Francesca Cao (Italy): The Lion of Central Asia

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Kazakhstan is the ninth country in the world for extension. Its history begins with the nomads in the steppe until the Russian invasion in 1890, which persists until the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of president Nazarbayev in 1991, who declares the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The first oil discovery is dated 1979, when Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union, but considered a giant desert for nuclear garbage. In the past twenty-eight years, everything changed for Kazakh people. The fall of the Soviet Union in fact had many hard consequences on the population, result of the country’s total dependence. From 1991 the main export becomes oil and in 2003 they are valuated more than 7 billion dollars, representing 65% of the total.

Isle D is the only example in the world of artificial Isle built to extract gas and oil from Kashagan, a field in the north part of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. Discovered in the year 2000, this field is considered to be one of the major Oil discoveries in the past thirty years and is assumed it will produce nine to sixteen milliard barrels. The weather conditions are extreme since the temperature goes over 40° C in the summer and below -30 in the winter. About 3000 people work on the Isle during the summer, while this number decreases during the winter. The workers have 12 ours shifts and stay on the Island 28 Days to 6 months.

Close to the on shore base of Bautino, there are few villages, where, during the Soviet Union, Stalin used to send the politic opponents. In the village of Atash, there is a lady called Asiya Kesikbaev, who had a very tough life. She doesn’t have a job and has to survive with two kids asking for food to the people who work for the factories in the Bautino area. She doesn’t have a house and her children sleep with the grandmother while Asiya uses the basement. Asiya’s husband repudiated her when their son was six months old, but, as a consequence of cold and malnutrition, the baby dies. Not far from Atash there is Sampe Gulbarshyn’s village. The old name of this village was Karagan, but Sampe doesn’t look too sure when she talks about it. About twenty years ago, her neighbors where farmers and fisherman’s, but then slowly everyone left, leaving her alone in this lunar landscape. Now she lives with her animals and the seldom visits of a relative.

In December 2008 the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe accuses Kazakhstan for lacking of the fundamental human rights concerning freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The document about human rights in Kazakhstan asserts that there is a climate of quiet repression, which causes silence on certain topics.

According to the Bureau of Consular affairs of the U.S. department of state, the area of Alma-ata, the old capital, in the southeastern side of the country, is ranked on the fourth level (the highest level assigned) of earthquake threat and does not have the sufficient resources to respond to a large-scale disaster.

In the Tekeli Village about three ours drive from the city of Alma-ata, several earthquakes caused many damages to the old houses built during the Soviet times. Apparently the local government, doesn’t give much help to the victims and, since the area is poor and with a high level rank of unemployment, the inhabitants don’t have the resources to fix the houses. In the suburbs of Alma-ata there is the Shanyrak microdistrict, an area of abusive houses. In 2006 the Alma-Ata City authorities wanted to destroy the homes of settlers who have built poor but dignified living quarters on the outskirts of the city. Many of those who live in Shanyrak were driven out of their last homes by the collapse of industry in Kazakhstan, in the early and mid-nineties. In May 2009 a flood destroyed a big part of this district, only 60 families will have new houses. The Kadyrkhan family, for example, had very hard consequences after the flood. One of the house’s wall was demolished and also the floor of the parents room. Since the help from the Akimat was late to come, they had to rebuild on their own.

After the Oil discoveries, president Nazarbiaev, who is still in charge, says, in a famous speech, that Kazakhstan will become “The Lion of Central Asia”, and decides in 1997 to move the Capital from Alma-ata to Astana, at the time a small village in the north western side of the country. A huge amount of money was used to build the new Capital. High profiled architects such as Norman Foster, were called to build a pyramid (The palace of peace and reconciliation), a fake earthly paradise Ak Horda, a giant tent shaped building, with tennis courts, beaches, volleyball courts, where the internal temperature is going to be fixed around 24° C), skyscrapers and buildings of any kind.

The aim of this project is to show the contrasts that the Oil discoveries raised in this country. On a side there is the new generation of young businessman and woman who live a totally westernized life in Astana, on the other one there is the largest part of the population, whose history is still-motion movie.

• Francesca Cao’s Web Site

Chloe Dewe Mathews (UK): Caspian

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Languishing quietly between two great continents, the Caspian is the world’s largest inland sea. In 2010 I travelled to its edge, to the point where Asia dissolves into Europe. For centuries, surrounding powers have laid claim to the region; first the Ottomans, the Persians, the Mongols and most recently Soviet Russia. These Empires have ebbed and flowed, each one leaving its mark on this enigmatic landscape.

In the 10th Century, oil was discovered on the Caspian coast near Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and has been exploited ever since. The boom of the late 90’s brought the current wave of prosperity to the area. However, Caspian crude oil is not only used conventionally as fuel: since long before mechanized extraction it has provided a curious health treatment.

In the “spa town” of Naftalan people gather to bathe in the chocolate-brown goo, which is purported to have therapeutic properties. Here, a substance normally associated with power, wealth and global trade is used for healing and wellbeing. They call it the ‘miracle oil’ and it has been bathed in for centuries.

As the Caspian oil industry continues to grow, the distribution of wealth is increasingly skewed. Migrants trickle toward the port city of Aktau, in Kazakhstan, finding work constructing elaborate mausoleums for the new oil rich middle class. I spent days camping among the workers, watching them saw through blocks of limestone and digging graves. Some of these tombs are engraved with drawings of nodding donkeys: symbols of the oil industry that have even crept onto the monuments to the dead.

After decades of Soviet rule, much discussion arose as to how the newly created countries would find their individual identities. For those on the edge of the Caspian Sea, that search has been coloured by oil, a substance which existed beneath the ground long before the land was inhabited.

This mysterious resource, both lucrative and destructive, pervades the atmosphere of the region. The way I travelled affected my sense of the place too: hitchhiking and camping caused me to think more about the distinct character of the place – the flatness of the land, the colour of the soil, and quality of light. I wanted to capture the relationship between the people and the land, bound up with one another in subtle and often unexpected ways; for every ecological scar left on the land by powers of the past, is a wound to its people.

This body of work stands as the first chapter in a long-term project that will develop into coastal Russia, Turkmenistan and Iran.

• Chloe Dewe Mathews’ Web Site

Support Emily Schiffer’s “See Potential” on Kickstarter

We are excited to announce the launch of Emily Schiffer’s Kickstarter campaign: http://kck.st/tnbSkD

Emily was a Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund photographer in 2011, and a recipient of the Inge Morath Award in 2009. If you haven’t seen it, please take this opportunity to view the slideshow of Emily’s acclaimed Cheyene River.

Emily’s new project, SEE POTENTIAL, addresses the absence of affordable, healthy foods on Chicago’s South Side. Emily will partner with community leaders and collaborate with other photographers to create large-scale, public photography installations that will visualize positive change and mobilize the South Side community. SEE POTENTIAL is an extension of a project begun last summer with support from the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund.

The Kickstarter proposal is a campaign for support and also an open call to all who have produced substantive documentary photographs of the South Side community to contribute to the project.

Please learn more about SEE POTENTIAL here: http://kck.st/tnbSkD, watch the Magnum In Motion produced video. Please contribute, and also and help support Emily’s project by sharing this Kickstarter campaign among your friends.

Anne Golaz (Finland): Hunting Games

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My approach to the “hunting games” began with a strong aesthetic fascination. Initially, I am not coming from the world of hunting and I am not part of the initiated people. But I wondered what could really signify this practice nowadays and further than the stereotypes? How to represent hunting in a modern society, where it is a very deeply contradicted subject? How to stage this universe without creating an expected and sterile polemic?

The ambiguous admiration, with its repulsive part, that I felt for hunting was the main motor of my work. I choose to react as free as possible, mixing a documentary approach with suggested and sometimes ironical pictures. But especially creating some staged and theatrical photographs, with a dramatic and imposing atmosphere. My work presents the hunting subject as an abounding and powerful universe, most of the time nocturnal, both frightening and fascinating, with ancestral foundations in a suggested world, but thoroughly contemporary.

My pictures meets with our relation with nature, animals and death. It becomes like a great hunting theatre and confronts directly the viewer to his personal and basic relation with wildlife. I tried to understand what can mean this hunting action (acte de chasse) fundamentally, what can define or represent it, starting with the attitude of being green dressed and ending with the Weidmans Heil congratulation1. I have been fascinate with this powerful membership, though illusory, to an extraordinary world. Something like a parallel dimension which brings mens together in the middle of the woods and where everyone dresses provisionally his hunter suit.

• Anne Golaz’s Web Site

Katie Orlinsky (USA): Innocence Assassinated: Living in Mexico’s Drug War

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In 2006, newly elected Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels. His intension was to take a stand against the violence, corruption and drug trafficking that had been increasing since 2000. Seven decades of one-party rule in Mexico ended and shifted the balance of power amongst drug cartels and corrupt officials. But Calderon’s war on drug cartels has only made the situation worse.

Mexico’s drug war is more than an armed conflict. It is a humanitarian crisis that has changed the lives of countless innocent people. The total drug war death toll has now reached over 30,000 people, and behind every murdered victim there is a family left to live with the consequences.

The feminization of Mexico’s drug war has become an undeniable reality. Women are becoming widows at alarming rates, left to fend for themselves in a shattered economy and easily lured into criminal activity such as drug trafficking and kidnapping: the only financial options available to support their families. Ciudad Juarez, the “front-line” of Mexico’s drug war, is the most extreme example of the many cities throughout Northern Mexico currently plagued by drug war violence and crime. And in the women’s prison of Ciudad Juarez, the country’s most dangerous city, an estimated 80 percent of the inmates are there for narcotics related crimes. The number of women in prison for federal crimes in Mexico has risen by 400 percent over the past three years.

In addition to women, there are countless children forever scarred by a childhood engulfed with violence, death and insecurity. In Ciudad Juarez alone, approximately 10,000 children have been orphaned since 2008. Soon these children will be teenagers, lacking the education, family structure, and economic security necessary to protect them from recruitment by gangs and cartels.

Behind the well-known narrative of the fighting between cartels and the army is the real story of the drug war in Mexico: the innocent victims trapped in a cycle of violence and crime.

• Katie Orlinsky’s Web Site

When: November 11, 2011, 6 to 9pm

Where: Magnum Gallery, 13 Rue d’Abbaye, Paris 75006, France

- For More Information: 20×200 Blog
On November 11, 6 to 9pm, the Inge Morath Foundation and Jen Bekman’s 20×200 project will present a limited edition of two photographs by Magnum photographer Inge Morath. Sales of the edition will directly benefit the Legacy Program of the Magnum Foundation, New York. Three print sizes will be offered, and prices will start at $100 for the pair.

The editioned photographs are from Inge Morath’s Bal d’Hiver (1955) a never published story that is currently featured in Issue 17 of Esopus magazine (USA), and in the December issue of Vogue Magazine, Italy. The Bal d’Hiver was organized in Paris as a benefit for war orphans, performed on ice by European royalty, in costumes donated by couturiers including Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior, and attended by an international roster of celebrities, from the Countess d’Paris to film star Charles Chaplin. Morath’s remarkable photos of the event take the viewer behind the scenes of this one-of-a-kind gathering while exhibiting her extraordinary sense of composition and intensely humanistic approach.

The Magnum Foundation’s Legacy Program preserves, interprets, manages, and makes accessible materials related to the history of Magnum Photos, and to the larger history of photography to which Magnum has uniquely contributed. Through its archives and related activities, the Legacy Program promotes research into, and appreciation of, the photographic medium, while safeguarding for posterity both primary source material and original objects.

Susan Meiselas, photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation, and John Jacob, Director of the Magnum Foundation’s Legacy Program, will speak. Jen Bekman andSara Distin of the 20×200 project will present sample prints and information on how the edition may be purchased.

Please check out the slideshow of Inge Morath’s Bal d’Hiver on Time.com’s LightBox.

A twenty-page spread will appear in issue 17 of Esopus magazine, and a small exhibition at Esopus Space deom November 2 – December 15. If you’re unable to attend the exhibition, here’s how to buy a copy of the magazine.

Gauri Gill (India): Balika Mela, Lunkaransar, 2003/2010

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I have photographed in rural Rajasthan for twelve years now, in villages, homes and families that treated me as their own. Although I chose to work independently, over the years I developed a relationship with various NGOs (non governmental organisations), including Urmul Setu Sansthan, in Lunkaransar. They have a bare bones campus in what used to be a one-camel town, albeit one with a busy National Highway running through it: simple, white blocks laid out in sandy soil, one of them a guest house that I knew I could stay in whenever I passed through, and where I was asked to pay whatever I could afford at the particular time. The stark setting placed into relief the various individuals inhabiting the campus, drawn there either by a greater motivation or personal circumstance. We were all fugitives from the world at large, for varying lengths of time, along with our dreams and accompanying disenchantments; ideas, plans and schemes were constantly afoot. The overarching utopian idea at Urmul remained Gram Sewa, or ‘in the service of the village’.

As part of their various programs, Urmul would organize Balika Shivirs, or camps for girls, where in the course of six months, girls who had never before attended school would be brought up to the level of a class five student. Somewhat related to the Shivirs, every few years they also organised a Balika Mela, or ‘fair for girls’, attended by about fifteen hundred adolescent girls from seventy odd surrounding villages. The Mela had various stalls, food, performances, a Ferris wheel, magicians, puppet shows, games and competitions, similar to any other small town mela. In 2003 I was invited to one, to do something with photography.

I decided to create a photo-stall for anyone to come in and have their portrait taken, and later buy the silver gelatin print at a subsidised rate if they wished. I had a few basic props and backdrops – whatever we could get from the local town studio and cloth shop on a very limited budget – but it was fairly minimal, and since it can get windy out in the desert everything would keep getting blown around, or periodically struck down. The light was the broad, even light of a desert sky, filtered through the cloth roof of our tent. Many of the more striking props – like the peacock and the paper hats – were brought in by the girls themselves. Girls came in, and decided how and with whom they would like to be photographed – best friends, new friends, sisters, the odd younger brother who had tagged along, girls with their teachers, their whole class, the local girl scouts. Some of those who posed for the pictures went on to learn photography in the workshops that we started in May of that year, and two years later they documented the fair themselves. Incredibly, one of them, Manju, even started a photo studio than ran successfully for a while in Village Kaalu. Her father was a member of Urmul, and therefore exceptionally forward thinking, but she may still have been one of the first to do so in the region, ever.

In 2010, a Balika Mela was held after a fairly long gap. Smaller in scale, it was called Balika Milan this time, and I was invited to participate once again. I decided to show the earlier Balika Mela pictures in a tent at the fair. Many of the girls who wandered in were surprised to recognize themselves or their friends. We found ourselves different, but also the same. Some of the girls were mothers now, others were teachers. I hadn’t quite planned to but spontaneously ended up making more portraits, this time in color. Whereas the earlier pictures were perhaps more about relationships and mysterious, improvised gestures that may constitute a small theater of the vernacular – possible references include those drawn from religious calendars, Bollywood posters or local photo studios – the later color portraits are also about the incredible and unique fashion on display. In our cities everything is increasingly branded and starting to look fairly homogenous. But here I found hearts stitched onto shirts, leather jackets over salwar kameezes, scarves instead of dupattas, hand knitted sweaters, hand embroidered jeans – a quite distinctive style. What remains common to both sets of pictures is a sense of sureness in the sitters.

Unexpectedly, that sense of self exists in a particular adult context. Almost every morning when I would open the local Hindi newspaper in Bikaner or Barmer, I would find that a woman somewhere had jumped into a tanka, fallen into a well, slipped into a water reservoir, drunk poison, hung herself from the khejri tree. Sometimes it was a cooking incident involving kerosene. It was usually labeled an accident, often unsolved, frequently the woman was said to be ‘mentally unsound’. One year when I went to visit a friend who had cerebral malaria in the Barmer government hospital, I met a girl with over eighty per cent burns. Her name was Looni. She told me her in-laws had set fire to her, but she could not bear testimony against them because her father-in-law was a constable, and she was scared that if she died her husband and influential in-laws would not then take care of her children. She did manage to get to a larger, better equipped hospital in Jodhpur for further treatment but ended up dying there some days later. When I spoke to the warden at the Barmer hospital, in the burns ward, he showed me pages from his register; there was a steady stream of women coming in every month.

I revisited the hospital and other sub-centers, attempted to follow particular cases, met the police and discussed what I found with local activists. I also realized how complicated each case was, particularly in a culture where there was such a pervading sense of fear, and a real hesitation to speak out publicly. I wish I could say that things have changed in the last decade, but I continue to read alarming reports in the local papers. Interestingly, all the girls mentioned in the newspaper are usually married, and prominently labeled as such.

In such a climate for a girl to leave her village to attend a Balika Mela, to be allowed or supported by her parents to do so, to then step in front of a camera in a tent with stray bystanders looking on, to not only do so but to say this is who I am and how I am, that spirit is what I hoped to record in the photographs. Urma and Halima, two Jogi girls who belong to a nomadic community with few rights, one that may almost be said to exist outside society as we know it, who have no land or jobs but must find a way to exist precariously on the fringes of villages and small towns, with no access to schools or healthcare or the law, and who must therefore make a living off chameleons or snakes or whatever they may find in the wilderness and that no-one else would wish to claim; Urma and Halima came into the tent and sat down very straight on the white plastic chair and the black stool, flanking the fake flower arrangement on its gleaming stand. They did so with supreme confidence, not unlike the Maharanis of a hundred years ago. This book is for them, and for that.

Gauri Gill

New Delhi, August 2011

Preface to the book, Balika Mela, with the full set of black and white and color photographs, forthcoming in 2011/2012 from Edition Patrick Frey. Gill is also a nominee for The Grange Prize 2011.

• Gauri Gill’s Web Site

“The Paris social season opened with a big, elegant splash last Tuesday. The Baronne de Gabrol, President of ESSOR, an association for the protection of France’s abandoned children, sponsored the Winter Ball, at which some of the most distinguished names in Europe amused themselves for the benefit of needy children.”

So begins Inge Morath’s description of the Bal d’Hiver, a dance on ice performed in 1955 by European royalty, in costumes donated by couturiers including Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior, and attended by an international roster of celebrities, from the Countess d’Paris to film star Charlie Chaplin. The exhibition at Esopus Space will consist of fourteen 22″ x 35″ prints from the acclaimed photographer’s original series, which has never been exhibited or published. The exhibition accompanies a piece in Esopus 17 that features even more images from the series, along with facsimile reproductions of Morath’s descriptive texts for Magnum Photos and a drop-out contact sheet from the photographer’s archives.

Esopus Space is located at 64 West 3rd Street, #210 New York, NY 10012.

Photo © The Inge Morath Foundation/Magnum Photos.

Please join us in attending a book launch and a conversation about the late Robert Seydel, his work, process, and influences with poet Peter Gizzi, artist Richard Kraft, and poet and senior editor of BOMB Magazine Mónica de la Torre.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21. The conversation begins at 6:30 p.m.
Printed Matter is located 195 Tenth Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets, NYC 10011. Phone: (212) 925-0325.

Published just months after Robert Seydel’s unexpected and sudden death, Book of Ruth is a debut book that cannot be contained in any single category. A first person narrative of sorts, it uses collages, drawings, and journal entries to create an intimate portrait of an unknown woman for whom the distances between the ordinary and extraordinary, the ecstatic and the desolate, loneliness and embrace is infra-thin. The detritus from which Seydel fashions Ruth’s art and narrates her inner life shine like the pages of an illuminated manuscript, revealing as much about the imagination of an artist as about the tenuous creation of self.

A visionary work by an artist and writer who himself was reclusive and uncompromising, Book of Ruth is the only published work by Seydel who had a single solo show in New York before his untimely death. This evening’s conversation—led by the editor who brought the centerpiece text “Flowers & Formulas” to the pages of BOMB Magazine—will open the door to Seydel’s work, shining light on his process and influences, as well as delving into the inimitable combination of playfulness, erudition, and imagination that drives his work.

ROBERT SEYDEL was an artist, writer, curator, and teacher. Editor of Several Gravities by Keith Waldrop (Siglio, 2009) as well as a professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, Seydel created, often using various personas, several large-scale series of works (many in small formats) as well as curated over twenty exhibitions before his death in January, 2011.

Book of Ruth is published by Siglio Press.