life in brooklyn
- Giving Back: The Ila Trust, New Delhi
Last week I was in New Delhi on assignment with BusinessWeek Magazine working with one of my most favorite editors Sarah Greenberg Morse. I’d been hoping to get to New Delhi for awhile now. I’d wanted to see some friends up there and get a dose of cold weather considering its the holiday season and its still 90 freaking degrees and humid in Mumbai. Delhi is cold well, at least colder and that my friends is a welcome change.
My regular assistant was out of town helping Laura El-Tantaway navigate a story in eastern Maharashtra, off she went borrowing my RZ and a bunch of film, so I hired Janikka as my first assistant and flew to Delhi to photograph an inventor of sorts. The portrait went like clock work and we decided to switch our flights and stay in New Delhi for the weekend.
Dan Pepper graciously offered up his room to J and I so we packed our bags and headed over to his apartment in one of my favorite parts of New Delhi, Jangpura Extension…. right near the amazing and wonderful HAWKERS HOUSE! I just love their cold coffee and grilled ham and cheese sammys! J and I haven’t seen Dan in ages and we’d been talking about working on a project together for a medical NGO he volunteers for called the Ila Trust perfect timing all around.
This past year has been super busy and my neck/back injury has really slowed me down the last few months. I haven’t had time to work on personal projects or to volunteer as much as I would like to. Being in the right place at the right time last week allowed me to fit in at least one small day of volunteering for an organization that really is doing a great service to the poor residents of New Delhi providing medical services on location to the people who really can’t afford it otherwise. Dan, who will be a doctor at some point in the next 10 years has been volunteering with Ila taking medical histories and doing pre examinations for the last few months. We went with the mobile medical unit on a cold Saturday morning at dawn. Three doctors and a pharmacist treated about 200 people on the side of a busy highway. While I didn’t do much, I’m hoping that the pictures I made for them will help a little bit. I’ll be going back to Delhi the next chance I get and photographing more.
As you know, TIS THE SEASON! So if you’d like to donate to Ila please send cash money via Paypal to me and I’ll get it to Dan. Shoot me an email and I’ll give you my Paypal address. Most of the people being served by Ila earn less than 100 dollars a month so as you can imagine… every little bit helps. 5 bucks to 100k. Send it over people.
- In Print: Vogue India
I had a couple of features in Vogue India this past November. Here is a shot from a shoot we did back in October. Bandana had some of her ancestral saris turned into dresses by three of India’s top designers. We photographed Tinu Verghese wearing the dresses with the designer in the frame. Lots of fun.
- 2009 Year End: Mumbai Chabad
In August 2009 I started working on a project for the London Sunday Times Magazine. Although the final article only used 3 images I worked on the story for a week. I was mainly to photograph the Chabad House in Mumbai and the people associated with it. I also photographed the General Manager of the Taj Hotel who lost his family (wife and two children) during the attack.
I photographed Rabbi Berkowitz, the Rabbi chosen by Chabad to organize the reconstruction of the Mumbai Chabad House that was destroyed during the November 26, 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Six Jews including the Rabbi and his wife were killed between Wednesday, November 25 and Friday, November 27.
I covered the 26/11 attacks for the NYT as they were happening. Ruth Fremson, Amiran White and myself were witness to the horrible events those days at the Taj Hotel, Chabad House and Oberoi hotel. We missed the destruction at VT station and on Colaba Causeway. Professionally I did my job and made pictures that people around the world needed to see but those days were very difficult for me on a personal level. I’d never seen anything like it and I never want to again. Though I wasn’t captive and no one I know was killed during those days I, like many native Mumbaikers and Indians alike, felt personally attacked.
I look at the work I did in August and September of 2009 ad a way of getting closure for myself. I needed to see the inside of the Chabad house as an American and as a Jew (albeit secular). I needed to photograph it and I didn’t want to do it with a throng of other photographers. I wanted to do it silently so that I could say goodbye to people I never really knew but had felt connected to for almost a year.
- Brunch With Naz
Kainaz came to town this week. She’s here on a Fulbright and makes a lovely addition to the Mumbai scene such that it is. We took her out for Brunch at the Marriott a couple of days after she landed and introduced her to one of the the stranger traditions one can experience here….
The Expat Brunch.
More pictures to come from the brunch and the fun marathon at Beej’s place that followed.
Welcome to the party Kainaz!
- This is very funny.
This is funny.
- I got Blogged!
Kevin Martin featured me in his Visual Student NPPA blog. Take a look here:
http://blogs.nppa.org/visualstudent/2009/12/10/working-abroad-michael-rubenstein/
- And this is why I love the British
And this is why I love the British Australians.
http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html
Amazingly funny.
- Jakarta and Bali
After I finished up some things in Jakarta I decieded to take a little four day break in the middle of nowhere. I got myself a room at a spa in Bali and switched off (mostly). This place is amazing. Seriously. If you ever need to just forget about the world I can’t recommend it enough. I didn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t bringing me beer or rubbing my back for three days. It was fantastic. Bali is definitely a place I’ll be coming back to at some point in my life. No doubt.
PS: Jakarta was cool too. Thanks to the Ogilvy team there for making me feel at home and showing me some great places to hang out.
- All You Photographers Out There
To all you photographers out there…
Please take care of your backs and necks. I was always thought that it couldn’t happen to me. I was young and invincible. Sure I spend a lot of time on the lap top, sitting in tiny, crappy airplane seats, walking around with 30 pounds of camera equipment on my shoulder, not exercising, eating badly, blah blah blah blah blah. Nothing can hurt me.
Well, after a week of lying flat on my back with two compressed discs I can tell you that if you want to be a successful photographer being able to stand up is a part of the deal. Take care of your cores yo, they are key to your success.
I have an awesome neck brace that I have to wear whenever I'm in a car or on a plane for the next little bit.
- Recent Work: Global Yahoo! Campaign and some updates
The last six months have been absolutely insane. I got back to Mumbai at the end of July after shooting a personal project in Portland, Oregon and spending a month in Europe meeting with editors with every intention of staying there for awhile. August was super busy in Mumbai shooting jobs for Glamour, The London Sunday Times Magazine, Forbes, NYT and NIDO (a new German client). As soon as September rolled around things went absolutely insane. Redux bid me for a job with Ogilvy West shooting a part of the new Yahoo! Global Campaign in Mumbai and through some stroke of unbelievable luck I actually got it. The Global Creative Director for the campaign was already in Mumbai to shoot the commercial spot so we sat down for a drink at the Taj Lands End. We sorted out all the specifics for our shoot that would take place later on in the week and I helped them sort out some production issues there were having with gear for their television shoot. All in all a fantastic day.
When the shoot day came, so did the monsoon rain. We had a lot of last minute adjustments to make but all in all the job went off. A few days later we were asked to bid several more locations. We lost Europe but got Taipei and Seoul and I was out of Mumbai again! I have to say that I had a fantastic time in East Asia. The crews, clients and agency folks in Taipei and Seoul were fantastic. Especially David Barker in Taipei. He’s a photographer that took on the production for our shoot on extremely short notice and did an absolutely fantastic job. He really hooked it up. By the time I got back to Mumbai there were billboards up all over town with my pictures on them. I’d never seen that before. All I can say is that it was surreal.
Unfortunately I can’t show you any of the images from the campaign yet, but I can show you some of the random shots I took while I was out and about. Here are some from Taipei…
- GF1 Part Two
The GF1 is turning out to be a fun little camera. It could do better over 800 ISO and the view finder could be sharper and easier to use but other than that I think its a great camera for going out with friends or for taking into places where a full sized SLR would be noticed. The really cool part about the GF1 is that you can attach Leica M lenses to it, the sad part is that there is a 2x crop so you really do need a 21mm for it to make sense. I tried it with my 35 and it while it was fun the crop was so tight that it proved pretty hard to use. Too bad an M9 is 7k.
M
- Playing with the GF1
The only good thing (other than chicken fried steak) to come out of my IRS trip to Portland (more on that later) was that I was able to pick up one of the new Panasonic GF1 micro 4/3rds cameras. I’ve been messing around with it for the last week or so and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I don’t think I’d use it to shoot assignments with but as a messing around camera or a quick small camera for street photography I think I’m happy. Here are a few from the trip.
Best,
M
- Yahoo!
I just saw the first ad from the Yahoo! shoot I did for Ogilvy West in Mumbai last month. I went the cafe that I always go to for breakfast and one of the waiters was reading the paper. It had a huge yellow cover with a girls face on it that I recognized but I couldn’t figure out how I knew her. Then I realized I had taken the picture. Funny eh?
I’ll post more as people begin to spot them.
M
- LENS
My work on Mumbai Sperm Banks was featured on LENS, the photography blog on the New York Times website. Pretty sweet.
Best,
M
- Even though I really hate that little mouse…
This is pretty cool too….
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