Chiara Tocci May 16, 2013
Posted by Geoffrey Hiller in Albania.Tags: Albania
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Shllak village, near Shkoder Albania 2009
Chiara Tocci (b. 1982, Italy) graduated from the Università di Firenze in 2006 and earned a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport in 2010. After graduating she won the Portrait Commission at the National Museum Wales and National Portrait Gallery, London in 2010. Chiara’s photographs have been published in Context and Narrative in Photography, British Journal Of Photography, Ag Magazine, and the Guardian. She is included in the 2012 Magenta Foundation Emerging Photographers and in the Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed 2011, curated by The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Other exhibitions include Hereford Photography Festival (2011), TRACE Gallery, Cornwall (2010), and the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China (2010). Her series Life after Zog was the recipient of the Marco Pesaresi award and was published by Schilt.
About the Photograph:
“My fixer and interpreter Antonela wanted to show me a new place one morning. We jumped on a “furgon” (a sort of shared taxi ) and ventured to the village where my fixer’s mother works as a teacher a few days a week. Surrounded by loud men smoking cigarettes and a crying goat at the back we arrived at the village of Bajze. Our first stop was a visit with a family related to Antonela: a big house inhabited by two toddlers and their extended family. The boys in this photograph, Sokol and Simon, were the newest addition to the family. A few years ago their relatives moved to the USA seeking asylum. This was a story shared by many Albanians.”
David Clifford May 18, 2011
Posted by Geoffrey Hiller in Albania.Tags: Albania
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Bektashi Ceremony, Mount Kruje, Albania 2004
David Clifford (b.1974, Canada) graduated from the Art & Visual Communication Centre in Lisbon and shortly after began freelancing in 1997. The following year he was accepted for an internship at Público newspaper, one of the main Portuguese newspapers. In 2005 he became photo editor of Público. His work has been published in: Visao, Expresso, Grande Reportagem, Libération, Le Monde and Bloomberg. Along with commissions for governmental institutions David’s photographs have been exhibited at the Centro Cultural Belem, Lisbon Portugal and FNAC Galleries (Lisbon, Porto, Paris).
About the Photograph:
“I drove from Portugal to Albania – a depressed and forgotten country lingering in the suburbs of the European Union. The bearded old man is ”Baba” Haxhi Reshat Bardhi, the head of the Bektashi, a Sufi order that derived from the Shia Muslims. The Baba went outside to greet the people and they would kiss his beard. Locals would later enter a room, eat a sweet and share a brief moment in the presence of the Baba. There was silence most of the time but once in a while the Baba would speak short sentences to the people sitting around him. He sat against the wall in front of the paintings of Iman Ali on one side and the first Bektashi of Albania on another. Everyone seemed to enter a dreamy state. On top of the mountain things looked pure and beautiful.”
Bevis Fusha April 29, 2008
Posted by Geoffrey Hiller in Albania.Tags: Albania, Bevis Fusha
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Porto Romano, Albania
Bevis Fusha was born in 1976 in a family of photographers. He has a degree in Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Tirana, Albania. He is currently freelancing and is based in Tirana, Albania. He is a member of the Anzenberger photographic agency in Vienna and also affiliated with Metro Collective in Washington DC. His photographs have been published and exhibited in Europe.
About the Photograph:
From the project titled Slow and Motionless Death. The 15,000 residents of Porto Romano, located near the Albanian harbor city of Durres, live with an ongoing environmental catastrophe. The United Nations Environmental Program has declared Porto Romano the most toxic “red zone” in the Balkans due to pervasive contamination by industrial chemicals such as lindane and benzene chloride. The majority of the residents moved to the area from poor regions in the north of the country after the fall of communism in 1992.
