Funakoshi: 95% of this fishing community was destroyed by the tsunami.  All Images © Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris.

An earthquake in the Tōhoku region of Japan triggered a tsunami that devastated the Pacific coastal area and resulted in nuclear disaster two days later, on March 11, 2011. This tragedy resulted in 15,880 deaths, 6,135 injuries, 2,694 missing persons, and hundreds of thousands of buildings damaged or completely destroyed.

Photographer Michel Huneault, who lives in Montreal, went to Tōhoku 13 months after the catastrophic event, splitting his time between documenting and volunteering. The result is a multilayered project that documents more than 155 miles of coastline, from Fukushima to Kesennuma, over a period of three months in late spring 2012. Huneault’s series mixes photographs, composite panoramas, HD videos and sound captures. “I want the viewer to experience in multiple ways the weight of emptiness and absence one must carry within the area. This is a necessary step to understand the larger impacts of this event.” To see more work from the series, visit Huneault’s website.

To see other photography series about Tōhoku, click here. (more…)

©Bob Adelman, Selma, Alabama, 1965

As a form of propaganda, activist photography tends not to stand the test of time. But among the many striking and even iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement were images shot by photographers who were working from within, particularly as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Some of their images endure for the formal beauty and raw emotion–not to mention the undeniable and systematic injustice–that they portray. University Press of Mississippi has just published 156 photographs by nine photographers in This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement. “Together the photographs and text remind us that the movement was a battleground, that the battle was successfully fought by thousands of ‘ordinary’ Americans…and that the Movement’s moral vision and impact continue to shape our lives,” the publisher says. Images by Bob Adelman, who went on to a successful career as a photojournalist, stand out in particular. Also included in the book are some noteworthy images by George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela and Tamio Wakayama. with personal accounts of covering the Civil Rights movement by several of the photographers. (more…)

All images © Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena’s “Car Poolers” exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles opened this weekend. The exhibition runs through April 6th.  Visit Kopeikin Gallery or Alejandro Cartagena‘s website for more information.
Cartagena’s “Car Pooler’s placed into the Personal Work category for the 2012 PDN Photo Annual. The 2013 PDN Photo Annual FINAL deadline is today! Visit http://pdnphotoannual.com.
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All images © Adam Amengual

Adam Amengual‘s series, “I Survived Skatopia,” documents a small skateboard/anarchist commune in Rutland, Ohio. Every June around 500 people from all over the United States gather in southern Ohio to participate in Bowl Bash – four days of of music, skating and debauchery. In these portraits, the participants are pulled away from the chaos, if only for a minute. Amengual’s series “Homies” placed in the “personal” category of the 2012 PDN Photo Annual and was the winner of the Sony Emerging Photographer Award.
The 2013 PDN Photo Annual’s extended deadline is today! For more information and to enter the context, visit: http://www.pdnphotoannual.com/

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La Brasserie de l’Ile St. Louis, Paris, 1994. © Peter Turnley-Corbis. All rights reserved.

Photojournalist Peter Turnley, whose images have appeared on the cover of Newsweek 43 times and who is best known for his career covering conflict, also has a softer side. He has been documenting life in his “adopted home” of Paris since 1975–making images that explore love in the City of Lights. He explains that if “there were any justification for trying to bring greater attention to those suffering from oppression [and various forms of injustices],” it would be to also show that “life is beautiful.”  In the 1980s he assisted Robert Doisneau, the French photojournalist and creator of the famous “Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (The Kiss)“ photograph and says he is “proud to continue to underline the ongoing universal theme of beauty and romance and love” in his work. He is currently working on compiling his “French Kiss” series of nearly 40 years of work into a book with the same title.

To read more about his week-long street photography workshops, visit this link. For updates on his work, visit his Facebook page.

–Lindsay Comstock

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