Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez

Good Bye: Gulu, Northern Uganda

This morning I said good bye to most of my students. Sara Terry and I spent the last week teaching documentary photography to a group of 7 students from Tufts University. They came to learn from us but mostly to learn from the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. In a short amount of time each of them produced fantastic work, they pushed themselves as photographers and people. Sara and I are proud of each of them.

It is such a privilege to be here in a place that has occupied much of my thoughts for so long and be able to share it and photography. As always with teaching, I learn far more than the students.

I hope that we will hear from some of the students here. I think that at least one of them will do a guest post about some of their personal work. But each of them produced work that I'd be proud to show in this forum.

Thank you to the students for working so hard this week and also to the Acholi for being such gracious hosts.

Have a great weekend.

Stephen Alvarez

Gulu, Uganda

Think Fixed Tech: More iPhone

Yeah, I know im late today.  And I know I am obsessing a bit on the iPhone.  I make no promises but I will try to stray from that path in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, heres a cool mod for those of you that not only use your iPhone camera a lot (dont deny it) but wish it could focus closer (since its set to infinity).  This Guy has all the pics on Flickr you need to get into that phone and mod it up.  Not for the weak of heart.

Geof Bowie
www.thinkfixed.com

Forgiveness: Pajong A village, Kitgum District Uganda

Yesterday I was taken to Pajong A village outside of Kitgum. July 22 2002 56 people were murdered in this village by the Lord’s Resistance Army. The community is now coming together to try and figure out how to rebuild itself. Part of that rebuilding is learning to live with the people who perpetrated the killing.

How do you forgive that sort of atrocity? The people of Northern Uganda have a long tradition of forgiveness. It demands accountability and truth telling. There is so much to learn from Africa. Every time I come here I get new insights into the human capacity for perseverance, compassion and love.

Stephen Alvarez

Gulu, Uganda

Lago Atitlan, Guatemala

The highlands of Guatemala are one of the most beautiful and sometimes saddest places on earth. A place close to my heart.

EARLY one morning with thunder waking me, I had this idea to photograph lightning reflected in the surface of Lago Atitlan, something was running through my head about the primordial sea and the Popol Vuh.

4 am with my assistant, driving like mad to get in the right spot by the lake to see a thunderstorm that never quite materialized...

Disheartened and driving to breakfast I came across this scene. An old time NG photographer told me that he always made his best pictures driving between places that he THOUGHT were going to make good photos...

-Stephen Alvarez

Think Fixed Tech: More Apps

Continuing from last week, here are a couple of interesting launches photographers may be interested in, or at least get a laugh from. 

Check out MiGhty Docs (iTunes link), which allows you to use your iphone to search your documents on your remote machines.  Might be a bit clunky right now but I imagine this could be very powerful if combined with Teleport. Free.

On the humorous side, but maybe not, we have a telephoto lens for your iPhone.  At $19 it looks really stupid interesting but we know lots of folks that love shooting with the iPhone camera, limitations and all.  So who knows: is this a joke or something that possibly work in some oulipian way?  Let me know

Geof Bowie
www.thinkfixed.com

Pabbo Camp, Northern Uganda

This morning I leave London and fly to Uganda. I'm going to help teach a workshop for Tufts University students and also to work on a personal project that I started years ago.

I've written about this before, personal work is so important. Every photographer needs a place to have their own vision without the gaggle of concerns that come from working with even the most understanding clients. When working for someone else I always have in the back of my mind what is appropriate for them.

Not so when I work in Northern Uganda. There I am trying to tell a difficult story in the best way that I know how without worrying what people will think of my images or even how I will publish them. It is a wonderfully liberating experience being free of those expectations.

Northern Uganda has changed a lot since I was last there. A peace deal with the LRA has come and gone, but even with out an agreement peace is coming to the region. This next set of pictures should be very different from the last ones.

-Stephen Alvarez

Don Beni part 8: What do do with the gold

This is # 8 and the final installment of Don Beni

What do you do when you are offered kilos of gold by a confessed murderer while sitting in a terrorist controlled jungle?

I figured that the thing to do was turn the offer down as politely as possible. The writer agreed and with the German ethnohistorian we decided to talk to Don B alone. The following morning the 4 of us went to the river by ourselves under the guise of shooting more portraits.

We had 2 concerns. 1 is that carrying gold out of the jungle the way we were headed seemed a suicidally bad idea.

2 that word of Don B's cache would get around and his life would be in danger. The first concern was pretty valid. But thinking back now, Don Beni hacked his way into the jungle and existed just fine there for years without our help it was a little presumptuous of us to think that he needed our help. In any event as I shot a new set of portraits we talked about what to do with him.

Eventually we decided to take back the assay and the German would help make some decisions about how to turn the gold into money that Don B could use. That decision allayed my fears, made Don B happy so the next day we packed to go.

The walk out was blissfully easy. 2 or 3 days walk along the Rio Verde. The terrorists, if they even were terrorists, were all very nice to us. With the end of the trip in sight even the porter's mood improved.

I got back to the US without incident. Got stuck in Chachapoyos for a bit, then had to fight the magazine tooth and nail to get them to pay the pittance that they had promised -par for the course with magazines.

It was such an amazing experience. Walking through the jungle day after day in search of a legend and then finding him. Don Beni was a diminutive yet larger than life character. What a privilege to meet him.

-Stephen Alvarez

Memory: Wilmington, NC

As I alluded to last Thursday, I keep a visual journal. In it there are thousands of pictures that I don't look at very often. Sometimes I just stumble upon them as I just now stumbled on this image that I made early one morning getting ready to leave for an airport. It describes that bleary headed feeling of traveling too much. And also, for me, the feeling of memories where you cannot quite pull up specifics of what happened but you know -trust- that your impressions are correct.

I've been thinking of memory lately as I get ready to head back to Uganda to pick up a personal project that has lain dormant for a number of years. Getting back into a personal body of work is an exquisite feeling, but it is not without this same cloudness. Why did I start the project in the first place? That is not as clear as it was when I first got off a plane in Adjumani years ago. But I have to trust the overall impression that it is the right thing to do.

-Stephen Alvarez

Stone Box, Guatemala

God have I ever worked with a lot of archeologists over the years. Good archeologist, or at least well known ones, are by there very nature great promoters.

Every notice that people don't find dusty outlying settlements, they find Troy, the Queen Sheba's Palace or the lost city of Ubar?

After years of being led to the greatest, most important archeological find of the century only to find nothing to photograph but a small pile of rocks I've become somewhat skeptical.

That is how I was when NGM asked me to photograph a carved stone box found in a cave in Guatemala. My first clue that it might be interesting was when I talked to the archeologist Brent Woodfill. Rather than give me a hard sell, Brent said "well I think it is interesting but why don't you come down and take a look."

Well I am glad that I did. First off the box is one of the most impressive artifacts I have ever seen up close. Carved stone boxes are virtually unheard of in the Maya world, and the workmanship on this one is very impressive.

Second, Brent and his girlfriend -now wife- Mirza became good friends in the time that we spent exploring underground sites near Cancuen.

Finally, the box was stolen -looted really- shortly after I photographed it. Brent did most of the heavy lifting in getting it recovered. He was able to use my pictures to generate so much publicity that the box was impossible to sell. It was mysteriously returned to the Guatemalan government.

Good work Brent.

-Stephen Alvarez

Sleep: Tulum, Mexico

April sleeps with the Caribbean sea washing the room with the sound and smell of the ocean.

I have to take pictures all the time, it is like a diary of my life. Usually I don't even look at the daily photos that I make until months or years later and then they are like little gems of memory that I get to discover...

-Stephen Alvarez