An urgent message is carried through these images: that environmental degradation is not someone else’s problem. This is our shared Earth and it is our collective responsibility to protect it.
The pictures of this issue show economic inequalities as they are today in a way which breaks the stupor of indifference generated by watching antiseptic clean TV programmes of the main news channels.
Through subjects which are hard, frequently morbid and often far from our everyday concerns, these photographers are taking on the primary role of the artist. They are revealing our deepest contradictions and expressing their dreams and the nightmares which we prefer to forget.
Human relationships, which function according to “traditional” expressive and behavioral codes, become devoid of their original foundation, thus merely retaining their “formal” aspects, which in turn imbues them with a greater complexity, given that it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge the sincerity and depth of what one says (and of what one is).
The photographers of this volume report the world as they have researched, investigated, explored, experienced and discovered it, and decided to tell us about.
Even though it has been only about 10 years since photography was included in art in Korea, photography is becoming the very basics and center of the whole art field as it goes through amazing changes.
In one of the dialects spoken in East Poland, which is a mixture of Polish and Belarusian, people strongly attached to the soil they had been cultivating for generations were called “Karczebs”.
The last global farmers shelter in rifts and unreachable ravines enveloped in loneliness huddle on the margins and scraps of earth still damp from warm, organic contact and human touch. Precarious land that is alive because of extreme poverty.
The observation of self and of one’s own being as a first step towards the observation of the world and the understanding of it. The transit, as a form of concrete existence of society and of individuals which allows (or forces) the human species to adapt to its own new activities and perceptions.
It’s common to hear photojournalists described as the eyes of the world, acting as witnesses to events that we would otherwise not see. To some extent this is true, but it’s a simplified description that suggests passive observation and it denies the greater function of active investigation that defines great photojournalism…
During the past decade, millions of Mexican and Central American migrants have left their homes and families and faced death on the journey to the United States.
