This book provides an unusual loook at cultural and political life in the U.S. over nearly three decades of change and stability. It combines the individual projects of photographers Fredrick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss as well as their combined 13 year documentary collaboration on three different cultural frontiers in Texas. What connects all of these projects is the artists' commitment to exploring social history beyond the cliches of class and race. In Wendy Watriss's Vietnam work, the images emerge from a sense of outrage at the injustice perpetrated on U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War by their own government. In Frederick Baldwin's Civil Rights work in Georgia and the lives of poor whites, the images provide an intimate glimpse of people's survival in their struggle for dignity and justice. These works honor the strength and beauty of these struggles. The photographs shown in Looking at the U.S. reveal the human face of a complex and fascinating history that has particular relevance to the values and political philosophy of the momentous political changes in the U.S.

Looking at the U.S., 1957-1986 (English and French Edition)

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Schilt Pub

The Chinese city of Chongquing is little known in the West. Yet with its 32 million inhabitants, the city is twice as big as the Netherlands Located on the Yangtze river in southwestern China, it is one of China's most rapidly growing cities. Ferit Kuyas stayed in Chongqing on dozens of occasions for long periods and became totally fascinated by the megalomaniacal construction fervor he witnessed there, as well as its beauty. The almost ubiquitous haze -- naturally present in this region but intensified by large-scale pollution -- gave his work almost automatically an added layer of mystery. Kuyas focussed predominantly on the periphery of the city, where the enormity of it cannot be directly seen, but rather felt. The result is a stifling and exceptional book that displays all the superlatives that describe China: huge unstoppable, terrifying, incomprehensible, fascinating, beautiful....

Chongqing: City of Ambition

Edkins, Diana

Kouwenhoven, Bill

The Innocent is a collaboration of trust and discovery from the vantage point of the children living in the war-torn region of northern Uganda who are resilient enough to show their courage, strength of will, and hope within the human spirit amidst conflict. The Acholi and Luo tribes have been caught in the middle of a complex and barbaric civil war for twenty-two years, in which countless numbers have been brutalized, and abducted minors comprised almost 90% of the rebel soldiers. It is estimated that as many as 66,000 children have been abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army wrenched from their families and forced to become soldiers and sex slaves.

The Innocent: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda

Dead Eagle Trail: America's Twenty-first Century Cowboys

Hilton, Jane

A portrait of his late cat, put up on a wall in his house by his wife, started to intrigue American artist Elliot Ross. The cat seemed to stare right at him. Ross wondered if the cat had consciously looked into the camera when the photo was taken. What the cat was thinking at that time. In what way the consciousness of an animal differentiated from that of a human being. In a quest to try and find the answers, Ross turned his thoughts and wonderings into a project: Animal. Around the world he portrayed animals and discarded the surroundings afterwards to make the portraits more isolated and powerful.

Animal

Ross, Elliot

On January 1st, 2001, shortly after midnight, a fire broke out in cafe De Hemel (Heven cafe) in Volendam, where several hundred young people were celebrating New Year's Eve. The highly inflammable Christmas decorations caught fire and in no time the cafe packed with revellers was transformed into a living hell. Some sixty young people suffered severe burns. In the ensuing panic, several of them lost their lives, either being trampled to death or suffocated, or as a result of fatal burns. This total would ultimately rise to forty. Hundreds of others were injured, many severely. Young people were disfigured for life and became disabled as a result of the terrible burns over the whole of their bodies.In 2003 photographer Suzan van de Roemer made portraits of the fire victims. Without a trace of sensationalism, just as they were. She also talked with them about their hopes for the future. The exhibition of this work in the Melweg Galarie in Amsterdam in January 2004 left an indelible impression on both those portrayed and on the visitors.In 2010, seven years later and ten years after the fire, she photographed the group again. The youths have now become young adults and have demonstrated more resilience than has been expected.

The Power of Resilience: Survivors of the Volendam Blaze

Veerman, Eddy

After a lone trip to Chernobyl in 2005, Donald Weber returned to the abandoned site of the nuclear disaster and spent the next six years in Russia and Ukraine photographing the ruins of the unstoppable storm we call history. Traveling and living with ordinary people who had endured much, and survived everything. Weber began to see the modern state as a primitive and bloody sacrifical rite of unnamed power. 
INTERROGATIONS is the result of his personal quest to uncover the hidden meaning of the bloody 20th century. In dialogue with writer Larry Frolick - whose own ancestors had been decimated in the final months of WW II - Weber insistently and provocatively addresses his questions both to the living survivors and to the ghosts of the State's innumerable victims, resurrecting their final hours by taking their point of view, and performing a kind of incantatory meditation over their private encounters with power.
The policeman, working girls, thugs, dissidents and hustlers who inhabit these pages are all orphans of a secret history; the outline of our collective fate takes shape in Weber's epic work, expanding our awareness of what it means to be an actor in today's dark opera.

Interrogations

Weber, Donald

Chilikov's photography career began in 1976 in the FACT group (S. Chilikov, Y. Evlampiev, V. Voetsky, E. Likhosherst, V. Mikhaylov). Very soon he became a leader of non-conformist photography in his region. Together with a group of like-minded individuals, he managed to organize exhibitions and festivals and to deal quite peacefully with official Photosoyuses. In 1980-1989 Chilikov organized the Analytical Photo Exhibitions ( Yoshkar-Ola biennale) and the annual open-air  photo festival on Kudysh River. In 1988 he participated in the finial exhibition of the FACT group at the Na Kashirke exhibition hall (Moscow).Since 1989 Chilikov has been working on a travel series about cities in the Soviet Union. His series, entitled ' Photo Provocations', 'The Countryside Glam', The Beach', 'The Gambling', 'The Philosophy of a Journey'  and others, depict the hidden eroticism of people of the countryside that appears even more vital when contrasts with depressing surroundings.

Selected Works: Sergey Chilikov, 1978-

Chilikov, Sergey

'My mother and I are the only members left of a big Italian family. She decided that throwing away all family slides was a big favour to me. 'It happened already', she said, 'and everybody is gone anyway...'
I had the chance to recover only a box containing some slides, metallic cans and small pieces of paper describing the destinations of the family's trips and other details. The wonderful individual slides I was able to see were made before I was born.
But there were others that had been carefully tied with elastic bands and papers, or they were inside closed metallic cans. I was more interested in these than in the ones I could see. How much I could or wanted to know of the past? Would the images tell the truth? What is the role of photography in a family's history? And what do I do with that "gift"?
I decided to let the tied up slides, the small metal cans and the pieces of paper speak to me not from the content of the images themselves but from the questions they were posing. I never opened them. And I am still listening....
I photographed with high-tech digital technology to underline the distance in time, technology and concept between one generation and the other (my gandfather Renato Vaschetti and mine). The original format of the images is 40 x 40 cm., glicee prints.'

Historia, Memoria, Silencios

Vaschetti, Lorena Guillén

Individual Artists

The Quest for the Man on the White DonkeyAs per the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the Messiah (the Prophet) will arrive riding on a white donkey. A few years ago, as I was photographing near the Dead Sea, a Palestinian man rode past me on his white donkey and I took a picture of him. It was after having developed this plate that I realized that I had encountered my “Messiah”; it was this chance encounter which brought me to initiate the body of work that carries the name: The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey.The American tradition of the great photographic journeys served as a blueprint for the initial phase of my quest, with the definitive difference that in such a small country as Israel the size of the territory in which my hunt was pursued necessarily differed from my predecessors. A condensed experience. What in any other country should have been a photographic journey spanning months of continuous travelling was inevitably reduced because no matter what destination I chose it always brought me back home by midnight at the latest. As I found myself passing through the same places over and over again, the personal identity of my project was revealed to me: I had to let go of the idea of narrating the physical journey itself and concentrate on the intimate, emotional reactions that these places evoked in me; I focused on trying to understand how I was reacting to the occasional encounters with people and scenery, and how those people and the scenery appeared to be revealed or lost at the same time, as if they were part of a scene that was ever changing or not changing at all.As my messenger started to reveal the “message”, the search for a deeper understanding of my country and what defines me as an Israeli became an urge to look for the in-between places, the unexpected situations; suddenly a detail requested my attention as I stood for hours waiting for a meaning to reveal itself, or pushed me away, puzzled. But in the end I had to hold on to it. I could not let go until that detail was made mine, until the elusive and enigmatic found their place in my understanding of what I deemed as an authentic, real encounter.In Israel I feel that the evidence of the past is strongly intertwined with the marks of the present and the questions about our future. This is why it is sometimes possible to see the past, present and future revealed in front of one’s eyes at the same time.Part of my identity as an Israeli is to question everything, not to take anything for granted, to show the tensions that constantly exist, to convey the truth behind the reality.Religious, social aspects filter into everyday life and their meanings are revealed as the journey moves on. Jewish missionaries, lost souls and individuals living on the fringe of society, all blend into this landscape of humanity. Yaakov Israel, January 2012

The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey

Isreal, Yaakov

History & Criticism

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