After Syria, I headed up to the biggest refugee camp in Turkey, in Kilis, with my man Alessio Romenzi. I did a short story on the camp that got rolled into a news wrap on Syria, and a gallery of photos for USA Today, all of it coordinated by the ARA folks, (thanks Jabeen.)

The Turkish government has consolidated the refugees from some of the smaller camps into the one in Kilis, which according to the most recent UNHCR figures now holds nearly 10,000 residents. Here, each family lives in a small prefabricated mobile home, with two rooms divided by a bathroom. Each small home has a sink and hotplate for cooking. They receive a regular ration of food, usually pasta, rice, and some beans. Row after row of the units are organized into streets of paving stones that families dig up to fashion make shift porches and stairs into their homes. But folks are restricted in their movements, and are unable to do much more than sit around and wait to see what will happen next in their home country. Guard posts line the edges of the camp. Concertina wire lines the inner and outer walls that surround the camp, intended to keep enemies out, and the residents in. The Kilis camp was the scene of a shooting the week before we got there. It’s only 300 meters from the Syrian line, and it’s a stones throw from the huge, official border crossing and it’s lines of semi trucks.

A homemade checkerboard. More pictures after the jump…..

Continue reading ‘Kilis Refugee Camp for USA Today’

My good friend Jim Merithew, photo editor for Wired.com, published a selection of my pictures from the Reyhanli refugee camp on the border of Turkey and Syria. This camp is close to Antakya, the biggest city in the area in Turkey. It is usually closed to journalists, but inexplicably they opened it up for two days, and I got to shoot some pictures inside. Folks in the camp are watching and waiting to see what happens next. Many had fled the recent offensive by the Syrian Army on their villages over the border in Idlib province. Many more had lost family members in that offensive. They all just want to be able to go home in peace.

There are some more pictures after the jump…

Continue reading ‘Reyhanli refugee Camp for Wired.com’

Made it into and out of Idlib province, in the north of Syria a bit over a week ago. This was in Kili, a small town that was destroyed by the Syrian Army offensive before the current cease-fire was (barely) implemented. Things are really rough there. Working on a piece with my partner Anand Gopal. More to come soon…

Massous, 46, a Syrian wounded in the fighting in Taftanaz, Idlib Province recovers in a hospital in Antakya, Turkey.

I have been on the Turkish/ Syrian border for two weeks now trying to report on the uprising here and the crackdown on it by the forces of Bashar Al-Asad. My partner Anand Gopal and I spent a couple days running around reporting this story on the wounded who were brought over the border after an attack on the town of Taftanaz in Idlib province, Syria. We are working on a longer piece about the situation, but we wanted to go ahead and file this dispatch with the McClatchy wire with the help of our good friend, McClatchy correspondent Roy Gutman, so the story could get out. It’s a disaster in the small towns of northern Syria, and because of the violence and intolerance of the regime to having independent eyes on what it’s doing, it’s extremely difficult to get the story out. Give the piece a read here. For some reason, the pictures didn’t run with the words everywhere, I don’t get it. But the pictures made it out too, and here are some more.

Eyad, a Syrian fighter wounded in a battle in Taftanaz.

Zig Zig, a Syrian fighter wounded in a battle in Taftanaz, Idlib Province, is treated in a hospital in Reyhanli, Turkey.

It was foggy, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was vanishing into the white.

57th and Lexington, January 25, 2012. The sun between the buildings here reveals things sometimes, hides things other times.

Last week I won a Pictures of the Year International award for the story I am doing on my Grandfather. It’s called Parlay, which is the name of his farm in Indiana. I have been photographing him for the last two years, trying to make a record of the man and his relationship to his horses. He has bred and trained and raced harness horses for over 60 years. It’s a project I am really proud of, and it feels good to see something so close to my heart get recognized. I am looking to get back there when spring rolls around, and things get cracking again. See you guys out there soon.

(Congrats also to my man Steve Winter who won with another great project this year, this one on tigers. Incredible.)

“The Lost,” my project on the search for the disappeared in Guatemala, published again last week on CNN.com. Thanks to Brett Roegiers and the CNN folks, I am excited that the story is finding more and more of an audience. Give it a look, let me know what you think.

I got a couple of days to work on this story about Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood with a tough history that is becoming another outpost of coolness. The article concentrated on the tension in the area with young white cool kids moving into an area that was predominantly African-American, West Indian, and Hasidic, and the legacy of a big riot that happened there in 1991. It was interesting. I am too new to NYC to claim any real understanding of the process of gentrification here. Folks want their neighborhood to be safe and successful. They don’t want to be pushed out by high rents, and they don’t want to feel like strangers in it. They are glad the drug dealers are gone from the corners, and there’s new life in the streets. But the tensions are there, and hopefully folks in Crown Heights can navigate them gracefully.

The Times did a slideshow, and there are some more outtakes after the jump…

Continue reading ‘Crown Heights for The New York Times’

Sunday morning my essay on the search for the disappeared in Guatemala appeared in El Periodico, one of the main newspapers there. My good friend Moises Castillo, the photo editor for the paper and long time AP photographer in Guatemala, edited the selection and shepherded it into print. It’s a big deal for me to get these pictures published there, and in front of Guatemalan viewers. Especially in the same week that former dictator Efrain Rios Montt finally went to court to answer to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for the killings he ordered during his tenure as head of Guatemala during the civil war. It’s vital to find the victims of forced disappearance and extra judicial killings from the war years- but it’s not enough. The people who committed these crimes have to be brought to justice for them. They have to answer for what they did.

Rainy day bank roundup for Bloomberg News. Too good to pass up. If you’re like me you can appreciate a little pink flair in an otherwise relentlessly grey day.

Both flags, and they played both national anthems at a Chinese business association banquet in Queens. The entire scene, I couldn’t get over how red it was.

Jonathan Ferreira gets a haircut in his neighborhood in the Bronx.

Over the course of the fall and into the winter, I got a series of assignments from the New York Times to work on their Neediest Cases project. This year was the 100th anniversary of the NYTimes Neediest Cases Fund, so they are trying to do 100 stories. I love doing these assignments and getting to meet and photograph the folks they feature, people who are usually moving ahead from tough patches in their lives with the help of local organizations or charities that themselves need help to keep going…

Continue reading ‘The Neediest Cases for The New York Times’

Toward the end of my trip to Guatemala, I headed down to the coast with Abd to photograph the Corta de Cana, the sugar cane harvest, for Bloomberg News. Guatemala is the fifth largest exporter of sugar in the world, and the sugar industry employs about 350,000 workers, so it’s a big deal…

Continue reading ‘Sugar Cane Harvest’

I was honored to be selected last month by the NPPA as one of five recipients of their new Short Grants for documentary photography. I was selected to continue my story on Cpl. Manny Jimenez, the Marine I have been following since his injury in Helmand last year in an IED blast while I was on patrol with him. The grants are intended to fund locally focused, short term documentary projects. This type of work has suffered in recent years as news budgets and outlets for visual storytelling have constricted, and the NPPA hopes to help address the situation with these grants. It was nice to be in the company as well of four other great photographers and stories- Mary F. Calvert, Mark Ovaska, Gabriela Bulisova, and my man Matt Eich. Congrats to everyone. Now let’s get to work on these stories.