27 December 2016 (Milos, Greece) – I love the magical, often mysterious, nature of visual expression. Images are not only about what you see in a photo but also about what you feel. National Geographic magazine, and The Atlantic magazine and the journalism photo site Muckrake are my favorite sources for photos. Herein my “favs” from 2016:
Earlier this year National Geographic sent a team to document the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. They met these three siblings collecting their daily allowance of bottled water. This photo is timeless, beautiful, infuriating, and inspiring. The photographer captures a moment that perfectly encapsulates the tragedy, the injustice, and the resilience of a city in crisis. It’s a gut punch.
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A dock worker uses a mallet to dislodge frozen tuna aboard a Chinese cargo vessel docked at the city of General Santos, in the Philippines. The cargo vessel spends up to two months at sea with a fleet of a dozen tuna boats working to fill its freezer. The scene looks like something out of a “Mad Max” movie. And I love those striped pants! The lighting is magical. It’s gritty and dark. You can almost smell the fish.
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This is from a National Geographic article “When Death Doesn’t Mean Goodbye”. Shot in Indonesia, cousins and sisters surround three-year-old Syahrini Tania Tiranda, who died the day before. They touch her and talk to her. To them she is to “makula” – s sick person. The Torajans – a tribe in a remote region of Indonesia – do not believe that death is an immediate, final separation. They often keep the preserved bodies of family in the house for weeks or months so they can continue to live with them, bringing them food and welcoming friends who come to visit the deceased.
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I spend a lot of time in the Middle East. I often come across the photos of Moises Saman. He shot this in Ramadi, Iraq. This is a displaced family that fled the ISIS-controlled town of Hit, and now live amid the rubble of an apartment complex in Ramadi. For me, this is the most powerful photograph in this series. It speaks to me on an aesthetic and emotional level. The light is beautiful and the color palette gorgeous, but the scene itself is layered with destruction and is deeply sobering. The boy on the left — a refugee who should have never had to be in this situation – lost both his arms in a shelling. Yet he bravely engages with Saman’s camera, embodying the very tangible, tragic effects of conflict and the resilience that humans can produce in the aftermath.
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This is not a staged shot. It is by Alex Webb, a photographer for Traveler magazine whom I know. My wife is Maltese and I spend time there and the country is now awash with photographers. Alex was wandering the streets of Malta for a travel piece … Malta was named the European Capital of Culture for 2018 … and stumbled upon this. There is a sense of serenity, exploration … and romance. I love the way light washes across the face of the girl on the right, just as the sun beams a shaft of light through the narrow walkways of Valletta.
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Ricardo Cafe, a cartoonist who entitles his work “No Reservations,” holds up his arm at a peaceful protest held on the State Capital lawn in Bismarck, North Dakota against the Dakota Access Pipeline. A simple shot, really. The fist raised in the air, the words “for my people,” and the absence of any one person’s face makes it “impactful” for me in a way because I think it has a universal message. It’s an abstract but still powerful and moving photograph about standing up and advocating for something you believe in, which is an important part of photography, along with documenting the truth of any situation.
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Miles Jappa shot this at the Dead Sea in Israel. The area’s high barometric pressure is thought to boost the stamina of marathon runners. I love it for the loneliness.
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Iraqi children look at the body of a half-buried ISIS militant while talking to an Iraqi soldier in Mosul, Iraq. Shot by an Associated Press photographer (no specific attribution). I found it both a both comical and shocking image. Backstory: jihadis were targeting young Iraqi children to prevent their families from trying to escape the besieged city.
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Artists prepare a snow sculpture for the upcoming Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, in Harbin, China. Shot by Tao Zhang. It is the top ice and snow sculpture festival in the world, attracting more than a million visitors. At night, the sculptures are colorfully illuminated and visitors can climb and play on many of the structures.