Thanks to duckrabbit for the information about the short (12 minutes) film ‘Undesired‘ by MediaStorm with photojournalist Walter Astrada you can watch on MediaStorm. Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes some of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found. ‘Undesired‘ is a powerful and moving film that makes the scandalous situation that most of us were probably at least vaguely aware about real in a very direct way.
Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes more of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found.
The film tells the story of some of the 40 million girls ‘missing’ in India through abortion, neglect and murder. You can also read more on MediaStorm in the feature ‘Mothers of A Hundred Sons: India’s Dying Daughters‘ by Shreeya Sinha, who was Associate Producer for the film, and made the interviews and some of the video, illustrated by pictures by Astrada, as well as elsewhere in a article by Swami Agnivesh, Rama Mani and Angelika Köster-Lossack published in 2005 by the New York Times and a story last year in The Guardian by Ciara Leeming.
Astrada‘s work on his Violence For Women project is also covered in an article in the on-line BJP by Olivier Laurent, who met him when he was showing his work at Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan. Surprisingly I don’t think this has appeared in the print version, nor for that matter has anything else from Perpignan. Perhaps because BJP is now a monthly publication, and Visa Pour l’Image took place at the start of September, shortly after the September issue this and their other reports from Perpignan was old news by the time the October print issue came out.
It’s a reflection of the magazine’s changed priorities that I could find nothing in that issue about Visa Pour l’Image, nor, for that matter about the largest photo event taking place in the UK at the moment, the East London Photography Festival, Photomonth 2010. In fact I’m finding it increasingly hard to see any justification at all for the print magazine, though of course it is difficult to survive just on the basis of web advertising (though About.com, who I wrote about photography with for almost 8 years managed it.)
You can see more of Astrada‘s work on the photographer’s own web site, including images from previous work about violence against women in Guatamela and the Congo. A former Agence France Press photographer he is now represented by Reportage by Getty Images.