NOTES FROM THE FIELD, Rena Effendi:

Recently I went to see the Damien Hierst exhibition at Tate Modern in London. There it was, the world’s most illustrious piece of art – a skull cast in platinum and set in diamonds. I waited in line to enter a dark cubicle specially built for it. Only six people were allowed to enter at a time. This way you could spend some quality time with the skull, intimately, in the dark. I watched it glow inside its box with its infinite reflections on the glass walls, eerie sparkling object with a missing tooth. Then I noticed the most interesting part of the installation - the facial expressions of the other five onlookers. Diamonds cast off light that reflected in their eyes giving them a special glow, a mixed look of awe and greed. They looked like actors from an old black and white Disney movie, pirates who had just discovered treasure and couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. I probably looked the same way.

In Sohag, Upper Egypt, I visited the Monastery of Great Martyrs of Akhmeem. There it was again, this time a female skull, dating back to 284 A.D. adorned with a crown of fake diamonds, but believed to have special healing powers, skin and hair intact and inspiring awe in thousands of Copts visiting the site. “The saints are bleeding to this day and the women’s hair is still growing, we even have to trim it. When the pope took one of the Saint heads in his hands, the head glowed. They are blessed!” - the keeper of the monastery tells the tale.

Monastery of Martyrs in Akhmeem became a place of pilgrimage for many Copts, as they believe attending the relics of the saints can miraculously cure ailments with divine power. These relics are of persecuted and tortured Copts dating back to the period of Emperor Diocletian and his colleague Maximian, 284 A.D. Sohag, Egypt.

May 2012

Tomas van Houtryve

Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

With each passing year, South Korea’s inhabited islands in the Yellow Sea look less idyllic and more like a war zone.

On Baengnyeong Island, South Korean marines can be seen digging fresh trenches and stacking sandbag fortifications. A collection of newly constructed bunkers stand ready to shelter islanders if North Korea unleashes an artillery attack.

Just before dusk on Wednesday, I watched a patrol of marines make their way along the island’s northern shore. The sea was calm and the air warm, but successive banks of anti-ship spikes and a long stretch of razor wire had altered the natural beauty of the beach. After dark, I spotted two Cobra attack helicopters with no lights skimming over the island.

Read full update at Pulitzer Center.

NOTES FROM THE FIELD, Sebastian Liste:

sebastianliste:

For a piece of land

“In the absence of any State presence, weapons are used to conquer a piece of land”                                 

Henri des Roziers, Pastoral Land Commission

In Brazil, the abolition of slavery was a slow and gradual process that resulted in a huge class of free workers. However, they did not have access to the means of production, in particular the land. Faced with the possibility that the abolition of slavery might result in the collapse of major rural producers, which depended on this workforce, the Brazilian Government ensured that the access to the means of production continued to be limited to a small number of individuals.

Nowadays, the 4% of landowners in Brazil control the 80% of the arable land, and 5 million families remain landless. While some see the land as a business, others see it as a means of survival. During the last decades, this gap in the use of land and its uneven distribution has led to a violent outburst, chaos and conflicts over the land, what has resulted in a massive rural depopulation, in which those millions of dispossessed have created hundreds of favelas surrounding the cities. 

I have dedicated the last 3 years working on documenting the hope, despair and struggles in these favelas, living with the marginal communities with no rights, formed by those landless families or their descendant, who had been running away from the poverty, oppression and violence of the interior of the country. 

For the last four months I turned my camera and my life to the Brazilian countryside, to understand  the roots of one of the most unequal societies in the world. Documenting the current situation of thousands of peasants who are living by opposing to emigrate to the cities and who keep fighting for a piece of land.

Evgenia Arbugaeva

Artlyst, Exhibition at Calumet London

During London Festival of Photography, Evgenia Arbugaeva will be exhibited at Calumet Photographic Gallery. If you’re in London or visiting London in June, see the show!

Dates: June 1- June 30

Location: Calumet Photographic Gallery 93-103 Drummond Street London, NWI2HJ

Hours: Monday-Wednesday, 8:30am-6:30pm Thursday-Friday, 8:30am-7:00pm Saturday, 9:00am-5:30pm

Saiful Huq Omi

Mother Jones and Magnum Foundation

Saiful Huq Omi, a photographer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, first focused on Burma’s Rohingya refugees in 2009, when he began documenting their lives in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom. The Rohingya—an ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority from Burma’s northern Rakhine State—have been persecuted for decades; nearly a million of them are estimated to reside in Burma, while another half million have sought refuge in Bangladesh. Smaller populations have fled to other countries.

View full photo essay on Mother Jones. 

Karen Mirzoyan

Mother Jones and Magnum Foundation

The first photo essay in a series put together by Mother Jones and Magnum Foundation, featured work by Karen Mirzoyan from his project Unrecognized Islands of Caucasus. 

Five months ago, the people of South Ossetia, a Georgian breakaway province, cast votes for their next president. Russia—the territory’s controlling nation—had endorsed a candidate, but the majority went instead toformer education minister (and anti-corruption advocate) Alla Dzhioeva. But her presidency was short-lived: The Supreme Court declared the election invalid, citing polling violations, and set a do-over election date—from which Dzhioeva was barred from participating. This week, Leonid Tibilov, a former KGB agent, won the new election.

South Ossetia is one of three contested republics in the Caucasus region. Its election chaos illustrates the impasse faced by these territories: All are trying to form autonomous nations, yet they can’t build government without a stamp of approval from one of the only countries in the world that recognizes their nationhood. Their independence depends on Russia’s support.