Sam Phelps is an Australian photographer based in Pakistan. Passionate about documenting contemporary world events that society wouldn't otherwise witness, his work is driven by a desire to move people and challenge their concepts of different cultures through intimate portraiture and commitment to story telling.
He grew up in Canberra, ACT and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Digital Media at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney in 2003. After university he spent time working in a nickel plating workshop in Oslo and in 2004 lived in Jakarta, Indonesia editing commercials for local television. Sam's interest in photojournalism was sparked during this period. Whilst commuting through this vast city everyday, he struck up frequent and fascinating conversations on buses, taxis, motorbikes and on the street with Indonesian locals.
Upon returning to Australia he worked as an Assistant Photographer on fashion shoots before embarking on his first dedicated endevour into the world of documentary photography in mid 2007. This journey took him overland from Mumbai to Paris with the goal of telling engaging, newsworthy stories about a diverse mix of cultures and individuals. A reportage on the Mumbai Fire Brigade resulted in a 2008 exhibition at the Indian National Centre of Photography. After crossing the Khyber Pass to Kabul he subsequently became embedded with one of the US Coalition forces that was responsible for provincial reconstruction. His most recent story documents Qat production and consumption in Yemen. He has published with international magazines including Liberation and Der Spiegel.
Sam recently completed an internship with VII Photo agency Paris and is currently based in Pakistan.
Gori is a hijra living in the Punjabi capital Lahore in Pakistan's east. She is of ambiguous genitalia and is part of one of the country's minority groups that although marginalised still play an active role in their community. This is a story exploring the strong bonds between Gori the Guru and her student Neelum and their day to day life as they make a living from dancing at child births and weddings, festivals and prostitution. The hijra community are accepted at some level in Pakistani society but also fall victim to brutal persecution and discrimination within public spaces, police stations, prisons, and their homes.
This is an ongoing project that I wish to launch within a multimedia storytelling plattform. I envision it to be much richer in a multimedia format with the combined elements of streets sounds, voices, music with the images I have produced in telling Gori's story. The images displayed here are not the complete story, I aim to have completed the photography component but aim to do so in the first weeks of the workshop. I have had experience in After Effects motion graphics as well as working as an offline editor for TV commercials in Jakarta, Indonesia. I received a Bachelor of Digital Media which involved video and sound production during university in Sydney, Australia. I am currently based in Pakistan working for newspaper, magazines, ngos and on my own personal projects.
The Mumbai Fire Brigade has the distinction of being the first organised fire service in India, created in 1865. Modeled on the London Fire Brigade at the time, even today it offers a window into the past, the officers uniforms, brass buckles, copper hose heads are, if not all original artifacts from the period, still the best tools for the trade. The protocols and strict code of conduct within the structure of the organisation are also reminiscent of a colonial time past. The MFB also offers an
insight into the meshing of old and new values of a rapidly changing India. A fair proportion of new recruits in the force are university educated graduates with degrees within the arts, law and
sciences. The MFB gives them a secure job with a salary, and a better rate of pay than many of the contracted jobs they would carry out within their area of study. With current trends in the
media focusing on the financial boom in India country I was attracted to document a community and social structure that has retained traditions and customs from the colonial past.
This series of photographs is part of a long term personal project focused on the remnants of colonialism in India and Pakistan. The future direction of the project will be specially focused on the partition and creation of the two countries in 1947, an act that has shaped the
region and destinies of millions of people since. Harnessing digital and analogue technologies I will create traditional photo portraits and a series of multimedia portraits that will merge video interviews with my subjects, photographic documentation of their lives now and those of their families along with archival images and footage from 1947. The aim of these multimedia portraits will be to engage a wider audience who are attracted to focused personal stories that speak of universal themes relating to history, race, religion, immigration, borders, segregation and postcolonial memory. I am passionate about creating a lasting record of the partition that is still shaping the events and geopolitics within the region today, notably the conflict in Kashmir and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
