I first heard of Spanish photographer Sebastián Liste (b1985) when he won the Ian Parry Scholarship in 2010 for his long term project Urban Quilombo, which looks at the the extreme living conditions faced by the dozens of families who made their home in an abandoned chocolate factory in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. In the factory, which they had occupied illegally, they lived together as a community creating a safer environment than the streets outside, but one from which they were being evicted by the government.
Since then he has own a whole string of awards for this and other work, the latest of which is the City of Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Award., renamed in honour of the young French photographer, born in 1983 and best known for his work on Haiti who was killed in Homs, Syria on 22 Feb 2012 (it was formerly called the Young Reporter of Perpignan award.)
Urban Quilimbo is a powerful and intimate series of black and white images – 52 on the web site – which give a great insight into the lives of those he is photographing, showing both their deprivation and scenes of joy. A photographer with a degree in Sociology and an MA in Photojournalism, he has a great interest in “the culture of resistance, examining how human beings transform their immediate environment to survive.”
Also on his web site are two smaller projects, Bahia and Istanbul. The pictures from Istanbul are perhaps more controlled, reflecting the very different enviroment, but include one of the more striking black and white images I’ve seen a quite a while. The site gives a choice of three image sizes, thumbnail, normal and larger versions which are seen by clicking on a thumbnail, but I think are just a little too big for the underlying files, which look better on normal view.
You can see more of Liste’s work on Reportage by Getty, which as well as Urban Quilimbo also includes some of his colour work from Brazil. This site also allows you to turn on the captions for the pictures, which are important. The pictures tell the story but sometimes need the text to clarify what that story is.
You can see a selected group of 11 images of Rémi Ochlik‘s pictures at The Guardian, which includes ‘Battle for Libya’ which won the first prize for stories in the general news section of the 2012 World Press Photo awards.