Candace Feit: Orissa's Tribals

Photo © Candace Feit -All Rights Reserved

 

 

Candace Feit is a photojournalist currently residing in New Delhi, and was featured on the pages of The Travel Photographer blog a number of times.

Her photographs of West Africa  (she was based earlier in Dakar, Senegal) appeared in the The New York Times, Le Monde, Le Figaro, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and Time magazine, among others.

Candace has recently published more Indian photo stories, including this one on the Adivasis of Orissa.  Orissa has one of the largest concentrations of tribal population in India, and according to a government census, they number around 7 million.They are neglected by the central government, and suffer from extreme poverty.

This has given rise to a fertile environment for the Naxalite anti-government movement, which exploits the vulnerability of the tribals, and forces then to take sides. In turn, the Indian government is battling this separatist movement, and the Adivasis find themselves in the middle of the conflict.

David Myers: City of The Dead

The City of the Dead is produced by David Myers, a part-time photographer who lives in Maryland and works in Washington DC.

The City of the Dead is a four mile long cemetery (a necropolis would be a better word to describe it) which extends from the northern to southern part of Cairo. It's called el-arafa by Egyptians, and is an area of tombs and mausoleums where people live and works amongst the dead. Its foundation dates back to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642 AD, and has grown with time until it reached the equivalent of a fully functioning residential suburb of Cairo.

I watched this short photo essay, and it brought back childhood memories when, once a year during the Eid festival, I had to accompany my father to pay respects to our ancestors and forebears who were interred in our family's mausoleum. I still recall it being as large as a couple of basketball courts, with two house-like structures sheltering a number of mausoleums, made of marble or alabaster, and intricately carved with verses of the Qur'an. It is under one of those that my father rests, alongside his forebears. The marble gateway to the mausoleums is carved with the name of my grandfather...which is like mine.

This brought back the smell of dust to my nostrils...the Egyptian dust that is tamped down by hosing it with water...the green-grey color of the palm tree leaves...and much more.

I've been to many Islamic countries and heard the adan in all of them...but few of them come  close to beauty and purity of the Egyptian adan. Perhaps I am biased....

Esther Havens: Ethiopia

Photo © Esther Havens-All Rights Reserved

It's very easy to like and admire Esther Havens. She is a humanitarian documentary photographer who focuses on social-awareness campaigns with Non Profit Organizations around the world, and spent the past two years capturing stories on water projects in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Haiti and Central African Republic.

She traveled to over 40 countries and, as she says "...seeks to open hearts and minds to see the third world conditions in a way that might challenge them to make a difference".She's especially supportive of charity:water, which she urges everyone to support.

Her website has many galleries of her travels to Ethiopia, Uganda, CAR, Iraq, Rwanda, Mozambique, Jordan, Nicaragua, India and others in Asia and South America.

The above photograph is from Esther's Ethiopia gallery.