Our first guest speaker for the Professional Practice unit was Jason Larkin, a British-born, South African-based documentary and reportage
photographer. Larkin majored in moving image for his final year at
university, which led to him making music videos, documentaries, and
promo videos. He then returned to university to complete a part-time
MA in photography. After he completed his MA, he moved to Cairo, a
city that he had never visited previously and had no grasp or basic
knowledge of the language.
“This
recent project focuses on the young emerging middle class of Mumbai
capitalising on the new opportunities and lifestyles offered by it's
booming economy. A small section of society that has progressed at
lightning speed over the last ten years, whilst the majority of
Mumbai’s inhabitants live the same as fifty years before. It
explores the new environments these Mumbaiker's live, work and play
in, and the increasing fluidity of Indian society.”
Mumbai Rising, Larkin's graduate project, led him to India to
investigate the issue of disposable income and the developing world,
and the conflict between tradition and young lifestyles. Larkin
followed several people over the course of a few weeks in order to
photograph their lives, something he did not find difficult, as “it's
easy to find people to photograph in a different country, they want
to tell you their story”. The project was shot on medium format and
35mm film.
Mumbai Rising was taken to a convention in Southern France,
where Getty Images showed interest in the work. One year later, after
moving to Cairo, the work was sold and published in Espresso Magazine
in Italy.
“Historically,
it’s common for children from low-income Egyptian families to work
in the fields or the family business, but with the high rate of
inflation and the global rise of food prices, casual and seasonal
work increasingly becomes full-time child labour. The UN believes 1.3
million children in Egypt are now employed, with 7% of Egypt’s
total workforce under the age of 12. In the brick kilns of Helwan
city, south of Cairo, child labour accounts for nearly half the
workforce in some brick factories. Children move heavy bricks from
the drying fields inside the kiln during 10 hour shifts, 6 days a
week for about $4 a day.
Many
of these working children are illiterate and as a result lead a life
of few opportunities. One Egyptian father told the reporter, “the
biggest victims of the recent food crisis are his children and his
neighbours children, who, instead of going to school, now have to
work”. With child labour so prevalent the cycle of illiteracy and
poverty becomes increasingly hard to break.”
Working Young,
was one of the assignments Larkin carried out for the Associated
Press (AP). It covered children working under-age in brick kilns in
Egypt, between the ages of nine and sixteen years old (the legal age
to work in Egypt is sixteen).
While
living in Cairo, Larkin met and began to work with Jack Shenker, who
later became The Guardian's
Egypt correspondent.
Larkin
joined Panos, a photo agency specialising in global social issues,
which “Recognising
that photography is more than pictures on a page, we engage in all
forms of visual communication producing exhibitions, multimedia and
video as well as long-term documentary projects.”
Larkin
and Shenker covered the Israel/Gaza conflict in a personal project,
showing the devastation caused by the Israeli bombings. The images
accompany Shenker's essay “Gaza
Laid Bare”,
a piece of work offered to the Telegraph,
but went unpublished due to the speed of the news. It can now be
found on guernicamag.com.
Alexandria
Elections
“Egypt,
a U.S. ally and the recipient of billions of dollars worth of U.S.
aid and military support, is cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood
ahead of parliamentary elections.”
The
Wall St Journal
commissioned
Larkin to cover the Alexandria elections and the rivalry between the
Muslim Brotherhood and Hosni Mubarak. The images were ran on the Wall St Journal blog
“Deep
within the bizarre confluence of ruler-straight lines and flamboyant
squiggles that make up the map of Central Asia lies a former Soviet
republic called Karakalpakstan, a semi-autonomous enclave of
Uzbekistan. This vast stretch of land was the site of one of the
twentieth century's most horrific environmental disasters - the
disappearance of the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest inland
body of water. Karakalpakstan bears the scars of the Aral catastrophe
everywhere; the old seabed has turned into the world's youngest
desert, the fishing industry collapsed devastating the local economy,
farmers have seen their crops wither away, and the rate of
respiratory diseases amongst the beleaguered population has
spiralled.
But
this isn't your typical tale of ecological mayhem. What's fascinating
about Karakalpakstan is its political dynamic; long under the thumb
of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, a nascent current of nationalism is
slowly beginning to creep through the Karakalpak people, some of whom
are beginning to demand outright independence from Tashkent. Those in
Karakalpakstan that aren't choosing to resist the Karimov regime are
by and large leaving en masse, escaping across the border to
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Conservative estimates suggest 10% of
the population has melted away in the past decade, with people
exploiting the complex tangle of ethnic backgrounds in the region to
gain citizenship elsewhere.”
Mistake
of Nature covered the “largest
environmental disaster of the 20th
Century”: the disappearance of the Aral Sea. The lake that lay
between Kazakhstan and Karakalpakstan began shrinking in the 1960s as
the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects.
Due to the shrinking of the sea, there is no fishing industry and a
60% unemployment rate.
To
complete the project, Larkin and Shenker formulated different ideas
and proposals and raised funds within 18 months to fuel travel and
other expenses. The two pretended to be tourists in Uzbekistan due to
the penalties on journalists by the Russian Federation. The project
was first ran without faces in order to prevent reprisals, but was
later published in Prospect magazine.
Mistake of Nature was
later put forward for an environmental award and went on to be
published in worldwide publications.
“Egypt’s
identity is particularly interwoven and defined by its history, a
history that has long been celebrated around the world. The open-air
museums of ancient Egypt promoted the world’s first package
holidays, drawing visitors to celebrate and interpret the country’s
rich history. Today, hundreds of museums in Egypt preserve and
exhibit the past for tourists and Egyptian’s alike. The grandiose
style of Egyptian museums reflects and magnifies the glorification of
Egypt’s bygone eras.
This
series focuses on the museums of Egypt and the different styles used
in curating and presenting the past to audiences. Using space,
materials and design, curators can venerate events, revere heroes,
and imbue history with a sense of grandiosity. Through the aesthetics
of the displays, museums and their curators help the public
understand history, but more importantly, reveal and mould Egypt’s
identity.”
Past
Perfect deals with people
interacting with Egypt's museums, the aesthetics of museum spaces,
and the popularity of museums with Egypt's tourists. To research the
project, Larkin read essays and interviewed historians. The finished
product consisted of fourteen prints to be exhibited. Past
Perfect won a $20,000 in a
competition and a six month solo show, which made Larkin revisit
exhibition prep from his BA.
“Faced
with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing
slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring
Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments –
Utopia, Dreamland, Palm Hills, Belle Ville and The Egypt of My
Desires. Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s
boundaries, in the desert, where it can be built from scratch. In
focusing on these landscapes I wanted to capture the reality of
fantasy lifestyles in mid-production, to document the extravagance of
a few whose wealth put sharp focus on the fact that 40% of Egyptians
live on less than $2 a day. The surreal remodelling of the landscape
shows little appreciation for the environment it is rapidly
colonising.”
Cairo
Divided
covered the new suburbs being built in the deserts for the rich,
namely 1.2 million homes. The scale, speed, chaos, and randomness of
the new build was photographed over the space of a year, mostly on
weekends due to prior commitments. Larkin found this project
politically and economically interesting. Shenker wrote a 7000 word
academic essay to accompany the images, however, the Egyptian
uprisings resulted in the work going unpublished. However, the
Guardian
Weekend
editor liked the project and took it on, but the essay was cut by
2200 words.
The
text was translated into Arabic and the project was made into a
booklet with the help of a small team. The product is a tabloid-size,
bilingual booklet printed on newsprint paper, which cost £500 to
produce, resulting in 5000 free copies.
Cairo
Divided
will be exhibited in the Brighton Photo Biennial as part of a show on
Agents of Change: Photography
and the Politics of Space. The project has also opened channels
between Larkin and National
Geographic.
The
issue of the houses built in the desert is now a big issue in Cairo,
however, production on the 1.2 million homes has since stalled as
financiers have been jailed because of the uprisings.
I found the talk to be very informative and interesting. Larkin's style of photography, his use of composition, and the colours from the film used, are very similar to that of the images seen in publications such as National Geographic, a direction in which Larkin appears to be heading.
