Pulitzer Center grantees Aaron Nelsen and Fernando Rodriguez are investigating Chile’s fishing laws on artisan fishermen.  “On the beach families welcome the returning fishermen with thermoses of steaming hot instant coffee and bologna sandwiches. Each crew makes use of their allotted plastic trays, doled out according to the amount of fish that were supposed to have been caught. The Recabal family, including Pablo’s mother, and sister, strap on aprons to help strip fish from the net. Crabs too small for sale are tossed into a barrel to be fed to scavengers. Pablo later confides that the life of an artisan fisherman is a difficult proposition. After paying $10 for the tractor to push the Eslora into the water and pull it out again, $100 for gasoline and the 50 percent fee to his father, who owns the boat, the men will take home around $20 for their efforts.” Read more here. Image: Boxes of juvenile merluza, sorted in plastic trays to be taken to market. Image by © Fernando Rodriguez. Chile, 2013.
Pop-upView Separately

Pulitzer Center grantees Aaron Nelsen and Fernando Rodriguez are investigating Chile’s fishing laws on artisan fishermen. 

“On the beach families welcome the returning fishermen with thermoses of steaming hot instant coffee and bologna sandwiches. Each crew makes use of their allotted plastic trays, doled out according to the amount of fish that were supposed to have been caught. The Recabal family, including Pablo’s mother, and sister, strap on aprons to help strip fish from the net. Crabs too small for sale are tossed into a barrel to be fed to scavengers.

Pablo later confides that the life of an artisan fisherman is a difficult proposition. After paying $10 for the tractor to push the Eslora into the water and pull it out again, $100 for gasoline and the 50 percent fee to his father, who owns the boat, the men will take home around $20 for their efforts.”

Read more here.

Image: Boxes of juvenile merluza, sorted in plastic trays to be taken to market. Image by © Fernando Rodriguez. Chile, 2013.

For one week only, Pulitzer Center’s award-winning e-books for iPad are available for FREE on the iBookstore! Get your copies today. 

“Voices of Haiti” is a multimedia celebration of Haiti’s resilience after the 2010 earthquake.

“In Search of Home” uses photographs and reporting to dive into the global crisis of statelessness, when a person has no citizenship to any country.

The giveaway is in honor of Look3, one of the largest photography festivals in the country, which is happening this week in Charlottesville, Va.

Mullah, give me back my billy goat. I’ve had no kiss despite that spell you wrote.

This is a landay, a Pashto folk poem from Afghanistan. Pulitzer Center grantees Eliza Griswold and Seamus Murphy collected the poems over several reporting trips. Their work was featured in the not-to-be-missed June issue of Poetry magazine. Griswold explained the context behind this particular poem: “For a fee, such as a goat, Muslim holy men used to write spells, love charms, and hexes. With the rise of stricter forms of Islam over the past several decades, this practice, like facial tattoos, has fallen out of favor.” Read more of their stories about women poets in Afghanistan here.

For three years, Mosse has captured retina-searing images of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for his series Infra, all shot on a now extinct 16mm infrared film designed originally for military reconnaissance through what he calls “an aggressively intuitive art-making process.”

His images depict in hyper-vivid color the landscape of war and those who live within this world of violence and upheaval.

The final iteration of Infra is a six channel video installation titled The Enclave (2013), premiering in theVenice Bienniale’s Irish Pavilion.

Mosse characterizes his work “as not a reaction against journalism, but rather an artist working in places [where] journalists are working.”

In this video for leading contemporary art magazine Frieze, Mosse introduces his latest work and touches on the dissonance of rendering aesthetically sublime such scenes of turmoil.

Mosse draws the eye first to a perception of beauty, the aesthetic of the image, and second to the nature of the scene, what he calls “a Hobbesian state of war where everyone has their back up.”

He visibly translates such heightened sensitivities, each frame saturated in hyper-real color.

With Congo’s lush verdant landscapes turned searing pink, the view is exhilarating.

The infrared film captures infrared light which is invisible to the human eye, with the “potential to make the invisible visible.” Mosse draws parallels with the ongoing under-reported conflict in the Congo, where figures from the International Rescue Committee claim a total of 5.4 million people killed as a result of war since 1998.

To portray the conflict as he has was “to bring these two incongruous notions together—to take two completely unrelated things, one, the history of photography, and the other, the history of Africa, and to examine them in light of each other.”

Representing the anguish, the human suffering of war in vivid color, Mosse hopes to create in the viewer’s mind an ethical dilemma, that of bearing witness to these crimes. Now fully observant of the deeply sinister nature of each image, so too viewers become aware of the ease by which they were seduced by the simple use of unexpected color.

“The Congolese rebels that we photographed had a very strange reaction to the camera,” recalls Mosse. “They were very ambivalent.”

Richard Mosse, photographer and Pulitzer Center grantee, is representing Ireland from June 1 to November 24 at this year’s 55th Venice Biennale.

Keep reading here.

- Katherine Doyle

pulitzerfieldnotes:

Turkey, perhaps the Middle East’s most-trumpeted democracy, dominated the international news cycle this week as one peaceful environmental protest in Taksim Square’s Gezi Park in Istanbul turned violent: Government-backed police pulled water cannons and tear gas on protestors. Demonstrations subsequently erupted across the country. The Guardian reported Thursday that three people have died and 4,000 have been injured in the tumult.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won three straight elections by popular vote – his supporters are largely religious and conservative. But dissent has grown steadily as Erdogan has implemented increasingly authoritarian measures in Turkey.

The Pulitzer Center snagged two of our grantees, Jenna Krajeski and Dimiter Kenarov – both of whom are based in Istanbul – to answer a few quick need-to-know questions about what’s happening there now. Their responses, e-mailed from Turkey, have been excerpted.

What specific stories within the protests do you plan to cover, where and why? How will you do it?

Kenarov: Environmentalism is not just a convenient vehicle for expressing dissatisfaction with the Turkish government, but a very real driving force behind much of Turkey’s protest movements in the past 10 years. In fact, environmental degradation caused by Turkey’s aggressive market liberalization and industrial boom has been tremendous. The pace of Turkey’s industrialization is so great that it threatens serious environmental collapse in a couple of years. In that sense, the clear-cutting of a few trees in Gezi Park is not just an excuse for protesting other social issues, but a serious concern in and of itself, and part of a greater pattern, which has to be explored.

Krajeski: I’m interested in a couple of angles particularly, both rooted in the idea of nationalism. I’ve written a lot about Kurdish rights in Turkey, and so far the Kurds have not mobilized in large numbers to join the protests even though they have many grievances with Erdogan. They feel alienated by the nationalism at the protests - the Kemalists who worship Ataturk, who Kurds consider an oppressor - and they are worried that by attending anti-AKP demonstrations that will ruin their peace process with the AKP.

But who else does the nationalism alienate? That’s what I’m currently working on. This idea of secularism as embodied by Ataturk versus Islamism as embodied by Erdogan is an overly simplistic one, to say the least. It’s worrisome the desire to return to Kemalism, and the real visionaries at the protests are those who reject both Kemalism and Islamism, but their voices risk being drowned out by the nationalism which, in its exclusionary fervor, is quite off-putting.

I’m also looking into the role of women. In my opinion, women have the most to protest and the most to lose. Erdogan has curbed rights to abortion and many other rights for women, but at the same time made it easier for religious women to live and work in Turkey. It’s impossible to look at Turkish society and count headscarves to conclude how conservative it is, but that’s what’s often done, by the media and by the secularists in the park. But what I want to write about is how women – under Kemalism and Islamism – have had their governments be this sort of paternalistic force (not to mention the highly militarized and masculine society writ large) under both Ataturk and Erdogan.

What do you think will come of these protests? What do you think they say about democracy, and Turkey’s democracy in particular?

Kenarov: It is still early to say. One big mistake that western commentators make is to compare the events in Turkey to the Arab Spring. In fact, the context is very different and, though Erdogan is hated by many, he remains a democratically elected prime-minister in a nominally democratic country, serving his third term and still enormously popular with the majority of the Turkish masses. It is hard to ignore the very real contribution of Erdogan’s party to Turkey’s growing economic prosperity and national confidence. The protest, overall, is not about a radical change of the regime, but about curbing Erdogan’s growing authoritarian methods and arrogance, and introducing a better system of checks and balances in the government, which will defend the rights of all Turkish citizens, not just of the ones who support Erdogan. In that sense, the protest is a welcome development and shows the growing democratic consciousness of Turkey’s middle class, which demands real rights and not just stable economy and jobs.

Krajeski: I have no idea what the outcome will be. So far Erdogan’s not budging. At the very least it will show him and his government that Turkish citizens will not tolerate police brutality and demand a voice in decision making, which is a very positive step.

As global civil unrest goes, how significant is this week?

Kenarov: This week is very significant because we’re talking about civil unrest not just in any country, but in Turkey, one of the key global players in the world economy. Any significant change in the domestic situation could lead to major repercussions in world politics and the global economy.

Krajeski: I can’t help but compare these to Egypt, where I was in 2011. There are so many differences. But this week marks a loud and spontaneous reawakening of the Turkish left wing, and perhaps a new protest culture. This is very important, even though it likely won’t lead to regime change. Turkey’s dormant individualism is now awakened. And it’s pretty exciting to see.

Follow Jenna Krajeski and Dimiter Kenarov on Twitter @dkenarov and @jenna_krajeski. Keep an eye on The New Republic online and The New Yorker online, where Krajeski’s stories will run. Kenarov plans to blog for the Huffington Post. Read their stories for the Pulitzer Center here and here.

All images by Dimiter Kenarov. Turkey, 2013. See more of his photos from the square here.