NOOR photographer Kadir van Lohuizen was invited to present a talk about his project Via Pan Am: Migration In The Americas at TEDxMaastricht. In the spirit of the TED concept of ideas worth spreading, Kadir shared his experiences creating the Via PanAm project, in which he traveled from Chile to Alaska, covering 15 countries along the Pan-American Highway, to visually investigate migration in the Americas.
Watch the talk here
Today, no one any longer doubts that glaciers the world over are retreating, and even more worryingly that Greenland and Antartica are melting at an increasing pace. The question: how fast is it going? It is alarming that past figures appear to have been too conservative and humanity should start preparing for the biggest displacement of mankind in known history. As people in all of the world’s regions become displaced at ever growing scales, the biggest question is: where will they go?
For one and half year Kadir van Lohuizen has been looking at the global consequences of rising sea levels caused by climate change. He traveled to Kiribati, Fiji, the Carteret Atoll in Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, the Guna Yala coastline in Panama, the United Kingdom and the United States. In these different regions Kadir not only looked at the areas that are affected or will be affected, but also where people will likely have to relocate to. Coastal erosion, inundation, worse and more frequent coastal surges and contamination of drinking water mean increasingly that people have to flee their homes and lands in a growing number of locales across the world. The human costs of these movements are dramatic in the extreme. The Rising Sea Levels project is designed to highlight both the immense complexities associated with in-island and inter-island/country movement, as well as the specific human rights implications involved with such involuntary movements.
This month Geo France published this important work in an extensive feature. Have a look at some of the pages here below:
Last week NOOR photographer Kadir van Lohuizen's exhibition 'Ali & Laila, An Amsterdam Family History' exhibition opened at the Amsterdam museum. The exhibition portrays the Dutch-Moroccan Rharib family from Amsterdam East.
In 1993, Kadir met the family for the first time and spent some time with father Ali, mother Laila and their five children. Kadir photographed them in their daily life and followed Laila and her husband to Morocco during their holidays to their home country.
Nora, Fatima and Farida in the courtyard of the house where Laila was born. Amsterdam, 1993
In 2013, 20 years later, Kadir was visiting a friend in the hospital when he bumped into a woman who recognized the photographer from her childhood. At first, Kadir did not recognize Nora, the youngest daughter of the Rharib family, as she had become a young woman and was herself now a mother. Nora was there at the hospital because her father Ali was ill from Alzheimers. Nora told Kadir. "Don't you recognize me? "We need you to come," she said simply. "My father is going to die."
Kadir and the Rharib family watch the multimedia installation at the 'Ali & Laila' exhibition.
The multimedia installation at the 'Ali & Laila' exhibition.
Once again the Rharib family invited Kadir into their lives and he soon joined them, as he did 20 years earlier, to Marroco. Kadir wondered what had changed in the meantime. Did the Rharib family found their place in Dutch society? How had the years in Amsterdam shaped their identity? Kadir documented how their lives had developed. Through this extended family portrait, the exhibit 'Ali & Laila' explores questions of identity, culture & integration in the Netherlands.
The exhibition runs until 8 March 2015 at the Amsterdam Museum.
More info: http://www.amsterdammuseum.nl/kadir-van-lohuizen
Tune in!
Kadir was a guest on the Dutch radio show 'Nooit Meer Slapen'. In the program he talks about the exhibition and his work as a photojournalist. You can listen to the show online (in Dutch) here.
Photos © Johannes De Bruycker
NOOR's recent group project in Za'atari is now shown at PHOTOVILLE – the largest annual photographic event of New York City; it is a modular venue built from re-purposed shipping containers. For Nina Berman this is an inspiring event ''it was here that I first started thinking about the possibilities for large-scale outdoor photographic displays''. NOOR is excited to bring the Za'atari project to this location, after it was initially installed on the walls of the refugee camp in Jordan. The installation features 4 meter wide images by photographers Alixandra Fazzina, Andrea Bruce, Stanley Greene and Nina Berman.
''Having covered stories of refugees around the world over nearly two decades, Zaatari Camp in Jordan puts a different face on what a crisis should look like. Far from languishing in the desert to wait out the ongoing conflict, the 120,000 Syrian refugees at Zaatari have mobilised themselves. Facing up to what is a protracted situation, they are getting by day to day in what has become a new temporary city across the frontier. These threads of new lives that are weaving together the community in Zaatari compelled me to look beyond the surface, to try and tell a more sensitive and positive narrative of the people I came to meet'' - says NOOR photographer Alixandra Fazzina, whose work is now available on the NOOR website - 'Za'atiri, New Lives' http://noorimages.com/feature/zaatari-new-lives/`
Also at Photoville, on Sunday September 28, there will be a Panel Discussion with Nina Berman on Photography in Public Space. This discussion will explore the politics, meanings, and impact of site-specific artwork, examining case studies from photographers who have mounted larger-than-life photographs everywhere.
More information on the installation:
http://www.photoville.com/2014-installations/zaatari/
More information on the panel discussion:
http://www.photoville.com/2014-programming/2014-talks-workshops/whose-space-our-space/
What to do at Photoville?
http://www.featureshoot.com/2014/09/10-workshops-panels-and-events-you-shouldnt-miss-at-photoville-2014/
NOOR photographers Nina Berman, Alixandra Fazzina, Andrea Bruce, and Stanley Greene worked on a collaborative photography project at the Za'atari refugee camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan. The photographers documented life in the camp and set up a photo portrait booth. They made several thousand images, nearly 100 of which were turned into large scale prints, blown up to 3 meters wide, and pasted on the camp's concrete security walls.
“We tried to strike a balance with images showing daily life without sugar coating the reality and at the same time not make the experience of looking at the wall depressing,” wrote Nina Berman on her Instagram, adding that certain questions would never be concerns when photographing for publications, but presenting photographs in public where the subjects are also the audience becomes an entirely different conversation.
To learn more about the NOOR Foundation/Za'atari project, contact the NOOR office.
"March is also March in Syria, [...] the whites of the flowering almond branches, the orange of tulips and then this temperate, kind wind, full of light and jasmine. Then, in the house on your left, yesterday, just before sunset, Asma committed suicide. A bullet in the head – March isn’t March, in Syria. She was 13." — from a feature by NOOR's Stanley Greene.
Tomorrow is widely recognized as the third anniversary of the worst humanitarian crisis in modern times: the Syrian civil war. About three years ago, minor protests in Syria in response to the Arab Spring and government corruption escalated to large-scale unrest. The ongoing armed conflict between rebel groups and forces loyal to the Ba'ath government has created almost 2.5 million Syrian refugees, according to the UNHCR.
In 2013, NOOR's Stanley Greene and Andrea Bruce worked extensively to cover the Syrian crisis, following those involved in the fighting and the civilians and emergency workers caught in between. As winter turns to spring and the first flowers tentatively bloom, we invite you to take a look at Crisis in Syria, our collection of stories about the conflict, and remember that March may not be March in Syria.
