Asia Journalist

„My latest story about Arsenic poisoning victims in Hunan Province, China has been published on Caixin Weekly. The victims live in a village near the highly polluted Arsenic sulphide ore mine and factories, hundreds of people died of skin cancer, lung cancer or liver cancer. Though the government shut down the mine and factory in 2011, but the pollution’s still left over. It’s the dark side of the old economic development mode in China. (by Yuyang Liu, Editors: Lilan Luo, Jia Wan and Sikun Wang)

Read the whole article (in Chinese) and see more pictures on Caixin Weekly:

http://mp.weixin.qq.com

Born in Ziyang, Sichuan province, Yuyang Liu is currently based in Guangzhou. His photography work focuses on urbanization and immigration issues in a rapidly changing China. He won the 2014 Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship, through which he studied at an intensive five-week program at New York University. His work has been exhibited in China and the United States. (Chinafile)

http://www.yuyangliu.com

“She wanted to tell the story of being neither here nor there, neither male nor female, and finally, neither a eunuch nor someone like me. She would always ask me, ”Tell me: what am I?”

World-renowned photographer Dayanita Singh’s Myself Mona Ahmed is a bold, empathetic glimpse into the life of Mona Ahmed, who belongs to one of India’s many visible-yet-ignored communities, the eunuchs. Feared by some and revered by others for their supposed mysticism throughout Indian history, it would be unfair to say that they haven’t been documented sensitively through various mediums in recent times. Yet none cut quite as deep as Singh’s poignant portrayal of Mona over the course of so many years, parallel to their deepening relationship.

The two first met in 1989, when Singh was on a shooting assignment for London’s The Times. Speaking of the assignment in the introduction to her book, Singh says it started out as  “a way to establish my credentials as a photojournalist, to show that I was on par with the boys in my male-dominated profession. When you work for the media, which tend to see India only as either exotic or disastrous, a story on eunuchs is a must, along with a story on prostitution, child labour, dowry deaths, and child marriage.”

However, the assignment didn’t proceed as planned. When Mona realised that the project was for the Times in London, she was concerned and asked that the film be returned to her—she had relatives in the UK who did not know she was a eunuch. Singh returned the film and Mona promptly threw it into the trash. While that put an end to the assignment, it was the beginning of a friendship whose importance in Singh’s life was not imminently clear.

See the whole article and more picture on

http://homegrown.co.in/from-eunuch-to-unique-this-photo-story-on-mona-ahmed-is-incredibly-poignant

Dayanita Singh studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. She is best known for her captivating photographs of the less obvious side of Indian society. Her images of people working, celebrating, or resting show Indian life without embellishment and capture insights into contemporary life that often challenge the disaster or exotic stereotypes of the West.

http://www.dayanitasingh.com

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/