Leica M Magazine No. 4

T he M a g a z ine f or L e ic a M p ho t o gr a p h y

No. 4

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14 ¤ · 16 US$ · 25 CHF · 2000 ¥ · 12 £ 01. 2 016 / e n g l i s h

4 192346 214008

This issue featuring:

Patr ick Z achmann R am S h e r gi l l J u l i e n M i gn ot Cé dr ic Ge r b e haye Co r e n tin Fo h l e n Tomas van Hou t ry v e And eight M photographers show: style is not everything, but everything has style!

LEICA M MONOCHROM Taking black and white to the next level.

Black and white is the essence of photography. For the 24-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor of the new Leica M Monochrom, this means that it works completely without the usual color filter in front of the pixels. Luminance values are measured by the sensor itself.

The result: 100 % sharper black-and-white pictures with unrivaled brilliance. More details at www.m-monochrom.leica-camera.com LEICA. DAS WESENTLICHE.

Experience the Leica M Monochrom for yourself in Leica Stores and Boutiques worldwide, and at www.leica-camera.com

De a r r e a der , Modifying a popular ad campaign, many photographers would be happy to say: “M – What Else?” It’s a claim that the M Magazine’s production team fully support, and one that the fourth issue of this magazine naturally seeks to emphasize! Of course, here at Leica we now have a delightful palette of camera platforms: the Q, the SL, the S – but when all is said and done, it is the M that enables a very special type of photography!

This latest issue of the M Magazine includes a best-of by Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann, stirring repor­tages by Tomas van Houtryve and Corentin Fohlen, unforgettable images by Julien Mignot and Ram Shergill, as well as a glimpse of everyday life in Belgium with Cédric Gerbehaye. In addition, the Lightbox presents a best-of pictures – both memorable and stylish – by renowned Leica photographers.

What more could you want?

But, I believe there is more. It’s spring. Time to get out with the M and shoot the pictures you’ve been com­ posing for a while now in your mind; perhaps it’s time for that chance picture that you stumble across in a fleeting moment in the street; or maybe you’d like to capture once and for all a specific landscape with a particular light­ ing effect, etc., etc. It’s like that for me as well. I always have my camera on hand, hoping to produce the kind of picture that motivates every photographer – a picture that leaves you feeling really satisfied!

There are so many possibilities to take creative photo­ graphs, so many ideas that go through your mind, so many situ­ations that can arise. And there’s only one thing left to do: get the M equipment together, make sure you have a clean sensor (assuming you work digital) and spot­ less lenses, get your bag packed – and off you go! This ­magazine challenges its readers to shoot the pictures they want to shoot. This magazine says, look at the photographs in this issue and let them inspire you – and then go out and find your own unique style!

Yours, Andreas Kaufmann

Content

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Lightbox a selection of leica m-photography

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In Search of Himself

Overshadowed by the Mine

Pat r ick Z achm a nn

T om a s va n Hou t r y v e

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Les Invisibles

D’entre eux

Julien Mignot

CĂŠdr ic Ger beh ay e

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Enduring Images

Timeless Beauty

Corentin Fohlen

R a m S h e r g i ll

206 photographers

Cov er Pho t o: pat r ick Z achm a nn / M agnum Pho t os, Hong kong 1987

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Information

M Magaz ine M – discover the complete world of Leica M photography with exciting reportages and striking photo series. M is a magazine in book format, dedicated exclusively to M photography and presenting great images by renowned and up-and-coming photographers.

The M Magazine: concentrating on the essential and celebrating every picture.

In earlier issues: David Alan Harvey, Bruce Gilden, Stanley Greene, Alex Webb, Trent Parke, Jacob Aue Sobol, Ayman Oghanna and many other photographers.

A pps Photographic inspiration to go – M photography for your smart phone or tablet: with the free M App you can access the M platform ­a nywhere and at any time.

For iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Online M photographers present their best works published in the New York Times, Stern, Newsweek, Le Figaro, Geo and many other publications, online at www.m-magazine.photography, where you will also find news, videos and stories revolving around M photography.

C ontact u s M Magazine by Leica Fotografie International info@m-magazine.photography www.m-magazine.photography

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L igh t b ox

Coco Chanel acknowledged that “fashion is ephemeral, while style is eternal”. This also applies to the eight pictures focussing on the theme of style that have made it into our lightbox. From the sixties till today, the protagonists in the photos have lost none of their fascination; so it is fair to say that “good style will always prevail” in pictures too.

a selection of leica M-photography

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Group portrait with lady: Elliott Erwitt’s glimpse into an American sitting room in the early sixties reveals that while the lady is dressed in a very short dress for the private occasion of a family photo, the men have opted for black. Back then as today, the classic suit is a safe stylistic choice, imbuing the home sofa with respectability.

Elliott Erwitt, Leica M analogue

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p h o t o : Ell i o t t E r w i t t / M a g n u m p h o t o s

Neither a trendsetter nor a victim of fashion: this gentleman testifies to the fact that, in questions of fashion, anything goes as long as it is comfortable. Swimming trunks and light sandals are all he needs – a walking stick, rolled up mat and silver bracelet round off his beach look. Unfortunately, we do not know what the woman at the snack stand thinks of the outfit.

One thing for sure, he has earned himself a surprised look.

Helen Levitt, Leica M3

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p h o t o : H e l e n L e v i t t / F i lm D o c u m e n t s L L C

Wild youth: the search for one’s own identity is reflected in young people’s outer appearance. While the rest of the group in a New York park recovers from the previous night, Davidson’s protagonist is checking her hair. The cigarette between painted lips is an accessory and expression of her self-reliance. It is her attitude that testifies to a certain style.

Bruce Davidson, Leica M2

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photo: Bruce Davidson / Magnum photos

Putting your best foot forward: “This picture was taken at the Ballinasloe Horse Fair – the largest of its kind in Ireland. While the men lose themselves in the world of horses, the women take particular care of their appearance.

They prepare themselves long before the fair begins: self-tanning, false eyelashes, nail polish – anything goes. And it is never too late to apply the curlers.“ Birte Kaufmann, Leica M9

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Out about the town, lost in the crowd yet still standing out. “It was summer in Paris. I noticed this man when I was travelling on the metro – I was touched by his expression. He seemed so lost, as he travelled 20 metre underground across the city, in a world he can no longer understand, and that can understand him even less.”

Pierre Belhassen, Leica M7

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Dolled up and ready to party: In the eighties it was also important for make-up not to get smudged during a hot night of partying.

If necessary, lipstick is applied in the middle of the dance floor – without a mirror and a perfect match to the pink satin blouse. Is it all about catching the attention of other guests or a simple love of colour? That remains the young party goer’s secret.

Tom Wood, Leica M2

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A stylish message: The picture was taken in Sarajevo in 1993 during the occupation by Serbian paramilitary and units of the Yugoslavian army. Despite the occupation, Meliha Vareshanovic walks proudly to work through the suburban district of Dorbinja that has been classified as dangerous.

Her message to the armed men encircling her city is quite simple: “You will never defeat us.”

Tom Stoddart, Leica M6

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Stylish in any situation: With the sun at its zenith, the face of a pedestrian has disappeared completely under the shadow of her hat. Despite the fact that the viewer can not see her features, her appearance is one of great presence. The other passersby have also done themselves up – the mixture of patterns is a perfect match for a 1974 summer’s day in New York.

Joel Meyerowitz, M analogue

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p h o t o : J o e l M e y e r o w i t z / C o u r t e s y H o w a r d G r e e n b e r g G a ll e r y

Lightbox

E ll i ot t E r w i t t

Pi e rr e Bel hass e n

Robert Capa invited Erwitt, who was known for his ­ humorous photographs, to Magnum Photos in 1953. Born in 1928, he became the agency’s chairman for the first time in 1968.

Pierre Belhassen (*1978) first studied film before turning to photography. Nowadays he works predominantly on his personal long-term projects.

Hele n L e v i t t

Tom Wood

The photographer and film maker (1913–2009) was assistant to Walker Evans and is one of the most important New York representatives of Street Photography.

After working in a car factory, Wood first studied art and then painting. Nowadays the Irishman is an internationally acclaimed representative of New British Photography.

B r u c e Dav i d s o n

Tom Stoddart

Davidson (*1933) is considered one of the most renowned socio-critical photographers of his generation. He has been a member of the Magnum Agency since 1958.

Born in 1953, Stoddart reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election victory of Nelson Mandela and the war in Kosovo.

He is represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

B i rt e Kau f ma n n

J o el Me y erow it z

Kaufmann (*1981) graduated from the Ostkreuzschule in 2012. Today she works as a freelance photographer and runs workshops at the Lichtblick School in Cologne.

Born in New York in 1938, Meyerowitz is considered a pioneer of colour photography. His first book appeared in 1979, and in 2013 he summarized his career in the book ‘Taking my Time’.

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Pat r ick Z a chm a nn

In Search of Himself Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann has spent the last forty years exploring the memories and questions of identity that have plagued him.

His pictures recognize that a person gets to know himself better through his encounters with other people. Striking a path through known and unknown territory, Zachmann’s steps are guided by the search for universality.

photographed with A Leica m4 / M5 / M6 / M9

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Above: Patrick Zachmann had just begun working on his long-term project about Jewish identity, when a Torah scroll was being consecrated at a house of prayer (Paris, May 1979). Right: A wedding in a synagogue in Marseilles five years later

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Zachmann’s project was due to be completed in seven years – he wanted to understand what it meant to him to be Jewish. He began his search by approaching those whom he felt the most remote from: the religious community (Paris, October 1981)

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Zachmann documented the life of second generation North African migrants in France (Marseilles, Septem­ber 1984) – a theme that reflects his own search for identity: his mother was twenty when she fled Algeria and came to Marseilles

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Later on, Zachmann felt the need to put cultural and geographical distance between himself and his homeland.

Above: A young triad member (Hong Kong 1988).

Left: A brothel in Macau (1987). The women have numbers by which the clients select them

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Patrick Zachmann

attracted by the same lights, the same people and situa­ tions as when I was photographing. This confirms my very intuitive and emotional way of working. The aesthetics and compositions are also taken into consideration. I also accept imperfections in an image, as long as I like the emo­ tions in it. A good photo combines both meaning and aesthetics; but it’s the succession of images that I’m most interested in. In that sense I belong to the American ‘photo essay’ tradition.

For forty years, Magnum photographer Patrick Z ­ achmann has been travelling the world with his Leica: Jewish iden­ tity, the Chinese Diaspora, the situation of migrants in ­Marseilles – his themes are as multi-faceted as his imagery.

“I don’t want to repeat myself, like many photographers do by developing a special style,” Zachmann once explained in an interview. All the more reason to show a cross-section of his work: analogue and digital, headstrong and impres­ sive, in colour and in black and white – unpredictability is the only common denominator.

One often feels your presence in your images, as if you were writing in the first person. Is it intentional?

I started working on myself very early on, without realizing what I was doing. All my projects are about looking at oth­ ers, about otherness to better understand myself as well.

And my personal series about the Jewish people, ‘Enquête d’identité’, is a perfect example of this. When talking about the world I talk about myself. When I write, I write in the first person. In most of my books, I include extracts from my journals and from my personal notes. In my latest work, ‘So Long China’ (published by Xavier Barral), there are forty five pages of text which are extracts from my writings during my visits to China since 1982.

What type of photographer are you?

I am a subject photographer. Not a street photographer even if I do photograph a lot on the street; I always have a theme in mind. I have a narrative approach, looking less for the beautiful image than for meaning.

Does that mean that a simple image, however good it may be, is not enough of itself?

Of course I try to make the best images possible, but a beau­ tiful image of itself doesn’t interest me. I’m not into the typically French tradition of humanist photography repre­ sented by people like Willy Ronis. I’m not looking for Henri Cartier-Bresson’s magical and virtuous decisive moment.

Instead, my photography places itself in the moment. I tend to integrate the decisive moment, a specific photographic tool in itself, into the background. The foregrounds and the totality of my images tend more to counter the notion of the exceptional.

There is definitely no objectivity in your work.

Is e­ verything subjective?

Yes. In the introduction to my book, ‘Enquête d’identité’, Christian Caujolle said that a true photographer, whilst accumulating his body of work, ends up creating a self portrait by the time he has completed his oeuvre. But there are two distances in my work: one close up, and the other from a place of stepping back. I talk about this idea in the workshops that I give: the importance of reflecting on the proper distance to one’s subject. Certain photogra­ phers get too close, without a legitimate reason to do so, and without having been invited into their subject’s inti­ mate space. One doesn’t get close to people just by working with a wide angle lens.

What are you looking for with your photography?

To capture universality and moments that the public can identify with. I want to surpass anecdotes and I’m con­ stantly searching for identifying, memorial and human values. When I worked on the Jewish people, which is a very personal theme for me, I had a lot of feedback from Algerian Arabs who recognized themselves in this quest, and in the consequences of the silence of fathers who were incapable of talking about the Algerian War. The Vietnam­ ese as well. So many people who came to me with tears in their eyes. They confided that they hadn’t been able to do this personal work themselves and thanked me for having done it for them. I ask questions about the world, about others, which both attracts me and leads me to despair.

In the case of ‘Enquête d’identité’, about the Jewish people, was it easy or more complicated for you to find the proper distance?

That seven-year project was a search for identity. I was trying to understand where I come from, what it means to be Jewish today. I tried to understand my identity through denial. I began my explorations by going to the people I felt farthest away from: the religious ones, with the beards, hats and rituals. Then I turned towards the youth, who had got together in self-defence; but I didn’t identify with them either, because they had a cowboy side to them that I couldn’t relate to. •

What defines your choices when you’re taking a picture and when you’re editing your themes?

At the moment of photographing, I’m attracted by certain subjects, lights, faces, of course, and situations also. After­ wards I forget about them. Then when I start editing, it’s as if another choice takes place, but I find that I’m often

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Patrick Zachmann

This work no longer qualifies as photographic documentary. You swing towards experimental and immersive photography.

Even if I continue to be a documentary photographer, this experience was closer to psychoanalytic photography, because my raw material is reality. I never define myself as a photojournalist; but if a situation revolts me, I just feel the need to react.

sion for me. I went to meet the mothers in Tunisia, in Algeria, of those I’d been following in Marseilles. All these cross-over stories were complementary.

You’re constantly working on the notion of identity.

Does it mean that you haven’t found your place as a child of the Republic, born in France, which prides itself on its secularism?

There is a sort of contradiction. I feel very republican and very attached to secularism. I’m not a believer and I’m wary of religions. My father was the same. He even detested rabbis and he used to tell us how lucky we were to be born in France, like him. But he was the child of ­Jewish immigrants, born in Poland, who, along with my aunt, were denounced by French neighbours during the Second World War and were deported. In fact, my parents wanted to hide the past. Their desire to assimilate should have worked. Except that here, like something out of Sartre, it’s the look of others that has jammed the mecha­ nism of the Republic. If you just keep hearing, “Zachmann?

That’s not very French”: words, but also aggressive and anti-Semitic behaviour, hurt. Faced with this inner con­ flict, I had to work on the re-appropriation of my story, of my Jewish identity, and to re-conciliate with the history of France.

Such as the revolution at Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example…

Exactly. At a moment like that you’re obliged to inform, to report. The Chinese students had high expectations of the foreign journalists. We were rather like heroes. It was the first time that they were really demonstrating and that the international press was there. I’m not very interested in being a press photographer with a duty to synthesize and symbolize an event in one picture. I try instead to tran­ scend the event, to make it more timeless.

Isn’t this mixture of styles a kind of signature of a number of Magnum photographers?

Since it was set up, the two influences ran alongside each other: on the one hand Robert Capa, the war journalist looking for the good press picture; on the other, Henri Cartier-Bresson, more of a poet, but also interested in the world. Beyond that journalist and artist divide, the com­ mon denominator between Magnum photographers is the human being.

As chance would have it, you were close to the Bataclan in Paris on November 13. How did you experience that drama and how did it impact you?

It’s strange that it happened to me, because it’s not foreign to what moves me in my work. But the journalist reflex took over instinctively. I was on a scooter at the Place de la Republique. I could feel that something really serious was happening, so I followed a police car; and so I found myself outside the Bataclan photographing the news.

I feel like I lived a very powerful moment, something indescribable. At the time of the funerals of the victims I wanted to be close by certain families. It wasn’t a ques­ tion of voyeurism at all, but simply the need to share that moment with them. Sadly I wasn’t able to be there. It’s very difficult to photograph such private moments and I didn’t have the connections. Even today I feel the need to see them and to hear them.

What is it you love so much about people?

Their path. Their stories – like those of migrants. I’m touched by the incredible odysseys of those who leave their families, their friends, their past and their country behind.

They leave in search of a new world and a new life.

Tearing oneself away from one’s country, disowning the past and erasing the memories – it reminds you of your parents’ own path. Memories for which you say you have no images: a paradox and even a sorrow for a professional photographer?

‘Mare-Mater’ (a project exhibited at Mucem at the end of 2013 beginning of 2014) is a biographical account. I wanted to recreate the family albums I never had. I became a pho­ tographer because I don’t have any memories. Those who have family photos can’t understand the heavy feeling of missing out, when you don’t have them. When I worked on ‘Mare-Mater’ I went beyond a journalistic approach. I added my mother’s story to the testimonies of the migrants: she was twenty when she fled from Algeria to Marseilles.

This separation of mothers and sons has become an obses­

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Dimitri Beck is Editor-in-Chief of the French Polka Magazine. He has been working on the development of the magazine and the Polka Gallery since 2008.

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Zachmann does not work exclusively in black and white. In his more recent travels, the French photographer has also been using colour.

The night life in seedy clubs and brothels are a recurring motif in his pictures

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photos: Patrick Zachmann / Magnum photos

A glimpse at red light districts in South Korea: a brothel in Seoul (2004). The search for his own identity dominated Patrick Zachmann’s work for a long time. In recent years the photographer has travelled to Asia repeatedly, focussing on the underground scene there

Jul ie n Migno t

Les Invisibles There are many beautiful faces on parade at the Cannes Film Festival. However, once they have floated down the red carpet, the remaining impressions start to fade away. Julien Mignot photographed these faces and Camille Rousseau illustrated his pictures. Her filigree lines in the ‘Les Invisibles’ series, empha­size the gentle character of the images, reveal­ing the hidden, virtually imperceptible aura of those ­portrayed.

Ill u s t r a t i o N s b y C a m i ll e R o u s s e a u photographed with A Leica M-P 240

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X AV I E R D O L A N

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ARIANE LABED

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JACK O’CONNELL

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ISABELLE HUPPERT

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LOUIS GARREL

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RACHEL BROSNAHAN

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J O H N C. R E I L LY

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LéA SEYDOUX

HARVEY KEITEL

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FINNEGAN OLDFIELD

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ANNE BEREST

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ADèLE EXARCHOPOULOS

SIENNA MILLER

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CHANG CHEN

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Julien Mignot

his technician Robert Adamson (1821–1848) produced around 3000 impressive calotype solo and group portraits of high compositional quality. One reason for the emergence of the art photography movement at the end of the 19th century (set in motion by amateurs and causing an international impact) was the critique made by the educated bourgeoisie towards the standard portraits of the 1880s ateliers: in the staged atelier sets that had dominated for forty years, people did not feel they were be­­ing represented accurately, in a modern way. As a result, people turned against this ‘soulless’ mass production. They rediscovered the creativity of the early days of photography.

Amateur photographers were now aware that a deliberate, creative process could produce artistic portraits. This led to a joy in experimentation and an exploration of the camera’s aesthetic potential.

During the Weimar Republic, August Sander (1876– 1964) conceived his vaguely sociologically oriented, long term project ‘People of the Twentieth Century’. The seven groups that Sander selected – farmers, craftsmen, women, classes, artists, the big city, and the last people – show a broad spectrum that encompassed all levels of society. The most significant feature of his work is the great respect he gave the many anonymous subjects who allowed themselves to be portrayed – the people who served as representatives of their profession and social class. His social portraits (far surpassing the character of the individual portrait) are considered to be milestones in the history of 20th century portrait photography. They have an impact that can be felt to this day. Even the influential portraits taken in the sixties and seventies by the US photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971) were aligned with Sander, though they concentrated on disturbing styles of the grotesque and the bizarre. Arbus deliberately explored groups on the edges of society. Her pictures of transvestites, nudists, small people, the mentally or physically handicapped and prostitutes did not expand the range of acceptable photographic themes, and opened the door to a vision of an absurd, parallel world. The intensity and quality of the dialogue between photographer and model – perceived solely in the resulting photos, as well as on the exact moment of expo­sure – were determined by the artist based on her own artistic ideas.

Numerous film industry personalities insist on being at the Cannes Film Festival – and countless photos are taken. The French photographer, Julien Mignot, was also there. Together with artist Camille Rousseau, he created portraits that seem to defy the transience of the situation.

Mignot captured spontaneous candid moments amidst the hustle and bustle between film screenings. Every four hours Rousseau got a printed picture, then used carbon paper to reveal the invisible: the aura surrounding each person. This is how the title ‘Les Invisibles’ (The Invisible Ones) came about. In doing so, the artists went much further than normal portrait photography. But how did it all begin for this genre? What milestones did it pass?

The following is a glimpse at three important steps in the history of portrait photography.

The first daguerreotype portraits left the general public with the impression that they had been drawn into a fascinating and magical visual experience; it was an abrupt break from the common way of seeing: “We didn’t trust ourselves at first, to look long at the first pictures developed. We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us, so powerfully was everyone affected by the unaccustomed clarity and the unaccustomed fidelity to nature of the first daguerreotypes,” is how Benjamin Walter formulated it in ‘A Small History of Photography’. It can be seen in the double portrait of an unknown mother and her daughter, that was produced in the atelier of Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann (1815–1901) and Eduard Wehnert (1811–1847) in Leipzig. Despite using high-speed lenses, the time of exposure in 1840 was still around 45 seconds, so that moving as little as possible was a careful part of the photographing process. The concentrated absorption that was part of the picture-taking process and which was necessary as an active contribution by the person portrayed (in order to achieve a sharp exposure), was breached in this Daguerreotype. While both bodies are reproduced in perfect sharpness, the mother’s smile, in particular, is accompanied by blurriness in her face and her whole head.

The picture reveals a personal ‘moving’ moment, a spontaneous but immediately controlled expression of life, which retrospectively makes the two women appear trueto-life and convincing.

In September 1840, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) produced a positive paper picture on the basis of a paper negative. With calotype (from kalotypie: kalos, GR: beautiful; typie, GR: print), a negative process that is considered the forerunner of analogue photography, a new kind of technique was available to photographers.

The Scottish painter David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and

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Dr. Sabine Schnakenberg is the curator of the F.C. Gundlach collection at the Haus der Photographie at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen.

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C or e n t in F ohl e n

Enduring Images Corentin Fohlen travelled to Chad on assignment for the UN Refugee Agency to capture images of the situation of the civil war refugees. His ­photographic reportage leads viewers to an aware­ ness beyond the brief transience of an event – beyond the fixed and finite moment. The French ­photographer believes that powerful images “make up the world’s memory.”

Photographed with a Leica M9 / M240

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Left: At the Dosseye refugee camp, Salamatou is given the very basics to survive: blankets, a water tank and food provisions for a month. Above: A girl poses next to a cooking pot. Many refugees get their first warm meal in months here

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Beatrice Duroumbaye has been living at Gondje refugee camp since 2006. She has to feed a family of twelve

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It is mostly Sudanese refugees living at the Iridimi camp in eastern Chad. A few girls ride their donkeys to the water hole

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Adam, a Sudanese refugee, has left his camp to earn a bit of money washing clothes for the local popula­ tion in the town of Iriba

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Left: A young boy transports wares for local traders at Am Babak market. Above: Guidi Oumarou has brought her emaciated son to the hospital at Gore.

They had to flee from the Central African Republic when rebels took over the local hospital

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There are not enough provisions.

Many Sudanese leave the Iridimi camp to try and find work in the closest town

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Left: Standing in line for food at the Gondje camp. Many people from the Central African Republic have been living here since 2003. Rations are becoming increasingly short. Above: A young woman at Dosseye recovers from the exertions of her escape

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Young girls at the Dosseye camp.

Many had to travel for months and now live in make­ shift tents and huts

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Left: Sudanese women have left their refugee camp to pick fruit in the desert. Above: Women at the Am Nabak camp complain about the reduction in food rations. Because the camp is already larger than the closest town, only a few can find work

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Beautiful images can be found even in the midst of tragedy – Fohlen often uses his camera as a psycho­ logical, protective shield

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Corentin Fohlen

“I left for Chad in May 2014 on a two-week reportage as­sign­ment for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It is the first time I’ve been commissioned by a United Nations NGO. The purpose of the trip is to document the consequences of the cutbacks of UNHCR aid. These cutbacks have a direct impact on the refugee camps located in Chad. Areas of conflict surround the country. The refugee camps in the south are occupied mainly by people from the Central African Republic. In the east, it’s the people from Darfur who are looking for safety. My pictures are intended to convince funders of the urgency to continue sending provisions to the Chad refugees. For myself, the approach to telling their story is the same as when I’m working for a magazine: to inform, to document, and to emphasize. Each new story is a challenge, but I’m used to travelling, to adapting to a given situation and to improvising. Once I have arrived somewhere, the way I work is very instinctual.

fleeing from the violence that is strangling the Central African Republic. Most of the families are Muslims, escaping from retaliatory acts following the coup d’état and the expulsion of President Bozizé.

In 2004, refugee camps for people fleeing from Darfur were set up in the Iriba region, located to the north of Abéché in the east of Chad. The Darfur conflict has been on-going since 2003. The fighting between a number of ethnic groups and the government has forced millions of people to leave their homeland. The desert climate con­ ditions have seriously limited the possibilities of devel­op­ ing the kind of agriculture that would help the population there. The people in the region are completely dependent on the delivery of aid from the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Many African countries suffer from chronic shortage of food; but refugees are a particularly threatened group, and the stopping of aid deliveries has profound, im­mediate consequences.

Drastic cutbacks. The daily food rations of 2100 kilo-calories per person have been reduced to 850. Instead of the 13.5 kilos of grain per month that people had been receiving – thanks to the UN – it’s now only 4.5 kilos. The refugee agency is in urgent need of additional funding in order to be able to guarantee sufficient sustenance for the people. The numbers of people fleeing from wars, conflicts and persecution have never been as high as it is today.

I assisted with food distribution in the field, where cutbacks in rations can be felt most. Some families tell us that rations are sometimes used up within ten days, whereas in the past they lasted for a whole month. They no longer have enough to feed the whole family. It’s not easy to speak with the people, to hear all about their suffering and to then be obliged to leave them again in this situation. But it’s part of my profession and I have to accept it. Still, it’s not easy to work on this assignment in an efficient way. Despite the long time spent in the field – two weeks is rare if you are working for the press – I had to carry out the assignment in two very distant parts of Chad, in both the south and in the east.

We had to drive for two days by car from the capital, N’Djamena, to get to the Gondje refugee camp in the south of the country. The people who have already been living there for years, have managed to achieve a bit with agriculture and trade, so they have some level of independence.

The newly arrived ones often have to fight to survive; yet ever increasing numbers of people are fleeing from the civil war in the Central African Republic, looking for safety in the refugee camps in Chad. They have often walked through the bush for two or three months, before reaching the country exhausted, sick and half starving. They are

How can I share their story? I want to concentrate more fully on the situation of the refugees, the people, their demeanour, their faces. That’s why, contrary to my normal approach, I’ve chosen to work in black and white.

In many situations, the camera becomes a psychological, protective shield, when faced with suffering and violence.

When I am photographing, it helps me to think about things like the composition, and to ask myself what kind of picture can best capture the situation.

As a professional photographer, I carry out my work faced with this catastrophe in the same manner in which I would work in happy moments. I aim to get well-composed pictures that tell a story. There’s no reason to avoid beautiful pictures, just because we fear too much beauty in a crisis situation. We know that now, more than ever, a good picture has multiple possibilities of being seen, shared and sold; and I say ‘now’ because today we can see so many pictures from all over. If you want to make a difference, you have to deliver powerful pictures. I believe in their power. When something happens in the world, it’s pictures that stay in our minds. A video might shock us, but it’s the individual images that remain. A photograph can be understood in seconds. I believe that photos make up the memory of the world.”

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Corentin Fohlen worked together in Chad with UNHCR spokesperson Céline Schmitt, who is stationed in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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T om a s va n Hou t r y v e

Overshadowed by the Mine A city in danger of disappearing. High in the Andes mountains, a mine that once supplied the Spanish Crown with silver is now poisoning the 70 000 inhabitants of Cerro de Pasco, eating away at the very earth beneath their feet. Tomas van Houtryve photographed the extent of the catastrophe: a look at a town whose existence will soon be little more than a memory captured in pictures.

Photographed with a Leica M9 / M240

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A wall painting draws attention to the issue of fine dust pollution. In Cerro de Pasco the threat posed by the mine can be felt everywhere

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Above: waste water from the mine flows unfiltered into a sedimentation pond close by Cerro de Pasco.

Right: Volcan, the mining company, is having trees planted. Critics consider the project a sham – the real contamination is not confined

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The Villa Pasco housing project was supposed to be the new home for the inhabitants of Cerro de Pasco, but 70 percent of the houses are empty

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In addition to the mine itself, growing piles of pit waste are also encroaching on the houses of Cerro de Pasco

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The water for washing comes from a hole in the mining company’s pipeline. The town’s rivers and lakes are poisoned

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Above: Nelsi Nieto Aguirre lives with her family in Villa Pasco. She is one of the few who heeded the call to relocate. Her father commutes 15 kilometres every day to get to the mine. Right: Mine workers as guests at a parade in Cerro de Pasco

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Children playing in the Paragsha district. The neighbourhood runs right alongside the mine waste dump. Mountains of pit waste are piled metres high.

The wind carries the fine dust into the city, many residents suffer from lead poisoning

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Tomas van Houtryve

For a woman intent on moving an entire city, fifty-six yearold Congresswoman Gloria Ramos Prudencio, barely five feet tall, looks unassuming. Her city is Cerro de Pasco, population 70 000. Perched on the treeless Peruvian altiplano at 4300 meters, it is one of the highest cities on the planet. “As a girl, walking past Bellavista where the Americans lived, I would pester my mother, ‘Why do the gringos get the nice houses?’” the soft-spoken Ramos recalls.

“In school my teachers called me preguntona” – she of too many questions. These days, her main question is how to save her home-town from a very big hole.

Latin America over the past decade has seen its ­mining sector triple in value to 300 billion dollars. Peru’s economy, among the fastest growing, derives one sixth of its gross domestic product from minerals. At Cerro de Pasco, you can see the entire history of Peruvian mining – and the costs it sometimes imposes: The mine here is literally consuming the 400 year-old town that supports it. The open-pit mine operated by a subsidiary of Volcan Compañía Minera, a Peruvian company, is a crater ­terraced like an inverted ziggurat. Over a mile long by a half-mile wide by a quarter-mile deep, it laps at the retreating town like a hungry sea. A line of abandoned houses, their steel roof tiles rusting and pockmarked, serves as a no-man’s land between the chasm and the ­living city. That barrier is not enough to protect the ­inhabitants from the mine’s toxins. Cerro de Pasco is one of the worst lead-poisoning clusters in the world.

drinking water at 25 times the cost in Lima. “My neighbourhood gets water six hours a week,” Ramos says. This year, a judge allowed Volcan to continue dumping mining waste into a pond just south of town.

There is also almost no indoor heating in Cerro de Pasco. The Andean cold drives shop girls into parkas and fingerless gloves; you see your breath over dinner in ­restaurants. Kids scampering down side walks have scarlet cheeks, as if they have been slapped.

An Epidemic of Lead. Along the western rim of the mine, massive mounds of lead-laced tailings brood over neighbourhoods such as Paragsha and Champamarca.

Dust from the mounds blows everywhere. Since 1996, Peru’s health ministry has sampled blood lead-levels in children here twice a year. The results are always the same: more than half the children tested have high lead levels, most likely from ingesting the tailings dust. “This place is Chernobyl,” says Paul Rodríguez, a doctor in ­Paragsha’s community clinic. A beefy guy with a quick, ironic smile, Rodríguez is frustrated. He knows from the surveys that the kids coming into his clinic are at risk – in four cases he has even seen the blue line across the gums that heralds severe lead poisoning. But he can not order up a diagnostic blood test when a child needs one. “They give us this,” he says, holding up a government-issued form crammed with check-off boxes. “All the symptoms of lead poisoning.

That’s great, except many, like headache, nausea, and vomiting, are non-specific. You need a lead level. But no lab here can run one. The surveys don’t test everyone, so you have to send your kid to Lima. No one goes. We practice medicine here like blind-man’s bluff.”

Cecilia Beraún was born in Champamarca, half a mile south of Rodríguez’s clinic. When I met her, she was living with her two boys in a school storeroom. Thin and worn, she earned her keep by cleaning the school at 4:30 a.m. before trekking an hour down to the base of the mine to work as a shoveller. Pay there was about 1.40 dollars an hour. Wedged between the pit and the tailings mounds, Champamarca is lead city. Cecilia’s boys, ages 10 and 7, had lead levels in their blood of 14.5 and 13.7 micrograms per deciliter. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers anything over 5 dangerous. Lead poisoning is a sneaky beast. Even low levels sap energy, make joints ache, and impair learning; moderate levels, especially in children, permanently lower IQs. Go higher and you get convulsions, organ dysfunctions, and death.

“They don’t learn well,” Cecilia said of her boys. “The ­Ministry of Health sent doctors for one day to examine them. All they prescribed was some vitamins – ‘to make them sharper,’ they said.” Any other advice? •

Glory Days. Four hundred years ago, legend has it, the rocks around camp fires in Cerro de Pasco ‘wept silver’.

For centuries, the mine here ranked among the Spanish Crown’s richest, filling galleons with silver. In 1820, the town was the first in Peru to be liberated from the Spanish.

By the early 1900s it was Peru’s second-largest city. In the 1950s, copper gave way to zinc and lead, a lot of it now destined for China. Until the mid-1950s, miners dug out ore the old-fashioned way, through adits. A year after ­Gloria Ramos was born, the mining company switched from adits to more efficient open-pit mining – within the city limits. In one of history’s unluckier wish-we’d-knownthens, it turned out the ­richest veins of lead and zinc were under the town. “The centre of the city once had foreign consulates and historic homes,” Ramos says. “For many years, we were Peru’s second city. The pit took all that.

These days, even the neighbourhoods built in the 1960s to get away from the pit are falling into it.” For the locals, avoiding a slide into the pit is just the half of it. All raw cinder block and rough-hewn side walks, the rump of today’s Cerro de Pasco lacks potable water, because its lakes and rivers glow orange with mining run-off. Trucks supply

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Tomas van Houtryve

Location, Location. Fix or flee? That is Cerro de Pasco’s daily debate. Each new lead survey prompts hand wringing and a call to action. Across Peru studies show, not surprisingly, that the farther away people are from lead-contaminated soil, the better. In May 2012 the Peruvian Ministry of Health declared a ‘state of environmental emergency’ in Cerro de Pasco. It pushed for more dust suppression through road paving, covering of tailings piles, and tree planting. A few saplings got planted. “No funds for more,” explains a local health official.

In the 1980s, when the mine was still governmentowned, President Alan García’s administration spent 30 million dollars on a housing project 15 miles from town to try to entice mining families to move there. At around 20 square meters, the houses were not very enticing. Only a smattering of people live in the forlorn neighbourhood, which is now controlled by Volcan; its logo is stencilled on every house. Neat rows of street lamps stand in grassy fields where construction stopped.

In 2008, Gloria Ramos gave up on such partial fixes.

Elected congresswoman in 2006, she managed to get the Peruvian legislature to pass – by unanimous vote – Law 29293, which mandates the complete relocation of Cerro de Pasco. But the law left a crucial question undecided: Who pays? “They allocated 2 million dollars to study alternative sites,” Ramos sighs. “But the ministries of Mining and Finance simply ignore committee meetings, so nothing moves.” In the meantime, the government halted planning for a new water system for Cerro de Pasco – why invest in a city that’s about to disappear?

Some 1400 people work in the mine, but only 400 are union members with full-time contracts. The rest are managed by middlemen who arrange three-month, noobligation deals with workers from all over. The transients earn about half what a full-timer makes – the equivalent of 4.50 dollars an hour, no benefits.

tal fines than any other mining company in Peru. Many of them were never paid. In 2011, Volcan spun the mine off into its Cerro SAC subsidiary – in order to limit its liability, Gladys Huamán Gora, director of Labor Pasco, a local watchdog group, alleges. “The mining industry has options on one-seventh of Peru’s national territory,” she says. “They could turn Cerro de Pasco into a model case.”

In 2011, Volcan made a profit of 328 million dollars.

But by 2014 its profits had fallen to under 100 million dollars. With China retrenching, lead and zinc production at Cerro de Pasco has dropped by more than half. The world boom in metal prices has subsided for now. But the pit and the pollution in Cerro de Pasco remain. Moving the town, says Volcan spokesman Jorge Nuñez, is not the company’s responsibility. “It is an issue that concerns the national government, in coordination with the regional government and the local government of the city.”

“What bothers me most,” says Gloria Ramos, “is they didn’t even take advantage of the boom.” Ramos did not run for re-election in 2011; she now lives in Lima and has abandoned politics. She still visits her parents in Cerro de Pasco every few weeks. In news­papers and at public meetings, “the attacks kept getting worse,” she says. “I was accused of being a job-killer, of wanting to close the mine.

There were personal threats.”

“I’m still fighting.” Just outside town, in a valley abutting the mine’s largest tailings lagoon, a man named Celso Santiago raises alpacas. His house is mud-walled, the zinc roof held down by rocks. With a face lifted off an Incan statue, he declares, “Yo soy conflictivo.” (I’m stubborn.) “I have fought them for twenty years. They have destroyed my fields, so I fight them with this.” Producing sheaves of legal documents, he lets on that, yes, he has a few years of university under his belt. “See that hill? After we won the first lawsuit ever against the mine, they promised to restore seven hectares. Only half got done. At first the mine is friendly, but their broken promises made me get tough. It took two years and a lot of money, and I’m still fighting.” Santiago still sees Ramos’ relocation law as the solution. He squints against the high-altitude morning glare. “No one wants the mine to go away,” he says.

“We just want it to be responsible.”

Who owns the problem? “Responsibility is slippery,” notes Federico Helfgott, a historian of Cerro de Pasco and adjunct professor at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. The mine’s ownership ­history complicates matters. The American-owned Cerro de Pasco Corporation – whose houses Ramos admired – was nationalized in 1974. Over the next 25 years, Centromin, the government entity, exuberantly mis­managed it. In 1999, Volcan bought the mine for 62 million dollars – a low price, according to many experts. “Some of the tailings piles belong to the pre-1974, American company, some to Centromin, and some to Volcan,” Helfgott says. “So who’s res­­ pon­sible for the lead poisoning? Who pays for the move?”

From 2010 to 2014, Volcan racked up more environmen-

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Tony Dajer, National Geographic Creative, travelled with Tomas van Houtryve to Cerro de Pasco. The text published here was commissioned by National Geographic.

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Cé dr ic Ge r be h ay e

D’entre eux What is Belgium all about and what makes the country unique? How do its people go about their daily lives? Cédric Gerbehaye’s series reveals a deep understanding and insight into his homeland.

The Belgian photographer has captured fleeting moments in a country defined by political, societal and economic challenges; and at the same time, his pictures emphasize a great sensibility and care for his fellow countrymen.

Photographed with A Leica M6 / m240 / M Monochrom

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Cédric Gerbehaye

Cédric Gerbehaye had not worked in his homeland for a long time. Maybe he never really ‘saw’ it, as he was only an infrequent visitor between his many trips abroad. The Belgian photographer was always taking us somewhere else: to other continents where living conditions differ greatly to our own; or into the middle of war zones that have no impact on our lives. At the same time, he brought us closer to the indelible, haunting scenes he witnessed.

Photographing in Belgium meant finally coming home, far from extreme situations – perhaps to explore his own terrain, discover his own identity. You might wonder if the intensity of his previous work, where he dealt with violence abroad, might lose some of its power when taking pictures in his own country.

Who would be able to summarize a territory where ­different regions confront each other without spilling blood, a small state where life continued to function in spite of 540 days of no government? What does this society so accustomed to compromise look like? What inequalities are kept under wraps? How many men and women have been forgotten and left behind? What humanity remains when a landscape fades away?

Charlerois which is intersected by motorway ring roads that typically cut through Belgian cities with no regard for neighbourhood life. Here, an old lady sits with her back to us enjoying a rare bit of sunlight; over there, a young teenager avoids eye contact, maybe embarrassed by the under­ sized bike he is riding. Somewhere else, two young girls with smart phones, naively catch the attention of underground travellers, while somewhere else – it could be Flanders, Walloon, Dortmund or Arizona – two bored teenagers sit in the back of their parents’ car during an old-timer competition. Somewhere else an engine roars, wheels spin and dust flies.

Apparent vulnerability. Here people are caught in a moment of solitude, of surrender. We feel the end of the big struggles; and through this surrender, a vulnera­ bility. Or, to put it another way, a willingness, which – it is one view among other – questions the announced end, infinitely back on the Belgian political chessboard, of this small country barely one hundred and eighty five years old, a country that is more of a foreigner to his own regions than to its large neighbours..

Those of us who live here know all about it. On both sides of this impermeable language barrier you find the same uncertainty and the same need of tenderness. Above all, this work moves us by pointing out the decline of crafts­ manship, the disappearance of gestures of work, and the criminalisation of the inactive and how they have been abandoned. At the same time, these photographs testify to a life that is carefree – a life of timeless leisure, and of gentle resilience.

It seems a different era, a time long gone, certainly, but also: yet to come, a critical threshold, a turning point.

If you look at these portraits carefully, you will see something which is both open and clear. It is another perspective, and perhaps it is responding to separatist ideologies, plans of miraculous recovery, or exaggerated pessimism.

Is it a call?

Let us stick to it. Let us go within and lose ourselves, enveloped by the same hearing, feeling and atmospheric space, looking out for the intimate, the tiny detail, the indecision, being both within and without, in pain and in tenderness – the inner bond.

The beast is a monster. Its smoothly shaven skin makes the muscles appear even more impressive. The ‘Belgian Blue’ cattle have existed for over 200 years, and they have 20 percent more muscle meat than normal animals. Its appearance speaks of wealth, performance and of flesh that is slaugh­tered and consumed. It speaks of Europe, of his masks and monsters. Where are the people?

Is this what they eat? Is this what they live for? What does this champion bull tell us about unemployed youths, about women in prison and in love, about the desolate faces of the mentally disturbed? What can this mass of flesh reveal about the amorous woman fluttering her eyelashes, about the exhausted fans at an open-air concert – Belgium, that Mecca of festivals – or about the beer enjoyed after a traditional parade?

If on the one hand, the display of the legendary ‘blanc bleu belge’ masks the despair of a rural community which feels threatened by foreign competition and the shrinking of an over-urbanized country, there are others dramas that reflect a deeper decline. The melancholic glance of a young metal worker and the fireproof jackets hung up forever tell the story: Gerbehaye visited the Seraing coking plant shortly before its closure after a period of drawn-out agony. It used to be one of the world’s main strongholds in the steel industry.

There were other places he also visited: the Berkendael women’s prison, one of three prisons bordering his lodgings on the outskirts of Brussels; and he walked the streets of

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Caroline Lamarche is an author living close to Brussels. She has had numerous books published by Gallimard. www.carolinelamarche.net

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R a m S he rgil l

Timeless Beauty Pictures valued for their rarity: Ram Shergill and his pictures encompass an area that is often closed to 35mm cameras – the world of studio fashion.

Having grown up in the time before the internet, and even though he makes full use of the potential of digitalization, his pictures remain defined by the aesthetics of analogue photography. They are imbued with an inner calm that occurs only when there are no distractions.

Photographed with a Leica M9

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R a m S h e r g i ll

You studied visual communications. Was it a matter of chance that you decided to make a career of fashion photography?

In fact, I even started out studying mathematics – not because I was interested, but rather because my father is a maths teacher. However, I was soon playing truant, missing out on lectures and spending time in the library instead. It was there that I discovered photography books by the likes of Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Paul Strand and Dorothea Lange. I would spend long hours immersed in these books. It wasn’t that I was trying to understand how the photographs were taken, but rather that I was imagining how it would feel to slip inside the pictures. It was like going on a fantastical journey. It was at the beginning of the nineties, in the days before we had the internet and before social media became so predominant. There wasn’t a constant barrage of distractions, things were calm and you could concentrate, you could get totally immersed in things. So then I attended a two-year intensive photography class at college, and afterwards continued by studying at Wolverhampton University for Visual Arts. They offered a diversity of different modules. My fellow students all chose film, so the course was hopelessly overfilled. I was left with electronic art and design, what we call animation nowadays; and I soon realized that that wasn’t for me either – the work was much too intense and unsatisfying.

The only thing I really wanted to do was grab my camera, head off for Paris and take photographs. Alone, spontaneous and independent.

Beautiful women with intricate head dresses, a young man, lit from the side and wearing ornamentally embroidered clothing, a wavy-haired blond with a cigarette between her fingers, nails painted bright red: British photographer Ram Shergill’s pictures alternate between masterful stage settings, modern compositions and surrealistic imagery – at times in warm saturated colours, at times in cool black and white. Shergill’s images are as multi-faceted as his biography, which he is happy to talk about.

Punctually at 9:30 he sits on the sofa in his hotel room.

It is Paris Fashion Week and he is waiting to introduce his latest project, the bi-annual magazine The Protagonist, to customers. He has not yet had any breakfast, but he shows no sign of hunger or tiredness – on the contrary, he is radiant. This is also due to the fact that he is wearing a jacket made by the Indian designer Abu Jani. It is covered in thumbnail-sized, golden sequins, that sparkle in the light every time he moves.

How do you regard Paris Fashion Week? As an Indian, a British or a cosmopolitan photographer? You were born in London, but you always like to point out that your parents were originally from the Punjab.

My roots are very important to me, and India as a country fascinates me. It’s a place where pictures seem to turn out great without any apparent effort, just because the place is full of colours and contrasts. I’ve spent a lot of time there during the last twenty-two years of my career. In the ‘India Fantastique’ book project – for example – there is a picture of a woman standing between two elephants. The customer actually wanted me to take photos of the elephants in front of the former Umaid Bhavan Palace of the Maharajah. I myself preferred to take them in a familiar setting, like their stables, so I took along some bananas for them and just got going. By the way, at the end of the shoot, one elephant lifted the hat off the model’s head.

And then you had a stroke of good luck because you met Isabella Blow, an icon of fashion who encouraged and supported young designers, and who worked as a journalist and a stylist…

It was one of those meetings that seemed destined to be.

I was standing outside the door of the famous Irish hat maker, Philip Treacy, because I wanted to borrow one of his eccentric hats for a study project I was doing, and I had no idea that, on principle, he never lent anything to students. The mood was very frosty when I was led into his salon, but there was Isabella Blow, sitting in the middle of a landscape of fantastical hats, dressed like a diva, and she offered me a biscuit.

With this picture you are paying tribute to one of your role models, the photographer Richard Avedon, who photographed ‘Dovima with Elephants’ – an elegant model flanked by elephants. Time and again I see references in your work to the great fashion photographers of the west – such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn – as well as to the idea of classic beauty and timeless fashion photography.

I consider Richard Avedon a true artist and, above all, a real gentleman. I met him once at one of his exhibitions and I just had to go up and speak with him, because I’m such a great admirer of his work. He was perfectly friendly and extremely obliging, and in retrospect I’m really happy I had the nerve to actually go and talk to him.

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And she took you under her wing, so to speak?

Yes, absolutely! She introduced me to the world of fashion. It was thanks to her that I met the British designer Alexander McQueen and because of her I also became friends with Philip Treacy. She soon dragged me over to British Vogue, and smoothed the way for the career I was to follow. •

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Can you actually remember the first photo you took?

Absolutely! It was the first thing I had published, and it was in the magazine Fashion Weekly. I still keep a torn out copy of that page. I had borrowed items from Andrew Heather’s collection, at the time when he was still studying fashion at Middlesex University. Later on he went to work for Givenchy. I applied the stuff that most fascinated me and disgusted me: the morbid fantasies of Alexander McQueen, where everything revolves around death and greyness, and the gloomy and unorthodox work of the photographer Joel Peter Witkin. I must have really hit a nerve because shortly after its publication – when I was with Isabella Blow and introduced to British Vogue for the first time – that actual picture was hanging there on the wall. “That’s my picture,” I burst out. If Vogue had been a bit quicker, then my very first published pictures would have appeared in Vogue.

Fashion photography has had a complete transformation over the last 22 years of your career. A new generation of photographers, including the likes of Jürgen Teller for example, no longer places the fashion at the centre of it all, but rather as something on the sidelines. Has that influenced your style?

I don’t treat fashion as something that belongs on the side­ lines. Clothing is the first wrapper we use to cover ourselves up on the outside; it’s often the expression of our frame of mind, and in a fashion production it sets the mood. Jürgen Teller has achieved a lot with his work. In particular, his campaigns for Marc Jacobs, where celebrities take the mickey out of themselves, spring to mind. Originality is the key to a good picture. From that perspective, I consider the work of people like Paolo Roversi, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Nick Knight or Tim Walker significantly more interesting.

Fashion is at the forefront of your work. And the models you work with are not blank canvases, and they’re not young girls or boys. You use models who come across as having real characters. Why is that?

I want them to be able to present the clothes they are wearing with self-confidence. A young person is lacking the experience to be able to do that.

of a ­picture. At the beginning, everything is fresh, but models who have to stand around for ages get tired and the resulting pictures are no good. Just recently I dis­ covered a shop in the Marais in Paris where I absolutely wanted to take pictures. It had exuberant wall decorations and Renaissance materials. I called a friend, a model, and she came by. We were finished in ten minutes – without any styling, hairdressing or make-up; at most I brushed her hair. I really like the pictures.

Speaking earlier, you seemed to allude to how much you enjoyed the peace that reigned before we got the internet and social media. Have these developments also influenced your work?

Unfortunately, pictures – especially in fashion magazines – have become disposable items. Some fashion spreads even look as though they’ve been pulled out of a fashion catalogue. They are empty and they have been retouched so much that the models appear to have no soul. The crisis in the print media is also responsible. We are living in a time of absolute abundance. Every person who owns a smartphone has now become a photographer. In one sense this is wonderful, but when a model at one of my photo shoots takes a selfie wearing the make-up and the clothes that are part of my story, and then posts it, then she takes some­ thing away from it beforehand. I can’t put a stop to it happening, but it weakens the strength of the statement I am trying to make.

With your new project, the magazine The Protagonist, you’re working in the opposite direction. The magazine appears only twice a year, and it looks a bit like a luxurious, coffee table photo book. It’s dedicated to ­creative people involved in the arts and culture, and includes elaborate features and photo spreads.

I’ve been producing pictures that belong in the area of visual arts for a long time, and I’ve shown pictures in a number of solo exhibitions. I do these particular pro­ ductions independent from commercial constraints, and just follow my personal inspiration. How one is able to create images that can stand the test of time is something I don’t know. I think that the simpler a picture is, the more enduring it is.

Do you spend a long time composing a picture? What kind of working process do you follow?

I like immediateness. That’s why I so love working with a Leica – I see the picture exactly like I’m photographing it, without any mirror in between. In my case, the first ­pictures are always the best, even when I’m working for a commercial client who wants to see a lot of variations

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Alex Bohn works as a Fashion Journalist and Director.

She runs the Faire-a-porter blog and writes for Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others.

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© V i n c e n t L a pp a r t i e n t

Photographers

Pat r ick Z a chm a nn

Julien Mignot / Camille Rousse au

“I capture the kind of moments that the public at large can identify with.”

“Trying to find the tale between all the characters; exploring what the spotlight conceals, to reveal the story behind the aura.”

When Zachmann told his mother he wanted to be a ­photographer, she grabbed the phone book to find a professional to help him out. She dialled Henri CartierBresson’s number, but only reached his ex-wife, who explained all about the privations of a photographer’s life. Not discouraged, Zachmann (*1955) started working as a photographer in 1975. In 1979, he began his project about Jewish identity, which appeared in 1987 titled ‘Enquête d’identité’. Zachmann focussed on themes of little interest to the news media, such as the Mafia in Naples, or the problems of migrants in Marseilles.

In 1989, Zachmann reported on events at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and documented the Chinese Diaspora over the following years. In 1990, he became a member of the Magnum Agency. In 2013, ‘Mare-Mater’ in which Zachmann links the current fate of migrants with his own family story, was released.

Born in Beaumont in 1981, Julien Mignot currently lives in Paris. His work appears ­regularly in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Libération and Le Monde. Mignot deals particularly with music photography, working for music labels like Universal, Virgin and Naïve, and was also employed as a photographer for the Parisian Philharmonic Orchestra.

His ‘Les Invisibles’ project, however, brought him to film – the pictures were taken in 2015 during the Cannes Film Festival. Commissioned by the New Yorker, Mignot took ­portraits of the film stars, which were later combined with drawings by Camille Rosseau. Born in 1980, Rosseau first studied graphic design, ­finishing with a Masters from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.

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Regardless of the camera or whether working in colour or black and white, Zachmann takes all his pictures with the Summarit-M 28mm f/2.8 and the Summicron-M 35mm f/2.

Julien Mignot photographed the ‘Les Invisibles’ series with the Summilux-M 21mm f/1.4 Asph, the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 Asph and the Summilux-M 50mm f/1.4.

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© Brian Sokol

© Pierre Terdjman

Photographers

C or e n t in F ohl e n

T om a s va n Hou t r y v e

“I adapt to any given situation and I improvise.”

“I felt that images could transmit ideas and realities in a way where words sometimes failed.”

Corentin Fohlen was born in France in 1981. He dis­ covered photography while studying art and drawing in Belgium. A few years later he started working for ­Wostok Press, a small photo agency where he dealt with political and social issues in Paris. He later turned to inter­ national news for Fédéphoto: elections in Afghanistan, the earthquake in Haiti, disturbances in Bangkok, the Arab Spring, starvation in Africa. He finally decided to step back and focus on long-term documentary projects.

In 2012, he began documenting the situation on Haiti, revealing an image of the country beyond the usual clichés, reflecting the consequences of international hegemony. He came in second place in the Spot News category of the World Press Photo Award in 2011, and once again in the Spot News Singles category in 2016, for a picture of an anti-terror demonstration in Paris taken shortly after the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Born in San Francisco in 1975, Tomas van Houtryve first studied philosophy. After graduating he turned to photojournalism. In 2010 he became a member of the VII Agency. A year later he received the Magnum ­Foundation Grant and was a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. His ‘Behind the Curtains’ documen­ tation of Communist States in the 21st century appeared in 2012. The same year, van Houtryve travelled to Cerro de Pasco in Peru for the first time. In 2013, supported

by Harper’s Magazine and a Getty Images Grant, he began ­realizing his ‘Blue Sky Days’ project. For that work he received, among other prizes, the 2015 ICP Infinity Award as well as second place in the World Press Photo Award the same year. Van Houtryve lives in Paris.

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Corentin Fohlen accompanied the work of the UNHCR in Chad, using only one lens: a Voigtländer VM 35mm f/1.4 Nokton.

Elmarit-M 21mm f/ 2.8 Asph, Voigtländer Ultron 28mm f/2, Summicron-M 35mm f/2 Asph, Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 Asph, Summar 50mm f/2, Summilux-M 75mm f/1.4.

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© max glatzhofer

© Stephan Vanfleteren

Photographers

C é dr ic Ge r be h ay e

R a m S he rgil l

“What does homeland refer to?

Our place of origin, or that which we are and know best?”

“I love the immediateness.

That’s why I love working with a Leica – without a mirror in between.”

While studying journalism, Gerbehaye realized that photography was his particular form of expression.

Born in Belgium in 1977, he first travelled to Israel in 2002 to document the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Up until 2006, he reported regularly from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the border region with Lebanon. In 2007, Gerbehaye’s work as a war reporter earned him the Prix Bayeux-Calvados, and he became a member of the VU’ Agency. That same year he travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo for the first time. During the following three years his reportage travels gave rise to ‘Congo in Limbo’, which earned him the World Press Photo Award and the Amnesty International Media Award. After reporting from war zones, Gerbehaye turned to his homeland Belgium in 2012. Two photo books have also appeared to date: ‘Sète #13’ (2013) and ‘D’entre eux’ (2015).

Ram Shergill’s parents moved to Great Britain from the Punjab in India. He himself was born in London and, after finishing school, first went on to study mathematics. He soon began spending time at the library, poring over photo books by Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Paul Strand and Dorothea Lange. Finally, he turned away from applied sciences completely and took a two-year, intensive photography course. He then changed subject and studied visual communications at the University of Wolverhampton. He met journalist and patron ­ Isabella Blow by chance, and she introduced him at the fashion magazine Vogue. Today his work is exhibited in nu­merous galleries and museums. Shergill publishes the magazine The Protagonist and lives in London.

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Cédric Gerbehaye prefers using a wide angle lens to photograph people in his homeland: the Summicron-M 28mm f/2 Asph and the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 Asph.

From wide angle to tele: Elmarit-M 28mm f/2.8 Asph, Summarit-M 35, 50 and 75mm f/2.5, Macro-Elmar-M 90mm f/4.

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Imprint

M Magazine Special Edition Leica Fotografie International Third year – Issue 01.2016

LFI Photogr aphie GmbH Springeltwiete 4, 20095 Hamburg, Germany Phone +49/(0)40/226 21 12 80 Fax +49/(0)40/226 21 12 70 ISSN 0937-3977 www.lfi-online.de E-Mail mail@lfi-online.de

Editor-in-chief

Authors

Inas Fayed, Frank P. Lohstöter

Dimitri Beck , Alex Bohn, Tony Dajer, Corentin Fohlen, Caroline Lamarche,

Art Direction

Sabine Schnakenberg

Brigitte Schaller

Photogr aphers

Design

Pierre Belhassen, Bruce Davidson,

Alessandro Argentato / Deputy Art Direction

Elliott Erwitt, Corentin Fohlen,

(Tom Leifer Design)

Cédric Gerbehaye, Tomas van Houtryve, Birte Kaufmann, Helen Levitt,

Editorial Office Katrin Iwanczuk / Editorial Board,

Joel Meyerowitz, Julien Mignot,

Bernd Luxa, Simon Schwarzer

Ram Shergill, Tom Stoddart, Tom Wood, Patrick Zachmann

Photo Editor

Camille Rousseau (illustration)

Carol Körting Tr anslation Jan Heberlein, Osanna Vaughn

Reproduction: Alphabeta GmbH, Hamburg

Ma nagement Board

Printer: Optimal Media GmbH, Röbel / Müritz

Frank P. Lohstöter, Anja Ulm

Paper: Profimatt

All articles and illustrations contained in the magazine are subject to copyright law. Any use beyond the narrow limits definded by copyright law, and without the express permission of the publisher, is forbidden and will be prosecuted.

Leica – registered trademark.

Leica Order Number: 91842

The M Magazine is also available as an app at the Apple iTunes store (iOS) and at Google Play and Amazon (Android). www.m-magazine.photography

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A n d o t h e r s a t

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LEICA M

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