© Martin Lopo

Blue Earth currently sponsors over 25 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

Photographer Lorena Guillen Vaschetti and anthropologist Martin Lopo’s Incan Plants Today is a record of Incan healing and cultural traditions, practiced by fewer and fewer as the years pass. The project documents Incan healing techniques that use the curative properties of native crops in the fertile Sacred Valley of Peru as it explores the cultural reservoir of the modern Peruvian people and the value of natural medicines and cooperative markets in the region.

Through their project, Vaschetti and Lopo have helped to sustain everyday healing practices while recovering ancient knowledge and cultural values. Self-sufficiency forms the cultural reservoir for Peruvian’s values of respect for nature, cooperative action, and reciprocity to the Pacha Mama, or Mother Earth.

- Bart J. Cannon, Executive Director

Namaste © Marie-Rose Phan-Lê

Blue Earth currently sponsors over 20 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

Traditional healing methods are becoming a lost art due to global modernization, cultural assimilation, and habitat destruction.  In many cultures, the healer is the vehicle through which medicine travels to the people.  Healing traditions, which were once transmitted from one generation to the next, are now near extinction as many healers are aging without apprentices to replace them.

Ultimately created to air as a six episode TV documentary, Marie-Rose Phan-Lê’s project Healing Planet explores the lives, rituals, and wisdom of traditional healers around the world.  The documentary follows Phan-Lê, an apprentice healer herself, as she learns from the elders of many varied cultures.  Through her journey, the audience is transported into a world of exotic places, esoteric practices, and practical applications in the art of healing.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

© Sara Terry

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 20 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

This week we are highlighting Sara Terry’s Aftermath.  The media cover war, but rarely the aftermath—the challenging time when people rebuild communities, rekindle hope, and learn to live again.  Since 2000, Sara Terry has been chronicling Bosnia’s struggle to rebuild following a vicious war marked by ethnic cleansing and genocide.  Aftermath shows us that the strength of the human spirit is tested not only on the battlefield, but in the wake of war as well.  Terry has documented the exhumation and identification of victims of ethnic cleansing, the postwar lives of widows and children, the continued existence of hard-line communities, and the return of refugees.  Terry feels that without an understanding of life after the guns and bombs have stopped, we can only have a naïve grasp on the impact of war.

Terry recently released a book, Aftermath, to critical acclaim, and formed a nonprofit organization The Aftermath Project to assist others working in postwar zones.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

© Wes Pope

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 30 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

This week we are highlighting Wes Pope’s Nature Versus Man in the Great Northwest.  Wes Pope’s Nature Versus Man in the Great Northwest is an ironic and humorous look at the ways in which man uses and abuses the forests, rivers, and wildlife that make up the Northwest ecosystem.  For this project, Pope used a pinhole camera—made out of recycled film boxes and latte cups—which provided long exposure times, making people look like ghosts while damage to the landscape appears clear and sharp—“a bit like seeing the world on nature’s time scale.”  Local insight and editorial perspective offer a firsthand glimpse into the impact of growth in the Northwest.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

Humpback Whale, Tonga, South Pacific  © Art Wolfe

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 30 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

This week we are highlighting a project by local Seattle photographer Art Wolfe, someone who arguably needs little introduction.  His project The Living Wild, producing the best-selling book of the same title, was a product of three years working in the field photographing wildlife in virtually every corner of the globe.  Art is well-known for his for his PBS series Travels to the Edge as well as for his long career as a conservation advocate.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

Abi Gul 7, Rumbur Valley, Pakistan.  Abi Gul’s father spent eleven years fighting in the Pakistan courts to keep the Kalash valleys from being logged.  For the Kalash, who have animist cosmology, trees are very sacred.  Three years ago Abi Gul’s father was killed by a bomb that was thrown into their little two-room home.  Her uncle continued the court case and finally won the judgement.  Abi Gul was very serious and quiet.  Very diligent, she stayed by my side and assisted me as I photographed her friends and relatives in her small village.  © Phil Borges

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 30 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

This week we are highlighting a project by Blue Earth co-found Phil Borges Animists: The Spirit of Place.  His project documents the few remaining traditional cultures where people spiritually communicate with their environment.  Today, we call these people “animists”: those who believe that the natural world is inhabited by spirits who nurture or destroy in accordance to the respect they are shown.  Borges’s project includes images from Siberia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Ecuador, Africa, and the Amazon basin.  It has been exhibited worldwide and published as a book under the same title.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

A young boy stands next to a mural of a Palestinian rock thrower that was shot and killed at a clash site in Gaza. © Ron Wurzer

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 30 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

This week we’re highlighting Ron Wurzer’s Palestinian Portrait.  His project documents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict post-9/11.  Wurzer’s aim was to help Westerners better understand the social climate in the region.  It documents the lives of ordinary Palestinians as they go to school, to work, navigate Israeli roadblocks, endure power outages, live in refugee camps in proximity to Jewish settlers, and deal with an increasingly violent situation and faltering economy.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

Three women at Fiesta. © Judy Blankenship

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 30 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

This week, I’d like to highlight Judy Blankenship’s project on The Canari Of Southern Ecuador.  Her project emerged as the result of many trips to the region documenting indigenous culture and resulted in a book, Canar: A Year in the Highlands of Ecuador that was published in 2005.  She has gone on to work with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

An aerial view of the Owens Valley from David Maisel’s “The Lake Project.” © David Maisel

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 30 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own. But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

Today I’d like to dip into our archives and highlight work from David Maisel’s project Black Maps. Often abstract in appearance, Maisel’s photos of regions suffering from environmental degradation are powerful statements. They speak directly and give first-hand evidence of the damage humanity can inflict on an entire region.

It is easy sometimes to overlook the scope of the damage directly in front of us - Maisel changes the scale.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager