Originally published January 15, 2009
Hello world !!!! .. not quite my first bash at blogging, tried it once before and stopped after three posts. This will have to run a lot longer than that. Think that for the sake of posterity, I’ll paste the old stuff without any amendments from my cobweb-draped Myspace page – and then carry on from there.
But before that, a bit about myself. I’m a 40 year-young photojournalist based in Malta. I’ve been working with the biggest newspaper here, The Times, since 1996, and have been a Reuters stringer since 1997. I’ve also just started an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography with the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts, London. My photography career started off in 1992 with a newly-launched newspaper, The Malta Independent. I didn’t stay there long, switching to freelancing, getting a terrific taste of what reportage photography should be all about by going to Albania shortly after the collapse of the Communist regime. Convinced more than ever that this is what I wanted to do with my life, I went to the UK to study press photography at Sheffield College. After graduating, I carried on freelancing in Malta and found myself doing the things I really wanted to do, making a couple of trips to Bosnia while the civil war raged there.
The difficulties of surviving financially through freelancing alone led me to jump at the offer to join the Times staff in late 1996. I’ve been there ever since, covering just about everything under the sun. I still love to travel to far-flung places to do reportage features, though it doesn’t happen on a regular basis. I’ve also kept my freelance work going, primarily with Reuters but also for several newspapers, magazines and corporate clients from all over the world.
As for influences, Tom Stoddart was one of the first, though in time I became familiar with the work of Sebastiao Salgado, Don McCullin, Alex Webb, James Nachtwey, Christopher Morris, Steve McCurry, Reza and countless others, all of whom have had a major impact on me.
I haven’t figured out how to embed a flash gallery here, so here’s a link to a portfolio of work I’ve done before coming onto the course
http://pa.photoshelter.com/gallery-slideshow/G0000kksnTHFnAhQ/
I’ve also got a website at http://www.darrinzammitlupi.com , but that’s hopelessly outdated. I’m planning to revamp it completely sometime over the next few months.
So, as mentioned earlier, here are my old myspace posts.'>
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Monday June 11, 2007
FIRST TIME BLOG
Category: Art and Photography
Quiet day in the office today, and blogging for the first time ever! Wonder if I’ll keep going at it. I’m updating my galleries on Lightstalkers(http://www.lightstalkers.org/darrin_zammit_lupi), trying to see if I can fit in some of my more recent work.
It’s been one hell of a busy month, both with shooting for The Times and for Reuters. May kicked off with Nicolas Sarkozy unexpectedly popping up in Malta right after winning the French Presidential elections. Those were a hectic but hugely satisfying couple of days. Tight security around the bay the yacht was anchored in made getting photos a huge challenge. I found it weird, and somewhat disconcerting, that security measures only seemed to apply to the media, and not to hunters running around with guns. I don’t know, but if I were Sarkozy’s chief of security, I’d be more worried about guys running around armed to the teeth than I’d be over a handful of journalists. Still, I managed to get exclusive images of him on his friend’s luxury yacht, and later jogging, which ensured the pix got huge play in the international media, particularly in France of course.
The pace never really let up after that. There’s been the odd quiet day, but that’s really about it. A lot of it has been the daily, somewhat mundane kind of assignments, but there’ve been some terrific highlights too. The continuous arrival of illegal immigrants has kept me busy. Lots of late nights because of that, as well as a couple of sleepless ones. Going out with the Armed Forces of Malta Maritime Squadron on one of their rescue missions left me with some powerful images. Sea was rough, journey was long and tiring, several colleagues puked their guts out (thank my lucky stars I didn’t join them in that!). You can’t not feel sorry for these immigrants – in this particular case, the 27 Somalis risked everything to escape the war in their homeland. You have to be real desperate to risk crossing the Mediterranean in a small rickety, barely seaworthy, boat.
I also shot a feature on immigrants for Le Monde, one of the largest newspapers in France. We went around different open centres, and tried, unsuccessfully, to gain access to a detention centre. A worrying development in this country is that certain government officials are now trying to restrict the media’s access to the open centres. It’s bad enough that they won’t allow us into the detention centres, but now they’ve gone too far. While on the one hand they complain that the international media isn’t telling the Maltese side of the story, on the other, they then shut the door in our faces when we’re trying to do just that. I have to emphasise one thing – I’m not talking about the Army here. The army have been terrific in that respect, particularly since Major Ivan Consiglio has taken over their PR department. Access, and the flow of information, has never been so good. Would it were the same in certain other official quarters……
Going back to the matter in hand, it’s ludicrous that we had to get Malta’s ambassador in Paris to intervene on our behalf. We only got access at the eleventh hour. Still, I think it’s uncalled for that we still had a government minder accompanying us most of the time. I think it gives off the wrong sort of signal.
Oh well, we got our pictures and story – now I’m just hoping I get a good spread in the paper on Tuesday.
Though I didn’t go to Rome to cover the canonisation of Dun Gorg Preca (got to give my colleagues a chance too!), I still had plenty to shoot on the story, both before and after the event. That’s one thing I’m glad to see is over for the time being, there was too much of it.
Flash floods last week were a pain, literally. Almost a week later, my back still aches like crazy, after I’d spent hours drenched to the bone – no small wonder that my back muscle went into spasm the following day with the slightest of movements. Next time I’ll be more careful, not worth the sort of risk I went through to get my photos.
Couple of nights ago was a more relaxing kind of assignment – covering the concert by world acclaimed Spanish tenor Jose Carreras. Spent the first couple of hours sitting relaxing to some beautiful music, and the last fifteen minutes (the encores) shooting like crazy. Guess there is glamour to this job sometimes.
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'>Saturday June 16, 2007
SHOOTING THE SAME STORY DAY IN-DAY OUT. HOW DO I KEEP IT FRESH?
Category: Art and Photography
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Shooting the same ongoing story day in-day out has got me thinking - How do I come up with something new and fresh every time? The continued influx of illegal immigrants, and the strong local and international interest in the story, is keeping me worked off my feet. Every time I get a call from a source informing me that another landing is imminent, or another boatload has been rescued, I wonder if I’m going to be wasting my time, and that of my editors, because the odds are that though the faces of the migrants will be different, the shots will be pretty much the same as the ones I did the previous occasion. Yet, can I afford to take the risk and decide not to go on the scene? There’s always the possibility that things might turn out very different for a change. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the play of colours combined with moving facial expression -
Sometimes there’s an element in the background or somewhere in the picture which just lifts it out of the norm, such as this soldier’s boots, or the Maltese flag.
Other times, it’s just the way the light is catching someone’s face – that’s something which, in my view, can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, and then you find yourself thinking in terms of art.
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Thursday, July 12, 2007
DINNER WITH REZA
Category: Art and Photography
If you were strolling along the Sliema/St Julian’s promenade last week, looking at the large photographic prints displayed there, and noticed from the corner of your eye a quiet discreet man taking pictures, then know that you may have been photographed by one of the world’s greatest masters of photojournalism, Reza.
Reza, born Reza Deghati in Iran in 1952, is in Malta to promote his exhibition “One World, One Tribe”, in which he tells the human story from birth to death, using people from all races, ethnic groups and nations to demonstrate the commonality of the human race.
He dropped his last name as the Iranian Shah’s regime collapsed in the late 1970s, when he saw that the new Khomeini regime had even less respect for freedom, particularly that of the press.
I was invited to join him for dinner earlier this week at the perhaps aptly named Paparazzi restaurant (never mind the fact that ‘paparazzi’ is very much a derogatory term if used to describe most serious photographers).
Reza may be the photographer who’s photographed the most National Geographic cover stories (twenty-five and counting!), has the sort of job that thousands of photographers like me can only dream about, but I found him to be extremely approachable and down to earth.
We talked about the differences in working on a daily newspaper and a publication like National Geographic. Many photographers claim that the only reason National Geographic photographers take the amazing pictures the magazine is renowned for is because they have several months to work on a single story. Reza strongly disputes this – “It’s true you might spend a long time to do a story, but in reality, you don’t really that much time to get a picture because it’s actually lots of little stories that you’re shooting and putting together into a package. You have so many places to go to, so much research to do, so you might still have only an hour or half a day to get the definitive shot in a particular location, much as it is on a daily newspaper.”
His first story for National Geographic was about “real life” in Cairo. He found he’d been booked into a five-star hotel and found the disparity hard to handle, going from that luxury to shooting the poorest of the poor, then back into the luxury hotel at the end of the day. So he changed hotel to a no-star hotel, and that’s when he started to get his best pictures. “You have to have passion for what you’re doing, and immerse yourself into that culture, live with the people whose lives you’re documenting,” he stresses.
“Having said that, the photographer does need the little comforts – you need electricity at the end of your day, for example. But sometimes, not even that is possible. In Afghanistan with the mujahedin, I lived with the fighters in the trenches and in the mountains for months, sleeping when they slept, eating when they ate.”
Sometimes the job can get dangerous. He’s been wounded several times whilst covering conflict and social turmoil in Europe, Africa and Asia. On over a hundred occasions he’s said to himself “OK Reza this is the end of your life.”
Looking back, he can find the funny side to a particular incident. “In Beirut, I saw an Israeli air raid coming in. I ran for shelter, and dived into a gully passing under a road. Bombs exploded either side of the road, and then I noticed that the ground beneath me didn’t feel right. Suddenly I realised I’d wrapped himself around an unexploded bomb from a previous day’s air raid. In every language that I knew, Farsi, Arabic, French, English, I kept telling the bomb, ‘You will not explode, you will not explode’.
Like many photographers, Reza is irked when asked about the photographic equipment he uses. “When a beautiful poem is written, do you ask the poet what pen he used?” he gently retorts.
He feels it is important that photojournalists give something back to society. After several years training local photojournalists in places he’d travelled to, in 2001 he founded a non-profit organisation to train local journalists and set up independent media in Afghanistan – Aina, meaning ‘mirror’.
A talk by Reza is to be held on Friday July 13 at 20:30hrs at the Mediterranean Conference Centre. A short DVD about Reza’s work will follow, together with a reception and sales of the images. The proceeds from the sales will go towards various charities. The event is free of charge, but strictly by invitation. Those interested in attending may call the event co-organiser Keith Marshall on 9947 1813.
Reza would welcome the opportunity to meet Maltese photographers at his exhibition. He’s interested in knowing about the photography scene in Malta, what training opportunities there are, what seminars, workshops take place, what sort of work the local photographers do, what the standard of photography is like.
The exhibition “One World, One Tribe” can be seen at the MCC from July 14 until the end of the month.
A selection of Reza’s photos can be seen on the web at http://www.webistan.com/index.html
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