photographer
The Navajo reservation’s population of 200,000 is cast wide, and small wooden buildings are scattered across the plateau. Many have to drive for miles to haul drinking water from watering points. Some have round water tanks topped by windmills or wells that are contaminated from decades of uranium, coal, and other mining in the region. Still, people draw from them to water livestock and sometimes for drinking.
A great number of punk, rock and heavy metal bands got their start in Arizona. The Navajo punk rock band Blackfire is one of them. The band was founded in 1989 by Jeneda, Klee, and Clayson Benally, three siblings born in the heart of the land struggle at Black Mesa in the Navajo Nation. They merge traditional Native American music with punk-rock, and are strong advocates against social injustice and the oppression of indigenous people.
Klee and his father Jones Benally photographed outside Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona. Jones raised his children on tribal chants and dances. They still occasionally perform as the Jones Benally Family, either as part of or separately from Backfire performances, to display their traditional form of dance, song and story that has been carried on for generations.
Jones Benally
This is Dr Jones. He is a Navajo medicine man and chanter. His daughter and two sons are musicians in the punk-rock protest band Blackfire. I met them in the Navajo reservation in Arizona whilst doing an explorative journey into the rich tapestry of American music together with filmmaker Iggi Ögard. We drove 8000 miles that winter. From highways to pathways, from big cities to quirky, small towns off the beaten track. We met local musicians with a story to tell, be it bluegrass pickers in Tennessee or punk rock polka rebels in Texas, amateurs or professionals. Each voice reflects Americas unique cultural and ethnical diversity, and their music follows the landscape, from the endless arid desert in Arizona to the muddy swamplands in Louisiana.
A few hundred meters from the bustling life of Istiklal Caddesi shopping hub in the heart of Istanbul, lies the proud but marginalized neighbourhood of Tarlabasi
The massive gentrification process taking place in Tarlabasi is to attract tourists. Now the state wants the marginalized people who live here to move away. But many of them have nowhere to go.
For hundreds of years, Tarlabasi´s narrow, winding streets were a peaceful home to non-Muslim diplomats and later Greek merchants. But as religious tensions rose through the mid-20th century, the Turkish government launched organised pogroms targeting non-Muslims in the city. In the ensuing violence, homes and shops were looted and destroyed. Over the following decades, those abandoned buildings were gradually filled by Gypsies known locally as “Roman”, and by refugees fleeing the Turkish-Kurdish civil war in the late 1980s
Tarlabasi´s central location has in recent years made it into prime revenue-generating real estate, and despite objections from residents, architects, and human rights groups, the neighbourhood is being demolished. At stake is Tarlabasi’s diverse and vital culture
In one of the poorest areas in Chicago art classes are changing lives.
At Legacy Charter School in North Lawndale – a long-impoverished neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago – they believe art creates successful children. All of their 500 pupils from pre-k to 8th grade have 120 minutes of art classes as well as additional music lessons with access to first class tools and materials. That is a lot more than most other public schools in the Chicago area.
In an area with high crime rates and gang violence, the principal Lisa Kenner believes that the art classes helps the children to discover skills they didn´t believe they had as well as sense of mastering. – Art is all about being human and it awakes feelings and empathy, which is something these children really needs.
