Book Release: Protest.

The first book in the series entitled "Protest" is now available for purchase.
This is the first book in a series entitled "Protest". It covers a time when the United Kingdom was being run by the Conservative Party under the leadership of Prime Minister David Cameron. I spent two years (2014-16) documenting the protest movement in Cardiff in south Wales. The nature of the protests during that period ranged from marches in solidarity with Gaza to anti-Nato protests when the NATO conference was held in Newport, Wales, anti-austerity and more recently protests in support of refugees and solidarity with the new leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn.

You can buy a copy directly from the publisher here

Signed Limited Editions (an Edition of 10) are also available on my website here

January's Cold Moon and dusting of snow - Leominster, Herefordshire.

Paul Conroy and the Peoples Convoy to Syria

   The People’s Convoy: A Children’s Hospital for Aleppo

British photographer Paul Conroy in Syria (Image reproduced courtesy of Paul Conroy)

On 22 February 2012 during the Syrian uprising, Paul Conroy was on assignment for the The Sunday Times with journalist Marie Colvin, the British photographer was injured while covering events from the Syrian city of Homs, a stronghold of Syrian opposition forces. The building where he and other journalists were based was shelled by Syrian government forces. Marie Colvin and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik were killed in the attack,  Conroy was injured along with another journalist, French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro. Conroy suffered leg injuries in the attack and was subsequently smuggled out of the city and across the Syrian border to Lebanon. He wrote a book about his experience called "Under the Wire - Marie Colvin's Final Assignment". Since then he has been recouperating in the relative quiet of Devon.

Paul's book about his experiences in Syria

Now he feels it is "Time to turn words into actions", one of his very good friends is Dr Rola Alkurdi Hallam, "cousin to one of my rescuers and the doctor famous for treating the victims of the infamous barrel bomb attack where hundreds of children were filmed, their flesh hanging from the bone in a scene from what could well have been a zombie apocalypse."

Paul and Rola are planning and raising funds for a "Peoples Convoy" to Syria to deliver seriously needed medical equipment. 
 
The last children’s hospital in besieged Aleppo was destroyed by airstrikes just last month. But people are coming together to take action. On the 17th December, a group of doctors will drive a convoy from London to the Syrian border with enough supplies for a new children’s hospital. From there, local aid organisations will get it to doctors in Syria so they can start work. They’re asking for our help to fund this mission and support the incredible job that medics do every day in Syria.

  In the video above Rola Alkurdi Hallam talks to Channel 4 news about the Peoples Convoy.

Paul remembers; "Five years ago laying in the shattered remains of what had, only minutes earlier, been the Baba Amr media centre in Homs, Syria. Next to me lay the shredded corpses of my friend and Sunday Times colleague Marie Colvin and the young French photographer, Remi Ochlic. We had been reporting from the besieged town, and at that time the estimated death toll was 8000, that figure now stands at nearly half a million. I am alive today because of the bravery of dozens of young, desperate and very brave civilians. Most of them died rescuing me. 
For five years now I have had to listen to the shallow, half hearted words of politicians (the few exceptions know who they are), who, for whatever reasons, have failed to halt the murderous onslaught of the Assad regime against its own people.

After the last of the hospitals was decimated by the Russians, Rola and I decided, in the words of my old friend Tony Benn that, 'If you want something doing, do it yourself.' That's what we are doing.
We cannot rely on the broken promises or vacuous statement of intent by politicians, many busy packing to move on to greener, and often more lucrative pastures."

Paul and Rola have made this appeal: 

"We are organising the People's Convoy for Aleppo. Essentially a flat pack emergency hospital to treat the children of Aleppo, who now have no emergency hospitals at all. We are free of any government or official funding and are relying on the inherent sense of humanity most of us carry within. We need volunteers, media attention, celebs to raise awareness and people to travel either the full length of the convoy, one stage, or even one day to give us a good send off. We owe the maimed, starving, traumatised victims of the Assad/Putin onslaught so much, this seems the least we can do. So help us please, if need be Rola and I will deliver it ourselves, I suspect though there are enough decent, moral minded people out there for that not to happen.
Please check out the links on how to help. Join us in the people's convoy. In twenty years time you can look your kids in the eyes and say, ' I tried', that's all we are asking. 

Thank you all,
Paul and Rola x"

The Peoples Convoy intend to raise the approx £90,000 needed for the Children’s Hospital through crowd-funding. They need to raise a further £20,000 towards the costs of the convoy. 

The convoy will leave on the 17th December and start in the UK and travel overland through France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The convoy will take 5 days to reach the Turkey-Syria border. When the convoy reaches the Turkey-Syria border it will be dis-assembled and handed over to IDA. They will then transfer the hospital resources through known routes and channels to mitigate the risk of remaining in convoy. Convoy chaperones will return home from Turkey.

The logistics of the operation will be handled by Across the Divide. They have 20 years experience of working around the globe, from remote projects in Mozambique to the BBC’s recent Children in Need Rickshaw Challenge.

If you want to volunteer, donate or get ivolved you can contact Cando, the organisation behind the Peoples Convoy by emailing: rola@candoaction.org

Or check out the links below to find out more about the Peoples Convoy and Cando:

https://youtu.be/BVWUsUlkefE https://act.thesyriacampaign.org/donate/peoples-convoy/
http://www.candoaction.org

A postcard from Anastasia Taylor-Lind in Ukraine.

   Originally, Anastasia Taylor-Lind travelled to the Ukraine in 2014 as part of an ongoing project called "Negative Zero", documenting the effects of population decline in Europe. Her arrival in the Ukraine coincided with the "Euromaidan Revolution" which started in February of that year and resulted in the ousting of the then President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Anastasia started to cover the revolution, producing a series of portraits which became the widely acclaimed book "Maidan: Portraits from the Black Square" published by GOST. 

Anastasia has now relocated to the Ukraine and is working on a new project about the war there. As part of this she recently posted on her social media accounts that she would be sending postcards as part of the project, inviting her followers to sign up to recieve one. So far she has already sent out hundreds of them around the world. One of them came to me as I had signed up to be a part of this.  

This is the postcard I recieved from Anastasia Taylor-Lind.

This is the message she wrote on the back.

This is the Imageblend I created after grabbing a shot of a gorgeous sunset in Leominster last night.

This was Anastasia's response to my Instagram post.

 As she said, unexpected and poignant. For me it's kind of poignant that the amount of people who have lost their lives in the conflict equate to the amount of people who have visited my blog from the Ukraine in the past few years. That would be 20% of my audience...gone!

I will be posting more about this in the next couple of months here on my blog.  

Upton Upon Severn Blues Festival 2015.

This weekend thousands of people flocked to the sleepy riverside town of Upton Upon Severn in Worcestershire for this years Upton Blues festival, which attracts acts from around the world.
If you are the ladies who asked me to take their picture on Saturday night at the Riverside stage drop me an email for a copy of the picture ;) . 

Interview; Slowing down with Daniella Zalcman.

   Folkestone in Kent, England, a photographer peers into the viewfinder of her TLR (Twin Lens Reflex) camera. Through the viewfinder she frames an English R.A.F officer, Squadron Leader Wayne Ladd poses in front of his Spitfire. The American photographer releases the shutter and the moment is captured for eternity. 

But who is this photographer? It could well be Margaret Bourke White, the first American female war photojournalist on assignment for Life magazine...it is in fact Daniella Zalcman, the scene described in the opening paragraph took place in 2013 and Wayne Ladd is a reenactor, his Spitfire a replica. 

"Margaret! One of my all time heroes. I started photographing World War II reenactors when I first moved to the UK and couldn’t legally work while some paperwork came through. Two and a half years later, I’m still photographing them. I’m actually about to go have lunch with one of them right now — a former Royal Engineer whose father was in Normandy on D-Day."

  

R.A.F Squadron Leader Wayne Ladd in front of his Spitfire. 2013. © Daniella Zalcman

Originally from Washington D.C, "But went to college and became a real human in New York." Daniella is a London based photojournalist who regularly contributes to the Wall Street Journal as their British Imperialism correspondent. Her award winning work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TIME, Sports Illustrated, and CNN, among others. Her photographs have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe and are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In an era of photography where 6 frames per second is the norm, where megapixels and sensor size are what matters and you can fit thousands of pictures on a single memory card. Daniella has taken a step back to a more sedate period of photography when in the 1940's and 1950's press photographers used medium format and only got 12 shots per roll of film. when my Dad started his career as a press photographer in the late 1950's his first professional camera was a plate camera! So even then 12 shots a roll was something of a luxury.

"I’d always loved photography, but I originally wanted to be a reporter. I was the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper and joined my college newspaper the second I got to campus, but it wasn’t until my second year of college that I serendipitously started shooting."

Whilst studying for a B.A. in Architecture with concentrations in Photography and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,  Daniella spent some time as an Editorial Intern at Wired Magazine and as a Photography Intern at The New Yorker. Shortly after this Daniella got her first break into the New York photojournalism community. 

"In September 2007, then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to speak at Columbia. The administration heavily restricted media access, and the NY Daily News wasn’t accredited. A photo editor called the Columbia undergraduate newspaper hoping to hire a student to shoot for them, and I picked up the phone. .. I was raised and trained by New York City tabloid photographers and editors — an experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It taught me to be incredibly hard-working, resourceful, quick on my feet, and generally tough as nails. Some of my fondest memories from breaking into the NYC photojournalism community are going on ride-alongs with legendary New York Daily News photographer Todd Maisel — multiple police scanners crackling, driving on the sidewalk on the way to breaking news scenes."

Daniella freelanced for the NY Daily News until 2010. "The Wall Street Journal started its own New York metro section in 2010, and a former editor from the NYDN was hired to help build the photo desk. I felt like I’d learned what I could from the Daily News and a few people I really cared about had left the paper, so I felt it was time to move on."

LGBT rights activist Sandra Ntebi in her home in Kampala. Uganda. 2013 © Daniella Zalcman

"Double Lives" the first part of a wider project called "Kuchus in Uganda" was Daniella's first major photo project. "I was in Uganda en route to South Sudan to cover its independence in 2011 and was looking for a story to work on in the week I had while I waited for my visa to come through. The man commonly referred to as Uganda’s first gay rights activist, David Kato, had been murdered a few months before, so I reached out to the LGBT community and began photographing their world."  

Back in 2009 international scrutiny accompanied the Ugandan efforts to institute the death penalty for homosexuality, with British, Canadian, French, and American leaders expressing concerns for human rights. The bill was finally passed last year to the dismay of the international community. Following on from this Daniella is also working on a story (supported by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting) on LGBTI asylum seekers from former British Colonies in the UK. As she writes in her project overview..."The UK left behind discriminatory penal codes in all of their African protectorates, criminalizing homosexuality in places where sexual orientation or gender identity had never before been stigmatized. Decades later, with the help of foreign evangelical preachers, anti-homosexuality laws are now the norm. But the UK continues to turn away Commonwealth asylum seekers in spite of that shared history and thorough documentation that their lives are in danger."

 

New York and London mashup. 2012. © Daniella Zalcman

In 2012 Daniella moved from New York to London, this brought about her next project which would be widely acclaimed across the world, "New York and London".  

On her website Daniella says this of the project..."I created this series of double exposures to map the intersections between two sets of streets and skylines. The resulting images are part New York, part London, and collectively represent my vision of home." Is there an artistic influence behind NY+L I wondered..."I suppose, in that they’re the only images I’ve ever taken that could really be construed as fine art. I studied architecture in college and I think the New York + London series certainly is very architectural in spirit."  

 

EchoSight mashup. 2013 © Daniella Zalcman/EchoSight

This project was the progenitor of the highly successful Echo/Sight project that she runs with fellow New Yorker and photographer Danny Ghitis whom she met at the 2009 Eddie Adams Workshop.  "EchoSight was an extension of my New York + London project playing with multi-city double exposures — we added the collaborative element and it really took off from there." After a few months the pair realised that they couldn't sustain the daily posting's as they had been and decided to open the project up to other photographers from around the world, the first two guest photographers were Ed Kashi and Laura El-Tantawy, from there it has gone from strength to strength. 

I asked Daniella what motivates her photographically..."Ah, these are all clichés, I think, but I’m most drawn to communities that are on the fringe of mainstream society — by choice or otherwise. I think journalism at its best gives a voice to those who have been marginalized and neglected and aims to tell their stories with empathy and dignity. I’m also drawn to stories that are connected to the legacies of western colonialism — particularly since I moved to the UK."

Daniella has been using medium format recently for her projects, I just had to ask why. "When I first started playing around with cameras in high school, they were all digital, and my first professional assignments were shot on digital cameras as well. I took one intro to photography class in college that was 35mm black and white film, partially because I thought it was important to understand the history of the craft of photography, and fell in love with film. Most of my projects these days are shot on medium format. I’m a much better photographer on 6x6. I think part of it is the inherent preciousness of film — it’s so easy to fire off a few hundred shots on digital and not stop to craft each frame. I’m much more deliberate and thoughtful with film, and I think it shows."

Daniella has admitted in the past to being addicted to vintage camera's, I asked her how many she has..."TOO MANY. It’s pretty bad. I do legitimately shoot with quite a few of them, is my excuse — mostly a Yashica D TLR, and many of the rest of them are casualties of trying to find the best medium format camera for me and my work. I went through a Hasselblad C (never again, with a shutter that fires like a machine gun), a Mamiya RB67 (too heavy), a Mamiya 6 (I’m terrible with rangefinders), and so on. TLRs are really perfect for me." 

Which contemporary photographers does Daniella admire? "Oh this is always so hard. It’s constantly changing, and so many of the people I admire are people I consider colleagues and friends. Right now — Lynsey Addario, David Guttenfelder, Jerome Delay, Ed Ou. Robin Hammond. Need more women! Natalie Keyssar, Laura El Tantawy, Kirsten Luce. The list goes on and on."

Lisa Rapaso sits around the communal fire at the Long House. The fire is the center of communal activity in Runnymede. 2015 © Daniella Zalcman

  Daniella's most recent project "How To Make The Wasteland Grow" has been focusing on the land activists who are living in a camp in Runnymede, Surrey.  The residents of the Runnymede eco-village believe modern living is fundamentally broken and decided they wanted nothing to do with it. "The Diggers" - named after a group of land activists who took over or squatted on commons and fields during the English civil war, have lived on the four-acre plot of disused land, 30 miles west of London since 2012. They are currently fighting an eviction in the Royal Courts of Justice. Daniella stumbled upon the group at the start of  this year, and, after a few phone calls, began to visit every week or so, spending time in the camp, helping out with chores around the camp, gaining trust. Daniella continues to visit the Runnymede community and is still working on this long term project. 

Self Portrait © Daniella Zalcman

To find out more about Daniella and her work check out these links below;

Website 

 Instagram

 New York + London

EchoSight 

Day Three; Upton Upon Severn 30th International Jazz Festival Parade.