It hasn’t been so long since Kabul was considered an open-minded metropolis. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Afghan capital was a popular stop on the hippie trail to southern Asia. Now, after thirty years of occupation and war, Afghanistan is struggling to reestablish its identity. Residents are pessimistic about the future. Rebuilding the city drags on, and the constant fear of new attacks has shaken people’s trust in NATO forces. “Crossing Kabul” is a portrait of today’s Kabul where, far from the fighting, normality is slow to return. German photographer Daniel Pilar focuses on everyday situations caught between tradition, Western influence and social progress.

Selected by Sophia Greiff on August 11, 2010

Aleix Plademunt Perez: My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape. I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 19, 2010

Two photo series from Iraq by Julie Adnan. The first, Born In Prison, shows women with their young children, photographed in prison in Erbil, Iraq. The second shows installations made with survivors of the 1988 gassing of Halabja, using photographs of their deceased family members.

Selected by Yumi Goto on July 9, 2010

Black clouds of dust spread to cover the skies of the Gaza Strip in the early morning of Saturday 27th of December, 2008. Multiple Israeli war planes started a series of air raids in over than sixty different locations of police stations and compounds as the first day of a 23 days war in Gaza started. Palestinian medical sources in Gaza declared that at least 1300 Palestinians were killed, nearly a third of them children. Sabha Abu Halima’s house was mostly destroyed by fire after it was hit by a phosphorus bomb that landed in her house. Sabha, her son Ali and granddaughter Farah (2), were seriously burnt. The father of the family, Sa’ad Alah Matr Abu Halima, and five of his children were killed.

Selected by Yumi Goto on June 23, 2010

“My son, there will be a post petrodollar economy in Arabia and it will be up to you create it.” That is what Sheikh Maktoum’s father said in 1990, shortly before his death, says Swiss photographer Florian Joye. “I chose the United Arab Emirates to work on, and especially Dubai, for a variety of reasons. After googling Dubai on the net, my curiosity and interest were drawn to the confusing mass of Dubai images that can be found there. The vast juxtaposition of virtual images, scale models and augmented reality of which there were many more than real pictures of Dubai is confusing. The idea of the city preceded its reality. My fascination for this new city caught between utopia and excessiveness, pride and seduction is the palpable reality of the purpose o f Sheikh Maktoum.”

Selected by Nathalie Herschdorfer on June 9, 2010

The first is from the Al Ahlam compound in Khadamiyah, Baghdad. It was shot at the juvenile detention centre in early 2007, when the so-called surge by American forces was going on.Iraqi security forces, highly sectarian at the time, were also busy asserting themselves. These children were almost exclusively Sunni, and had seemingly for the most part been picked up for minor offenses, or simply rounded up in whole-sale sweeps of Sunni neighborhoods.Only one of the kids seemed to have been involved in really bad stuff: kidnappings and IEDs.

Selected by Hannamari Shakya on April 15, 2010

What I find interesting is that I guess the majority of us expects a different world view from Dvir, being a descendant of Israel. But he does the opposite. His choice is to use his professional life as a photographer to get close. And by getting close in images he shows me the world and growing up of people that he is supposed to call ‘the enemy’. He gives me hope with his portraits and even very literally in his words when I quote Natan Dvir:

“If I, a Jewish Israeli man, have been accepted and was allowed into my subjectsʼ personal lives – so can other.”

Selected by Margo de Beijer on April 7, 2010

I was deeply touched by the work presented here today. Eman Mohammed’s series were suggested to me by my friend Dalia Khamissy, who urged me to show Mohammed’s work here on Bite! Knowing that Eman Mohammed (23) lives in Gaza herself, in the midst of the devastation and the rubble she describes and portrays, I admire her braveness for daring to pick up a camera to show us the country of her family which has been struck so violently. By revealing the circumstances in which Mohammed Khader, his wife Ebtesam and their 22 family members find themselves, Eman takes me by the hand and brings me close to their home and her heart. I can almost feel the grown ups of the family struggling to show strength, so that the children and grandchildren can carry on.

Selected by Margo de Beijer on April 2, 2010

Forgetting is not an option in the seemingly eternal and interwoven conflicts of the Middle East. Increasingly finding myself distanced from hard news, I am drawn to the humor and contradiction prevalent within the diversity of Middle Eastern culture(s). I want to provoke the audience to reflect on regional social issues, stereotypes, and realities. The perpetual images of blood, suffering, and conflict are not the only defining characteristics of the Middle East.

Selected by Margo de Beijer on April 1, 2010

The focus of my photography is the Middle East, on women and children especially. Lebanon in particular is interesting because of its key location as a gate to the Middle East, between the West and the Arab world. I grew up and lived in both Lebanon and the U.S. I am a Lebanese insider who speaks the language, knows the country, and understands its people, but also an outsider who can see Lebanon and its complexities through Western eyes, who can still be intrigued by the dichotomies that are shocking to the Westerner, but unnoticed by the locals.

Selected by Elie Domit on February 16, 2010