[sic]: Límite, [Feb. 2013]

[sic]: Límite:

"iSpy with my little eye: Apple’s u-turn on privacy sets a precedent and threatens everyone’s security"

Image credit: Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY 3.0 US)

"Apple has just announced significant changes to their privacy settings for messaging and cloud services: first, it will scan all images sent by child accounts; second, it will scan all photos as they are being uploaded to iCloud. 

With these changes, Apple is threatening everyone’s privacy, security and confidentiality...

EDRi [[European Digital Rights] and other civil society groups have been warning of the risks of these proposed technological ‘solutions’. 

Despite the laudable goal to protect children, these changes in fact introduce measures that make everyone less safe by creating a ‘backdoor’ into our private lives. 

With Apple blessing these privacy-invasive technologies and the adoption of the recent interim CSAM legislation, we are deeply concerned that these practices will be normalised and promoted further by other companies and by policy-makers. We call on Apple to abandon these proposed changes and to step up against corporate and government surveillance."

Read more here.

4th century Roman aqueduct and footbridge: Sant Jaume dels Domenys in Tarragona, Catalonia

 My photos from today's walk...

"Eva's eye" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

 

[Photo: Eva Parey, from Expulsiones Anunciadas]

Even if you just look at the titles of just a few of her solo exhibitions before you focus on the poignancy of her photography, you can get an idea of the scope of Eva Parey’s work: ‘Expulsions Foretold,’ ‘Chernobil Beach,’ ‘Princesses for sale,’ ‘Forced Nomads,’ ‘Gypsy lives,’ ‘The daughters of Durga.’  

From last summer until now, the Covid-19 pandemic was also the subject of an especially harrowing set of photos she took of life in Barcelona’s streets and treatment rooms. It has also meant that several of Eva’s recent exhibitions have had to move online.

I would say it’s near impossible to do justice to the best photography by attempting to use words to describe or comment on it. What I can express is how I’m taken in by her images because of the pure humanity that shines through them and how sensitively she frames her subjects. 

The nucleus of her whole catalogue is people and the living environment but more particularly, people from minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.

These include children in Barcelona’s eviction-ravaged Meridiana, ethnic Kalash animists, slum-dwelling women in Mumbai, the victims of new segregation along the Slovak wall and Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona (including her photos of men at prayer in a mosque).

Much of Eva’s work can be viewed on her website (EvaParey.com). One project  she talks about there that has been widely displayed in galleries across Catalonia is titled ‘East Winds.’

According to her it’s “a portrait of the Romani Diaspora [concentrating on a family headed by Ioana,] a matriarch whose 15 children are dispersed across Europe, between Romania, France, Germany and Spain.”

In the section of pictures called ‘Under a Hot Tin Roof’ she says that “After living for a while in Barcelona, Ioana decided to return to Romania, taking care of her grandchildren.”

In Eva’s opinion her children “aspire to be like their elders who are their role models, putting them in the same position as their predecessors once they become adults: at the mercy of political decisions, socio-economic ups and downs and socially at the back of the queue. Emigration is the only way out.”

Her skills are not restricted to fixed images though. Recently, Eva’s first documentary film became available through Filmin. Called ‘Arrels fondes’ (Deep roots) and jointly directed by Pep Martínez, it’s an hour length co-production with IB3 Television in Catalan with English or Castellano subtitles.

As a “journey through the branches of memory on the island of Formentera from the Franco regime to its opening to tourism, locals on the island of Formentera narrate how they survived the famine in the mid-1950s.

Through autumn to summer, the island's transformation is shown, “from tranquillity to tourist saturation with globalization causing the inevitable loss of certain ancestral customs, despite the retired peasants remaining rooted in land and sea; a deep bond that few young people inherit.”

Eva appears to not be content with her substantial creative output since 2006, sharing her knowledge by teaching photography at the Tecnocampus University of Mataró and photojournalism at the UPF in Barcelona. Her professional history also includes participation in collective and group shows such as ‘Photojournalists: looking at violence against women in the world,’ which was held in Barcelona’s Institut Català de la Dona in 2019.

George Orwell wrote that “ As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.” I’d argue that the progressive left could certainly do with a lot less factional tribalists and a lot more people like Eva Parey.

She’s someone who quietly gets on with using their empathy and talents to reveal the human damage that the capitalist machine is doing every day to countless millions across our groaning planet.​

(This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Feb. 2020.)

From Eva Parey's webpage...

EXPULSIONS FORETOLD

In the summer of 2010 the French government ordered the mass expulsion of thousands of Roma during August and September after the riots in Saint-Aignan that were triggered by the death of a Roma at the hands of the police.

 

Some of Ioana’s children were living in camps on the outskirts of Lille in France. The police arrived with an expulsion order for everyone to leave within 24 hours. When the time was up they led them to the Belgian border or deported them by plane on the understanding that they would not return to French soil. Many left voluntarily in order to be able to return.

 

This happens every year to Roma people from Eastern Europe. The French government continues expelling Gypsies, nowadays offering no form of financial help.

"Street photographer documenting Madrid's invisible population"

"When Michael Damanti, a photographer from the United States, moved to Madrid five years ago with his Spanish wife and two children he expected to make a bunch of new friends in the new city...

'In 2015 I was an outsider in this country, trying to learn the language and find work. A chance encounter soon changed that, forming the beginnings of a long-term photographic series about Romani population in Europe,' he told The Local.

'Walking home one day from another disappointing day of cliche photos, I came across a Roma Girl sleeping on the ground holding an old change cup. Her name was Sibella. I knelt down to take her photograph and as I stood up I noticed another Roma-girl walking right towards me saying, "What are you doing? That is my sister!" That was the day I met the "Cobadin-Girls of Sol".

“Over the next four years I met with them every day, carefully documenting their story and gradually becoming absorbed into their lives. We have been through births, deaths, arrests, fights and the day to day struggles we all endure.”

What he has produced is a remarkable set of photographs of a group of people who are at best invisible to society and at worst, the frequent targets of abuse.

At first, he approached them with handmade signs with witty slogans, such as 'freewifi' and '#Brexit: Keep calm and give me money' to replace the ineffectual ones they had written themselves.

“This was the way into their lives, I noticed their signs were incredibly long (5-6 lines) and 100 percent trite and boring.  No one was reading them. So I offerend alternatives, lighthearted signs with quick simple messages in English for the tourists. This began the friendship.”

Read more from Fiona Govan's article at the Local.es here.

3 min. VIDEO: "Two worlds" -- The brilliant imagery of Uğur Gallenkuş

"Istanbul-based artist Uğur Gallenkuş portrays two different worlds within in a single image.

Combining a pair of side-by-side photographs - one of the thriving Western world and the other of the war-torn Middle East - he highlights how, despite living on the same planet, these places could not be more different.

The differences are as striking as they are heartbreaking."

Images from the Stasi secret police files (of then East Germany)

Simon Menner

While conducting research on surveillance, I realized that the public has very limited access to images   showing the act of surveillance from the perspective of the surveillant. What actually is it that the Orwellian “Big Brother” gets to see when he is watching us?

For over two and a half years, I applied this question to materials from the former East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, which had become publicly available after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi was one of the most effective surveillance apparatuses ever. The quantity and breadth of the images I was able to unearth was surprising: images documenting Stasi agents being trained in hand signals, or perfecting the art of disguise; Polaroids taken during clandestine searches of people’s homes, to ensure everything could be put back where it belonged; photographs made by Stasi spies photographing other spies.

Many of the images shown here might appear absurd or even funny to us. But it is important not to lose sight of the original intentions behind these pictures—photographic records of the repression exerted by the state to subdue its own citizens. The banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive. Many of the images are open to wide interpretation and could feed or confirm the suspicions of the Stasi agents viewing them. For example, the photograph of a Siemens coffeemaker: Is this West German consumer product evidence of contacts with Western agents? Or merely a present from relatives? The difference can mean years in prison, demonstrating one of the fundamental problems and limitations inherent to any and all forms of surveillance.

Presenting most of these pictures can be a double-edged sword. Many represent an undue intrusion into people’s private lives. Does reproducing them repeat the intrusion and renew injustices committed years ago? I grappled with this difficult issue and concluded that the pictures should be presented because they make an important contribution to discussions about state-sanctioned surveillance systems.

—Simon Menner, November 2014

For fascinating and disturbing photo exhibition click here.






[Source and creator: Open Society Foundations. (Creative Commons license rules.)]

"The lost photos of Barcelona"

[Image: Milagros Caturla, courtesy of Tom Sponheim]

  
An envelope in a Barcelona flea market held the work of an unknown master photographer...

"In the summer of 2001, American Tom Sponheim was vacationing in Barcelona with his wife. On their way to the cathedral of Sagrada Familia, they wandered through the bustling flea market of Els Encants.

Sponheim spotted a stack of photo negatives on a table, and after checking that they were decently exposed, asked the vendor how much. She asked for $2.50 for an envelope of the shots. He paid her $3.50.

Upon returning home, Sponheim scanned the negatives and discovered that he had stumbled upon the work of an unknown but immensely talented photographer."

Read more from source and see more of the remarkable photos here.

(Article first found via Business Over Tapas.)

'COLOUR' in Barcelona

The photographic work of my friend Ibrahim Sajid is part of a new exhibition (until June 21) at Arenas, the former bullring at Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 373- on Plaça d'Espanya, Barcelona.

The concept of this international group project is stated as:

"Mankind has come a long way, yet even in today’s modern world, our behaviours are stereotypical.

Racism, bias and discrimination are the social evils prevalent in all societies and each and every one of us plays a role in either contributing to or breaking down racial prejudice and intolerant attitudes.
Our opinions are created and nurtured by superficial beliefs, making us form biases against ethnicities, cultures, religions, gender, nationalities, races and color without even trying to see beyond.
This installation urges us, as a society, to question the first impressions we form at a glance, regardless of his or her appearance, forcing us to look beyond the colour."

"Easy on the eye" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Watching my son doing his geography homework the other day I was struck by how much time he was spending on selecting online images to accompany his (minimal) written work.

This activity is now a big part of modern education which I also know because as a (thankfully former) secondary school teacher of History and English I was continually struggling with students to focus on the text they were developing or learning from and to consider the pictorial aspect as secondary, or supportive. 

Students as old as twelve would regularly include a photo of say, Adolf Hitler, with the caption, “Here is a photo of Adolf Hitler,” with no other information about him, as if naming him was all that needed to be said and the real task was to cut and paste an image of him. Some older students would often just plagiarise whatever Wikipedia told them was the truth.

But why should I be surprised about all this? If you are reading this article on a train or metro have a look around right now, or next time. There will probably be more people scrolling through photos on their phones than reading something (apart from chatting by text, perhaps.)

The popularity of social media has given rise to even more use of moving or still pictures as communication. Instagram and YouTube, to name just two, have meant that sharing visuals is easy, fun and almost cost-free. Amateur photography has never been so straight-forward, thanks to camera-phones and digital technology.

Children are obviously some of the major users of their own photos as well as those of their friends. One survey of more than 2,700 young British people aged 13 to 25 found that almost one in six children sends naked photos. Equally, this so-called “sexting” phenomenon in the USA lead investigators from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to find that of the more than 130 million images containing child pornography examined since 2002, one in four were initially posted by minors themselves.

It’s natural for young people to have an interest in their bodies and other’s bodies as well. I see no big problem there but an apparent increase in obsession with body image can at least partly be explained by the strong influence of ‘supermodels’ (recently including male ones) and the visual appeal of “skin is in” singers and groups, especially from hip-hop, rap and R&B.

The power of the metrosexual male idol such as David Beckham or Ronaldo has yet to be explored in the mainstream media but this increased emphasis that male-grooming puts on the connection between the visual and the physical is abundantly clear. 

Our society simply values those with “eye candy” appeal more than anything else and that is because a glance takes a split second but conveys so much. It’s for this basic reason that film stars have long been paid absurd amounts of money compared to others in the creative industries including virtually all painters, writers and non-commercial musicians.

Looking is easy. Listening is often hit and miss.Reading needs more concentration or patience.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2015.]

"9 year old Spanish boy becomes Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year"

"Since 1964, the National History Museum in London has been organizing their annual Wildlife Photographer Of The Year contest.




This year, the Grand title winner in Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year, which includes photographers up to 17 years of age, was Carlos Perez Naval – a 9-year-old boy from Spain."


Read more from source here.

"La meva Barcelona"

Eugeni Forcado's evocative collection of black and white photo’s of Barcelona in the 1960’s and early 1970’s.

“Between the sky and the earth”

The stunning photography of Cristina Garcia Rodero...

"I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain in all its passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage, pain, in all its truth; and the fullest and most intense moments in the lives of these characters as simple as they are irresistible…”

A Catalan eye

It was announced today that Manresa photographer Jordi Cohen Colldeforns has won an award for Travel Photographer of the Year in the category of Best Single Image in a Portfolio - World in Motion (above) which is now being shown at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Audio slideshow here.

A universe of pain

Video: This week an exhibition in Barcelona. Photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez culminates a decade of his work with a new exhibition called 'Disappeared'. He has pictured the pain of family members who face the loss of a relative disappeared by a dictatorial regime. The work is shown simultaneously in Madrid and León.