'Cat Walk' from 'Chica Barbie.' ©Carl Bower

Miki Johnson: Tell me a little about how you first found out about the beauty pageants of Colombia.

Carl Bower: I saw a small article in the New York Times that said there was a pageant there for practically anything imaginable — Miss Sun, Miss Sea, Miss Purity, Miss Pretty Legs, Miss Honey — the list went on. I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of these contests with everything else I had been reading about Colombia: the cartels, the guerrillas, the bombings and kidnappings. I thought of how such parallel realities could coexist and the extent to which our popular conception of the country had been a caricature formed by stories of the drug trade.

At the time I came across the article, I was supporting a close friend in her battle with breast cancer. She had been a national champion ballroom dancer and a competitive bodybuilder. Her appearance was something that she took pride in and took pains to maintain even as she lost one breast, then another, and suffered the effects of chemotherapy and radiation. Throughout her ordeal, I noticed how her sexuality seemed undiminished, if not stronger. I started to wonder, if a beautiful person gradually loses elements deemed to be part of that beauty, where is the tipping point at which they are no longer beautiful? Is there one?

In my anger and frustration with the cancer and growing obsession with the commoditization of beauty, the story of the pageants struck a nerve. Here was an environment where all the issues I was grappling with were stripped bare and distilled to the point that it might be possible to convey some of them on film.

At first I tried finding the pageants through government records, but most of the information was unreliable or outdated. Through a friend, I met a fashion designer commissioned to create the dresses for a candidate to the national pageant. I photographed her preparation and coaching, learned of regional pageants, and met with judges, organizers, parents of contestants. I visited modeling agencies and schools where girls were being trained to compete in the pageants from the age of four.

'Aguardiente' from 'Chica Barbie.' ©Carl Bower

When I learned of festivals occurring throughout the country, I went to various towns and introduced myself in their mayors’ offices. I went everywhere: to the national pageants, with their weeks-long round-the-clock media blitz, to high school pageants, to pageants with just three candidates.

I began to see how the pageants were one of the few unifying threads in a country compartmentalized by geography, politics, and social stratification. It seemed that everyone, regardless of social standing, had an opinion about them: not on whether they were good or bad, or whether they should exist, but on who should win. When I returned to the United States, I found that some of the complexity I experienced was missing from the photos, so I went back. I kept finding new layers of meaning, so I ended up going back again and again.

MJ: You said that as you’ve gotten deeper into the story it has gotten more complicated and you feel more ambivalent about the role of these pageants in the culture (something visible in the images). What were some of the contradictions you discovered?

CB: When I began photographing, I felt that the pageants were essentially meat markets. It wasn’t just that thousands of people were scrutinizing the contestants’ bodies; what struck me was the categorical, exhaustive, and unforgiving nature of it. Are her ankles thick? Who has breast implants? Who doesn’t but should? Whose ass is too small, too large, or shaped like melons when it should be like oranges? After the current Miss Colombia was crowned last November, there were months of public demands that she have her nose fixed to better compete in Miss World.

Even in comparison to our own celebrity-obsessed culture, the arguments and scoring in Colombia had developed to the level of sport. I thought of all the young girls in the audiences with their jaws dropped in awe. Had they already decided what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to have value, what they needed to be loved? Given my friend’s experience and the questions and emotional baggage I began with, I think I was preconditioned to see things in fairly stark terms.

Those feelings haven’t changed, but they have been complemented by others. For example, there was almost always a genuine enthusiasm in the crowds, which included old, young, male, female, rich, and poor. And despite the crude assessments, the favorites of the crowd were not always the most beautiful — they often seemed the most intelligent or exuded a stronger sense of character. While the source of young men’s enthusiasm was fairly easy to track, older men and women expressed a sort of paternal affection. And even as the candidates molded their personalities into coquettish personas, they were still excited to be there.

'Miss Coffee' from 'Chica Barbie.' ©Carl Bower

One of the first things I had trouble reconciling was the absolute mania over the pageants with an environment where the threat of violence was nearly ubiquitous. More than half of the Colombians who invited me into their homes eventually showed me “The Picture.” The face in the photo was always different, but I came to expect and dread the moment it would come out. A brother killed by the FARC. Someone’s else’s brother, killed for the pesos in his pocket. A friend kidnapped years ago who hadn’t been seen since.

The woman who introduced me to the fashion designer went to the funeral of a very close friend, then held a huge party at her apartment only a few days later. I asked if it was difficult, having it so soon. She gave me a long look. “If we went into a period of mourning every time someone we knew was killed, we wouldn’t have time for anything else.”

It’s boring to be a victim, and tiring. Pageants, soccer matches, festivals and concerts are not only opportunities to forget, but a form of defiance. A refusal to be defined by the violence or to wait in vain for it to end. Colombia’s problems have been grave, but Colombians themselves are astonishingly optimistic. It is one of the things I respect most about them, one of the things that keeps drawing me back.

MJ: Tell me about what it’s like to be a foreign male documenting these events so tied up in creating definitions of youth and femininity. Even here some people might question a man dealing with “women’s issues.”

CB: I don’t see that these are strictly women’s issues, or that a man shouldn’t be able to discuss them or be without empathy. We are all pressured at some point to fulfill certain roles based on what we look like more than on who we are. Sometimes we go along; sometimes we don’t. It’s actually the theme of the group show I’m in at the Farmani Gallery in New York, titled Select Gender.

I didn’t start this because I’m a feminist advocate or viewed the world primarily from a female perspective. It happened because I watched helplessly as one of my best friends was overcome by breast cancer and because of the pain and admiration I felt for the way she confronted it. I responded to what was in front of me, in the only way I knew.

After documenting her experience for several years (Diane’s Story), I began looking at the culture of the pageants. I’d love to say I set out on an altruistic mission, but this was originally driven more by my own anger and confusion and attempts to understand the issues. Despite my initial motivation, this project has probably raised more questions for me than it’s resolved, and I’m at the point now where I feel that may be an end unto itself.

'Circle of Men' from 'Chica Barbie.' ©Carl Bower

I don’t think my gender hindered the project once people got to know me. I tried to be very open about what I was doing, explaining that I was mostly interested in the idea of the contests, how young women were transforming themselves to meet a very specific ideal, and the fact that the obsession for the contests was on a scale North Americans could only imagine. I think some people were just relieved to have a foreigner focusing on anything other than violence and the drug trade.

I tried to speak with the organizers, security teams, judges, and always the candidates themselves before I started photographing, so they knew I was approaching things from a different place. Some didn’t know what to make of me, but decided that I must be harmless.

I traveled with the candidates whenever possible, until most just thought of me as part of the entourage. I was usually allowed to work in areas that were off limits to local photographers, who were perceived as using their credentials as passports for voyeurism and chatting up the girls. So in many cases my position as an outsider was probably an advantage.

MJ: This project is now your first book. What have you learned about making images for a book and how that differs from a long photo story?

CB: I viewed a book as an extended essay until I started laying one out, turning the pages and realizing things just weren’t working. When I first started shooting, I was thinking only of a series of images, each driving home a different aspect of the themes I was exploring, built into a narrative.

When I started paying attention to books I really liked however, I started to see that many were not only documents but meditations, and that the interplay between these forms gave them a certain rhythm that drew me in and kept me there. In the books I returned to most, there seemed to be a point where I wasn’t so much studying the pictures as breathing them in, absorbing them through osmosis, without being aware of exactly what I was thinking.

I also found myself flipping back and forth more, sometimes going back and pausing a long time at a more meditative picture without knowing why. When I jumped forward to where I’d been before, I realized my perception of the latter photo had changed, like I’d been given a key without knowing the direct connection, or passed a divide between information and understanding. Photo stories, more topical and limited in length, often can’t accommodate the more meditative pictures. But the books are dead without them.

By clicking on the links below the IMPACT logo, you can move through the exhibition, viewing galleries of images, all related to the idea of “Outside Looking In.” Each “gallery” will include a series of images a photographer has uploaded to their blog along with this same IMPACT logo.

At any time you can click on the IMPACT logo to be taken to back to this post, where all the participating photographers are listed. (The “next” button actually takes you to a random gallery, so keep clicking if you get a repeat.)

By allowing viewers to move between different photographer’s online galleries, we hope to gain exposure for their work while providing a multifaceted visual study of the chosen topic.

We also wanted to remind viewers of the important role photographers play around the world, so we asked participants to share images from a project where they had an impact or were impacted themselves. If inclined, they have also included a link to an organization that they believe is having a positive impact on the world. Please help us increase this project’s IMPACT by sharing it with your community.

Enjoy!
The IMPACT Team: Yumi Goto, Miki Johnson, Paul O’Sullivan, Jeremy Wade Shockley

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Gazi Nafis Ahmed: Inner Face

Daniel Beltra: Tropical Deforestation

Fabiano Busdraghi: Physics, adventure, poetry and photography in Antarctica

Shiho Fukada: No Retirement Plan

Sean Gallagher: Desertification Unseen

Bill Hatcher: New Zealand Masters of Sport

Ed Kashi: A “Fady” in Madagascar

Michael Kircher: Adventure for Healing

Pete Marovich: A Look Inside the Old Order

Sara Mayti: The Sound of a 4.16

Thomas Peschak: Saving the Most Important Fish In the Sea

Ian Shive: American National Parks

Jeremy Wade Shockley: The Mountain Kingdom

Art Wolfe: The Ganges River

Rachel Wolfe: Jamaica

Digital Photobook Prototypes

Collaboration and Crowd-sourcing

Self-publishing Success Stories

Small Publishers Pushing the Boundaries

What People Are Actually Paying For

Newsweek’s cover image of Sarah Palin in running shorts awkwardly holding her PDAs caused a huge stir this week, especially when Daily Finance uncovered that the resale of the image, originally made for Runner’s World by Brian Adams, constituted a breach of the original contract. In a side saga, photojournalist Nina Berman took considerable heat for her incisive comments about the cover on the BAGnewsNotes blog when a YahooNews link flooded the blog with new readers.

A recent study conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found evidence that merely looking at a photo of a loved one can decrease a person’s perception of pain, the New York Times Well blog reported this week. Although the study was very small, focusing only on 25 women’s reactions to images of their boyfriends, it found that their pain perception was lower looking at a photo than even holding their boyfriend’s hand.

The winners of the 64th Annual College Photographer of the Year were announced over the weekend. Ryan C. Henriksen was named College Photographer of the Year and Maisie Crow, the runner-up (both are students at Ohio University). Check out the extensive gallery of winning images, as well as archived screencasts of the judging process, which lend incredible insight into how the judges’ decisions were made. UPDATE: There’s a great interview with Documentary Gold winner Alex Welsh over at The Visual Student.

The Telegraph launched a new section this week called Telephoto that compiles an impressive array of stories focusing on art and documentary photography. After being tipped off by 1854, the blog of the British Journal of Photography, we had a great time perusing gems like Alec Soth’s video diary of trying to photograph the most beautiful woman in Georgia (the country).

A 1,500 year-old pottery fragment in the abandoned city of Yinpan, which Sean discovered serendipitously after his original "abandoned city" story fell through. ©Sean Gallagher. Courtesy Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

Planning thoroughly and planning well are key to a large-scale assignment. However, staying flexible and being willing to throw out the plan at a moments notice is equally important. If you are prepared for both, there is a good chance your trip will be successful.

Traveling in rural China is not the best place to have a specific plan. Like most of us, I live in a large city where I am used to trains turning up on time, buses criss-crossing the city at all times of the day, and convenience at my fingertips almost everywhere. As soon as you step out of China’s major cities, a lot of this evaporates.

In my plan, I had penciled in one week for each location. As far as details — timing, when to arrive, when to leave, etc. — my notebook held no more information than, for example, “Week 1 – Inner Mongolia.” I knew exactly I where I wanted to go and what I wanted to achieve there, but it was impossible for me to predict how and when I would arrive and leave a certain place. In this respect, I had to remain completely flexible and not become frustrated if I could not get to a location on ‘x’ day, as ‘y’ day would probably be ok, too. This was a luxury I had working for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which afforded me much more time than most assignments.

Adapting to change was the only constant on my trip. Mid-way through our journey, my assistant had to unexpectedly return to Beijing, forcing me to work alone for a small portion of the trip. I had anticipated something like this, so I focused on subjects I could cover without an assistant.

The biggest challenge during my Pulitzer assignment was when my “chapter” on abandoned cities appeared to have fallen through. I had researched and planned a trip to a spectacular abandoned city in the Inner Mongolian deserts. The day before embarking, we discovered that the area had just been shut off to outsiders because the route to the city passed through one of China’s space rocket launch centers. I had no other back-up location for abandoned cities, so I was concerned that this important chapter would be missed.

As we called hotels to book rooms for our future stops, we mentioned our predicament to a hotelier. This hotelier happened to be a professional guide to explorers and told us of another abandoned city rarely visited by outsiders. A quick search online revealed that the demise of the city fell inline with desertification, so we decided it was our final (and only) option. The old city of Yinpan turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole trip, despite coming about completely by chance.

Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Tourists enjoy themselves on the 100-meter-high sand dunes. ©Sean Gallagher. Courtesy Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

Before I was awarded the grant from Pulitzer, I had to have it clear in my mind what I wanted to achieve with this project and how exactly I wanted to achieve it. I had already been working on the subject of desertification on-and-off for over a year, so I already had a good idea of most of the main issues.

In drawing up my application for the grant, I had to lay out a detailed plan of where I would go during my proposed trip, which forced me to clearly identify the key issues that were important to the big topic. Beginning this planning process was no easy task. China is a vast place and desertification is an equally vast issue. I knew that I was going to have to lay a careful plan if I was to achieve everything I wanted to.

The first thing I did was revisit all the old articles that I had bookmarked online over the months. I have a habit of bookmarking interesting articles in case I ever need them or decide to follow-up on them for potential photo-essays. This helped me quickly review what I was already familiar with. Through my research, I then started to make a list of separate issues that were all linked to desertification. These included things like environmental refugees, degraded grasslands, abandoned cities, threatened water, tourism, science vs. the desert, etc.

The next step was to head to my office wall, where a large, detailed map of China became my logistical planning station. With articles in hand, I started to circle locations that seemed to represent each issue I wanted to cover. Quite soon, I had circles and scribbles all over the map. My proposal was going to be for a 6-week trip, so I knew I didn’t want to attempt too much — but I also needed to cover all the key issues. I decided to tackle six issues, one per week, giving me seven days with each location and issue.

One of my main goals for this project was to show that desertification was affecting vast swathes of China. I therefore planned to travel from “coast to coast,” 4,000 km from one side of China to the other, and picked locations that would move me progressively across the country. Most of my locations fell along China’s northern rail network, so I decided to ride these trains as a way to link my locations and give me a better feel for the land I was traveling through.

Once I had decided on locations and how I was going to travel to them, I needed to identify how I would cover the issue in each location. Again, this came down to research. I trawled the web looking for information on each location to give me a an idea of what images I could potentially make there. For some of the locations, however, the information was limited, so I knew it was going to take some investigative work once there to tell the story. Also, you can never plan completely what pictures you will take because it is often the serendipitous ones that eventually turn out to be the best.

Even after all my research was done and the plan was laid out, though, I just knew that everything would not transpire as smoothly as I hoped. “This is China — things are never straightforward,” I though to myself. I had prepared as best I could, but I also had to be ready to adapt quickly to the changes I would inevitably have to make to my plan.

• Shaw Rocco’s Cellular Obscura, a series of images taken with this generation’s Kodak Brownie i.e. a cell phone. Don’t miss the end of the slideshow – it’s very worth it. Also, bonus points for a great version of one of my favorite songs.

• Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, the result of more than 10 years (and several prestigious grants) documenting post-Soviet Russia. Several people mentioned this to me as the standout of all the festival slideshows.

• Carl Bower’s Chica Barbie about the beauty pageants of Colombia. I feel incredibly ambivalent about these images, which in my mind is a marker of great art. This was one of several great projections brought in by Slideluck Potshow…a natural addition to a festival that started as a projection in Nick Nichols’ backyard.

• Martin Parr’s Playas book. Watch the preview on Magnum in Motion, but keep in mind that the book is so much trashier (in the best way) in person. Parr found the worst designer, cheapest paper, and least-talented printer possible to produce this little conversation piece…which claims “$7.99!” on the cover but really sells for $40.

• Kelly Shimoda’s I Guess You Don’t Want to Talk to Me Anymore. Ok so I technically knew about his one before, and in fact I think my cell phone is probably in this project somewhere, which comprises photos of cell phones displaying text messages. But until I saw this at Slideluck, I didn’t realize how many images were available on Kelly’s blog and website.

• Michael Wolf’s Transparent City. Considering that the Museum of Contemporary Photography has already picked up on these, I’m probably behind the times. The best part about seeing these as a slideshow was the mix between the distance and detail shots of people photographed in the windows of huge office buildings.

• Blood Trail, a documentary following conflict photographer Robert King through 15 years in the field. Sadly, I didn’t make it to this film, but I heard so many great things about it that I am making it a point to hunt down a copy asap.

• Jessica Dimmock’s Papparazzi! Jessica made a name early for herself with her Ninth Floor work about a community of addicts living in a posh New York apartment building. Of course I was intrigued to learn she had moved on to photograph the least respected and possibly best paid editorial photographers in the business.

• Tim Hetherington’s Sleeping Soldiers, which most people saw at the New York Photo Festival, where it was praised as the highlight of the program. I’d watched the video online, but it’s always better live on a huge screen.

• Yolanda Cuomo and Kristi Norgaard, who designed all the visuals for the festival, explaining the fascinating process they go through to design photo books for legends including Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Sylvia Plachy.

A lone farmer rides his tractor through a small rural village. ©Sean Gallagher. Courtesy Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

During my 1-year paid internship at Magnum Photos London in 2004-5, the then deputy director Hamish Crooks gave me and fellow interns some simple yet important advice on how to find newsworthy stories. “Pick up a newspaper and read.”

Hamish encouraged us to devour headlines to understand why people care enough about an issue to report on it. He also advised us to find topics we were passionate about on a personal level, rather than simply covering issues we were “expected” to cover. From that point on, I started to read news in a different way — always assessing its visual potential and gauging my own interest in the subject matter.

In the summer of 2007 I came across the subject of desertification in a news article. Images of villages and towns being swallowed by slowly moving sand dunes filled my mind. I imagined cracked earth in drought-stricken regions and intense sandstorms blocking out the sun. When you first consider covering an issue, it is inevitable that you conjure images that represent your preconceptions about it. Some turn out to be true, others don’t. One of the challenges of reporting on a subject is to confront your preconceptions and free yourself from them.

I began my work on desertification in western China by taking two weeks to gauge the potential for this story. At the beginning of 2008 I received the first David Alan Harvey Fund for Emerging Photographers, which helped me continue this work and also look at other environmental issues in Asia. As I continued the desertification story, I started to look for other sources of funding to help me continue the work and enable me to push even deeper into the subject matter. This is when I discovered the work of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and their travel grants to cover under-reported issues, which I felt desertification definitely was.

Application for the Pulitzer Center grant involved writing a detailed project proposal and outlining logistical and financial planning for the entirety of the proposed project. My project also had to fall in line with the Pulitzer Center’s focus on, “enterprising reporting projects throughout the world with an emphasis on issues that are under-reported, mis-reported, or not reported on at all.” Even though I had first read desertification in an international publication, and had seen work on the same subject by other photographers, I still believed it was a vastly under-reported issue and deserved more attention.

In February of 2009 I received an email from Nathlaie Applewhite, the Associate Director of the Pulitzer Center, informing me that my application for the grant had been successful. At that point I began my preparations and logistical planning for 6-weeks on the road. Needless to say, there was a lot to do!

• Have you seen The Vendor Client Relationship video yet? If not, you might be the last one. Go check it out now and we won’t tell anyone ;-) It’s a hilarious take on the real world situation for those who work in the photography and advertising business.

• A Photo Editor pointed us to another noteworthy new online video — Michael Almereyda’s documentary about photography icon William Eggleston on Snag Film, William Eggleston in the Real World. The fillmmaker followed Eggleston on various trips around the country, capturing his complex personality and how it affects his work.

• The winning images of the PDN Photography Annual 2009 are now available on its website. We want to give a big shout out to our friends and contributors Alan Chin and Ed Kashi, who won the Photojournalism/Sports/Documentary and Corporate Design/Photo Products categories respectively.

• Speaking of technology, the ASMP blog has a post on the five tech trends to watch, including multimedia, the mobile web, immersive websites, computer generated imaging, and augmented reality. If you don’t know what those are, time to get on the cutting edge.

• The New York Times reported that a group of scientists in Europe gathered in a small town in the Netherlands to try to reinvent Polaroid film, which stopped production last year. They took over an abandoned old Polaroid factory and are attempting to reinvent the chemicals needed for the instant film processing. According to the Times, Florian Kaps, the Austrian entrepreneur behind the project, hopes to start manufacturing and distributing the film worldwide later this year.

• Earlier this month, Stephen Mayes gave a key-note speech at a World Press Photo event in Amsterdam. Essentially, he criticized the lack of variety both in terms of subject matter and style of visual language in photojournalism. Whether you agree with Mayes’ argument or not, we think his speech is worth a look.