The “Welcome to Exilistan” exhibition has reopened, and our studio space includes a sound and video booth collecting oral histories – memories, stories, viewpoints – from the Afghan diaspora in Berlin.

The exhibit and studio space at Rosa Luxemburg Strasse 16 in Berlin Mitte.

Find out more about this project on our brand new Afghan Memories website, which will eventually feature the videos we are currently collecting.  For now, the studio space at Rosa Luxemburg Str. 16 in Berlin Mitte is becoming a home to the expanding Newsgroup Afghanistan team of young people, and a venue for talks and exchanges.  Ongoing infos, opening hours and announcements are best followed on our Facebook page.

Meanwhile, some more pics from behind the scenes of our Vernissage and events….

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I had the great fortune to connect with a wonderful participatory media project for young Afghans in Berlin when visiting the city briefly in August, and was able to join the team for the opening weekend of workshops. Now I am back in Berlin for the year, just in time to complete the project, which is turning into a beautifully realized exhibition at Box Freiraum in Friedrichshain.

More of the youth reporters’ work will be featured later on, once @EverydayMigration is up and running on Instagram and Medium, but for now, some behind the scenes images of the process and exhibition.

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I am thrilled to report that OSF is supporting a dual project I will be creating while based in Berlin, Germany for the coming year:

As a curator and researcher, I will help launch @EverydayMigration as part of the #Everyday Projects, to highlight and discuss the role visual media plays in how we understand global migration and displacement. And as a visual journalist I will continue working with Afghan youths in Berlin by reporting and teaching, to create a multimedia portrait of a new generation in exile that is finding itself caught in a world of contradictory impulses – between rapidly increasing technological and cultural globalization on one hand, and the rise of populist xenophobia and national isolationism on the other. Stay tuned for more detailed updates soon, but for starters here’s a list of the awe-inspiring group of fellows I will be joining…

Everyone loves Sithandizele, our first participant from Botswana!

In July, the Graying of AIDS team attended the International AIDS Conference in Durban for our third installment of creating portraits and collecting oral histories on aging and HIV/AIDS. Over the course of five super productive and stimulating days we were able to interview and photograph some amazing people from Botswana, Canada, India, Jamaica, Mauritania, Mexico, Namibia, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania, Uganda, the United States, and Zimbabwe for the ongoing Stories From An Aging Pandemic archive.

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Portraits of Vice Media co-founder Surooj Alvi shot for the Montreal Gazette as part of a profile on the company’s newly expanded Brooklyn headquarters.

So very happy to see the story on young refugees I photographed and interviewed in Berlin this fall published. The full piece can be seen and read over at Al Jazeera America. A huge thank you to Mark Rykoff for letting me produce this reportage, and for the great layout! With Andrew Curry (text) and Caroline Preston (editing.)

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In honor of this year’s World AIDS Day, I decided to reach out to some of the former Camp Heartland kids who were featured in the OSF Moving Walls 11 exhibition, or had been profiled in the book that I co-produced for the HIV/AIDS NGO‘s peer prevention outreach. It has been 15 years since I first began photographing and interviewing teens who were facing the continuing stigma surrounding HIV, and all these years later, given our new sharing culture and social media connectivity, it seemed time to follow up.

The series ran over at the Open Society Foundation’s Instagram feed this week, presenting updates on the young people’s lives, as well as their thoughts on growing up, secrecy and disclosure, friendship and loss, and surviving against the odds. To be continued.

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Also for World AIDS Day, we were featured on Yahoo News with a selection of images and quotes from our Graying of AIDS oral history project.