Photographers Blog

Along the Croatia border

By Antonio Bronic

Two months ago, I started working on a story about Croatia’s border police preparing for the country’s EU accession and trying to prevent illegal migrants from crossing into Croatia. For a media person, it is indeed rare to hang out with the police for 24 hours and I was afraid they would be stiff and uncooperative. How wrong I was. They were friendly and nice and, in the end, even took pity on my efforts to capture something dramatic on camera.

I visited three border crossings, two in the south, with Bosnia and Montenegro, and one in the east, with Serbia. I was mostly interested in finding out who were the people trying to cross the border illegally. They were mostly poor and unemployed citizens of Afghanistan, Syria and Albania, who wanted to reach rich European countries through Croatia, in hopes of finding salvation there.

From talking with the police who have been patrolling the borders for years, I found out that some illegal migrants travel for two months from Afghanistan and are really starving, thirsty, exhausted and poorly clad once they are caught. In some cases they surrender voluntarily to the police, just to get some food. Those who are captured are returned to the country from which they crossed into Croatia but that often does not stop them from trying again. There have been cases of illegal migrants who have tried to cross the border for ten days in a row. One of the most interesting and amusing stories I heard while hanging out with the border patrol was that once illegal migrants mistakenly entered a police van, thinking it was their arranged transport that would take them to another country.

I was just as unfortunate.

During the ten days I spent there I did not manage to photograph a single illegal migrant in action. Just a day before my arrival on the border crossing with Serbia, one Afghan man was captured. One day after my departure, of course, the police seized nine Syrians and two Albanians who had been hiding in a nearby village and waiting for a bus to their next destination. Abandoned houses in local villages are often used as a temporary shelter in which the migrants change their clothes or take a nap, always in a hurry, and often leave their old clothes scattered around the fields.
For the police, it is certainly the most difficult to arrest mothers with small children, and such cases are unfortunately not rare, they said.

The crossings I visited were in sparsely populated ares, near villages or towns with only a handful of residents, all of them known to the police. Every new face was therefore easily registered and observed with suspicion, which I was able to feel upon myself. Because my license plates were not from the area, local police grew suspicious of me as soon as I came to a place and immediately had me checked by radio.

San Diego, California

By Mike Blake

As technology costs drop allowing the individual inventor to become freer to pursue their dreams, create their ideas, and start up new businesses, the world will become a more fascinating place to live.

I first made contact with Otto Diefenbauch in early 2013 after a youtube video of him flying a cardboard-type plane along the California coastline went viral. We chatted and he said he was working on something even better and would drop me an email when he was ready to show it off. So, six months later when he dropped me an email I was curious to see what he had been up to. In this case, it was a much more refined and well designed “flying people” plane. I’m really not sure what to call them.

Otto would be testing some prototypes and I was invited to come along with my cameras. It was a bit of an early start, considering the past two months I have been working late helping edit the NBA and NHL playoffs. I was given very specific direction, though it was in somewhat of a strange location: Meet by some dumpsters off a side road in back of a building.

Istanbul, Turkey

By Marko Djurica

Everyone who has ever been to Istanbul knows their famed Turkish fast food restaurants, especially in Taksim Square. Doners, kebabs and other delicacies are on offer 24/7. The competition is vast and every vendor fights to lure customers. You can’t really go wrong: most of the places have friendly staff and tasty morsels of food. But in one restaurant I experienced a kind of service I could never have dreamed of.

Namely, on June 22 I was in Taksim Square covering the protests that had begun 20 days earlier when the government of Prime Minister Erdogan announced it would build a new shopping mall on Gezi Park, the last large green space in the city. A large number of protesters faced down a line of riot police armed with water cannons. No one needed to tell me what was going to happen; I have been in similar situations many times. The demonstrators shouted anti-government slogans, the police asked them to disperse because rallies are forbidden. Naturally, after a few hours, tensions rose and the police began to use water cannons and tear gas to evict the masses – now a common sight at Taksim.

Even though at first glance it was frightening, it seemed that both sides could get used to this. Tear gas rained down on all sides and so many canisters landed in front of the mass of kebab stands, the open kind which lack windows and doors to hide from the gas burning your eyes and throat. I decided to go inside and take photos, expecting empty tables, chairs flung pell-mell and charred food abandoned on the grill. But what I saw instead stunned me.

Athens, Greece

By Yorgos Karahalis

Some say that to come in contact with “God” is a spiritual matter that has nothing to do with the particular spot or place where such contact takes place. Well, if it were that simple then there would be no need to build churches or mosques.

In the Greek capital Athens, where almost half the country’s 11 million people live, there is a 500,000-strong Muslim community, mostly immigrants from Asia, Africa and eastern Europe. Many of those are faithful and want to express their faith by praying in an appropriate place. Well, there is no such place – there isn’t a single “official” mosque in the wider area of the Greek capital.

Instead, they have to rent flats, basements, old garages and all kinds of warehouses and transform them into makeshift mosques to cover their need for a place to hold religious ceremonies. There are lots of these types of “mosques” around town but they’re not easy to spot and whenever I arrived at one of those addresses I had to double-check it was correct as there was no way to identify these flats or warehouses from the outside. I could not say that they’re miserable places but I could better describe them as hidden places, places that do not want to get noticed. During most of my visits people have been very welcoming and very keen to express their concerns about the lack of a recognizable place of worship as well as their fears about the threats they get from some locals.

Cairo, Egypt

By Asmaa Waguih

On a bridge that overlooks the Nile, a couple stands close to one another, planning for their future. A fisherman passes under the bridge in the boat his sons are rowing and a larger vessel approaches blaring loud music, with young people dancing inside and enjoying a cruise. Elsewhere, school children stand on the bank near some rocks and take a dive into the water to cool off. Everything’s happening on the Nile – this is the lifeblood of Cairo.

I wanted to shoot a story about life on the river because in Cairo it attracts everybody, rich and poor. There are expensive places where you can go and hang out, have dinner and see a belly dancer, but the Nile is also a huge attraction for the majority of the population who are less well off and who can pay two or three Egyptian pounds (around 30 or 40 cents) to take a cheap shared cruise down the river at night.

You could spend your whole life taking pictures of the Nile and there would still be more to see, so I had to try and choose my subjects. Some of my images show the huge contrasts in Egyptian society, from the huge buildings in central Cairo, to life in the shantytowns towards the outskirts, where I photographed a man washing his horse in the water.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

By Sergio Moraes

It took them 21 years but they’re back. Brazilians began to hit the streets last week to protest the lack of investment in health, education, public transportation, and security, and against corruption and the exaggerated spending for the Confederations Cup, World Cup and Olympic Games. The last time I saw a nationwide movement of this type was in 1992, during the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello. He ended up resigning.

Two decades later Brazil’s youths have again provoked the entire country to fight for their rights. The difference between these protests and the ones in 1992 is the level of violence from both the police and the demonstrators. I covered them back then, and those now in Rio and Belo Horizonte, and there’s no way I can agree with those who say that it’s just a small group from each protest that confronts the police. I’ve seen the protests divided into huge groups between those who are fighting for better infrastructure and services, and others who just want to fight the cops, but they are all in the battle.

The first protests were against the increase in public transportation fares, but with the movement’s success suddenly other issues have made the list of demands much longer. Since they began during the FIFA Confederations Cup, a warm-up to next year’s World Cup, the protests gained much more visibility than normal. One of the biggest complaints is the amount of public money being spent on the construction of stadiums, and for that reason many of the demonstrations are held on match days, and even inside the stadiums as fans hold up posters with phrases like, “We want FIFA-standard hospitals,” or “No more corruption.” It’s worth noting that FIFA prohibits demonstrations inside stadiums during its competitions, but this time Brazilians managed to dribble around FIFA and get their posters inside.

Havana, Cuba

By Maxim Shemetov

I’ve never been to Cuba before. Frankly speaking, today is my first visit. It’s a very short one of only 24 hours, of which now I have only half left to walk around Old Havana and to swim in the ocean while the global hysteria over the uncatchable Edward Snowden carries on.

For me, this story started on Sunday when I woke up and slowly went to the office. It was supposed to be a usual working weekend when almost nothing happens. Almost… Incoming calls suddenly started to light up my cell phone. The big story with Snowden as the lead actor flying somewhere via Moscow began. It is hard to describe all of the next 24 hours spent in the airport, with expensive tickets booked to get inside the transit zone at Sheremetyevo and disappointment that a lot of energy was wasted on information that turned out to be wrong.

The next morning I headed to the airport again to take the same flight as Snowden. It looked suspicious that everyone knew when and how a top secret target was going to leave Russia. The flight number, even the fugitive’s seat on the plane, was known 24 hours ahead of departure! I met around 30 reporters flying to Cuba near gate 28. All were filming a newly arrived plane while arguing with airport security.

Gaza City

By Mohammed Salem

Since the summer vacations started, every morning as I go to the office I see lots of children on the way to their summer camps, travelling either on foot or by bus. Based on my previous visits to these different camps, the stark contrast between the various activities on offer occurred to me as an interesting subject for a story.

I started my exploratory tour by visiting a Hamas-run summer camp, where I spent about 20 minutes watching the youngsters and seeing what they were really interested in. My attention was caught by their tough determination and ability to perform military-style exercises under the heat of the sun.

The scenes I watched in that camp were in complete contrast to what children are offered by the U.N. fun weeks. So for my story I planned to find two schoolchildren who were at the different camps, and document their daily activities in order to illustrate their personal lives.

Grand Canyon, Arizona

By Mike Blake

The world loves an intriguing story and if television can wrap it up into a prime time event – then the show must go on.

That said, sometimes history is uneventful. This is why I was off to Flagstaff, Arizona to cover Nik Wallenda walking across the Grand Canyon on a tight rope. Details were sketchy at first. The Discovery Channel was in control of access and waivers and releases had to be cleared before we would sign on to cover. A media position was being set up, but we were told it was a distance away.

GALLERY: WALKING OVER THE GRAND CANYON

After a couple of flights and an overnight at a Motel 6 I met up with the Discovery handlers and a small group of local and international media including our correspondent Tim Gaynor who was writing the story. We all climbed onto a bus and motored up a few hours to a portion of the Grand Canyon on Navajo Nation land where Nik Wallenda would make his historic walk. There was a transfer from the bus on the side of a windy road to a smaller van/SUV that took us along a dirt road through a sheep farm and to a set of media risers perfectly placed to give you a great view of the action, with the exception that we are about half a mile away from the location of the crossing. So far that you were actually unable to see the tightrope with your naked eye, or for that matter, Nik walking on it.

Singapore

By Edgar Su

As someone who has lived in Singapore all my life, haze is not unusual, it is somewhat a seasonal event that I have become used to. But last Monday was different, I woke up to a slightly smokey smell in the air and the view outside my apartment was more hazy than usual. Immediately, I checked Facebook to see what my friends working in the city were experiencing. Many posted pictures of a very hazy skyline from the view in their office and remarked that even the air in the subway and malls smelled of smoke.

I immediately made my way to the business district to have a look. My first instinct was to get up to the rooftop of the Marina Bay Sands hotel to get the best vantage point available in the city. On the way up, a hotel staff member apologized to me in the elevator, “I am sorry for the view today”. He was right, from the observation deck, the haze was so thick that I could only see the outlines of landmark buildings.

There on the 57th floor, I could feel no breeze. It was very humid, my chest felt tight and I found it hard to breathe carrying all my gear with me. I needed that one picture showing a human element against the hazy skyline and I knew it was at the poolside which only hotel guests had access. My only option was to wait to join one of the three daily scheduled tours of the pool for the public. So I waited two hours in the humidity before a tour guide came along and brought us in. “Take as many pictures as you want” he said. The only problem was, it wasn’t exactly a tour of the pool, we were only allowed in a small 20 yard stretch shared among at least 40 other tourists with cameras and we had only about fifteen minutes. Worse still, many of the hotel guests were suddenly getting out of the pool because of all the tourists looking at them. But I was lucky, just before I was about to leave, a man began swimming in front of us…