A Way To Help Alexandra Boulat

Please read and ponder this...

"Hello everyone.
We are currently focused on trying to help Alex and her family in any way possible, so please bear with us. As many of you may know, Alex had surgery on Thursday morning to stop bleeding in her brain. The operation was successful and she is currently in a medically induced coma. The doctors have done this in order to give her the best chance for recovery. We should have more information in a few days.

In the meantime, if any of you would like to help Alex and her family deal with the medical costs involved, contributions can be made through VII. Please send your support to VII Photo, 920 Abbott Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291. Please make the check out to VII Photo with the words “Alex Boulat Fund” in the memo. Contributions can also be sent to us via paypal to frank@viiphoto.com (again, indicate that the money is for the Alex Boulat Fund). Alex is being tended to by an amazing team of doctors and medical staff. We couldn’t ask for anything more at this point.

Thank you all for your prayers and best wishes. This means a lot to Alex’s family."

Returning Home to Life's Twist of Fate

Life messes with us. Life speaks volumes in both the simple and profound ways it plays with our every day. The stories I try to tell are part of that passion play...part of that most important mechanism of creativity....telling the stories of humanity...with the drama, transitions, transformations, daily nuances and ultimately pain, sadness and loss.

This is not the kind of blog entry I ever imagined making when I started this 10 months ago, but events of the past week have compelled me to share this personal story.

This week I returned from a grueling 6 week trip to India and Italy. Within two days of returning home to my family and studio, I also reentered the world of caregiving. My 84 year old father-in-law, Herbie, has dementia and has been living with us for over a year. This situation was the basis for the multimedia story that Julie Winokur, my wife, and I produced last year called the Sandwich Generation.

It now appears Herbie is rejecting his daytime caregiver. She is a lovely woman who has been with him for two years, feeding him, taking him to doctors appointments, dates with friends, washing him, shaving him, sitting idly by for hours while he napped, watched TV, etc. It's very sad and disturbing to see this downturn in his cognition and the impact on us is profound. Herbie is a very sweet and easy man, so it's surprising to see him turn against someone like this. I think he is taking his frustrations out on her because she represents his increasing neediness, mental decline and lack of freedom.

What prompted this journal entry was this...one day last week while Herbie was out on a walk down with his caregiver, he refused to return home with his her. She didn't know what to do and called us at our studio. I volunteered to return home to deal with the situation. After all, Julie had been home for six weeks holding down the fort so it was my duty this time. Once I arrived on the scene, there he was wobbling on his shaky legs, standing in the midday sun, adament about not wanting her to touch him or be near him. After about thirty minutes, I finally coaxed him to walk home so we could get him a cold drink and cleaned up. It was disturbing and quite sad.

Simultaneously, I got into a rage with my 12 year old son for not helping us out because he was too involved in his video game. I hate these video games and the way they are capturing the minds of our youth, making even the most sensitive among them, zombies to their immediate worlds and the people around them. I figured his touch and smile would make Herbie calm down. All my son could conjure up was a 20 second visit before bounding back upstairs to his video game...where he killed who knows how many more people.

I ended the day beaten, tired and feeling very sorry for myself. But all that dissolved upon hearing the shocking and sad news about a colleague, Alexandra Boulat, who that day had suffered a brain aneurism while working in Ramallah, in the West Bank. She had been taken to an Israeli hospital, endured a five hour operation and the last I heard was stabilized in an induced coma. As you can imagine, my self pity and worries were rendered meaningless in light of this jarring news. Here was a great photographer in her 40's, far too young to have her lifeforce and creativity sucked out from her. Here I was with my life full and ahead of me, albeit complicated.

How do we deal with this circumstances. How do we recover and carry on. I see so much misery and loss in my work. Yet my life endures with its daily preoccupations and obsessions about parenting, accomplishment, maintaining my marriage, my friendships, managing my studio....everything that makes my life full and meaningful. And then a day of hiccups with my son and father-in-law, as disturbing and sad as they may be, become pointless in light of Alex's news. Or maybe more accurately, they are placed into proper perspective by the news of a respected colleague, who could also be me, possibly struck down in the middle of her vibrant life.

Anyone who reads this, please take a moment out of your day and extend your thoughts, prayers, positive energies, to Alexandra and her family.

Here are a couple of images taken by our au pair Debbie Robertson, who had the presence of mind to pick up a little digital camera lying around to capture my urgings to Herbie about getting inside out of the sun....so I could get back to work, to my life, to the process of avoiding the end.

Iraqi Kurdistan Film Screening in NY

The Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook will be screening Saturday, July 21st at 4pm on screen 7 in NYC as part of the NY Film and Video Festival.

The screening will take place at Village East Cinemas, located at 181 2nd Avenue (at 12th Street) in Manhattan's East Village.

For tickets and other useful information, visit the website at:

NY Film Festival

Black Gold Story Inspired This on You Tube

I just received this email from someone in Austria, in response to my story about oil and conflict in the Niger Delta that appeared in the February 2007 issue of National Geographic. Here is another example of how the world is getting smaller and how we can inspire change that can spiral into a larger movement of consciousness.

-----
Hello There,

The article you made about the oil crisis in Nigeria inspired me to make a small animation about the situation there.
I tried to explain a complicated global problem in a very simple way. If you are curious about it, you can watch it on the following link:
Oil Crisis on YouTube
thank you for the inspiration and keep up the good work.

Best regards,

Tom Vens
Space & Design strategies
University of arts Linz

Teaching in Siena, Italy

I'm just finishing up the second of two workshops in Siena, Italy for the Canon Photographic Workshop series. This program in Italy is run by Carlo Roberti, an energetic soul dedicated to teaching photography and producing successful workshops around Italy, including most prominently the Toscana Photographic Workshops , which take place every summer in some ridiculously peaceful and beautiful place in Tuscany. The students are a mixture of amateurs, young photographers and professionals.

I teach photography over a wide spectrum of venues and for a variety of reasons. It's usually a two way street, where we all learn new things and inspire each other in this magical field of photography. It's interesting to teach people who are not necessarily trying to become photographers. In this case, it's about sharing one's passion, love and appreciation for photography. Photography has this amazing power to mean something on a very personal level. You don't need to have ambitions to become a great or successful photographer to gain joy from the endeavor of making images, experiencing life through the action of image-making and the pure satisfaction in sharing and knowing you've created something that nobody can take away from you.

Too often, in the missionary zeal to create something that might change the world and pull back the covers on important issues of the day, we can forget the pure, personal and very particular joys of making images. These kinds of workshops, like in Siena, remind me of these special qualities of photography.

Here are a couple of photos of "Don Carlo", enjoying yet another meal. I'm not sure if touching his ear means death for someone or that he just wants another bottle of Brunello wine.




Here is a photo of me with Bruno Stevens, the very energetic, talented "wild Belgian photojournalist" who has been teaching with me here in Siena. That parenthetical description is his own.

Notes From A Changing India

It's been a while since I posted anything to this blog. I've been working for the past four weeks in India on a long term project which I can't talk too much about. Suffice it to say it's a look at how India is changing and modernizing, while coping with it's breathtaking history and legacy of being the largest democracy in the world with over 1.1 billion people.

I am quite taken with India and always have been ever since I came here with my then girlfriend, Julie Winokur, in 1994 to propose to each other at the sacred spot in the Himalayas where the Ganges River begins. Since then I can see how much has changed while so much has remained the same. Change here is at breakneck speed and at a quality level that is mostly world class. Indians know how to do things right and especially when it comes to technology and the utilizing the wonders of the modern world. After all, most of these new developments are being made by Indians wherever they are in the world!

Here is an image of me working in a part of India that is most definitely not cutting edge first world, along the Ganges River in Allahabad.

photo by Vinay Diddee

For the first time I am working abroad on a project that is combining traditional stills with HD video towards the goal of creating a great print story but also a kind of multimedia piece that would combine the major strands of stills, video, audio and some aspects of the flipbook idea I worked with on my piece about Iraqi Kurdistan last year. I'll be trying to accomplish something different again, but as always with the goal of creating engrossing, meaningful and relevant storytelling about an issue of our times.

Stay tuned.