Untitled, originally uploaded by Fabien Dany.

in Afghanistan, children are regularly used to work or help their families. Here this girl is carrying water to bring back ‘home’, which is for her an informal housing unit on a hill surrounding Kabul

Tulum, Mexico, originally uploaded by Fabien Dany.

It’s so nice to go through olf film archives. You can just find back nice pictures, full or memories, that were staying in a box, along with others…This picture of the carribean sea was taken in Tulum (Quintana Roo, Mexico), in late 2001.

I was trying to get some space in my archives, and as I am terrible at organizing my films, I ended up browsing through them as much as moving the boxes around. So I scanned some of them so they won’t rot in boxes. Here’s this one from around year 2000, taken in Orsay Museum in Paris. The building used to be a railway station, and the big clock’s still there. The film scanner I’m using is a Plustek OpticFilm 7400.

While doing research about migrations of people from Afghanistan, I came up with that map. I thought it would be of interest to share it.

The map is in french.

Partying in Iran, originally uploaded by Fabien Dany.

Via Flickr:During my last stay in Iran, I attended a couple parties. Even though they’re supposed to be forbidden, I felt like I was in some kind of club, out of Iran…

I was following links from my flickr account when I came across Big Huge Labs website, which I had discovered a few years ago, but somehow ran out of my mind. This website offers a lot of different tools to play with flickr : searching tools, picture editing, frame creation, a very convenient Color Palette creator that exports to Adobe Swatch Exchange format….

I had fun with my pics for a couple minutes, and came up with this, from the motivational poster creator.

Martyrdom and business, originally uploaded by Fabien Dany.

Via Flickr:Wall painted faces of martyrs dead in Iran-Iraq war, on the sides of a big avenue in the center of Tehran (Iran).Iran-Iraq war lasted from September 1980 to August 1988, making it the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage—half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers as well as civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more injured—but it brought neither reparations nor change in borders.Bank Mellat (meaning « Bank of the Nation ») is a state-owned commercial Iranian bank. It was established in 1980, with a paid of capital of Rials 33.5bn as a merger of ten pre-revolution private banks. Currently, the bank’s capital amounts to Rls 13,100bn and is one of the largest commercial banks in the Islamic Republic of Iran, ranking among the top 1000 banks of the world.

Ekbatan housing estate, Tehran, originally uploaded by Fabien Dany.

Shahrak Ekbatan is a housing estate in Tehran, facing the historical Mehrabad Airport. The estate was built in the 1970s by american architects, just before the iranian revolution. It comprises about 20 000 apartments in its tower blocks. Shahrak means « small city » in persian. Several dozens of blocks are built around central spaces left for shops and recreational spaces like parks and greens. Each block is made of high-rises between 6 and 13 floors, with more than 500 apartments in each tower. Shahrak Ekbatan was from the very beginning designed as a luxury estate, and stays up to this day a model of comfort attracting the well-off in Tehran. Note : Satellite dishes are legally forbidden in Iran, but they can’t control everywhere all the time…

I took some pictures trying the burst mode of my Pentax K20D Camera, with a Fish-Eye lens.
Thanks to the skaters in Venice Beach, (CA, USA), I was able to edit that short video. I wanted to test how Adobe Premiere works, so I chose a set of my images easy to edit.

For those who wonder about the music, this is the intro of 19 Years, by The Leftouts, available in a creative commons License.