Social Documentary Website

I've stumbled across the Social Documentary website, a new addition to documentary photography on the web, and which features documentary photography from around the world.

According to its self-description, Social Documentary welcomes "professional and amateur photographers, journalists, NGOs, students—anyone with a story to tell and a collection of good photographs" and who seek to create easy and affordable websites on SocialDocumentary.net.

Its secondary goal "is to create an online image bank of quality photographs documenting all aspects of the world created by an international collection of photographers. "

The Terms & Conditions are here, and, as usual with such ventures, make sure you read and accept these before deciding.

Yan Seiler: The Outsiders

Photograph © Yan Seiler-All Rights Reserved
Yan Seiler travels allows him to document the plight of people in several Asian countries, an experience that provides his work a strong humanitarian slant.

His biography on his website is sparse, but it appears the Swiss national’s interest in photography is very recent, and was kindled by the gift of an old film camera in 2004. He discovered his indisputable talents quite rapidly, bought a digital SLR and took a break from his office job to leave for Asia.

I feature this SoundSlides slideshow titled The Outsiders of Yan's work amongst a community of lepers in India.

By way of background, leper colonies still remain around the world, in countries such as India, Japan, Egypt, Nepal and Vietnam. It is now commonly believed that many of those segregated into these communities were presumed to have leprosy, when they actually had syphilis. Leprosy is not highly infectious, as approximately 95% of people are immune and sufferers are no longer infectious after only a few days of treatment.