Hope Gardens
By Lucy Nicholson
Lilly Earp changes the diaper on her 5-week-old baby sister Emily with the confidence another child would have cradling a doll. She’s only 8, but she already shows the street smarts of an older child as she helps her mother. It helps to be resourceful when you’re homeless.
Her mother, Doreen Earp, 38, who is originally from Germany, and her three children ended up on the street after her relationship with Emily’s father fell apart. They stayed in a hotel for a month, then with people from their church and eventually ended up with no roof over their heads.
Today, they’re lucky to be among the 150 or so other homeless women and children living at Hope Gardens on the outskirts of LA. It’s a place where those at the end of the line are given a life line. The shelter for families is an oasis compared to where most of LA’s massive street population lives on a grim patch of downtown’s Skid Row. While homeless services are concentrated downtown, it’s no place for a child.
Risking life for school
By Beawiharta
On Wednesday morning I received an image on my twitter feed (@beawiharta). It was a photo from a local newspaper that showed a student crossing a river on a collapsed bridge. The picture caught me. I needed to find out where it was so I could go there to capture it.
Shortly afterwards I arrived at the office. I had forgotten about the collapsed bridge because we were very busy. I had two assignments for the day, a breast milk courier story and a story about Indonesia’s rising investment rating. This was a big financial story because Moody’s ratings agency restored Indonesia debt to investment grade.
I went to Jakarta’s business district to find photos of middle-class workers returning to their homes. When I had finished, I realized that I had something different to shoot for the next day. I searched Google maps to find the location of the collapsed bridge but I couldn’t find the exact location. There was a blank map with only the name of the village, Sanghiang Tanjung. Surprisingly, it said the village was just 130 kms (80 miles) away from our Jakarta office – a travel time of about two hours. My estimation was it would take 4 hours.
3am Thursday morning, my friend and driver Soewarno and I headed to the village. We reached by 6am. But the difficulty was this village was just a blank area on the map. Also, we had to find the right direction that the students would take, so that I could take a pictures from the front, not from the back. We found many roads in the village but no one knew where the bridge was. With the help of my friends, we were able to get the name of the head of the village, Epi Sopian, who accompanied us to the location. Edi said the bridge collapsed during Saturday’s big flood when wood and bamboo hit the suspension bridge’s pillar.
As sad this story is to see the difficulties these young children are facing, just to get the basic education; its equally inspiring to see their determination and confidence to be educated. Is there any way we can reach to the villagers or head of the village or to the school officials in order to understand how much funds they would need in order to repair/rebuild the bridge. I will try raising funds for this cause. Please get in touch with me at my twitter handle @navishjain
The children of Dadaab: Life through the lens
Through my video “The children of Dadaab: Life through the Lens” I wanted to tell the story of the Somali children living in Kenya’s Dadaab. Living in the world’s largest refugee camp, they are the ones bearing the brunt of Africa’s worst famine in sixty years.
I wanted to see if I could tell their story through a different lens, showing their daily lives instead of just glaring down at their ribbed bodies and swollen eyes.
It was a challenging project. As one senior photographer asked, how else can we tell the story without showing images that clearly illustrate the plight of the starving millions? Few photographs cover all aspects of life in the camps.
Many of Dadaab’s children are dying. And then there are others who, despite living in the world’s oldest refugee camp, embrace their childhood; they play, go to school, care for their siblings and collect water for their families. I wanted to incorporate all of these aspects of life for Dadaab’s children into this project.
To tell the story, I combined Reuters photography captured during the height of the famine with footage I had collected when I was in Dadaab six months ago, before the severity of the crisis hit international headlines.
The point is, when news of the famine made it to the front pages, the children I had filmed in Dadaab were now only perceived as children on the frontline of famine. Not just as children who were excited with the furor we brought to the camp.
It is very hard with even the best efforts and intentions to overcome corruption: bribes and payoffs, extortion, protection rackets, insiders syphoning off the oil and mineral revenues, corporations pretty much doing whatever they want and enslaving entire populations, and commodities traders driving the price of grains and fuels up.
I know, Africa should lower the tax rates for the top 1% to 15% and they will create lots of jobs!
Too bad they don’t have Fox News in Africa.
A daughter’s last goodbye
Six-year-old Wakana Kumagai began to run from the car when she arrived at a temporary mass grave site in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi prefecture.
She had come to meet her father.
On that day Wakana attended an entrance ceremony for her elementary school. Afterward she went with her mother and older brother to the grave site. She showed off her dress and bright red school satchel as she described the entrance ceremony to her father. But her father, Kazuyuki, slept in the soil.
He was only 31 when he died.
Street photography is like falling in love…
I was walking in downtown Los Angeles when I saw the two brothers sitting there. They were drinking soda by a hot dog stand. The symmetry struck me – their identical outfits, the two-tone wall they leaned against and the two bottles.
It was after a couple of days photographing Japanese baseball superstar Hideki Matsui’s home opener with the Los Angeles Angels. There were so many Japanese photographers that I had to leave for the stadium six hours before the start of the game in order to reserve the best shooting position.
Matsui-stalking was fun, but no-one gets into photography because they enjoy fighting for shooting positions or carrying heavy camera equipment up flights of stairs.
Walking around downtown with one camera and one lens (Canon 5D Mark II and 50mm f1.2) is much more like it. Street photography is like falling in love with photography all over again.
A couple kisses on a street in South Los Angeles, November 11, 2008. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
It all started a few months ago when I was given a Blackberry with my first camera phone. Suddenly I was able to snap every photo I saw without having to think about choosing a lens, setting the exposure, over-thinking the composition. Capturing decisive moments, it has become my photo sketch pad.
My favorite photo here are the boys drinking the cola. Love the way the colors all go together and the way the picture suggests a very lazy day and yet the sunny shirts make it seem like there is something more going on.
You do have a wonderful talent and I hope someday I could be as good.
If you would like to check out my photo page :
http://rainbowofphotos.blogspot.com/2010 /04/ahh-to-be-seagull-and-soar-where-ev er.html
Life with a “Quiverfull” Family – the story behind the story
Rick Wilking is a Reuters contract photojournalist based in Denver, Colorado who has been shooting for Reuters for almost 25 years based in Europe, Washington, D.C. and now in Colorado. Rick recently developed the idea of spending time documenting the lives of a Christian “Quiverfull” family who have 15 children due to their belief that all family planning is best left in the hands of God. Rick produced the following piece of multimedia video from his time spent with the Jeub family in Colorado and tells us about the experience below. - Jim Bourg
I am convinced that the easiest part of my job is taking pictures. Coming up with story ideas, getting access and then producing the final results are MUCH tougher! That was very true with this story. I read about Christian Quiverfull-minded folks who closely follow and live by Christian scripture and biblical verses and decided to try to find one of these families to document. I begged my way into a Quiverfull forum on the web and was met there with much skepticism about letting me in. One family in Kansas said maybe and another back east said I could come by. But neither were enthused and I knew the travel budget was too tight for a trip that distant and long.
Then I found the Jeub family, only a 90 minute drive away from my home in Colorado. They too were tentative at first but let me in after seeing stories I had done recently in their area. My work documenting the headquarters of the “Focus on the Family” organization, portraying troops returning from Iraq at a nearby military base and covering “The Purity Ball”, a Christian father-daughter event all convinced them of my fairness and the integrity of my photojournalism. They said they prayed on it hard and were led to let me into their home to tell their story through pictures and sound.
Quiverfull, like any other belief system or philosophy, takes different forms. Believers generally view children as a gift from God and avoid all forms of birth control. To many, including the Jeubs, the movement means trusting God entirely to decide your family size by surrendering your life to God.
The Jeubs say that goes for their reproductive life too. “Wendy and I believe God wants us to trust Him in our family planning. The results are his to deal out. We’re more than fine by that. We are amazed (italics theirs) at how incredible the blessings have been…..We have 15 children, but why would we say that #16 wasn’t a blessing? Or #17? Or #18?”
I think that parrents who chose to honnor gods wishes and love children are wonderful what could ever be wrong with loveing children and wanting as many as you were chosen to have I think that people who chose the quiverfull way of life should be praised for acc. The honnor bestoed upon they my a higher power than them selfs. May all the familys who have chosen this path always be rewarded in all the best possible ways
The emotional toll of covering violence
The police scanner says there was a shooting in Zone 7, very close. We arrive right behind the firemen. Two men on a motorcycle had been shot with the same bullet. Neighbors start to gather as I make a few pictures of the rescue crew loading the victims into the ambulances and rushing off to Roosevelt Hospital in Guatemala City. The neighbors are angry and start taunting the police, accusing them of incompetence.
Daniel – i’m a travel magazine editor. I’d like to chat with you. getlostlukeATgmail.com.
Luke
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Resident Photographers Blog Expert
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The Wall
@onthelake – You will keep a cat alive to the tune of @1000.00 and wonder why a mother would cling to her child? It also isn’t at all clear whether any of these women actually ever had husbands or even stable relationships. I suspect most didn’t.
And I more or less agree with eduardo1418 – the government has been using wars for generations to flush surplus males – I’m almost convinced.