#james estrin

[thechemistryset]

Candida Royalle

Photographs: James Estrin

[soulbrotherv2]

West Africa, as Seen From Its Barbershops

[Read James Estrin’s complete New York Times article and view many more of Andrew Esiebo’s photographs here.]

[simchiyin]

A big thank you to @jamesestrin for the in-depth interview he did on my past and present, for NYTimes Lens blog. 

Just back from the road and posting this late. 

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/vii-sim-chi-yin-china-photos-family-destiny-to-photograph-the-new-china/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

July 9, 2014 1:39 pmJuly 9, 2014 1:39 pm

A Familiar Destiny to Photograph the New China

By JAMES ESTRIN

Sim Chi Yin had a cushy expat life in Beijing working as a reporter for The Singapore Straits Times, writing long feature stories and sometimes taking photos. The company paid for her education at the London School of Economics in exchange for eight years of employment. She had health insurance, a pension and job security.

So why did she walk away from that after nine years?

“I wanted to be a photographer but the editors at The Straits Times said I was overqualified,” she recalled. “Almost every year I asked to be assigned to the photo desk but they didn’t take visual journalism seriously.”

Ms. Sim — an ethnic-Chinese, middle-class child from Singapore whose family had risen from humble roots — had wanted to be a photographer since she was a teenager. So as grateful as she was to her newspaper, she took a gamble on photography.

Her decision, which meant slashing her expenses and moving to a smaller apartment, has paid off: Last month she joined the cooperative photo agency VII as an interim member, after being mentored for the past three years by Marcus Bleasdale as part of VII’s mentorship program.

Photo

Monks on a leisurely visit to Mandalay Hills. Monks are revered in this largely Buddhist country and led mass protests in 2007, leading to a crackdown and an exodus of Burmese activists into Thailand.Credit Sim Chi Yin/VII

“Most importantly, she is great photographer, a great journalist and a really good person who is dedicated to issue oriented storytelling,” said Ed Kashi, who is on VII’s board.

He also acknowledged that VII, like Magnum and other cooperative agencies, have had too few women and people of color as members and that Ms. Sim’s background is a welcome change. Ms. Sim, who has freelanced for The New York Times, Time Magazine and the New Yorker, speaks fluent Mandarin.

The interim membership is like a two-year trial marriage for both sides, during which Ms. Sim wants to organize group projects and expand the agency’s presence in Asia.

Chi Yin Sim grew up in Singapore in an ethnic Chinese family that had lived overseas for three generations and almost never spoke of the past. As a teenager she devoted herself to being “a useful person”, working with disabled people and volunteering as a Salvation Army Christmas bell-ringer at shopping malls.

Her parents were not interested in politics or civic engagement. Ms. Sim always felt that her parents didn’t understand or approve of her interest in social issues, activism and eventually journalism.

But she did not fully understand their disapproval at first.

After receiving a masters in Chinese history she delved into her family’s past, especially curious about her grandfather, whom no one ever spoke of. Her mother showed her a photo of a man with a box camera slung around his neck.

Photo

Sim Chi Yin’s grandfather, Shen Huansheng. It’s likely this photo was taken in the early to mid 1940s in British Malaya.Credit Sim Chi Yin/VII

Over the next eight years she discovered he had been a school principal, businessman and eventually the editor of a leftist newspaper in Malaya. She learned that he had been active in Malaya’s Chinese community and was arrested and tortured by Japanese occupying forces during World War II. When the British returned, he wrote anti-colonial editorials, which led to his arrest. Given the choice of staying in jail or being deported, he left to his ancestral village in Guangdong province, leaving his family behind temporarily.

Ms. Sim only learned this hidden family history in full when she visited her relatives in Gaoshang, a farming village in China, in 2011. Her grandfather is revered as a martyr for the revolution: a six-foot tall obelisk marks his burial place. A month after arriving he joined the Chinese Communist Party guerrillas, he was captured by Nationalist forces and was executed shortly before the Communist victory.

Ms. Sim often wonders what her grandfather would think of the “New China” he fought for. She is “sure that he would be disappointed” with a lot of aspects of it. But she also suspects he would have approved of her interests in journalism and social issues, as she tries to do what she can “to be useful.”

“It’s an enormous place with enormous problems,” she said. “But I have come to really care about China and its people. After all, it’s the place where my grandfather died for.”

Follow @chiyin_sim, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

[nomadasarte]

"Lo que trato de lograr con mis fotografías es capturar momentos profundos, experiencias que sean esencialmente internas -- invisibles. Cuando estoy fotografiando mi objetivo es estar completamente presente, en el momento" James Estrin, fotógrafo del New York Times

[ohfalada]

By JAMES ESTRINHauwa Mutah wants to be a biochemist. Monica Enoch loves to sing. Dourcas Yakubu is a shy girl who exchanged hand-written notes with a boy who called her “the remote control of my life.”

These teenagers are among as many as 276 schoolgirls who were kidnapped last month from Chibok, a poor, remote northern Nigerian village, by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram. Their story has become global news, with plenty of images of protests in Nigeria and beyond (and some that were mistakenly used of girls from Guinea-Bissau in a social media campaign). But there has been little discussion of the girls as individuals, daughters, sisters and friends with dreams and hopes.

Glenna Gordon covered some of those protests in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria, but still felt she was missing something.

She realized that although she could not photograph the girls, she could photograph their personal possessions and present the items — dresses, notebook, letters — as nicely as possible.

Glenna GordonAn article of clothing owned by Comfort Ngala Bullus, one of the more than 200 girls who were kidnapped on April 15.

“I kept thinking about how these girls are missing and how they’re missing from our pictures of the protests,” she said. “I felt the girls were getting lost.”

Ms. Gordon has been photographing in Africa since 2006 and has been working with young women in northern Nigeria for the last two years. She decided to try to cover the story as soon as she heard about the abductions.

But it has become very difficult to get to Chibok in the last two weeks.

Ms. Gordon said there were military roadblocks and rumors of an impending Boko Haram attack.

She met relatives of the girls in Abuja and Maiduguri, including Sunday Samuel, who owns a computer shop and is a cousin of two of the kidnapped girls. He helped Ms. Gordon contact several parents, and she interviewed them by phone and explained what she wanted to do. She arranged for them to send some of their daughters’ notebooks, dresses, jewelry and shoes from Chibok to Maiduguri by bush taxi and then on to Abuja by bus.

Glenna GordonMargaret Pogu, a 16-year-old known as Maggie, loves playing with her friends. Her father is a teacher in Chibok.

Ms. Gordon borrowed a photo studio and pored over the items, gleaning clues about the girls.

She learned that their handmade blue gingham cotton uniforms were all slightly different. One uniform was restitched three times — maybe the girl couldn’t afford to make a new one and kept repairing the old one. Another uniform was nicely made but utilitarian, so maybe a mother — not a teenage daughter — made it. And the smallest one was still dirty; Ms. Gordon thought the girl had to wait until she had money to buy soap and wash it.

Ms. Gordon filled in the details with more phone conversations with the girls’ parents.

Elizabeth Joseph likes to play hide-and-seek, and to read her Bible by lantern. She is the fourth of nine children, and her father always drops her off at the boarding school on the back of his motorcycle.

Monica Enoch sings with her father, who is a pastor. Her friend Saratu Emmanuel lost her family in a Boko Haram attack on a nearby village and went to live with Monica. Both girls are now captives of Boko Haram.

Hauwa Ntaki studies English and in a handwritten letter sent a million greetings to her brother, a thousand greetings to his friends and none to his enemies. She is third in her class at the boarding school and loves volleyball.

The students were kidnapped on the day they were taking their final exams. Schools in the area had been closed because of threats by Boko Haram, which roughly translated means “Western education is forbidden.” Even for poor girls from a remote village, an education can provide greater opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers could have dreamed of.

In Ms. Gordon’s photos, the abducted girls are no longer anonymous, faceless victims. They are teenagers — at times hard-working, endearing, proud and even judgmental.

“I wanted this to be about these girls,” Ms. Gordon said, “and nothing else.”

[4thwardfumble]

In this photograph I leave a little more room for interpretation than in some of my other photos. It made me think about getting past what is immediately in front of me and looking for deeper meaning from photographs.

Lauren Justice, interviewed by James Estrin...

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/a-quiet-moment-among-neighbors/?smid=tu-share

[davidsimonton]

"While Mr. Ballen is pleased when his photographs affect people’s emotions, he said he took pictures only for himself and the effect that they might have on him. 'The good pictures expand my consciousness of who I am.'” from Inside Roger Ballen’s Mind: A Place of Refuge and Madness, by James Estrin http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/inside-roger-ballens-mind-a-place-of-refugee-and-madness/

[jocelynarr]

james estrin