Trading to Extinction ~ By Photojournalist Patrick Brown

Patrick Brown has been awarded a prize in the World Press Photo contest and the prestige’s 3ppp award for his work on the trafficking of poached animals in Asia. From the pristine jungles of Cambodia to the great national parks of India and Nepal, Asian wildlife is being plundered on an unprecedented scale.

Day by day, hour by hour, our planet`s rarest creatures are being hunted, trapped and slaughtered to feed a global black market in wildlife products.  Patrick has worked on this project for 10 years in an attempt to expose that trade.

Every year, some 30,000 primates, two-to-five million birds, and ten million reptile skins enter the Asian wild animal market, the third-largest illegal smuggling operation in the world.

In cultures where tiger skins, rhino horns, and bear bile are imbued with mythical properties, these wild animal parts are bought and paid for at astonishingly high prices. In Black Market, we come to understand that the price for these rarities may be the very survival of endangered species world-wide, as well as the ecological stability of the planet.

Support Patrick's book and find out more about Patrick Brown’s project by visiting his Emphas.is page

Thai poacher in cuffs. Score one for the good guys!

VICE visits Patrick Brown in Bangkok to talk about the craft of photography and his forthcoming book, Trading to Extinction, which documents the illegal trade of endangered animals in Asia. We then travel with Brown to Guangzhou, China, where he finishes his decade-long project.

The sale of bear paws, crocodile hearts, and other rare animal parts form the world's third-largest illegal market. Black Market explores the human passions and ancient beliefs that drive the trade and threaten its most endangered species. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/black-market

Photographer Profile ~ Vladimir 'Boogie' Milivojevich

Boogie was born Vladimir Milivojevich in Belgrade, the capital of what was then Yugoslavia. His friends gave him his nickname because he reminded them of a cartoon character called the Boogieman. He recalls the Belgrade of his childhood as a peaceful place, where crime rates were among the lowest in Europe and a strong sense of community prevailed.

This sense of stability changed drastically during the 1990s, he said, as Yugoslavia was upended and Belgrade transformed into a violent and poverty-ridden city. The situation was so drastic that Boogie remembers a period where his mother’s entire monthly pension could only buy two pounds of onions. Bleakness and hopelessness permeated the city. A few of his childhood friends succumbed to heroin addiction. People ended their own lives to avoid dying of starvation. Boogie walked around with homemade dog food to feed abandoned pets. To support his family, he traveled to Bulgaria to smuggle paint and sell it on the black market. (His father painted religious icons, so he knew which paints and colours were in demand.)

His father was also an amateur photographer. He gave Boogie his first camera. Boogie walked the streets day and night, recording the degradation of his city.

“All the moral values in our society somehow disappeared or got twisted during that time,” he said. “I realized much later that I probably started shooting to preserve my sanity, to distance myself from the chaos around me.”

He developed and nurtured a style. He was never influenced by other photographers’ work. He could barely afford film, let alone expensive photo books. He now sees this as an advantage. He was not tempted to emulate anyone else. Instead, he was able to focus solely on creating his own raw aesthetic, which grew organically from his connection to the streets.

In 1997, Boogie and his friends decided on a whim to apply for the United States green card lottery. He had never planned to leave Serbia but it turned out he was the only one of his friends to win. He left Serbia a week before the war in Kosovo began.

In America, he continued to photograph incessantly on the streets, now focusing on the neighborhoods of Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Queensbridge. His pictures of heroin addicts and gang members are poignant and shocking.

[via NewYorkTimes]

“If I left my house without my camera, my heart would probably start pounding and I would get all tense,” Boogie said. “That thought freaks me out. I wouldn’t be able to take it. Maybe it sounds cliché, but I really do feel like I am one with my camera. I like to compare it to martial arts, when you practice some moves so many times that — when you need to use them — you don’t think, you just react. Thinking is the enemy.” ~Boogie 







“The streets are larger than life, they are living and breathing,” he says. “Pictures are everywhere. They just come to you.”~ Boogie










“I don’t think my work is depressing — just real,” Boogie said. “My intention is never to provoke any specific reaction from the viewer. I can see how people think my work is dark, but I guess that is just a natural part of who I am. Maybe it is because I put my negative energy into my work. I don’t know. I just try to be honest and just observe.”~ Boogie

One of the most haunting photos in his book is of a woman chopping up meat on a park bench. Boogie is not sure exactly what she was doing, but recalls that such incongruous moments were commonplace. “I spotted the woman near Kalemegdan, the medieval fortress, and started taking pictures, moving closer and closer,” Boogie said. “At one point, she turned towards me, holding the cleaver. I backed away pretty quickly. I have no idea what she was cutting.”




“One’s work will always depend on the state of mind one is in, and I think I’m doing pretty good in that department,” he says. “I have a two-year-old daughter now and I like being a dad. I’m growing organic tomatoes in my backyard, so I can’t complain. I do feel more inspired then ever. It wouldn’t surprise me if my work looked more positive, although I have no idea. I don’t really stop to analyze it much.”

Photographer Profile ~ The Poetic Eye of Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Álvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City in 1902. He came from a family of artists, and met several other prominent artists who encouraged his work when he was young, including Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera.

He studied painting and music at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1918, but did not begin experimenting with photography until the mid 1920's. Though he was never formally a member of the surrealist movement, his work displays many characteristics of surrealism, and he was exposed to many of its founders. His work often suggests dreams or fantasies, and he frequently photographed inanimate objects in ways that gave them humanistic qualities.

From 1929 through the mid-1930s Alvarez Bravo's photographs are indeed dominated by pictures he made in the urban streets - shop windows jammed with goods, advertising billboards slipped into the architecture, and vignettes from life's ongoing mini-dramas as they played themselves out. While Henri Cartier-Bresson and the other French photographers of the "social fantastic" used the Leica 35mm camera, Alvarez Bravo used a Graflex camera, which has a larger negative and requires more time between exposures. Asked if he had used a Leica soon after its invention, Alvarez Bravo reported that Rodolfo Mantel, the photographic supply salesman who suggested him for Primer salon Mexicano de fótografia in 1928, received the first Leica in Mexico: "One day, while he was trying it out, he took a photo of me and I took one of him. He developed the negative, and it was very grainy.... I didn't buy this Leica .... Photographers thought that Leicas were toy cameras."

The larger negative of the Graflex provided more detail in the finished print, and was particularly suited to Alvarez Bravo, whose pictures appear to derive from a thoughtful, more deliberate, intellectual manner of picture-making, rather than a reliance on his immediate instincts, as was true in the work of Cartier-Bresson, for example. [via Wiki and MoMA]

Optical Parable is one of Alvarez Bravo's most famous pictures. In it, the negative has been reversed in the printing, so that our eyes are momentarily tested - part of the experience of a visit to the optician. Alvarez Bravo has commented that he was interested in our experience of a shop and its window as one approaches it from the outside, and then, upon entering and looking back out, how we experience everything in reverse: the window and the signs. The picture is a metaphor for all of life's experiences - the idea of reversal, the idea of opposites, the idea of inside and out - and it provides us with the opportunity to experience the idea of reversed experience, as a work of art. There is also something uncanny in our experience of the photograph through the trick Alvarez Bravo has momentarily played on us - it turns out that the world is not what we think it is. [via MoMA]

The Daydream of 1931 is a simple, direct picture of a young girl standing on a balcony caught in a wistful moment by the photographer. Alvarez Bravo glanced up to see the girl as he sat reading Dostoevski in the tenement where he lived, jumped up to retrieve his Graflex, and returned to find her in the same pose. Despite its simplicity, the picture is a rhapsody of longing, lament, or revery. The construction of the picture puts the young woman at some distance from us, behind the barrier of the fence whose angles are repeated in the angle formed by the position of her arms. The light on her right side, and especially on her shoulder, seems to emanate from above, singling her out. Her insulated experience is not betrayed by the photographer, or by us, in the slightest. In its quietude and its sense of the solitary, the picture exists in a kind of vacuum, while it simultaneously conveys its message across time and place. [via MoMA]

 

Mexican Artist Frida Kahlo

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Self Portrait with Nude