Cultural Practices
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[ CULTURAL PRACTICES ] A set of photographs that increases the understanding and appreciation of a cultural practice. It can be about festivals, religion, traditions, or contemporary cultural trends. Each submission consists of 5 to 20 images. Each participant is allowed to enter up to 2 submissions. The images must be taken in 2019 or 2020.
Judges for Cultural Practices
Quick links to award categories: COVID-19 / Spot News / Portraits / Nature & Environment / Covid Picture Story / Covid Expressions / Issue Reporting Picture Story / Cultural Practices / Photographer of the Year, Asia
The song comes alive as night draws in. Hear it curl beneath the blanket, slip between the fold of cradling arms, in rooms across the world. To an audience of children, a hidden chorus of caregivers fills the night with song. They’re singing lullabies. We’ve been singing them for millennia. Etched with reed on a clay tablet is a Babylonian lullaby that’s more than 5000 years old. By the glow of a phone, or to the thrum of the city, lullabies still charm babies to sleep today. We inherit them, and we pass them on. We carry them across borders and we make new ones along the way. They contain the traces of those who came before us, and they will carry traces of us long after we’re gone. Within lullabies we’ve inscribed our greatest fears, and in the same breath, our prayers, our hopes, and our reassurances. ‘Living Lullabies’ illuminates critical issues facing women and children through the multidisciplinary storytelling of families’ night-time rituals. It explores how caregivers prepare children for sleep in environments fraught with risk, and the unique role of the lullaby as a vector for sense- and place- making. For families in different countries around the world – mothers protecting their children from toxic air in Mongolia, families in Turkey escaping conflict from Syria, teen mothers relying on their communities in Liberia, families grappling with the climate crisis in the Philippines, and essential workers isolating from their children in the USA amidst the COVID-19 pandemic – bedtime rituals are a way of making safety in rapidly changing environments. This project aims to demonstrate how issues at the top of global agendas – conflict, migration, public health, and climate change – affect and are reflected in the stories of bedtime for children around the world.
Beginning of the seventeenth-century the British East India Company arrived in India later they begin to rule India. So there was a shift of administrative and political policy to govern the country under the company rule. It was then the emergence of the Zamindari system eliminating the erstwhile Jaigirdari system in Bengal. Those who were loyal and submitted enormous wealth to the Company were awarded the Zamindari system. Many lost in the process while there was a proliferation of nouveau rich Zamindars. It was the system in the history of Bengal of the emergence of Zamindars or Wealthy Landlords. The British East India Company needed representatives to rule India. The Zamindars class helped the British merchant later on the colonial rule, to facilitate with service for power and wealth there was a substantial rise of the Zamindars as the British power increased. So their coalition with the British monarchy exploited society to increase their wealth. Later in the ninetieth century, many Zamindars had changed their association with the British when the nationalist fervor plagued in Bengal. Overnight the status of these aristocrat families changed on 15th August 1947, the day of India’s independence. The privileged class of society completely reduced to an ordinary citizen of India. Like fellow countrymen, they tooled a normal life and took various employment services for survival. My project is about the social and political condition of the descendants of the Zamindars in the decolonization period in independent India. These families are an important part of the history of Calcutta and Bengal. I’m archiving the history of the Zamindars, their culture, aristocracy, tradition in the decolonization period through their present descendants.
I first had the idea to dedicate this cycle of works to dacha life [country living] almost by accident, when I was already in the process of shooting. I had a literal stroke of inspiration. I had never had a dacha before, nor been exposed to any of the stereotypical things one finds in a Russian country house: woodturning stoves, antique trunks with old clothes in them, a family garden or fresh strawberries from the patch with cream. In this cycle I have tried to achieve several things: explore the paradox of sifting through an old album of my own [cultural] memory, but simultaneously coming to terms with the fact hat I have no such memories. While I had certain associations, and my idea of country life was not a metaphorical tabula rasa, coming face to face with the realities of country life made my own preconceptions seem as though they were inversions, or reflections, as they might appear on an undeveloped negative. With all my subjects, in Perm, Voronezh and in Leningrad Oblast I tried to come closer to understanding and capturing all the small joys of Russian dacha culture which I had never experienced before. This cycle of works is an attempt to get intimately close to the metaphorical Other, to explore the limits of platonic friendship, to explore the connections between the Corporeal and the Natural, and ultimately to capture the essence of my generation. In the euphoria of dacha life, I was able to understand myself in a new way, to be at peace and in harmony with myself. The feelings of loneliness and unease which plague both me personally and my generation generally were eased, at least for a time. My project is an attempt to capture the paradox of nostalgia for something which I have never felt or had, until now.
