Essays and Features

As a young photographer in search of his identity Ian Teh traveled to the hinterlands of China. It was 1999 and the country was celebrating its 50th anniversary as a Communist nation with much fanfare. Under the leadership of then-President Jiang Zemin, there was a renewed commitment to Deng Xiaoping’s program of economic reforms. Capitalistic growth would skyrocket in the coming decade. From long travels among industrial towns, Teh intuited that the country lay on the cusp of immense change. So he made a promise to himself — to keep returning to these spaces that were to become the source of China’s global power.

15 years later, the promise has been kept. As China has sashayed onto the world stage with great aplomb, Teh has become part of a small group of photographers, writers, journalists and artists that have traveled and lived far beyond the lights of Shanghai and Beijing and have attempted to capture the daily lives of those fueling China’s “growth” story.

He has published two monographs on China — Undercurrents (2008) and Traces (2011). His approach has changed dramatically between the two bodies of work. From a raw and visceral vision showing chance encounters and rambling journeys, he has moved to a more formal aesthetic using large static panoramas to capture landscapes that are primarily sites of environmental erosion and industrial invasion. His use of colour has remained unfailingly subtle — a palette of pastels that was far ahead of his time when he first began to work with it.

Alisha Sett sat down with Teh to discuss his evolution across two decades. Read the interview and see more pictures on OBSCURA, Malaysia’s premier photography festival website:

http://www.obscurafestival.com/2015/interview-ian-teh/

A short story and photo essay from Indian photographer Sohrab Hura.

The sound of the cage crashing to the ground tore through the house. The crow had escaped. A light came on, and on the bed Madhu tottered from left to right trying to find her head. Her hands clasped at the smooth top of her torso, her fingers feeling for any trace of a stump of a head before falling still for a moment and then again repeating the motion, frantically. Even now she kept forgetting that she did not have a head. It had already been a year. An obsessive lover had stolen it while she had fallen asleep to the rumble of the waves outside. She should have seen it coming. The fortuneteller had warned her that it would hap – pen, and there had been other signs too. Every time he made love to her he bit her really hard. It wasn’t something unusual for a man to do, but with him it was different. He would try to tear the flesh off her breasts and when he didn’t manage, he would smile and say, „I just wanted a piece of you so that I wouldn’t miss you when I leave“, and then he would slip the money down beside her.

It was a hot and sweaty night. The wind had strangely stopped blowing in the evening and with it the sea had died. Madhu rubbed the sweat off her body. The day had been long and boring. An idiot of a photographer had come over from the nearby city of Chennai. He had heard about this woman who had lost her head and wanted to take photographs of her. He had said that he wanted to take photographs of all the wonderful and vicious things that happened along the Indian coastline and that he had started on his way through Tamil Nadu. „Why on Earth would anybody waste his time on something like that? Anyway he had a strange accent,“ she thought. (by Sohrab Hura)

See the whole article and more pictures on VICE UK:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-lost-head-and-the-bird

Sohrab Hura is a young Indian photographer, from a small place called Chinsurah in West Bengal. Trained as an economist, he gradually turned to photography, shooting his immediate surroundings, family and close friends, simply “making photographs just for the love of making photographs”. Eventually, he made the leap to photography as his main occupation and became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2014. He is currently the coordinator of the Anjali House children’s photography workshop that takes place during the Angkor Photo Festival, Cambodia every year and his home base is New Delhi, India.

http://www.magnumphotos.com

The political instability has plagued Nepal since the end of the civil war in 2006. Longstanding problems of discrimination and social exclusion affects large segments of the Nepali society.

Continuing aftershocks and landslides make it clear that the earthquake in April was not a single disaster, posing serious challenges for the people of Nepal.

Women, Dalits, Indigenous Peoples or people with disabilities, are the ones facing increased challenges when accessing urgently needed relief material and psychological support but are also facing human rights challenges.

Every year, thousands of child and women are trafficked into neighbouring country India sold into prostitution, domestic slavery or into forced labor. “Loss of livelihoods and worsening living conditions may allow traffickers to easily convince parents to give their children up for what they are made to believe will be a better life,” Tomoo Hozumi, UNICEF Nepal representative, said in a statement. “The traffickers promise education, meals and a better future. But the reality is that many of those children could end up being horrendously exploited and abused.”

After the first quake, thousands came to take refuge in Kathmandu, people who lost family members, their assets. Their roots have been forced out the ground, they are living in dramatic situations since then.

Scared, traumatised and grieving they for most only received a tent and some food and had to survive on their own. Old women surviving on their own, babies being born in the camps, rain infiltrating in tents, sickness, have made their basic needs a daily hassle.

Article published in The Kashmir Walla, see more pictures:

http://thekashmirwalla.com/2015/08/life-in-the-nepal-camps/

Zacharie Rabehi is a French photographer who came to India at the age of eighteen. He loved the country so much that he decided to stay. Check out his powerful images on:

http://cargocollective.com/zacharie