Human Rights Photographer Charged as Part of Migrant Extortion Scheme
A human rights photographer who once worked for the Red Cross has been arrested and charged for allegedly being part of a gang that exploited migrants.
A human rights photographer who once worked for the Red Cross has been arrested and charged for allegedly being part of a gang that exploited migrants.
Tariq Zaidi is a British photographer who has spent three years between 2018 and 2020 studying and documenting the savagely violent gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and others operating in El Salvador.
For his project Skin Deep, photographer Steven Burton shot portraits of current and former gang members and then used the power of Photoshop to reveal what they would look like without their face and body tattoos. This 4-minute video shows the reactions of the subjects seeing their 'shopped portraits for the first time.
I’m a big fan of the portrait. It’s even better when the portrait is about more than the photographer’s skill, but about the life, challenges, and successes of the subject. “Skin Deep” by Steven Burton is one such project that caught my eye.
As the reader who send this video in to us said, "Buzzfeed isn't the normal source of photo interest stories." Case in point, the top photo-related article on BuzzFeed's home page as of this writing is, "19 Celebrity Prom Photos That Are Actually Super Adorable."
The video above, however, is a wonderful breath-of-fresh-air exception to the BuzzFeed rule.
Steward Magazine has published a fascinating interview with photographer Anton Kusters, who spent two years documenting a yakuza gang in Tokyo, capturing highly intimate glimpses into what life is like in the criminal underworld. When asked what he felt like when the project was just starting out, Kusters states,
I was extremely nervous. Since they are gangsters, I thought I should be very careful, in case I shot something I wasn’t supposed to see. But this actually upset the gang. They saw my nervousness as disrespectful. I remember one time early on this guy pulled me aside and said, “You are here to take pictures. Act like a professional.” It turned out they respected me if I was really aggressive about getting a certain shot. To not take photos was a sign of weakness.
As his surname suggests, Kusters is not from Japan (he's from Belgium). It took 10 months of negotiations before he and his brother were given an unprecedented access into the closed world of Japanese organized crime.
Mexican photojournalist Julian Cardona has lived in Ciudad Juarez since 1960 and began documenting the city in the early 1990s as a photojournalist for the local newspaper, El Diario. He says he's seen Juarez shift from an idyllic postcard-worthy border town to the city known as the homicide capital of the world.