Interview in Herefordshire Live about my work and forthcoming books.

Recently sat down with Mark Bowen from Herefordshire Live to chat about my work and my forthcoming series of books "Protest". Click on the link to check it out!!

http://herefordshirelive.co.uk/photography/jim-wood

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 

Interview; Marvi Lacar and 1in20.

Marvi Lacar

  
   Recently I have been collaborating with Marvi Lacar whilst contributing to her highly successful online project 1in20, a platform promoting an open conversation about mental health issues and emotions we all share but don't necessarily speak about.

The name comes from the statistic that for every 20 people who attempt suicide 1 person dies! 1in20 started as a profile on Instagram and Facebook earlier this year. This week has seen the launch of 1in20 as a stand alone website.
In between her role as a contract curator for Facebook Paper, working on 1in20 and preventing her two sons "...from growing up to become serial killers". Marvi very kindly found the time to allow me to interview her.

   Marvi Lacar started her career as a photojournalist in 2004 covering assignments for various domestic and international clients. Marvi has been recognized by Photo Levallois, Communication Arts, American Photography, Photo District News and various photo awards and film festivals for her stills and video work.
Lacar lives on the east coast with her husband, their sons Mateo and Kaleb and two Mini Dachshunds 

 Born in 1976 in the Philippines, Marvi emigrated to the U.S at 15. "My mother decided to pursue a Ph.D. after she separated from my dad. I was still a minor back then and she felt I should be with her and get the opportunity of getting an “American education." In the late 1990's whilst studying for a B.A in Health Science at Kalamazoo College in Michigan Marvi began to develop an interest in photography.
"It was rather serendipitous. I was an undergrad for the sciences because my full-time scholarship required that I stay in the sciences to keep the scholarship. I had an art scholarship as well so I pretty much hung out in the Art department, and the Spanish department and I was rather interested in Political Science at that time… By the end of my junior year, my academic advisor told me that on paper I looked like a bloody mess, so I needed to tie all of my interests together. My senior thesis ended up being an analysis of a recently passed bill that would affect the healthcare of migrant farmworkers, and I proposed that I would photograph the conditions at the farms to humanize the quantitative study… health science, spanish, political science and art. It made for a very interesting year."
During this time Marvi won a six-month foreign study travel grant, this took her to Madrid.
 "I’m not a photo book person.  But I saw Salgado’s work when I lived in Spain during my foreign study year and that opened my world to documentary photography. Before that, I really didn’t know that you can combine artistic expression with social activism. I do remember that one of the first photo books that I took with me was the Phaidon 55 edition of Eugene Richard’s work. I loved it because it included so many of my favorite images of his, it was portable so I carried it with my in my bag."
After completing her B.A she started studying for her M.A in Journalism, also becoming a Teaching Assistant in the Magazine Design course and the Photography Department at the University of Texas in Austin. During this time Marvi also started freelancing for the Dallas Morning News while in graduate school and for the Associated Press Philippines whilst completing her graduate thesis.
In February 2001 Marvi returned to the Philippines and the island of Mindanao. For all of Marvi's life a village on the island called Maladeg had been considered a "peace zone" since Muslim and Christian families residing in the area formed a committee to help put a stop to decades-long clan feuding among them. Marvi felt the need to return to her homeland and cover this story because she grew up in the area and felt affected by what was happening. "The story of the village intrigued me because outside the border there was constant violence, but inside the borders there is harmony."  This became the subject of her 334 page thesis "Maladeg peace zone; an ethnography of a refuge village in the Philippines"
In 2002 Marvi completed her masters degree at Austin, Texas.
"I was lucky enough to have gotten the most supportive mentors from the start of my career, even when I was an intern. When I decided to move to NY to start a freelance career, I worked right away. Vince Laforet saw my portfolio and introduced me to editors at the Times. On my free time, I would give myself assignments so one time, I went to the financial district to photograph the atmosphere during the 9/11 anniversary and the photos ended up being in the cover of a national magazine. I got represented and then a little after that David Laidler took notice and brought me in to Getty in 2005, which eventually became Reportage."
I wondered if her upbringing had an influence on the subjects she chooses to cover?
 "I’m sure. I’m not consciously analyzing myself like that but I do pick stories that move me. But then again, I’m a pretty curious individual so sometimes I pick projects that I know nothing about. When I first moved to New York, I hung out in jazz clubs in my neighborhood in Harlem. I also did a story on sexual proclivities of New Yorkers because  I thought it was an interesting subject… sometimes, I just want to walk into a world unlike mine. "
Over the years Marvi has been working on a project called "Women In Poverty". The story began when she read the speech that Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus gave in accepting the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his concepts of microcredit and microfinance.
 “He stressed the importance of women in lifting families and communities out of poverty,” says Lacar. “Essentially his point was that women, more than men, will spend money on the care and well-being of their families, and that if a community invests in women, it is essentially investing in itself. I wanted to explore pockets of societies where this isn't true, where poverty is directly linked to cultures that undermine women's rights and welfare.”

   In 2007 Marvi became the Manager and Editor for Lowy Lacar Photography. Yes that Ben Lowy!  She has been responsible for multiple web site designs, marketing campaigns, prints sales and the sequencing and edit of many of his feature stories including his Iraq/Perspectives book. "Ben and I met a few different times at a few different events. It is quite a convoluted story actually but in short, I didn’t like him when I first met him. He is persistent though, so I eventually got to know him and obviously, I quite fancied him."
"I like storytelling. Ben likes creating visually compelling images. When we work together we combine both of our interests so that means we explore different ways of storytelling whether that’s with stills or video."
 "In 2007 we lived for a few months in Nairobi and we spent most of our free time at an elephant orphanage. We look back at that experience very fondly." Whilst in Kenya the Women In Poverty project started focusing on the issue of female genital mutilation in Kenya’s Massai tribe, and the lives of girls who had escaped forced marriages to older men.  Ben and Marvi started shooting video hoping to make a two minute film for the internet, after collecting over 30 hours of footage the idea morphed into a 20 minute documentary film "Escape" which was the winner of several awards in 2012.

Both of these images are from the 1in20 profile on Instagram.

   In 2008,  Marvi's Father passed away, three days after he was buried she was admitted to hospital suffering with acute clinical depression.
"I pulled out of photography when I got sick, I wasn’t very functional. Ben took the burden of supporting the family (though at that time we didn’t have children). My career wasn’t stressful for me, I never felt the stress of making it as a photojournalist so in that sense, photography didn’t compound my illness. You have to keep in mind that I was also single, living in a rent stabilized apartment in NYC and lived off of Doritos and Diet Coke, so my lifestyle was very low maintenance. The only time finances became an issue was when we had to deal with healthcare and insurance… that’s a story in and of itself....Ben went through what I went through in his teens, that is the reason why he was able to help me and understand my situation."
 In 2009 Marvi self published a book, it was a visual diary documenting her battle with depression, "A Journey Through Avignon" was also exhibited at the Levallois Photo Festival in France.  From this would grow 1in20.
 How do you feel about sharing your deepest darkest thoughts to the world? Is it a sort of catharsis?
 "They were not my deepest darkest thoughts. You have to understand that me revealing this to people wasn’t a big effort for me. There was no taboo looming over me. My husband was the one who told me to document my journey from the beginning. He snuck my first generation iPhone to the psych ward so that I could document it. My mother did research when she found out about my diagnosis. I spoke candidly to my brother about it. My editor told me to take however much time I needed. Everyone in my immediate surrounding treated my depression like an illness so I was in a very fortunate and in somewhat of a unique position to go public about what I went through. The process of documentation itself was cathartic but not going public with it. Going public with it felt more of a responsibility, not an obligation but a way of paying it forward."
"I had been trying to figure out what to do with my own project on depression.There were many iterations of that project in my head… it was a photo book, it was an ebook, a multimedia project… It somehow didn’t seem complete. I spoke to a friend who suggested that I should think about including other people’s story and even then I still approached it in a very traditional way. I thought I would have to travel and take photos and interview subjects."
"Then Robin Williams died of suicide and all of a sudden people were coming out of the woodwork and revealing their own experiences with depression and mental illness. It was then that I realized that I was well equipped to tell everyone’s story using social media. I consulted with some friends as I went forward. Ideas aren’t borne in a vacuum so 1in20 was really borne after many sessions of talking with people who knew more than I did. I play many roles in 1in20. Depending on the artistic inclinations of the contributor or the kind of submissions I receive, I have been editor, curator or photographer."

    Photo geek time! What's in your camera bag? 
"I’m not a camera geek so I’m the worst person to ask that question. I also am really small. I’m 4’10 and weigh 85lbs. so I try not to break my back with gear. On assignment yes, my bag is sometimes full with 2 cameras bodies (Canon Mark 3) and a few lenses. Though the last assignment I had, I just took the Olympus OMD and 3 fixed very small lenses.Tourists had more gear than me. "
Whose photography do you admire at the moment. You can not say Ben Lowy :)!?
"No, as a matter of fact, I’m pretty tough on Ben. I wouldn’t say I am drawn to photography. I’m drawn to people and I’m drawn to work that seems to reveal the person taking the photos. I think of late, I’ve been looking at Emily Schiffer, she’s a good friend and there is a certain honesty and vulnerability in her images that go beyond the subjects, I feel like I see Emily too in the images that she takes even when they’re not about her. I feel the same way with Rena Effendi, Kitra Cahana, Diana Markosian, Laura Tantawy, Kerry Payne, Lorena Ros, Ruddy Roye, Chris Capozziello… actually there are many but they are my contemporaries and my friends and I admire them personally. Also those whose work I just relate to as a mother like Julia Fullerton-Batten, Robin Schwartz, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Matt Eich… I’m not the best at remembering names but I do remember bodies of work. There are also photographers who I admire because of their dedication to  issues that they feel very passionately about like Stephanie Sinclair, Nina Berman, Ami Vitale, Brenda Kenneally, Lynsey Addario, Jon Lowenstein there are too many to list but these are people who have dedicated years to document specific stories and I find them very inspiring."
 Did you get any advice at the beginning of your career that you would pass on to some one starting out now?
 "Exercise. Photography is learned by doing, take business classes instead...I think photojournalism has evolved and we have to figure out a new model. It is just a matter of finding new and creative ways to drum up assignments and clients. Ben and I have fun trying to figure that out together. It is quite exciting at times and frustrating when you hit a wall but I suppose that’s growing pains..."
What does the future hold for you photographically any thing in the pipeline?
 "I haven’t been able to plan more than 72 hours in advance. For now, I’m pretty wrapped up with my day job, plus managing Ben’s house accounts, growing 1in20 and making sure my boys don’t turn out to be serial killers. "

Check out some of Marvi's work by following these links...

1in20 website

1in20 Instagram profile

Marvi Lacar website

Ben & Marvi on Vimeo

Laura El Tantawy Interview.

 "This is not the story I set out to tell. All innocence is lost. They ask: 'Are you with us .. or against us?' In my time covering Egypt, I have never seen so much violence. The country is so polarized and sharply divided. There is a fire raging. So many people have been killed. I see their blood seeping into a red mound of hate. This country that for a long time inspired me to see good over bad has pushed me into a lot of darkness..."  This was posted on Instagram this week by the Smithsonian magazine and reposted by Laura El Tantawy. It is text excerpt no.5 from "In the Shadow of the Pyramids" Laura El Tantawy's first book. Published by Dewi Lewis and set for release in January 2015. 

  Recently I had the amazing good fortune to be able to interview Laura about her life and work.

   Laura El Tantawy is an English/Egyptian photographer living between Cairo and London.  She  was untill recently represented by the prestigious VII Photo Agency through it's Mentor Program.  Her work is recognized internationally through publications in Le Monde (France), Time Magazine (international edition), National Geographic Magazine (USA),  Foam Magazine (The Netherlands), The Wall Street Journal (USA) and Burn Magazine (USA), among others.  Additionally her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo and group shows in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

  Laura El-Tantawy was born in 1980 in Worcestershire, England. Her parents were Egyptian, when Laura was five months old the family moved back to Egypt. Laura grew up in Cairo and spent her early teen-age years in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.
   I asked Laura about her upbringing and how it influences her now. "I grew up in a hardworking family. My dad is a self made man and I remember as a child a lot of the conversations he would have with my mother about making a life for us and never wanting to see us want something that we could not have. My parents have lived their life for us. They never do anything for themselves. My sisters and I are at the very center of their universe and their life literally revolves around us. I wish they would do more things for themselves. My father is a doctor and my mother is an artist. She has been a huge influence on my life artistically and my dad a huge influence in terms of his integrity, modesty and hard work ethic."
    In 1998 Laura left her family and travelled to America to study at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, where she read journalisn and political science."I always had a passion for writing – expressing, journalism seemed like the right place to start."
    During her studies Laura had the opportunity to take a photography course to earn extra credits towards her diploma. "I am not sure I was always arty but I was certainly always different. I didn’t try to be different on purpose but always felt detached from everyone else around me. I completely embrace that sense of individuality even though it came at a cost usually. People tend to think you are weird if you are different. Again, I bring this back to my parents who always encourage me to be who I am and be proud of it, so that’s who I learnt to be – myself. I think I always had a desire to express certain emptions and early on I didn’t do that through writing and once I discovered photography, that became my writing."
"My professor at university was my first influence. I had never thought of photography as a career and actually did not know it could be a career. My only experience with photography had been on family vacations and my dad standing us up for 15 minutes long to take photos. So I thought picture taking was rather static. At university I remember the first event I covered where I realized photography has so much more depth. It was a dance performance and I took a picture of the dancers that was extremely colorful and blurry in a sense that you felt the energy of the dance. That was a revelation for me and I think my work always goes back to that image. The first work I saw that moved me was James Nachtwey’s Inferno and William Albert Allard’s work in National Geographic. I was impressed by Nachtwey’s concern for the world and the people living on the margins. I wanted to become the kind of concerned photographer he is. I was equally blown away by Allard’s strong compositions and sense of color and use of light."
   After graduating from university Laura was selected as one of 16 college graduates from around the United States to take part in the Poynter Institute for Media Studies' Visual Journalism Fellowship . Laura says that her involvement in photography "Has been a very long and slow process. I guess once I finished university I was accepted at the Poynter Institute, that’s probably when I knew I maybe I was on to something."
   In 2002 Laura started working as a staff photographer with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in 2003 they published a four day series studying the problem of obesity in America shot by Laura.  After a spell at the  Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida, Laura left to become a freelance photographer in 2005.
 "Newspaper work was a great way to teach me flexibility and the ability to visually adapt in any given situation and be able to make pictures. I made no contacts through my staff job and my freelance career was very difficult to get started.  I have always worked extremely hard and failed a lot and succeeded only sometimes. It’s all about your work, work and work.   I have a lot of respect for the ethics and morals of photojournalism and this is how I work in the field, but the vision is not necessarily traditional photojournalism. I am not interested in telling stories, but I believe in making pictures that are around a certain theme or that come together to express something. Again, I want to emphasize that I see the individuality and personal expression as two of the main attractions for me to continue to pursue photography. This is all very hard though and does not come easy. It is much easier to conform to the standard and do what everyone else is doing – that work is easier to sell. But there has to be a model and a sense of this is who I am and this is what I am going to do and that’s how I am going to say it. There has to be a conscious decision of why you are doing what you are doing and the way you are doing it, otherwise it is all just up in the air and a waste of time. My style reflects who I am, as self centered as that may sound, but I think people who know me will attest to the fact that I am not arrogant. But this is just the best way to describe it, but generally photography is very much about the photographer. It’s about seeing and expressing those very personal emotions."
   At this time Laura started work on a project to document a changing Egypt. This project would become known as "In The Shadow Of The Pyramids".
"I made a conscious decision not to rely on assignments to make a living. Having a sense of independence and staying true to who I am and what I want to express are extremely important for me. I work a second job, which is how I survive financially and I put my savings into my long-term projects. So this was a calculated decision that I made because I realized that if I was to survive on assignments, I would have to change my visual style. I wanted to maintain my freedom and allow myself room to experiment and possibly fail sometimes without risking my integrity with a publication. So I work under a different model – I produce the work, then have it published."
   Over a period of nine days in January 2007, 55 photographers from all over the world gathered in Thailand to capture images of the kingdom at that precise moment in time. By the time the shoot was finished, the 55 photographers had delivered to EDM (publishers Editions Didier Millet) over 80,000 digital images; and several thousand photos taken on film had been sent for processing. Laura was one of the 55 photographers after being recommended by Magnum photographer David Allan Harvey. The book "Thailand: 9 Days in the Kingdom" showcased the best of these endeavours. The book was presented as a gift to the Thai King, His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, on his 80th birthday.
    In 2008 she was nominated and accepted to take part in Reflexions Masterclass, a two-year photography seminar directed by Italian photographer Giorgia Fiorio and French curator Gabriel Bauret.
    In 2009, she accepted a six-month fellowship at the Reuters Institute For The Study Of Journalism at the  University of Oxford (UK) to research free speech in Egyptian media. Her resulting paper was called "In the Shadow of the Pyramids: A Case Study of Free Expression in the Egyptian Media, 2004-2009". You can download a PDF of the paper at the Reuters Institute website.
"My photographic interest in a project typically stems from having some personal connection with the subject matter. When I first read farmers were committing suicide in India, I immediately thought of my grandfather who was a farmer his whole life. I wondered what circumstances could possibly drive a typically humble community into seeking such definitive measures? What would my grandfather have done? It was at that point I realized this is a story I had to tell and in December 2009 I traveled to India and started working on this project." This project became “I’ll Die For You”, in 2010, it was selected as a finalist for the Photocrati Fund for humanitarian and environmental photography and the Visura Spotlight Grant. It was also selected in the main exhibition of the Noorderlicht Festival in The Netherlands (Land: Country Life in the Urban Age). Laura has continued to work on and expand this project in Egypt and currently in Ireland.
   On February 11th 2011, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down and instructed the supreme council of the armed forces to manage the affairs of the country. Laura had been in Cairo for two weeks, covering the demonstrations, she was in Tahrir Square when the announcement was made
 "It was hard. The conflict between being photographer and protestor was always there. It’s not something I can entirely describe in words to be honest. I was really at odds with myself and who I was going to be and do: celebrate or document this historic moment. I did a little bit of both." Her photograph's from this time are a part of her new book, keep an eye on her Instagram feed where she is publishing more excerpt's.
   I asked Laura which photographers she look up to now.
"Actually I am most inspired by music and painting rather than other photographers. Of course there are people I follow and find very inspiring. I like the work of Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Miguel Rio Branco, Jeff Jacobson, Rebecca Norris Webb and Didier Ben Loulou."
"What motivates you to keep going out and taking pictures?"
"Well, I suppose it’s the sense that I feel strongly about a certain issue and I have to express it – I have to go on the record as making a statement about it."
"In another interview you said "I spent a long time feeling that I had to prove something through my photography and that took a lot of my energy and it became very destructive for me. It wasn't until I looked deep inside and stopped focusing on the outside that I realized photography could be enjoyable!"."
"I think it’s going from a sense of having to prove what you can do, to knowing what you can do and just doing it. It’s not about what others think but about what you want and what you think."
"Do you believe it has got harder to make a living in the past 15 years as a photojournalist?"
"I don’t know honestly. I always keep myself on the margins of the profession. I am not interested in any of these negative discussions because they are mostly useless. I focus on the positives and keep my head up and work hard."
   In June, Laura won a Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant, the resulting exhibition is due next year.  At the moment Laura continues to work on her "I'll Die For You" project  and is currently putting the finishing touches to her "In The Shadow Of The Pyramids" book.
   I asked what the future holds for her photographically. Her reply...
"That is a mystery!"

   Here is a list of links to Laura's website and her projects;
Laura's Instagram
Laura's Website
I'll Die For You Project
In The Shadow Of The Pyramids Project