AAA is pleased to share the following entries for the “Place” category in the 2011 AAA Photo Contest. Voting by AAA members begins the October 6 and will be open through October 14. Directions for voting (along with login information) will be emailed to current AAA members. Voters will see thumbnails of the photos in the ballot and will vote for their top choices in each category.
To get a better look at the Place photos, please peruse this gallery. To see a photo in its entirety, just click on the photo you wish to view. Be sure to also check out the People, Process and Practice entrants too.
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- Caption: This picture was taken in July 2011 in Amsterdam. It shows a graffiti in the Red Light District, leading to window prostitution, legal in the Netherlands. Title: Human Trafficking in Amsterdam. Photo courtesy Patricia Tovar
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- Caption: Anthropology is about letting go of expectations. At first glance, this photo of Mahasarakham University looks so beautiful and romantic, with the spire of the President’s building in the background. The reality behind this photo is different. The noise was deafening- from construction, traffic, and loud music from the bars below. Air quality was terrible, with smoke from rice fields and construction dust everywhere. This was taken from the luxurious 9th floor apartment for VIP’s where I lived with my son. We had the entire floor to ourselves. None of my Thai coworkers could identify that this photo was taken at their university, because they had never seen it from that perspective. Title: Long Day Done (Mahasarakham University, Thailand, February 2011). Photo courtesy Kathryn Stam
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- Caption: Suharyono doesn’t have religious preferences. Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and folk religion trinkets have a place at his modest souvenir stall next to Prambanan Temple, a ninth century Hindu compound in Central Java, Indonesia. He sells miniatures of Prambanan’s main temples and some of the statues inside, and similar mementos for Borobudur, the neighboring eighth century Buddhist monument. After Prambanan was damaged during an earthquake in 2006, the world heritage site has had a hard time reaching the visitor numbers it used to attract. Having lost a sizeable percentage of their income, shop owners like Suharyono are desperate to sell something, anything. “Cheap price my priend!” Title: Multi-faith souvenir stall (Prambanan, Central Java, Indonesia; 30 July 2011). Photo courtesy Noel B. Salazar
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- Caption: This is the second of two photos about sky and road. Here the environment is the built environment of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, just under the shadow of the 1960s modernist Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I liked the contrast with the wide open spaces of Wyoming, how it reflects how built space organizes life in New York City. Here nature seems to push out through the openings in the side walks and out from the limnal spaces between neighborhood, roads and water, but is pushed back by the humans of Bay Ridge. Title: Sky and Road, 101st Street, Brooklyn. Photo courtesy Leila Monaghan
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- Caption: This is one of two photos about sky and road. This one is shot from the corner of Hwy 130 and Herrick Lane, just outside of Laramie, Wyoming. For me, the picture captures the grand sense of space in Wyoming, how people just being a small part of a larger world. Humans impinge upon but don’t dominate this space. Title: Sky and Road: Herrick Lane, Wyoming. Photo courtesy Leila Monaghan
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- Caption: This is a photo of IBM’s famous tagline “THINK” etched into the historic IBM Engineering Building built in the early 1930s in IBM’s birthplace, Endicott, New York. IBM and the US government have been wedded from the inception of IBM in the early 1900s, and this image reflects the solid fixture of “THINK” (and IBM power) and the American flag devoid of wind. The contextual political economy and ecology of the image, of course, is also important, as this IBM building and American flag are located in a contentious EPA Superfund site that is an historic epicenter of high-tech pollution. Title: IBM Building at the IBM-Endicott Superfund Site, Endicott, New York, 3/12/2009. Photo courtesy Peter Little
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- Caption: This photo captures residents of Vaitahu, on the island of Tahuata, resuming their volleyball game after a mid-afternoon shower. The community engages in sports, like volleyball and soccer, in an effort to both have fun and stay fit. While an overwhelming number of post-colonial island communities in the Pacific suffer from major weight problems, the community of Vaitahu promotes physical activity, like volleyball, in an effort to prevent the emergence of serious health issues, especially among the youth population. Aside from the game, the major focal point in the photograph is the Catholic Church, an institution built by the French and attended by most locals on Sunday mornings. Title: Vaitahu Rainbow and Volleyball, Tahuata. Photo courtesy Wendy Leicht
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- Caption: In the mountains of northern Luzon in the Philippines, vast areas of mountainside have been converted over thousands of years of human labor and ingenuity into an extensive system of rice paddies, which require much continuous effort and diligence to maintain. These workers are performing the ceaseless task of shoring up the paddy retaining walls to prevent leakage and erosion. The photo was taken at the rice terraces of Hungduan, Ifugao province. Title: Maintaining rice terraces, northern Luzon, the Philippines. Photo courtesy Barry Kass
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- Caption: Infotech workers in Hyderabad, India, sit on the floor around a laptop to plan an NGO’s activities in a member’s flat. Besides the laptop and a wireless router, the apartment’s furnishings are limited to an evaporative cooler and a cotton mattress. Despite their relatively high salaries, unmarried IT professionals, especially men, tend to furnish their rooms sparsely. This in part reflects the large amount of time they tend to spend at work and out socializing — their flats are often simply places to sleep. Their highly mobile lives, regularly moving from company to company, city to city, and even country to country, also discourage accumulating substantial furnishings until after marriage. Title: Gathering around the laptop (Hyderabad, India, 2010). Photo courtesy Bascom Guffin
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- Caption: Residents of an upscale housing society in Hyderabad, India, play with colors to celebrate Holi. The society marked out a portion of its parking lot as a play area for the occasion and provided a tanker truck to ensure a steady supply of water. This and other organized celebrations in the township such as Ganesh Chaturthi, Ugadi, New Year’s Eve and the Cricket World Cup finals, have been important in fostering a sense of community in the residential complex. Even the on- and offline discussions around concerns about late-night noise associated with some of the celebrations help create a sense of ongoing engagement amongst the more than 1,000 households that make up the township. Title: Playing with colors (Hyderabad, India, 2011). Photo courtesy Bascom Guffin
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- Caption: For most of the year this bull ring serves as a prison for errant animals. Cows and donkeys caught trampling people’s crops are taken to the mayor, who locks them in the bull ring until their owners pay a fine to have them released. It was built just a few years ago to house annual bull fights for the town’s patron saint day. Once a year the town’s population grows from about 500 to several times its normal size as former residents who have migrated to the national capital return to join in the festivities. Title: Bull fighting on Huallyapampa (May 2, 2011, southern Ayacucho, Peru). Photo courtesy Kate Grim-Feinberg
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- Caption: Saci is an Afro-Brazilian folkloric character commonly depicted standing on one leg, smoking a pipe, and wearing a red cap. He is nationally renowned as a trickster and the protagonist of minor pranks. Appearing on the outside of a commercial building in the centro district in Sao Paulo, this graffiti art reinterprets Saci within the context of urban life and critiques Brazilian racism. It visually illuminates the contradiction between Saci as an endearing figure of national sentiment and a potential threat should he physically appear in the street, where police would probably subject him to the scrutiny, harassment, and violence meted out to many Afro-Brazilians on a daily basis. Title: Urban Saci Graffiti in Sao Paulo, Brazil (July 2010). Photo courtesy Reighan Gillam
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- Caption: Ten years later, 9/11 is in one way memorialized by continued war and militarization, domestically and globally. Who owns the sites of 9/11? What claims are made in deciding that ownership and membership? Who gets to decide? Who are “Americans”? The contentious site of the old Burlington Coat Factory and the creation of a Muslim community center, two blocks from Ground Zero is a window into answering these questions. Title: “Making Place” New York City, NY October 2010. Photo courtesy Sue-Je Gage
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- Caption: The Nammy Office in a U.S. military camptown in South Korea has provided marriage and visa license information over several decades to Korean women and American men. More recently, the all Korean wooden sign to the far right, representing historic and symbolic marker, is replaced by a multinational and multi-lingual sign. Most of the “club women” and other women in the camptown are Filipinas, many who have come on entertainment visas, many of whom are human trafficked into South Korea to serve U.S. soldiers in these camptowns. Title: “Arrival and Departure” Tongduch’on, South Korea June 2009. Photo courtesy Sue-Je Gage
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- Caption: Iban day labours, planting seedlings for a rapidly expanding oil palm plantation industry in Indonesian Borneo. In this forested corner of Indonesia the Iban has traditionally practiced swidden cultivation. Recently however these frontier areas of ‘unexploited’ lands and immense forest resources have been gazetted for large-scale state sponsored plantation schemes triggered by global demands for agricultural intensification. Within this developing plantation economy, the cash poor Iban embrace the immediate benefits of local employment. However, fears of exclusion from the long-term benefits of agriculture schemes and increased localized resource conflicts are immense. Title: Agrarian Frontiers. West Kalimantan, Indonesia. March 2011. Photo courtesy Michael Eilenberg
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- Caption: The amply antlered head of a sacrificial reindeer stands guard in the trees high above the grave of a recently deceased reindeer herder in Tutonchany, Evenkiia (Russia). The trees of this graveyard are laden with various such sentinels, including saddles and birch-bark saddlebags stuffed with reindeer skin, clothing and reindeer-herding and hunting paraphernalia belonging to the deceased. (September 2010) Title: Graveyard Guardian (Evenkiia, Russia, September 2010). Photo courtesy Brian Donahoe
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- Caption: Kids frolic in the midst of a Javanese kampung built on reclaimed landfill at the extended shoreline of the small island city. As in many parts of Indonesia, migrants from densely-populated Java coexist uneasily with residents who have older local roots; by necessity, newcomers occupy gaps in the landscape—or, as in this case, entirely new land—and sometimes their influx can cause existing seams to strain or burst. Many of the Javanese in this area resettled from nearby Ambon after communal fighting broke out there a decade ago along what came to be defined as religious lines. Title: On the brink–Ternate, Indonesia: June 2010. Photo courtesy S Chris Brown
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