Berlin

Tomorrow I head out with the other American Burnsies to Dresden, where we will have our midterm meeting. It is a chance for us to talk about our fellowships, compare notes and make suggestions. We will also have a chance to see a bit of Eastern Germany and the city made famous in Slaughterhouse V. So I will catch up with you guys over the weekend and let you know how everything went…


No time for sleep, Dresden is waiting! © Damaso Reyes

Berlin

While I was doing some research online at work I came across this headline: Dollar hits fresh 15-year low. You can read all about it here and here but it basically boils down to: since Damaso has been getting his fellowship money in dollars he is S.O.L. Boy, I can’t wait to get back to Solitude and those wonderful Euros they give me there.


What it's all about....

But it does raise a real issue. Basically I am going to have to start making my money in Euros instead of dollars. Think about it: when I make $1000 back in New York and then hope on a plane to Berlin or Rome it is only worth about €720. Once I land I am nearly 40% poorer! And trust me things are not cheaper here in Europe, beer being a notable and delicious exception!


So, as they say here in Germany, or would say if they were me, ich muss das Geld finden! Feel free to help out, suggestions are welcome! Maybe write a letter to the Treasury Sec? Light a little bit of a fire under him to DO something? Just a thought….



Mmmmm....Geld.....

Berlin

It’s hard to believe that it has been six years…


The day after. © Damaso Reyes

For the first time since that terrible day, the 11th of September falls on a Tuesday, the same day of the week the attacks took place. It was a warm, bright and clear morning. The night before I was up late at a party for a newspaper and went to bed with few worries.


The view from Chinatown. © Damaso Reyes

Walking across the Manhattan Bridge after hitching a ride to the Brooklyn waterfront, I saw most of lower Manhattan covered in smoke. One of the first things I noticed when I got to the other side, and that which would linger with me the longest, was the smell. An acrid mixture of melted rubber, concrete and humanity, a smell lingered over New York for weeks. Heading down towards what would become known as Ground Zero I soon became covered in a fine, and then thicker coat of dust.


Walking towards the ruins. © Damaso Reyes

Before leaving home I wondered for a while about whether or not I should go and take photographs. In less than a minute I came to the conclusion that of course I should, I’m a photographer, this is what I do. I wasn’t excited, more like resigned. I shot that day for about ten hours. And photographed for another five days. And then I stopped.


A fireman. © Damaso Reyes


The flames continued. © Damaso Reyes

For me New York isn’t and wasn’t just a place, it was and is my home, my birthplace. The towers were older than I was and I fully expected then to be around long after I was gone. I have photographed them inside and out. I especially enjoyed going to the top of one of the towers to the rooftop observation deck. I remember the first time I went up the Towers as a child and remembering that the cars looked like toys. And then they lay in ruins.


Grief. © Damaso Reyes

I suppose that day taught me that nothing is permanent. I also knew that on that day my country would start on a path that was ill-advised: revenge. What happened six years ago can’t be avenged; the dead will never be satisfied. In those six years my government has killed many, many more and for what?


Missing. © Damaso Reyes

In the past six years I have traveled back to Rwanda, lived in Indonesia, gone to Tanzania and begun work on The Europeans. Thankfully I haven’t been witness to anything as horrible as that day in September but I have seen a thousand smaller horrors. Yet my faith in humanity remains. I know we can do better, I know that we can live together and I believe that we will. The only question is how many of us have to die before that happens.


Peace. © Damaso Reyes

Berlin

Can’t you see I’m working? Seriously I just realized a few days ago that the deadline for the Guggenheim Fellowship is at the end of the week so I am spending the better part of today, which of course happens to be one of the few nice days we’ve had in a while, revamping my proposal. Let’s hope that they are suitably impressed!

So I have decided to start a little regular feature called HCB’s quote of the week. HCB is of course Henri Cartier-Bresson, considered one of the fathers of modern photojournalism. While doing research for a story I am writing about Leica I came across several of his quotations which are very illuminating and often very funny, enjoy!


HCB behind the Leica.

“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time. We play with subjects that disappear; and when they’re gone, it’s impossible to bring them back to life. We can’t alter our subject afterward.... Writers can reflect before they put words on paper.... As photographers, we don’t have the luxury of this reflective time....We can’t redo our shoot once we’re back at the hotel. Our job consists of observing reality with help of our camera (which serves as a kind of sketchbook), of fixing reality in a moment, but not manipulating it, neither during the shoot nor in the darkroom later on. These types of manipulation are always noticed by anyone with a good eye.” -Henri Cartier-Bresson, "American Photo", September/October 1997, page: 76

Berlin

So what is it I do all day?

It’s hard to put into words, but don’t worry, I am keeping busy, mostly working on articles and looking glamorous at the Vanity Fair offices. Hard to believe that I am half way done but it’s true!

In any event, lest you think that my star has risen too high, Jimmie and I cannot for the life of us find a news organization to support our application to the Pulitzer Center to go to Kosovo. Hard to believe I know but it is starting to drive me a little nuts. As much as editors complain that they can’t find good stories here we are like the pretty girl at the bar, waiting for someone to notice us. So if you know some editors, feel free to pull some strings. Check out the proposal below…


Domestic Violence Survivor. Kosovo, 2005

The Legacy of Rape

In 1989, when the Serbian government revoked Kosovo's status as an autonomous province within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, political analysts and activists in that country and abroad anticipated deterioration. The danger became more apparent with each passing year, even though the wars that engulfed the other parts of the former Yugoslavia did not spill over into Kosovo. By late 1996, a previously unknown guerrilla group called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began coordinating attacks against the Serbian police. Faced with limited options at that point, the West chose military action by NATO in 1999. Taking advantage of the NATO bombing, Serbian and Yugoslav forces "ethnically cleansed" more than 850,000 Kosovar Albanians, and killed thousands more. The NATO bombing eventually forced government troops out of the province, but not before serious war crimes had been committed-atrocities which continue to poison Kosovo's post-war environment, including rape and sexual violence.

Writer Jimmie Briggs and photojournalist Damaso Reyes are proposing a feature article on the post-war legacy of rape in Kosovo and the struggle for female survivors to achieve legal justice for their attacks. Of late, the overwhelming majority of media attention on Kosovo deals with the quest for independence from Serbia, but for Kosovar women there are more pressing issues. Many who survived attacks during the war do not want to report the rapes for a variety of reasons. Some women victims of rape expressed fear that they would never be able to marry. Others felt terrified that they would be shunned by society. Many women have expressed anger at their attackers and willingness to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). That willingness to testify is tempered by fear that their attackers may still be at large in Kosovo, or that they may return.

The piece which we are proposing will be built around the personal struggles and professional efforts of those in the legal rights community working on behalf of justice for women survivors. For women willing to testify, issues of witness protection and support loom large. Once open conflict broke out, the jurisdiction of the ICTY over Kosovo began. As they tried to ethnically cleanse Kosovo, paramilitaries often aided by masked Serb neighbors systematically searched villages for girls of prime, child-bearing age. It is estimated by the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control that as many as 20,000 Kosovar women (4.4 per cent of the population) were raped in the two years prior to NATO forces entering. Unlike Bosnia, where international organizations were located throughout the war, the Kosovar province was on its own. We hope that through this story we can begin to shed light on the challenges that Kosovo’s women face as the province moves towards independence.

Kassel

Is modernity our antiquity?
What is bare life?
What is to be done?

These are the three questions that the curators and organizers of Documenta 12 say the show is organized around. I think you can guess what my response was.


Stuffed Giraffe anyone? © Damaso Reyes

I spent most of today wandering around the five different sites of the show with my friend Anu, who is in town from San Francisco. At least I wasn’t alone in my disbelief and disappointment. Ever since I was a fresh faced undergraduate art student in New York I had heard about Documenta, the fabulous art show held every five years in Germany which broke new ground and introduced the world to artists who would change the art scene.


Shiny art is my favorite kind. © Damaso Reyes

If Doucmenta was ever like that it certainly isn’t today.


You will respect my authority! © Damaso Reyes

If the artists weren't dead or the art wasn’t made twenty, thirty or forty years ago, then the work was almost universally bad both in execution and content. While we were walking through yet another gallery filled with pretentious post-modern art, Anu proposed the theory that the curators were displaying so much bad politically inspired art to subvert the good art that is being created and thereby reinforce what is currently popular in the art world.


Bad Art! Bad! © Damaso Reyes

I can’t say that I disagree.


Harvey Keitel makes an appearance, for no good reason. © Damaso Reyes

Of course there were some very good pieces, but they were few and far between. Anu and I were in agreement that much of the best work was by artists from the developing world. Most of the new work from American and European artists was either derivative or badly made. Most frustrating for me was the fact that there was a good deal of work by artists who were either already dead or who gained fame decades ago. The show seemed to be more of a celebration of the sixties and seventies than of work inspired by today’s world.


Finally we find something we kinda like! © Damaso Reyes

A few people seem to agree.


Compared to the giraffe, this is pure genius, don't you think? © Damaso Reyes

All of this left me with some very mixed feelings. On the one hand I feel like what is en vogue in the art world today is very different from what I am producing and that fact will make it even harder for my work to gain anything resembling acceptance. On the other hand so much of the work I saw in Kassel was God-awful that I feel like there must be space for well executed art that is rich in content.

One can only hope!


I can't believe our long national nightmare is finally over! © Damaso Reyes

Berlin

So tomorrow I head down to Kassel for a few days to check out the Documenta art exhibition. Hard to believe that I have already been here in Berlin for a month and only have thirty days left to go. It never stops seeming strange to me how time can move both so quickly and so slowly. On the plus side I will be working and hopefully wrapping up a few stories for Vanity Fair this month and I will make sure to keep you post with all the details.


Protestor. © Damaso Reyes

Since you won’t be hearing from me for the next few days I thought I would post some images from my trip down to New Orleans in February 2006. This weekend of course is the 2nd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the Crescent City and I traveled there six months later to document the first Mardi Gras after the storm and the state of the city. Below you will also find links to some articles I published as well.


Mayor Ray Nagin. © Damaso Reyes


A destroyed sports car. © Damaso Reyes


Dancer. © Damaso Reyes


Derek Beard, a Mardi Gras Indian.


Read the Articles

After the Storm: New Orleans in Transition

Black Small Businesses Struggle to Survive

New Orleans and the Death of the American Dream