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LKPOV / Ask Mr. LK?
Posts tagged "war photography"
LK, retired photo-assistant and freelance-photographer. LKPOV, notebook of inspiration and visual references. Click tags to see personal posts or other categories. Feel free to ask.

conscientious:

dvafoto:

Short film about Simon Norfolk’s Burke+Norfolk.

“But when I watched the short documentary film, I was struck by his words, and his willingness to put his politics where his photographers were. He spoke with surprising honesty not just about what he thought of the work being produced by embedded photographers, but also about the entire war and its objectives. This is very rare to hear when it comes to working photojournalists. Most professionals prefer to hide their personal politics and opinions behind vague statements about ‘bearing witness’ or ‘asking only questions, and not offering answers’ and other such obfuscations that hide their fear of being marginalized in the rather small, cliquish and deeply conservative editorial world that is photojournalism.”

- Asim Rafiqui writes about Norfolk and his project on in a post called “Against Whispering” on his blog A Spinning Head.

I guess people would rather talk endlessly about Photoshop pseudo-scandals in photojournalism (while ignoring the increasingly kitschy aesthetic that is so widely used) or about the supposed heroism of photojournalists themselves than about issues that actually should be covered. Good for Simon Norfolk that he is willing to be a lone wolf.

vicemag: Army Girls Can Be Girly Girls in Afghanistan I don’t know about you ladies, but to me the army has never seemed like the ideal place to spend your early twenties. In my mind, there would be no shopping, Gossip Girl or spending hours in one position under the sun trying to achieve the perfect tan. Or basically anything else that’s silly and unimportant, but is an important part of me feeling unashamedly like a girl. Turns out I was wrong. Lalage Snow is a photographer who has spent a good part of the last five years in Iraq and Afghanistan photographing female soldiers. According to her work, girls in the army remain very intent on “being girls.” Not that this makes the army any more appealing to me personally, but I think it’s cute to know that, while you’re sweeping the roadsides for Taliban IEDs, you can also sorta smile to yourself whilst imagining Spencer from Made In Chelsea getting blown up by one. So I called up Lalage for a chat. VICE: Hey Lalage. What’s up?Lalage Snow: Hey! Just got back from holiday with some friends. We stayed in a house in Assenois, which is in the south of Belgium. We ate lots of paté and drunk biére blonde.And how did that differ from your time in Iraq and Afghanistan?Haha! It was different, but you know, it was much girlier than you’d think. The British girls in Iraq, for example, would sunbathe any chance they got, while when it came to the way they decorated their bunks everything was over-the-top girly. Pink washbags and sponges, pink iPod cases. The American girls would have a slumber party almost every night. They’d watch scary films and eat popcorn in their little bunker on a computer. When you are in such a masculine environment you sort of need to cling on to your femininity really tightly. How old were most of the girls?Young. The American female engagement team were like, 19 to 22 years old.You know how they say women are more tolerant to pain, because of our periods and baby birthing and all that? Did you find that to be the case with the female soldiers?Well, for the time I hung out with the girls they never came under fire. Their main job is to go out and find Afghan women on the streets and search them. Because men are not allowed to speak or touch Afghan women, they were finding that often they were hiding rifles or thousands of dollars under their burqas, and so the female team was brought in. Right. Were they being treated differently by the male soldiers?Yes and no. They would get some hassle and some slack at the same time from the other guy soldiers, but I think at the end of the day, they look at it and say we are just soldiers together—a job is a job. They have the confidence to do so.
But the funniest thing was the Afghan response to these girls. They can see that it is a soldier in uniform, but they also see the blonde hair underneath the cap in a ponytail and they are like, “Oh my God, it’s a girl looking like a man!” They all think that Western girls are really weird. Continue reading + see more pictures

vicemag:

Army Girls Can Be Girly Girls in Afghanistan

I don’t know about you ladies, but to me the army has never seemed like the ideal place to spend your early twenties. In my mind, there would be no shopping, Gossip Girl or spending hours in one position under the sun trying to achieve the perfect tan. Or basically anything else that’s silly and unimportant, but is an important part of me feeling unashamedly like a girl.

Turns out I was wrong. Lalage Snow is a photographer who has spent a good part of the last five years in Iraq and Afghanistan photographing female soldiers. According to her work, girls in the army remain very intent on “being girls.”

Not that this makes the army any more appealing to me personally, but I think it’s cute to know that, while you’re sweeping the roadsides for Taliban IEDs, you can also sorta smile to yourself whilst imagining Spencer from Made In Chelsea getting blown up by one. So I called up Lalage for a chat.

VICE: Hey Lalage. What’s up?
Lalage Snow: Hey! Just got back from holiday with some friends. We stayed in a house in Assenois, which is in the south of Belgium. We ate lots of paté and drunk biére blonde.

And how did that differ from your time in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Haha! It was different, but you know, it was much girlier than you’d think. The British girls in Iraq, for example, would sunbathe any chance they got, while when it came to the way they decorated their bunks everything was over-the-top girly. Pink washbags and sponges, pink iPod cases. The American girls would have a slumber party almost every night. They’d watch scary films and eat popcorn in their little bunker on a computer. When you are in such a masculine environment you sort of need to cling on to your femininity really tightly.



How old were most of the girls?
Young. The American female engagement team were like, 19 to 22 years old.

You know how they say women are more tolerant to pain, because of our periods and baby birthing and all that? Did you find that to be the case with the female soldiers?
Well, for the time I hung out with the girls they never came under fire. Their main job is to go out and find Afghan women on the streets and search them. Because men are not allowed to speak or touch Afghan women, they were finding that often they were hiding rifles or thousands of dollars under their burqas, and so the female team was brought in.

Right. Were they being treated differently by the male soldiers?
Yes and no. They would get some hassle and some slack at the same time from the other guy soldiers, but I think at the end of the day, they look at it and say we are just soldiers together—a job is a job. They have the confidence to do so.


But the funniest thing was the Afghan response to these girls. They can see that it is a soldier in uniform, but they also see the blonde hair underneath the cap in a ponytail and they are like, “Oh my God, it’s a girl looking like a man!” They all think that Western girls are really weird.

timelightbox: Donovan Wylie’s new book, Outposts: Kandahar Province and an accompanying exhibition at the U.K.’s National Media Museum show us some of the tiniest bases in remote areas of southern Afghanistan. See more here.

timelightbox:

Donovan Wylie’s new book, Outposts: Kandahar Province and an accompanying exhibition at the U.K.’s National Media Museum show us some of the tiniest bases in remote areas of southern Afghanistan. See more here.