PRIVATE

The collection of photos published in this magazine is a photo-story of personal concerns, documentations and reports made by 14 photographers who live and work in Iran.

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…

Good news, it infuses this issue with a sense of joy, and with an aspect of carefree childhood seized in flight. There is a feeling of solemnity, but a tender solemnity. An innocence that confronts the world, its difficulties and the trials of study, but it is amusing, happy, and touching.

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.

You are only dust amidst dust. You are only just visible even if you gesticulate, even if you make a commotion, even if you speak loud and clearly: you act in a silent film. Or rather: one hears nothing that you would like because…

The photos in this volume are personal records of events that have taken place in the physical world. They are about discovery, not creation; about finding out, not inventing – for other people to see how the photographer has framed what he has witnessed. These photos are meant to educate us. And they will, provided we are willing.

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.

As unique and special the scenes are that the photographers for this issue have chosen to focus on, the similarities (what we have in common, what we share) that can be found around the globe are striking.

In contemporary China, uncertainty about what is “true” and what is “false”, “reality” and “appearance”, extends from the realm of photography to that of existence itself. We often feel that we are confronted with such an illusory, ambiguous, unexpected “reality” as to lead us to doubt not just our perceptions, but our very capacity for interpretation.

Such photographs are there not to gratify a curiosity, but are made in response to a feeling: it is not only the landscape we see, even if it takes solid form, and darkens or brightens in certain frames, or is transformed by the space under changing skies…

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.

Buy / Gift PRIVATE 47 A living environment is a defined terrain where actual and imaginative perceptions are...

For more than 10 years, Galerie VU’ has been promoting photographers of various ages, nationalities and inspirations. This issue of private magazine, which is dedicated to them, proves it.

Our planet is in crisis; a crisis captured through this collection of photo essays taken by world-class photographers. It tells a story of environmental degradation and gives a voice to some of the forgotten peoples who are paying the price. This issue of PRIVATE takes us on a journey across the world, highlighting the human and environmental costs of “development” from our rivers and land to the skies above us.

The goal of the photo agency Noor is to produce, publish, and exhibit long term visual projects on topics of human concerns to a broad international audience while maintaining the dignity of the subjects.

Whenever people talk about ‘Indian photography’ it obviously leads to a debate and discussion about how appropriate it is to term it as ‘Indian photography’ rather than ‘photography in India’. The question is: to what extent has photography in India been Indianized?

The photographers of this volume report the world as they have researched, investigated, explored, experienced and discovered it, and decided to tell us about.

What is the state of Polish photography after 2000 then? This is a difficult question: today there seems to be a lack of meaningful currents and trends, and lots of authors borrow from other countries.

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.

In Pakistan we have reached a state of alchemy that typifies the post-post modern life. Life drudges through its multifarious activities of simple poverty until it climaxes into a bustle of hot abrasion in the struggle to churn out the most out of the given condition of existence. As the world turns its gaze on us, we struggle to mould a new fathomable identity- one that can be left on business tables after striking a deal or negotiation, a firm shake of the hand and a name and a number. I am Pakistani.

In this issue of PRIVATE , they are not images to be quickly rushed through like channel surfing on a television set. They are meant to be slowly appreciated for what they show us about America that we have not seen in the press or in images made by photographers who briefly visited the United States.

The destruction of our environment – albeit caused by natural disasters – involves parties (communities, governments or industrial players) and is often the result of a multiplicity of factors: human negligence, inadequate planning, criminal abuse of our resources, natural causes. This issue of PRIVATE offers its readers a selection of photographs that touches onto the many facets of the environment.

Mastering this split image is the role which photographers of African origin have assigned themselves, sometimes against their better judgement, in order to avoid misunderstandings.

When I look at the twenty photographers which make up this Metropolis edition of PRIVATE, it’s not what makes the cities different from each other that strikes me, in fact I’d say that these big cities are very similar to each other, not in their detail, faces, bodies and scenes, but in the variety of emotions which they arouse and which we all experience.

A special issue of PRIVATE dedicated to Panos Pictures, a London-based independent photo agency representing photojournalists worldwide.

Images used in photojournalism today look, to me, like fragments of reality snatched from a complex world which is essentially indescribable. […] Photojournalism today is a heroic thing. It is an old song, a last raised voice.

Buy/Gift PRIVATE 32 For those born before television, before sleep became one amongst many options, night was travelled...

VII derives its name from the number of founding photo-journalists who, in September 2001, formed this collectively owned...

The collection of photographs before you is the stuff of nostalgia. Almost every work affects a spatio-temporal distance. To find the reasons, recall the events of the past two decades, beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which was a definitive rupture from a if not the past.

The objective of this issue of PRIVATE is China outside the cities, the infinite China of the countryside, and it has the declared intention to give justice to about 900 millions people who live in a huge territory at the borders of the economic miracle. The artists are all Chinese, and among the best contemporary photographers.