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A preliminary look at the work i have been doing for the Alicia Patterson Foundation grant I received this past year may now be had, although there is still a shitload of work to be done.
The URL is http://www.dominicanbatey.org.
The site is collaborative, so contributions from other people involved in the sugar industry and the bateys have yet to appear, but much of my own work is there, minus about five multimedia “films” which will slowly make their appearance.
For those of you who are solely interested in photography, I imagine this project will disappoint, as it is really a mix of text and imagery and not intended to showcase my photos at all. It is a bit of Kapucinski, a bit of Montaigne, a bit of Meiselas (thinking of her Kurdistan book) and then of course a bit of photography in my usual vein. More imagery of mine is in fact coming, but I was unable to access the mills this year due to the unpleasant uproar that occurred in the wake of a couple films that came out, and now it looks like things have cooled down a bit and I will be heading back to the mills so I can put the finishing touches. There will also be a series of holga shots of the old colonial plantations in ruins.
The purpose of this project is twofold: aside from helping advertise the plight of the braceros and helping those who work to help them, I am also very much intent on testing the potential of the web as a new publishing medium and, to some extent, to make an end run round the gatekeepers of the traditional media outlets. As to the latter, frankly, I am fed up with wrestling with the publishing or media establishment, I dont have much respect for their thinking or their MOs, and I am quite quite tired of the way in which unconscious ideological factors (not to mention overt market considerations) condition editorial agendas to the extent that the editors themselves, despite all the good intentions they may harbor, are completely unaware. We have allowed our collective cultural consciousness to be administered to us by organizations that by their very nature tend toward mediocrity. If you do not believe me, just survey the material out there and analyze the reasoning behind it, and then read the great sociologist Max Weber on the nature of bureaucratic institutions.
While I will be continuing work on this project, I am about to start a new project, the initial phase of which will be funded by a think tank involved in Dominico-Haitian relations. The project is called Borderlands, and will look at five global border regions where cultural and historical ties run deep but political or economic conflict converts these areas into hot zones. First, the Dominican/Haitian border. Then Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan, Cyprus, and US/Mexico. Yet another overly ambitious undertaking that I may never finish!!!!
Any ideas occur to anyone, just pm me and I will be happy to reflect on your suggestions.
abrazos desde quisqueya
by
Jon Anderson
at
Sat May 17 12:24:48 UTC 2008
(ed. May 17 2008)
Santo Domingo,
Dominican Republic
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