
so, here we go:
1: propably the most interesting picture of all: you can watch my beard grow with every new blog-entry ;-). next to me is muba, friend, guide, fixer and mum in one person. with the glasses he looks like a high-school teacher, but in his past we was actually working in some other kind of buisness.
anyway, behind us lies the line of control and with that, talibani-country pakistan...
2: that's kashmir. and although i'll never be a great landscape photographer, i assume you can guess how beautiful it is over here...
3. kupwhara, the end of the world or at least nearby. i came there to cover the mentioned election-boycott and this is what i've found...empty, deserted streets...goddamn boring !
4. try to make the best out of it...
5. one more try
6. the only people in kupwhara, seen on the day before the boycott.
7. the healthcamp, organised by koshish, a local ngo. i don't think i can use any of the pictures for my story, but at least i supplied them with some photographs from their work..
8 - 17 healthcamp
18. a streetscene in srinagar. the building in the backround got bombed and burned down during the peak of the militancy in the mid 1990's and is nowadays again used by local shopkeepers. i like the image as it tells something about the history here in kashmir...
19. a kashmiri men is reading an article in a local newspaper about the antielection protest which took place in sopore, some 60 km north of srinagar. i actually went throug that town when we went back from the LOC, but bad luck, i missed it...
20. a streetscene in downtown srinagar. it's shot with my backup-lens, a 24mm 2.8 manualfocus nikkor, which is propably older than me. but i like the oldschool look, especialy the flares...
21 - 23 some more street from srinagar. the traffic in the city sucks!!!!
24. an old kashmiri men is sitting in the ruins of a bombed building in srinagar, selling cigarettes and biscuits. nature is slowly crouching back over the ruins and with that covering the scars of the past.
25. ahhhh, i hate to look at this frame. it makes me nervous, my eyes can't find a place to rest, but to some extent that what's it's all about here in kashmir...the impossibility of finding freedom and peace.
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