Catalogue
SESSION 7 March 2012
instantcoffees.wordpress.com
Š Instant Coffees, 2012 Edition, design and research: Alejandro AcĂn Translators: Jack Bradbury and Maider Dominguez Photography Cover: Cristina de Middel On-line publisher: www.issue.com instantcoffees.wordpress.com All rights reserved.
On - line Catalogue
SESSION 7 March 2012
Index
GAVIN MAITLAND Bamboo Club
ALICE CARFAE Tin Girls
CRISTINA DE MIDDEL Made in
JIM MORTRAM Market Town JImmy and the Jacks
Page 8
Page 14
Page 19
Page 24
JORDI RUIZ CIRERA Menonos
MAXIM DONDYUK The TB epidemic in Ukrainia
RAJAN ZAVERI The mountain people
SUPAY FOTOS Borde
Page 34
Page 39
Page 44
Page 29
Intro Well, it’s been a busy and exciting season for us and we hope for you too. Seven sessions here in Bristol, 2 in London as well as 4 in Spain. Plus our Pics & Plot group collaboration as part of Bristol Festival of Photography in May of this year and the recent talks by Brenda Ann Kenneally and Robert Knoth. We’ve had over 60 participants from 15 countries, with works looking at modern China, competitive pigeon breeding in Spain, family and marriage, expressions of national pride and communities in far flung places and closer to home. Overall the spirit of storytelling that Instant Coffees embodies has been incredibly well represented and really heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who has been involved in making it possible, participants, curators, designers, lecturers, sponsors and of course our audience. Session 7 started off with a fascinating and enlightening talk by Gavin Maitland about the Bamboo Club, Bristol’s first West Indian social club, that existed in St Pauls for 11 years through the 60s and 70s. From the collection of photographs and newspaper clippings that exist in the Bristol Record Archives, Gavin told a fragmentary story of the club, it’s genesis, some of the characters involved and some unanswered questions raised by some of the unearthed images. Gavin continues his analysis in the essay contained below that he has kindly allowed us to reprint. Then came the slideshows, another great variety of works from playful to powerful and a fitting end to the season. We began with Alice Carfrae’s Tin Girls, part of a long term work she is conducting about human trafficking in Nepal and the effects it has on the women involved. Allowing them to tell their stories is important not only for them to continue the healing process but to hopefully raise awareness of the problem, the reasons behind it and prevent the continuation of the practice. Cristina De Middel’s MADE IN is a striking and fantastical sideways look at the youth of modern China and the kaleidoscope of pressures and influences they face. An explosive and humourous work but asking a serious question about the values with which they are instilled and what will happen when these teenagers reach adulthood. Jim Mortram’s Jimmy and the Jacks is an extreme close up snapshot of Jimmy and his dogs and the company they provide him as he grows older. Highly personal, almost microscopic
in focus, this work is part of an ongoing project documenting the area where Mortram lives, the people, their problems, their lives. Menonos by Jordi Ruiz, is a picture of the culture of the Mennonites in Bolivia, a culture that they are trying to hold onto in the face of the outside world that is always encroaching. Candid individual portraits and images of the daily life of these people raise questions as to how many of the children shown will continue in this way of life in the face of the world outside their own. The TB Epidemic in Ukraine by Maxim Dondyuk is a shocking look at the ravages inflicted by this bacteria on a country that appears to have little concern for the devastation of thousands of lives in the midst of numerous other political problems. The images are harsh, candid and in some cases almost dreamlike in their intensity. Rajan Zaveri’s The People from the Mountains is a brief portrait of the Jebeliya tribe in the Sinai desert and their transition from nomadic to settled people, making the economic choice faced by so many tribes around the world to service tourists that flock to their homelands. The final dreamlike work is by Peruvian collective Supay Fotos. Borde shows the town of Iquitos in the middle of the Amazon and the effect that humans living there has had on both themselves and the jungle. Where the two worlds meet there is still the magic and power of the forest, despite the almost inevitable pollution and destruction brought by a settlement so deep in its midst. Our next outing was in May during the month long Bristol Festival of Photography. On Friday 25th May, the wonderful communal arts space The Island played host to a collaborative show organised by ourselves and FireFly PhotoFilms from London. A packed house enjoyed a selection of slideshows from five collectives, El Cíclope Mecánico from Spain, MICRO from Italy, Rawiya from the Middle East, FireFly PhotoFilms and Instant Coffees of course! There was some delicious Spanish food and drink made by our own Alejandro, music, plenty of lively discussion and a raffle to finish off the night. It really was an enjoyable and lively evening, it was great to see so many people coming along and thank you all for the positive comments.
In fact it went so well that we repeated the formula in July for Brenda Ann Kenneally and Robert Knoth’s visit to Bristol. Following on from Brenda’s The Hinterlands workshop in June, we hosted an evening of excellent talks and discussion in collaboration with The Hinterlands and again at The Island. Having worked on the interconnected stories of the international drugs trade and its effects on social change in the working classes for decades, both Brenda and Robert gave inspired and in depth talks to another full house. Robert went first, elaborating, along with Antoinette de Jong, the trails of violence, destruction and human misery that follow the passage of heroin and cocaine from production to distribution. Jumping around through time and space we saw layers of societal damage from East to West, their’s really is work that demands a wider audience. Brenda continued in a more personal but similarly comprehensive vein, elaborating the effects of the incarceration of a generation of men and the resulting family bonds and partnerships that have sprung up, all through the lens of her own experiences in the place she was born, Troy, New York. All this was accompanied by more of Alejandro’s culinary prowess and felt like a fitting end to a great season of works. Look out for more from us in the near future, until then keep telling stories! By Jack Bradbury
GAVIN MAITLAND ‘These Museumy Emblems of Others’: Against the Colonial Museum, Toward Commemoration.
“Out of a few stored bone chips, we remember a dinosaur” If we look at two institutions in the British city of Bristol that both propose to positively represent the history and evolution of Black British culture then we can see two very different developments in the archiving and exhibition of that history both through the prism of the provincial institution; the newly opened M-Shed; serving as a replacement for the seemingly lost Empire and Commonwealth Museum (an essay of its own waits in the wings as to the theoretical implications of an entire museum being lost) and the Bristol Black Archives Partnership. In her critique of the BECM on the eve of its assumed move to London, Corrina McLeod calls the BECM a “site of contested identity” which does not know whether to commiserate or celebrate its dark past and its part in the transatlantic slave trade. I would like to suggest that the M-Shed, which opened almost five years after the closure of the BECM takes this self-conflict even further, by attempting to distance itself still further from any association with its past. As if in a stroke of serendipitous irony; the fact that Bris- folk archive in the most genuine and literal sense and not as sometol played such a huge part in the slave trade and that 2007 was the thing filtered through the high-minded rhetorical vision of a Turner 200th anniversary of its abolition in Great Britain is especially perti- Prize nominated artist. nent as this was the same year that the BECM closed its doors and the BBAP opened theirs. I would like to suggest that, like the BECM “There is everything, or Everything, the great unand the M-Shed, the BBAP exists also as a site of contested identity, but one, which serves unconsciously as an emblem of otherness. A differentiated past, all of it, which is not history, celebration of Bristol’s Black community. but just stuff.” Opened to the public in March of 2007 with the intention of being used as a repository of and for archives which relate to the ‘Black Presence’ in Bristol, the tagline of the BBAP is “leave a legacy, pass it on” . In this way we can begin to think of these archives as the very “museumy emblems of others” or otherness of which James A. Boon speaks of and by which their very ‘otherness’, as subjects of British colonialist rule excludes them from participating. In this way the remnants collecting dust within the stacks of the provincial record office can be given a new life, in opposition to this, resulting in a folk archive of a misrepresented part of British and Bristolian culture. This is representative of that which has become the province of contemporary art by artists such as Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, who initiated their own folk archive as a means of documenting typically English customs they saw as dying out. Here, however I speak of a
The Bristol Black Archives Par tnership on the surface seems less conflicted than the BECM but upon closer inspection we find that it is located within the Bristol Records Office, itself housed in one of three large warehouses which served as the stop-off point for tobacco on its way into the hearts and lungs of the Great British population from where it was grown under severe colonialist rule in the West Indies. That even now the dictates of local government still hold sway over what happens within is not unironic. Since the BBAP is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which itself has specific concerns as to how its money is to be spent, the ever watchful eye of Bristol City Council is always on hand to turn ruin a perfectly good idea.
That the implicit connection between West Indian culture in the UK and the results of colonialism and the slave trade is never made explicit is one of the most glaring omissions in Britain’s continued reluctance to “own its bloody past”, as Tristam Hunt stated in 2003, on the eve of Bristol’s bid as European capital of culture. He wrote that, since a great part of the city’s cultural heritage is based on the “elimination of other cultures” perhaps Bristol City Council should create its own ‘Museum of Slavery’ based upon the already successful holocaust museums of Washington D.C and Berlin which stand as museums to memory, or ‘Lieux de Memoire’ as Pierre Nora put it. He goes further to say that this should include actively engaging with Bristol’s “disenfranchised” Afro-Caribbean community. In 2012, and after almost a year of the new M-Shed being open, Bristol is yet to see any active involvement between its ‘Heritage Institutions’ and the local West Indian community. The emphasis between the fall-out of British Imperialism and of colonialism is one that is difficult to stress here. As it would have clearly become a point of embarrassment not to be involved in the anniversary celebrations/commiserations of 2007, Bristol City Council created the exhibition Breaking the Chains as a round-about way to own up to - but not apologise for - the city’s involvement in the slave trade. After the closure of the BECM this exhibition became a permanent part of the ‘Bristol People’ gallery of the new M-shed which proposes to tell the highs and lows of Bristol’s past in such a way that is palatable enough for young schoolchildren to do their homework from. A certain degree of commendation must be given but by this point it would have become unavoidable anyway. By acknowledging what is generally considered ancient history, the city further distances itself from its more recent past; By de-emphasising any connection that could be made between the end of British Imperialism and the beginning of Colonialism ultimately obscures any relation either have to the influx of West Indian immigrants in the late 1940s and 1950s. Most academic research and discussion into the history and evolution, even the nature of the museum in the United Kingdom has been based mainly around such collections such as the Victoria and Albert (previously the South Kensington) Museum and British Museum, respectively. These have been easy and popular to critique as they embody both positive and negative aspects of Empire and of Colonialism.
It is easy to admire the efforts made in the creation of ‘the museum’ as we know it today and many writers have established heir careers critiquing the Empirical and Colonial dictates that it embodies. Few writers however seem to tackle the dialectics of the provincial museum as it stands in contrast to these giants. The problem of writing about subject matter as this is that it does not fit squarely into any one medium: museum studies? Colonial studies? Social Geography? How do we begin to talk about a subject that is at once multifaceted yet remains belligerent in the face of any easy categorisation? In terms of the material importance of the provincial archive, Elizabeth Edwards has written extensively on anthropological archives as Schwartz has on archives of photographs, which act as binding tools for nineteenth century industrial power relations. Jo Spence has written on the importance of the family photograph as a tool of art therapy; helping to uncover and overcome past traumas. So, if the photograph can be thought of in these disciplines, why are they never combined to create a multi-dimensional reading of the provincial museum or archive? This is where an interdisciplinary approach to readings of the past and investigating social memory are
required.
“Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.” The function of memory in the twentieth century has changed to the degree that its keepers no longer serve as scribes of historical consciousness but have become vast storage facilities to time. Alan Sekula states that when a photograph enters an archive it instantly loses all meaning accrued throughout its ‘social life’. The photographic archive creates an “abstract visual equivalence” between the images it possesses. He talks of an archive as if a living entity or social system with its own agenda and set of power relations between its inhabitants. Though I agree that an image can be lost once it enters the archive, as is often the case, there is a greater inherent possibility within picture libraries and archives in being able to unlock stories and histories long thought forgotten:
Last summer, while randomly searching Bristol Records Office for an interesting subject I came across the very fragmentary, mostly photographic archive of the Bamboo Club; the first West-Indian social Club in Bristol, which ran from 1966 to 1977. What I uncovered about the history of Bristol’s Afro-Caribbean community, its involvement with the civil rights movement, its influence on popular music both locally and internationally, sports, social history, community spirit and general good vibes, left me with enough starting pints to leave my head spinning and enough good strands to write a whole book. For me though, the subject was always the archive and the question of how seemingly forgotten or lost photographs might help us to forensically reconstruct the past. For me the importance was not the critique of the large-scale museum - although this plays an important factor in the equation - but of a highlighting of the possibility inherent in the local or provincial museum. How did the children of the ‘Windrush generation’ help to create an identity for themselves and their peers? An identity which grew out of many different strands of what it meant to ‘be Black’ during a period that saw so much conflict over the very same question. The Bamboo Club catered to young and old alike, with darts and dominoes matches, live music, club nights and a restaurant serving West Indian food. The club hosted sports events and was the home to the Bristol West Indian Cricket Club, which still exists today. It started the St. Paul’s Carnival, a celebration of Black identity and heritage, which also continues today. The Bamboo Club opened its doors on the 28th October 1966 and lasted eleven vital years, closing when it was gutted in a fire in 1977.
If we think of the archive as a conduit of historical consciousness we can begin to think it as a conscious entity that does not disappear when we shut the door and switch off the light. History exists as we exist, it is always with us and a part of us. This can be embodied as statuary emblems of the past: monuments, buildings, memorials, etc. The embodiment of memory in and of and as a site where a sense of historical continuity persists suggests the notion of what Eelco Runia calls Presence; “a vertiginous urge to taste the fact that awesomely real people, things, events, and feelings can awesomely suddenly cease to exist”. The notion of Presence can be felt throughout the more modern concern toward an active philosophy of history evident in books and articles, concerning the function of monuments and acts of commemoration and remembrance as they relate to the collective function of memory and history. Pierre Nora, whose text influenced Runia’s, calls this ‘Les Lieux de Memoire’. He states that such notions of the past are buttressed against our sense of our own individual and cultural identity. Our sense of who we are is informed just as much by our collective past as our private present. The mostly photographic, fragmentary archive that remains documents civil rights clashes on the streets of Bristol, live music from African-American Rhythm and Blues bands in the mid-1960s to the Jamaican sound systems and Bob Marley himself in the mid1970s. The archive of the Bamboo Club is a document of the ephemeral, made all the more poignant by the smoke damaged nature of many of the photographs that were saved from the flames that spelt the end for this cultural institution. Images whose materiality, such as those used for newspaper publicity and to promote local bands, speak to us of the commercial intent of the club, as well as more personal and private photographs of members; relaxing with friends, showing off trophies and hanging out with musicians. These photographs attest to an upwardly mobile desire among young WestIndians, while not simply content to copy British models of success, sought to create an individual identity for themselves, borrowing and mixing from a variety of influences to create their own Black British identity which continues today. The archive of the Bamboo Club acts as a crossroads to the variant strands of displaced African heritage thoughout the world during this time and a sense of pride in community is what makes this archive so complete a document of the times.
Runia uses the construction of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial to further elucidate his theory of Presence as it may be incorporated within the functioning of a memorial that traverses the space of the figurative and metaphorical. He writes that when the buildings from the death camps were re- appropriated as part of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, a process of “artistic transubstantiation” took place in which the literal became the figurative. The function with which the buildings were intended were inverted and displaced, coming to serve instead as a defiant commemoration to the lives of the thousands of Jews that had been exterminated within them, allowing their memory to be “metaphorically associated with what it is to be commemorated”. We take both Runia’s notion of Presence and Nora’s Lieux de Memoire with us as we look at James A. Boon and his idea of the “museumy emblems of others”. The idea that the colonised and Othered also make museums is central to the idea which I propose here. The Tahitian Feather Cape of the ruling dynasty of the island of Tarohoi is used by Boon as an example of a living, breathing museum. Captain Cook and the colonising forces plundered the islands in 1769, bringing many of its treasures back to be displayed at the South Kensington and British Museums. The Tahitian Feather Cape
stands in direct defiance to such colonialist attitudes towards its inhabitants. Hair, skulls, buttons, labels and even Cooks portrait are reputed to have been sown into the Tahitian Feather Cape; an archive which serves as the product of ethnographic interactions between native and stranger, decontextualised and presented as an archive which doubles as ceremonial garment. Another example can be seen in the slave quarters of the grand plantations kept in Louisiana before the American Civil War. These small brick shacks once used to house entire families of slaves have been re-appropriated and decontextualised from their past use. Standing as a series of modern, metonymical monuments which have power not because they give an account of an event or a span of time but by “forcefully ‘presenting an absence’ in the here and now”. This ‘ absence’ recalls Barthes’ notion of the that-whichhas-been and, in a the same way we can begin to imagine that the Bamboo Club, lost to the fire of 1977, maintains its absence in the ‘here and now’ through the archive that it has left behind. Achieving, through the act of artistic transubstantiation, the metaphysical/metaphorical state of a living museum.
“Literal museums and figurative: without walls (ambiguous and permeable anyway), or with. ...Books read as a museum (some of them resigned to be, some not; rituals enacted as a museum. Cities. Experience itself as a museum…” So, the idea of an idea floats in space and time continuously in the way that the past exists in the present. In this way, through the repositioning of our notion of the past, the notion of Presence moves from the literal to the figurative. So that, through the continual forms of expression that are employed to represent it - seen most explicitly in monuments, statues and commemoration - the past continues to exist in the present once it is past. In this way, both the past of History and the present-day reality allows that both function metonymically and ontologically at the same time while remaining existentially separate from each other. In this same way we recall the words of Captain James Tiberius Kirk speaking in commemoration of his friend Dr. Spock in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan; “He is not truly dead, as long as we find a way to remember him”.
Gavin Maitland is a curator, archivist and photo-historian. He currently works in archives of Christies and the Victoria and Albert Museum and previously attended Glasgow School of Art, NSCAD in Nova Scotia and most recently DeMontfort University in Leicester. He writes about the social and geographic (mis)representation of maligned cultures through photography’s varying histories. http://photohistoryrulesok.blogspot.co.uk/ All images are from the Bristol Record Archives and are used with permission. Their accession numbers are given and can be found at; http://archives.bristol.gov.uk/dserve/ or B Bond Warehouse, Smeaton Rd, Bristol, Avon, BS1 6XN.
ALICE CARFRAE TIN GIRLS
© FOSI VEGUE
© FOSI VEGUE
© FOSI VEGUE
For the last three years I have been a student studying Documentary photography at university of Wales, Newport. I had great success on the course and really enjoyed the challenges that it presented, both academically and personally. As well as studying photography I have taken an active role in building a commercial portfolio, and taking the first steps to establish myself as a professional photographer. I have had an editorial commission from The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and have had my work published in various journals, magazines and online publications, as well as working on commissions from charities and government organisations such as the Youth Justice Board. I have been successful in receiving funding to allow myself to work on an ongoing long term project about human trafficking in Nepal. It is this type of long term human interest story that really drives me and my work. Alice Carfrae
Tin girls It is said that in Sindhupalchok, Nepal, you can tell which household has sold a daughter, or lost a mother by looking at the rooftops of the village. The ones with corrugated tin roofs as opposed to the traditional timber and slate indicate that a sacrifice has been made; a selfless act to try and better the family’s situation. The unaffectionate nickname given to these women who give their lives is ‘Tin Girls’. Documentary photographer Alice Carfrae travelled to Sindupalchowk in North-eastern Nepal, an area that is particularly heavily affected by trafficking. During her time in Sindupalchowk, Alice stayed with a number of families of survivors of trafficking. Whilst there she photographed and interviewed a number of women who were willing to share their stories. Sharing their stories is important to these women as they hope it will help not only to break the social stigma surrounding trafficking but also prevent it from happening to others. www.alicecarfrae.com/
CRISTINA DE MIDDEL MADE IN
© NATALIE NACCACHE
© NATALIE NACCACHE
© NATALIE NACCACHE
Cristina De Middel is a documentary photographer and artist now based in London that has been working as a photojpurnalist for different newspapers in Spain (and with NGO´s such as Doctors Without Borders or the Spanish Red Cross) for almost . She combines her strictly documentary assignments , which has been exhibited and awarded in several occasions (incuding a National Photojournalism Award Juan Cancelo and a special mention at the New Fnac Photographic Talent ), with more personal projects . This B-side of Cristina´s work deliberately asks the audience to question the language and the veracity of photography as a document and plays with reconstructions or archetypes that blur the border between reality and fiction.
MADE IN Everybody seems to agree about the future of China. Everybody is staring at the fantastic growing of a nation that will soon ( 2016, some say) turn into the leading economic power of the world. The human right watchers, the environmental concerned and the demographic experts hardly get to raise their voices upon the optimistic and gentle vision offered by the market gurus that claim the Chinese example as the model to follow in order to overcome the world´s crisis. Still, very little is known, due to censorship, about the generation that will soon be in charge of this leadership. Suffering the strongest social, academic and professional pressure in the history of their country, Chinese teenagers struggle to find their place in a society they hardly understand. Unable to find answers in their communist grown parents, facing the new challenges designed specifically for them as future leaders, there must be a reason for suicide being the major cause of death between Chinese teenagers. Based on the observation of the extremely interesting and symptomatic routine of the Chinese youth, this essay tries to convey an honest approach to the society they live in. The leisure culture, the competitive race from sports to college, the requirements of a family that has invested their little money and huge hope in raising a modern champion, the traditional social bindings and the complex personality of only child that know little about generosity and solidarity is, from my point of view a time bomb. www.lademiddel.com
JIM MORTRAM JIMMY AND THE JACKS
For the last 18 months together with people on or far beyond the outskirts of my local Market Towns community I have been recording through collaborative environmental portraiture, audio and video interviews coupled with straight documentary shoots their life stories and memories, musings, hopes and struggles. I do this with a passion and belief that the photographs we can make have a weight and longevity beyond our time here, have an ability to communicate a story long after the characters have departed, they are time capsules awaiting discovery. These are moments of daily endurance that in a generation will have passed forever. I work as a full time Carer in my families home and at the end of the week there is no budget for any photographic work. Most all of my equipment is borrowed and all of my shoots are completed in free time away from my duties at home. Portraits from the Market Town series are multi award winning and have been published in print & book format worldwide. Market Town has no end date, it’s a project I will work on forever, constantly updating how I present the stories via essays, interviews, articles, stories, portraits, mixed media exhibitions and a series of books. Jim Mortram Jimmy and Jacks immy’s hands, legs and shoulders are permanently in pain and it’s taking longer to do everything, opening jars, bottles. And the walk to the local shop that would take five minutes now takes 40, but the Jacks are there by his side, there at 4 a.m. when he wakes from the aches within, there when people are not. Backing this slideshow Jimmy tells us of leaving Lewisham in London, the day his late wife passed away and his first dogs. jamortram.posterous.com
JORDI RUIZ MENONOS
Jordi Ruiz was born and raised in Barcelona, at the shore of the Mediterranean sea, where he got a degree in Design at Elisava College in 2007, after spending a period living in Dublin while studying at the National College of Arts and Design. Then he worked for a while in different studios as a graphic designer, until 2010 when he decided to leave it all and devote to photography. In 2011 he moved to london to study the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the LCC, graduating with distinction on the same year for my long-term project about the Mennonite communities in Bolivia. At this time he is working on documentary and portraiture and his photographic interest range from social issues to the portrait of small communities and environments. During the last year his work has been internationally recognized by some of the most prestigious institutions, including the POYi, the AOP, the Royal Photographic Society, the Ian Parry award or Lisa Pritchard Agency. Jordi’s work has been featured in different print and online medias including the Sunday Times Magazine or Foto8 story of the week. Mennonites Mennonites are Christian Anabaptists who left Germany around the XVI century, and have since been migrating from country to country. Throughout this time of migration they have always remained separate from the local population and have preserved their ancestral way of life - refusing to use most modern utilities, like cars, telephones or electricity, and maintaining a very humble existence. During the 1950s the Bolivian government invited them to work and populate the east of the country, in the province of Santa Cruz. They came from all along the American continent, mainly from Canada, Mexico and Belize, and started spreading their farms and fields along the vast, dry territory, expecting they would be able to ‘live the life as Mennonites’ in this new country. Today, there are about 50,000 Mennonites living in Bolivia, spread in more than 50 colonies, although the exact number is difficult to determine as many are living unregistered or with foreign passports. They call themselves Menonos, and they intend to maintain their traditional and closed communities at any cost. However the new socialist government is increasing environmental control that prevents the Mennonites from cutting down the forest. And the growing ‘influence of the locals’, means easier access to alcohol, music and cars - big issues with which the colonies are not sure how to deal. Some will eventually decide to leave the colony for a new and more isolated one, where the forest is yet to be cut, and Bolivian towns are tens of dusty kilometers away. But still Mennonites will always be a considered a source of income for Bolivians, and they know this. Sometimes they have to go to the city, but they don’t drive, they have cattle but no way to sell it. So no matter where they settle again, soon taxi drivers will start driving around, cattle buyers will pass with their trucks, and just a while after a little shop will be placed right at the entrance of the colony. New countries in which to settle are difficult to find, and so is new land in Bolivia, so the feeling of ‘getting to the end’ of a period is felt all around the community. www.jordiruizcirera.com/
MAXIM DONDYUK THE TB EPIDEMIC IN UKRAINE
Born in 1983 in Ukraine. Got higher education, specialized in management at the Kharkov StateUniversity of Food and Trade. Working as a cook. Since 2007 has engaged in professional photography. My name is Maxim Dondyuk and I’m a 28 y.o. documentary photographer living in Ukraine. I used to be a photojournalist covering news events in Ukraine, but two years ago I quit and started in documentary photography. I have been shooting a project about Hasidic pilgrimage to Ukraine to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) for four years now. Photography allows me both to immerse and to analyze events around me; it is a way to make a deep and prolonged analysis. In future I plan to go to Israel to document the lives of Hasidim before and after Rosh Hashanah. The TB Epidemic in Ukraine In 1995, the World Health Organization declared the tuberculosis epidemic in Ukraine. Over the past 16 years the situation has greatly worsened. Each day TB takes lives of 30 people, annually - about 10 thousand. In December 2010, I went to Donbass region in Ukraine. I was greatly influenced by what I saw on the first day. One of the first patients I had photographed was suffering from gastrointestinal tuberculosis. He was lying naked on a hospital bed and staring at the ceiling. A week later I was with him in the last hours of his life. He could not move or talk, his body was like a skeleton covered with skin. He clutched a cross to his chest and prayed. Afterwards I met his wife and she told me how he had walked around the house with a torn stomach and intestines dragging across the floor, because the ambulance had refused to transfer him to the hospital. They had to call for a taxi. After a while I realized that this happens all over the country and that the epidemic of tuberculosis has become one of the national problems. A lot of prisons amnesty the convicts in serious health conditions so as not to spoil their mortality figures. Two-thirds of former prisoners are dissolved in the country without being kept under medical supervision. Hospitals are in a terrible state and all phthisiology keeps on doctors who are long overdue to retire. Patients with drug-resistant TB have to use public transport to receive medical supplies and food and those without money just die in their beds. In the midst of current political wars in Ukraine everybody is just indifferent to the problem of tuberculosis. maximdondyuk.com
RAJAN ZAVERI THE PEOPLE FROM THE MOUNTAINS
Rajan is an Australian/British freelance photojournalist who uses reportage in mixture of media to focus on the social and cultural interests of a community. He has covered issues both locally in the U.K and internationally; with recent projects in London, Croatia, Bosnia and Egypt. His work has won him Guardian Student Photographer of the Year 2011 and shortlisted him for Magnum’s Ideas Tap Photography Competition 2011. Rajan has been exhibited in Foto8 and Candid Arts in London and a collective exhibition in Third Floor Gallery and Jacobs Market in Cardiff. Rajan is the co-founder of Firefly Photofilms, a multimedia company based in London specialising in digital storytelling through the mediums of photography, audio and video. A graduate from Newport University in 2010 with a BA in Documentary Photography. Rajan has also undergone training for Video, Sound and Journalism at the SAE Institute in London. He currently works on documentary and commercial multimedia projects in London, England. The mountain people The traditional way of life for the Jebeliya tribe is becoming extinct. They are nomadic Bedouins living and moving from place to place in the Sinai Desert. In recent years there has been a mass influx of tourists, and the attraction of profits in tourism has enveloped the area. There has also been an increasing of government control and checkpoints making it harder to move. Almost all of the Jebeliya tribe have ceased their traditional nomadic existence, opting instead to move into housing and sell goods and services to tourists who pass through in droves. zaveriphotography.com
SUPAY FOTOS BORDE
SUPAY FOTOS We are a group of Peruvian photographers compromised with documentary photography, because we consider it a tool for the diffusion and interpretation of our culture. Our objective is to show the stories and characters that charm us, who create their own worlds, people who follow their dreams and construct them according to their own ways and manners. In a society filled with beauty and violence, such as Peru, we find valuable what these people transmit. For that reason, we would like to share these experiences with others. At the same time, we try to offer our own point of view, honest and subjective.
Border In the heart of the Peruvian jungle, there is a city called Iquitos, which is surrounded by three rivers. It is like an island in the middle of the forest. Since its founding, it has been a strategic harbour in the river Amazonas with a special bound with nature. Iquitos loves and lives thanks to nature, but at the same time it destroys and contaminates her. The initial harmony that made Peruvians associate this land to the word “paradise� is nowadays hidden by the actions of men. Iquitos is thus place that gets far away, every day, from once it was before. What is then left in its place? No longer a shore, but a gap between the needs of man and nature, between the city and the Amazon; an uncertain frontier, though still magic and wild territory.
www.supayfotos.com
I International Photography Collectives Screening Show
If you want to know more about our activities please visit our blog at instantcoffees.wordpress.com We say goodbay until next season! Have a great rest of the summer!!!