8th Angkor Photo Workshops: Applications Open

The Angkor Photo Workshops is back for the 8th year, and has now announced that it is accepting applications.

I can't emphasize strongly enough that it is a phenomenal opportunity for all photographers, emerging and established, and this comes from personal experience following my attendance and participation last year. It was a delightful experience to meet all those concerned with the workshop, and co-mingle with the hundreds of photographers who joined it.

The Angkor Photo Workshops is held annually in Siem Reap, and is offered free to selected young photography talents from Asia. The week-long professional photography workshop provides participants with firsthand training, invaluable exposure, and a chance to develop their personal photographic style and vision. Over the years, the workshop has highlighted emerging talent from the region, and many previous participants are now pursuing successful photography careers.

Angkor Photo Festival 2012: Submission Calls

Angkor Photo Festival is calling for submissions with a deadline of May 31, 2012!!!

The festival's 2012 program will present works photographed throughout the world through exhibitions and slideshows in Siem Reap, with no imposed theme.

The submissions guidelines and form contain all the information needed on how to submit work for this year’s festival. 

The festival will be held from December 1– 8, 2012 in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The deadline to submit the application is May 31, 2012, and all photographers will receive an answer by the end of July 2012.

Since its inception in 2005, more than 180 young photographers from all over Asia have been selected to participate in the annual free Angkor Photo Workshops. Conducted by renowned international photographers who volunteer their time, the Angkor Photo Workshops provide participants with firsthand training, invaluable exposure and a chance to perfect their art.

Over the years, the workshop has highlighted emerging talent from the region, and many previous participants go on to embark on successful photography careers both regionally and internationally.


I attended the Angkor Photo Festival last November and one of my photo essays The Possessed of Mira Datar was featured at the festival. 


I was greatly impressed by the Angkor Photo Festival's evenings at the FCC, and by the quality of the curating. Francoise Callier and Jean-Yves Navel were not only paragons of hospitality, but were instrumental in making a success of the event, along with the assistance of Camille Plante and Jessica Lim.

This is a phenomenal opportunity for all photographers, emerging and established. Submit your work for inclusion in the Angkor Photo Festival. You'll never regret it.

Foundry Photojournalism Workshop: Scholarships Announced

The Foundry Photojournalism Workshop has announced the winners of the Foundry full tuition scholarships for its 2012 Chiang Mai workshop.

Eric Beecroft, Director of the workshop, stated that the amount of entries was unprecedented, and the quality of work received was stunning.

The awardees are:

Arif Setiawan, Indonesia

Saw Banyar, Burma/Thailand

Barat Ali Batoor, Afghanistan

Ajit Bhadoriya, India

Enrique Leopoldo Benedicto Cruz, Philippines

Satirat Dam-ampai, Thailand

Nguyen Thanh Hai, Vietnam **

Ekkarat Punyatara, Thailand

Roger Anis, Egypt

Fabian Weiss, Germany

Ilkin Huseynov, Azerbaijan

Simona Pampallona, Italy

**Nguyen Thanh Hai is also known as Maika Elan, and I'm especially pleased she will be working with me on my Vietnam; North of the 16th Parallel Photo Expedition-Workshop this coming September.

If any of my readers are still on the fence with this unequaled opportunity to attend phenomenal classes with top-class photographers and photojournalists, and expand their network with their peers and others, I really can't urge you strongly enough to get off that fence and join!!!!

The Wakhan Corridor

The Wakhan Corridor is a slender area in the far north-eastern Afghanistan which forms a land link between Afghanistan and China. The corridor was a political creation of the Great Game, and a result of agreements between Britain and Russia in 1873 and between Britain and Afghanistan in 1893. It currently has 12,000 inhabitants, who live very much the same as their ancestors did centuries ago.

In 2011, inspired by an article published by the New York Times, Fabrice Nadjari and Varial, two 33 year-old authors, photographers and childhood friends, decided to embark on a journey in the Wakhan region. It is here that they decided to take photographs of the inhabitants of the Wakhan villages. The portraits made with their Polaroid cameras developed odd hues, and their quality deteriorated quite rapidly due to the altitude.

The photographers also produced the Traces of Time book project (to be published in May 2012) which they claim "presents a vision between a current and tangible printed reality that already ceases to exist and an uncertain present resembling the past. This is the perspective of travellers who steal a snapshot of life and leave behind a trace that could change the lives of those they've passed."

As is seen in the trailer (listen to the haunting soundtrack!!) above, the photographers convinced Ismaili children, young women, and housewives, opium smokers, village chiefs and simple peasants to pose for their Polaroid cameras.

The show Wakhan, An Other Afghanistan will be featured at the MILK Gallery, 450 West 15th Street in New York (May 18-23, 2012).

Travel Photographer Of The Year (TPOTY) 2011

Photo © Louis Montrose-All Rights Reserved

The annual (and impatiently awaited) Travel Photographer Of The Year competition results have been announced, with Louis Montrose being awarded the coveted title.

Louis was born in London, but grew up in New York City, and lived in the San Diego area of southern California for many years. Formerly an Elizabethan scholar and professor at The University of California, he now pursues his calling as a photographer full time.

Amongst the talented other entrants, I noted that Sergey Anisimov, Timothy Allen, David Lazar, GMB Akash, Matjaz Krivic, Richard Murai, and Larry Louie are all recognized for their work.

The winning images from the Travel Photographer of the Year competition 2011 will be exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London from 21st June to 19th August 2012.

A niggling thought about TPOTY: with a couple of exceptions, all the winners and runners-up (and judges) seem to be from Western countries. Having seen the quality of photographic work by Asian and Latin American photographers, I am surprised that none have won in a category. It may well be that TPOTY's 'reach' is limited to Europe and the USA and if so, I hope its founders will exert efforts to make it better known in Asia and South America to name but two continents.

Here's also a short movie of TPOTY's Exhibition Opening last year.

Siem Reap Journal: Issue #5

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

Well, all good things have to come to an end. The Angkor Photo Festival's closing night included an intriguing photo talk by Roger Ballen, and the results of the 2011 Angkor Photo Workshops.

The award for the best photo story produced during the workshop was given to Carrie Lam*, a Singaporean photographer, for Cure...an ethereal collection of images. Her workshop tutor was Magnum photographer Antoine d'Agata.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Francoise Callier and Jean-Yves Navel, who overwhelmed me (and many others) with their cordiality, and gracious hospitality during every night of the Festival, as well as the hard work of both Camille Plante and Jessica Lim which made a success of this Festival.

So thank you very much for a great event!

*I didn't find a website for Carrie Lam.

Siem Reap Journal:Issue #4

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

The Angkor Photo Festival is continuing its momentum, with today's penultimate night including a slideshow of the 5 finalists and the result of the inaugural Reminders Project Asian Photographers Grant. One of my favorite photographers, Shiho Fukada, is one of these five.

Since it's Friday, I dropped by the Siem Reap solitary mosque to explore whether there's anything worthwhile to document. Each Muslim community in Cambodia has a hakem who leads the community and the mosque, an imam who leads the prayers, and a bilal (as in Bilal, the Prophet Muhammad's muezzin) who calls the faithful to the daily prayers.

I met a few of the community members, one of whom spoke a reasonably fluent Arabic. While some of the Cham go to study the Qur'an at Kelantan in Malaysia, he learned it in Phnom Penh.

The two children were running around in the mosque, and the boy in particular was a bundle of energy.

Siem Reap Journal: Issue #3

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

I've got a few things to talk about in this post, so here goes:

The opening of the Angkor Photo Festival was covered in yesterday's The Phnom Post which marveled that the front lawn of the Foreign Correspondent Club was packed with photographers, photojournalists and guests.

I was happy that Rahman Roslan, a photojournalist from Malaysia, who told the story of Nur, a young Indonesian woman returning home after suffering five years of abuse as a domestic worker in Malaysia, was quoted to say that Angkor workshops hadn’t just improved his style, but had changed his entire life.

I was also thrilled that Francoise Callier, the festival program director and curator, was quoted as saying “I wanted to focus on young photographers for this show, although there are some more established shooters in there too, like Tewfic El-Sawy."


I have also used my new iPhone to snap (and snap is the exact word for it) pictures of whatever takes my visual fancy, and I must say I find this to be very gratifying and entertaining, especially when using Instagram and Hipstamatic filters. That being said, I found it very useful when photographing people here. I can show these images to whoever I snapped, and it's an instant icebreaker. The iPhone is not threatening....everybody recognizes it's a phone, and the young and old take delight in choosing which filter to apply to their portrait, and in flipping from one image to the other.  At that point, they are ready to be photographed and photographed and re-photographed!

I'll be writing about this when I have more time.

Siem Reap Journal

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

It was a good move to arrive early at the opening of the Angkor Photo Festival last night. Held at the Foreign Correspondents Club (known locally by its acronym FCC), it quickly filled up with almost 400 people to watch the projected slideshows of some 21 photographers. The slideshows included The Mercy Project/Inochi by James Whitlow Delano, Nishant Ratnakar's Fistful of Dreams, Nur by Rahman Roslan, Kauser Haider's A Hall Full of Cinema and my own The Possessed of Hazrat Mira Datar.

I introduced myself to Francoise Callier, the indefatigable energy behind the festival and its curator. I also met Jean-Yves Navel, the co-founder and director of the festival, as well as Camille Plante and Jessica Lin, both indispensable to the success of the festival for a number of years. The photo slideshows were all highly impressive, and the large audience was held in rapt attention.

Tonight saw the second installment of the slideshow program of about 13 photographers which included Whale Hunting In Lamalera by Ardiles Rante, Wendy Marijnissen's Dr Musarat, and ended with the lengthy Exodus by Sebastiao Salgado.

The photograph above is of one of the caretakers at Wat Bo, and has nothing to do with Angkor Photo Festival...but I thought it would be appropriate to feature it for a post on Siem Reap.

Another bit of information: I have yet to use my Canon 5D2. All I carried and used since my arrival in Siem Reap is the M9 and a couple of lenses.

Siem Reap For The Angkor Photo Festival

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy- All Rights Reserved

I'm thrilled to be in Siem Reap to attend the 7th Angkor Photo Festival. Posters of the event can be seen in many places of the town, as this one in Pub Street. I duly bought kramas (the traditional Cambodian scarf) and already have a tuk-tuk driver who claims he's the 'best' in Siem Reap. We'll see about that in due course.

More news on the festival will be posted soon. Its opening night is tomorrow evening, when my own work will be shown.

Foundry Photojournalism Workshop 2012: Thailand!

Eric Beecroft, the co-founder of the Foundry Photojournalism Workshops, has just announced that it was ready to accept early registrations ($100 deposit, non refundable, and deducted from the total tuition amount) until January 15, 2012. Early registration guarantees a spot and precedence in the choice of instructor.

The 2012 Foundry Photojournalism Workshop will be held in North Thailand from July 29- August 4, 2012.

For regional students (South Asia-- India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tibet and South East Asia-Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Phillippines, Laos, Cambodia,Indonesia, Malaysia) the tuition is $475. For all others it is $975 US dollars. Payment is via Paypal.

So spread the word via social network sites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

On The Way To The 7th Angkor Photo Festival

I'll be traveling tomorrow to London for a brief stopover before flying off to Siem Reap via Abu Dhabi and Bangkok. I chose to fly Etihad, the Abu Dhabi airline, from London to Bangkok after hearing it offered an impressive flying experience in terms of comfort and service.

The festival itself is to take place in Siem Reap from November 19 to November 26, 2011. This well established event is the first photography festival held in Southeast Asia and for 2011, will exhibit the work of 110 photographers, out of whom 60 are from Asia.

The 2011 list of exhibiting photographers includes Andrew Biraj, Pep Bonet, Paula Bronstein, Marco Di Lauro, Tewfic El-Sawy, Siddharth Jain, Yuri Koryzev, Liz Loh-Taylor, Wendy Marijnissen, Erica McDonald, Palani Mohan, and many more.



On the subject of Cambodia and Siem Reap, I thought I'd re-mention To Cambodia With Love, a book published by Things Asian, illustrated with my photographs of Siem Reap.

It's described as "With its unique insights into dining, shopping, sightseeing, and culture, To Cambodia With Love is a one-of-a-kind guide for the passionate traveler."

It can be purchased from various online bookstores, and I believe the Siem Reap bookstores have it in stock.

I expect my posts might be irregular whilst traveling, but I'll try my best to update my readers with my gallivanting during the Angkor Photo Festival.

Angkor Photo Festival: Updated Website

The Angkor Photo Festival website's just announced facelift is quite substantial, so have a look at the 2011 schedule of events and you may be tempted to drop by, if you aren't already planning to attend.

The festival is to take place in Siem Reap from November 19 to November 26, 2011. This well established event is the first photography festival held in Southeast Asia and for 2011, will exhibit the work of 110 photographers, out of whom 60 are from Asia. 

The 2011 list of exhibiting photographers includes Andrew Biraj, Pep Bonet, Paula Bronstein, Marco Di Lauro, Tewfic El-Sawy, Siddharth Jain, Yuri Koryzev, Liz Loh-Taylor, Wendy Marijnissen, Erica McDonald, Palani Mohan, and many more.

Delhi Photo Festival: Submissions Details

Mentioned in an earlier post, Delhi Photo Festival is gearing itself up, and is now at the stage of inviting submissions. Further stages are being worked on as I write this, and include an enticing array of workshops, lectures, portfolio reviews, gallery walks and seminars.

Through Nazar Foundation, the festival is the brainchild of Prashant Panjiar and Dinesh Khanna, both well known photographers, and for mentoring young photographers and propagating photography.

I know I have many readers from India and elsewhere who will be interested in participating in such a venue, and I encourage them to review the submission requirements and send in their work.

I am excited to have been invited to the festival, and I'm scheduled to lead a 3-4 hour workshop on Multimedia For Photographers.

Delhi Photo Festival: Nazar Foundation

The Nazar Foundation, in partnership with the India Habitat Centre, is organizing the Delhi Photo Festival on 15 to 28 October 2011.

The Delhi Photo Festival is a non-commercial venture, and entry will be free to ensure popular and wide-reaching participation. Through Nazar Foundation, the festival is the brainchild of Prashant Panjiar and Dinesh Khanna, both well known photographers, and for mentoring young photographers and propagating photography. Nazar Foundation was launched with the aim of institutionalizing what these two photographers are already been doing so on an informal basis.

The core attraction of the festival will be exhibitions of photography from India, Asia and other international work.

This promises to be quite an event, and will include workshops and seminars. I am excited to have been asked to teach an Introduction to Multimedia class on the afternoon-evening of October 15.

More details will be available in due course, and a schedule for submissions and the process will be announced soon.

Joseph F. C. Rock: Western China

Photo © Joseph Francis Charles Rock

Joseph Francis Charles Rock (1884 – 1962) was an Austrian-American explorer, botanist, and anthropologist. For more than 25 years, he traveled extensively through Tibet and Yunnan, Gansu, and Szechuan provinces in China before finally leaving in 1949.

His travels in Western China is featured by On Shadow, and I thought I'd show the gallery of his more than 275 photographs made in the 1920s. It's always fascinating to me to view photographs made during these early years of photography, which required lugging heavy cameras and large amounts of developing chemicals. What we present-day photographers carry is a mere trifle of what these photographers had to schlep. They certainly had porters to do it for them, but imagine the difficulties this still was, as well as having to develop the films in situ.

For those of you who are patient and interested enough to scroll through the 275 images, you'll notice one that is captioned as "Lamas with trumpets, drums, and cymbals chanting the prelude to the Black Hat Dance in front of the main chanting hall at Cho-ni Lamasery" and was taken in December 1925. Compare it with contemporary photographs of Bhutan's Black Hat dances at its tsechus, and you'll realize that not much has changed.

On Shadow is primarily run by Nicholas Calcott, and was founded in January 2008, originally as the blog arm of the publisher 12th Press. It presents projects and essays from invited scholars and artists.

Pop Photo's 25 Best Places To Photograph

Photo © Carolyn Drake-All Rights Reserved
Popular Photo Magazine has published a feature titled 25 Best Places To Photograph after running a poll amongst various documentary and travel photographers who are drawn to cultures far-removed from ours both geographically and chronologically.

The photographers are, amongst others, Chris Rainier recommending New Guinea, Carolyn Drake recommending Xinjiang, and Andrea Pistolesi recommending Sicily.

Jaipur was recommended as one of the best places to photograph but in my view, that city pales in comparison to a hundred of other more picturesque places in India.

I could have easily straighten that out had I been asked.

And what about Nepal, Bhutan, Bali, Vietnam, Ethiopia....?

Gulf Photo Plus Responds

Mohamed Somji of Dubai's Gulf Photo Plus (GPP) has responded to my criticisms which I raised in my earlier post. Here's his response:

Hi Tewfic,

Thanks for your blog post about our annual event. We had a quick email exchange last year and believe me, I would like nothing more than to have more local/regional Arab and Asian photographers but please understand a couple of things:

(i) The event caters mainly to commercial photography interests: lighting, fashion, photoshop, landscape, etc. - we have always struggled to fill in the documentary workshops.

(ii) The tutors we bring in have international acclaim in their respective genres. I would be very happy to invite Arab/Asian photographers for these particular type of workshops

But, I'm afraid in those genres, I have yet to come across photographers who I would have considered inviting and as someone who teaches workshops, you will appreciate that a good photographer does not necessarily make a good tutor.

I know Munem Wasif well and I had invited him to come to Dubai but I guess he was/is busy with his projects and the same with Farah Nosh so please understand that we are always open to the idea of bringing regional photographers and we do our best to promote local talent. I have reached out many times to Arab photographers to teach/present and we started a Slidefest evening which we aim to repeat again in Feb/March where we promote Dubai based photographers.

We are a young organisation and slowly making a foothold in the photography scene and I'm fully committed to nurturing photography in the region and promoting the work of Asian, Arab and African photographers.

Thanks and look forward to hearing from you.

Mohamed Somji

POV: Gulf Photo Plus (Dubai)

If anyone thought Dubai's financial difficulties would diminish its appetite for hosting international cultural hooplas, they ought to think again. Dates for the annual Gulf Photo Plus (GPP) event have been confirmed as the 1st to the 6th March 2010. This is trumpeted as the region’s only hands-on dedicated photography event.

It will be a week long event packed with over 50 workshops, 90-minute seminars and panels, an exhibition featuring work by the invited photographers, etc. The event will start with an exhibition featuring selected works from the 12 visiting photographers including Joey Lawrence (TTP's Travel Photographer's of 2009), David Nightingale, Robin Nichols, Bobbi Lane, Joe McNally, David Hobby and Zack Arias. Also scheduled is a video SLR workshop presented by Vincent Laforet, and a fashion photography seminar by Melissa Rodwell.

Scanning the list suggests that if you expect to see local, Middle Eastern, or regional names amongst the invited photographers, you'd be badly disappointed. It's sad, isn't it?...but this has always been a symptom in the Gulf, and to a lesser degree in the rest of the Middle East. Some would call it the pathetic legacy of colonialism, and a habit of cultural dependency.

Here are questions the organizers may want to think of. Why aren't the talented and courageous Palestinian photographers, who risk their lives to document the daily horrors of Gaza, also invited? Why doesn't GPP also invite some of the immensely talented Bangladeshi documentary photographers who document the impact of poverty and floods on their homeland? Why don't you invite the Kashmiri photographers...why don't you also invite the emerging Afghan photographers...the incredibly prolific Indian photographers? The Malaysians...the Iranians?

What's the point in promoting the work of well-established Western photographers who already get more than their share of exposure in Europe and the United States? Aren't the local, Mid Eastern and regional photographers also entitled to get their work exposed in Dubai? Why don't you use Dubai as a hub to expose native and regional talent to the world? Dare to break the cycle of this addictive dependency on Western talent and promote your own...and that of your region. Yes, perhaps GPP won't attract as many Western sponsors at first, but it will attract the best non-Western photographers...and the sponsors will return soon enough. This is the future...leave the past where it belongs.

By the way, I have the feeling that GPP's organizers haven't caught up with the news that the old boys club has crumbled. And by the way #2, TTP's vented in a previous post about the same issue here.

I know, I know, I digressed...so let me get back to the event. Details have yet to be posted on Gulf Photo Plus's website, but can be seen here.

GEO Magazine Closes NY Office

Photo © GEO. Courtesy PDN
It's a real shame that the German GEO Magazine has closed its New York office effective yesterday. Nadja Masri, GEO's New York bureau chief, and Tina Ahrens, a photo editor in the New York office, both well-known in the photo circles here in NYC, will leave the magazine.

Its office was a regular venue for documentary photographers to show their portfolios, especially as the magazine was known for publishing lengthy photo essays, often devoting 20 pages to a story.

While GEO NY will no longer have a physical presence here, its photo editors in Hamburg will continue to work with U.S. photographers.

Via PDN online.