James Nachtwey - extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB)

Susan Katz
James Nachtwey speaks at the VII Seminar, in conjunction with the New York Photo Festival

Courtesy © 2008 Susan Katz

Famed war photographer James Nachtwey has brought the full force of his artistic vision and a brilliant international media campaign to bear on the underreported and ever-growing pandemic of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). Supported by the TED community (an organization of the world's cutting-edge thinkers and doers), the photographer is using his 2007 TED Prize to harness both the power of new media and his moving photos of worldwide XDR-TB victims. From large-scale, outdoor slideshow projections in the capitals of the world to a takeover of YouTube's home page, the photographs are alerting the international community to the entirely preventable spread of dangerously mutating and often lethal strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis. The word is getting out.

The project is an example of photo-activism at its best to promote awareness of alarming health issue. To see examples of the photographs, video clips and to learn more about how you can be involved read the article: James Nachtwey & TED's creative campaign to fight the XDR-TB pandemic on the Photowings website.

Andrew Garn: Magnitogorsk

Andrew Garn
Man
[Magnitogorsk]
2000

A.M. Richard Fine Art

LL/27461

Most of us have everyday lives far removed from that of heavy industry and at times in my life I've worked for large conglomerates such as Firestone Tyres and in the cable and wire rope works of Bridon in the UK. There is a magnificence in heavy industry despite the grime and often terrible working conditions - the scale is awesome and the ingenuity that can create plants on some a scale stretches the mind. The recording of working conditions has a long tradition in documentary photography and it was common in the earliest Daguerreotypes to record workers with the tools of their trades - painters with their brushes, miners with shovels and picks and so on. Lewis Hine recorded aspects of child labor in the USA and the Bernd & Hilla Becher the typologies of industrial buildings. On this website there already exhibitions on the industrial remains of Eastern Europe recorded by Bruce Haley and the English industrial decay photographed by John Darwell.

In this online exhibition New York based photographer Andrew Garn takes us to Magnitogorsk in Russia.

The Magnitogorsk Metal Kombinat (MMK), built in the late 1920s during Stalin's Five Year Plan, is the largest steel plant in the world today. The sheer vastness and architectural complexity of this Siberian metal city, conceived with the ambition to become the "Pittsburgh of the East", is unparalleled throughout the world. An important record of political, social and manufacturing history, Magnitogorsk is also a feat of engineering and socialist ideals. The Russian steel plant, constructed on an uninhabited barren and hostile plain near the Ural River and a mountain rich in iron ore, stretches for over thirteen miles. By comparison, the great US Steel plant in Pittsburgh, PA, was a third of this size.

Thanks to Andrew Garn for his assistance with this exhibition.

There is an online exhibition on Luminous-Lint.