Damir Sagolj wins World Press award
Reuters photographer Damir Sagolj won first prize in the World Press Photo Daily Life Singles category with his photograph of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung on a wall in Pyongyang.
Below, he recounts taking the photograph.
“After days of excitement and lots of rare pictures in the provinces, I came back to Pyongyang without big plans for shooting in the capital. All I wanted were some moody general views of the city. This is probably the easiest big picture I shot for a long time – it was taken from the window of my hotel room in Pyongyang early morning, just before the sunrise. I knew that portrait was there and I insisted with our hosts to get a room on a very high floor facing that direction. So, all I had to do is to wake up early in the morning, make a coffee, light a cigarette and make sure I exposed well. The scene has this eerie look for maybe 5 to 10 minutes, then the revolutionary songs and propaganda speeches from loudspeakers wake the city up.”
Canon 5D Mark II, lens 70-200mm, f4, 1/60, ISO 800
Caption: A picture of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung decorates a building in the capital Pyongyang early October 5, 2011. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj
To see more of Damir’s photography from North Korea click here.
Gas & Water
By Tim Wimborne
Coal Seam Gas drilling is controversial. It’s also worth billions.
Some Australians love it, some hate it. The issues are big and they are complex. The industry is expanding like wildfire and the story develops daily. To more effectively tell this very thin slice of the story I combined pictures with audio, text and time-lapse video.
I believe this sector of Australia’s massive resources boom has the potential to make major political shifts. While reporting on it a farmer, a traditionally conservative lot, said to me “thank god for the Greens”.
Gas & Water from Tim Wimborne on Vimeo.
Invisible snow: Six months later
By Yuriko Nakao
For the first blog on the “invisible snow” of Fukushima, click here.
As Japan approached the one year anniversary of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, I revisited Buddhist zen monk Koyu Abe, chief priest of Joenji temple in Fukushima. I covered him six months ago when he was planting and distributing sunflower seedlings in an effort to lighten the impact of the radiation following the nuclear disaster triggered by the earthquake, the worst since Chernobyl in 1986.
Ever since my coverage of Abe and his family, I had kept in touch with them, checking in once in a while to see how they were doing. Despite their hardships and their stoic way of devoting themselves to the community, they were light hearted. One night, Abe called my cell phone in excitement because they had seen me on television when I was covering the world gymnastics championship.
Thanks to this sort of relationship, I was able to be a part of his daily life while covering his latest efforts to counter the radiation amid his normal duties as a monk and as the father of three boys.
When I arrived at the temple in the first week of February, it had a different look. Last time, the grounds were filled with flower seedlings and sunflowers bloomed as cicadas buzzed. But this time, the temple was quiet and colorless under a blanket of snow — with radiation storage tanks piled next to the entrance.
The scourge of malnutrition
By Adnan Abidi
As a photo-journalist my work is to bring out stories and emotions through pictures. And I have been doing that for the last umpteen number of years. However, after so many years of capturing events that have shocked people across the world, I was about to stumble upon a reality that would be even more shocking than what my camera could capture. It was one such assignment where me and a colleague were to travel to Rajasthan, India. The story was on one of the most prevalent issues of my developing nation—Malnutrition. When I started out from Delhi towards Rajasthan, I did have an idea of what was about to come my way. However, I never anticipated the intensity with which it would move me.
The first stop we made was in a village called Shahbad, the place where we were to actually find some severely malnourished children. After travelling 12 hours by car our visit turned out to be bitter disappointment since we found nothing except empty and ill-maintained hospital wards. After a lot of discussion and research the local doctor at the hospital agreed to take us to the Kasba-Thana village, located at the Rajasthan-Madhya Pradesh border, so that our story could gain perspective and ground. It was this village that brought its first shock for me.
During my wandering through the village I learnt that the way of life in this village was quite different from what I have experienced living in an urban city. In this village, which is home to the Sahariya tribe, women are the bread winners of the family. Not because these women are empowered and belong to an ultra modern tribe, but the men of the tribe have resigned themselves to absolute reckless lives.
The local doctors told me that while most women of the tribe go out and earn daily wages at early hours of the day; their men start to drink around the same time. In fact such exploitation has resulted in the abject poverty of the families and severe malnourishment of their children.
Quiet work amidst the reeds
By Herwig Prammer
The light is soft and warm, yet I am astonished at how cold it is. The thermometer says minus 15 degrees Celsius, but it feels far lower. In the car I did not recognize how strong the wind was blowing from the north.
Ernst Nekowitsch makes thatched roofs from reeds that grow along the shore of Lake Neusiedl, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Vienna, Austria. He tells me to have a look around. I will find his workers out in the reeds, he says.
So I climb up on the roof of my Land Rover and try to position myself in reeds higher than my vehicle. When I see the harvesters with their machines on the expanse of frozen water, I wonder why I cannot hear them. It is so quiet here. There is just a swoosh of reeds swaying in the wind. I take my cameras and walk along the grooved lanes the harvesting machines cut through the reeds. It is more difficult than I expected. The ground I cover is a 15-centimeter-thick layer of ice as smooth as glass. Sometimes you can even see the lake bed.
A young woman stops her small tractor with balloon tires and welcomes me. Julia, the daughter of Ernst Nekowitsch, explains that she is actually a beautician, but in the winter she helps with the harvesting and in the summer she joins her father roofing. Her father has leased more than eight square kilometers (3.1 square miles) of reeds at the lake, and usually they harvest two to three square kilometers (1 square mile) each year – assuming it is cold enough and the ice on the lake is thick enough to bring on the harvesting machines. Nearly all of the reeds are exported, most of it to the Netherlands. Here on Neusiedlersee we have the largest reed belt in Europe besides the Danube delta – always enough work, she laughs, as she starts her tractor again.
From the Quake to the Cup
By Mariana Bazo
Nearly 300 Haitians are stuck in Inapari, a tiny Peruvian village on the border with Brazil. They are victims of the 2010 earthquake in their country and traveled weeks chasing their dream of simply getting a job. They believe that in Brazil the upcoming World Cup is creating great opportunities.
Some 3,000 kilometers after leaving home, they reached the Brazilian border only to find it shut to them, closed to stop the wave of their compatriots that began to arrive after the disaster.
They wait in the middle of the jungle and understand little. They’ve bet everything on this chance, selling or just abandoning all their belongings back home to make it this far. They now have nothing in Haiti and can’t reach their destination, nor can they return. They even asked me why they’re not allowed to cross the border, assuring that they are good workers and are willing to work hard to live better.
Inapari is a lowland village of immigrants from the Andean highlands. A few years back it was opened up to the world with the construction of the Interoceanic Highway uniting the Pacific with the Atlantic across Peru and Brazil. With that road came many things good and bad. First came illegal logging. Then came illegal mining and smuggling. But at the same time Brazil and Peru are now united, commerce is more fluid and Machu Picchu is now only 12 hours away by road.
Have you seen this Fukushima child?
By Kim Kyung-Hoon
Near midnight on March 12th, 2011, I was looking for Fukushima evacuees who had fled from towns near the nuclear power plant hit by a massive tsunami and earthquake the day before, and was now leaking radiation.
On hearing the warnings of meltdown and radiation leaks at the nuclear plant, my colleagues and I drove west from Fukushima airport where we landed by helicopter with two very simple goals: stay as far away as possible from the nuclear power plant, and find the evacuees.
However, there was no clear information where to find the evacuees and how far away we had to stay from the nuclear plant to ensure our safety in the panicky and chaotic situation.
After asking around for several hours in Koriyama city in Fukushima Prefecture, we found out that all the evacuees were getting radiation checks before they could be admitted to evacuation centers. When we got to the makeshift inspection station, which was set up at Koriyama Sports Complex, what we encountered was more like a scene from a sci-fi movie. Officials in protective suits from head to toe were scanning the refugees to check whether they were radioactive.
The evacuees were standing in a long line waiting for the radiation test. What I saw in their eyes was terror and anger at their government’s inefficiencies. Several people who had been tested for radioactivity had been separated from the group and they were sitting on the ground with despairing and puzzled looks as they waited for decontamination.
In the long line of evacuees, I spotted a little girl brought by her mother.
The cycle of life and death
By Adnan Abidi
“Ganges is Holy,” said my boatman as I pointed my camera to photograph devotees half submerged in the blackish brown waters of the sacred river, the second most polluted in India. It was my third day on a photography assignment on Bihar- a sprawling state on the Gangetic plains of eastern India. My brief was to cover the overall progress of Bihar, hence I planned to photograph a bridge under construction over this sacred river. After a couple of shots with my wide angle lens I shifted to telephoto and as I zoomed in I saw a crow, a crow savoring or maybe just sitting on a corpse.
The boatman wasn’t as shocked as I was. This was no extraordinary sight for him. He continued to praise the progress of the state, and its new efficient minister but said things will not change overnight. On seeing me still shocked about the corpse he revealed that as Hinduism describes Moksha as liberation from the cycle of life and death, freedom forever from earthly miseries and sufferings, the holy river Ganges is believed to be a pathway to attain Moksha. And Hindus believe that dying on the banks of this holy river enable a soul to attain Moksha. So at very short intervals, sometime just weeks, people here see corpses floating on the river, and its an accepted phenomenon. He said that’s the way of life here and still there was progress!
I smiled at his optimism. He was all praises about the current government and the development it had brought even though personally he still lived hand-to-mouth. Earning his daily bread was an extreme challenge, for he like many boatmen had no option but to stay in the boat (floating in water) as they could not afford land. Even though there is a lack of basic resources, catastrophic flooding every year, and the lingering impact of poor past governance, there was a ray of hope in Bihar. I wondered if all this progress could bridge the gap between prosperity and poverty- a mammoth task that lay ahead for the current Bihar government.
California skateboard dreams
By Mike Blake
Recording how we as a society advance and decline amid a changing world is pretty much what being a journalist is all about. The changes are mostly man made, sometimes nature, but humanity rolls along and each new generation brings with it change. Put a camera in your hand and record the events with images and you have a better idea of my job for the past 26 years as a staff photographer for Reuters.
That may be a strange introduction to a piece about a kid from Canada who follows his dream to be a professional skateboarder in California, but not really.
Skateboarding got started in the 60’s with clay wheels and surfers looking out at a flat ocean. But nothing really happened with skateboarding until polymer technology advanced and created urethane. Then along comes a guy named Frank Nasworthy and the skateboard wheel clicks in his head. From that point on technology has advanced, and along with it, skateboarding. To the point where you have a little story about Jordan Hoffart, who follows his dream.
Behind the scenes: Zoo surgery
By Phil Noble
One of the best things about this job is the ability it gives you to photograph things you would never normally get to see in most walks of life. Whether that is pitch-side access to top sporting events, behind the scenes glimpses at royalty and presidents or getting close to wild animals, the opportunities are as varied as they are fascinating. Photographing a young Cheetah cub having a broken ankle repaired definitely falls into those categories.
Me and another news agency colleague had sat down with Chester Zoo’s marketing team a few years ago and discussed the possibility of doing different pictures at the zoo apart from the normal cute baby elephants and giraffes that regularly appear.
We had worked slowly with them to gain the trust of the keepers and zoo management by shooting a variety of behind the scenes jobs like the recent health checks on the tiger cubs.
I was really keen to photograph as many different things as possible at the zoo to give myself and therefore our clients an insight into what goes on. As with most things in life it’s the things that we seldom get to see that are often the most interesting.
“A Day in the Life of a Mobile Veterinarian”
http://www.efn.org/~hkrieger/vet.htm
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