Photo Booth

October 18, 2013

Between Here and Paradise: Rena Effendi’s Havana

  • E01.jpgA girl waits for transportation in Havana’s Old City, in June, 2013. Posters of Fidel Castro abound in the city—this one is in the window of a state-owned shop.
  • E02.jpgBoys playing on a vintage Oldsmobile on Vigia Street, in Havana’s Cerro neighborhood.
  • E03.jpgA woman dressed in white for a Santería ceremony.
  • E04.jpgA family inside of an old wooden house in San Francisco de Paula, an outlying suburb of Havana, where Hemingway used to live.
  • E05.jpgA man sells fruit on an Old City street corner.
  • E06.jpgTwo girls return home from a classical Spanish dance class in the Old City.
  • E07.jpgA couple dancing salsa on their doorstep, in San Francisco de Paula.
  • E08.jpgA family having a Sunday picnic in Parque Lenin, a popular weekend destination on the south side of Havana.
  • E09.jpgA waitress at a state-owned café in Regla, one of Havana’s boroughs.
  • E10.jpgThe streets of the city are full of Eisenhower-era cars. This man has stopped his Oldsmobile to cool off the engine in the neighborhood of La Vibora, where Leonardo Padura went to school.
  • E11.jpgThree generations of a family in a dilapidated cinema in Regla. They rent the structure for roughly a dollar per month to house their private manicure business.
  • E12.jpgMen drink rum after work in the neighborhood of Cerro.
  • E13.jpgA state-owned barbershop in Regla.
  • E14.jpgA woman smoking a cigar on Calzada del Cerro.
  • E15.jpgCalle Sol, a street under renovation in the Old City.
  • E16.jpgA man loads produce for the state-owned fresh-food market in Regla.

In this week’s issue of the magazine, Jon Lee Anderson writes about the Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura, and about Cuba’s complex, troubled history with its writers and artists.

Anderson quotes Reinaldo Arenas, the displaced Cuban writer best know for his memoir, “Before Night Falls,” in a 1983 interview with Ann Tashi Slater: “Everyone who lives outside his context is always a bit of a ghost, because I am here, but at the same time I remember a person who walked those streets, who is there, and that same person is me. So sometimes I don’t really know if I am here or there. And at times the longing to be there is greater than the necessity of being here.”

The photographer Rena Effendi, whose pictures accompany Anderson’s piece, documented many of the neighborhoods and enclaves that appear in the work of Padura and other Cuban artists. In her photos of Havana, we see a city almost frozen in time. Relics of another era dot the streets, like props from a period film. Effendi also depicts the city’s lively street life, photographing people in motion against a backdrop of vivid murals and Havana’s signature pastel colors. “Cuba is neither a paradise nor a hell but, rather,” Anderson writes, “more of a purgatory, where some of us have the possibility of salvation.”

October 18, 2013

Portfolio: Syria’s Lost Generation

dorfman-syria.jpg

For six months earlier this year, the photographer Elena Dorfman covered the Syrian refugee crisis for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, one of the organizations that mobilized to build the Za’atari refugee camp, in Jordan, which David Remnick wrote about in August. Of the millions of Syrians displaced by the civil war, Dorfman was drawn most strongly to the teen-agers. “They seemed particularly shell-shocked and bereft,” she said. “They spoke to me of powerful longing and frustration.”

In these portraits, Dorfman documents a small fraction of a population disproportionately affected by the war. As Remnick writes of Za’atari, “The dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a close friend to the war.” The same is true for the teen-agers Dorfman photographed in camps in Lebanon and Iraqi Kurdistan. “They all talked about missing out on lives,” she said, “on futures that now seem lost.”

Click here to view an audio slide show of Dorfman’s photographs.

Photographs by Elena Dorfman.

October 16, 2013

Q. Sakamaki Takes Japan

  • sakamaki-01.jpgHigh-school girls in Tokyo.
  • sakamaki-02.jpgChildren on the Tokyo Gate Bridge.
  • sakamaki-03.jpgA park in the Tokyo Opera City Tower.
  • sakamaki-04.jpgMorning rush hour in Tokyo.
  • sakamaki-05.jpgMorning rush hour in Tokyo.
  • sakamaki-06.jpgA hostess takes a cigarette break in the Kabuki-cho region of Tokyo.
  • sakamaki-07.jpg A three-year-old girl’s Shichi-Go-San (a traditional right of passage) at the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, in the city of Kamakura.
  • sakamaki-08.jpgSakamaki’s mother leaves a Buddhist temple in Mikawa.
  • sakamaki-09.jpgA farmer in Mikawa Province.
  • sakamaki-010.jpgKatsura River, in the Arashiyama district.
  • sakamaki-011.jpgA surfer headed to Shichirigahama Beach in Shonan, along the coast of Toyko.
  • sakamaki-012.jpgSurfers after a day at Shichirigahama Beach.
  • sakamaki-013.jpgA view of the city of Kyoto from Jojakkoji Temple, in Sagano.

Last week, New York-based Japanese photographer Q. Sakamaki hosted The New Yorkers Instagram feed. Photographing during a visit to Japan, Sakamaki provided a pocket-size window into life all over the country, from daily commutes in Tokyo to the surf culture along the coast of the Sagami Bay, in central Japan. On this trip, Sakamaki, whose work generally has an international-affairs focus, documented his first trip in over two decades to his family’s home town, in the rural province of Mikawa.

Sakamaki took these pictures using the Hipstamatic app on his phone: “Logistically speaking, shooting with Hipstamatic is the same as shooting film: I decide which film and lens I will use before I take a photo,” Sakamaki said, adding that that Instagram has been a source of inspiration in the past year, exposing him to work that he wouldn’t encounter otherwise, as well as providing him with an outlet for sharing his more experimental photographs.

October 15, 2013

Wolfgang Tillmans: Up Close and Personal

  • WG01.jpg“Central Nervous System” (2013)
  • WG02.jpg“Engadin II” (2013)
  • WG03.jpg“Augenlicht” (2013)
  • WG04.jpg“Karl, Hand on Shoulder, São Paulo” (2012)
  • WG-08a.jpg“Karl Smoking” (2013)
  • WG06.jpg“Outer Ear“ (2012)
  • WG07.jpg“Alyscamps II” (2013)
  • WG05.jpg“Karl, Utoquai 4” (2012)

Wolfgang Tillmans’s newest exhibition, “central nervous system,” signals a return to portraiture-based work and a departure from the pictures in his latest book, “Neue Welt,” which explore the diverse landscapes and life styles of people around the world. Of this shift, Tillmans reflected, “I’ve found that portraiture is a good levelling instrument—it always sends me back to square one.”

The title “central nervous system” refers to Tillmans’s focus on the subtleties of the human body; the work is an in-depth, dramatic offshoot of his early portraiture pieces. The images have a simplistic depth and a frankness, qualities that Tillmans considers an implicit aspect of portraiture photography. “Making a portrait is a fundamental artistic act, and the process is a very direct human exchange,” he said. “The dynamics of vulnerability, exposure, embarrassment, and honesty do not change, ever.” The photographs in this collection highlight a dualism inherent in portrait photography—the work is equally revealing of subject and artist.

The show is on view October 14th through November 24th, at Maureen Paley, in London.

October 15, 2013

Through Positive Eyes: The Career of Gideon Mendel

Seventeen years ago, the South African photographer Gideon Mendel, then thirty-seven, received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his work on H.I.V. and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Tomorrow night is the thirty-fourth annual Smith Fund grant ceremony, at which Mendel will reflect on his body of work and present the new short film “A Broken Landscape,” an eloquent synthesis of his impressive career. (Note: the film contains some graphic images.)

Mendel got his start as a news photographer in the early eighties, documenting the violent resistance to apartheid in South Africa and, later, the country’s first free elections. He eventually began photographing the impact of H.I.V. / AIDS in South Africa, moving away from a documentary practice toward more overtly activist work. Mendel aligned himself with various AIDS-prevention organizations, and his work took on stronger conceptual undertones.

With recognition came criticism; Mendel was accused of being a so-called victimologist who presented his subjects as powerless, nameless people headed for death. He countered this critique by introducing text and short films to his work, literally giving his subjects a voice. In 2001, he published his first monograph, “A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa.” For Mendel’s most recent piece, “Through Positive Eyes,” which he considers the final chapter of his work on H.I.V. / AIDS, he asked people to photograph their own lives—the result is an acutely intimate portrait that further empowers the subjects to combat the stigma surrounding H.I.V.

Mendel’s current work, “Drowning World,” which depicts victims of extreme flooding as a response to climate change, is currently on view at the International Center of Photography’s Picture Windows.

“A Broken Landscape” (2013). All photography and film by Gideon Mendel. Edited by Lara G. Reyne and Mo Stoebe.

The Smith Fund ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be held at the S.V.A. theatre on Wednesday evening, at 7 P.M.

Subscribe to The New Yorker
  • This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features in your inbox every Monday.
  • Cartoons: A weekly note from the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
  • Daily: What's new today on newyorker.com.
  • Receive all the latest fake news from The Borowitz Report.
I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement, and Privacy Policy.