At the end of each day, North Korean officials would review all of the photographs taken by Tariq Zaidi -- deleting the ones they didn't approve of. But then Zaidi was lucky to be capturing any images at all from inside the hermit state.
It was my younger years. I had just published work from the Sudanese Civil War, and the Editor-in-Chief of Germany's GEO magazine, wrote that “Per-Andre risks life and limb for a good shot." Basically, I presume he meant I was a young fool, who took on assignments very few in their clear mind would consider.
Exploring the former house-monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party is one of the most exciting explorations I have ever done.
Almost 25 years later, the country of Romania is still in the midst of a difficult transformation from one of the region’s hardest dictatorships to a modern European nation. A transformation that photographer Tamas Dezso masterfully captures in his series Notes for an Epilogue.
Yesterday was the 24th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square -- an event that has been immortalized in history by AP photographer Jeff Widener’s famous “Tank Man” photo we shared earlier today. What you may not know is that, in China, the government still does everything it can to keep the event shrouded in mystery, pretending it never happened.
The Internet, however, is having none of it, as memes depicting the tank man photo in ways that might avoid censorship nets spring up all over the place. One of the most viral is the photo you see above.
It's nearly impossible to find a photograph in China taken before 1970 -- most images were destroyed or removed to other countries during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
A professor at Bristol University in the UK is running a project in search of these lost images, the BBC reports:
Such photographs are exceptionally rare in China. The turbulent history of the 20th Century meant that many archives were destroyed by war, invasion and revolution. Mao Zedong's government regarded the past as a "black" time, to be erased in favour of the New China. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s finished the job.
"If you were at all savvy," says (Professor Robert) Bickers, "you realised early on that you had to destroy your own private family records, before the Red Guards came and found evidence of your bourgeois, counter-revolutionary past, when you might have drunk coffee in a café bar, à la mode."
In the 1970s and 80s the Czechoslovak secret police, among other things, were charged with surveying the population without their consent or, for that matter, knowledge. Taking pictures from under coats or inside suitcases, the secret police kept tabs on the goings on of the general public. And while the act itself is voyeuristic and creepy, the pictures turned out surprisingly well.