New Nations, Living in Limbo
By Jonathan Blaustein
There are corners of the globe where breakaway countries exist in #geopolitical purgatory, embraced by their would-be leaders yet unrecognized by the international community.
And Narayan Mahon wanted to document them.
This fascinating realization came to him in 2005, when he learned about “#unrecognized_countries” while studying at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. At the time, he was just becoming interested in photography as well, so he applied to graduate school at Syracuse University with the express intention of visiting unrecognized countries for a long-term documentary photography project. It was a big stretch, given his limited knowledge of either subject.
“This is the first thing I ever worked on; the first photographic idea I ever had,” he said. “I had a point-and-shoot digital camera, and I didn’t know what aperture meant. I didn’t know an f-stop from a stop sign.”
He soon learned. Financing his project with student loans and a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, he embarked on his research in earnest. He set some very strict standards for the places he wanted to visit: that it maintain its borders and have a working government that seeks — but does not receive — international recognition.
He ended up with a list that included #Abkhazia, which had seceded from Georgia; Transnistria, which had broken off from #Moldova; Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been a part of Azerbaijan; Northern Cyprus, which was a partition of that island nation; and Somaliland, which separated from the barely functioning country of #Somalia. Not surprisingly, the first three on his list emerged when the Soviet Union collapsed.
▻http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/new-nations-living-in-limbo
#nation #state #photo #photographie #photography #
