magneticblog

Nudity and Censorship in America

2011-11-30T23:12:00.001-05:00

In the thirty years I have spent as a photojournalist my lens focused on a great diversity of subjects and situations. I think I can safely affirm that some pictures are easier than others to be shown to generic audiences and to receive praise.

There are images that, if interestingly photographed, carry a “built in assurance” of good reception from the general public, for example photos of dressed up children (even starving ones), conventionally beautiful, beautifully lit and scantily dressed men and women, suggestive landscapes, celebrities, puppies, kittens etc.

Other subjects have some difficulty in reaching and pleasing an audience, even on the “free” World Wide Web and very often they end up appealing to specific groups of people the image itself had no intention of targeting at all when it was taken.

As it happens to many professional photographers I too have shot several nude studies during my career. While I was based in Europe, my nude photos were basically just another chapter in my portfolio and triggered some interest, which sometimes led to exhibitions and publications.

Since I moved to the USA, about twenty years ago, I have increasingly found that my nude images could bring me trouble and have reluctantly decided to self-censor that branch of my photographic work.

Here in the US of A photographing a naked body appears to carry a dangerous stigma.

While the media and Hollywood are able to relentlessly bombard us all with gruesome images of disturbing violence and make millions of dollars with those images, a mere nipple or a hint of pubic hair could quite easily land an image-maker in trouble or even in jail in the USA today.

Perhaps one of the most anti-nudity censorship attitude in the USA can be found on the so-called “social media”.

Just a few days ago a good friend of mine, a brilliant photographer himself, had the “imprudence” or the “lack of judgment" to innocently post on Facebook a photo of his infant daughter, candidly sitting on a rug and reading a bedtime story to her doll.

But horror!! The little girl wasn’t wearing any clothes!! (The pic was actually taken in the Caribbean, where clothes aren’t always a strict necessity, especially for young children) and although the picture had absolutely no graphical elements depicting “forbidden areas” of the body, the “nudity police” at Facebook immediately censored it and my friend was bitterly reprimanded.

So, my friend first tried to dispute the removal of his image with the Facebook “nudity police”, to no avail.

Then he posted a public comment on his Facebook page about his indignation at this rather silly and overzealous Facebook censorship and, while I refrained from commenting (having been censored myself all over the social media before- for “safer” –non child – partial nudity - I wasn’t certainly surprised to see this happening) a few of his other friends did.

It was interesting to follow the thread and feeling in agreement with quite a few comments, including my friend’s own.

One of the comments said: “….Facebook is like a gathering in somebody's salon in the eyes of the law. If the person hosting the salon says you can't do or say something, no matter how silly their interdiction, well, it's their house and they're the boss of everybody”.

My friend did not agree and replied: “…well I am not sure that analogy applies. This private company is providing a service to the public. It makes money off that service. It has a right to ask members to agree to rules and regulations that do not infringe on a client's rights, but the fact that Facebook operates without any system of redress or transparency, allows for members to make anonymous accusations, does not deign to explain its actions or make clear the grounds for its actions (other than refer the member to their policy statement which does not answer the question at all) and ultimately does not vouchsafe its members' right to due process, seems to me to be a violation of the law. If an employee or a client of a private company is wronged, the law requires that the company justify its actions or be liable to penalties. I see no reason why Facebook should be exempt, especially when one considers that the company now controls the flow of information for billions of people. All organs of public communication are subject to the same laws as the rest of the nation, why should Facebook be allowed to act unilaterally and without regard for the rights of its users?”

While conceptually I strongly believe in what my friend is stating there, sadly, I also tend to agree with the “gathering in somebody's salon" analogy.

Call me cynical, but I have extensive personal experience, that in this post-GW Bush corporate America, a private company providing a service to the public and making money off that service can indeed increasingly infringe on a client's rights without any system of redress or transparency. Things have gotten out of hand over here, to a great extent, perhaps thanks to the decreased scrutiny by the mainstream media, which in the past could be a somewhat feared social watchdog and has lately become a mere mouthpiece of corporate propaganda.

That’s why I try to be very careful about what I post on my heavily “privately set up “ Facebook account.

Make no mistake, we are indeed socializing in a weird, voluble, big brother family salon here, full of little publicized, ever-changing “privacy rules” and people we barely know or don’t know at all.

Another interesting comment to my friend’s original post was: “…[I] remember Sally Mann's run-in with the art community over her images of her naked children. It took her years to deal with the fallout of that. Second, kiddie porn is such a tungsten-hot topic that anybody who is in touch with nude children or anybody charged with child porn, tends to overreact. …… So while this may indeed be censorship, in the long run they may be doing you a favor to remove it. Finally, there is a subculture of people in the US (maybe elsewhere in the world) who are crazed opponents on this subject. They are so crazy they will go to any end to stop people who appear to have anything to do with nude children. I am sure FB has run into them before, and just doesn't need to deal with their ire”.

All food for thoughts, isn’t it?

Anyway, let me digress a bit and tell you about my own bruises and scars about my nude photos.

My (paid) Flickr account was restricted as “unsafe” four times in the past three years.

I was able to talk them into revoking their decision by selecting all those photos that even remotely could pose a threat to Flickr’s concept of “social decency” and self-restrict their view. This means they don’t appear on my public stream anymore and only those members who decide to remove the “safe view” filter from their accounts can now view them.

By enforcing this self-censorship I probably made Flickr happy enough to un-block my (paid) account but I also unintentionally solicited a constant stream of real pornographers and various other shady characters hitting on my pictures….sometimes thousands a day.

As I noticed all this unusual activity on my stream I took the time to verify what kind of images these people posted in their own accounts and found myself in front of a barrage of explicitly sexual photos, sadly with no artistic or creative virtues whatsoever…basically mere, squalid, at times quite objectionable, pornography.

So, these pornographers where hitting on my nude studies to enrich their kinky collections and photo exchanges.

I blocked them all, several thousands to this day, but they kept coming, like little Pac-Men (Porn-Men?) in a crazed video-game…..

In the end the only solution was to restrict all my nude studies on Flickr as private.

Which means no one can see them, but me.

Which means: what’s the point to upload them onto Flickr to get constructive criticism and interesting comments from fellows photographers in the first place?.

Which means… I might as well bury all those images in my hard-drives….. !

Which probably means we live in a truly sick world where art might as well rhyme with fart.

Ok, now let me get to the bottom line, more horror stories shall be re-lived in my next post, perhaps…

The bottom line is somewhat abstract: I read Orwell’s 1984 when I was a teenager for the first time and many times after that. In this lifetime I have come to experience “doublespeak” ( and doubletruths, doublevalues, doublestandards etc. etc.)on my own skin, on my creativity, on my sense of reality, on my social environment, almost on a daily basis, especially in the last couple of decades.

2+2= 5 for some, for others it is 4 and for others might be 6 or whatever.

Yes, whatever.

Gone for good are the days when you could make and present something at face value.

Maybe those days never even existed.

Gone are the days where accountability was a necessary, unequivocal concept that applied to the majority of society, including public and private companies.

A lot of people I know are quite enthusiastic about social networking, about finding old and new “friends”, building relationships, being socially and culturally validated through a computer screen, which depends on an apparently inexhaustible supply of electricity and electronic transmissions.

I am not immune to all this and I do not hide behind an unsustainable neo-primitivism either.

You can find my name all over the Internet, you can Google me, see some of my pictures on several photo-sharing platforms. I own three websites and this blog.

I use the internet on a daily basis, mostly for work and research.

But make no mistake, I am and I remain suspicious as well as try to exercise extreme caution in my “social media” interactions and in the content I post there. I have an inescapable inner feeling, telling me that everything I post, or even comment, could produce more harm than good, to me and to others, whether I like it or not.

It has happened to me before, in several occasions.

I also remain suspicious of the actual usefulness of a daily full immersion in the web, the high-speed highway we think we drive from this keyboard. I keep having the feeling that someone else is actually at the wheel and we just toy ourselves with a dummy driving device while sitting on the driver’s lap.

It can be extremely easy for anyone to develop a screen addiction, wasting days, energy and creativity in front of this screen, trying to fill a void, a sense of loneliness that only real people, real social efforts and exchanges could help us fill, not emails, text messages and banalities exchanged in someone else’ electronic salon.

Moreover, I find it very difficult to “be myself” on the web, as a human being, a thinker, an artist.

Often in our social activities we need to put up a mask, to reassure a client, to soothe and mellow the creative process of a project and so on. On the web it is the same, only more subtle and potentially more difficult (and dangerous) because we don’t necessarily know who is standing in front of us and we cannot elaborate a working strategy based on human psychology and social common sense.

Most of all, I never forget who is the boss of the “social networks”. And it’s not me.

At best, I am just a “user” of this Internet thing.

Yes, a “user”- paradoxically exactly the same term we use to define a drug addict!

By the way, the internet can also be a useful tool, especially for research and wide data access, but we must be aware that this constant electronic connectivity is moving much faster than our learning curve and like all things it easily lends itself to abuse and misuse.

My personal recommendation would be towards using the Internet in moderation, like most things, from alcohol to spicy food, and never, ever post anything you don’t want the whole world to see, comment on, steal and reproduce.

In order to end up this already disproportionately long rant, which, by the way, brutally digressed from the initial topic of nudity and censorship to awkwardly land onto an extremely complex concept of social media, big brothers and my personal mistrust in humanity at large, I shall say one last thing about the original topic that sums it all: if you don’t want to have trouble in America today you are better off posting a picture of a dismembered fetus than the picture of a nipple.

Alternatively, stick with puppies and kittens.

Good night and good luck.

Freedom of the PRESS ?

2011-11-16T17:18:00.001-05:00

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MY PRESS CREDENTIALS ? : ..... of course my thirty years of press credentials just don't fit around my neck.... so I am just wearing a few for entertaining my friends. However, I also took this picture to comment on a serious problem that is not being addressed properly and re-occurred yesterday during the eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park, here in New York City : A MEDIA BLACKOUT. If we believe to Mayor Bloomberg affirmation that he ordered to cordon off two city block around the perimeter to avoid people (and journalists alike) getting hurt during the eviction operation, why was the airspace above the area also restricted to TV network helicopters ? Reality check guys....!! the Media is almost entirely constrained and manipulated by the government (read Corporations) nowadays .... a press pass is not worth the plastic is printed on.... sad but true. Take it from me, I have been around for a while !

OCCUPY WALL STREET Portraits of the 99%

2011-10-26T12:58:00.001-05:00

OCCUPY WALL STREET NEW YORK CITY

99% PORTRAITS

This series, which I like to call "99% Portraits" was mostly shot over the last month or so, in Zuccotti Park, the downtown Manhattan location occupied by the protesters.

I decided not to make my subjects stand in front of a seamless background and light them with sophisticated strobes/flashes like I have seen several fellows photographers do.

I thought I had to strive towards simplicity to photograph as candidly and unobtrusively as possible.

The majority of the subjects did not "pose" for me unless they became aware, due to my proximity, that I was photographing them.

I posted two or three of these portraits on my instagram feed (@magneticart) for the best part of October 2011 and I continue to do so as I acquire more images.

Most of these faces were captured in the midst of protesting, while having a discussion, an interaction with friends, a moment of rest or of inner reflection.

Not iconic images from a somewhat distant reality, but men and women just like you and me, fighting for something they believe, fighting to exist and progress in a fairer society.

The 99%.

I see the light

2011-09-06T22:16:00.001-05:00

As much as I love photographing with my iPhone, I often feel frustrated by its poor performance in low light conditions.

So, the other day I put together a little rig using bits and bobs I found around my studio, accumulated in many years of image making

The bits and bobs I used, perfectly visible in the pics, are:

1) An old medium format flash bracket

2) A dinky swivel with cold shoe attachments

3) A battery operated (4 AA cells) LED light panel

4) A cheap iPhone cradle for my already ancient 3Gs iPhone

Well, I must say I am pretty happy with the results. The rig is very lightweight and extremely portable, allowing me to shoot photos and video with the iPhone both vertically and horizontally.

The light I used is an old, dead cheap LED panel that won’t be of much use in illuminating a whole train station nor a face backlit by the sun, but will give you a pretty decent fill for a portrait taken in a dark environment.

The other positive attribute of this rig is that you can position the light to camera (iPhone) left, elevate it above or push it below at various angles, courtesy of a dinky swivel I attached between the grip and the light panel.

If a want a more diffused light I use a cut square of quarter scrim but, as the light doesn’t heat up (the beauty of LEDs) you could even use your handkerchief!

Using a stronger diffusion (yes, I tried a mini soft box, a small translucent umbrella etc..) simply takes too much humpft out of the light so you might as well foggetaboutit.

Today I was at Adorama with my dear friend iPhoneographer extraordinaire Sion Fullana who was buying the bits and bobs to build a similar rig for himself. A very polite gentleman from Africa got interested in my contraption and asked me if he could photograph it as he saw a great marketing potential for it.

I declined and asked him not to photograph my homemade device.

As I got home, thinking about it, I felt that was a silly behavior on my part.

At this point in my life and career I mainly pursue professional gratification from the images I humbly try to create everyday. Unfortunately, I am not rich, but I do have food in my plate and I am blessed with health and love in my life.

So, why should I be cagey and worried about sharing my knowledge? Is my little invention going to make me rich and famous? Is marketing this contraption what I want to spend whatever time I’ve got left on this earth doing?

I don’t think so. I want to keep taking pictures.

Photographing, telling visual stories, until I can steadily hold a camera in my hands.

Then, I’ll get a tripod (!).

Knowledge is power but I think it is a good thing to share that power so that it can benefit others and not only yourself.

I guess I have been fooling myself for a moment with that increasingly popular and common attitude of pitiless copy-righteousness and scruple-less capitalism that I deplore on a daily basis in far too many aspects of the society I live in.

Copyrights, model releases, location releases work for hire contracts, corporate espionage, legal disclaimers, trademarks are ephemeral yet cruelly limiting concepts and situations I have repeatedly encountered in my life and in my career.

And I always despised them, or at least the right side of my brain always did!

So, tonight, perhaps as an apology to that polite African gentleman who I forbid to photograph my lighting contraption, I publish this on the web for all to see.

Perhaps you can “steal” this idea from me and get very rich. I wish you well.

But most of all, my biggest hope is that you’ll get better-exposed images when shooting with your iPhone in the dark.

Summer, iPhone, Hydrants, Instagram and the City

2011-08-05T17:19:00.001-05:00

A work in progress, perhaps to distract my attention from various heath-waves, a failing economy, the lack of air conditioning in my old apartment and indeed my personal, frustrated longing for a long vacation at the seaside.

Also, a photographic voyage in the lower income neighborhoods of Manhattan and the Bronx focused onto all those thousands of people who, like me and worst than me, get stuck in the boiling city during the summer.

The lack of a holiday home, lack of money, work commitments or, ever increasingly, unemployment epidemics, are the culprits of our sweating and swearing on the melting urban asphalt.

We’d love to get out of these stuffy tenements, to exchange our old and smelly apartments for a mountain breeze and the sweet shade of the palm trees, but we can’t.

We are stuck here.

We fight back the heath and the sweltering desolation of this disenfranchised geography with fans and air conditioning, trying not to think about the monstrous consequent electricity bills, we struggle to reclaim the refreshing fun we would rather have at the beach by opening up hydrants and showering amongst passing cars.

Summer in the city.

Photographically speaking I decided the best instrument to document the above scenarios was going to be my iPhone.

Small, lightweight and unobtrusive was the way to go.

I started crossing from Manhattan into the Bronx everyday over the 207^th Street bridge, sweating profusely each and every step.

I then decided to have a daily feed (or stream) of my photographic explorations using what has recently become one of the most successful photo-sharing site, especially amongst iPhone photographers: Instagram.

Instagram, a relatively new mobile photo-sharing site, is rapidly increasing its popularity, nonchalantly surpassing other long established sites, such as Flickr, due to its ease of use and its phenomenal sharing speed, enabling you to shoot, process your image and share it directly from your mobile device in a matter of seconds.

There is a vibrant and growing community of professional photographers and amateurs alike using Instagram who share their work and relentlessly comment on each other photos, leave constructive feedback and follow their favorite streams.

The Instagram experience indeed resonates with the concepts of immediacy, accessibility and portability at a global level.

I thought it would be interesting to experiment sharing on Instagram my “summer in the city” project, so I began posting three- four photographs everyday.

Almost immediately I received great, positive feedback and interesting comments from people who enjoyed my work as far away as Japan, Spain, Italy and Australia, to mention a few.

Obviously, I am focusing on a particular face of the summer metropolis and some of my photographs depict underprivileged subjects sweating away in tough and broken neighborhoods, but I also try to show the fun that can be had in the summer streets, as well as the irony and the surreal, timeless outlook of certain scenarios I come across.

The most popular chapter of this work I posted on Instagram has been what I titled “Hydrant Wars” where I was able, thanks again to the stealth quality of my iPhone camera, to depict children and adults shooting each other with the refreshing, high power water jet from many illegally opened Fire Department hydrants.

Not only I was surprised about the level of close up intimacy I was able to achieve shooting with an iPhone but I also marveled, looking back at many shots I had taken, about the true and encouraging sense of community (and clean, joyous, albeit a bit transgressive, fun) transpiring from some of those photographs.

Of course both my iPhone and I often got soaking wet while doing this.

And I hereby report that we both survived and rather enjoyed it!

Using a brand new service Blurb recently introduced, allowing you to compose your book by directly uploading photos from your Instagram stream, I published this limited edition book about my summer street photography with an iPhone.

Check it out.

I just received a few copies and I was truly impressed with the image quality they were able to deliver in print using such miniscule photo files.

You can follow my stream on Instagram (stream name: magneticart) or just check it out here below.

I upload new pictures everyday.

IT AIN'T OVER TILL IT'S OVER....

The Photo Thief

2011-05-28T14:28:00.002-05:00

Stealing images in the street.

Last week I was interviewed by filmmaker Eric De Fino in the making of what promises to be a very interesting documentary about the worldwide explosion of iPhone photography and “iPhoneographers”.

Conducting the interview was Sion Fullana, an incredibly talented young photographer and a dear friend of mine. Sion has an uncommon talent for “seeing” through his lens and he is able to tell complex, poignant and strongly poetic stories with just one frame. His work has already gained millions of followers on the web. Sion is often featured by international media, and rightly so, as one of the leading artists in the upcoming “iphoneography movement”.

My interview happened just a few days after I attended an interesting presentation at one of the Apple stores, here in New York City, where another prominent iPhone photographer, Jim Darling, was talking about his work.

While admiring stunning examples of his street portraiture, I listened with interest to Jim explaining his approach and workflow. He said that he tends to establish a “rapport” with all of his subjects and often ends up befriending them and keeping in touch after portraying them through his iPhone.

I find this approach very interesting and admirable, something that over the long time I have been photographing people I was only seldom able to do, probably due to my inner social predisposition and three decades spent covering hard news.

As I wrote before and explained on Eric De Fino’s video interview last week, one of the biggest assets of shooting in the street with an iPhone is its stealth ability, giving me the gift of invisibility.

Increasingly, over the years, I felt encumbered by carrying a conventional looking camera and having to shove it in people faces in order to get my shot. A camera, by now, is undoubtedly a social weapon in many people eyes. Often, if not always, when in front of a lens we put on a mask, we adjust our facial expressions, we compose ourselves along the “appropriate” canons we think are pertinent based on popular concepts of beauty, composure, fashion and photography.

In a world relentlessly and brutally influenced by the mass media I must admit I also find it increasingly difficult to overtly present myself as an image-maker.

Then, there is the issue of gaining permission to record and use an image: a grey area, a labyrinth of custom tailored copyright laws deciding who owns what, who can use what, based more on corporate power than common sense and social fairness. These laws are usually quite flexible and modifiable, depending on who you are, who your friends are and the size of you bank account.

Then, there is the issue of privacy.

I am well aware, ad so you should be, that the establishment is lawfully (?) recording my and everybody else’s image, countless times a day, for law enforcement purposes.

What is being done with this legal espionage, ranging from security cameras on most buildings to nude x-ray scans at airports, who gets to see these images, if they are stored, for how long and where, remains a well known mystery and an uncomfortable yet widely accepted reality.

Frankly, at this point in history I don’t think I can endorse or exceedingly worry about, in my photographic work, upon a concept of “image ownership”, as this is otherwise ignored, overlooked and manipulated at will in modern society.

Lastly, there is the issue of commercializing your photos, which can inhibit the process of making a picture from the start, whenever adequate compensation for the subject is not available or contemplated or if your work is not preemptively validated or commissioned.

This brings me to the subtitle of this short essay: “stealing images in the street”.

Perhaps I am thief. And the iPhone is my evil enabler.

But…hey, I am a good guy at heart, really…. by choice or by necessity.

Anyway, for the arguments sake let’s say I steal images in the street.

If I steal images I surely do it in a Robin Hood-esque fashion.

If I steal something, I steal from the unknown and unexplored of unknown people’s psyche, from their unnoticed and often unnoticeable social facades.

I steal images that perhaps no one would ever even consider stealing for their apparent uselessness and un-interestingness.

I steal these photos, often randomly, to manipulate them through my visual creative intuition and give them back, as a message in a bottle (the bottle being the web, the message my artistic sensibility) to the very people I took them from and in the same fashion I acquired them: randomly and at no cost.

So, what is the purpose of the exercise?

To celebrate the ordinary and to discover how extraordinary it might actually be or become.

Let me say it now: art does not always mean money. Or at least, for me, it doesn’t.

My most enjoyable time is during the creative process of making an image.

Selling, marketing, having my image validated by art critics never really interested me very much and, whenever I look at photographic work being auctioned today for several million dollars, I think I understand even better why it doesn’t.

So I should say that stealing these photos is mainly part of an inner, intellectual research on the plethora of unstudied imagery surrounding me.

In a society obsessed with wealthy celebrities, where how interesting you are is often synonymous of how well connected to the “right” people you are or how much validation you have been able to acquire through your social skills and not who you actually are, I am fascinated by the “man in the street” the perfect stranger, filling your field of vision for just an instant, never to be seen again.

I try to capture that image, celebrate it, explore it and perhaps interpret it as deeply as possible by fixing it into a unique photographic frame.

Fact is I need to “steal” these images.

I need my subjects to be unaware of my presence as not to jeopardize the genuine attributes of their face and body expressions.

I am not the first photographer embarking in this type of research and I won’t be the last.

However, last nigh, coming home from yet another street iPhone-photography adventure in NYC, while downloading to a hard drive my catch of the day (which I had already post processed on the subway train back) I perused a very popular photo website and came across this article.

Aside from the fact that I don’t make money with my street photography, the article started to make me feel somewhat unethical in my approach to it.

However, I quickly realized that the real problem here is all about the money.

If a prestigious gallery or museum was to decide to exhibit and sell my street photos for large amounts of money I do think that would automatically reduce my privileges as an “invisible” photographer.

The point that makes my invisibility ethical is that it does not infringe on my subjects rights to make a living from a commercial use of their image, as I don’t make a living from the commercial use of their images in the first place.

So, we could say my street photography could be defined as an “innocuous intellectual and visual experiment” of a philosophically complex renaissance man’s mind.

What would I do if tomorrow my street images start selling for millions of dollars?

I would probably have to continue acquiring them in the same unobtrusive, stealth way (I see no way around that) but I would probably try, just out of sheer civility, to get in touch with my subjects and offer them a monetary compensation. Failing that, I would probably establish a fund or donate to charities the unallocated amounts, in case I am unable to track down all my unknowing models.

Anyway, as I keep enjoying my photography, in the streets and elsewhere, I don’t worry too much about becoming rich and famous and facing this kind of problems right now.

What I do worry about is the ever increasing, paranoid, legal, social, financial and pseudo-ethical implications that get piggybacked to everything we do creatively and artistically, the frightening paperwork, legal battles and anxiety attacks about a photograph, a musical tune, a literary work.

Sometimes I feel that in the world today, copyright issues are becoming not only more difficult to implement but also a dangerous, counterproductive and counterintuitive force, blocking and constraining the immediacy of the creative process and the unpredictability of the artistic mind.

The disastrous consequences of this could well mean the death of creativity and spontaneity for their own sake, something that the careful eye might notice is already happening in way too many aspects of modern living.

Moreover, can we still seriously expect to own the rights to our own image when we almost don’t expect anymore to own the rights to privacy in a public place, to a free health care, to decent living standards, to an affordable education?

Probably not.

A Friday afternoon in Brooklyn

2011-01-11T01:25:00.004-05:00

Download:

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Music: "Hebe Bop" by Hasidic New Wave -Album Psycho Semitic

What do I know about Hasidic Jews? Not much.

I mostly buy my photographic goods from them!

I do that at Adorama and B&H, the two stores run by orthodox Jews, with the best assortment and the best prices in New York City.

What do I have in common with Hasidic Jews?

Not much.

Well…I have a fairly unkempt beard and long, curly hair but I was unmistakably born and raised Catholic in my native Italy.

There is, perhaps, a faint mnemonic oral history connection in my childhood with Jews, if we really want to dig deep.

My grandfather, during World War Two, was imprisoned by the Nazi and sent to a labor camp, where he befriended several Jews and nearly died with them, until my grandmother, a very strong willed woman, together with the wives of other prisoners, was able to organize an escape for their men, just a couple of nights before their husbands were to be shipped to Germany.

So, as a child, I did hear stories about those Jewish friends from my grandfather.

Nevertheless, my education and life are certainly a world apart from the Hasidic community, but for some reason, over the years, I have always had a fascination, not to mention a strong visual attraction for their very private, ancient looking society. Plus, I have a very keen culinary interest for certain kosher recipes, first amongst them: matzah ball soup.

Trying to make the best of a bitterly cold winter in New York City, last week I started taking photograph in a Hasidic neighborhood. With utmost respect for their right to privacy, I walked around one of their Brooklyn enclaves just a few hours before the start of Sabbath.

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Everybody was extremely busy, rushing to finish all business before sundown. Entire families were often running down the streets, buying flowers, doing the last shopping, trying to find a parking spot, making the last calls on their cell phones.

You could feel this preparation as a powerful energy in the air. It made me think of the rest of the city, so far away, on that Saturday afternoon, as if it was a different planet altogether.

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Black clad men, boys and children started playing strange optical games in my lens, as if they were multiple reflections and projections of the same subject. I was rapidly loosing the notion of time, place and history, surrounded as I was by a perfect replica, or rather a vivid, realistic extension of a distant culture still being lived and written with strength and determination, black on white, just like those black coats on the snow covered sidewalks.

At sundown, a deafening siren blasted in the air, unequivocally announcing the beginning of the Sabbath and almost acoustically wiping off the working week to prepare bodies and souls for the next twenty-four hours of prayer, rest and reflection.

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I took a few more frames in front of a Temple, while the last men and children were rushing to enter, quite oblivious to me and to my photography. Then I got on the subway and went back to the 21^st century.

My experience, for peripheral and marginal it may appear, triggered and augmented both my respect and my interest for this community.

I admit that, as an American in a brutally divided and divisive America, the close-knit social tissue of the Hasidic fascinates me.

Obviously a lot of my fascination also has to do with the visuals of it.

I admire the tenacity and the political statement of dressing today, even here in New York City, in exactly the same way they dressed centuries ago in the remotest regions of Eastern Europe.

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And I guess I admire their tenacity in being able to “resist” the world at large, a world luring the majority of us towards an apparently inevitable consumerism and relativism, in all aspects of who we are, how we look and how we behave with each other, a world pasteurizing our individuality and our many ancestral cultural identities into a monochromatic mush.

I know too little about the Hasidic community, the strongpoint of their belief, their history and their customs to have a realistic opinion about their lifestyle but I can certainly make some initial comparisons based on previous research I have conducted in different fields of oral tradition.

For example, I cannot but immediately notice that every single manifestation of oral tradition I have investigated in the past twenty years is by now either extinct or has gone through major changes due to the influences of modern society.

I could perhaps find a small number of exceptions to this rule, mostly in the oral tradition of Haiti, which in my personal experience is particularly resilient and difficult to erode.

Everything else, no matter how geographically remote or how strongly preserved in the name of faith, magic, healing or cultural identity, is inexorably mutating at a fast pace, succumbing to modernization.

In a world where corporations have more power and leverage than governments, in a world where socializing is less and less practiced and promoted, where family and society rules are bent, voided or ignored to accommodate financial interest and greed on all continents, the Hasidic tenacity certainly is, to say the least, appealing to someone like me who for all his life has tried to research and preserve the oral tradition of our ancestors.

[[posterous-content:pid___4]]

Without doubt I am interested to hear from someone who considers television, computers and the technological orgy of our times as a negative presence in their children lives and want to avoid it, replacing it with more organic ways of learning such as books, music, socializing. Someone ho has the determination to refrain, at least a day of the week, from switching on or off anything at all !

Of course, I can immediately see controversial issues and oxymoron too, as they are an inescapable fact of every society.

Some critics of these ultra-orthodox Jews, after hearing about my interest and fascination for the Hasidic community have hurriedly warned me about several things (and here I merely quote their words, refraining from a personal opinion, which my ignorance is still not allowing me to express).

They told me about the abusive treatment towards Hasidic women, segregated from the society of men as mere child bearers, who cannot even show their hair in public nor look at a man in the face, they told me about the double standards, apparently part of some Hasidic men sexual life, about the brutal and blindfolded activism of certain ultra-orthodox groups, especially in Israel.

[[posterous-content:pid___5]]

Well, I definitely need to know more.

And, mind you, I don’t really care to reach any personal decision about what is right or wrong. When you investigate a phenomenon from a cultural and a visual angle, the “rights and wrongs” are just numbers in an equation. My short field trip to Brooklyn, the other day, rapidly convinced me that for a researcher and visual explorer of oral traditions like myself, something like the Hasidic community would be a greatly interesting topic to look into.

It is my hope, with utter unobtrusiveness, respect and determination, to establish some contacts within the New York Hasidic community. I would like to photograph a series of portraits of community elders as well as slices of everyday life, commerce, prayer and celebrations.

Considering I don’t know anybody in that community yet, I’ll need to do a lot research and brainstorming alone, at first, to envisage a viable field strategy for my new project.

I’ll probably do that after enjoying a matzah ball soup.

[[posterous-content:pid___6]]

TO BE OLD

2010-12-15T18:19:00.001-05:00

Almost as if persistence of vision could last a few decades, I keep seeing an old man, his head between his callous hands, his elbows on an ancient marble table, his eyes closed. And I hear myself saying “ Grandpa, what’s the matter? Is there something wrong ?...."

And he wouldn’t answer, his eyes would remain closed and his head would just move slightly, as in disbelief. A clock he had bought in his youth was still noisily dissecting the seconds, in the silence of the house where he had been living for the past sixty years.

Download now or watch on posterous

La_vita.mov (52216 KB)

Dissolve to today.

I walk down the street in the metropolis, I am slightly depressed, thinking how much my “disconnect” with the so-called “reality” restlessly grows on me every day.

I am not old yet, but my understanding, my resistance and my patience have been declining very significantly lately.

My mind processing capabilities are probably already obsolete. I just enjoy, like and desire less and less of what I see and what I hear around me.

At the same time I find myself incapable of strategizing alternative lifestyles, alternative choices, more benign geographies, escape routes, like I used to be able to do until a few years ago.

Where do I go from here? I truly don’t know.

And I am positively sure that my problem is not (only)just due to dysfunctional brain dopamine and a depression prone genetic but it is indeed due to the march of time.

An old person can easily find he or she is as a true stranger in the present tense.

Perhaps that’s why old people tend to re-live their past experiences so much.

The present often becomes a painful and constant reiteration of your incapability to adapt, to comprehend, to accept, to enjoy. And the present is also increasingly stating your un-usefulness, your lack of elasticity, the increasing burden to society you represent.

In a society where there is no respect nor pity for the young, there is even less for the old.

TO EARN A LIVING

2010-10-31T21:54:00.001-05:00

MATADERO

I am not vegetarian.

I occasionally eat meat, although it has never been one of my favorite meals and, for personal health reasons I try to limit as much as possible its consumption.

Anyway, this book is not about my alimentary habits but rather about my personal, visual meditation on the condition of living beings, people and animals, a meditation about life and death.

I shot these photos in a rather primitive slaughterhouse in the south of the Dominican Republic, where, perhaps due to the lack of strong social movements against cruelty to animals, a photographer is still being allowed to enter such place and freely document it.

Despite a lack of all those humanitarian implications that such a place would provoke in “the modern world”, here, the only concern in letting me photograph the slaughterhouse was the obvious lack of hygiene, which could jeopardize business even in the Dominican Republic, should these photos be published locally.

My reassurance that it was not my intention to do so, quickly gave me access all areas to photograph “business as usual” in the slaughterhouse.

All along, while shooting, and later, while editing these photos, a question was in my mind: who is suffering more and longer over here? The animals or the people? The killers or their victims?

Of course these cows and these pigs are being killed in a very violent and inhuman way, a knife shoved into their heart to then let them bleed till they die, but what about the killers? In this pre-industrial world they don’t even wear the rubber boots, the face mask, the gloves and the white apron their American colleagues are issued (as per FDA rules) in order to preserve a certain degree of hygiene and as a pretence for a more professional and perhaps detached approach to their license to kill.

No, here the killers walk barefoot in the blood of their victims, they plunge their bodies inside the carcasses to extract their innards, they struggle, man versus pig, sweating, screaming as loud as the pig, while searching for the deadly spot, right above the heart, to give a painful, yet almost instant death.

And while the animal dies, they don’t. They continue to live in this gory theater of guts and blood and screams, killing animals day after day. In a paradoxical way, the life sentence to the executioner can be perceived as crueler than the death sentence of the victim.

And then you think: how can they do it?

They kill to earn a living.

Download now or watch on posterous

Mataderro_slideshow_B_web.mp4 (33762 KB)

<div style="text-align:left; width:450px"><div style="display:block;">MATADERO by Giovanni Savino | Make Your Own Book</div></div>

See TEDx Mediterranean speakers clicking here

Giovanni Savino TEDx Mediterranean- "Oral Tradition is the most valuable of our possessions. If we don't lose it, no one can take it away from us."

2010-10-03T14:04:00.002-05:00

I just got back from presenting my work in Cannes, France, at the first TEDx Mediterranean event. It was a wonderful experience and a most interesting occasion for a cultural and friendly exchange with other researchers, musicians and artists.

Here is the text of my TEDx presentation and a few photographs from the event.

"Oral Tradition is the most valuable of our possessions. If we don't lose it, no one can take it away from us."

My name is Giovanni Savino, I was born in Italy and I started playing the trumpet when I was six years old.

As I grew up I got involved in many different fields of the arts in order to express the creative spirit I was born with, as creativity has been, throughout my life, the most enjoyable survival tool I could find.

I soon got involved in music recording, then in photography and cinematography, telling many stories through images and sounds over the past 30 years.

When I was a teenager, I shot a film that perhaps was to shape my entire career as a visual artist and a researcher.

It was a six minutes long BW film shot on a grainy super8 film stock about my grandparents reminiscing about their youth, spent in extreme poverty, in the wild west of our native Tuscany: Maremma.

As I improvised (just like with my trumpet) my first film-making experience, I began recording about 5 hours of conversations with my grandparents, which I then edited down while shooting cinematic portraits of them, their faces by now, over seventy years distant from their so vivid memories.

That short, grainy film, opened my eyes and validated what I tried to pursue for the rest of my life and my career: preserving oral traditions.

More importantly that film taught me the modus operandi to capture such materials, which I would use with many people from many different walks of life in years to come.

Moreover, to this day, when I go back to those recordings and footage, I get tears in my eyes and at the same time feel a great happiness, to have been able to preserve a slice of the personal and social history of my dear grandparents.

This leads me to discuss briefly a statement that could summarize the essence of today’s speech: "Oral Tradition is the most valuable of our possessions and if we don't lose it, no one can take it away from us."

Life and culture move at an increasingly fast speed, worldwide. I feel it is of paramount importance to discover and preserve the enormous amount of data that does not get recorded in history books, data that is passed along in speech but also in music form from grandfather to father to son. Oral depictions, sometimes very personal, at times very subjective, other times photographically accurate, of events, traditions, songs and feelings can help us to truly reconnect with the past, in a very intimate way, something impossible to achieve through mainstream historical documents.

And today, in the world, there are two factors that make preserving human oral tradition more important than ever: The displacement of great numbers of people for natural or socio-political causes and the relentless attack upon autochthonous cultures by strong corporative powers, enabled by the mass media, promoting the erasure of cultural diversity by imposing new and monotone global values even in the most geographically remote parts of the globe.

Also, in our society, time is becoming a rare commodity and the fast pace of our lives, certainly is not an enabler for social reunions where a cultural connection between different generations can be achieved through storytelling.

My first audiovisual presentation is an excerpt from a photo reportage I did in one of the poorest Haitian immigrant settlements in the Dominican Republic: Batey numero dos (Batey two).

While not geographically too far from the riches and the modern lifestyle of a Dominican city, people here live on an average of ten dollars a day, six months of the year, the other six months, on zero income.

This is because the private sugar cane company employing them requires their services only during harvest season, leaving these workers to fend for themselves the remaining six months of the year.

There is a local clinic, just two rooms and a cabinet full of aspirin, painkillers and condoms serving over 8000 Haitian workers, also from nearby settlements.

Since the sugar cane company employs airborne weed killers liberally spraying from an airplane all over the area, there has been a great increase in eye problems and blindness amongst the workers.

Obviously, since the Haiti earthquake, the number of Haitian nationals illegally crossing the nearby border in search of work and better life conditions has greatly increased.

Most of these people own nothing if not the ragged clothes they are wearing. They live in substandard housing, cement and zinc roof shacks built in the 1950’s, often up to 15 people in a room, sleeping amongst dirt, vermin and desperation.

They told me their biggest problem is food. They are hungry. The little money they earn harvesting sugar cane is barely keeping them alive six month of the year. The remaining six months they are on their own.

You would think that this is a living hell and indeed it is.

However, the human values of these workers, the social cohesion and the profound respect for their cultural heritage truly impressed me during the time I spent in Batey numero Dos.

I am going to show you today just some street portraits of these workers, their children and their families.

From a photographic and conceptual stand point I decided not to show the abysmal living conditions of Batey numero Dos and focus instead on these people’s faces, forgotten faces in modern, busy world, faces loudly shouting their suffering but also their inner strength and ancestral roots.

Download now or watch on posterous

Batey_Dos_Forgotten_Faces.mov (6183 KB)

I find some of the children portraits particularly impacting; they stare into my lens as if due to their young age they hadn’t yet experienced the hardship of their parents but they already knew what life had in store for them.

The soundtrack is a traditional song amongst the many I recorded there, when some workers gathered to play one night, once back from the fields, using plastic buckets as drums. This is the music from their past, music from voodoo ceremonies they perhaps started attending at a very young age, in their villages.

I noticed how the children present there were attentively listening to the chanting and drumming, literally ingesting it into their memory bank to learn how to sing it themselves one day and perhaps eventually teach it to their own children.

This music appeared to me to be this people’s most valuable possession, handed down through many generations, something that unlike everything else in their existences cannot be forgotten, modified, brutalized or taken away from them.

Now I would like to present a very short excerpt from my documentary “The Real Comarca of Liborio” as an example of how oral tradition, in this case music, can remain as the only testimonial of a major social and political movement.

Liborio Mateo was a peasant born in a remote village of the Dominican Republic, near the border with Haiti at the beginning of the 1900.

He suddenly disappeared during a hurricane and his family, thinking he had died, started arranging for his funeral.

Liborio showed up the day of his funeral saying that God had lifted him up to the sky during the storm, investing him, despite Liborio’ s reluctance, with supernatural powers to heal and counsel humanity for a period of 33 years.

Very soon many people started following Liborio and his Christian values based on humility and altruism, elevating him to the pantheon of popular religion as a living saint.

Liborio moved to the mountains and started living with an ever-increasing group of followers, while performing miraculous healings and even resuscitating the dead, as oral tradition largely recalls.

Apparently Comarca, Liborio’s music was always present in the life of the Liborio camp, accompanying many everyday events, from social gatherings, to prayers, to supernatural healings.

Comarca lyrics, sung over a fairly simple melodic and rhythmic structure, talked about religious values and supernatural events but also commented very boldly on social injustice and political corruption.

Around 1920, a time of great changes in the Dominican society, rapidly moving towards the industrial age in the middle of a North American military occupation, Liborio and his followers became a very unwelcome and potentially dangerous phenomenon for both politicians and the military.

The altruistic, peaceful but at the same time socially rebellious aspect of Liborio’s message and way of life was feared by the occupying forces as destabilizing the political situation in the country.

The US Marines finally assassinated Liborio, in 1922.

But Liborio’s philosophy did not die with the man. Instead it kept resurfacing for many years, with different leaders and always on the beat of Comarca music, until it was finally destroyed, as a social movement, in the massacre of Palma Sola in 1962, where hundreds of followers, men, women and children where murdered in cold blood by the Dominican Army.

Nevertheless Liborismo still exists today, not openly as a social movement anymore, but in the heart and soul of many lower class Dominicans and through Comarca music, still being performed mostly at religious events by small groups of old musicians who try their best to pass it on to their sons and grandsons.

One of the most popular Comarca song goes: “ They say Liborio is dead – Liborio is not dead at all….”

iPhone Ergo Sum

2010-09-20T12:29:00.002-05:00

I think I am unconsciously and loosely paraphrasing more than one illustrious photographer when I say that photography is more about your eye than the camera you use.

Now I’ll go further, and I’ll quote what one of my favorite writers (and fellow cigar smoker) said:

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

(Mark Twain)

This is my preamble to say a few words about an article that was pointed to my attention by iPhone photography pioneer and friend Knox Bronson, who showcases on his website, Pixels at an Exhibition, many interesting images produced with iPhone cameras and commendably promotes this branch of photography in art galleries worldwide.

The article, by William Storage, at his site, The Eye Game, is very well written, with several interesting visual examples shot with an iPhone camera and, in parallel, with a professional camera, the Canon 5D.

However, I think that doing quality comparison between these two image-making devices completely misses the point about what iPhone photography is all about.

I am, of course, a relentless iPhone enthusiast but I am also a working photographer who has earned a living for the past thirty years making images.

In my career I have used many different cameras and I have soon come to realize that image making is not only about f -stops, depth of focus or shutter speeds.

Image making is about choosing the right tool for the job and develop a technical confidence in using such tool that allows us to concentrate on the conceptual and artistic side of what we do, to produce exactly the kind of images we are trying to produce, without fussing or worrying about “technicalities” too much.

Enters the iPhone.

Why, so often, do I love photographing with this cell-phone, while leaving an incredibly sophisticated, expensive and high-quality arsenal in my bag?

Here’s a few reasons:

1) Shooting with an iPhone is 99% about framing and composition, exactly what photography is mostly about (not about changing lenses, setting ISO, selecting white balance, checking histograms, Photoshopping etc.)

2) Less is more.
Nowadays an increasing number of people have access to incredibly sophisticated image-making tools. A brief visit to the NYC photo megastore B&H quickly illustrates the sheer number and diversity of photographers and aspiring photographers investing vast sums of money in high quality (mostly digital) photo equipment. Personally I already own all I need for virtually any job opportunity might arise. Having worked in photography for many years (sometimes traveling with ten flight-cases full of gear, bending my spine for carrying bags full of cameras and accessories, having equipment confiscated by unfriendly foreign law enforcement officers etc) I am somewhat reluctant to go on a leisurely walk carrying a Nikon D3 and a 70 to 200 mm, f 2.8 lens, unless there is a specific reason to do it. That equipment is heavy around my neck, it is extremely obtrusive and it is blatantly screaming to the world: “I AM a PHOTOGRAPHER!
Not good, especially in this day and age.
It is refreshing, and also very rewarding, at times, to take a minimalist approach to things. Limiting myself to the limitative iPhone camera often boosts my ingeniousness and creativity. Not to mention an increased ability to capture candid shots which any “camera-looking” device would make more difficult if not impossible to capture. A Leica camera with a 35mm lens was the enabler for Henry Cartier Bresson ; the iPhone is mine.

3) The serendipitous factor.
Shooting with an iPhone, framing and composition remain my responsibility. Everything else, from how the tiny lens reacts to a specific light condition, to the apps I use to process an image until I have a result I am pleased with, are a fascinating combination between my own decisions and the occurrence and development of the final image, by chance, in a happy and beneficial way.
There are times I even feel inclined to draw comparisons between iPhone photography and, for example, reading Tarot cards, where, besides a knowledge of the symbolic, ancestral meaning of each card, what is most important is your ability to interpret them within a personal, intuitive open perspective.

To sum up, iPhone photography, for the end user, is not about science.
It is more about poetry, about bumping into the mystery of human vision and about exploring a specific photographic philosophy.

Naturally I find it fascinating that the clever engineers at Apple where able to design (applying science and technology) an interface so beautifully responsive to often indefinable concepts of the human mind such as mood, imagination, creativity and artistic sensibility.

Anyway, I say, either love it or hate the iPhone photo capabilities but just don’t waste your time comparing it to anything else because the iphone is unique.

And validating my statement I can see an ever-increasing number of people, photographers or not, whether carefully using certain techniques or completely by chance, create unique and incredibly interesting images with it.

Also, I see more and more art galleries and magazines keenly observing and increasingly featuring iPhone photography.

If you live in New York there’ll be two opportunities to see works from the booming iPhone art movement at two interesting events in the city where I was invited to participate and showcase some of my iPhone work:

EYE’EM IN NEW YORK EXHIBITION at THE OPEN HOUSE GALLERY
September 27, 28, 29, 2010

iPhone EVENT at the SOHO APPLE STORE

(Where I was supposed to be showing some work and doing a Q&A)until one of the organizers got upset about my participation to the EYE'EM event above and kicked me out of it......

October 29, 2010

9/11 9 years later

2010-09-12T00:04:00.002-05:00

united |yoōˈnītid| |juˈnaɪd1d|

adjective

joined together politically, for a common purpose, or by common feelings

I had always thought I was a veteran, a hardened and at times even a bit cynical newsman, until that September eleven.

Years of travel to disaster areas and war zones did not prevent me to get deeply touched and traumatized by the events of nine years ago right in the heart of the city I call home.

When the twin towers were brought down I spent over four uninterrupted weeks in the area of what soon came to be known as “Ground Zero”, working for a television network.

We witnessed and reported the stupor, the incredulity and the sheer pain at first and later on, as the days passed by, the human strength, the heroism and civic values of the American people.

One of the things that helped me most in surviving emotionally such a horrible experience was the sense of togetherness and unity I could perceive around me, all the time.

While from the destroyed buildings noxious fumes kept smoldering up to the heavens for many days and the streets were covered in dust, shattered glass, burned papers and even human remains, we were all doing our jobs in unison.

From us in the press to the police and the fire brigades, whose heroism was truly relentless, to the many doctors who rushed to the scene, to sanitation workers with their unpleasant and most difficult task of cleaning up the mess, to the many NYC citizens, cheering to the rescue vehicles passing by and offering their time and labor in many supportive activities.

It was a truly horrible moment in American history, and we all silently understood it, deep inside ourselves. At the same time, I think it was one of the highest peaks, at least in my lifetime, of social union, as, in spite of the dreadful situation, we were all strongly focused towards common goals and feeling truly blessed for living in this country.

As the years went by, a lot of things in America, the world and even inside my soul have changed.

Although I sometimes returned to ground zero, to report about the commemorative events that take places there every September eleven, to this day I don’t particularly enjoy going south of Canal street since my month-long permanence in that area nine years ago. Whenever I do, memories suddenly become too vivid and I even have flashbacks, I smell the deadly smell again, I hear the sirens, and I have distressing feelings of total, unrecoverable loss that leave me quite unsettled.

This morning I woke up really early, feeling a little under the weather (or perhaps just a day older). I decided not to go to ground zero and instead pay my respect, have my moment of silence, in private.

Then, all of the sudden, I changed my mind and a little later I found myself emerging from a subway station in that area I unfortunately know so well.

I witnessed two main events, a city block away from each other: a rally in favor of the controversial Mosque, which is to be built nearby, and a rally by radical anti-abortionists. I took a few shots of both events and, despite my absolute respect, unobtrusiveness and a police press pass around my neck, I managed to be shoved rather impolitely in my chest, while I was taking a shot, by a Lieutenant screaming “and next time I’ll take your camera from you”.

Soon I had enough.

Tonight, I don’t even want to attempt a judgment about what I saw. I’ll just say that my visit to ground zero didn’t allow me see much unity or civic values in my fellows Americans today. I think, had it not be for the massive police presence, most of the people there, some them screaming “Allah Akbar” in a megaphone, others kneeling to Jesus Christ in front the poster of a dismembered fetus, would have gladly tried to slash each others throat.

http://www.magneticpic.com/

Iphone Photojournalism

2010-08-28T10:10:00.001-05:00

I have been singing praises about the Iphone virtues as a visual creativity tool for a long time now, but can the Iphone be useful in reportage of current events too?

Can this small camera, without optical zoom capabilities, with fairly slow and awkward shutter actuation, a mere thee megapixel resolution ( I have a 3Gs) be used to document something happening across the police and fire department lines?

I am inclined to say yes- albeit somewhat suffering from the aforementioned limitations. The Iphone had already proved to be an interesting and valid photo documentary device in my recent trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but the other day, walking in my NYC neighborhood I suddenly came across a building fire.

Several fire brigades were already on the scene and a group of people, who had found refuge clenching to a fire escape were waiting to be rescued.

The iphone was the only camera I had.

The first problem was not having an optical zoom to get closer to the people stuck on the fire escape. I somewhat tried to get around this using the ProCamera app digital zooming capabilities which, while degrading the resolution of the image, allowed me to get a bit closer.

The second technical problem was my inability to lock exposure while tilting the camera-phone to the upper floors, where all the action was, as the brightness of the sky would fool the meter, grossly underexposing my shots. I tried to overcome this by carefully framing each shot while keeping the bright sky out.

Then, of course I had to deal with the slow responsiveness and recycle time of my shutter as well as the difficulty of releasing it by touching the screen (oh –how much I wish I had an actual button to press!!)….

All said and done I had a few pictures that, had I been the very only person present to cover the events, I could have possibly emailed to a magazine or TV station to be used for broadcast.

However, there was plenty of media there, so, my material being redundant, I decided I had the luxury to post process it to make it more visually interesting.

I decided to use the artistic quality of the Iphone and its apps to accomplish not a “breaking news” report but rather a mini-feature type of imagery, documenting, perhaps in a more poetic or stylized way, the work of the fire brigades, people reactions and the general street atmosphere.

A lot of the Iphone “magic” is, in my opinion, to be able to use its optical limitations to our advantage, not seeking the obviously impossible sharpness and immediacy we could obtain with an orthodox camera but rather explore different visual avenues to tell the story, or the “parallel story”, or the “story behind the story”.

Indeed, this often comes to be a more artistic than “hard news” approach, even when the actual subject of our images is actual “hard news”.

One great advantage of being in this hard news situation with an Iphone (worth mentioning here), is that, having decided not to display the police press pass I always carry in my pocket, I was never asked for it, I guess because I didn’t have two big dslr with long zoom lenses dangling from my neck I somewhat gained an easier access to the action.

This makes me think that indeed the iphone could be the perfect tool for the rapidly expanding practice of “citizen-journalism”.

Giovanni Savino

http://www.magneticpic.com/

THE HOUSE OF THE SUN

2010-08-17T00:39:00.002-05:00

A photographic book project about a remarkable house.

LA CASA DEL SOL

(The House of the Sun)

The "House of the Sun", as the man who had it built, Nicolas Michelen, named it, is a marvelous example of a comfortable living environment with a touch of odd creative architecture attached. It sports forty-two external doors (much safer than glass windows in those days full of bandits, "Caudillos" and revolutionaries), it still has the original Zinc roof ("that zinc was the best, not like the thin stuff they sell today", I was told). This house weathered out four cyclones, endless tropical storms, and even the recent earthquake in Haiti, which was felt very strongly in this nearby region.

Three women, a cat and four dogs live here.

This is Georgette Michelen.

She told me that if she is forced to move from here she'll surely die of sadness.

The "House of the Sun" is remarkably well insulated with incredibly aged planks of wood, so hard that a steel nail refuses to tack in them. It is also very well ventilated (what did you expect with 42 doors??) and there is a wonderful, happy and loving vibration there. As I was invited in, I felt as if I had gone back to my grandmother's house, where I grew up. My facination with this house was triggered in fact by some ancient Italian tiles I saw in the living room (due to the Italian immigration to San Juan at the beginning of last century) and well, those tiles are identical to those I remember from my childhood.

There is a balcony all around the house and although a big truck hit it some time ago (and run away), destroying the front part, Georgette still loves to walk outside sometimes balancing nonchalantly on half broken and disconnected planks.

Georgette used to teach music, now she is retired, but upon my request she accepted to play something on the very piano her father bought for her, which indeed, would also need a lot of restoring, repairing and re-tuning like the rest of the house.

Georgette never married and her stepdaughter, Juana, is also a musician and a talented piano player.

She was also very helpful in my quest to discover and record the history of this amazing house.

She told me lovely anecdotes about growing up in the House of the Sun which I shall try to recount the best I can in the book I am about to write.

The house is one of the last examples of Dominican Republican Architecture and was built around 1910 in San Juan De La Maguana, just a few kilometers from the border with Haiti, by Georgette's father, a very successful businessman who emigrated from Bethlehem to Haiti at the end of the 1800 and eventually settled in the Dominican Republic.

In the many hours and days I spent photographing there, I had the distinct perception that the house was ALIVE.

Alive in many ways. It is obviously full of memories, anecdotes and even mysteries but I also felt that the structure itself was somewhat alive....and breathing...Unlike the places of residence we are now accustomed to live in most modern cities, with cement walls, small rooms, low ceilings, this house was built with the inhabitants in mind. Large rooms, high ceilings, huge doors,precious and durable wood,and most of all an extremely comfortable and "livable" layout.

This house is entirely build out of wood. All the wood was cut and shaped by hand, assembled by hand and painted by hand.It is totally organic. And naturally, just like a human body it "feels" its hundred-plus years and it is full of ailments, aches and pains. However it is still alive. And amazingly this wooden structure is so strong, so resilient that it appear to have been able to even stop the course of history. Time, in many ways just stopped here.

This house made me think of a huge animal who refuses to become extinct and continues to live, not adapting or mutating, but simply resisting the forces of progress and the clicking of time thanks to its enormous mass and its sheer strength.

Just like a centenary whale or elephant, its skin is full of scars and microorganisms that live on it, survive on it and of it and continually reproduce. This house, despite the brutal tropical weather and an almost total lack of maintenance is a masterpiece of humane architecture and a monument to creative ingenuity.

There are many stories embedded in these walls. I have collected a few and I want to transcribe them the best I can to complement the hundreds of pictures I shot of the tiniest details in this amazing building that is probably destined to a premature death. Yes, this house could easily continue to exist for hundreds of years more but, due to the blindness and carelessness of local entrepreneurs and politicians, who look at the real estate value of the land it is built upon, it could well happen that in a recent future, they'll cleverly "condemn it as "unsafe" and rapidly destroy it.

Georgette is fiercely fighting against this, but her resources are limited and the modern world just don't give a damn.

My dream (and unfortunately it is very much at dream stage) would be to find someone, a private person, a non profit or some arts organization, who would be able to purchase this house, start restoring it (allowing Georgette and her next of kin continue to live there until her passing) and eventually utilize this wonderful space as an academic retreat or even as an art and cultural center.

This house would lend itself marvelously as an art gallery, a theatre space or even a music school.

Yes, I know... dreams are dreams but I still want to have a tiny speck of hope that perhaps someday, through the images of the book I just started to compose, someone with the resources (not that much money would be needed to start the restoration) and more importantly with the visionary power to save this unique residence will enable the dream to become reality.

Giovanni Savino

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Rolling with the Punches

2010-08-06T12:51:00.001-05:00

That’s what is best to learn early in life.

The punches sooner or later will come and they’ll keep coming. It is wise to figure out how to survive them and possibly, how to punch back.

That is what these kids do in a God-forsaken gymnasium of San Juan de la Maguana, the last Far West of the Dominican Republic.

Most of them come from poverty stricken families and grow up with an inner anger, which is hard to dissimulate. All the temptations of the modern world are right there, just a few blocks away from the zinc roofed shack they share with a large extended family.

The latest cell-phones, the Internet, fancy cars, plasma TVs and colorful scooters are their dreams, but they soon turn into nightmares, due to their inaccessibility. And the lack of these goods, make them feel even more discriminated against and fuels their desperation and their rage.

There are no jobs out there, there’s no hope to honestly earn what you desire trough legitimate work, besides, most of the rich people they observe in the streets have gained their position through political corruption, nepotism and illicit activities.

This rage fueled by lack of hope often leads them towards becoming first petty thieves and then full-blown criminals dabbling in robberies, drug dealing and prostitution.

Boxing represents a theoretical chance, a possibility of being discovered by a foreign agent, travel, earn money, but mostly it seems to me to be an opportunity for these kids to punch life back in the face, that life that deceived them, defrauded them of what they wanted, voided their hopes.

Boxing is letting them try to open a path, with their fists, out of the otherwise terminal social isolation and captivity they were born in.

And at the same time, discharge their rage.

So they fight.

Download now or watch on posterous

boxeadores_loop_web.mov (168 KB)

Despite the old rotting gloves they wear, the lack of shoes, the stench of sweat and urine from the overflowed restrooms in the gymnasium, every day, when the sun is strongest, at three in the afternoon, they gather to train with an uncommon determination. Every day.

And periodically, often during “fiestas patronales” or political rallies, they fight each other in boxing tournaments, an eye to the adversary’s fist and the other to the crowd, hoping to spot a talent scout, an agent, a foreign face looking at them.

Download now or watch on posterous

Rolling_with_the_punches.mov (20927 KB)

On the ring, some of them win, some others loose…. But the sad truth is that talent scouts mostly comb through Dominican athletes in the Baseball fields, not on the boxing ring.

There’ll be a rematch, another day, in some similar place and hopefully someone will finally notice them and give them that chance, they all pursue, of bettering their life.

But in the meantime, all they can do is spit, sweat, ignore the pain and keep rolling with the punches.

Express Mail

2010-06-25T08:21:00.001-05:00

It had been my intention to send weekly updates about my travels to this blog but I am having more problems than expected getting a wireless carrier.
My cellphone (whenever I manage to recharge it) only feebly works if I walk to the top of a mountain and frequent rains make this a difficult task. I thought this image would illustrate my difficulties in reaching the "outer world". This Haitian worker crosses the Atibonito River with his heavy load and although I very much doubt the bright yellow US Express Mail sack he is carrying contains letters and parcels, I think it shows the daily struggle that accomplishing the simplest task involves over here.
I am still on the Dominican/Haitian border, waiting for the rain to stop, probably after the 29th of June, I am told,
celebration of the day of San Pedro. Then I'll try to cross the Atibonito on a canoe to reach a village deep into Haiti to meet a remarkable man I heard lots of good things about.

Before it's too late

2010-05-24T11:07:00.002-05:00

While in the deep south of the Dominican Republic, attending and photographing fiestas de Palos, I came across and instantly became fascinated with a musical genre that could be defined a peculiar cousin of Merengue Tipico: Comarca.

Unlike (some) Merengues, Comarca lacks conformity, musical petulance and arrogance.

Unlike Merengue, Comarca was never commercially recorded and distributed before.

Comarca sings a poetic, melancholic-yet undefeatable song of socio- political concepts .

Unlike Merengue, Comarca was born and bread exclusively in the San Juan Valley and it is a consequence, perhaps an instrument, of the messianic movement “Liborismo” led by Liborio Mateo at the beginning of last century.

Olivorio Mateo

Olivorio Mateo (or Liborio, Papa Liborio, Dios Liborio), born in Maguana Arriba, a section that lies a few kilometers north of the city of San Juan, was the most important Curandero and messianic leader in Dominican history. He used Comarca for healing and as many legends tell, even to resuscitate the dead.

The Olivorismo (or Liborismo) was a vast social-religious movement said to have its origin in the summer of 1908 after a hurricane, which affected the entire south of the island, heavily hitting the area of San Juan de la Maguana for three interminable days.

During the hurricane, Olivorio had disappeared from his home.

At first, nobody cared because he often used to leave for many days without a word.

After a while, his family thought he might have fallen victim to the storm, so they organized a "novena" for him (nine days of prayer by relatives and friends at the home of the deceased).

But the last day of the “novena”, Olivorio suddenly appeared, with a knotted cord on the forehead, saying: "I come from very far", adding that an angel mounted on a magnificent white horse had transported him to heaven during the storm and there, God, after blessing him with his divine seal, entrusted him back to earth, to preach His message and heal the sick.

"I am not crazy. I am coming, sent by God, to a mission that will last 33 years. Everyone who believes in me will be saved," clarified Olivorio.

Today, there is just a bunch of very old men left who still know how to sing Comarca. Some of them have inherited their musical talent and their instruments from their parents or grandparents who were actual followers and friends of Liborio, before he was murdered by the U.S. interventionist troops in 1908.

I had to research a lot to find the surviving Comarca musicians and I had to travel a lot (even on horseback) to meet them and document their music. A particularly difficult location to get to, both geographically and psychologically, was Palma Sola, where the Liborista movement was finally brutally mass exterminated in 1962 by Dominican governmental troops.

The result is a collection of live field recordings I compiled on a CD and a short film, which, aside from giving rare musical examples, tries, very succinctly, to look at this music and the “Liborista” movement in its social and historical context through the words of the last survivors.

The audio CD is, in my humble opinion, a very precious time capsule of a musical genre that not many ears have heard before and that perhaps in just a few years will become completely extinct.

Will this production sell millions of copies and become a blockbuster video? Certainly not.

However, It was something that needed to be done while the last interpreters of Comarca are still alive, before it’s too late.

So I did it, the best I could, with the very limited time and equipment available, without being able to seek financing or distribution. One more precious occasion in my twenty-five years of journalism to prioritize content over appearance in a completely heartfelt self-financed project.

It was for me a true privilege to meet the last Comarca musicians, the last surviving “Liboristas” and give them the opportunity to play their music and tell a story they lived in first person, a story which is, to this day, a dramatic chapter, full of unanswered questions, in Dominican history.

La Comarca Fija de Liborio (The Real Comarca of Liborio), my new labor of love, a documentary about oral tradition and a rapidly disappearing musical / cultural expression is being distributed in the U.S.A. by Earthcds.com (Audio CD + Video DVD).

Download:

More video excerpts from this documentary (English language version- with voiceover by Henry Fiol):

HERE and HERE

Cherished childhood memories

2010-05-15T10:17:00.002-05:00

I don’t have many.

I had a very unhappy childhood.

The relationship with my parents (who are still alive) has not found a much needed healing in nearly fifty years.

I guess, as a psychological self-defense mechanism, I erased most of my memories from my childhood, aside from a few happy ones from when I lived with my maternal grandparents.

My childhood dreams haven’t come true and although I have somehow managed to attain a fairly successful life and career, I was never able to completely shed the psychological pain and pessimistic outlook on life I absorbed from my parents in my early years.

Of course this pessimistic perspective, assimilated both genetically and socially from my parents, has affected negatively my entire life experience, from schooling to relationships to networking to my private self. They officially diagnosed me with anxiety and depression (just like my father) when I was five years old.

While I have no more ill feelings towards my parents (I did have them, often, when I was younger) over the years, through my observation of different family lives, I became very concerned about the extreme and sometimes negative influence parents can have over their children.

As I was growing up I had the distinct yet inexplicable feeling I was losing touch with the greater, intense potential to express myself through the creative abilities I was born with.

I suppose this is a process which affect most of us, whether we are aware of it or not, as the creative mind we all possess in our early years gives up space to the rational mind, a necessary switch, in order to survive more or less efficiently in a society rewarding financial success as the most desirable goal to attain.

The “original dreams” about our potentiality (e.g. when I grow up I want to be…) get revised, corrected and frustrated along the way by our inner inability to make them become reality, by social, cultural, environmental, financial obstacles and by a dysfunctional relationship with your parents.

Indeed there are many different social, financial and cultural factors contributing towards a child becoming a “winner” or a “loser” in life.

But parents (or a single parent) certainly are either the very first obstacles, or the first support mechanism, we encounter in the linear learning trajectory since our birth.

My work in progress “ When I grow up”, started seven years ago when I was living in the poorest barrio of Azua de Compostela, in the south of the Dominican Republic.

While I was roaming around Azua dusty and dirty streets with my camera, under a scorching sun, a lot of children would just come along asking me about what I was doing and why.

Over time, following me, “El Fotografo”, became their favorite pastime and I got to listen to their stories and sometimes met their desperate parents and saw their below-poverty living quarters.

Most of these kids had just one parent (their mother) or were loosely “looked after” by some other family member. Some of them would occasionally go to a shabby, ineffectual school, some others wouldn’t even bother; all of them spent 99% of their day (and often nights) in the streets, interacting with different levels of barrio sub-culture, including prostitutes, pimps and drug addicts, always trying to find new ways to earn, beg, steal a few coins in order to eat something.

While many of their stories ranged from sad to horrible, their living conditions were appalling, their nourishment inadequate, all of them were able to come up with an snappy answer when asked:” what do you want to do when you grow up?”

Their life plans (just like mine when I was their age) where candidly optimistic.

Nurse, doctor, policeman, politician, computer expert, airplane pilot, getting married to a foreigner and go live in New York or in Europe, journalist, shop owner, lawyer etc etc.

Sadly, I documented with a series of close-up portraits the imprint of hardship I could see reflected in their eyes along with hope, happiness, sadness, pain and anger but above all I think what transpires from these children headshots is how difficult it will be for them making their dreams (whatever they are) become a reality.

The world is very focused on appearances. Who your parents are, the school you got your degrees from, the size of your house, the quality of your clothes, the car you drive, who you know, are without doubt stronger social validation factors than your natural abilities or creativity per se.

These children’s facial expressions, sad, pensive, happy, desperate, hopeful, were visually pinpointing onto a personal awareness about the pitiless compartmentalization of a society where if you are born poor, you’ll most likely remain poor, if you are not given the instruments to compete with the rest of the world in your early years, most likely (thanks God there are always exceptions to this cruel rule) you are not even getting a chance to compete.

We often delegate our kids’ education (albeit later complaining for the poor results), to an underpaid schoolteacher, to a relative, to the street, to fate, to life itself.

We could blame the school system or simplifying, we could blame society for our children failure in later life.

Instead, I tend to point my finger to the very first social institution we encounter in our existence: our parents.

It is all too well to procreate, but when it comes to teaching values, social strategies and life philosophies to our sons and daughter how many of us have clear ideas? How many of us know exactly what to do and how to do it? How many of us have the time or the will to do it well? Not many parents are able to smartly and compassionately help build the necessary emotional and rational mind in their children, especially in the flourishing relativism of the last few decades. Some parents can’t even clothe or feed their kids. Some others just don’t give a damn. Abuse, of all kinds, is a sad, horrible and quite common denominator in many children’s lives.

A newborn child is like a white page but nobody seems to know exactly what, how or when to write on it, so, different hands, different users with different purposes write things on it. The child is to receive a fairly random (and partisan) shower of data, of opinions, of prohibitions, of traumas, of neurosis etc that will eventually determine and regulate his adult life.

As for me, a confessed dysfunctional son and self-blamed dysfunctional father, I keep photographing street children and recording their sincere utopias, hoping that observing their candid, intense expressions, permeated with drama and joy and trauma no words could express better, will teach us adults more respect and induce a clearer recollection of a similar drama, joy and trauma we also possibly once experienced as children, until we allowed ourselves to forget and inexorably “grow up”.

http://www.magneticpic.com/

When I grow up

2010-05-11T23:16:00.001-05:00

Download now or listen on posterous

When I grow up AUDIO.mp3 (884 KB)

Giovanni Savino
magneticart@gmail.com

917 403 9811 USA

MAYDAY AMERICA !!

2010-05-02T16:29:00.003-05:00

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.</small>

Every year when we get to the first day of May I can’t help but feel sad.

My maternal grandmother was born in Italy on May first 1912.

Her father, Orlando, was a horse-cart maker and a community leader.

With the advent of Mussolini and his fascist “black shirt” punitive squads, they would go to Orlando’s home and, in front of the little girl’s eyes, arrest him, often beat him up, “purge” him-shoving cod liver oil down his throat (with a funnel)- and throw him in jail for a few days.

This would usually happen on the last week of April every year so that he would not be able to throw a party to celebrate his daughter’s birthday on May first, which could enable him, in the fascists’ eyes, to actually celebrate Workers Day, a strongly forbidden festivity in those years.

Yesterday, May 1, 2010, a large workers march was being planned in New York City and although I had received no assignment by any news organization whatsoever, I just decided to go along and cover it for my own sake.

The marchers were mostly legal and illegal immigrants, chanting at the top of their voices a desire to be recognized and integrated by a society they joined by the necessity to earn a living, to raise and educate their kids, as well as to provide for extended families left in their sub developed countries of origin.

Of course yesterday the recently passed Arizona law sb1070 on immigration was a hot and sad topic on everyone’s mouth.

I don’t feel this is the time nor perhaps the place to expand a lot about what I think of this issue, however I can say that, being an immigrant myself, having experienced poverty myself, having dreamt the “American Dream “ and to an extent having been able to live it, my heart is with these people.

Politics and politicking aside, I just present here some views I was able to capture of the immigrants march in New York City, May first 2010.

The GALLERA project

2010-04-26T16:06:00.003-05:00

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

In the Dominican Republic a “Gallera” is a round arena, usually carpeted, with tribunes and chairs overlooking, where cockfights take place.

A smell of blood, sweat and alcohol, permeates the place.

The “sport”of cockfighting is mainly a manly one.

The women you meet in a “Gallera”, aside from the occasional wife or daughter, are mostly prostitutes (“Cueros”), usually working along with the “Gallera”bar owner on a commission for the bottles sold. They entertain their clients between fights and then, after the last “pelea” (fight), they might go off with someone to a cheap hotel nearby to either celebrate a victory or soothe the pain of a loss.

The cocks are first weighted and matched in fighting pairs, then stowed in plastic, numbered cubicles, where they can be observed prior to the fight for everyone to detect their strength, their defects, their combativeness and place bets accordingly.

Before they fight, the cocks are “armed” with deadly spurs enabling them to stab their adversary more efficiently. The preparation of a fighting cock can take up to several hours. First the natural spurs are cut and shaped with a knife so that the plastic replacement spur can be glued over it, then stripes of a special sticky tapes are wrapped all around the spur in a similar way you would do with a boxer hands before slipping his boxing gloves on.

Also, before the fight, often for several weeks, the cocks go under a regimen of all sorts of vitamins and energizing potions. In addition the lower part of their bodies is accurately shaved and repeatedly sprayed with chewing tobacco (“andullo”) impregnated saliva by their trainers.

An aspect of the relationship between the trainers/cock owners and their animals that I must admit escapes my personal comprehension is how can someone care so much, invest so much money (vitamins, special food, etc) in their animal only to throw it into an arena to fight to their death?.

The fights are very noisy and quite bloody. People scream, to the top of their voices to change their bets and to encourage or insults to the fighting cocks.

Spectators in the front rows, closer to the arena, sometimes protect their clothes with the pages of old newspapers from the too common sprays and spurts of blood from the wounded cocks.

Money quickly changes hands as bets are doubled and tripled as the fight progresses. The cocks have a pre-set time limit to kill their adversary or else they can win (just like in boxing) with “points”, unless it’s a draw.

Weekly and monthly wages are doubled or lost in matter of minutes.

Utter desperation and exhilarating joy are common sentiments to be encountered at these cockfights.

The cock often becomes the living (or dead) symbol of either good luck or endless misery.

Some poor lady often collects the dead cocks, washes the blood off, peels them and sells them for their meat. The meat of a cock that died in a fight is very tough so it is usually cooked for many hours ,then shredded and mixed to herring filets to improve the taste. Obviously this culinary concoction is said to have marvelous aphrodisiac properties and strengthen a man’s sexual potency.

NEW OLD CITY

2010-04-23T18:28:00.002-05:00

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Living in New York City, I developed a sort of compulsion to photograph its unique buildings, to explore their post-modern shadows and textures.

These days, I do it mostly with my Iphone 3G, which, as photographer Chase Jarvis cleverly realized, is the best camera, as it ilives right in my pocket all the time.

So, nearly everyday, I return home with 20 to 50 new shots from this unique metropolis I have been calling home for more than twenty years and you can see here a few examples from my treasured archive.

Aside from buildings I also shoot street signs, scribbles, graffiti, manhole covers, grids, wall textures, trash, subway trains, posters, and all sort of objects that grab my eye and immaginatio, both outdoors and indoors, as I roam around the Big Apple.

When I look at the photos I often find myself thinking about the Buck Rogers comic books I loved to read as a kid and I feel like I somehow ended up living in them.

Mind you, I don't own a flying machine, nor a car. I would hate to own a car in NYC. Actually I think owning a car would be quite foolish here.

Click here to download:

too_much_too_many.mov (1786 KB)

The best way to see New York City is walking. Then, if you get tired, you can jump in a yellow cab or take the Subway. Easy.

This is one of the oldest new cities in the world and, for rapidly and not so graciously it might be aging, for all the different problems it had to endure and keeps struggling with, I can still smell the utopia that helped raise these skyscrapers. And I like it.

For me New York city is indeed one of the monuments to the American Dream. A symbolic city.

A place you either love or hate.
A place you love to hate.
A place you hate to love -but love anyway.