Projects

At the southernmost tip of South America, a group of women are working together to keep alive their cultural tradition of spinning and weaving wool for clothing. These women call themselves “Hilanderas del fin de mundo”, or “spinners at the end of the world,” and they spin, stain, and weave local sheep’s wool in Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego region, where the process has been passed down through generations of families.

After months of buildup and half-hearted attempts at diplomacy, Russia launched a full, unprovoked invasion of it’s neighbor Ukraine on February 24, 2022. On the false pretexts of safeguarding its own security from NATO expansion and countering Ukrainian radicals, Russia initiated the largest ground war in Europe in decades.

Since protests in Kyiv drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014, Eastern Ukraine has been convulsed by a rebel insurgency, inflamed by Russia, that has evolved into a full-fledged war centered in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk – an industrial region known as Donbass.

The U.S. Mexico borderlands are most often described as the peripheries of a dividing line. My Republic refuses that lens categorically and reframes the landscape as a character that creates a unique and unifying experience far into the American Southwest and deep into northern Mexico.

The Yupik village of Newtok in western Alaska, population 380, is sinking as the permafrost beneath it thaws. Erosion has already wiped out nearly a mile of Newtok’s land, and it is estimated that in three to five years it could be underwater. The entire village is in the process of moving to Mertarvik, a new village site about nine miles away. Newtok is the first community in Alaska that has already begun relocation as a result of climate change—pioneering a process that many other Alaskan villages may soon undergo.

The years-long drought in California has led to a steady uptick in the number, size and ferocity in wildfires in the state. Wildfires are a natural phenomenon, but drought, climate change and decades of fire suppression led to more than 6,000 wildfires burning more than 300,000 acres in 2015 alone.

In 2014 the world witnesses the largest outbreak of the lethal Ebola virus. Before surfacing in Guinea, and later spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone, the virus was largely relegated to the remote forest regions of Central Africa where sporadic outbreaks were typically short lived and claimed a relatively small number of lives. It is thought that the scope of previous outbreaks was largely contained by virtue of the extremely remote and isolated nature of the environments in which they occurred. Hunters and other people who interact regularly with the forest and wildlife that lives there were typically the first victims. While no one yet knows where exactly the virus originates, researchers know that it lurks somewhere in the forest.

In Cambodia, the monsoon season can turn entire communities into islands for months at a time, cutting them off from medical services. In a country dealing with an alarming Tuberculosis crisis, this is a recipe for disaster. Thankfully for the people of Cambodia, the dedicated health workers of Operation ASHA travel by foot, by motorcycle, and even by boat to bring cutting-edge Tuberculosis care to the most isolated communities.

The Eastern European country of Belarus is known primarily for its autocratic leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who since 1994 has presided over the former Soviet state as if the USSR had never collapsed. Its economy is largely state-run and political freedoms essentially nonexistent, although a thriving IT industry and relatively low levels of corruption have brought a modicum of comfort to the growing middle class in the capital city of Minsk. It remains a geopolitical fulcrum, shrewdly playing close ties with Russia against Western desires for openness.

“The New End of the World” is a hybrid documentary that explores, through photography and video, the footprints generated by the pandemic in the southernmost city in the world and how nature reveals to us as our safest shelter.

In the Maryknoll Sisters Residential Center in Ossining, New York, 70 retired Maryknoll Sisters adjust to their new lives after living abroad for 50-60 years. Many of the Sisters are over the age of ninety. And as each Sister passes, their stories of selfless dedication to humanity are lost with them.

On the evening of March 18, 2018, Sacramento Police Officers Officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet were investigating routine vandalism complaints in the Meadowview neighborhood when they shot and killed Stephon Clark, 22, in his grandmother’s backyard. They claimed he pointed a gun at them. It was a cellphone.

In these photos, Tamara Merino and Luján Agusti capture how the migration crisis impacts daily life on both sides of the US-Mexico border. 

The Indus River and its tributaries provide crucial fresh water to both India and Pakistan, yet the future of this shared resource is increasingly precarious as a result of climate change, population growth, and bitter political divisions.

Scientists call the Alaska “ground zero” for climate change, and last year was the state’s warmest on record. Alaska is at the front line of climate change and what is happening to villages across the region can be seen as early indications for the rest of the world’s future. “Chasing Winter” explores how this reality is transforming the relationship between people, animals, and the land.

"In the Shadow of the Sun" is a rebuttal to the typical representation of California as a land of wealth and beauty. It's not just the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Yosemite and Napa. It's also the state with the highest rate of poverty in the nation.

Are we prepared?

Extreme rainfall is a serious challenge for Western Norway. In specific areas, flooding could be twice as high as the floods that hit the region in 2005. This film presents results from the CICERO-led research project TWEX Translating Weather Extremes into the Future that offer local and regional decision-makers a more realistic picture of what future weather extremes might look like, hence facilitating adaptation planning and implementation.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a small mountainous territory in the South Caucasus caught in limbo. Officially part of Azerbaijan, it has functioned as a region of Armenia since the two former Soviet republics fought a bloody war over the land as the Soviet Union fell apart. A 1994 ceasefire brought an end only to official hostilities. In early April 2016 fighting once again erupted for four intense days, killing dozens on each side.

A visual study on Mexican syncretism applied to masked dances.

A short film introducing Trond Mohn Stiftelse, the Trond Mohn Foundation, founded in 2004 by means of a NOK 250 million donation (approx. USD 30 million) from Trond Mohn. The foundation gives grants toward research and research supporting activities at the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital.

Seventy-five choir members from the Bergen Philharmonic Chorus, sheltering in the safety of their own homes, created this extraordinary piece of music during quarantine from the Coronavirus in Bergen, Norway. Each singer recorded their own selfie videos which was then pieced together to create The Whitsun Hymn from Edvard Grieg from Peer Gynt.

Achieving financial security is an uphill battle for women in rural Myanmar. To solve this, women are teaming up in extraordinary ways to lift themselves out of poverty and invest back into their communities. Together, they gather in groups to start communal savings banks, elect leaders, receive financial training and start small businesses, all while strengthening their social connections and ability to bring about change. This platform is possible through the award-winning micro banking program, WORTH, a subset of PACT Myanmar, one of the oldest running aid organizations in the country.

On October 11, 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarch announced its support for Ukraine’s effort to create an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, moving out from under Moscow’s patronage for the first time since 1686. It’s a move with long historical roots that was finally realized due to current political tensions, and it has incensed the Russian Orthodox Church leadership, who may break from the church leadership in Istanbul in Christianity’s biggest rupture in a thousand years.

“There are two ways of thinking about living here; either you go on every day and when it’s your turn to die you die, or you live every day in fear.” – Daniel Gonzalez, 26, a resident of Ciudad Juarez who later moved to El Paso, Texas.

In the fall of 2013, the war between Congolese forces and rebels known as M23 culminated in a fierce battle on plains of volcanic rock in Congo’s east. For more than a year, M23—a formidable rebellion with ties to Rwanda and Uganda—had scored successive victories over the Congolese army, including the capture of Goma, the region’s most vital city. In late 2013, with enhanced support from the United Nations and the international community, the Congolese army resolved to crush the rebellion and launched one of the largest military campaigns in its recent history.

“Living City: A Tale of Two Bridges” compares the decision to replace the 60-year-old Tappan Zee Bridge connecting Westchester and Rockland counties across the Hudson River with the decision to renovate the iconic Brooklyn Bridge that is more than twice that age.

Jason Melerine was born to the water. His father fished, his grandfather fished, his great-grandfather fished. At age 11, Melerine drew pictures of the boat he would someday own. The day he turned 16, he quit school to go crabbing. Now 28, he can barely read and write. Fishing off Delacroix Island, a sliver of land alongside the Louisiana coast, is all he knows.

Across nine million square miles at the top of the planet, climate change is writing a new chapter. Arctic permafrost is thawing much faster than expected, releasing carbon gases that could reshape the planet and drastically speed up global warming. It is already transforming the landscape and changing the lives of people and animals from Alaska to Siberia.

The Beating of the Heart is a dispatch from a place where I both do and do not belong. In 2011 I began photographing in the small town of Webster City, Iowa. Over the next several years I visited more than a dozen times, photographing life in Webster City as well as my own experiences and reactions to it, trying to better understand the people I now consider friends. These photographs are the accumulated record of my journeys, revealing the degree of my bond.

Angelica Ortiz collapsed on the asphalt outside the morgue’s single door. The sun dried her tears. She lifted herself up to glance through the small glass window as if to check if he was still there. Inside her ten-year-old son lay on a cold steel gurney. She fell back down to her knees. Her husband still didn’t know. She was alone but for a small crowd of journalists who stopped to take her picture. Renato Lacayo, a Honduran journalist, stood back and watched them.

This series of diptychs were taken in May 2015 and June 2015 during this past year’s abnormally fast spring thaw and are part of a larger work in progress about the impacts of climate change across Alaska.

As winter settled over Ukraine in late 2013, Kyiv exploded into crisis. President Viktor Yanukovych announced that he would abandon a promised trade and partnership agreement with the European Union in favor of support from Russia. Thousands of people took to the streets in protest over a culture of official corruption which they feared would only deepen amid closer ties to Russia.

Mali has been long been known for both its rich ancient Islamic history, and its modern vibrant culture. But over the past two years, many of these features were almost permanently destroyed, when jihadi militants took over the cities of the north, like Gao and Timbuktu. Imposing their own despotic version of religious law, with brutal punishments and public executions, the jihadis threatened to decimate the relics of Mali’s ancient past, and suppress the lively spirit of its joyous communities. Women bore the brunt of this crackdown: they were forced to cover their brightly lit clothes with dark hijabs and face-covering burkas, and banned from work, school, or regular access to medical care. Behavior deemed “immoral” resulted in imprisonment and beatings.

The ocean is man’s last true relationship with the wild. Fishermen and the waters they work cannot be separated. And to save one, you must save the other.

Over the past three years there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of women imprisoned for federal crimes in Mexico. Ciudad Juárez is the most dangerous city in Mexico, plagued by drug war violence, not to mention poverty and unemployment, which has only escalated after the financial collapse. The rise of women’s involvement in narcotics related crime in Juárez has also escalated, directly linked to poverty and lack of employment opportunities.

The American West is entering it’s fourth year of a historic drought. Climate change is playing a role, but there’s simply not enough water to support the increasing population and large-scale agriculture in what is essentially a desert.

On July 9th, 2011, the swamps and plains of southern Sudan became the world’s 193rd country. For decades, across this vast and largely vacant landscape, unspeakable violence and devastation prevailed. More than two million people perished as southern rebels waged a 23-year rebellion against the northern government aimed at empowering the resource-rich but deeply marginalized south. In 2005, the war came to an ostensible end with an agreement that allowed for the prospect of southern independence in 2011, the same year in which the ceasefire expired.

Five years after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 250,000 people, Haiti continues to struggle. Despite the tremendous resources and ideas brought to bear, intended once and for all to set right Haiti’s development and governance challenges, many of the issues that have plagued the country for decades, including corruption, violence, dependence on foreign assistance, and poor infrastructure, remain deeply entrenched. Hopes raised high have fallen, replaced in the minds of many Haitians by bitter resentment that they have once again been exploited and forgotten.

When a massive influx of Central American children streamed across the U.S.-Mexican border in 2014, it sparked a political crisis, and a heated debate about the causes of this “surge.” U.S. politicians argued that the children were coming merely for economic reasons (that is, simply to take American jobs), rather than face the complicated reality that we have a refugee crisis on our very own doorstep.

On July 17, 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile as it passed over eastern Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board. Immediate suspicion, backed up by on-the-ground evidence and analysis from Western intelligence agencies and international investigators, implicated the pro-Russian rebels currently fighting a war in the region, who seemingly received the weapon directly from Russia.

The power of music: Six young voices pay tribute to our front line workers throughout the world who haven't stopped fighting COVID-19 since the day it arrived. The Edvard Grieg children’s choir came together during quarantine to give thanks on behalf of us all.

Using Zoom to rehearse from the safety of their homes before recording the music standing two meters apart in the empty music studios at Grieg Hall during quarantine, the six-member choir sang The Lord is my Shepherd (hymn 23) by Howard Goodall (Faber Music) under the leadership of Conductor Håkon Matti Skrede.