Isangqa

War stories. From the March issue of SF magazine: ...

2007-04-12T14:11:00.000-07:00

War stories. From the March issue of SF magazine: Short story talent Daniel Alarcon on conjuring the nameless, war-torn country of his debut novel (pdf).

Justice Firebrand. From the December issue of the ...

2007-04-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Justice Firebrand. From the December issue of the magazine, a short profile of Moira Feeney and SF's Center for Justice & Accountability, which aims to put a hurting on international torturers (pdf file).

For Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, the day of reckoning was long overdue. The former Haitian death-squad leader—allegedly responsible for more than 5,000 deaths—had spent the last decade in comfortable exile in New York, but this August a couple of his victims finally got to have their say. In a packed federal civil court, two Haitian women recounted how Constant’s thugs gang-raped them in the 1990s. The judge ruled against Constant; “the devil,” as his countrymen called him, was no longer untouchable.

That the women had the chance to tell their stories in court was largely due to 31-year-old Hastings alum Moira Feeney, lead attorney on the case. Feeney works for San Francisco’s Center for Justice & Accountability, which has brought more human-rights abusers who’ve evaded punishment—from Chilean assassins to Somali generals—to heel in civil court than any other group. The center often wins multimillion dollar judgments against defendants. While collecting can be tough, “ultimately, it’s not about the money,” Feeney says. “Our clients had their day in court—that’s the goal.”

More reviews in San Francisco mag. On Lisa Margo...

2007-03-31T21:20:00.000-07:00

More reviews in San Francisco mag.

On Lisa Margonelli's Oil on the Brain:

When it comes to oil, American thinking might be summed up best by a “No More Blood for Oil” sticker on an SUV—which is to say, our ignorance is surpassed only by our arrogance. In this eye-opening travelogue, Lisa Margonelli, a former San Francisco contributor, maps the terrain between our comfortable existence at the top of the supply chain and the brutal realities on the ground. Bouncing from a Twin Peaks gas station to the oil fields of Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran, she advances a global notion of oil: it is politics, economics, a blessing, and, as the anarchy in the Niger Delta attests, a curse. Though prone to overkill (at one point, she jams five sets of statistics into three sentences), Margonelli excels at the telling description. A shrewd gas magnate has “pool player’s eyes”; American oil workers in destitute Chad look like “anxious ghosts.” It’s a sobering picture, and Margonelli’s attempts to salvage some hope from this bleak wreckage—she reports on China’s strides toward a sustainable future—sink like stones skipped into the ocean. In the final analysis, she writes, “there is no such thing as cheap gas.” It’s just a question of who pays, and how high the price.
CHRIS SMITH

And, from the December issue, a review of Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple:

The devil, as the saying goes, often comes in an attractive form. So it was with the reverend Jim Jones, the magnetic leader of San Francisco’s now-infamous Peoples Temple. In Jonestown, award-winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson charts the church’s transformation from utopian social justice movement to doomsday cult, as well as Jones’s own descent into insanity. We know how this story ends, of course—in a South American jungle in 1978, with the biggest mass suicide-murder in history—and the film propels us toward its conclusion with metronomic precision, giving the proceedings a sense of sickening inevitability. Through spooky, archival footage and interviews with temple members and a handful of survivors—whose raw pain, as they remember loved ones dying in their arms, is almost too hard to watch—Nelson masterfully connects the radical preacher’s flower-power teachings to the piles of bodies in Jonestown’s muddy town square. (One of the most fascinating characters is Jim Jones Jr., Jones’s black adopted son and the subject of a San Francisco profile in 2003.) What even Nelson can’t tell us, though, is why things went down as they did. As one temple member says, “We felt like we had gotten in so deep that there was actually no way out.” That’s the best answer we’re likely to get.
CHRIS SMITH

Captain of the Skyline. My feature on SF Board of ...

2007-03-31T18:53:00.000-07:00

Captain of the Skyline. My feature on SF Board of Supervisors President and city development kingpin Aaron Peskin, for the February issue of San Francisco magazine, is finally online.

I didn’t hear many lukewarm assessments of Peskin over the course of my reporting: his supporters say he’s just what the city needs now; his enemies paint him as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, a NIMBY warlord who has somehow seized control of the levers of power.

Coming soon... At some point in the coming months,...

2007-03-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

Coming soon... At some point in the coming months, I'll be rolling out a whole new website. For now, though, here's a photo from my time in Guatemala last month. From a church in Santiago de Atitlan:

On display. Some of my new photos from South Afric...

2006-12-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

On display. Some of my new photos from South Africa and Zambia are up at the Rayko gallery, on Third Street in SF. Stop by sometime.

The View from Joburg. I've posted some of this yea...

2006-09-13T23:09:00.000-07:00

The View from Joburg. I've posted some of this year's southern Africa photos in my gallery at Lightstalkers. It's a temporary measure--eventually, I'll get them up here--but the slideshow is pretty nice. Check it out.

Updates. Lots of little pieces for SF mag--mostly ...

2006-09-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

Updates. Lots of little pieces for SF mag--mostly reviews--that I'm finally getting around to posting: capsule reviews of the Arab Film Festival ("40 ways to visit the Middle East"); of the Center for Investigative Reporting's new documentary, Nuestra Familia, about the Latino prison gang ("Like father, like son"); on Pierluigi Serraino's new book on the Bay Area's modernist architectural legacy; on ReadyMade magazine's blog; and Cindy Sheehan's passionate but wildly uneven polemic, Dear President Bush. (caveat emptor: the last three are pdfs.)

Also, here's a travel piece on Mt. Shasta ("Downward Momentum") from a few issues back.

Someday, too, I'll get some of the new southern Africa photos up.

Reviews. Since November, I've been writing blog re...

2006-02-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

Reviews. Since November, I've been writing blog reviews for San Francisco magazine. They're not online, but I've made some rough pdfs for your reading pleasure: on SF Supervisor Chris Daly's blog, local photo blogs, a cool local podcast called Sparkletack, and Mother Jones.com's man in the Middle East, David Enders. (The files are heavily compressed so they load quickly, so just enlarge them when they open.)

SF Open Studios. I'm doing it again this year, so ...

2005-10-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

SF Open Studios. I'm doing it again this year, so if you're in the SF Bay Area, come by. Details here.

Georgia dispatch. I've finally gotten around to po...

2006-02-04T14:29:00.000-08:00

Georgia dispatch. I've finally gotten around to posting a long piece from Georgia; this one was picked up then dropped, in various forms, by various media outlets last year. In the end, it never ran. Seems a shame not to do something with it, so here it is. A snapshot of Georgia, about a year after the "Rose revolution."

Crude Politics. I've got a new piece up on Open De...

2005-08-19T18:09:00.000-07:00

Crude Politics. I've got a new piece up on Open Democracy this week about the BTC pipeline, which runs from Azerbaijan, through Georgia, and on to Turkey and the West. The oil has been flowing since May; not surprisingly, it's a big deal in tiny, unstable Georgia, which has never seen a project even a fraction of this size. It might also be, however, an environmental disaster in the making. Read all about it.

Detroit summer. Just posted some of my work from D...

2005-08-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

Detroit summer. Just posted some of my work from Detroit last month. I was there over the 4th of July weekend, shooting and reporting a bit each day. This year, the holiday celebrations went off more or less without a hitch: There were no snipers on the rooftops. The fires continue, though. One building I photographed had just burned the previous night -- not necessarily arson but just an accident -- crackheads, people said.

Exhibit A. I've got a few pieces from the Republic...

2005-05-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

Exhibit A. I've got a few pieces from the Republic of Georgia and South Africa in ArtSpan's biennial juried exhibition. It's 25 artists altogether -- 20 from San Francisco, five from France -- at the Limn Gallery, on 2nd and Townsend in San Francisco. The opening reception is Thursday, May 26, from 6-9 p.m. If you're in the Bay Area, stop by and say hello.

Maputo, Mozambique. Came across this shot while g...

2005-05-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

Maputo, Mozambique. Came across this shot while going through my archives. I'm putting together a presentation for a photography class here in San Francisco, combing through cd after cd, picking out photos that might illustrate my points. So here's one that doesn't illustrate much of anything (except its blatant shilling for Sasseka, which is, I think, a brand of rice). I kind of like it anyway, though.

The Baixa. Maputo, Mozambique. I made this photo, ...

2005-04-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

The Baixa. Maputo, Mozambique. I made this photo, on a typically hot afternoon, in the Baixa, a crumbling neighborhood near Maputo's port -- all faded Portuguese-era buildings, weedy lots and broken concrete.

Elephants, Limpopo Province, South Africa. I don't...

2005-04-19T18:30:00.000-07:00

Elephants, Limpopo Province, South Africa. I don't do much wildlife photography, but elephants are about as cool as it gets, no?

Abkhazia, The State of Where? The latest Colors m...

2005-04-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Abkhazia, The State of Where? The latest Colors magazine has a photo essay on Abhkazia, one of the breakaway Georgian provinces, by Eric Baudelaire. Some, though not all, of these haunting photos are available online (registration required). The accompanying text, by Dan Halpern, is pretty sympathetic to the Abkhaz cause, something I've rarely come across in any Western media. Whatever the merits of the Abkhaz case for statehood, though, Halpern makes this good point about how states come into being, and who decides:

[ ... ]
for most of the stateless, the proof is in the lines on the ground. In Georgia, along the Black Sea, the ancient Abkhaz nation currently fighting for independence dates the original sketching of its own lines to tribes back almost as far as the sixth century BCE. "Amazing Abkhazia!" as the Russian writer Isaac Babel called it, and later, "the fertile and enchanted
garden," was sovereign by the eighth century and saw its independence live, die, and be reborn over and over until the 20th century, when it became subject to Soviet Georgia. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Abkhazia declared its independence again. "But will Georgia give up Abkhazia?" asked the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapus'ci'nski at the time. "There are four million Georgians and only 100,000 Abkhazians. It is easy to predict the chances."
[ ... ]
Ten years ago, Abkhazia established its own government, with the force of more than a thousand years of history behind it. But who will recognize it? The existence of a nation requires little besides the nation's belief in its own existence; the state requires the sanction of other states to exist. There is little agreement on how to treat the invisible; it is hardly any wonder, then, that the invisible feel that to be seen, they must make a noise.

Colesberg Township, Northern Cape Province. Taken...

2005-04-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

Colesberg Township, Northern Cape Province. Taken late one afternoon in the black portion of this drowsy town on the edge of the Karoo. We spent three or four days here, gathering string for a story that never ran, an apartheid parable on the construction of a dam near here in the late 1960s. Much of the area was flooded, and about a thousand black residents -- most of whom lived on white-owned farms -- weren't given more than a day or two's notice, even though their bosses had known for months or years. Many had to flee their homes, leaving everything behind, as the water rose.

back home, the story was picked up, then dropped, by a few different news organizations. A very frustrating experience, all told, and I felt terrible when a few of the people I interviewed wrote to ask what had happened to the story.

(This is when Alex and I had the Mercedes, too, but that's another story.)

The Arab Street. Specifically Cairo's streets, tha...

2005-04-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Arab Street. Specifically Cairo's streets, that is. I've got a photo essay on life in Cairo up on Orkut's Digital Image Cafe, a new Google media site with weekly photo essays and columnists (including my old friend John Gorenfeld, the left's leading expert on the Moonies). There's even a Q&A -- first one I've ever done. Check it out if you're so inclined.

Kezar Field, 7.30 pm. I shot this one evening at ...

2005-04-05T20:33:00.000-07:00

Kezar Field, 7.30 pm. I shot this one evening at the track , near my home in San Francisco. There's a lot of history here: At one point, this area marked the far western edge of the city (at this time, Buena Vista Park was known for the bandits that emerged from its shadows to rob passerby on the road over the hill). It also used to be the home of the 49ers, before anyone much cared about pro football. When my Dad was in the Navy in the 1950s and posted to Vallejo, he came to a few games here. Now, Kezar is mostly used by runners from all over the city, and the occasional high school football game or track meet.

Next in the South African photo series ... Church ...

2005-03-29T23:42:00.000-08:00

Next in the South African photo series ... Church courtyard. Kabokwenki township, South Africa, 2002. In the townships, there are bars and there are churches -- there's very little middle ground. I made this image toward the beginning of my time in South Africa. I was staying with one of my fixers, Alex, in his home about an hour from Nelspruit, Mpumalanga Province, a steamy lowland area near Mozambique. His church -- like most down there -- was an evangelical offshoot of the Christian mainstem, and the service was entirely in Swazi.

Sometimes, it can feel like there's nothing in this world that hasn't been photographed, and nobody who isn't used to photographers roaming their streets, but the people at Alex's church greeted me with a sort of quizzical but friendly amusement. I got up in front of the congregation and introduced myself, and tried (unsuccessfully) to explain my reasons for photographing the service, which mostly had to do with depicting everyday South African life. It didn't make much sense to anybody, evidently, because Alex soon took over the presentation. Speaking in Swazi, he asked everyone to, more or less, "humor the foreigner." Which they did. (You can find other, previously published photos here.)

(Note: original post expanded.)

What the Hell Happened to Detroit? As always, that...

2005-03-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

What the Hell Happened to Detroit? As always, that's the question when you're talking about my hometown, the poster city for American urban decay. Via Detroitblog, I see that there's a new documentary on Detroit making the rounds now, put together by European professors at U of M. As you might expect, the filmmakers spend much of the movie touring the ghost lands of the city.

As the film makes its way to the present, the filmmakers inject themselves as they take Woiquart on a driving tour of the city. They let him make observations -- interjected with academic theory -- as he scrutinized the city block by block.

When they reach the central business district, the filmmakers must point out to Woiquart that he is actually downtown. He can't believe it.

"Right here? Downtown?" he asks. "C'mon! Clean it up!"

The film will probably make some people angry -- understandably so, given the way most outsiders look down on Detroit. I'm a bit skeptical myself, but I haven't seen it yet so I can't say. (The proprietor of Detroitblog, for instance, notes that the film doesn't once mention Coleman Young -- the mayor who presided over the city's fall -- which doesn't make any sense at all.) With luck, it'll make it out to the west coast sometime soon and I can see for myself.

First in an occasional series ... It probably happ...

2005-03-22T20:18:00.000-08:00

First in an occasional series ... It probably happens to every photographer: Sometimes while combing through old negatives, searching for something else, you come upon photos that you ignored the first time around. Happened to me last week, looking for a few SA photos for requests. They seem worth posting, even if I never do anything else with them. So here's the first, shot in a tenement in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, in 2002.

Photo News. A few different art galleries now carr...

2005-02-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

Photo News. A few different art galleries now carry my work. ArtMango.com, a new online gallery (with physical gallery space in San Antonio) launches this week. Go check it out. And Rayko, the venerable San Francisco photographic arts center, is celebrating the opening of its huge new home with a show by 12 SF photographers (including yours truly). The opening reception is this Friday, February 18. I'll be out of town, sadly, but starting at 5:00 pm there'll be food, drink and live jazz -- plus lots of great work -- so drop by if you live in the Bay Area.