In 1974, the German photographer set out to convey the truth about how people really lived in the communist GDR – depicting her fellow citizens with a ‘timeless coolness’
Continue reading...Category Archives: Photography
‘Not enough work, not enough money’: can this Kyrgyz village survive without tourists? A picture essay
Life was hard in this remote area of central Asia, until tourism offered new hope. Then Covid-19 struck and the visitors stopped coming
- Photographs by Danil Usmanov
It has been over a decade since Umar Tashbekov saw his opportunity. His village, Sary-Mogol in Kyrgyzstan, at an altitude of 3,600 metres, is close to Lenin’s Peak, a popular mountain destination for tourists. If they were already hiking there, why not attract them to visit his village too?
Sary-Mogol is a three-hour drive from the nearest city of Osh, in the country’s south-east. Life here is not easy – short summers and unfavourable growing conditions make it hard to grow much more than potatoes and barley. The main source of work is the large livestock market in town. Others find employment as teachers or in the nearby coal mine. Out of its 5,200-strong population, about 500 people have left for Russia where companies welcome factory workers.
Continue reading...Inside the outbreak: photographing England during Covid pandemic
Guardian photographer Chris Thomond lives in Manchester and spent most of the year under strict lockdown measures while travelling on assignment around the north of England’s coronavirus hotspots photographing life during the pandemic. He looks back on his year
Early on during the pandemic I’d seen a short film from the Philippines and read an extended blog from northern Italy, both featuring photographers dressed in hazmat suits, toting cameras housed beneath protective covers. Embedded with paramedics as they dealt with seriously ill patients, my fellow photojournalists sensitively showed doctors in sweltering emergency hospital pop-up units or portrayed intimate moments as spouses and other terrified family members bid farewell to their loved ones as they were stretchered from their homes, some for the last time.
Over the following weeks I was drawn to the frequent updates of the legendary photographer Peter Turnley’s remarkable black-and-white street portraits from New York (and later Paris, his adopted home). They showed exhausted medical staff outside trauma centres, lonely subway travellers, homeless wanderers and an assortment of essential workers and normal residents who were just about holding things together. The biggest city in the US rapidly became one of the centres of the outbreak and suffered a correspondingly large death toll. Turnley showed immense bravery to walk the streets each day and his empathic approach towards subjects rewarded him as he witnessed tender moments which he skilfully captured for history.
Continue reading...Calls for release of man arrested photographing transfer of Rohingyas
Bangladesh authorities under pressure from rights activists including Bianca Jagger over detention of Abul Karam
Bangladesh authorities are facing calls to release a Rohingya man arrested while photographing the transfer of refugees to a controversial island camp this week.
Abul Kalam, 35, has been held since Monday morning when he was reportedly beaten before being taken to police barracks near the Kutupalong refugee camp, where he has lived since leaving Myanmar as a child refugee in the early 1990s.
Continue reading...England weather: bank holiday snow replaces storms – in pictures
Snow has swept England during a cold and frosty start to the Boxing Day bank holiday after days of stormy weather. The Met Office has issued yellow warnings for snow and ice for much of England and Wales
Continue reading...On the road to nowhere: France border closures causes UK lorry chaos – in pictures
The decision by France to close its borders to incoming freight traffic from the UK has caused chaos in Dover – the gateway to Europe – and roads leading to the port
Continue reading...Batman, nurses and an orangutan – Thursday’s best photos
The Guardian’s picture editors select highlights from around the world
Continue reading...Indian farmers’ protests – in pictures
Tens of thousands of protesting Indian farmers are camping along at least five major highways on the outskirts of New Delhi and have said they won’t leave until the government rolls back new laws on agricultural reform that they say will drive down crop prices and devastate their earnings
Continue reading...Masked Horses: photographs by Tim Flach
Wildlife photographer Tim Flach’s series Masked Horses speaks to the role of the horse as a companion to humankind over the ages. A disguise, or a protection the images reflect on our current pandemic. Flach’s animal photographs have often been likened to classical portraiture and his portraits of horses wearing gas masks, head protectors, equine inhalers and blindfolds are both captivating and disturbing
Noël Coward’s private lives: the photographs that could have landed him in jail
A newly discovered album contains intimate, joyful glimpses of the playwright drinking, partying and holidaying with his famous friends and lovers. The result is an astonishing insight into gay life in the interwar years
In 1931, Noël Coward was the highest-earning author in the western world, celebrated for his scintillating comedies and sensational dramas of hidden love such as The Vortex, Private Lives and Easy Virtue. As well as writing hit songs, musicals, novels and short stories, he painted and, not least, performed. But perhaps the most astounding thing of all is the fact that – at a time when homosexuality was illegal and would remain so for some time – he lived an openly gay life.
It is this that makes a newly discovered photograph album so extraordinary. It shows intimate glimpses from the private life of this towering cultural figure. Apparently compiled in the 1930s by Coward’s closest female friend, Joyce Carey, the album is a remarkable insight into gay lives of the interwar years, lived in plain sight. Carey died in 1993. It is because of her long-held loyalty to the man she and other intimates only half-ironically called the Master that the album has only now come to light, due to be sold at a London sale room later this month.
Many of the shots were taken at Goldenhurst, Coward’s country retreat in Kent, an extended redbrick farmhouse he bought in 1926. Here, and at more exotic sites, we see the artist and his famous friends at play. They bask in the ancient, faded sunlight, these people whose lives were bookended by two world wars. There’s Lord Mountbatten, fishing – Coward was later to play him in the wartime film In Which We Serve. And here’s Alec Guinness, in smart sunglasses, with his seraphic smile that gave little of his personal life away.
‘I can load film on horseback’: cowboy photographer Kurt Markus – in pictures
Kurt Markus began his career shooting cowboys in Montana. A new exhibition shows how he trained his lens on boxers, fashion models and nudes, too
Continue reading...‘It was a little awkward’ – how Rick Schatzberg shot his old friends topless
They grew up in a ‘nowhere’ suburb in the 70s, smoking skunk, going for rides and dating girls. The photographer reveals why he decided to capture the ravages of time on his old childhood gang
Rick Schatzberg had a dark epiphany a few years back, when two of his friends died in quick succession, one from a heart attack, the other from an overdose. “When two people you know and love die within six weeks of each other,” says the photographer quietly, “you realise that death is not just something that happens to other people, to the unlucky people. It’s something that is suddenly very present.”
Schatzberg’s response was to undertake a project about encroaching mortality – his friends’ and by extension his own. The result, several years in the making, is The Boys, a photobook that is both nostalgic and brutally realistic: a visual evocation of youth in all its instinctive carefreeness; and old age in all its debilitating inevitability. Composed of casual colour snapshots of his male friends in the 1970s, and large-format contemporary portraits of their ageing bodies, it lays bare what the novelist Rick Moody, in his accompanying essay, calls “the sobering action of time”.
Continue reading...From Martha Washington to Melania Trump: 250 years of first lady portraiture
Portraits of presidents’ wives have evolved with the role, and although it remains highly gendered, a new exhibition aims to celebrate their contribution and to ‘rectify the absences of women in US history’
Bess Truman, US first lady from 1945 until 1953, has not become the sort of historical figure people quote on Instagram. “A woman’s public role is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight,” she said, even though, behind the scenes, she was nicknamed “the Boss” and wrote many of President Truman’s speeches.
Continue reading...‘I partied with an Italian princess’: the glory days of clubbing in Ibiza – in pictures
A new book explores Ibiza’s halycon days – from open-air superclubs to daytime beach raves. Photographer Dave Swindells talks us through the highs and highs ...
Continue reading...Muhammad Ali flattens Cleveland Williams: Neil Leifer’s best photograph
‘I gambled on Ali getting a knockout, fastening my camera to the lights way above the ring. And Williams landed flat on his back in a good spot’
Everyone assumes the picture I took of Ali v Liston in 1965 is my favourite – it has even been called the greatest sports photograph of all time. But my favourite photograph I ever took is Ali v Williams, no question about it. It’s the only one of my photographs hanging in my home. I’ve shot everything in my career, from Charles Manson to the pope, but I’ve never taken a better photograph than this.
I shot 35 of Ali’s fights. I was ringside for Sports Illustrated when he won the world title in Miami in 1964 and my photo for that made the cover, so by the time of the Cleveland Williams fight I was pretty well established. Williams was a very promising heavyweight but the underdog; the main thing I remember from that night was how excited I was about how I was going to shoot it. Putting a camera over the ring goes way back, maybe to Joe Louis’ days, certainly Sugar Ray Robinson. But the lights that lit up those fights were always 20-25ft over the ring and there was no lens wide enough to capture the whole scene; photographers used fisheye lenses so the ring never quite looked square.
Continue reading...Barefoot in thorns: Gaza through the eyes of a Palestinian photographer
My Gaza by Jehad al-Saftawi is a personal account of peoples’ suffering as they go about their lives under Israeli blockade
Working as a journalist in Gaza, says Palestinian photographer Jehad al-Saftawi, is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. “You must always watch where you step. Each neighbourhood is composed of its own intimate social network, and travelling through them with a camera makes you a significant suspicion.
“You’re caught between the two sides of the conflict: the rulers of Gaza limit what you can photograph and write about, imprisoning and torturing those who disobey. At the same time, the Israeli army sees you as a potential threat that must be eliminated, as has been the fate of many Palestinian journalists.”
Continue reading...The rubber duck revolution – in pictures
Ducks have become a symbol of Thailand’s pro-democracy protests in Bangkok after demonstrators used them as shields against police water cannon and teargas
Continue reading...Two polar bears come sniffing in the Arctic night: Esther Horvath’s best photograph
‘I heard from the ship that two bears were walking directly towards us. I told the scientists to pack up. When they said no, I showed no mercy’
In the autumn of 2019, I joined an expedition to the Arctic. We set sail from Tromsø, Norway, on 20 September, on the Polarstern icebreaker. There were 100 people on board – 60 scientists and 40 crew – but the ship was big enough that it never felt crowded. There were people you didn’t see for days.
The plan was to find the perfect ice floe to anchor to, then drift for one year through the central Arctic Ocean and the six-month long night of the Arctic winter – about which we have almost no scientific data. The study was the first time that this oceanographic, sea ice, atmospheric, ecosystem and biogeochemistry research had ever been done at this scale. On 4 October, the ship turned off its engine in order to become frozen into the sea ice. That was the last day of daylight. The days got shorter very quickly, and the darkness was intense. Mostly it was overcast. You couldn’t see the stars. You couldn’t hear anyone speak, either, because of the constant wind.
Continue reading...Photographers against Oppression print sale for Belarus – in pictures
Photographers against Oppression have organised a print sale to raise money for those adversely affected by recent events in Belarus. More than 16,000 people have been detained for taking part in peaceful protests in the wake of disputed election results, according to the Viasna human rights organisation based in Minsk
Continue reading...Sacre bleu! France as you’ve never seen her before
They set out to capture the forgotten France, the everyday architecture of emptied towns and overlooked villages – before their uniqueness is lost for ever. Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier talk us through their vast photographic atlas
From the industrial north to the sun-baked south, Eric Tabuchi has spent two decades scouring the landscape of France with an obsessive eye. In 2008, the Danish-Japanese-French photographer created a beguiling series called Alphabet Truck by sneaking up on 26 different articulated lorries on the move and photographing the single giant letter adorning each one’s rear, from A to Z. In 2017, he made Atlas of Forms, a 256-page guide to all the shapes, from pyramid to polygon, the world’s buildings are based on. And in 2017, he joined forces with the painter Nelly Monnier, also his partner, to create the Atlas des Régions Naturelles.
This sprawling, unwieldy multipart portrait of a nation takes as its foundation the 500-odd régions naturelles, or non-administrative areas (a bit like British counties) into which mainland France is divided. Monnier and Tabuchi are slowly making their way around the country, arriving in each area with a minimum of preconceptions. First impressions are key, the idea being to shoot a few characteristic landscapes, then to work their way up through the area’s vernacular architecture, with everything dictated by local conditions.
Continue reading...