book project with blurb

To celebrate NOOR’s 5‐year anniversary, we made a series of eleven small books in partnership with Blurb®.

Each book contains work from the past five years chosen by each member photographer according to their personal visions: Nina Berman, Pep Bonet, Andrea Bruce, Alixandra Fazzina, Stanley Greene, Yuri Kozyrev, Kadir van Lohuizen, Jon Lowenstein, Francesco Zizola and former members Philip Blenkinsop and Jan Grarup.

The books can be ordered in the Blurb® online bookstore at EUR44,12/USD50,72,- (ex. VAT) each.

The books are also available as e-books for the iPad, iPhone, or iPad Touch.

Concept and design: Teun van der Heijden of Heijdens Karwei

Printing and binding: Blurb

Book format: Small Square (18×18 cm, 7×7 inches), number of pages: 60 pages, paper: Premium Matte Paper, and book cover: Beige Linen Hard Cover with Dutch Jacket.

NOOR is most thankful for the support Blurb® provided by producing this series of books.

usa-canada - nina berman

I conceived of this book as a journey from muted colors, loneliness and uncertainty, to landscapes more richly hued but in distress, all in some way fueled by the language of money, the candy colored pixels, abstract screens, and disembodied traders poised to rule the day. I drew from specific stories: the Obama Train, a women’s prison, NOOR’s climate projects as seen in Las Vegas and British Columbia and my ongoing work on the shale gas rush. I also...

philip blenkinsop

Without him who can speak of it? - It is our calling to be this witness. The path allows no deviation. The scenes one captures of the collective suffering, the physical and emotional pain, the loss and the hopelessness of situations stay with you. A large part of you becomes the sum of these parts. The faces and the pleas and the dying breaths of the oppressed and the cheated and the victims of the porcine and the avaricious… of the never-have-enoughs, burn inside you,...

hell & heaven - pep bonet

About seven years ago, I had a conversation with Kadir van Lohuizen, we were watching the news on TV and it was showing images of Darfur. I commented that I thought it was a heart-breaking story. Kadir asked me if I had ever seen the pictures of Pep Bonet, yes sure, isn’t he that art photographer who won the Eugene Smith grant in Photography? Kadir laughed, “Man, you do not know his images.” Since that time I have come to know Pep and his pictures. Pep’s pictures speak to...

surviving war - andrea bruce

This is a visual record of Afghanistan, a decade after 9/11. At the same time it is a picture of the survivors, the widows, the husbands and the sons who, amid escalating violence, will make the choices that decide the future of Afghanistan. On August 10, 2010, the United Nations reported that Afghan civilian casualties rose 31 percent in the first six months of that year, mostly due to insurgent attacks such as suicide bombings. Rumors of corruption are rampant, from President Hamid Karzai’s government to...

unseen, unheard - alixandra fazzina

Over the past five years, I have moved from Yemen to Pakistan, covering the effects of wars in Somalia and Afghanistan. In the places I made my home, armed conflicts also continue. Propelled by sectarian hatreds, misshaped ideologies and radicalised armies, daily acts of bloodshed and cruelty seldom make the headlines. For the victims, there is often no healing and no moving on. On frontlines and in the camps, I have spent much of my time collecting testimonies that illustrate and reflect...

caught between war and famine - jan grarup

During the last 21 years, Somalia has been in a constant limbo of a war between warlords, clans and armies. Severe drought has also hit the country in recent years. For the Somali people, life is a constant struggle for survival. They seek refuge from conflict and drought in neighboring countries. Some leave their home for Kenya, to take refuge in the worlds biggest refugee camp Dadaab. Others go to the northeastern Puntland State of Somalia and settle in smaller makeshift camps, others...

looking through the glass onion - stanley greene

“I have always seen myself as being clandestine, gathering evidence in secret - stealing images with my cameras”. It remains essential for photographers to scour the ground, unimpeded, using the only weapons we know. Our cameras, notebooks and voices make us the unwelcome pests of aggressors around the world. Witnesses are inconvenient. Yet as most of my colleagues will agree, countries such as Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Chechnya, are becoming...

the revolutions that weren’t - yuri kozyrev

After the “Arab Spring” sparked off in Tunisia early 2011, inciting protests throughout the Arab world, I went on assignment for Time magazine to Cairo’s Tahrir Square where the Egyptians had gathered to claim more freedom and justice. Ever since, I regularly visited the countries that saw the “Arab Revolutions”, documenting the uprisings and their aftermaths in Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia and especially Egypt and Libya. Much of the reportage on these world-changing events...

families - kadir van lohuizen

Looking at my work over the past five years, since we started NOOR, and from before, I realize how many families I have portrayed over the years. Families in joy, families in misery, families who stick together despite the hardship surrounding them and those who have been separated due to the course of history, conflicts, natural disasters or for economic reasons. The micro-cosmos of a family can often tell and explain issues at stake and hopefully create an understanding between...

aftershock - jon lowenstein

January 12, 2010. Four days before my fortieth birthday. As the magnitude of the quake continued to grow I grew more and more interested. My fortieth passed and I sat idle working in frozen Chicago. I am not a ‘news’ photographer, yet I do take an interest in documenting certain ‘news’ stories that touch me, that pull at me to go and witness our collective history. Yet still I waited and continued to watch the story on my evening glow box. ‘There are too many photographers. What good would another one do?’...

true colours - francesco zizola

When the idea of NOOR began to dawn within the minds of some photographers seven years ago, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were breaking out after the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. Images of killed or wounded American soldiers were banned from the American press and an impressionistic representation of the war began to take hold. Out of focus or blurred pictures, sharp silhouettes, or highly contrasted but elusive black and white images were...