Workers in tea gardens of West Bengal, India, that produces Ctc tea for domestic consumption complain that they have been devoid of basic facilities while political parties make hollow promises during every elections which are never fulfilled.
Humanitarian photographer Leila Alaoui died in the attack in Ouagadougou
È morta nell’attentato terroristico del 15 gennaio in Burkina Faso. Leila Alaoui ci lascia in eredità un universo fotografico intimo e appassionato.
Leila Alaoui’s lens focused the world through the filter of humanity. Her photography was in fact imbued with activism, championing women, men, diversity, and peoples’ cultural roots. She was 33, and she died after the terror incident that shocked Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, on 15 January. She was wounded during gunfire and died on 18 January.
To Leila Alaoui, photography was a “social mission”
Born in Paris in 1982, she lived and worked in Marrakech and Beirut, Lebanon, where – alongside her companion Nabil Canaan – she created “la Station”, multidisciplinary artistic centre. She went to Burkina Faso to document violence perpetrated on women in the western countries of the continent, on assignment for Amnesty International.
“My work is first of all a social mission,” she said in 2011 in an interview with the Moroccan magazine TelQuel. Her works are known all around the world: she exhibited in New York, Paris, Buenos Aires. In her last exhibition, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris, France, Leila chose to focus on the deepest, most hidden and rural traits of Morocco, told through life-size photographs of women and men posing in traditional clothes. “I visited different communities, looking intimately, in order to unveil the subjectivity of people I photographed,” said the artist.
Morocco shown through protagonists’ gazes
It’s a collection of aesthetical, ancestral, Northern African universes and traditions, told with passion and courage: “Have you seen her bright smile she used to have on her face when she was photographed? That was her secret. She was determined to defend her cause. She was able to find beauty in everything and every person, expressing it to us,” said Fatym Layachi, French-Moroccan author and Leila’s friend, to the newspaper Le Monde.
In 2013, she organised in collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees a workshop with a group of 20 women and young migrants, at Rabat’s East West Foundation. “She has always kept a reserved distance from people she photographed,” said her mother, Christine. “She was interested in their lives. I can still see her smile. I can hear her warm voice. She was all that”.
Siamo anche su WhatsApp. Segui il canale ufficiale LifeGate per restare aggiornata, aggiornato sulle ultime notizie e sulle nostre attività.
Quest'opera è distribuita con Licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 4.0 Internazionale.
India is in the middle of the elections, but sadly none of the politicians have uttered a word on man-animal conflict that has been devouring several lives every year.
Manipur, a state in north-east India, is still reeling under the tremors of violence that broke out last year devouring lives and paralyzing the economy.
The government of Tanzania is currently planning to evict more than 80.000 indigenous Maasai people from their ancenstral land
A new UNU-INWEH report on the global bottled water industry reveals the massive scale of this market and the lack of strict quality controls.
Isatou Ceesay founded a social enterprise that is helping to fight plastic pollution and empowering women and young people to gain economic independence.
In 2020, Mihela Hladin made a radical decision that many, in recent times, have probably considered. This is her story, with photos by Matt Audiffret.
The Brazilian government has started evicting illegal gold miners, responsible for the health emergency that has hit the Yanomami people.
Asur culture and tradition in West Bengal are on the brink of extinction due to age-old religious stigma and the apathy of the state government.