fireflyphotofilms.com/blog

Check Out: Fifteen Years of Human Rights Photography

Firefly Photofilms in India — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:30:54 +0000

Dear Friends,

I’m thrilled to announce that the Open Society Foundations are making available to the public an expansive documentary photography collection chronicling some of the most pressing human rights and social issues of our times.

Click here to view the new Moving Walls website.

The website houses a searchable archive of our Moving Walls exhibition series, which provides evidence of human rights abuses, puts a human face to conflict, and documents the struggles and defiance of marginalized people. The series has included more than 170 photographers over a span of 15 years.

Check out the new website and the latest exhibit, Moving Walls 20, and tell us what you think.

Sincerely,

Amy Yenkin
Director, Documentary Photography Project
@AmyYenkin

New Firefly NGO Video – Nazdeek: Police Brutality

Firefly Photofilms in India — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:29:45 +0000

New Firefly NGO Video - Nazdeek:

Harrowing Testimony Documenting Brutal Beating of Woman by Delhi Police: Time to Demand More

Hear directly from community members and activists on the brutal beating of three innocent civilians, including one woman, by the Delhi police in a jhuggi cluster in Baljeet Nagar, Delhi. Bite marks, a fractured foot, and, intensive chest beatings caused severe harm, with Preeti, a mother of 3, rendered temporarily unconscious, and left to suffer seizures, shortness of breath, and intense chest pain several days after the violent incident.

Please share the video and join the fight to end police brutality. Together we’ll be working with the Baljeet Nagar community to demand a more accountable, gender-sensitive police force.

Kate Nolan – Neither

firefly — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:32:45 +0000

Kate Nolan has spent the last 4 years documenting women in Kaliningrad after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Please take a moment to read more about the project and head to the Indiegogo video to see how she bringing this work to life with Dutch designer Sybren Kuiper.

Neither 2009-2012

The view of this faded garden explodes my mind and I get paralyzed, I have no clue how to move two legs, let alone a thousand. – Natasha

Neither is an exploration into the hearts of young women in Kaliningrad. The first generation to have grown up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they look to define their identity in this small ‘island’ within Europe. The women I have been living with and sharing with have generously opened up their homes and their minds to allow me to better understand this link between place, identity and history.

This project that has been such a large part of my life over the last few years is now at its final stage. Having changed and grown with the support of many, I finally feel like I’m getting a chance to give a voice to the amazing women that I spent so much time with bringing me into their homes, telling me of their dreams and fears. Over the last six months I have been working with the internationally renowned Dutch designer -SYB- to create the book. Using eyewitness accounts of women who first arrived in Kaliningrad in 1945, and handwritten diary entries of contemporary women, the book works to establish their voices within this project. These personal stories in conjunction with my images, do not seek to answer any questions but rather give a voice to their experiences.

Click to see the video: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/neither-photobook

Pic from a project I’m currently working on, used for a…

Firefly Photofilms in India — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 01:45:00 +0000

Pic from a project I’m currently working on, used for a story in The Hindu paper:

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelhi/unsettlement-colony/article4612828.ece

A mother and daughter pose in their home at JJ Colony in Bawana….

Firefly Photofilms in India — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:58:46 +0000

A mother and daughter pose in their home at JJ Colony in Bawana. Part of my on-going project on slum resettlements in Delhi.

Some faces from Holi 2013 in New Delhi

Firefly Photofilms in India — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:03:54 +0000

Some faces from Holi 2013 in New Delhi

Nothing like a car exploding right outside your house to keep…

Firefly Photofilms in India — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:23:39 +0000

Nothing like a car exploding right outside your house to keep you on your toes

Got a photo story up on Vice on Rahat Open Surgery in New…

Firefly Photofilms in India — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:13:54 +0000

Got a photo story up on Vice on Rahat Open Surgery in New Delhi.

Delhi Ambulance Drivers

Firefly Photofilms in India — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 07:56:52 +0000

Delhi Ambulance Drivers

Rapes and the Indian Justice System: An experimental data visualisation

Firefly Photofilms in India — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 06:52:33 +0000

Attended Hack/hackers Delhi this week, heres a write up by Pierre Mario Fitter on what

we created:

This weekend, I attended an excellent big data visualisation workshop organised by Hacks/Hackers Delhi. The idea was to get journalists and techies to collaborate on investigative, data-driven stories and tell them in intuitive ways. Numbers dull the reader’s mind. A well-designed infographic can convey complex ideas in a single frame.

The group I was a part of included journalists Nasr ul Hadi, Rajan Zaveri, Aayush Soni and my colleague at ITG Rohan Venkat. Our ‘techies’, who did much of the heavy lifting, were Piyush Kumar and Konark Modi. We were also joined by Yuan Lei, a journalism student from Shantou University in Guangdong. Since it’s been such an important story in recent weeks, we looked at how rape cases in India are treated by ‘the system’.

Before I get to our findings, I want to add a short note. We had just three hours to find data, organise it, clean it, ‘query’ it, and generate the visualisations. Not a lot of time. I’m sure a team working with more resources (particularly time) will draw more impactful conclusions. Our intention - since this was not a formal editorial process - was to start the conversation. We focused on three questions based on the data we had immediately available.

1. Adjusted for population, which states have the highest incidence of rape?
For brevity’s sake, we called this ‘rape probability’. In other words, how many rapes per thousand people. (Total reported rape cases/ State’s Population x 1000).

Some states such as Mizoram appear to have an unusually high ‘rape probability’. This may simply be because more rapes are reported, and not necessarily because women are more at risk. The national average was about 0.03 rapes per 1000 people.

2. If a rape case is reported in a state, how often does it result in a formal chargesheet?
We called this ‘chargesheet probability’. (Number of cases where charges are framed / Total reported cases x 100).

The clear outlier here is Manipur with just 9% of reported rapes ending in chargesheets. Is that only because of AFSPA? We cannot draw that conclusion until we know who the suspects are in each reported case. I also noticed an oddity. Three states - Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Tripura and Goa - have ‘chargesheet probabilities’ higher than 100%. We didn’t have time to find out why, so if someone out there could help in explaining that, I’d be grateful. The national average here was about 80%.

3. Finally, of the total reported cases, how many result in convictions?
We called this ‘conviction probability’. (No. of cases ending in convictions / No. of reported rapes x 100).

The outliers here are Nagaland and Sikkim with convictions secured in nearly 70% of cases that went to trial. Kerala was personally surprising with just a 2.7% conviction rate. The national average was about 18%.

Data sources: 2011 National Crime Records Bureau, National Census data

P.s. Even though we had the data, Google Fusion Tables would not generate visualisations for Jammu and Kashmir. It automatically marked the territory as ‘disputed’. Oddly, while it marks Arunachal Pradesh with similar diagonal lines, we still get the data represented on a map. I have contacted the Help Team about this and will post an update if I get a reply.

P.P.S Several states and U.Ts would show zero in their data fields. That’s mostly because data was either unavailable or could not be reliably ‘cleaned’.