Chris Smith’s blog

The World Cup has finally begun (read my new South Africa piece here, starting at pg. 71), and in honor of the globe’s most popular game, I’ve compiled a quick portfolio of soccer-related photos from Africa and the Middle East. You can see most of these images, in larger form, on Flickr.

Pimville, Soweto, South Africa, 2009.

Midan Hussein, Cairo, Egypt, 2000. I took this photo of an impromptu midnight game during Ramadan.

Maputo, Mozambique, 2002.

Colesberg, Northern Cape, South Africa, 2002. Note the color differential between players and coaches. It's the same with many of Africa's national teams today.

Gaza City, Gaza, 2001. I took this photograph in Beach Refugee camp, close to the Mediterranean but locked away from the world. Things were bad then, during the second Intifada. Things are worse now.

Atar, Mauritania, 2007. Mauritania is an insular place, and most people don't go out of their way to make you feel welcome. These kids were the exception.

Soccer field, Jabulani, Soweto, South Africa, 2006.

The new issue of the travel magazine Afar has a small piece of mine on Newtown, Jozi’s cultural hub. [Turn to page 18.] I’ve spent a lot of time in this former industrial neighborhood on my visits to Jo’burg, and I’ve seen it change. Back in 2002, my fixer and I almost got jumped while shooting in a shady bar near the old taxi depot cum trash-pit that once dominated Newtown’s landscape. The red-eyed drunks in the bar allowed me to take a few shots then thought better of it. Switching from English to tsotsitaal, they asked my fixer why he was protecting me. That was when we decided it was time to go.

That bar is gone now, replaced by a mixed-use condo project. It’s all part of a huge redevelopment push by the city fathers, aided by a welter of security cameras and an unwillingness to let all of downtown Johannesburg go to hell (indeed, similar efforts are underway in other parts of the city). But Newtown, with its mix of museums, restaurants, and nightspots, is the farthest along.

My last visit coincided with a music festival, where I ran into the venerable Pops Mohamed, a South African world-music icon who nevertheless rides the bus all over town. As the sun set over the city, we talked about Indian food, and the best bars in the inner suburbs. It was a decidedly unglamorous conversation to have with a pop star, but that’s the kind of place Newtown is: buzzy, but down-to-earth.

Afar’s content isn’t online but you can find it, as they say, at better newsstands everywhere. (Update, 4.11.10: I’ve just discovered an online cache, and edited this post accordingly.)

(You can see more of my South African photography here.)

I shot these photos last month while reporting a story on the ways in which Soweto–and, more generally, South Africa–has changed since the end of apartheid. The piece will come later, but for now there are photos.

Out this month in California magazine, my piece on Mauritania (.pdf), possibly the single strangest place I’ve ever visited.

Outside our windows the desert is silent, malevolently hot, and virtually empty. Every so often, though, we see things: knots of camels grazing the scrubland; hulks of cars left for dead by the roadside, their skeletons filling with sand; wraithlike men engaged in the Sisyphean task of sweeping the blowing sands off the blacktop.

…

The man driving the Land Cruiser has seen it all before. Our guide is a whippetlike man of indeterminate age. His face is deeply lined; a meticulously cared for goatee frames his mouth. Like everyone else we’ve met in Mauritania, Sidi Al Moktar is taciturn to the point of caricature. He is a font of knowledge about camels–how long they can go without drinking, how far they can walk without resting. About almost everything else, he’s mum.

You can read the whole thing here, and here’s a link to some of my Mauritanian photography.

While working on a piece about Mauritania, a phantasmagorically weird Saharan country that rides the line between Arab North Africa and black southern Africa, I went back through some of my photos and put together a sort of “road suite“–a series of images shot from the window of our Land Cruiser. By way of description, I think “bleak” is a good word. I was too lazy to dig the negatives out, so I just scanned the test shots from printing. In this case, I think the extra grit suits the subject matter.

The news of a terrorist bombing outside Hussein Mosque in Cairo hit close to home. Back when I worked there, I spent a lot of time wandering the alleys of Islamic Cairo (as it’s sometimes called), a portion of the city so ancient that buildings from the 16th century are generally considered “new.” At the end of 2000, I was working on a photo project for grad school, and spending more or less all of my time down there. It was the month of Ramadan, and you’re not supposed to eat or drink from sunrise to sunset, so most people lie low during the day (it’s not uncommon to see office workers sleeping under their desks) and stay up for most of the night, eating a big meal at three or four in the morning. Midan Hussein, which is near both the famous Khan Al Khalili bazaar and a bunch of local markets, is always pretty busy. But on those Ramadan nights it just pulsed with life: every cafe was full, and huge banquet tables were set up in the square, overflowing with families celebrating the holidays. As a foreigner whose command of Arabic was limited to pleasantries and directions, I was humbled by the friendliness of virtually everybody I met (this was, of course, before George W. Bush took office–lots of people were actually excited about him, believing that he would follow his father, who was tougher on Israel than most recent presidents). People invited me to eat with them, plied me with tea, held their children out for my admiration; I remember a long, midnight conversation with a bunch of Islamist students from Tanta, the Egyptian Fresno. We talked about faith and TV shows.

All told, it was a peaceful time in Cairo. The government had pretty much crushed the Islamist insurgency of the 1990s, going so far as to burn the fields in the Nile Valley to deny its enemies cover. But these things don’t so much die as simply burrow underground, only to reemerge later. Egypt is a dictatorship (witness the saidi soldiers on every street corner), and so long as that doesn’t change, nothing else will: its citizens will get poorer and angrier, and the insurgencies will reappear, just as brutal as ever. And yesterday the tourists in Midan Hussein paid the price.

While flipping through some photos from Mali tonight, I came upon this one. The background’s blown out and my Photoshop skills aren’t good enough to fix it, so I never did anything with it, but, wow, I love the faces on these guys.

Josh Tenge, ambassador

The first time I went sandboarding was more than a decade ago. I was in Swakopmund, a surreal town of Bavarian-style gingerbread architecture on Namibia’s desolate, windswept coast. The boards back then were just modified snowboards, and the riding was slow going–not altogether different from a sunny, sludgy day in Tahoe. You could carve big, slow-motion turns, pretending you’re Jake Burton or something, then head off to the local beer garden.

The next time I tried sandboarding was earlier this year, in Florence, Oregon. Florence is a weird place, the sort of hippie-redneck hybrid you only really find on the Pacific coast, and it might very well be the monster-truck capital of the West, owing to the massive dunefields looming over the ocean here. It is also the sandboarding capital of the country, with a fully developed local scene. I went out with Josh Tenge, four-time world sandboard champ, and he showed me how far the sport has come in a decade. The boards have changed: small and edgeless, fast and incredibly responsive, and mercilessly unforgiving when you leaned too far into a turn (my punishment: a sore back and sand that was still lodged in my ears days later). And Josh, with his ever-expanding arsenal of tricks and visions of sandboarding safaris, has become the sport’s roving ambassador. Sandboarding is beginning to come into its own.

All that’s to introduce the piece I wrote (and shot) for this fall’s Men’s Book. It’s a clunky interface, but do check it out. The story starts on page 40. You’ll find more of my sandboarding shots here.

Last week, Mother Jones ran an old photo of mine, one I made in 2002 of a Zimbabwean immigrant (or economic refugee, if you prefer) in his apartment in downtown Johannesburg.

As their nation slipped into chaos under the rule of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, millions of Zimbabweans flooded into neighboring South Africa in search of work. Many ended up in Johannesburg, Southern Africa’s de facto capital, scratching out a living on the streets and sharing rooms in decaying apartment blocks in the city’s rundown core.

I made this photo in 2002, and things have only gone downhill since then, the years marked by spiraling inflation, stolen elections, and state-sponsored thuggery against the democratic opposition. Even if current power-sharing negotiations manage to loosen Mugabe’s grip on the country, Zimbabwe will need to be rebuilt, more or less, from the ground up.