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Jahi Chikwendiu
thaKing
Registered Users Posts: 478 Major grins
went to a photography lecture today and today's lecturer was Jahi Chikwendiu...BD, do you know him from the Post? he had some great shots and shared lots of emotions that went into his shots...he's a hometown guy, so the place was packed...
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Any of the lecture worth sharing here? Thanks.
- he talked about close encounters while on location...he was with other photogs in Baghdad and took a "day trip" to Karbala...he was granted access into the jail and he kept going back and was granted all the access he wanted (these photos are on his website)...during one of his trips he was shooting at an intersection during a battle...traffic got heavy from people scrambling from the city...they all decided they better leave and only got a few hundred feet away when a car bomb went off right where he was standing...
- another close encounter came while he was in Africa earlier this year...he went to Pres. Obama's father's homeland to shoot during the inauguration...afterwards he went to the Congo...at some point they were stopped by militants and robbed of everything they had except passports...he lost 3 bodies and lenses, macbook and other accessories...he called back to the Post and they were glad he was ok...but immediately asked, when can you get new equipment? that got a laugh...
- some of the best images he displayed were of 2 series...one was a high school in DC where he went for a year...he said it was a middle of the road school - not the worst around and not the best...and boy, the school was struggling, although it was better than others...the other series was his half-sister...she has diabetes and lost most of one leg and the other foot...well, he showed her relationships she had and how she got through her life...the images were very powerful...
- he discussed how he got into photography, and it was very personal...his mother got him a camera from his dad (it sounded like his parents divorced and his mom had to buy the camera from his dad)..all along he thought his dad gave him the camera but he learned later his mom got it for him...he got really choked up and it was emotional...
- there were others...how he can take shots of horrible images and not let it get to him, how he watched a woman die of AIDS, a woman breastfeeding when she actually had no milk, another woman who watched her entire family slaughtered by the Janjaweed...
like you said, his images are powerful...and to see an entire series rather than an image or 2 really brought things to life....