RAMAYANA TATTOOS

Katharina Hesse is a damn good documentary photographer, and here's one of the many reasons why I say that:

She and her colleague, Lara Day, are requiring support for a worthwhile photographic book project Human Negotiations. It's on Kickstarter, and is an independent, self-funded documentary, exploring the lives of a community of Bangkok sex workers through both images and text.

Human Negotiations is not a journalistic account of the sex trade, but instead is a personal interpretation of a line of work that is frequently misunderstood.

To date, the project has garnered international support and was shown at numerous spaces and international festivals. Pledged funds will go directly towards printing costs so that Human Negotiations can be published as a book to coincide with an exhibition in China's foremost space for contemporary photography and video art.

So do consider to help Katharina and Lara with your pledges! It's really a worthwhile project and will encourage other documentary photographers to bring similar projects to the fore.

Katharina Hesse is a Beijing-based photographer who has lived in Asia for nearly two decades. Her photography focuses primarily on China’s social concerns among them youth, urban culture, religion and North Korean refugees.

Lara Day is a writer, editor and photographer based in Hong Kong and Bangkok whose work has appeared in leading publications including TIME and Travel + Leisure.

Photo © Stefen Chow-All Rights Reserved

Stefen Chow is a photographer currently living between Beijing and Singapore. He worked with various news organizations, including Getty Images, Associated Press and Bloomberg News, as well as commercial clients such as Keppel Corporation, Singapore Airlines and Shell International. Not content to have traveled to over 30 countries, Stefen also summitted Mount Everest in 2005.

His website is full of visually varied photo galleries and I thought his most interesting were those of his personal work. For those who are adventurers, I recommend you view his work of Chomolungma (the Tibetan name of Mount Everest). and for those interested in culture to spend time viewing his large photographs of the Hasidim in Brooklyn, New York.

Hasidic Judaism is a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promotes spirituality and joy through the popularization Jewish mysticism as the fundamental aspects of the Jewish faith, and was founded in Eastern Europe in the 18th century. Brooklyn is home to one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities outside of Israel, with one of the largest concentrations of Jews in the United States.

Photo © Nicole Precel_Courtesy Al Jazeera

If you think Al Jazeera is only an excellent source of international news, and the Arab satellite television channel that left all our cable networks in the dust during the momentous events in the Middle East, you'd be wrong because it also features photography essays such as the one by Nicole Percel's Vietnam: Between Tradition & Modernity.

In February 2011; Nicole Precel and Nick Ahlmark were in Chi Ca Commune, a cluster of villages in Xin Man district, part of Ha Giang province in northern Vietnam, the poorest province in the country, to make a movie for the final episode of Al Jazeera's Birthrights, a series examining maternal health around the world.

Al Jazeera also features social documentary work such as the accompanying video The Mountain Midwives of Vietnam.