Bill Withers took to the stage in Zaire and sung this song.
Listening to it tonight just reduced me to tears. So far from home, it hurts.
THANKS @Magotsi
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A taxi driver duckrabbit met tonight called Francis, who when asked for a receipt handed me a blank one and said:
for sending me this video. Cheered me up no end. I could warn you about the swearing, but if it was a problem you wouldn’t be reading duckrabbit would you?
I’m not a hugely emotional person. You could break down in tears in front of me and I’d might give you a glancing pat on the back in some sort of lame effort at sympathy. But this excellent little film about a couple of brothers who make chocoalate got me all emotional. I have no idea why but I watched the whole 9 minutes of this film and was totally hooked. It was about chocolate but it wasn’t.
The Mast Brothers from The Scout on Vimeo. There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that duck is having an amazing adventure in Kenya. I’ve been attending a four day Masai ceremony in which warriors make the transition to elders. Myself and Yasuyoshi have been the only foreigners invited. It is a great honor. Actually its not that different from the Eurovision Song Contest. Lots of people, getting dressed up, slapping on make-up, singing songs, dancing and getting really, really pissed. The fact that this party happens only once every eight years might exlain why the thousands of people attending are determined to have such a great time. The real difference is that at Eurovision song parties they don’t kill fifty cows and then barbecue them. Shame because the food has been bloody delicious. Who said man cannot live on cow alone? You may be wondering who I had to kill to get entry to the party? Yasuyoshi first photographed this clan during the post election violence in 2008. His photo of the tribes fighting on a hill won a first in the World Press Awards. Since then he has been visiting the community on a regular basis, earning their trust. That explains his presence here. Mine was brought with two crates of beer. Honest. OK so that was the good news. Now the bad. I knew that there had to be a downside. Tonight on the way back to our hotel I asked one of the elders what would take place tomorrow, the last day of the ceremony. It turns out there will be a big kick ass fight with canes in which everything gets trashed. How rock and roll is that? Unfortunately though I am expected to take part, which might explain why everyone I’ve spoken to has been so vague about the activities up until now. I can’t complain, and to be totally honest, I’m actually looking forward to it. Now the serious part. This Masai clan have never written their customs down and now their culture is under threat. Many people have told me that they fear this is the last time this ceremony will take place on such a large scale. They tell me how important Yasuyoshi’s work is to them because he is documenting a record of their culture that has never been captured in such a way before. For future generations that will be priceless if the clan are to retain a sense of who they are and where they come from. God bless Yasuyoshi, he is a hero. Mine and theirs. Pete Brook over on Prison Photography has posted up an awesome find…you have to check it out… ‘Saturday Come Slow’: Broomberg and Chanarin Team Up with Massive Attack and Former Guantanamo Detainee, Ruhal Ahmed’As Pete says: “It is neither film, photography nor journalism; the video is part activism, probably art and definitely a call to thought.” Indeed.
A sobering lesson on the fate of the world’s glaciers from Mediastorm and the Asia Society, in the week when the UK ‘Con-Dem’ coalition government put pollution standards “on hold”, giving the green light to the building of new coal-fired power stations. Fantastic. I saw this today and it made me go hmmm. A handbook on what to do and not do in a war zone. I thought most of it would be fairly logical but I guess as more newbie journalists and photographers try and make a name for themselves then it might be a useful to some. Here’s a excerpt from the blog. ‘Reporters Without Borders (with UNESCO) has compiled a Handbook for Journalists for those going to dangerous parts of the world, listing international norms protecting them and containing practical advice on how to stay alive and safe.
What are the basic rules in a war zone? What are the first things to do when somebody is wounded? What protection does a journalist have in a war zone? The handbook has the answers.’ CLICK HERE to read some more but you would have thought most of it was fairly logical. I’m not usually a fan of photographer-narrated slideshows but I really love this one by Brian Lesteberg because he’s telling his own story rather than contextualising someone else’s. Wonderful pictures and a touching, human little tale. Spotted on Hin Chua’s blog. That said it is not exactly my cup of tea. I am on my way to the Masai Mara to spend some time hanging with my old friend Yasuyoshi Chiba, and to watch a coming of age ceremony that takes places only once every generation. This is the first time the ceremony (which marks the crowning of new warriors) will take place without lions. Conservation and tourism wields the power now in the Mara, which means the lions have ended up with greater rights than the Masai. Yasuyoshi has been living in the community for over a year now (when he’s not shooting elsewhere). The Masai have given his family land so that he can build a house, that’s how highly they think of him. I know how they feel. Although we could hardly be more different in character I have learned a lot from Yasuyoshi, not least that you can be both great at what you do, and put others first. Tonight the community will gather for projected slideshow of his work. Trust me, it’s the hottest ticket out of town. I like this. It made me smile. It is one of those multimedia/videos that is not only shot and edited very well but shows a great sense of humour that is sometimes missing in this all too serious world. CLICK HERE “Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us……[they] don’t tell us everything we need to know.”I’m just coming to the end of Susan Sontag’s seminal essay on our response to images of horror, Regarding the Pain of Others. It covers much of the ground frequently discussed on duckrabbit and other concerned photography sites – public apathy towards photojournalistic images, the aestheticism of violence and the truth or deception of images. G’wan. You really should read it. LPA, aka London Photographers Association, aka as Little Pilfering ******* “You can live vicariously through images of conflict. There is an underlying exoticism to it. Depicting war doesn’t bring it to an end. I felt sickened by it, but didn’t want to give up what I was doing. I started feeling you had to be more complex in your approach – examine where the weapons were coming from, which governments were profiting from those conflicts. Simply to portray war was no longer enough. First I had a feeling of powerlessness then I channelled that energy into a story.”Zed Nelson on how a brush with death in Afghanistan changed his approach to photography. This goes to show how you can not see something that is right in front of your face. This is a pic out of one of my windows, a window that I look out of dozens of times a day. For the first time the other evening things lined up and I saw this pic. It’s a shot of nothing really, just a lampshade, string from the blind, and acers outside. The reflection from inside divides the frame. I just like the balance.
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