NOOR is an Amsterdam-based agency of nine documentary photographers which aims to “contribute to a growing understanding of the world by producing independent in-depth visual reports.” As well as encouraging and promoting the individual work of the photographers, “collective projects are at the core of Noor.”
You can see a little of one of these, Consequences by NOOR on-line at the moment, a slightly confusing blog on which more material will be posted later. The exhibition, which opens at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 7 – 18, 2009, looks at some of the crunch points of climate change around the world: “subjects include: a massive pine beetle kill in British Columbia, genocide in Darfur, the rising sea level in the Maldives, Nenet reindeer herders in Siberia, Inuit hunters in Greenland, a looming crisis in Kolkata, India, coal mining in Poland, oil sand extraction in Canada and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest by Brazilian cattle ranchers.”
At the moment there is a single photograph and some text about each of the nine photographers, Francesco Zizola, Jan Grarup, Jon Lowenstein, Kadir Van Lohuizen, Nina Berman, Pep Bonet, Philip Blenkinsop, Stanley Greene and Yuri Kozyrev. It’s a distinguished list including a number of photographers I’ve written about in the past.
The latest post includes a video of Zizola shooting ‘A Paradise in Peril‘ in the Maldives, the lowest lying country in the world, and which will be one of the first casualties of the sea level rise caused by global warming and the melting of polar ice caps. In it Zizola talks about the situation and also a little about how he is trying to show it through his pictures, some of which are inserted into the video.
Zizola, born in Italy in 1962 and living in Rome, published the book Born Somewhere in 2004 after photographing the situation of children in 28 countries over 13 years. His latest book Iraq, part of an Amnesty International series published in 2007, contains pictures from the early months of the 2003 invasion. He has received many awards, including World Press Photo of the Year in 1996, seven World Press Photo awards and four Pictures of the Year Awards.