The media usually portrays the lives of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong as one of extremes—a black and white world of abusive employers and irresponsible ‘helpers’. Yet how accurate is this one-dimensional view in representing the daily experience of tens of thousands of women trying to cope with the challenges of providing a better life for their families?
In the cramped living spaces of Hong Kong, two cultures joined by an employment relationship are forced together by the mandatory live-in requirement. How do both workers and employers walk the line between the intimacy of proximity and the distance of professionalism? Back in South East Asia, families are left for years without daughters, wives, and mothers. How do they deal with the separation and sustain relationships over such distance and time?
Robert Godden
Independent journalist So Mei Chi and human rights photographer Robert Godden explored these issues and more in the book Strangers at Home to be published on 20 September 2015. An exhibition of the photos from the book will take place at Open Quote, Joint Publishing’s space at PMQ on Aberdeen Street, Hong Kong. The exhibition will open on 20 September and run for three weeks.
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.
Sohrab Hura
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:
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.
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.
Zacharie Rabehi
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.
Zacharie Rabehi
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:
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:
Yvan Cohen has been photographing in the Chinatown district of Bangkok for some 6 years now – visiting once or twice a week, mostly at night.
The project doesn’t have a clearly defined starting point because he didn’t plan to document Chinatown; there was no initial goal and no assignment. He was simply drawn to an area that he found visually inspiring because it felt genuine, it felt evocative and it felt connected to the past.
For anyone who knows Bangkok – or at least has an image of the city in their mind’s eye – they will know from his pictures that the districts he has been photographing represent a neglected facet of this metropolis. The typical caricature of Bangkok is a city of exotic temples, gleaming skysrapers, steamy bars, saffron-clad monks and eternally smiling inhabitants.
Yvan Cohen
Yet while much of Bangkok’s appeal is derived from these images of oriental exoticism, the reality is that many local communities and numerous historic buildings have already been devoured by rapid and unplanned development. The Bangkok of the postcard and the travel brochure is fast disappearing.
It is precisely Chinatown’s connection to the past, its anti-modern identity and its sense of culture, ancestry and tradition which draws him to it. Chinatown and a few other districts remain islands of authenticity where you can still catch glimpses of what life would have been like in this city decades, or perhaps even a century, ago.
Yvan Cohen
The pictures don’t carry a message per se, they don’t document a burning issue but they are a testament to an aspect of this city’s identity which is increasingly threatened. One day, perhaps not too far in the future, these pictures will serve as a visual bridge to the past and as a poignant reminder of a history and of an identity that risks being completely erased.
See more of Yvan Cohen`s photos about Chinatown at:
A video portrait by Bangkok based multimedia journalist Bradley Cox of photographer Yvan Cohen in Bangkok’s Chinatown district from his occasional series „Long Story Short“.
Yvan is a founding member of LightRocket, a cutting edge online service for photographers, including secure backup, customizable websites and direct sales. After honing his passion for photography in Europe, Yvan arrived in Asia in 1991 where he has been living and working as a photojournalist ever since. Yvan’s assignments have ranged from shooting fashion in Bangkok to covering major political and social stories across much of Asia.
Fluent in English, French and Thai, he has worked regularly for a range of international publications including, Time, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Australian, the New York Times and L’Express. Yvan was also a former photographic correspondent for AsiaWeek Magazine.
