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How do you photograph fracking?

Since September 2018, photographer Rhiannon Adam has been documenting individuals on both sides of the fracking debate. For Adam, listening to an individual’s story dictates how she photographs them. Her ultimate aim: to redirect the narrative away from the singular news piece and give an identity to those involved.  

Located midway between Preston and Blackpool, Preston New Road became the focal point of the fracking debate after Cuadrilla Resources applied to drill at the site in 2014. The UK government gave the final go-ahead this summer and the first frack took place on 15 October 2018, midway through Adam’s project. This is the first time fracking has taken place in the UK since a moratorium on the practice was lifted in late 2012.

Adam centred her series on the activities at Preston New Road. Working at and around the site for four months to date, she immersed herself in the everyday lives of those on the frontline of the fracking resistance. Adam also photographed campaigners from elsewhere, high-profile anti-fracking spokespeople, and individuals in support of the practice. She captured each subject in a context different to that in which they might otherwise be shown.

Featured subjects include: the 87-year-old campaigner Anne Power; fashion designer and activist Vivienne Westwood; and Simon Roscoe Blevins – one of three campaigners who were briefly imprisoned in September 2018 for their part in an anti-fracking protest.  

All images copyright Rhiannon Adam. All text copyright Hannah Abel-Hirsch, Studio 1854.”

Kai and Callum

“When you do a 12 hour night shift at Gate Camp you have to keep yourself awake somehow; I try and read my books for university” 

Kai, 20, and Callum, 22, are a couple who met at Maple Farm Camp. “I was doing a photo project during the summer when I stumbled across this,” says Kai, gesturing to Callum. “I thought, ‘he is nice to take pictures of.’” The two now share a tent in Maple Farm’s backfield. 

Every Wednesday the couple take the night shift at Gate Camp; for 12 hours they sit and monitor Cuadrilla’s activities in and out of the main gate. Kai is studying a BA in Photography at Blackpool and the Fylde College and stays awake by reading. “When I was by myself I used to get panicky with my coursework: topics and big words that I did not understand,” she says. “But, living in this community, I can just ask someone and chat through it. I find it a lot easier.” Kai’s mum brought her to the site for the first time. “She wanted to come down, but she is quite ill and needs help walking. She was anxious so I was like I’ll come too,” says Kai. “The next week she didn’t come; she got really ill. So I came down by myself, and again the week after that, and I just never really left.” 

Both feel disillusioned with the preoccupations of many people their age. “When you are protesting something like this, a lot of conversation can seem quite pointless – talking about I’m a Celebrity, Love Island etc.” says Callum, whose mum, Katerina Lawrie, is also a resident of the Maple Farm Camp. “I got really passionate about it very quickly,” says Kai. “I had a big group of friends and none of them understood at all.”

John Tootill

“This industry is in its death throes — very soon it will cease. It cannot carry on as it has no future whatsoever” 

John Tootill has run Maple Farm Nursery, located just 800 metres from Preston New Road, for 34 years. He lives there with his family. “I started the business with my dad. We worked together as a team for many years until his death a couple of years ago,” he says. “My dad was extremely concerned by Cuadrilla’s proposals to carry out fracking so close to our nursery and feared the worst for his family home and business.” Tootill had no idea about fracking when Cuadrilla Resources first applied to drill near his home. After discovering what the process was, and the risks it posed, he was horrified: “I am just trying to defend my family, my community and all the things that I have been brought up to believe in.” 

One of Tootill’s concerns is the effect that the practice could have on his livelihood. “I want people to be able to visit the nursery without fearing for their health and their children’s health.” He donated a portion of his land to the protectors, on which they have set up Maple Farm Camp. “It is a big sacrifice because it is a site on the main road, which, from a business point of view, is an important location,” he says. “I am happy that it is being used to further the campaign against this harmful process.” The camp also provides a “safe haven” for protectors: “Maple Farm offers a refuge for people to feel secure because the policing can be very oppressive.”

ootill himself has had a number of run-ins with the police. On the gates of Maple Farm Camp, a collection of large signs denounce fracking and the myriad dangers associated with it. In 2016, Fylde Borough Council sought to prosecute Tootill for unauthorised advertising. The case was dropped by the Council once his barrister disclosed to the court that the decision to prosecute him was made by Fylde borough councillors who had received money from Cuadrilla. He has been arrested twice: once for obstructing the road, and again for obstructing a police officer during an anti-fracking protest. The charges were dropped for both cases. “One of the reasons I was targeted by the police is because I am a local businessman,” he says. “I am seen as the face of respectability; that is not the face that industry and the government want showing opposition to them. And I have made my opposition very, very clear.” 

Cuadrilla’s activities at Preston New Road have polarised the local community. “Cuadrilla has worked on this community for years: they have splashed money around, to all sorts of organisations: sports programmes, football and rugby clubs, schools, village halls, the list goes on,” says Tootill. “Many local people are frightened to show opposition to what is being imposed on them.” But, Tootill has remained dedicated to the fight. “The sooner that this dirty, reckless industry packs up and goes, the sooner I can get on with normal life,” he says. “Stopping it here will empower people to stand up for their communities in other places where the industry is trying to get a hold.”

Anne Power 

“I am very prone to get angry; that saves me from getting scared” 

“I did not realise that this was going to change my life so fully,” says Anne Power, 87, who made headlines when police dragged her across Preston New Road outside the fracking site after she refused to move from the entrance “I have got to 87 [she was 85 at the time] without ever being injured on the road; I know how to manage things for heaven’s sake.” Anne’s grandfather was a policeman. He died after sustaining injuries while saving children from an oncoming cyclist. “I had such a respect for the police,” she says. This is no longer the case.  

Anne has been demonstrating against fracking for five years. At least twice a week she drives back-and-forth, between the site and her home in Manchester. Often, she travels through the night to ferry people from site to site. Last summer, 2017, she spent four nights in her car on the roadside, just beside Preston New Road. A group of protectors built two towers at the gate. “I was watching while I was dozing; I couldn’t tell whether they had built it on the bonnet of my car or not.” 

 

“I have done things that I would have never expected,” says Anne, who originally, if not reluctantly, trained as a teacher. Disillusioned by the curriculum, she retrained as a personal counsellor and started her own practice in 1981 in a small cottage in the hills of Lancashire. That same year she joined the Green Party. “My life dovetailed in that way: I found a political philosophy for the first time and a personal philosophy that really suited me.” Today, Anne devotes the bottom floor of her house to the activities of Party members. “I got involved in the fracking resistance because it started at Barton Moss, very near to where I live.” she says. “I had just moved house and had the stair carpet laid. I went to an anti-fracking meeting in Eccles; the next day I went to the protest camp and from then I was just there every day, relentlessly. I never finished moving into my house.” This year, Anne has, in her own words: “focused on making more of a nest for herself.”

Produced by Studio 1854 & the British Journal of Photography.

Rhiannon Adam’s photo story – Fractured Stories – is a British Journal of Photography commission supported by Ecotricity.

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2018. Robert Frank

Robert Frank, one of the best photojournalists of all times, is exposing in Arles until September 23rd

 

Frank was bormber 23rd.n in Switzerland. His mother was named Rosa Franks and his father was named Hermann Frank. Robert Frank states in Gerald Fox’s 2005 documentary Leaving Home, Coming Home that his mother, Rosa (other sources state her name as Regina), had a Swiss passport, while his father, Hermann originating from Frankfurt, Germany had become stateless after losing his German citizenship as a Jew. They had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Robert and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo.[2]

Though he was initially optimistic about the United States’ society and culture, Frank’s perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Frank’s own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris. In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall’s, Vogue, and Fortune. Associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers (not to be confused with the New York School of art) during the 1940s and 1950s.

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Memoria by James Natchwey.

“I have been a witness. A witness to these people who have been taken everything – their homes, their families, their arms and legs, and until the discernment. And yet, a thing that they had been subtracted, dignity, this irreducible component of the human being. These images are my testimony. “

James Nachtwey

Conducted in close collaboration with James Nachtwey and Roberto Koch, this exhibition is the largest ever retrospective dedicated to the work of the photographer. Through his look, it proposes a remarkable reflection on the theme of war, the scope of which is necessarily collective.

Ten-seven different sections constitute the route of exposure, forming a set of nearly two hundred photographs. They offer a broad panorama of the reports the most significant James Nachtwey: El Salvador, the Palestinian Territories, Indonesia, Japan, Romania, Somalia, the Sudan, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal, the United States with among others a singular testimony of the attacks of 11 September, as well as of many other countries. The exhibition ends on a news story dealing with immigration in Europe, today more than ever a topical.

It brings together as well the photographs of the one that can be considered as the photojournalist the most prolific of these last decades, an observer exceptional of our contemporary world and probably one of its witnesses the most perceptive.

James Nachtwey, whose career is marked by numerous prizes and awards in a variety of areas, is globally recognized as the heir of Robert Capa. Its moral force and its social commitments and civilians were led to devote his entire life to the Photograph. Sudan, Darfur, 2003 © James Nachtwey Archive, the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

Documentary.

It captures the most extreme conditions of human life – which do not take that too often the forms of hell on earth – thus the witness epic in the cruelty of the war. It has continuously been to photograph the pain, injustice, violence, and death. But for that it never is forgotten the suffering and loneliness human, it creates images of a dizzying beauty, spotlessly framed and informed, and to the effects quasi-film. The extraordinary beauty and infinite tenderness which emanate from are all means to fight and resist.

In a posture always compassion, it captures scenes and contexts: in Bosnia, in Mostar where a sniper aims through a window, famine in Darfur, the sick of tuberculosis or even the terrible effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Among its images the most emblematic, we think immediately to which represents a young boy of Rwanda, a survivor of a concentration camp Hutu, the face Scarface. Also Come in mind the photographs of the second intifada in the West Bank, where Nachtwey was then in the first line. It depicts the war since 40 years, showing without detour the fate of the populations that are the terrible experience. As of September 11, 2001, when the war reached “at home,” on American soil, during the attack on the twin towers, followed by the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The images of James Nachtwey reveal humanity mutilated by the violence, devastated by disease and hunger, a tolerance which, by nature, seems to go astray.

“I wanted to become a photographer to enter the war. But I was pushed by the natural feeling that an image that would expose without detour the true face of a conflict would be, by definition, a photograph anti-war”.
James Nachtwey

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mostar, 1993 © James Nachtwey Archive, the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

 

JAMES NACHTWEY The duty of memory

“The memory is an essential thing that we have to imagine the future and prevent the errors of the past. Through his photographs and his words, James Nachtwey reminds us that if we are unable to the remembrance of the past, we will be condemned to perpetual its repetition.

For nearly forty years, James Nachtwey photograph the pain, injustice, violence, and death. This death if particular which knows neither the fullness of old age or the heat of the loved ones, but who has the eyes of a child, the emaciated hands of a woman or a man’s face that poverty has ravaged. What the fact Hold, costs that, within this “grieving community” that form our human condition. In this maelstrom of “eternal pain,” it is this belief infallible that the photojournalism, in what he has led, can still influence public opinion, as the first milestones in a history book that would remain to write.

Born in Syracuse in the State of New York in 1948, James Nachtwey grew up in the 1960s. Its eyes are a flood of images of the Vietnam War and marches for the civil rights. Quickly, he feels how vital it is to testify and, through its work, it, therefore, commits to combat the hypocrisy, which if we often, in fact, divert our gaze, as much as our conscience. The reportage in Romania, which follows the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, marks a point of no return. The doors are starting to open. As those of a hell on earth, an orphanage where a dramatic crime against humanity had to be committed. The painful reality the spoiled up to the marrow: “I wanted to flee, I did not want to watch later. But it had become a test. Had to do I steal or well assume full responsibility to be there, with my photographic camera?”.

These glances panicked, seized in a massive plan, occur as infernal circles. For example, the famine in Somalia, “where the deprivation of food is used as a weapon of mass destruction and, where, since the middle of the year 1992, epidemics and hunger have caused the death of more than 200 000 people”. Sudan also, devastated by war and famine, as well as the Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994, Zaire or even the Chechnya. The objective of James Nachtwey also aims poverty in India and Indonesia, the scourge of AIDS, the drug or tuberculosis, but also the acts of love of the relatives who remain at the bedside of patients.

Then comes September 11, 2001. The war, which had not affected the more prosperous part of the globe since sixty years, returns to the West. This history to mark a new turning point. Nachtwey documents the wars that ensue in Afghanistan, Iraq, and that recall the errors of the past bitterly. His compassion inspired him an unfailing sense of empathy toward those who suffer, populations traumatized by the earthquakes, like in Nepal, in Haiti or Japan, and by the tsunami that struck Indonesia. Then it coexists with the terrible contemporary tragedy of migrants in Europe, among us, where hundreds of thousands of people are forced to flee to try to survive in an elsewhere that they imagine a land of hope and the home.

Nachtwey writes: “My photographic work is linked to the human instinct, the one who wins when the rules of the Civilization and the socialization fly in brilliance. At this time, the law of the jungle takes over. Violence and land claims are then needed, spoofing with them their batch of cruelty, terror, and suffering, but also a spirit of ancestral survival. It is a dark mechanism and frightening, and I am trying through my work to make a share of spirituality. Essentially the compassion.”

A COMPASSIONATE GAZE is a look of knowledge, conscience, and memory: the only possible antidote against this obscure scope, this heart of darkness that takes its horrific load by the yardstick of what the whole man is capable. We look at the images of Nachtwey, and we know now: we cannot forget ever again. ” Roberto Koch Co-Commissioner of the exhibition New York, 2001

© James Nachtwey Archive, the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

 

Biography

James Nachtwey is born in 1948 in Syracuse in the State of New York (USA). He studied the history of art and political science at Dartmouth College from 1966 to 1970. In 1976, he worked as a photojournalist for a newspaper in New Mexico and then, in 1980, he moved to New York as a freelance photographer for various magazines. It is from 1981 that James Nachtwey will devote themselves entirely to photograph the war and social unrest Major. It covers the conflicts in the world, convinced that the awareness of the public remains essential to cause the change, and the photographs of war disseminated by the media can trigger a real consciousness to act in favor of peace.

In Europe, it documents the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the war in Chechnya and the civil unrest in Northern Ireland. In Africa, it photography the genocide in Rwanda, the famine which becomes a “weapon of mass destruction” in Somalia and Sudan and the struggle for the Emancipation in South Africa. It documents the civil wars which gobble up Central America in the years 1980, El Salvador in Nicaragua in passing by Guatemala, as well as the invasion of Panama by the United States. In the Middle East, it covers the conflict Israeli-Palestinian since more than twenty years as well as the civil wars in Lebanon and, more recently, the war in Iraq, where a grenade explosion wounded him. It begins to work in Afghanistan during the years 1980, photographing the resistance in the face of the Soviet occupation, then the Afghan civil war and the offensive against the Taliban in 2001. In 2010, he shot military fighting Americans in the Helmand, Province in the south of Afghanistan. Elsewhere in Asia, it documents the guerrillas in combat in Sri Lanka and the Philippines as well as the bloody repression military against demonstrators in Bangkok in 2010. It has recently testified to the refugee crisis in Europe, the earthquake in Nepal and the “war against drugs” to the extrajudicial Philippines.

 

 

James Nachtwey covers the social subjects throughout the world with dedication always equal. The homeless, drug addiction, poverty or even the crime and industrial pollution are among the main subjects that it has widely photographed. Since the beginning of the years 2000, he has a great interest in health issues across the world, in particular in the developing countries, attesting to the ravages of diseases which the devastating effects affect a more significant number of people than the war. In 2007, he received the price ted for its global campaign to raise awareness of tuberculosis, based on its belief that the collective consciousness can encourage research, facilitate the financing, mobilize donors and motivate the political will. Many distinctions have been the crowning glory of his career as a photojournalist, but also to reward its contributions to the art and humanitarian causes. In 2001, he received the Common Wealth Award. In 2003, he got the price Dan David and, in 2007, the Heinz Family Foundation Award. In 2012, he is a laureate of the cost of peace of the city of Dresden for the whole of its reportage carried out for more than 30 years on all the conflicts of the world. In 2016, James Nachtwey obtains the price Princess of the Asturias.

He won five times the Robert Capa Gold Medal, for his courage and his exceptional work. It receives the title of the photographer of the year on eight occasions; the first price of the World Press Photo Foundation on two events; the Infinity Award in photojournalism three times; the price Bayeux-Calvados of war correspondents on two occasions and the price Leica on two occasions. Rewarded by the Overseas Press Club, by the time Inc., and by the American Society of Magazine Editors, it also receives the Henry Luce Award, the price of the foundation of Leipzig for the freedom and the future of the media and the cost of world citizenship Dr. Jean Mayer. In 2001, war photographer, a feature-length film documenting the life and work of James Nachtwey, is nominated for the Oscar for the best documentary. His books include deeds of war and hell.

 

The photographs of James Nachtwey are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Library of France or even of the Center Pompidou. Its images have been the subject of numerous personal exhibitions in the world. It has been invited to present his work at several international events, including the TED Talks, the Conference Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenges, the Pacific Health Summit, the World Conference on Tuberculosis in Rio de Janeiro, the annual meeting of the Young President’s Organization in Sydney and, on the occasion of the World Day of Peace in 2011, before the International Olympic Committee. The title of Doctor Honoris Causa is awarded by four American universities, including the Dartmouth College, which has recently acquired the whole of the archives of his work.

World Press Photo 2018. The nominees.

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Portraits of girls kidnapped by Boko Haram militants, taken in Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria.

The girls were strapped with explosives, and ordered to blow themselves up in crowded areas, but managed to escape and find help instead of detonating the bombs. Boko Haram—a Nigeria-based militant Islamist group whose name translates roughly to ‘Western education is forbidden’—expressly targets schools and has abducted more than 2,000 women and girls since 2014. Female suicide bombers are seen by the militants as a new weapon of war. In 2016, The New York Times reported at least one in every five suicide bombers deployed by Boko Haram over the previous two years had been a child, usually a girl. The group used 27 children in suicide attacks in the first quarter of 2017, compared to nine during the same period the previous year.

To see all the nominees please visit the 2018 Photo Contest gallery: http://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2018 

 

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