Having lived in Turkey between 2003 to 2008 and produced the book, Fault Lines/Turkey/East/West looking at contemporary Turkey, I already had a clear idea of the issues and contradictions at play in todays Turkey. Fault Lines, coincided and focused on the dynamic changes taking place during my time in Turkey, landscapes, towns, and cities were being reshaped, an extensive road network was under construction, town centres “beautified,” and large …

This photo made by Italian free-lance photographer Fabio Bucciarelli, on duty for AFP in Syria, was awarded in 2013 the Robert CAPA Gold Medal, the 2nd Prize of World Press Photo Spot News Stories, and 2nd place of the Picture Of The Year International (POYi) – News Picture Story. The international news agency AFP produces up to 3000 new images per day in politics, conflicts, sport, fashion etc. Every year AFP photographers are awarded prizes …

attended the Turkish Olympiads from all over the world, while Ami Vitale portrayed the other side of Kapadokya (Cappadocia). The guidelines of the project were determined at the beginning. The photographs were supposed to be free of an orientalist viewpoint and preconceived notions of Turkish culture, and they were not to be taken from a touristic approach. Our aim was to tell something new instead of repeating clichés. The people who could do i…

Water management is one of the oldest and most entrenched issues in southeast Turkey. So much so that every new government for the past 40 years has worked on a range of dam and irrigation projects, all with the objective of solving this problem. No one can deny that there have been great advances as a result of these projects. People living in remote provinces have slowly begun to gain access to and use modern resources to update their irrigati…

Long before mobile photography became a hype, standard of use for millions and a controversy in discourse on photojournalism and iphone photography, van Kesteren collected and published handy photos which Iraqi refugees  had obtained from friends and family staying behind, living their day-to-day lives in war torn Iraq. By giving sych prominence to ordinary pictures by Iraqi people and publishing them alongside with his own images in “Bagh…

A cross-lighting ceremony that took place near Tupelo, Mississippi, in late March following a Ku Klux Klan rally in Memphis, Tennessee, that was organized to protest the renaming of three parks in the city built in honor of the Confederacy. It is a “cross lighting,” not “cross burning,” because these Klansmen “do not burn, but light the cross to signify that Christ is the light of the world.” Photo by Robert King. In late March editor-in-chief o…

1. Prize Portraits – Christian Charisius: “Shadow Play: Former Bundeskanzler Helmut Schmidt (SPD) takes part in a ceremony in Hamburg for renaming Botanischer Garten to Loki-Schmidt-Garden.”  © obs/dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH Great pleasure, vast sorrow, excitement, and thoughfulness. „dpa Pictures of the Year 2012“ call special moments of an many-faceted year to mind. 18 very special pictures of their photographers Deutsc…

A Bosniak soldier cries after arriving to his home village, 3 years early he had hid in the forest and watched his family and the rest of the village executed by Bosnian Serb forces. @1995 Emmanuel Ortiz “Broken Lights” is a journey through the wars that broke the republics, broke the communities and broke the people of the former Yugoslavia. Emmanuel Ortiz starts in Croatia visiting the frontlines in eastern Slavonija and the besieg…

the ugliness of war and the blind nationalism of politics. Falling into the fashion world by chance, when an editor, from the Italian Fashion magazine AMICA, discovered my political work.  With them commissioning me at first to document the Ralph Lauren store in New York, for they loved the way I documented Republican America in my first book “My America”, Steidl 2006. The real difficulty in Fashion is that it’s the complete opposite of journal…

Berlinstagram is the private iPhone project by Michael Schulz. With over 2000 iPhone pictures of Berlin over the last 2 years and about 90.000 followers, Berlinstagram is a shooting star in the iPhone Foto Community weltweit and a declaration of love to the city of Berlin. A small selection of 20 images will be exhibited at The Browse Gallery June 13th to July 13th 2013, together with 1 image of each of the 40 selected series of the Mobile Photo…

Title: Aleksander Zelekson, Nizhny Novgorod, RUSSIA, 2007  © Rob Hornstra / courtesy Flatland Gallery NL | Paris Under Vladimir Putin’s rule, Russia has reclaimed its position among the superpowers of the world in the past eight years, the economic recession and the tumultuous nineties seemingly all but forgotten. Thanks to the country’s huge abundance of raw materials such oil and natural gas, the Russian economy is flourishing as never before…

CYPRUS, Nicosia : People queue up outside a Laiki bank branch in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, on March 28, 2013, as they wait for the bank to open after an unprecedented 12-day lockdown. Queues of dozens of people formed before the doors swung open at 12:00pm (1000 GMT) for the first time since March 16, and there were tensions as a few branches opened late, with customers banging on the doors In March 2013, Cyprus, the small island country in …

day of shooting in the amateur fields on the edges of the Bosphorus. It felt like beginning another story. The fiendishness and zealotry that surrounded the professional games was gone. This was a much needed escape from the cramped rooms and chaotic streets of an overbearing city, a chance to run in the wind, move your body, sweat, play, breath. I wanted to drop the camera and race with these guys instead of puttering around on the sidelines, w…

For ten years Pedro Rosa Mendes (writer) and Wolf Böwig (photographer) traveled the region to document the West African wars. Their work has been recognized and published in newspapers and publications around the world. Under the label “The Charles Taylor Wars”, an international lineup of illustrators and artists now create a crossover version of the reports, merging illustration, photography and written word. With this media conversion the proj…

Berlin HIPsta Diary To take pictures with my smartphone has given me a new and instant way of seeing things. The pictures of this series were taken with the “Hipstamatic-App” within two years and represent diaryentries. Pictures of Berlin, my city… Exhibition at Restaurant Z. Click here for location information. …

Ballroom, Pitsunda, ABKHAZIA, 2009, © Rob Hornstra / Courtsey Flatland Gallery NL | Paris Mapping a future for photojournalism by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen In 2009 dutch author and filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen and the dutch photographer Rob Hornstra started their 5year project on Sochi (Russia). The small city at the Black Sea is the location for the Winter Olympics early  in 2014. The duo wants to document the change the city is goin…

For the second time chief international photo editor of Doctors without Borders Bruno de Cock will exhibit a selection of new iPhone pictures at Browse Fotofestival. 20 of his images will be on display together with 40 images of all the winners of the Berlin Calling Mobile Photo Award and 20 pictures of Michael Schulz Berlinstagram project from June 13th to July 13th 2013 at The Browse Gallery. …

Simple Beauty What do you really see? A moment can be special in any kind of way – once you discover the moment, that lets you feel something, stimulates your fantasy or creates something new within us. Beauty can be hidden anywhere. In the dead and alive, in the silence as well as in the noise, within colour and within greyness. Everyone has to define for oneself where to find it. Exhibition at Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Click here fo…

stanbul. Anyway, that experience is very important for me. Different shapes, colors, unique movements and motions: These all give one inspiration and a completely different sort of excitement. A photographer must always think freely and broadly; that is the only way he or she can capture unique images. What was interesting for me was not just Istanbul’s historical and artistic fabric but that the metropolis worked as a city. I saw interesting sig…

…th 300 sheep while Gülcan and Yasemin look after the 300 goats that climb the almost vertical face of the mountain. We hear the two girls shouting at them so that they don’t disperse. Under the trees, five Kangal dogs pretend to be asleep. The two following nights, as I sleep under the stars among the goats, I hear the dogs barking at the night’s sounds, walking around the animals that are not enclosed. They are like dreadful bodyguards. The six …

A dilapidated neighborhood in the city’s center, Tarlabaşı Boulvard runs parallel to Istiklal Prospect, Istanbul’s cosmopolitan artery. If, by walking down Istiklal, you can hear the city’s heartbeat, then Tarlabasi, only 3 minutes away, is its shadow twin, beating with its own irregular rhythm. In spite of its run-down looks and reputation for widespread crime, Tarlabaşı is a culturally vibrant neighborhood kaleidoscope – populated by mig…

I have seen Istanbul in a variety of different seasons. This city is, with its various cultural riches, a full to brimming depot of world heritage. And this characteristic always manages to awaken the desire to shoot photos in me. Istanbul’s residents are very warm and polite. I have never encountered any problems when taking photographs. Compared to people living in the other big cities of the world, Istanbul’s residents have lives less filled …

le in other cities, the people of my city, Tabriz, were in mourning. In later years, I got to see Ashura activities in not only Iran but other countries. I watched all sorts of religious rituals, and even participated in, for example, a Pagan festival. Just as there were aspects to these that resembled Ashura Day, there were also of course different aspects. And still later, I realized that acts such as beating and whipping oneself, drawing blood…

In January of 2003, the TV series ‘Kurtlar Vadisi’ (‘Valley of the Wolves’) had just begun to be broadcast. Thanks to its references to the politics, as well action scenes that Turkish viewers had not been much accustomed to in locally produced series, it became very popular. There are many different TV series in Turkey that appeal to all sorts of viewer demographics. There are historical series, political ones, family series, action series and …

Tokyo Tower A new tower, Sky Tree, recently opened in Tokyo and has become the newest sightseeing destination. It has replaced the Tokyo Tower, which has been in the center of the city for more than fifty years. The more Sky Tree is crowded by people, the more Tokyo Tower attracts me. The tower is visible from anywhere in Tokyo. I don’t doubt Tokyo Tower will  keep giving me inspiration more and more in the future. Exhibition at Bezirksamt Fried…

Water Reading With pictures taken in Rio’s historical downtown, between Lapa and Cinelândia, this work is a reading of the city through its reflection on water, its places and people that we are used to see in a daily routine. It is from a new perspective, distorting the world and making it a magnificent thing. At the same time, in this vision, the fluidity of the water contrasts with the hardness of concrete, like a dream being swallowed by rea…

“I Like It. What Is It?” This sequence started with a Facebook group, “Daily Shot,” where every member of the group posts a new photo from that day. Before that I thought that a photographer is someone with a strong ability for mathematics. I love the idea that anyone can make pictures today. We will never be out of genres and ideas in photography. That is my message in this series of mobile photography. Exhibition at Bezirksamt Frie…

© Kai Wiedenhöfer As we know today, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the end of the Eastern bloc was anything but the end of the Wall as a symptom of enmity cast in concrete. To the contrary: old walls remained, new “protection walls” were build. Since 2006, photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer has photographed eight of these border- and separation walls for his project “WALL ON WALL”. A series of panorama pictur…

Burmese Days This is a small black and white edit of photographs from Myanmar. The people I’ve met there was incredibly nice and heartwarming. The photos were taken during Christmas and New Year 2012/13. Exhibition at Salon Halit – Art. Click here for location information. …

© Kai Löffelbein In Hong Kong, one of the world’s wealthiest metropolises, there are around 130,000 people living in cages. While ever more luxury shops open just a few streets away, many inhabitants can no longer afford the increasing rents. To avoid living on the streets, they move into wire cages, apartments subdivided into tiny cubicles or coffin-sized rooms – their entire world reduced to a few square metres, a life shared with strangers. A…

©_Katja Heinemann After unsuccessfully trying to conceive a child for years, Rhonda and Gerry, an American couple, hired a surrogate mother in India. A short documentary for the iPad, this video is part of a feature story package on the phenomenon of outsourcing pregnancies via commercial surrogacy, a booming part of the medical tourism industry in India. The exhibition “The Global Baby: Our Family, Made In India” was selected for Be…

Iraq, Basra, 24 April 2012 – An old woman, Undertaker, wears the linen-wrapped body of a child in the children’s graveyard for burial in Basrah. © Christian Werner During the bombardment of Iraq in 2003 thousand tons of depleted uranium ammunition dropped on cities like Basra and Fallujah and their inhabitants. After the Gulf War, the cancer quota rose, and every day, malformed children are born. The exhibition “Depleted Uraniu…

Geneva Camp, Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesch. © Maria Litwa ‘Inside Geneva Camp’ is a multimedia story about three young women who live in Geneva Camp in Dhaka. It’s the largest ghetto-like settlement for the Urdu speaking minority in Bengali speaking nation of Bangladesh. A huge number of this language minority lives here since 40 years. The exhibition “Inside Geneva Camp” was selected for Berlin Fotofestival’s multimedia special “E…

Pictore from Texas Blues. © Uwe. H. Martin Multimedia report White Gold investigates the social and environmental effects of cotton production. It is part of the collaborative art and research project World Of Matter. The exhibition “White Gold” was selected for Berlin Fotofestival’s multimedia special “Explore New Media”. …

CITY OF NORMALCY (ORDINARY PEOPLE). Women wait to go through a metal detector at one of the entrances to downtown Grozny just before the Victory Day parade on May 9, 2010. Outside the entrance an armoured personal carrier is parked. Grozny, Chechnya, Russia, 2010 , © GROZNY: NINE CITIES / Photography & video by Olga Kravets, Maria Morina, and Oksana Yushko,Ccuration: Anna Shpakova, Music and Multimedia Production Jose Bautista / KanseiSounds…