From the shanty towns of Khlong Toei to the hidden parts of Chinatown, Cody Ellingham walked Thailand’s capital every night for five weeks to photograph the city for his book Bangkok Phosphors
Category Archives: Photography
Photographic discovery is a window into Soviet-era Ukraine photo essay
In the remains of a bombed-out Soviet darkroom, hundreds of rolls of film were discovered rotting among the rubble by the photojournalist Samuel Eder earlier this year. He shares his experience in recovering these fragments of history and of reuniting them with their subjects
When war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, transforming thriving communities into ghost towns overnight. As classrooms became sniper nests, family homes became barracks and community centres turned into ammunition caches, precious remnants of peacetime life were consumed by the war. Among these lost relics are the remains of a bombed-out Soviet photographic lab – with hundreds of rolls of film left rotting among the rubble.
Continue reading...Archive of blood: how photographer Letizia Battaglia shot the mafia and lived
Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers. Warning: contains graphic imagery
Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”
What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”
Continue reading...‘I was peeing and a polar bear popped up!’ Secrets of Seven Worlds, One Planet
Shooting poachers, circling polar bears, flailing four-tonne seals, singing rhinos and the world’s worst sea … the team behind Attenborough’s latest extravaganza relive their thrills and spills
Chadden Hunter, producer, North America and South America
Continue reading...Destruction and panic as quake hits Albania – in pictures
A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Albania early on Tuesday, killing four people and sparking panic in the capital, Tirana, and other cities. The epicentre of the quake, the strongest in the region in decades, was about 20 miles north-west of Tirana, according to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre
Continue reading...Eggs, fakes and Kim kissing Kanye: 10 Instagram posts that defined the decade
From its birth in 2010, the app has grown to reach one billion users. These were its winning images
El Salvador: a country ruled by gangs – a photo essay
There are few places on earth as dangerous as El Salvador, a country with a population of just 6.5 million people – yet 10% are involved with gangs
El Salvador is no stranger to violence. It endured a brutal civil war in the 1980s, which lasted for more than a decade. In many ways this history has underpinned the evolution of a terrifying gang culture where extortion and murder have become the norm. In the aftermath of the civil war, US immigration policies hardened. The net result was Salvadorian migrants convicted of crimes were deported back to El Salvador, renewing the cycle of gang culture and undermining the foundations of a fragile and struggling state.
Continue reading...Greta Thunberg, time traveller? Girl in photo from 1898 resembles activist
Girl in viral image looks similar to activist in both the intensity of her stare and braided hair, prompting Twitter jokes
Could Greta Thunberg be a time traveller sent from the future to save humanity from the unfolding climate crisis? A cadre of Twitter users seem to think so, after the photograph of a young Klondike goldminer bearing a striking resemblance to the Swedish activist was discovered this week.
The now viral 1898 image of three children operating a goldmine in Canada’s Yukon territory is part of a sprawling collection by the documentary photographer Eric Hegg. Near the end of the 19th century, the Swedish American captured some of the most iconic images of people hoping to make their fortunes in the rugged north.
Continue reading...Thailand welcomes Pope Francis – in pictures
Pope Francis arrives in Bangkok to boost morale of Catholic minority and speak about human trafficking
Continue reading...Hong Kong protesters clash with riot police – in pictures
Riot police have swooped on pro-democracy activists trying to flee a university they had set ablaze in one of the most violent confrontations in nearly six months of unrest. Hundreds of demonstrators clashed with officers who had threatened to use deadly force, as tensions flared elsewhere in the region
Continue reading...Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, 1989 – in pictures
Thirty years ago, Czech photographer Bohumil Eichler was working for a dissident student-run news agency when the Velvet Revolution began. His work from Prague has rarely been seen, until now.
Continue reading...Joana Choumali wins 2019 Prix Prictet photography prize
Artist becomes first African to win the prestigious prize, for embroidered pictures created following terrorist attack
• See a photo essay of the Prix Pictet 2019 shortlist
Joana Choumali, a 45-year-old photographer from Ivory Coast, has become the first African artist to win the Prix Pictet. The announcement was made this evening in a ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for the opening of an exhibition of the 12 shortlisted artists.
The theme of the eighth Prix Pictet, a global award for photography and sustainability, was Hope. The jury, which included last year’s winner, Richard Mosse, praised Choumali’s “brilliantly original meditation on the ability of the human spirit to wrest hope and resilience from even the most traumatic events”.
Continue reading...Punk persecution: how East Germany cracked down on alternative lifestyles – in pictures
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s secret police regarded punks as the most dangerous youth element in the country and ‘the leading force’ behind anti-government activities. These unnamed police mugshots from the former DDR demonstrate the lengths to which the security services would surveil, harass and detain punk ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathisers’.
- Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr is published by Dialogue Books
Germany prepares to mark 30 years since fall of Berlin Wall – in pictures
As the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches on 9 November, photographer Andy Hall visits the once-divided capital
Continue reading...Brian May completes stereoscopic ‘devil cards’ collection
Queen guitarist finds last two of 19th-century set of French ‘Diableries’ after 30 years
They have names like The Infernal Cavalry, Satan the Journalist and Bicycle Race in Hell, and tell horrible stories of oppression, torture and misery.
There are also scenes that show the damned playing billiards at “Cafe Chez Satan”, a fancy dress carnival with the Prince of Darkness as an untrustworthy nurse, and a “lottery in hell” for which there is only one winner.
Continue reading...Rescued at sea: how did refugees’ lives in Europe turn out?
In June 2018, Italian photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi joined the last ship patrolling the Mediterranean to save refugees. Then, over many months, he tracked them down to their new homes
• Life aboard the Aquarius: a photographic diary
• Photo diary part two: the Aquarius arrives in Malta
In early 2018 Italian-born photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi was living in Berlin combining reportage work with commercial projects. He travelled the world for German media, producing stark images of the slow death of Brazilian rivers and the dignity of survivors of the Haiti earthquake.
But he began watching with growing horror as a crisis unfolded closer to home. In his native Italy he could see an increasingly rightwing government cracking down on the rescue ships that patrolled the Mediterranean, particularly off the coast of Libya, threatening fines of tens of thousands of euros for bringing ashore people who were risking their lives trying to reach Europe in flimsy boats. By June, when the country’s hardline interior minister Matteo Salvini began closing Italy’s ports to the rescue ships, 45,000 migrants had already crossed the Mediterranean that year, with more than 1,000 deaths. Salvini’s crackdown worked. Ships began to vanish, until there was only one left: the Aquarius, run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and SOS Méditerranée.
Continue reading...Strike a contrapposto pose to look more attractive, science says
Study finds pose makes waist-to-hip ratio seem lower on one side and looks more appealing
Dancers do it, Instagrammers do it, even the Venus de Milo does it. When it comes to striking a pose, it seems the only way is contrapposto. Now research has shed light on why the attitude is so appealing.
Experts say the pose, which involves standing with weight predominantly on one foot with a slight twist in the upper body, makes the waist-to-hip ratio appear strikingly low on one side of the body.
Continue reading...Seven days that shook Chile – in pictures
Crowds gathered in the capital, Santiago, set up fiery barricades and clashed with riot police in protest against rising subway fares and to demand better education, healthcare and wages
Continue reading...Spain exhumes Franco’s remains – in pictures
The remains of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco are being moved from a grandiose mausoleum outside Madrid to be reburied in a family crypt. The closed-door operation will fulfil the wishes of those who considered the mausoleum an affront to the tens of thousands who died in the country’s civil war
Continue reading...The enthronement of Japan’s Emperor Naruhito – in pictures
Japan’s new emperor ascends the Chrysanthemum throne in a ceremony marking the high point of several succession rituals that began in May
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