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A World of Mist: South Island, New Zealand

Autumn, Keats said, is the season of mists. A photo essay by Steffen Schrägle captures mist from New Zealand to Argentina, while Robert Macfarlane sums it up in words ...

Mist is trickster weather. It steals silently in, turns familiar landscapes strange, dampens sounds, blurs vision—then clears suddenly and without warning. It has fairy-tale properties: to find yourself in mist is to be both enchanted and unsettled.   One of the eeriest hours of my life came in the Scottish Highlands. Five of us had climbed up, in thick snow, onto the summit plateau of a mountain called Beinn a’ Bhuird. Five hundred feet short of the plateau we met a fine white mist. The snow and the mist combined to produce the phenomenon known as white-out, in which air and ground seem to melt together and the world becomes depthless.  

Pictured: South Island, New Zealand, June 2009 “I was driving around on a location scouting for a job and came upon this lake,” Steffen Schrägle says. “It was amazing to see the red light coming through the mist, as if from a painting. A kind of fairy tale. Nothing moved, there was no wind, it was just magic to see this moment. I still don’t know exactly where it was” 

Cairo by iPhone: 1

When a British photographer moved to Cairo last year, he had no idea what was about to unfold before his eyes. In this photo essay, shot entirely on his iPhone, Steve Double captures a city before and after it made political history. Text by
Max Rodenbeck 

Cairo is a difficult place. The biggest Arab or African city and one of the biggest mostly Muslim metropolises, it is furiously crowded, grubby and noisy. It is venerable as the home to the sole survivor among the seven wonders of the ancient world. But the pyramids of Giza are often smog-bound today. Their stark triangles no longer perch romantically at the edge of undulating Saharan wastes, but sit instead in a sandpit, rimmed by the highways and apartment blocks of Cairo’s ever-expanding western suburbs. As the nightly Sound and Light show at their feet proclaims, the Sphinx bears witness to 48 centuries of time. But history’s latest efflorescence happens to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet whose own impassive sentinel, Colonel Sanders, gazes back at the Sphinx from a hundred yards away.

Pictured: “In a city that must be one of the most polluted in the world,” Steve Double says, “a clear sky is a rare thing and a clear sky with clouds even rarer. So, on the odd occasion that you can see the sunset in more than an orange haze of exhaust fumes, it’s a wonderful moment.” The image of the sun’s rays fanning out across the heavens has a particular relevance here: “It is thought to have inspired the architects of the pyramids”  

English seaside: The people's coastline

There’s the beach, and then there’s the English seaside. In this photo essay, Sheila Rock views it through American eyes, as “a forgotten England”. Text by Jasper Rees. 

The seaside the English do like to be beside looks different depending on who’s doing the looking. “King Lear” conjures up the coast of Albion as a place of epic scale and dizzying perspectives. Vera Lynn made the white cliffs of Dover a wartime symbol of home. There’s another coast that is altogether more domesticated and slipshod: bawdy in Donald McGill’s postcards, seedy in Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock”, gaudy in the Technicolor snaps of Martin Parr.  

Pictured: "I was photographing something else", Sheila Rock says, "and I just chanced upon these children. I happened to be far enough away and on the right lens to get the right dynamic. They were like fairies on the beach." Rock shot only three frames

BREAKING SHIPS: WHERE SHIPS GO TO DIE

In Bangladesh, ship-breaking turns a stretch of beach into a vision of hell and a parable of globalisation. A photo essay by Saiful Huq Omi. Introduction by The Economist's Asia editor, Simon Long.

THE CHILL OF IT ALL: SURFING OFF THE COAST OF SWEDEN

Surfers don’t just gather in California and Cornwall. A few tough men have made a habit of surfing at Torö, an island off the coast of Sweden. Among them is the photographer Daniel Månsson, who captures some frozen moments. Text by Isabel Lloyd.
Pictured: Johan Cargelius, a pioneer of surfing at Torö, wears a 7mm-thick wetsuit in winter. He claims not to suffer from the dual curses of the cold-water surfer: neither “ice-cream headache”—vivid, neuralgic pain at the front of the face—nor surfer’s ear, where bone grows over the eardrum in an attempt to protect it from continual dousing. “But two of my friends have had their ears drilled,” he says, nonchalantly.

Shadow Boxing: The boxers of Kibera, Nairobi

In the slum of Kibera, life is lived for the moment. Jehad Nga, an American war photographer, keeps going back to the local boxing club, where it feels as if the men are fighting their own shadows. Here he talks to J.M. Ledgard about the appeal of the place.

Pictured: Harun Ibrahim, 23, shadowboxes during practice. Ibrahim fights in the lightweight category. The limited equipment means most boxers shadowbox during the training sessions

Extreme Dogs: Hungarian sheep-herding dog

Famous for his extraordinary pictures of horses, TIM FLACH has now turned his lens on dogs. He talks about abstraction, neuroscience and the things we do to pets ...

Introduction by JOHN PARKER, globalisation correspondent of The Economist. His own dog is a Newfoundland.

Pictured: A Puli, a Hungarian sheep-herding dog (name: Andy). The long corded coat is designed to protect the breed from the harsh winters of the Hungarian plain. Traditionally, the dogs were shaved along with the sheep they herded and, like their charges, grew their coats back before winter. The shot, designed to show the dynamic qualities of the coat, was made by getting the dog to run and jump towards its owner, with the camera between the owner’s legs.

HOLY ROLLERS: Kathmandu's Sadhus

No sex, no family, no money…but plenty of consolations, including considerable flexibility and a liking for a giggle.

IAN WINSTANLEY  photographs the Sadhus of Kathmandu. Introduction by SIMON LONG.

London For Loners: SUNDAY NIGHTS

Big cities by day can become all too familiar. But on Sunday nights in winter, even sights you know well can turn into something strange and new. A photo essay by PETER KINDERSLEY. Introduction by JOANNA PITMAN.

The Barbican Kindersley shot this panorama by climbing to the cordoned-off space on top of one of the residential towers. "Unusually for me, it was early evening. The light faded rapidly and I wanted to catch the amazing luminescent sky with the glitter of tiny lights below. I felt as if I was in a low-flying airplane."

BEHIND THE CURTAIN: The Lviv Ballet (1)

Seldom does a Westerner win the trust of an eastern European ballet company. But, for our photo essay, SIMON CROFTS went backstage with the Lviv ballet—and even into the dancers’ homes. JULIE KAVANAGH, author of "Rudolf Nureyev: The Life" and a contributing editor to Intelligent Life magazine, writes about the ballet company.   Pictured: A stampede of swans to the dressing-room. The corps de ballet must return their pachki—their tutus—to the costume department to allow the staff to get home on time.

KENYA: FACES OF AIDS

Most photographs that capture Kenya appear in technicolour, zooming in on the country’s vibrant hues and landscapes. Their subjects are usually animals. (Tourism propped up the Kenyan economy until 2007, when the presidential election dragged down the industry.) This collection is quite different. In 2005 and 2007 ALEXANDRA SUICH, now a contributor to The Economist, worked with organisations in Kenya that provide at-home care to people who are HIV-positive. There she met and photographed a number of people, mostly women, who are fighting the disease or caring for people stricken with it.

Pictured: Charlotte Washe, Malindi, Kenya
Government hospitals are often oversubscribed, with two to a bed and patients on the floor. The hospital in this photograph is small and private, with only a few beds. Charlotte Washe, a nurse, helps oversee the hospital. In her free time she serves as a community health worker, providing at-home care to people who are HIV-positive and are too poor, too afraid or too sick to travel to hospitals for care.

BERLIN REVISITED: 20 YEARS AFTER THE WALL

In 1989 BRIAN HARRIS photographed the fall of the Berlin wall. Twenty years on, he returned to capture today’s Berlin for our photo essay in the Summer 2009 issue of Intelligent Life. Here we show a selection of Harris’s pictures with his commentary, introduced by TIM DE LISLE, editor of Intelligent Life. We are grateful to the Independent for permission to use photos from 1989.

Pictured: The Holocaust memorial, officially known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which opened in 2005 in the old no-man’s-land between East and West. "I saw this boy skipping from stone to stone who wouldn’t even have been born in 1989. It reminded me of something the architect, Peter Eisenman, said when it opened: 'People will dance on top of the pillars'."

21st-Century Slaves: A HIDDEN INDIA (1)

They’re not in chains, but they are shackled by debt, paid virtually nothing and treated harshly. Pete Pattisson goes to India to capture the face of slavery today in our Spring 2009 photo essay. Introduction by The Economist’s Asia editor, Simon Long

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT 
Migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh work late at a brick kiln in Punjab. Sometimes the kiln shuts for lack of demand, so the workers earn nothing and have to borrow more from their employers. There is even an informal market where workers can be “sold” to other kiln-owners, just like slaves. 

THE NATIONAL THEATRE: BEHIND THE SCENES

The National Theatre has been called a castle, a cathedral, a temple of art, a palace of culture and a nuclear-power station. But the theatre's idea of itself is changing. What was once a spot for earnest plays and capital-A "Art" has become a friendlier, sunnier place with the vitality of a carnival. Brian Harris, a former chief photographer of the Independent , spent a month behind the scenes capturing  preparations for "War Horse", a National hit that is now earning ovations on the West End.  Robert Butler, a former theatre critic, describes the drama within the fortress.

The National Theatre at night: LED lights transform the concrete exterior into a winning display of orange, purple, green and blue. When the National opened here in 1976, in an area badly hit by the Blitz, it was a lonely bastion of culture on the south bank. Among the many changes at the National over 32 years, the biggest has been its location. The stretch of riverbank that runs from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge has become London’s high street for the arts, with an annual footfall of 19m people. A little further east sits Shakespeare’s Globe, Tate Modern and the steely curves of Norman Foster’s City Hall.

Closing Time: A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS

Before there were chainstores and malls, there were single shops--and the British were famous for keeping them. Now they are dying out. The photographer Nick Dawe has made it his mission to capture them for posterity. Here we present his pictures as a photo essay, and he explains to Nick Coleman what draws him to these singular establishments.

"This is a personal project which has been going on for years. It emerged out of another one, “Roadside Britain”, which is just things of interest I catch sight of on the move. Some of these images were found that way too, but with a difference--I began to find that some of the pictures weren’t just about places but also about character."

Pictured: Powell’s Bakery, Poplar, East London
"Powell’s was part of a small chain around the Isle of Dogs area of East London—now unfortunately all gone. One of the shops baked the bread, which was then distributed around the others. When people look at Molly in my portfolio, they comment that it’s a shame there is so little stock. I have to point out that the picture was taken after lunch—there’s not much left on the shelves because she’s had a good day."

ARCTIC BLUES: THE BIG CHILL

The Russian winter tends to be romanticised, but it doesn’t feel much like a Christmas card when you’re actually there. SIMON ROBERTS captures its astringent beauty for our photo essay, and talks about it to ALEXANDRA LENNOX

Arctic Russia is cold, harsh, strange and vast—it stretches nearly halfway round the world, from Finland to Alaska. If you want to photograph it at its coldest, you have to be quick. “During the winter months”, Simon Roberts says, “it’s perpetual dusk and by 4 o’clock it’s pitch black. I was working in temperatures of minus 25 to minus 40, which left little time to take the pictures as it was difficult to expose my hands for long.”

Pictured: Monchegorsk, Murmansk Region, North-West Russia “The snowy fields around Monchegorsk disguise the fact that it is one of the most polluted towns in Russia,” says Simon Roberts. The church pictured in the foreground was built just a year ago and is surrounded by dachas (traditional Russian country homes), a retreat for the rich and poor alike. Since the demise of communism, the church has enjoyed a revival.