Photographe Paul Galipeau Ottawa Canada | lechampiondumonde.com

More Israel photos & World Press Photo in Ottawa

An article I wrote along with a series of photos I took during my time in Israel last year ran in the July 2008 issue of Maximumrocknroll. Some people may have already seen it but I’ve been waiting to put it online. The wait is over. There’s also another collection of images I shot in Israel which have been up for a while.

Last night, I visited the Canadian War Museum where this year’s winning images of the World Press Photo contest are on display. It was neat to see photos from Israel and Kenya, two countries I’ve seen a decent amount of in the last 12 months. What stuck out most for me though, were the Sport Feature Stories by Erik Refner, Erika Larsen and Travis Dove. Each were so bizarre and so far removed from sport that I found it sort of hard to imagine them as relevant to the category. But still, it worked. It made obvious an essence of each sport (marathon, hunting and skateboarding, respectively) that most people tend to ignore and each story, I think, stands as a cultural monument to these pasttimes.

The Nature Stories by David Liittschwager and Paul Nicklen were also rather striking and spoke to my own experiences in the Arctic. What’s amazing is that Paul Nicklen won both 2nd and 3rd prizes in this category. This guy’s physical limits are nearly unnatural to do the things he does.

Finally, I wish I could find a copy online but perhaps it is only available at as part of the travelling exhibit. Gary Knight, the chair of the World Press Photo 08 jury, had a written statement of introduction walking into the exhibit that was refreshingly honest and offered great advice to photographers. Essentially, he called out to those who entered the contest using photos that resembled winners from previous years and how taking photos with a contest in mind is exactly the worst thing to do. Again, unless it is already and I haven’t found it, his statement should be online so everyone can read it.

If you’re in Ottawa,  do not miss this. It’s only the second time it comes here and it’s one of only four North American dates (the others being Montréal, NYC and Mexico City).

World Press Photo 2008 winners gallery

Photos from mostly Danish photographers

Here’s an edited version of a post I made elsewhere in the fall…

Nicolai Fuglsig. 1998. Kids in Muslumvo, Russia – an area heavily affected by Chernobyl. This photo was shot in his final year as a student at the Danish School of Journalism. The series was highly celebrated until it was revealed that many photos were staged. “He is one of the best visual communicators I have ever met but it is very good that he is no longer doing photojournalism.” He’s directing commercials now. Maybe you’ve seen one of them.

James Nachtwey. 2001. Yeah.

Martin Parr. 1995-1999. From Common Sense. I think my sister took this exact photo of our old cocker spaniel (RIP).

Stephan Vanfleteren.

Erik Refner.

Erik Refner. From the Rockabillies series. This guy also graduated from the Danish School of Journalism.

Joachim Ladefoged. From the Body Building series. Another graduate of the Danish School of Journalism. He’s a VII member and spoke to my class when I was there. “You either have balls or a telephoto.”

Anton Corbijn. 1999. Kylie Minogue.

W. Eugene Smith. 1948. From the Country Doctor series.

Lars Tunbjörk. c2000. From The Office series.

Richard Billingham. 1995. Untitled.

Peter Granser. 2000. From the Sun City series.

William Eggleston. 1971. Halloween.

Anders Petersen. 2005. From the Gap (France) series.

Nick Waplington.

Larry Sultan.

You should also check out Trine Søndergaard and Charlotte Oestervang, two more Danish photographers doing awesome stuff.

I wonder when I’ll stop posting about Denmark…

Interview with the NYT picture editor

This is fairly old, circa July 2006, but I couldn’t pass up sharing this collection of great reader questions fielded by New York Times’ Assistant Managing Editor for Photography, Michele McNally. There are several questions, asked by people with varying degree in photography or simply, people curious about what the professional culture at the New York Times is like.

For people working within photojournalism, there are a lot of questions are worthreading. A lot of the answers are quite long so I will post a short one that tilts its hat at Denmark.

Q. Is there any publication abroad that you really like for the quality of its pictures?

– Giovanni Carozzi

A. The best are the Danish newspapers, with Politiken leading the way. I look to Stern and Paris Match after big news; they will publish 25 double-pages of great photography if the news warrants it. German Geo usually has something and photographers love working for Mare.

Check it out.

Fires in Denmark.

My old Danish neighbourhood is being burnt to the ground…sort of.

Those yellow bricks on the right? My old apartment. Foto: Emil Ryge Christoffersen

Foto: Lars Skov

Foto: Susan Thygesen

This has already made international headlines but essentially, what prompted these arsons and other riot acts was the arrest of three men who were suspected to be conspiring to assassinate Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists responsible for the Mohammed illustrations that got all eyes on Denmark in 2006. The big deal is that these suspects lived minutes from my Danish apartment, in what is officially considered to be the largest ghetto in the country.

When I was still there, It was common to see burnt scooters in pedestrian underpasses, there were fireworks on a nearly nightly basis (great to watch from my bedroom window) and after a local arab man joined the Danish police, others decided to bomb his car.

Now, I heard that after buses were pelted with stones in the area of the city, they are refusing to provide service there.

My European experienced exposed me to a continent that, with the exception of Germany who is very careful about how it openly views immigrants, is new to the idea of immigrant populations and perhaps has some difficulty dealing with the newcomers. We saw it in France in the Parisian suburbs in 2005 and now we’re seeing it for a second time in Denmark.

Europe does a lot of stuff better than North America…bread, chocolate, cars, public transit, cell phones… It needs to start figuring out newcomers though.

Here’s a Danish rap video shot in Copenhagen.

Best of 2007

I’m back in North America now. This year was pretty insane. Here are some things I got into. There should be a film category but I hardly went to the cinema this year…

Best Albums
Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Band of Horses – Cease to Begin
Deerhunter – Cryptograms
Final Fantasy & Cadence Weapon – Live on CBC
Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala
Justice – †
Orphan Choir – Winter 07 EP
Timbaland – Timbaland Presents Shock Value
Various/John Waters – A Date With John Waters
Voxtrot – Voxtrot

Best Songs
Clipse – Flashing Lights (Benzi refix)
Justice – The Party
Klaxons – Gravity’s Rainbow
Lover – Out of My Head
M.I.A. – Paper Planes
Matt & Kim – Yeah Yeah (Flosstradamus Remix)
Midnight Juggernauts – Into the Galaxy
Mims – This is why I’m hot
Yelle – Je veux te voir
Young Buck, T.I. and Ludacris – Stomp (Ratatat remix)

Best Concerts
Ennio Morricone @ Radio City Music Hall (New York City) February 3
Final Fantasy @ Black Sheep Inn (Wakefield) April 12
The Format @ House of Blues (New Orleans) July 26
Girl Talk & Crystal Castles @ Babylon (Ottawa) June 29
Hairspray @ National Arts Centre (Ottawa) March 17
Isis @ Barrymores (Ottawa) March 20
Jackie O Motherfucker @ The German Jazz Chamber (Århus) November 16
Jens Lekman @ Studentderhuset (Århus) August 18
Modern Life is War, Cobra Noir & I Refuse @ Montgomery Legion Hall (Ottawa) May 11
Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines @ Voxhall (Århus) November 2

Best Exhibits
Art contemporain @ Centre Pompidou (Paris)
David Burdeny @ Herringer Kiss Gallery (Calgary)
Hunter S. Thompson, Mike Brody, LeRoy Grannis, Jeff Devine and Hugh Holland @ M+B Gallery (Los Angeles)
Fernando Botero @ Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
Inuit Art @ Winnipeg Art Gallery

Videos about a Latvian and a Greenlandic

My friend Kalvis.

A while ago, I posted about Soundslides, linking to one I made about my Latvian friend. Since making it, he’s become a bit of an international celebrity and girls around the world are fawning over this baltic boy.

With another person from my school, I’ve since made another one about a Greenlandic woman living in Århus that you might want to watch.

As I have spent decent amounts of time in the Canadian arctic, it was interesting for me to compare the general opinion on Canadian Inuit with public perceptions about Greenlandic people living in Denmark. Likewise, it was a nice opportunity to listen to someone openly share her experiences.

Both are online for your viewing pleasure.

Kalvis from Latvia (one minute, nine seconds long)
Ane Marie from Greenland (three minutes long)

Photos from the west coast

Rune.

In my previous post, I wrote about foods I made during my week in Hvide Sande, on the west coast of Denmark. We didn’t leave Århus to cook in a nice kitchen though. We were there working on a magazine assignment and everyone was going after different stories. I started doing one about trawling in Denmark but switched to the local surf scene when a few contacts pulled through.

Running against 25m/s wind.

After staying up until 4:30 am working on layout and printing, the final product was finally complete. A 68 page magazine produced in a week a half by eight students. It is something that we created essentially for one teacher to see, I thought it would be nice to share it with others as well.

Download it here! (PDF, 9mb)

I didn’t use the trawl story but I still like some of the images that came out of it.

Flemming.

Palle.

Tjeck out some more photos on Flickr.

Getting around in Århus

Pretty much everyone in Denmark (Europe?) rides a bike. Its strange though. I’ve grown up with the mind that the simple act of riding a bike was acting against the establishment – as though the powers that be prefer us in unsafe planet-killing motor-vehicles. But, in a city that has a great bike-loan program and boasts a wide bike lanes, elevated away from hazardous cars and trucks across a virtually flat landscape, I find myself transplanted in a land where my big-fuck-you-by-way-of-pedal-power is pretty well punt blocked. Did I mention that gas costs about twice what we pay in North America?

So being in such a bike-friendly place, I must feel pretty satisfied, right? Mission accomplished, Critical Mass! We won! Right? Not quite. My first impression actually is that cyclists here don’t know how good they have it and kind of take it for granted. Also, given the greater number of cyclists, can you imagine that there are actually traffic problems on bike lanes? All in all, I don’t sense the same sort of camaraderie that North American bike-culture offers. I miss places like Re-Cycles where I can fix my bike by myself using a generous pool of used parts and tools I can’t afford on my own. Hell, with the police auction here being the only real place to get a used bike here, I even miss the Bike Dump and the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It isn’t abnormal for people here to spend $100 on a used bike you’d get in Canada for between $10-40.

How excited I was, then, to finally decide that the dust covered and flat-tired pink and black 12-speed in my apartment basement would become my Danish road racer. After it hadn’t moved in over a month, could a free, fast bike be too good to be true? Yup. Finally, the owner of the bike, my downstairs neighbor reclaimed it. Very doubtful that it will ever get used though! What gives?

RIP.

Unlike in Canada where you’ll find people advocating death penalty for bike thieves, Bike theft is not only rampant here but it is sort of accepted as normal to the point that in some cases, it perpetuates itself. I only got here in August and already I’ve had friends who have been victims of bike theft. Suck it up and buy a new one? No. Most people will just steal someone else in the hopes that the universe will balanced itself. After a while, people will probably find themselves stealing their old bike without even realizing it.

You’ll also find a lot of abandoned bikes with bent wheels and broken spokes on the sidewalks. These are generally picked up by the cops and sold at auction. Still though, who would just ditch their bike – even a stolen one? OK. People in Ottawa ditch bikes too but we’re talking about mass ditching in Denmark. I could probably find 100 ditched bikes a day if I wanted to.

The city centre caters to nearly 100% pedestrian traffic too which is pretty awesome but cobblestones make not a good surface for skateboarding or biking with skinny tires for that matter.

Being sans-bike isn’t the worst thing though. It forces me to take the bus, which is an experience in itself whereby it lets me listen to sick jams and helps get me acquainted with the kids of Gellerup, “a concrete suburb that stands as an example of the 1960s urban development that scars several Danish cities.” Very similar to the banlieues in Paris.

Scandinavian cell technology gives Palestine a new ghetto blaster

Like in Canada, Palestine scarves (Keffiyeh) as fashion before politics are sort of a big deal. Like jeans though, these don’t appeal so much to the 20-something set but rather kids from high school. Who is to really say what these people know about the political situation and where they stand? Who is to really say anything about the two guys in the photos above?

Now, about two weeks ago, while walking home, a group of kids came to me like they have nearly every day. They started dancing and for some reason I took my phone out. It may be something you do countless times a day without thinking but a few seconds later, this guy ran up behind me and yanked my phone from my hand! This led into a pretty good foot chase that ended when he jumped off a second-storey balcony but not before saying but two words to me: Fuck you. Quickly, this other guy (passer-by/accomplice/kid-in-the-know?) said that he could help me get my phone back. “Great!” Shortly after, he declares that this can only be done for a fee. Protesting a little, what choice did I have? I offered him 100 kroner (about $20). Not enough. I insist that this is the most I can give but he continues to ask that I offer more. “How much more?” He shrugs. Finally, he says “300 kroner” (about $60). Fine. And I got my phone back about 5 minutes later.

With a November 9 release date in the UK and speculations that Canadians will have to wait until Q1 2008, it should go without saying that there are no iPhones in Scandinavia yet. Inquiring minds willing to drop about $700 might want to know that some online stores are starting to sell unlocked ones that should work on most North American GSM providers, however. Still, iPhone or not, with Ericsson being a Swedish firm and Nokia being Finnish, this area is fairly well covered. What’s more, as cell phones are increasingly becoming the site of technological consolidation, it comes as no surprise to hear that on top of doing telephony things, my phone can take photos, record and edit video, record audio, play radio, play mp3s, (badly) surf the internet, wake me up with Rhianna’s help every morning, store 4GB of media and Bluetooth my life away.

All this but still, I practically always travel with my iPod which does some of the things my phone does but really only does one thing well and that is play mp3s. Not everyone feels the need to carry two devices though and who can blame them? What we can blame them for is forgetting headphones or the headphone adapter and riding the bus while listening to the latest (post-humous) Tupac single. Evidently, using cell phones as a bus ride boombox had once become such a serious problem that the city of Århus even put notices at every stop instructing passengers not to do this.

These are the sounds of a generation though and really, not much can or should be done to squash it. Truly, what I find most funny about this whole thing is how these speakers seem to only cater to one style of music. For example, once, I naively put Louisville band Lords on my phone, hoping that I could jam out on some sick riffage. Well, It turns out that the guy who designed the speaker on my phone favours Atlanta hiphop to Louisville hardcore.

Mislabelled Canadian Goods

This is what maple syrup looks like in Denmark. Pretty typical product design, right? The clear glass bottle lets you see how dark the syrup is and of course, the maple leaf on the label is a given. The confusion lies in the fact that this is apparently Ver(t)mont brand maple syrup, yet, is a product of Canada. The way I see it, I might as well start a company that sells Israeli oranges called Yukon Oranges. Sure, Vermont neighbours Québec, probably Canada’s largest producer (and consumer) of this delicious nectar but why not just call it what it is: Canadian Maple Syrup?

In any event, a can of Canada’s finest sirop d’érable was the only food item I brought with me from Canada. After corrupting my roommates with its delicious qualities, I am not running dangerously low and refuse to pay the exorbitant prices for this important wonder-juice.

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