From chapter 2 of the book “Elegance and Dignity – Stories from India”

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Alang is the largest ship recycling yard in the world, a kilometres-long expanse of sites where gigantic carcasses of ships are waiting to be disassembled by hand-workers, who recycle parts and components. Here are employed about 40000 workers, as much as a medium town. It’s a dirty, dangerous, exhausting and deadly job. They climb on these metal giants that stay torn apart and half-cut into the sea. They handle oxyhydrogen flames throughout the day, the air is unbreathable and saturated of combustion gasses, of oils, lubricants and acid fumes, the air is pungent, stinging, it burns the eyes and the nose. Here as elsewhere the workers are poor labourers coming from agricultural areas even poorer than here, like Bihar, Assam, Orissa, West Bengal or the neighbouring Pakistan, they flee from hunger, do not have any formal training to deal with toxic materials, are willing to make this life for the equivalent of a few euros per day. For this little money they are daily exposed to arsenic, lead, contaminated by asbestos, all of which under deafening noise. In the closer village people live by sheep farming and by a related industry (recovery and distribution of spare functioning pieces of the ships). It’s like stepping back 200 years when you exit the shipyards and visit the village. But even here the pollution is terribly high.

Scrap materials, however, are a big business and thanks to cheap Indian labourers a too little costly one, and these environmental risks are not taken into any account. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and Turkey are the homes of the world’s shipbreaking facilities. Every year the shipping industry sends around 600 ships of all types to be dismantled on their beaches. Workers here are totally unqualified, having very little education and are thus easy to be exploited. Workers are being provided neither with the adequate training nor with the equipment to work in such a dangerous and toxic environment, although shipbreaking is considered by the International Labour Organisation as one of the heaviest and most hazardous occupations in the world. Their general living conditions after migrating to the yards are extremely bad. Every year thousands of workers are the victims of deadly accidents at the yards of India, Bangladesh and other shipbreaking countries. The working conditions are extremely bad and safety measures hardly exist. If the shipbreaking workers don’t die or get seriously injured because of an accident, they suffer a big risk of falling ill or dying from toxic waste-related diseases.

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© 2013 Marco Palladino – All rights reserved

beach, broken, cargo, chunks, container, corrosion, damaged, discarded, disposal, dump, environment, environmental, freight, garbage, goods, heap, indonesia, industry, iron, junk, junkyard, lombok, metal, ocean, pile, pollution, polution, recycle, recycling, reuse, rust, rusty, scrap, scrap-iron, ship, shipping, stack, steel, traditional, transport, transportation, trash, ugly, utilize, waste, wreck, wreckage, yard, pollution

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Sometimes between oblivion and fame there is just an ordinary event. It was the year 2007, and during an auction, for a few hundred dollars, Mr. John Maloof, bought something like 40,000 negatives of unpublished images. Shots made by a nanny between the '50s and '80s, that narrate life of people living in the largest American cities streets.

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In January and February of 2013 I made a long journey to India in search of stories through which to tell a much visited country under a new light and in my opinion a more true one. It was the period of the Maha Kumbh Mela and I started with the desire to go to this huge religious festival, like my colleagues, to capture one of the most beautiful mass rituals of the modern age. The fate instead led me elsewhere.

I discovered the Gujarat, very little kwown by tourists and I was able to photograph an India that is very different from that illustrated on the postcards. At short a book will be published (both English and Italian) containing eight reportages and various littler stories. After that I’ll publish the photos. But here's a preview that collects portraits, excerpts from stories that will be illustrated in the book. Good vision.

 

 

 

©2013 Marco Palladino. All rights reserved

 

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ARTICOLO IN ITALIANO >>

What a beautiful picture, who knows what treatments you have made in Photoshop? Willy-nilly any photographer is today confronted with such questions. Just think about the winner photo of the World Press Photo Award 2013, the beautiful photograph of Paul Hansen, that has aroused so many reactions, as it should be, the vast majority however addressed to the editing, that many have considered excessive, and once again all complaints against the photographer, who is guilty according to many of creating drama in picture out of retouching, with an almost painterly use of light and color, definitely got in a fake way, according to many critics.

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