Book reviews, news and Threads
Welcome to July's newsletter 🗞️ Tom reviews two important photo books, we share photo festivals and news from the region, and ask you to join us on the newest Meta social platform.
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In this issue 🔽
Featured stories
Our editor-in-chief has been busy! Tom has two new articles up for our members, both of them reviews of landmark photo books from recent years.
Veejay Villafranca’s Signos, by Tom White
Signos is a visceral testimony to the victims of devastating storms in the Philippines. This is a book that transmits the chaos and nightmare of the typhoon’s aftermath from the moment you open it.
The photographs draw us in with the same heaviness that causes a stilted building a century old to lean with age and damage, away from the solidity and stability it had promised for so many years, even as it still gives shelter from a tidal surge.
Time unfolds the trauma in this narrative. The photographs draw us in with the same heaviness that causes a stilted building a century old to lean with age and damage, away from the solidity and stability it had promised for so many years, even as it still gives shelter from a tidal surge. Turn the page and this building crashes into the violence of a child’s doll forced against the fence of a maternity house. A young child crouching in the background casts their gaze directly at us, just as the doll’s lifeless bodies avert theirs. We enter a room in a government health facility, and the light screams through the quiet of a waiting patient. This internal pain is made visceral, the silence of the photographic image increasing its intensity.
The narrative is relentless.
Far from being removed from what happens “over there,” Signos reminds us that the climate emergency is playing out all over the world. As the northern hemisphere is once again experiencing record-breaking temperatures, Signos is also a reminder that none of us gets to escape the consequences of the climate emergency. What we all get to do, however, is contribute to the solution.
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The Banda Journal, and the curse of the nutmeg, by Tom White
That time emerges as one of the central themes of The Banda Journal should come as no surprise. One of the earliest images in the book is of Fort Concordia, built by the Dutch in 1732 on the site of an earlier fort from 1630, ostensibly to protect the local village of Wayer from pirates.
Here, a figure stands framed in an oval opening, hands clasped behind his back, facing out across that same stretch of sea and sky to Hatta Island. The harsh sunlight somehow diffuses throughout, with the fort’s wall forming a shadowed band across the image…
This quiet contemplation exists throughout the Banda Journal, despite its exploration of colonial violence, ongoing trauma of dispossession, and the inequity that is the inevitable outgrowth of settler colonialism, trade-as-conquest, and the desire to turn all land into a source of efficient economic productivity, regardless of the environmental damage this can cause.
The Banda Journal by Fatris MF and Muhammad Fadli was the 2021 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards winner. Charlene tells us why this book and its story resonates with her personally, and Tom takes a deep dive into this compelling, critically acclaimed work which examines the history of colonisation, nutmeg, and the legacy of the spice trade.
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Around the Region
Ulet Ifansast photographed this powerful story of a slavery operation disguised as a drug rehabilitation program in Indonesia for the New York Times. Read it here.
We’ve been following Bangkok-based Lauren Decicca as she covers the continuing turmoil in Thai politics for Getty and the New York Times. Check out her work on Instagram.
Writing Foto has republished an interview with Filipina Kimberly dela Cruz on her project “Death of a Nation” on former president Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial war on drugs. Read it here.
TransAsia Photography Issue 31 is out!
Jakarta International Photo Festival is on from 8 to 24 September.
XPOSURE+ PHOTO 2023 is in Kuala Lumpur from 21 September to 1 October.
Bandung Photography Month begins on October 16th.
We're on Threads
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