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The smell of fixer is one of my oldest memories of photography and my dad’s Nikon SP and the black Besseler enlarger would eventually become part of my own path into photography. Robert Levin was a writer at heart, and didn’t flatter himself with comparisons to the pros of the day, who happened also to be his professional associates and friends, but took some pleasure in his creations. As an editor, he assigned Henri Cartier-Bresson to photograph Dr. Anthony Pisicano, a local Long Beach pediatrician, and the Frenchman visited or house. Weegee passed by the house once, and Life’s Bill Ray photographed our family for a Life Magazine. Bob’s photography books were among my earliest photographic influences, although the truth is that I came to photography in my 20’s, and that his friendship with Howard Chapnick of Black Star, who also lived in Long Beach, was a major door-opener for me.

When my father passed away in the early 70’s I was given two large boxes by his secretary at Redbook Magazine, containing thousands ofj prints, negatives and personal papers from his childhood in the Bronx, where he attended Dewitt Clinton High School amd eventually the City University of New York and then Columbia. Like many of the upwardly mobile Jewish families living in the Bronx, the Levins had begun a slow migration to Long Island. For Alfred and Frances Levin and their two boys, Long Beach was the preferred summertime residence. Alfred was a jewelry salesman, first travelling in the South and than opening up his own business in the Jewelry Exchange on 47th Street. America was both affluent and expanding, and young adults were mobile and interested in things like Kodak Brownie cameras, which were extremely popular and easy to use, and made photography available to the growing American middle class. The first section of pictures taken in Long Beach, of Bob and his friends were made with one of them.

Robert served in the military during World War II as a writer for Stars and Stripes, the army’s newspaper. But he returned to Europe after the war with my mother, Martha, and spent a year, writing and photographing extensively, this time with a black Rollei twin lens reflex camera. These photographs are among most interesting, moody still-lifes and landscapes, often inspired, or so she jokingly insisted, by the direction of my mother, who had studied art history, and considered herself to have the finer eye of the two. In fact, she took full credit for his ability with the camera.

After returning to New York, Robert freelanced as a writer for men’s magazines like Pageant and Coronet, writing detective stories and doing interviews with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy. The young couple lived in Long Beach in a rented apartment, and looked foward to a bright future in a country of expanding opportunity. I was born in New York City in 1950, and with my sister Peri followed two years later Before settling in and buying a house with a GI Loan, my parents decided to return to Europe, and the four of us we sailed off to France pn the Liberte. We lived in England, France, Spain and Italy, and my dad continued to freelance for the men’s magazines. typing off manuscripts and mailing them off to his editors in New York. By this time he had purchased a Nikon 35mm camera which had become the rage in photography and was aware of the work of Cartier-Bresson, as he was of the progressive writers like Jean-Paul Satre, and of course the American Henry Miller, and in our little family he had a opportunity to document what was a very idyllic and transformational time. He liked street photography, but some of the most compelling images are clearly of his own family. I don’t remember him posing any pictures, he was definitely a bit of a lurker. He rolled his own film, and developed much of it in a portable darkroom.

The family returned to Long Island so that I could begin school. We bought a Levitt house in Long Beach, and eventually Bob would take an editorial position in Manhattan at Redbook Magazine and commuted by train or car from Long Beach. The photographs from this time period are less candid and more representative of special events, a school play or graduation, or a family gathering. Eventually he was able to purchase a larger home in nearby Lido Beach very close to the water and it is here that the photographs tapered off. A divorce, a new life in Manhattan, made photography more of an afterthought, and less of a passion. There was less time, and certainly much less time for the family on Long Island.
What has become clear to me, is that the camera and the photographs of the family represented a vision of what family life was supposed to be, rather than the reality of what it was, or what perhaps what my father was.

My own career as a photography, if you could call it a career, has roots in the work of my father’s pictures. My comfort about the camera, came directly as a result of its presence as an indicator of love. I started with the Nikon SP that was used for all of his European work, although by this time the SLR had become the magazine photographer’s workhorse, and I quickly gravitated to the newer cameras, for better or worse, and the eventual assignments that took me all over the world and allowed me more success than I ever thought possible as a professional photographer.

But looking back at my father’s pictures, what impresses me most is that some of the most meaningful images that we can take are of things that are of our families, our friends, our communities, and the moments of our lives that are worth preserving. All photographs are proof that something happened and a way to mark our time as we live our days, one at a time. The increased volume of images, from cell-phone cameras, digital SLRS and the like as easy to use as they are, doesn’t really change the reason for using a camera. And I can only wonder what the children of today will see forty years from now when looking back
at the images taken by their parents. Will they be nostalgic for the 2010s? Probably so,

Homeless in New Orleans

Homeless In New Orleans

The photographs in this special issue of 100Eyes were made during the photo workshop I taught in New Orleans last month during Photo NOLA. The work was so good, that I thought it important that it needed to be seen by a wider audience. A week after the photographers left town, 8 young people were killed when a ramshackle abandoned warehouse they were living in burned to the ground. The death of the kids, who were demeaned in some places as gutter punks and freeloaders, was controversial as it was tragic. Although most of the photography in this piece is of the chronically homeless– people who have for whatever reason become homeless and remained that way through parts of their adult lives–the deaths of the travellers, transients in most cases by choice, taught me that the two groups had a lot in common. There remains a possibility that one of the women photographed by us was killed in the blaze. Lexie panhandled and lived in the same area that the tragedy occurred. We are hoping for the best.

The homeless come to New Orleans for much the same reason that everyone else does. Some are born here. Others just happened to find their way to the Big Easy, for a job, for Mardi Gras, or to start a new life. Some are fleeing abusive relationships, or just can’t live with their family. Some are travellers who are just passing through on their way to someplace else, incapable or not wanting to participate in society. The cities large number of abandoned houses provide shelter for those with enough initiative to find them– in fact thousands of people are estimated to be living in abandoned houses all over the city.

But, many of those who are least able to help themselves end up on the street, living alone, in small groups, dependent on handouts from New Orleanians for food and clothing and sometimes panhandling at traffic lights for booze and cigarette money, or for money to spend a night in a cheap hotel. We found a group of homeless last week when the South was in a deep freeze, huddled on a cold sidewalk across the interstate from The Mission, a privately run shelter, the most visible one in the city, that sits just off Expressway that connects the East and West Banks of the Mississippi River. Most in the small group intended to remain outside that night, preferring to take their chances in the cold rather than heading across the street and standing in line to be allowed into the Mission. “I’d rather take my chances here,” said India, who was the first to camp on the spot, on a patch of concrete under a browned palm tree. There was talk about the $5.00 that the Mission was now charging for a night on a cot. Although on a freeze night the Mission was forced by law to accept all the men and women it could without charge, many on were skeptical. “If there aren’t enough beds they might take us to jail,” said Metal, a 28year old from San Diego, named after his taste in music.

This anti-Mission group seemed more self-reliant, than those in line across the street. There were accusations that the formerly homeless couple that ran the Mission kept all the best food for themselves. Like most such shelters, the Mission is high on Christianity, and a religious service is mandatory. And paying $5.00 to spend the night, often forced a choice between the cheap alcohol at the corner store or a night inside. Most in India’s group would rather take their chances in the cold than deal with the men who waited on line to get into the Mission.

Their patch of sidewalk India found was a few blocks from the Amtrak Station (which had doubled as a jail in the days after Katrina) and a bit further from the Superdome where the Saints play. He had quickly been joined by Rocky, then Metal, and Marguerite with her husband Walter. The benefit of camping out as a group was that they were easily found by New Orleanians looking to give away food and clothing. That and the camaraderie, which is a part of the fabric of life in the Big Easy, from Uptown to the Lower Ninth Ward. Mostly they did nothing but sit around. Sometimes the day would be broken up by a bit of drama, as when a car careened into the sidewalk outside the Mission on the other side of the Interstate, sending seven people to University Hospital. But for the most part they sat, in the cold, or slept under heavy blankets, or Rocky, in his tent. They hated weeks when the Saints played a home game, because the police would come by a few days in advance and force them off the sidewalk, normally under the Interstate. Why the police allowed them under the Interstate but not on the sidewalk no one knew, but regardless few of the homeless were Saints fans.

The proximity to the Amtrak Station, which doubled as the Greyhound Terminal, seemed ironic, as most in the group said they were headed out of town, but had gotten stuck for some reason or another, and had no way to raise the money for a bus ticket. The constant noise of traffic on the interstate served as a reminder of people who were going somewhere, whether it be just across the River to the West Bank, or perhaps headed towards Baton Rouge and west from there. The weight of addiction, to alcohol, marijuana and cheap cigarettes, which seemed to be always dangling off of their rough fingers, pulled them down, like birds without wings. They all aspired for more, but had settled for a life on the streets, which was something familiar, a life that they didn’t like, but could live with. There was no sense of time under the highway. The group rarely knew the day of the week, or the month for that matter. They were shackled by an inability to deal with society, with family, with an employer. They were getting by, and for the most part, that was enough.

Holding cardboard signs and looking for spare change, the homeless are part of the American bad dream, a grim reminder to many of lives gone bad, or people too weak to compete. A large encampment of homeless that had gathered under the Claiborne overpass in New Orleans, was disbanded by the Nagin Administration in the years after Hurricane Katrina. In San Francisco it is rumored that the city actually put homeless on buses to Portland, where the group is well-represented on the sidewalks of the downtown area, and until recently, sleeping under the overpasses. In Portland, as in many American cities, the homeless are evicted from their encampments during the holiday season.

America is a wealthy country, and its wealth has fortunately absorbed many of those who perhaps, given a less forgiving country, might also be camped out under the nation’s interstates. Or maybe it is there that they are headed, as the nations ability, and desire, to pay for social programs seems to wane, as the need increases. Larger cities, with the ability to make life for the homeless difficult, or ship them more or less willingly out of town with much desired bus tickets to another city, pass the problem on to smaller or hospitable cities, which often have less resources to assist the men in women in finding a sustainable lifestyle, which most often involves providing them with a means to find even minimal employment. Unfortunately, a job in McDonalds does not pay enough for even the rental of the most basic apartment, and often the homeless lack any of the documentation needed to gain state assistance and live in the welfare bubble. Dealing with the bureaucracy requires a set of skills that might require a continuing education course in themselves., and the budgets for groups that might potentially provide this kind of assistance are often minimal and have to be used on basic needs like temporary shelters and food, rather than the long-term programs that might help integrate the homeless back into the mainstream of society.

Unlike the homeless who are on the street due to circumstance, the homeless travelers and “gutter punks” are often homeless by choice. This group is a more heterogeneous than many think, some proportion of them coming from middle-class or in some cases wealthy families, choosing to live on the fringes of society rather than hold down jobs. Among them though are college students who can’t afford traditional housing, and many who are unemployable either by an unwillingness to work or by the expectations of those who might employ them. Will Burger King hired someone with a tattooed face to work at the drive-in counter? Most corporations have strict rules about dress and body art. Although discrimination because of race is theoretically illegal, discrimination because of personal decisions about body styling and dress is certainly not. The result is that in many cases members of the alternative culture couldn’t get employment even if they wanted it. Whether this group truly falls into the category of homeless is arguable. Many would say that they are not homeless at all, but simply live without the traditional shelter of a home or rented apartment. The argument could be made that a “home” involves more than a roof and walls, and that a true home exists only in the context of a community. Those in the counter-culture may often have a community and a family structure that is stronger than a single mother living in the suburbs with her small children.

Will many of these travelers remain homeless throughout their lives? Only a very small percentage of the “hippies” that trekked across America to the streets of Haight-Ashbury in the 60’s, remained on the edge of society. But with the continued shrinkage of the American economy isn’t it possible that the homeless population will continue to grow. As a friend of mine warned me over coffee the other morning, “In the future grandma and grandpa may be having Thanksgiving under the interstate.”

Andy Levin

100Eyes is an online photographic showcase featuring contemporary photography including documentary, art, and alternative photojournalism. Edited and created by Andy Levin, 100Eyes is made possible by the generosity of photographers who donate their work in the spirit of a shared photographic community.

China: The Past is a Foreign Country

My grandparents fled the People’s Republic of China and entered the Republic of China in 1949. I was left with them after my birth in 1979 when my parents entered the US. Memories from then are faint and perhaps uneventful, except a slight sense of desire for my mother. I went to elementary school in the US but was brought back to Taiwan for high school and I struggled to fit in. Dropping out of college, I fled from Taiwan in 1999 and moved to New York City, without a friend, and forever an orphan of childhood love I’d never experienced.

Recurring nightmare since then: feeling the sky folding downward, slowly and steadily, over my self, drones within my skull, my jaws tight, body stiff and hammered down. At age five, I met my mother and she watched over me to ensure that my afternoon nap was taken. My back towards her and I pretended to be dead.

I oscillate in between the here and the elsewhere of my imaginary, sketching forth a landscape ruins in reverse, a melancholy before the melancholic journey arises, dissipating before the completion of dreams, preemptive dreams striking upon the memory of the future. I’m a stranger to myself with an address that changes without end, drifting from one town to the next, following footfalls into transit stops and transitory playgrounds and onto a dystopic drawing board of sorts.

I can’t fully digest the details of the world, breathing its smoke and smog, and all the petty whispers and pretty lies circulating in my lungs, engulfing what’s left of me, and in no act can the gnawing space between us be relieved.

Photographing is like catching mosquitoes buzzing ceaselessly in one’s dark room.

The negative images projected in the dark room are my silent quarrels with the world, and imperfect and precarious as they may be, I scratch the smallest speckles of light against the dissolving surfaces of fogged and out-dated photographic paper, anticipating the blacks of my desire to reverse, like moths with the lights out.

The lone hit man in exits the room, turns back to glance, the caged bird is still alive.

Walking into the quake aftermath and searching through the artifacts that remain with the living, my presence felt though not affecting quantitatively the conditions I saw. We exist in the menagerie as we know, and that is enough, the flood of chance, the ritualistic fire, the afternoon shade, and we move on, in miniature alterations, to each our disquietude.

Our man in Chengdu drives us anywhere we want, almost running over a cop only to yell “out of the way” or something in local Sichuanese, and driving on, here to honk is a normal gesture saying that “I’m here.” One night into an hour driving on quake ridden mountain roads (daytime its beautiful despite the damaged cars and voided railings over steep drops, but night changes all…) cutting pass cars, quite tense even for our driver, especially since it was all silent, the horn died along the way… What was that 50s French film with Yves Montand driving through the night transporting nitroglycerine tanks cautiously on uneven roads and one fatal bump would ignite all?

We sneak through under a covered rickshaw, to see the site of a collapsed school with the memorials of dead children, was it nine or ten thousand that died? There were parents mourning (I saw) and protesting (I saw not). Soon a cop takes us out, jotted down our passport numbers, and escorted us away.

There is always a side path into the towns left half intact, debris everywhere and the white powder covering grounds where corpses once laid.

Headed back down the mountain roads, stopped in a village, became center of attention, everyone hospitable and highly alert, reminded me somehow of the ancient tale by Tao Yuanming, then an informer of the village informs of our arrival. We’re scooted off again as foreign crazies with cameras, passed through another village, another checkpoint.

A family living in a ramshackle, the 6 year-old girl curiously modeling for me, I’m offered chicken and corn wine, the best meal I’ve had in days.

I walk bravely, into the cops, chatted a bit, waited for orders, gave them 2 films (I’d shot 10-15 rolls), got them back, promising not to publish negative views of China back home to them foreigners, that’s that, no use bribing cops with cigarettes but I feel semi-pro now dealing with them. The flooded areas caused by massive landslides I couldn’t reach, too many checkpoints, one would take days to find alternate footpaths.

I arrive weeks after the Sichuan quake: the dead had been buried or burnt en masse, so I see only the living, in the tennis court that is a temporary hospital and makeshift shelters dotting the periphery alongside the fallen boulders.

In this dirt world but not of this dirt world, we seem to exist: constant washing and rewashing of towels to wipe off the summer sweat, the summer dirt, and the winter dirt.

One may consider Chongqing if one may choose to die, exit the cable car over the Yangtze river, gulping her ancient thick silt, away past boatmen with curious eyes. This vertigo city, built upon mountains and endless stairs and in between the footpaths, dropping us into our nights, traversing from house to pavements spackled with blackened spit to ground drillings for yet another modern tower to foot massage parlors (the girls inside watching television) filled with grilled chickens and tossed away bones, fusing below what is called one’s head, and high above, vapors from the river spirals forth towards an unknown future that neon KTV lights disguise as intoxication.

The flooded town sees itself in the dirt roads leading to the river swallowing all, and on boats, livestock wait desperately to be slaughtered and scale upon the signs of futures index. Memoirs of an overdevelopment, it is 2008 and I arrive too late, the new city towers visibly above the opaque ruins that one calls history, slanted and crooked along a deep slope, the local officials installing a grand staircase and cable car lines linking the living and the dead.

Another snapshot besides the Gezhouba Dam: a forgotten pool, the dam affirms and negates the passage of time, as kids swim and bathe without care, and not far away, a carcass of a dog floats, alongside the weeds and reeds in this moist summer afternoon.

Private bus conductors drag you on regardless if the destination of yours and theirs coincide or not. Then they dispose you off the highway and drive on.

Chinese ideograms embody an image of the past with all the layered references, in the (misty) air, so to speak, in newspapers and propaganda banners, and hence the material evidence of history is discarded without sentiment lost.

The LCD screen above grounds our experience with flickering lights and sweating bodies chanting: “Let’s go China!” The wind brings forth ashes from fireworks afar, showing not what the cries were for. I’m in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping plaza, minutes from Tiananmen, invisible amongst the crowds awaiting the 2008 Olympic open ceremony.

After the applause, the master feeds on time their sheltered, and in frenzy, digestion is made, to ensure precise vomit of the self.

And heard faintly the murmur of someone with a flat mechanical tone.

I once walked past a zoo, surrounded by road constructions while visitor numbers zero. The loneliest zoo in the world, I imagine. The one-humped camel came to entice me, but shy I was and declined. Monkeys were fed, so were the wolves. The male lion roared, but who heard? Soon the earth will swallow him too.

Cicadas molt, their shells remain empty on tree barks for us to ponder.

Wayne Liu

Eric Guo, whose real name in Guo Yang, is a young man who came to Beijing from the countryside with the dream of becoming a photographer. I know this because we have corresponded through email with the use of Gogle translator, an amazing web page that translates, more or less, English to Chinesa and vice versa. Guo has photographed the Yi people, an indigenous, ethnic minority that live in the mountains of Sichuan province, using a 2 1/4 camera, and traditional film. Guo has a beautiful sense of black and white, and his images seem to come from another century. His lament, that traditional cultures are being absorbed into “modern life,” is familiar, and its also the reason that photographers often seek out that which is endangered and disappearing, before they fade away into history. Above all the camera provides a record.

Rian Dundon is an American photojournalist from Monterey, California. He is currently enrolled in the Social Documentation M.A. program at University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds a B.F.A. in Photography and Imaging from New York University (2003). Since 2005 Rian has lived and worked predominantly in Mainland China. He speaks Mandarin Chinese and is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States.

Rian’s work has been featured in TIME, Newsweek, The Irish Times Magazine, Stern, Vision, and Out Magazine. He has exhibited in solo and group shows at the FotoGrafia Festival (Rome), Beijing Photo Spring, The Camera Club of New York, The New York Photo Festival, New York University, and the Angkor Photography Festival. In 2007 Rian received a Tierney Fellowship for his project examining youth culture in interior China. He is a contributor at New America Media and has lectured on his work at New York University and East China Normal University in Shanghai.
http://www.riandundon.com

M Scott Brauer was born 1982, Landstuhl, Germany, to American parents, and is currently based in the American Northwest. Brauer graduated with honors from the University of Washington with dual degrees in philosophy and Russian literature and language in 2005 and worked for daily newspapers in 2006 and 2007: the Northwest Herald in suburban Chicago, and the Flint Journal in Flint, Michigan. Brauer is represented by Invision Images, Aurora Select, On Asia, and Wonderful Machine and his clients include: The New York Times, Fader magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Time Asia. http://www.mscottbrauer.com

Katharina Hesse holds a graduate degree in Chinese ( & Japanese) studies from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris; she is one of a few foreign photographers who are accredited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has lived in China for 17 years.
Hesse initially worked as an assistant for German TV (ZDF) and then freelanced for Newsweek from 1996 to 2002. In 2003 and 2004 she covered China for Getty. Hesse is self-taught in photography and her photos have appeared in publications such as Courrier International, Der Spiegel, D della Repubblica, EYEmazing, Glamour ( Germany),IO Donna ,Le Monde, Marie-Claire,Neon, Newsweek, Reporters without Borders annual book ( Germany),Stern, Vanity Fair (Italy/Germany),Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit etc. http://www.katharinahesse.com

Markel Redondo is a freelance photographer based in Bilbao, Spain. Some of his clients include Greenpeace, Bloomberg, the British Council, Le Figaro Magazine, Le Point, New York Times, South China Morning Post, The Mail on Sunday or Frommer’s Travel Guides. Markel was finalist at “Descubrimientos” Photo Espana 2007, nominated for the Joop Swart Masterclass in 2007, 2009 and 2010 and took the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop in 2007. After spending two years documenting social issues in China, he is based in Bilbao now, where he works on commisions and projects. http://www.markelredondo.com

Carolyn Drake was born in California, USA in 1971. She studied history and media/culture at Brown University, graduating in 1994, and later learned photography at ICP and Ohio University. Her photo career began at the age of 30, when she decided to leave her multimedia job in New York to learn about the world through personal experience. She currently lives in Istanbul and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, a World Press Photo award, the Lange Taylor Prize, and a Santa Fe prize finalist. http://www.carolyndrake.com

Wayne Liu currently resides and eats in Chinatown, NYC, and was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1979.

Ryan Pyle was born in 1978 in Toronto, Canada and in 2002 realized a life-long dream and moved to China, where he began taking freelance photo assignments, working for the NY Times, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and others. http://www.ryanpyle.com

Sergio Ramazzatti has written and photographed hundreds of stories for most of the leading Italian magazines, including D La Repubblica, IoDonna, supplement of the daily Corriere della Sera, Specchio,
supplement of the daily La Stampa, Ventiquattro, supplement of the daily Il Sole-24 Ore. As a novelist, he published ‘Vado verso il capo’ (Feltrinelli 1996), ‘Carne verde’ (Feltrinelli 1999), ‘La birra
di Shaoshan’ (Feltrinelli 2002), ‘Liberi di morire’ (Piemme 2003), ‘Tre ore all’alba’ (DeAgostini 2005) and ‘Afrozapping’ (Feltrinelli 2006). In 2005 he won the Enzo Baldoni Prize for Journalism of
the Province of Milano, and the International Photography Award (Los Angeles) in the ‘Editorial’ category.
www.parallelozero.com

Xiqi Yuwang, was born in 1975, in Zheijang, China. He arrived in Spain in 1990, where he first studied Fashion Design, and afterwards Photography, at Art and Design HighSchool of Valencia. Yuwang grew up at PineHill, in a familiar ambient, among poets and painters. His work will be exhibited in ARCO, the most important Contemporary Art Fair in Spain this year. http://xiqiyuwang.blogspot.com

Guo Yang (Eric Guo) graduated in 2002 from Tsinghua University in Fine Arts, and photographs elements of the past that are being absorbed into so-called modern civilization in China. Guo was born in a poor, mountainous region in Northern China and at aged 18 entered the Hebei Arts and Crafts School. Contact Eric Guo at ericguo06@yahoo.cn .

Holly Wilmeth spent her childhood living between the city and jungles and agricultural plains of Central America. After graduating in Political Science and Languages, she lived in Japan for
two years teaching English in rural communities. In 2003 she returned to the US where she took up photography as a career, but her wanderlust continues to see her visit many remote corners of the world from Mongolia to Mexico, where she is currently based. http://www.hollywilmeth.com

Christian Als is a Danish photographer born in the countryside outside Copenhagen. Most of his work centers on ‘concerned photography’ and he is drawn to social, political and economic issues throughout the world. Als has worked in countries like Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, DR Congo and Kenya. I love to undertake social and humanitarian projects around the world, and his work has been published in publications such as TIME, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times Magazine, GEO, Stern, Der Spiegel, The Wall Street Journal and L’espresso, to name a few. http://www.christianals.com

James Whitlow Delano’s work in Afghanistan was awarded 1st place in the 2008 NPPA Best of Photojournalism competition for Best Picture Story (large markets). He received the Alfred Eisenstaedt (Eisie) Award administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and presented by Life Magazine, for work done in China. His photographs have also received the Award of Excellence three times from Communication Arts Photography Annual for work done in China, West Africa and monograph book publishing. James has been cited with awards in the PDN Photography Annual five times. Delano’s 2003 Three Gorges and 2004 Shenzhen, China projects have been cited with Picture of the Year International awards. He lives in Tokyo. http://www.jameswhitlowdelano.com

100Eyes is an online photographic showcase featuring contemporary photography including documentary, art, and alternative photojournalism. Edited and created by Andy Levin, 100Eyes is made possible by the generosity of photographers who donate their work in the spirit of a shared photographic community.

The ghost men then feel blindly for the stones because they can’t see anything.

Payment is determined by size: big stones bring big money, small stones only a little. This is work for young men, generally only managed by those aged between 22 to 40 years. It is work for men who are muscular and strong. For visibility reasons, mainly they work from 11 am when the sun is at its hottest.

It’s a high risk environment because the water is extremely cold and the men are underwater for long periods. Often they catch colds and fevers which makes breathing more difficult. They come from the Mymenshing and Kishorgonj districts and so have no family to care for them when they are sick. The men work for a month, then go to their home district for a few days before returning to their rock collecting duties.

Such is the life of the mysterious men who live much of their day underwater.

 

Arman Adnan (b. 1986), is a graduate of the Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography.