Peshawar, Pakistan 1984 by Steve McCurry

Photographer Steve McCurry’s most famous photograph is a portrait of Sharbat Gula. Those piercing sea-green seem to drill into your very soul asking why? Why war?

In an interview with Phil Coomes for the BBC Steve McCurry said:

“I was doing a story on the Afghan-Pakistan border, this was a time when there were three million Afghans living in Pakistan. And one morning I was wandering through this refugee camp in Peshawar and heard these voices coming from this tent. I went over and looked in and I realised it was a girls school. These were girls around 12 years of age. I started to talk to the teacher to see what was going on, and as I was surveying the situation I noticed this one little girl sitting off in the corner with these amazing eyes, I’ve never seen anything like that.

“Eventually I asked the teacher if I could photograph her and for the next couple of minutes I made five or 10 frames of her. And for a brief moment the light was right, the composition was right, the background was right, everything was right and I made the picture.

“Once it was published on the cover of National Geographic we literally got thousands of letters. People willing to send her money, people wanted to adopt her, there were even men who wanted to find her and marry her. It just never let up over the 17 years.

“Many years later I went back to see I could find her. I was a little bit apprehensive because I thought is this going to be good for her? But then I thought this would be an opportunity if we could help her, give back to her, and actually compensate her for all the usage of that picture and make her life better. And I thought this would be the overriding, the most important thing we could do.

“We found her, and she was married to a baker and had three children. She was living in a small village in Afghanistan. She seems to have a pretty good life; although extremely poor, her husband was making only one dollar a day.

“Her big dream in life was to have her children educated and to perform Hajj. So National Geographic actually made that happen for her. Not only her but she brought 11 of her relatives and friends on this trip which was really and truly once in a lifetime experience for them. And then they organised a particular kind of compensation for her.

“I did of course photograph her again. Photographing her without her burqa was totally up to her and her husband. We had a lot of help from her community but somehow this thing came together and with this cooperation she was willing to be photographed.” Phil Coomes, BBC.

Xteriors II & Xteriors VI

Dutch photographer Desiree Dolron’s combines traditional photography with digital manipulation to produce painterly pictures that echo the great traditional Flemish artworks – something I find pleasingly compelling when done well.

Xteriors XII & Xteriors VII

Hat Tip: bumbumbum.

Amongst the 20 shortlisted entrants, Akash was unanimously voted the outstanding entrant in the 2009 awards by the judging panel. His two portfolios demonstrate an ability to work with movement and a range of different light. They are vibrant and engaging whilst still managing to tell stories about the people and places in his images. Judges’ Panel 2009, Travel Photographer of the Year.

Ship breaking in Pakistan

Ships purchased on the basis of their light displacement tonnage (ldt) are demolished in ship breaking yards and sent to steel re-rolling mills for reuse as raw material for production of steel. Currently, the international ship demolition market is cantered on the Indian subcontinent. While a large number of tankers find their way to scrap yards in Pakistan and Bangladesh,

The workers in Gaddani, Pakistan are mostly Pashtu people from the Northern Territories close to the Afgan border, they are seasonal workers, in their home they work as farmers, they are quite poor, they are what you would call fundamentalists in their Islamic believes, they veil and lock up their women, they are hard workers, they are tall and strong, they are soft spoken but proud. G.M.B. Akash.

Take me Home

Due to Bangladesh’s large population, inadequate seats on the trains and poverty, it is quite common to see a thick layer of people occupying the roof of a train. Frequent accidents, which occur when a free rider slips, are not enough to deter these stowaways of the railway. G.M.B. Akash.

Hat Tip: The Guardian.

If you’re a photographer you might well think so

While the use of anti-terrorist stop and search powers has fallen in recent months, a succession of high-profile incidents involving the use of the legislation against photographers has embarrassed senior officers, who privately concede that the rank and file are misusing their powers on the ground.

Recent examples include Jeff Overs, a BBC photographer who told the Andrew Marr Show he was stopped under suspicion of terrorism reconnaissance while photographing St Paul’s Cathedral, and Andrew White, an amateur photographer questioned by two police community support officers for photographing Christmas lights in Brighton.

In April two Austrian tourists were forced to delete their shots after being stopped by police in Walthamstow; and Alex Turner, an amateur photographer, was arrested under section 44 after taking images of a fish and chip shop in Kent.

Earlier this week Grant Smith, an architecture photographer, was apprehended under section 44 by City of London police while photographing Sir Christopher Wren’s Christ Church, around the corner from the Gherkin.

Smith, a critic of the stop and search policy, had been wearing a badge that read “I am a photographer not a terrorist” when police approached him. To top it off, when an ITN London Tonight crew arrived in the area to cover the story they reportedly found themselves subject to similar treatment. Paul Lewis, The Guardian.

Perhaps I’m being over dramatic, but you have to wonder how we’ve ended where photographing a chip shop can get you arrested. Haven’t the Police got something better to do with their time? You’d hope so.

Emilio Morenatti won the 66th POYi Newspaper Photographer of the Year Award – whilst his photos are visually stunning they’re all tinged with sadness.

A Pakistani child looks on as women covered with burqas from the tribal region of Bajur and Mohmand agency wait to be registered at the Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, Friday, Jan. 30, 2009. More than 200,000 people have fled the fighting in Bajur and Mohmand agency to camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Afghan Niurkhan, 11, stands next to his tent in Afshar refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan. Niurkhan who lost his parents two months ago during fighting between coalition forces and Taliban militants fled his village in Helmand province to seek shelter in the refugee camp in southern Kabul.

An Afghan man carries a bundle of balloons as he walks along a street on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, June 27, 2008

See more at the Denver Post.

Hat Tip: Very Short List.

Made of steel rails from bookshelves. On October 10, 1994, inmates Gerhard Polak and Raimund Albert used this ladder during their successful escape from ‘Santa Fu’ prison in Hamburg, Germany.

Mark Steinmetz photographed some of the tools German prison inmates created in their spare-time – as Mark writes These examples bear witness to man’s love of freedom. See more of Marc’s photos

Hat Tip: Very Short List.

Clarisse d’Arcimoles unearthed some old family photos and has restaged them. The results seem to ask us questions about our own relationships and mortality.

Hat Tip: BBC.

A Boeing 747 used by the president was escorted over lower Manhattan by a US air force fighter jet today as part of a government photo opportunity and training mission, causing a brief panic among office workers near the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The Guardian.

As no-one had thought to inform New Yorkers workers unsurprisingly they poured onto the streets in panic.

What PR executive came up with that idea?

On The Official Google Blog software engineer Paco Galanes
writes:

We’re excited to announce availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive – about 10 million photos.

Just add the text “source:life” to your Google Images search to specify images from the archive.

Hat Tip: A Fistful of Euros.

Climate Change is the big environmental issue, but what are the effects, here in the UK it’s expected that our climate will become Mediterranean although looking at our last two summers that’s pretty hard to believe.

With his series “The Chinese Dust Bowl” Benoit Aquin, the winner of the first Prix Pictet, what is claimed as the world’s richest photographic prize, shows the brutal effects in northern China which is turning 400,000 square km of once-fertile farmland into desert.

Sanggen Dalai, Inner Mongolia, China, 2006

Gansu Province, China, 2006

Wuwei Region, Gansu, China, 2006

Wuwei Oasis, Gansu, China, 2006

Wuwei Oasis, Gansu, China, 2006

Hongsibao, Ningxia, China, 2007

Bayannur Region, Inner Mongolia, China, 2006

Xilinhot City, Inner Mongolia, China, 2006

Hongsibao, Ningxia, China, 2007

Lanzhou, Gansu, China, 2007

Source: BBC.