Justin Mott: Hanoi

Photo ©Justin Mott/NYTimes-All Rights Reserved.
The New York Times' Travel section features Justin Mott's photographs of Hanoi. The accompanying article (by Naomi Lindt) highlights how the capital city of Vietnam experienced remarkable growth since the 1990s , by shedding its grimness and morphing into a sleek metropolis with high-rises, world-class cuisine and art.

I've photographed in Vietnam for an NGO in 2003, and had one week to cover various assignments from Hanoi to Can Tho in the south, and consequently acquired a limited view of this country and of its people.

Justin Mott and his work were featured quite often on this blog; for instance Saigon, Cremation in Bali, Cambodia, and a 1 on 1 Interview.

The Gnawa Festival Photo~Expedition

I am leading the Gnawa Festival Photo~Expedition from June 18 to June 29, which will include street photography in the bustling souks of Marrakesh, in the desert city of Ouarzazat (or Ourzazate) and 4 full days of the Gnawa festival in the coast town of Essaouira. For good reason, the expedition was sold out very quickly.

From Wikipedia: "Gnawa or Gnaoua (غناوة) refers to an ethnic group and a Sufi religious order in Morocco, in part descended from former slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa or black Africans who migrated in caravans with the trans-Saharan trade, or a combination of both."

The Gnawa musicians deeply hypnotic trance music (as befits their Sufi affiliation) play hypnotic trance music, repetitive and very rhythmic, which is accompanied with loud hand-clapping and cymbals, while the Gnawa dancers twirl the long tassels on their caps with their head movements. Their songs call on revered saints (also known as marabouts) to drive out evil, cure psychoses, or cure scorpion stings.

The Gnawa Festival official website has a musical intro of typical Gnawa singing style.

An article in the New York Times on the Gnawa Festival last year gave me the idea to set up the photo~expedition.

Thierry Falise: The Jarawas

Photo ©Thierry Falise-All Rights Reserved.
The Belgian photojournalist Thierry Falise has photographed a number of various indigenous groups, including the Jarawas, one of the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, in his gallery titled The Twilight of the Andaman Naked People.

The Jarawas are estimated at between 250-350, and have largely avoided interactions with outsiders. They are a hunting and gathering nomadic tribe, hunting wild pigs, monitor lizard with bows and arrows. It takes a while to accept that the Jarawas are not an African tribe, but rather aborigines from a group of archipelagic islands in the Bay of Bengal, south east of India.

Based in Bangkok, Thierry Falise has covered South-East Asia and beyond since the mid-eighties, as a correspondent for Gamma photo agency and currently for the Bangkok-based Onasia. In 2003, he and a colleague were arrested in Laos after completing a story on a Hmong minority, and were sentenced to 15 years of prison. They were released after five weeks due to an international solidarity campaign.