LENS BLOG: Coming to Terms With the Legacy of War. By Jesse Newman (lens.blogs.nytimes.com)

(lens.blogs.nytimes.com)With Pictures by the grant winner Davide Monteleone (“Red Thistle — the Northern Caucasus Journey”)

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The cover of "War is Only Half the Story, Vol 5"

Spin the globe, point your finger and stop it cold. Odds are you’ve landed on a country that has, at one time or another, seen armed conflict or all-out war. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, the United States, Sudan, Israel, Colombia and Sri Lanka, to name a recent few. As each new conflict unfolds, audiences around the world feed on a steady diet of images depicting violence and suffering. They flash daily on our televisions and computer screens, and scroll across our tablets and smartphones. In the best of circumstances, cease-fires are eventually declared and peace agreements signed. The tanks roll out, soldiers depart and media attention shifts to a new story. Often, only a handful of international journalists and photographers stay behind – and join national ones – to cover what remains.

Some of those photographers have been honored with grants from The Aftermath Project, a nonprofit organization committed to the idea that war is only half the story. Each year, The Aftermath Project awards grants to photographers from around the world who are working to tell what they see as the other half: what happens after years of the bombing and bloodshed come to an end, when refugees return home, rebuild towns and villages, and set out to restore their societies. Many photographers working in postconflict settings believe these stories are every bit as newsworthy as war itself. By distributing their work to artistic, academic and political groups around the country, The Aftermath Project hopes to broaden public understanding of what it calls “the true cost of war – and the real price of peace.”

$1,300, Davide Monteleone, #2, 18x18 inches

“If it’s not breaking or yelling or dying or bleeding in front of us, we don’t know how to cover it,” said Sara Terry, founder and director of The Aftermath Project, which is in its seventh year of giving grants and on the verge of publishing its fifth book. “The news media can be very horizontal,” she said. “We want to cover stories vertically. Go deep. Explore the consequences of conflict and how people learn to live again.”

The Aftermath Project is itself an aftermath of sorts. Ms. Terry, an award-winning correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a freelance magazine writer, became a photographer in the late 1990s and spent five years documenting life in postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. For her, the most important photograph she took during that time showed a forensic anthropologist in white gloves, carefully handling the skeleton of a teenage boy found inside a mass grave of victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica.

“These graves had tried to obliterate evidence of a massacre of 8,000 men and boys,” Ms. Terry said. “But the anthropologists were determined to give them back life by identifying them one at a time, by naming them. I realized I want to be part of the story that says hatred and evil and inhumanity isn’t the final word on who we are.”

Photographers awarded Aftermath Project grants work on stories that focus on how individuals and communities come to terms with the legacy of war: how they remember their dead, search for justice, rebuild civil and political institutions, cope with trauma and find joy. The coming book, “War Is Only Half the Story, Vol. 5,” features the work of the grant winner Davide Monteleone (“Red Thistle — the Northern Caucasus Journey”), and the finalists Elizabeth D. Herman (“Women Warriors: Bangladesh”); Lara Ciarabellini and Massimo Mastrorillo (“Bosnia and Herzegovina — If Chaos Awakens the Madness”); Carlos Javier Ortiz (“Too Young to Die”); and Miquel Dewever-Plana (“Guatemala: The Other War”).

Mr. Monteleone’s photographs explore what daily life looks like in places like Abkhazia and Chechnya; they document the weddings, funerals and sporting events taking place amid an unsteady peace in the Caucasus. Two other photographers, Ms. Ciarabellini and Mr. Mastrorillo, have expanded on Ms. Terry’s work in Bosnia, chronicling the continuing struggle for harmony between previously embattled communities in the former Yugoslavia.

As in past years, the book featuring these stories will be distributed to members of Congress; professors and students in journalism, peace-building and postconflict studies; human rights organizations; and museum curators. A continuing Kickstarter campaign seeks to support the book’s publication (13 days remain), and applications for the next round of grants are due on Nov. 5.

Ultimately, Ms. Terry said, it is a matter of what you choose to shine a light on. Her words echo those of the journalist and media critic Walter Lippmann, who said of the press, “It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” For The Aftermath Project, both the fighting season and everything that comes afterward deserve to be brought to light.

“Conflict is the story of our inhumanity to each other,” Ms. Terry said. “If those are the stories we keep telling ourselves, what have we become?”

The Aftermath Project’s campaign to raise money to finance its book is here.

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ARTICLE: Boca on the Black Sea. By Haley Sweetland Edwards (theatlantic.com)

Image credit: Davide Monteleone/Contrasto/Redux


An American developer seeks to create the “Florida of the Caucasus.”

March 2011 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE +++ theatlantic.com

The real-estate developer doesn’t seem to see the bullet holes in the cement wall behind him. Or the mortar-scarred apartment buildings. Or the half-bombed mansions where trees sprout through wallpapered living rooms. All the real-estate developer seems to see in Abkhazia, this breakaway territory wedged between Georgia and Russia along the Black Sea, is opportunity.

“This place could be the Florida of the Caucasus,” Bruce Talley says, jabbing my arm with excitement as we walk between two filthy concrete hotels. Gorbachev, Khrushchev, and Stalin all built vacation homes in the area, their porches overlooking a string of empty beaches, turquoise water, and looming mountains that tinge peach at sunset. “This is the ideal subtropical paradise for 145 million Russians, and there is nowhere for them to stay.”

The fact that Abkhazia, a piece of land roughly the size of Puerto Rico, claims to be an independent nation; that Georgia vehemently claims it as its own; that a formidable queue of Russian tanks along the Georgian border defends its asserted sovereignty; that hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled from here in the past two decades, leaving their empty homes to crumble in the beautiful sunshine—these are all merely matters of detail. Talley, a South Dakota farm boy who served a stint in Alaska as a crab fisherman, made millions as a bond salesman in California, enjoying a lifestyle that afforded him Porsches (plural) and a Ferrari (metallic blue). He got into real-estate development six years ago and moved to southern Russia, convinced that a fortune can be made here (he’s currently developing a shopping center in Krasnodar).

In November, after receiving a personal invitation from Abkhazia’s de facto prime minister, Talley became the first American real-estate developer to open a firm here. (“We need Western investment,” Prime Minister Sergei Shamba told me. “Bruce is good for us.”) Talley now blogs, tweets, and maintains both a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan page—all to promote Abkhazia.

Talley’s moment of opportunity traces back to the confused crack-up of the Soviet Union, when the region of Abkhazia was incorporated into the new nation of Georgia. Independent-minded Abkhazians promptly set up their own government and managed to stave off Georgian authority. For most of the past 20 years, though, Abkhazia’s economy has been in a deep freeze, stymied by war with Georgia in the early ’90s and then by international blockades.

But Russia’s decision in 2008 to recognize Abkhazia as an independent nation (along with Georgia’s other breakaway region, South Ossetia) is now opening up Abkhazia to the world. At least that’s Talley’s pitch. With sovereign recognition came Russian-backed border security (tanks, long-range missiles, 3,000 troops), Russian cash (upwards of $120 million a year), an influx of Russian private investors, and more than a million tourists last summer alone. The newly revived real estate is suddenly primed for development.

As Abkhazia’s only ally in the region, Russia has been the first to take advantage. The former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has bought beachfront property near Pitsunda, where he plans to develop a resort. The Russian government also plans to build a luxury resort, already nicknamed “Putin City,” sometime before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, just north of the Abkhaz border.

Of course, Georgia, which still claims legal control over Abkhazia, is officially aghast. Georgian diplomats say the de facto Abkhaz government has no authority to allow anyone—least of all their enemies in Moscow—to lease, develop, or privatize the Georgian beachfront. The U.S. and most of the international community support Georgia’s position. Partly as a result of this isolation, Abkhazia has ceded to Russia control over its railways, airport, and offshore oil exploration. The tiny territory has come to rely on Moscow for roughly 90 percent of its trade. But a handful of American and European policy experts are beginning to share Talley’s instinct: if Abkhazia’s going to develop anyway, maybe the West shouldn’t be left out in the cold.

“All our current policy does is push Abkhazia further into Russia,” Lincoln Mitchell, an associate research scholar at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and a former director of the National Democratic Institute in Georgia, told me. “If we start a dialogue with Abkhazia, we could begin to drive a wedge between them and Russia. We have to build a relationship with the Abkhaz people before we have any influence there.”

Driving back down Abkhazia’s wending coast, Talley pointed to a series of decrepit, half-collapsed Soviet- era buildings. “I see a five-star hotel here,” he says, and “a family resort over there,” and “definitely something akin to a Club Med along the coast up here.” When a line of palm trees gives way to a view of the snowcapped Caucasus Mountains, Talley jabs my arm again. “Look! It’s like Big Sur meets Kauai!” And then he laughs. “Okay, so that’s a bit of a stretch. But just wait. You’ll see. This place will change so fast.”

Haley Sweetland Edwards is a journalist who covers Central Asia and the Middle East and currently lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.

PHOTOESSAY: Emerging Photographer Grant 2010 Recipient: Davide Monteleone, Northern Caucasus (burnmagazine.org)

impressive photostory is here >>>

Northern Caucasus is a mix of stereotypes as well as surprises. For centuries it has been a country of political, religious, military and expansionist rivalry, a struggle between opposing states, and also between allied states. Ever since the beginning of the 19th century, this region has been part of the tsarist Russian Empire, later absorbed by the Soviet Block.

With the 1991 radical transformations involving the entire Warsaw Pact coalition, and the storm caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, new and ancient disputes resurfaced, and in some cases worsened, and revived political and economic aims of supremacy in the area.

This project takes into account the regions in which these disputes are not over yet, or may be apparently concluded, as intermittent fires under the political rhetoric of normalization and pacification. I intend to investigate with without prejudices such reality, beginning with the daily life of people living in the Northern Caucasus, who never reached their coveted independence and are still suffering the ramifications of the Russian Empire during the colonial age. They are divided between the claim for independence and the pride for their diversity, economic subordination, the historical-political and mental affiliation, the condemnation to an eternal geographic position in a limbo limes, and the elaboration of a new post-soviet identity. My goal is to go further away from the bird’s eye view of the geopolitical analysis, gliding down to a low altitude to find the details of such a complex world, with the aim to give a new key to the present day Russian Caucasus.

I’ve been working from Chechnya to Dagestan, from Northern to Southern Ossetia, just after the war in August 2008, all the way to Abkhazia, from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea coasts, crossing geographical and political borders. My interest isn’t to cover the news that brought the region back under the international floodlights, but to carry on a considered path by making notes of the tracks left behind.


Bio

Born in 1974, Davide Monteleone spent the first 18 years of his life moving to various cities of Italy because of the work of his parents. After graduating, he studied engineering and then stopped to move to the U.S. and after that to England. Is here that he discovered his interest in photography and journalism. Back in Italy in 2000, he completed his studies in photography and journalism and began working with the major Italian magazines. At the end of 2001 he moved again, this time to Moscow, where he lived until 2003 working as correspondent for the photo agency Contrasto. This choice proved to be determining for his career. He started working regularly with major national and international newspapers such as D, Io Donna L’espresso, New York Times, Time, Stern, and the New Yorker. Since 2003 he lives both in Italy and Russia, where he is pursuing long-term personal projects and continues his editorial work. He published his first book Dusha, Russian Soul in 2007.


Editor’s Note:

Davide will receive $15,000. from Burn Magazine through the Magnum Cultural Foundation to continue his work in the Northern Caucasus.

PHOTOSTORY: Documenting the Chechen Struggles (lens.blogs.nytimes.com)

After suicide bombers set off two huge explosions, killing dozens in the Moscow subway system last week, attention turned toward Chechnya — the troubled republic in North Caucasus where the Russian government has sought to suppress a violent Muslim uprising since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Italian photographer Davide Monteleone has been working there extensively this year, pursuing a project that documents Muslim life and the struggle for stability as the Russian government tries to stamp out the remnants of a war that has continued for nearly 15 years. Based in Rome and Moscow, Mr. Monteleone, 35, is represented by Contrasto.


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