Khmer Rouge chief interrogator faces court

picture from guardian.co.uk video footage

This has almost nothing to do with photography, but since I have already written about this, and I think it's important, here it is:
finally Duch, the director of the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, the center of the Khmer Rouge repression system during Pol Pot's rule, is facing a trial.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2007/nov/20/duch.trial

"Al-Qaeda in Maghreb" feature published on the Web

Today the feature story published on PeaceReporter Magazine has been released for the website too (Italian only, unfortunately):

Link


Enjoy!

ste

The Lady of the bees

Na Tassadit and Dani Martinez, Kabylie, Algeria (picture by stebaraz, 2007)

Na Tassadit is an old artist who is trying to preserve the tradition of berber women to paint scenes about bees and nature on the inner walls of berber houses.

Young generations are not interested in preserving the tradition, but Na Tassadit receives the help of Denis Martinez, an energic Spanish-Algerian artist.

And - as she finishes to explain to the audience her story - she jumps into Dani's arms and she starts crying.

Please check the multimedia slideshow at the following link:

The Lady of the Bees

(italian only)

Kabylie, Algeria, and my first published pictures

Kabylie, Algeria (picture by stebaraz, 2007)

In mid-July I had the chance to ho go to Algeria with a friend of mine, Christian Elia aka "Chicco", a journalist for the www.peacereporter.net website.
He was in charge to write some articles about Kabylie, the berber region of Algeria, and he asked me to join him as a photographer.

We stayed in Algeria for about 10 days, and we had the chance to follow the events of the "Raconte-Arts" Festival, a festival aimed to promote the conservation of berber culture, thanks to movie screenings, poetry readings and artistic performances and workshops.

After the trip, we have produced some articles and multimedia presentations about our trip: the first number of the Peacereporter Magazine (a spin-off of the website) opens with an article about the elusive presence of Islamic armed groups in the region.

While the title of the story is quite scary ("Kabylie, the headquarter of Al-Qaeda in Maghreb", I felt safe in Kabylie: we've been always surrounded by our friend Karim, an algerian guy who spent last 10 years in Italy (he spent one year in Baghdad too, but this is another story), and currently works in Turin as an educator and as a journalist.

The festival was organized by his brother Hassan, and so they invited us to go there and take a look at how life is in Algeria.

We discovered a beautiful region - mountains, woods, rivers - and a brave and proud people who welcomed us with incredible hospitality.

In the next days I'll come back with a more detailed post; until then, you may take a look at some of my pictures at this link: my pictures from Kabylie.


Enjoy !

Nic Dunlop, Duch, Francois Bizot and the Khmer Rouge

S-21 Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh (picture by stebaraz, 2006)

Last year I had the chance to spend a couple of weeks in Cambodia; I did not know so much about the country before crossing the border at Poipet (I was coming from Thailand): Cambodia was a big surprise to me, a beautiful country with wonderful people, struggling to recover from a dark and recent past which is not yet ended.

Anyway, in a far past Cambodia was the center of the Khmer empire, which was the largest continuous empire of South East Asia. The empire had an intensive cultural and political life and its greatest legacy is Angkor, which was the capital during the empire's zenith. Angkor bears testimony to the Khmer empire's immense power and wealth: satellite imaging reveals Angkor to have been the largest pre-industrial urban center in the world, larger than modern-day New York.

The visit to the ruins of Angkor constitutes the highlight of any trip to Cambodia: the city is absolutely wonderful and magic, its buildings emerging from the forest where it has been hidden for over 6 centuries.

Anyway, I think that the beauty of Cambodia resides in its countryside: I remember with great joy a day-trip on a moto in the surroundings of Battambang, and the boat-trip to Siem Reap.
Having the time to taste the flavour of rural Cambodia, wandering around with no specific destinations, allows the visitor to dip into the country's rhythms and culture.

Anyone who travels to Cambodia cannot avoid facing the spiritual and material consequences that the Khmer Rouge regime left on Cambodian identity, like scars that fail to disappear.

What happened in the country between 1975 and 1979, after the radical Maoist movement of the Khmer Rouge lead by Pol Pot took the power, has been defined by some scholars as a "self-genocide".
It is estimated that about 1.7 millions people lost their lives because of the violence, the displacement, the famine and the total collapse of the industrial and agricultural system: about 1 Cambodian out of 5 did not survive to Pol Pot's rule.

Recently I read a book by Francois Bizot, a French scholar who is the only Westerner who survived imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge.
The book's title is "The Gate", and tells the story of the author's imprisonment in 1971: he was captured and accused of being a CIA agent (actually, he reached Cambodia in 1965 to study Buddhism).

Bizot developed a strange relationship with his captor, Comrade Duch, who convinced the Khmer Rouge leadership of Bizot's innocence.

But Comrade Duch is the same person who later became the director of the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, the center of the Khmer Rouge repression system: out of 17.000 people imprisoned, only 7 survived.

Bizot's book takes the reader into an exploration of the mind of a man who later became one of the cruelest torturer of the last century, and makes us doubt that the difference between monstrosity and normality is not as big as we would like to believe.

After the fall of the regime, Duch succeeded in avoiding the capture, and disappeared in the forest: the complete story can be read here.

And here comes the photojournalist,Nic Dunlop.
Born in Ireland, he became a photojournalist in 1990, a soon got obsessed by Cambodian history and by the history of the S-21 and of Comrade Duch.

Here, and in his book "The lost executioner", Dunlop tells his story, about how he started travelling Cambodia looking for Duch, and how, at last, he found him in 1999, and made him confess to be the S-21 lost executioner.

Here you can find the picture he shot to Duch when he bumped into him in a Refugee Camp in eastern Cambodia, where Duch was working for an American NGO, after his conversion to Christianity.

And, suprisingly, when Nic Dunlop found him, Duch did not oppose any resistance, and declared himself ready to face the judgment of a court and to pay for what he did.

Today, after almost 30 years, Comrade Duch is likely going to be trialed for his crimes: recently has been reached an agreement between Cambodian and foreign judges for a U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal to begin investigating Khmer Rouge leaders in the deaths of 1.7 million people during their 1975-79 communist regime. (italian and english)

Enigmatic and elusive as ever, Comrade Duch is waiting in his cell for his fate to be decided, thanks also to a brave and undaunted photojournalist who dedicated part of his life to his hunting.

My S-21 pictures can be seen here.

p.s. 19th September 2007 Update

Good News..

"Police arrested the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader Wednesday, taking Nuon Chea to appear before a U.N-backed genocide tribunal for his role in the 1970s Cambodian regime blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people"
"Nuon Chea helped Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot seize control of Cambodia's underground communist movement in the 1950s and '60s. He later became the group's chief political ideologue during its murderous rule in the 1970s"

Read more here

Photographic Workshop in Siena

Bruno Stevens and Ed Kashi, Siena (picture by stebaraz, 2007)

Last weekend, from Friday to Sunday, I was in Siena, Tuscany, where I attended a photographic workshop with two outstanding photographers: Bruno Stevens (left, see also here) and Ed Kashi (right)

The course was organized by Canon and Toscana Photographic Workshop, and even if the organization on the italian side was not exactly perfect, the experience was really great, and worth the travel and (maybe) the expenses.

I am quite informed about photojournalism and photographers (thanks also to some previous Tpw workshops I attended during the last years) but I have to admit that I did not know so much about Kashi and Stevens before the weekend.

Ed (Kashi) is american, and has been in the business since the early 80's, working on assignments on social and political issues for National Geographic, New York Times, Newsweek and many more, and working on personal projects; in the last years he's been facing the challenge of multimedia storytelling (1,2 and 3)

Bruno (Stevens) comes from Belgium, and has been working as a sound engineer for over 20 years: he became a photojournalist only 9 years ago, but he immediately became one of the most successfull photographers around; he usually covers war zones, natural disasters and crisis in general, and he works both for newspapers and magazines and for humanitarian organizations (UN, MSF, HRW, etc etc..)

Ed and Bruno are quite different characters: while Ed is calm, precise, pragmatic, positive, and gives the impression to be as steady as the rock, Bruno is exuberant, absolutely talkative, a real volcano!

But, beyond their differences, they are really committed to their jobs, and they firmly believe in photography as a medium able to change society: with different accents, they seemed to me to embody "the concerned photographer".

During the workshop Ed and Bruno analyzed the portfolio of the participants, and showed some oh their most recent pieces of work: Ed showed us some material about Nigeria, Kurdistan (here) and about his personal projects, while Bruno showed us some shots form his recent 6 weeks trip to Iran (here), and some stuff about Sri Lanka, Sudan, Palestine, and about his project on tubercolosis.

We were sent out to shoot some images both on Friday and on Saturday, but with no specific assignment (and this is my main reason of complaint, but I think it depends more on Tpw than on Ed and Bruno) and we've been asked to make 15 pictures selections of every day of shoot, that were edited and commented by Ed and Bruno in the classroom meetings of Saturday and Sunday.

I found myself in troubles on Friday: I usually shoot following a theme or a project, and I was not ready to be granted such a high degree of freedom, and to be left free to shoot in a tourist-crowded Siena.
Even I was quite disappointed by my pictures, I took some decent shots.

It happened more or less the same in the second day, even if I had the fortune to bump into the celebrations of a Contrada (neighborhood), and so I focused - even if not on a "story" - at least on an homogenous subject.

The results, while quite messy in terms of composition and cleanliness of the images, were better from the point of view of my approach to the subject: I was using a 24mm prime (35mm equivalent on my digital reflex) and I was "obliged" to get close to the subjects.

We were divided in two groups, and I had my pictures edited by Ed on Saturday and by Bruno on Sunday: I really loved the way Bruno did the edit, he was positive but he knew how to be "tough" on some bad images, even in a funny and entertaining way (they told me that Ed's edit on the second day was quite "tough" too, so it may have been a deliberated choice to be more "soft" on the first day and more strict on the second.

Anyway, I really learnt a lot from Ed and Bruno, both in terms of photographic language and - above all - in terms of opening my mind to the essence of what it does mean to be a photographer.

If you want you can take a look at some of my shoots on my flickr space.

Ed posted some thoughts on the workshop here: you can take a look at his blog to share his vision of what happened in Siena.

For me it was really an inspiring experience, both from a photographical point of view and from a more general one; Ed and Bruno art two very committed individuals, who shaped their lives (and keep on trying every single day) around the values they firmly believe in: giving voice with their job to who does not have a voice and cannot be listened, hoping that making avalaible to a wider audience what happens around the world can contribute to make this planet a better place.

Thank you Bruno, thank you Ed: I wish you all the best.

Starting from two pictures

Last weekend I attended a photographic workshop in Siena, and while I am not satisfied of my shots, I like this two pictures, above all the second: while the first is just composition and little else more, the second, even if it's not perfect (the background is quite messy, the bottom edge is a bit too narrow), it makes me think that I was able to catch the moment.

A New Start

I started this blog more than one year ago: it was supposed to be mainly a photo blog, about me and my life, and it was tought to be written in Italian.

After starting the blog I never really felt the need to feed it, till a couple of days ago, when I was in Siena, Tuscany, attending a workshop with two wonderful photographers (and human beings), Ed Kashi and Bruno Stevens.

I will talk in detail about the workshop in another post: here I just want to underline how much energy these two guys - who are as different as the sun and the moon! - are able to transmit, and how much enthusiasm they are able to convey.

With this post I want to begin a New Start for the blog: I'm going to talk mainly about photography and photojournalism, but - it's a personal blog, after all - I may be tallking about me and my life.

Beacuse like Ed and Bruno never stopped to say, "if you want to take good pictures you have to know who you are".

Enjoy!

p.s. The first posts of the blog have been written in Italian: I want to leave them as thay are, as a reminder, so I am not going to translate or eliminate them.