Today i wanna direct you to a couple of important projects that catched my attention in the last days, covering different issues, some big in the media as the Haiti story, others often forgotten or never really told before. I’m always affected by two major things. The one is the quality of the visual side, the other thing is the quality of the storytelling. And i think these two are important when we want to adress stories that might be far away from daily life of the public that is looking at it. Not creating a pity, but creating an interest for the issue.
The first story is done by the Open Society Institute about the issue of stateless persons, persons without any ID-card, no recognition as citizens of any state. Some of them life at a place all their life, but they could not get registered, what brings a lot of problems like no social security, no jobs, and so on. What you can see below is just the introduction. The Open Society Institute has a full multimedia feature with stories from different places what you can find here.
.
The second story i would like to direct your attention to today is done by danish photojournalist Jan Garup as part of the project ‘Consequences’, what covers the effects of Climate Change. I wrote about that project before here, but this particular story was not featured on the main website with insteed having a story of Jan Garup about the civil war in Darfur (what is also close related to the effects of Climate Change, resulting in land shortages for use for agriculture or cattle). This story is about refugees that come from Somalia to Kenya and Yemen, partly because of the civil war, but also because of the changes in the climate that makes it impossible for them to live where they lived before. The story was featured in the famous NY Times Lens blog with a short interview of Jan Garup. Click on the picture or here to get to it.
.
.
The third story is done by photojournalist Ron Haviv of the famous agency VII and covers the aftermath of the Haiti Earthquake. Haviv was in Haiti the day after the earthquake and is one of those guys you would call ‘old combat photographers’ having covered more or less all wars and disasters of the last decade. The multimedia piece below was done for the telegraph 21, a video magazine. There was a lot written about the media coverage of Haiti, about sensationalism and all that, about photography without permission, voyeurism and so on. This piece for sure pictures the worst, the dead bodies, the desperate people, all of what you thought after some days that it might be not the only story from Haiti. And i really get the feeling of shame in the last scene when the woman is lifting her hand to the photographer as it feels exactly that to me: voyeuristic. Even when the rest of the piece is good and important. But you can dicide yourself. What do you think?
