AFAR assignment

Last March I was assigned by AFAR, a San Francisco travel magazine to go to Jerusalem to do a story on Jerusalem stone. The assignment was a mix of portraits of architects, architectural landscapes and travel.
I did a small interview for the website A Photo editor, reproduced below or here.

A Photo Editor
The Daily Edit – Monday 8.8.11

Afar
Design Director: Jane Palacek.
Art Director: Steven Powell
Director of Photography: Tara Guertin
Photographer: George Georgiou

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted.

Heidi: Are you shooting a lot of travel now?

George: I don’t often shoot travel assignments, the last time I was in Jerusalem was during the beginning of
 the 2nd intifada, when the City was very tense with a lot of clashes. So it was great to see the city relaxed, 
with all the tourist returning and Arabs and Jews moving in each others areas without fear.

I know this was shot during Purim, how much of a gathering collected to listen and watch?
Where the streets bustling and were people responsive to you taking photos?

I had arrived in Jerusalem around 5 in the morning and was staying in East Jerusalem, the Arabic side.
 I got up around noon and decide to walk around the City to get a feel of the place, I had no idea it was Purim until 
I started to notice a few people dressed up. I headed towards the city center in West Jerusalem, which was full of people
 dressed up and generally partying and having fun. Shooting was easy, as is usually the case when people are celebrating.

Where were you to take this opening image?

I knew fairly early on that an image of the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock would be perfect as both
 are unmistakably symbols of Jerusalem and illustrated the main theme of the feature, Jerusalem stone through the ages.
 I walk around trying to get onto as many rooftops as possible to find the right angle and light, in the end I took this image
 from a spot that is accessible and popular with tourists. The photograph was taken at the beginning of the Sabbath on the Friday evening, just as the sun is starting to set and the floodlights are switched on. During the Sabbath, photography is not permitted by the western wall, so it was a perfect time to step back and make a landscape. I managed to get to this vantage point just before the tourists, by the time I left there were rows of people waiting to get to a glimpse of this view.

by HEIDI VOLPE

Leicester feature for Russian Reporter

A few weeks ago I shot a feature for Russian Reporter on Leicester, the 10th largest city in the UK.
The story was based on the  prediction that Leicester will become the first city in the UK with a non-white majority. I was free to explore and interpret this story as I saw it.

I've never been to Leicester before and apart from my London project, "Invisible", I haven't shot a story in the UK for years.

One of the first things that you realise is that Leicester is not London. Statistics are interesting but can also be misleading.
London is a truly multicultural city, and I soon realised that the population of Leicester is roughly similar to individual boroughs in London and there are a number of London boroughs that are less than 50% white.
So, if I move around my area of London, I see pretty much every corner of the world represented, not only that, but people are living almost on top of each other. My "Invisible" project addresses some of the issues of how we occupy and share a space. More on this in a couple of months, I am in the process of finishing this work and have a preview exhibition/installation lined up for July in London.

What I found in Leicester, is a city that is very proud of it's status as a successful multicultural city. It has become an official and unofficial line, with almost everyone singing to  the same tune. The psychology of this is interesting, in the same way that negative stories repeated start to reinforce believes and behaviour, in Leicester the spin is one of pride of it's multicultural status.

What I observed in Leicester was that although the workplace, business and the city centre were multicultural, the residential areas were fairly segregated, the East and North mainly non white and the South and West mostly white. Also on a social level people seemed to keep to their own kind or tribe,  giving you two different levels of interaction, the private and the public.
In many ways, maybe this is one of the ways multiculturalism works. We recognize and respect difference, people live in peace with each other and overlap as and when. In the end we all live in our own tribes, be it by income, age, ethnicity, subcultures.
So I decide to photograph the different ethnic groups in there tribes, time didn't permit me to explore the mixed space of work and the city centre.

Later this year the 2011 census data will come out, so it will be interesting to see if Leicester is the first Non White City in the UK.

All Photographs ©George Georgiou 2011

Fault Lines in 24 magazine, Italy.

Newsweek

Newsweek used my triptychs from Istanbul in the way they are intended to be seen, good to see a magazine respected the photographers vision.

Shortlisted for BJP project assistance award

I have been shortlisted for the BJP project assistance award alongside 7 others.
Proposals of each photographer can be seen by clicking on their names.

Eight photographers in competition for £5000 Project Assistance Award

The names of the eight photographers who will compete for BJP's £5000 assistance award have been announced

For the past year, BJP has showcased every week a personal project from a photographer looking for completion funding or assistance shooting another series. Out of the 56 projects published in BJP, eight have now been selected for the final stage of the competition.

This year's shorlist includes CJ Clarke, Jude Edginton, George Georgiou, Liz Hingley, Kalpesh Lathigra, Sayaka Maruyama, Dana Popa and Clare Smart.

The eight shortlisted photographers will now be invited for interview at BJP’s London HQ . An independent judging panel will assess the photographers’ proposals and offer advice on how they might be tightened up or improved. Each will then receive a cheque for £300 with which to carry out additional research (which might include shooting tests, drawing up a budget, etc) over a four-week period.

They will then have to present their plans to the panel, which will award the £5000 cash prize to the best project.

• CJ Clarke is nominated for Belfast Now - Forgotten Union, which documents the lives, habits and environment of the fragmented unionist community in Belfast.
• Jude Edginton was chosen for his I'm the Daddy Now work, which aims at portraying up to 50 men of all ages who became fathers as teenagers.
• George Georgiou's In the Shadow of the Bear documents the aftermath of the peaceful "colour" revolutions that took place in Georgia and Ukraine against the backdrop of Russia's resurgence as a major international power.
• Liz Hingley is nominated for her project titled Under Gods, Europe, which she started on Soho Road in Birmingham. Her next stop will be in a street of Paris 'to show the growth of multi-faith communities and the issues they cause and face in different countries'.
• Kalpesh Lathigra is nominated for his Infrastructure of the War project, which looks at the lives of British soldiers in Afghanistan.
• Sayaka Maruyama's work Japan Avant-Garde is an homage to Japanese culture. The photographer's work is inspired from Geisha style and Japanese art.
• Dana Popa is nominated for Not Natasha, a project that 'trace the tragically fractured and damaged lives of young girls and women caught up in human trafficking for prostitution within Europe.
• Clare Smart is nominated for her Club Liberty 09 project - a series of portraits focusing on the concept of identity through music culture.

For more information, visit bjp-online.com/paa.