Image from the series Oil Rich Niger Delta. Copyright: George Osodi

With the recent protests against huge fuel subsidy cuts, and as the country reels from a spate of deadly sectarian bombings, there have been a lot of powerful photographs from Nigeria in the news of late. There are also a number of even more powerful (graphic) images on Flickr and Twitter, images that I haven’t seen published in the mainstream media. So it seems timely to publish this post which I’ve had in draft for a while about George Osodi‘s work.

A Nigerian photographer, Osodi has spent much of the last ten years photographing in the Niger Delta region and the sprawling city of Lagos. He says it took him a year or two to realise that mostly that meant photographing oil – and that once he’d realised that, there was no going back. Pollution, protests and conflict are constant themes for the people of the Delta, and they are themes that run through almost every one of Osodi’s pictures. But he didn’t imagine that nearly a decade down the line he’d be sat in a trendy photo gallery in east London, talking about how he got there.

But that’s where he was, just before Christmas last year, in Foto 8′s shiny new space in Shoreditch, telling his extraordinary story. It didn’t quite cost him his job – he gave up a position working in a bank in order to become a photographer in the first place – but it did cost him pretty much everything else. His friends thought he was crazy and shunned him, his girlfriend left him too; he sold his car and then had to let go his apartment in order to carry on funding taking pictures. He taught himself photography, and how to process film – first black-and-white, then colour. At one point he says that all he owned was a t-shirt, a pair of jeans and a camera. What he didn’t realise was how dangerous trying to photograph the oil industry would be. He’s been kidnapped by militants and threatened by oil company security guards alike.

Luckily though, his series of photographs, Oil Rich Niger Delta, are an incredible testament to his commitment and belief in the decision he made. Recently published as Delta Nigeria: the Rape of Paradise by Trolley Books, the series is a relentless visual assault, by turns horrific, beautiful, distressing and uplifting. The music that accompanies the slideshow embedded below is at once perfect and incongruous, but the book somehow conveys exactly this kind of soundtrack simply through the images themselves.

There’s an obvious similarity between Osodi’s images and those of the American photojournalist Ed Kashi, whose book Curse of the Black Gold was shot over broadly the same time period. And Christian Lutz’s work also provides an alternative, in some ways more detached, view of the Niger Delta, by depicting the lives of people working within the oil industry, as opposed to those outside it. But, being from Lagos and the Niger Delta, there’s something different about Osodi’s images, a closeness and an immediacy that could only come from being Nigerian himself.

Osodi was lucky enough to get offered a position as a photographer for a Lagos newspaper a few years ago, then as a stringer for AP, and his work started to get noticed. Now he has the book out, is represented by Panos Pictures and his work is being collected by art buyers and curators alike.

Back in December, the BBC News website profiled the publication of ‘Nigerians Behind the Lens‘, a collection of contemporary Nigerian photography. This includes some of Osodi’s work, but it also presents some alternative views of modern Nigeria, through the work of a range of commercial and editorial photographers. This provides some welcome balance – of course there must be other stories to be told in Nigeria, beyond those about oil. I’ve worked on a couple of development ‘success’ stories photostories from Nigeria, on getting more women into teaching and girls into school, and improving access to maternal healthcare, but there must be many more. I’d love to be able to commission someone like George to document some of the other stories in Nigeria, some of the long-term development challenges and successes.

Osodi speaks profoundly about his love for Nigeria, the beauty of the country, and the hope of its people, despite the conflict in the Delta:

“I just wanted to document what’s happened here for the future of Nigeria, so that people know what it took. I wanted to put a face to this place, this paradise lost”

Nigeria is facing a crisis at the moment. Luckily it has citizens like George Osodi who are there to document it, to force us to look, to force us to help its people to overcome.

You can see more photoessays about oil, including some of Ed Kashi’s and Christian Lutz’s work (although oddly, not Osodi’s?) in Foto8 magazine’s oil-themed issue, The Legacy of Oil, which was published in winter 2010.

Photo: © Alejandro Chaskielberg

The BBC News In Pictures blog today ran an online gallery of photographs from Turkana in Kenya, by award-winning photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg, apparently comssioned by Oxfam. The BBC ran them under the headline In Pictures: Combating drought in the Horn of Africa. I’ve added a question mark to this in the title of this blog post very deliberately – because I want to ask whether Combating drought in the Horn of Africa is really what these pictures show us.

One of the interesting things about these images is that they were all shot at night. Chaskielberg’s technique of working at night, using long exposures, moonlight and artificial lighting to illuminate his subjects, won him the Sony World Photography award last year, for a series of images of islanders in the Parana river delta in Argentina. For that reason alone they fall into my interesting occasional blog topic about photography being about things we can’t see. Another point of interest is that a colleague of mine also visited Turkana recently, with Oxfam and produced a very different report in almost exactly the same place, about exactly the same issues. You can see it here.

But one of the other most interesting things about Chaskielberg’s images is that they were commissioned by Oxfam. I think that this represents something of a departure for an NGO like Oxfam, as a means of communicating photographically about emergency response work  - perhaps a welcome one, but perhaps not. Let me explain.

We’ve come to expect ‘photojournalistic’ images from NGOs, to tell us a ‘truth’ about what we’re witnessing – even if we know that that ‘truth’ often has an ulterior motive (whether it’s to prompt us to act, to donate, to support or to share). Images produced for or by NGOs are rarely put into the public sphere purely to inform us objectively.

Chaskielberg’s images take us into somewhat different territory. Part art, part photojournalism, part intervention, partly choreographed, they run the risk of becoming the story themselves, of obscuring the story that Oxfam presumably wants to us to hear and agree with (about the fantastic work that they’re doing in Turkana to alleviate the impact of the current drought and mitigate the risks of future ones).

Perhaps there’s something in the treatment that jars a little – the captions tell a slightly different story to the pictures, referring to (but not providing a link to) an (admittedly) related Oxfam/Save the Children story about how the crisis in the Horn of Africa might have been avoidable had the world reacted sooner. Some of the images aren’t captioned with any contextual information about the subjects either, although they all feature either individuals, families or groups. There’s also something coldly ‘anthropological’ about the images which I find slightly unsettling.

The BBC’s picture editor, Phil Coomes, tackles some of these questions in his blogged interview with Chaskielberg, to which Chaskielberg’s response is:

“I would like to break with the idea that a beautiful picture of a hurtful situation detracts from its message or documentary value.

“All realities have light and shade and nothing determines that photographing in a tough way would offer a clearer message; it is just a decision of the artist who is trying to communicate an idea.

“Famine in East Africa is a painful reality of a preventable catastrophe, but even in this situation people love, desire and dream of a better future.

“I find myself as a classic photographer using film cameras interested in photographic techniques and portraiture. My intention is to highlight a hopeful vision of the present, showing people’s strength and to inspire the viewer that a change is possible.”

Coomes comes down on the photographer’s side, but I’m not so sure. There’s no doubt they are stunning images, photographs that show us a very different view of a challenging story and a challenging situation. And Oxfam are to be congratulated for trying to use creative photography to help them tell a story. But do these images really tell us about how Oxfam is combating drought in the Horn of Africa? Or do they just intrude on people’s privacy and suffering for the sake of a clever photographic technique and some good PR coverage? I’m playing devil’s advocate here a little of course; I don’t know the answers, and I’m not criticising Chaskielberg, Oxfam, or Phil. I’m just not sure this is way to tell these kinds of stories In Pictures.

You can see more of Chaskielberg’s images, read interview and even watch a behind the scenes film on the BBC In Pictures blog. I’m interested to hear what others think?

Haiti, two years on: Handing over refurbished homes in Leogane. Picture: DFID/Brenda Coughlan

It’s hard to believe that two years have already passed since the devastating earthquake which struck Haiti on 12 January 2010. There’s been a lot of media coverage of this ‘anniversary’ over the last couple of days, largely focussed on reports that aid money is still not getting through to people, and that some 500,000 people are still living in emergency shelters.

It’s true that there are still huge challenges in Haiti. But it’s also true that there have been successes. A year ago, the number of people living in emergency shelter was a million. That number has been halved in a year. It’s still a shocking number, but progress is being slowly being made, and it’s important that we recognise this too. There are good news stories in Haiti – not enough of them by a long way, but they are there.

That’s why I thought I’d share this photo that landed in my inbox at work yesterday. Taken by a colleague of mine in Haiti a few weeks ago, it shows a very different picture from those that you’ll see in the mainstream media – the moment that a refurbished home is handed over to its owner, in the coastal town of Leogane, some 12 miles from the capital, Port au Prince.

This is a major achievement in Leogane. 90% of the buildings there were completely destroyed in the earthquake; a city of 130,000 people reduced to rubble in minutes. The French charity ACTED (Agency for Technical Co-operation in Development) has been working over the last two years in Leogane to repair and refurbish as many of the buildings and homes that survived the earthquake as possible, with the help of funding from the UK. You can read more about the project on the DFID website.

This picture carries huge resonance for me. I visited Leogane six months after the quake, back in July 2010, and photographed some of ACTED’s engineers carrying out the first structural assessments part of this project, on the few buildings that were left standing. Although it’s taken 18 months, it’s great to see that this project at least is now nearly complete, and that a few more families are finally able to begin to put the earthquake behind them.

Sad that my first blog post of 2012 should be about the passing of another great photographer, but I just thought I’d share this Magnum in Motion audio slideshow interview with Eve Arnold in conversation with John Tusa, from 2009.

Considering Eve Arnold’s standing as a Magnum photographer and the extraordinary archive of photographs she leaves behind, it’s a shame that there seems to be very little in terms of interview/retrospective multimedia material available about her online – apart from those pieces that talk about her photographs of Marilyn Monroe. Even this piece is quite narrow in scope, although it includes segments on Joan Crawford, Malcolm X and Margaret Thatcher. But it’s wonderful to hear Eve Arnold’s voice. May she rest in peace.

See more: http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&l1=0&pid=2K7O3R14AZX1&nm=Eve%20Arnold

Obituary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/05/eve-arnold-memorable-photographs

To mark the end of 2011, I thought I’d just blog a quick post on my ‘pictures of the year’ -inspired The Guardian’s selection of ‘development photos of the year‘, as well as by the fact that one of my pictures was selected by them as one of their Photographs of the Year earlier this week. (I’m as amazed and bemused by this as I have been about all the other media attention that this picture has attracted this year, and humbled to be included in such a selection, especially given what an incredible year it’s been in terms of major global news events).

So, for what it’s worth, here are my ‘photos of the year’ – selected mainly from ‘creative commons’ images that have crossed my desk at work during the course of 2011, plus a few more famous ones. Hope you enjoy, and here’s to more momentous photographs in 2012!

Haiti, one year on

Ruins of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, one year after the quake, by Hoyasmeg

Receiving oral rehydration salts at cholera observation centre by Amanda George/British Red Cross

The 12th of January 2011 marked ‘year-on’ point from the Haiti earthquake. Cholera and other diseases remain huge problems in Haiti, as do shelter and land-rights issues.

Japan tsunami

Members of a British search and rescue team climb over debris from the tsunami, whilst searching for trapped people as snow falls in Kamaishi, Japan, Wednesday, March 16, 2011. Picture: Matt Dunham/AP Photo

A family’s photo album lies among the debris left when the tsunami bore through the city of Otsuchi in north-eastern Japan. Photo: Kathy Mueller/IFRC

Libya

Hundreds of refugees from Libya line up for food at a transit camp near the Tunisia-Libya border, 05/03/2011. UN Photo/OCHA/David Ohana.

In a tragic accident in Ajdabiya, Libya, on 4 June 2011, three-year-old Shada Yonis brought a hand grenade into the living room as the family and some children from next door were watching TV. She pulled out the arming pin. Her father Yonis Sala grabbed it and tried to save his children by covering himself over the grenade. He was killed along with Shada, and five-year-old Shema. Three other children and Shada’s mother were seriously injured. Visible in this photo is the shape of Yonis Sala where he took the shrapnel. Sean Sutton/Mines Advisory Group

Tim Hetherington’s last photograph, taken shortly before he was killed in an explosion in Misrata, Libya, along with fellow photojournalist Chris Hondros, on 20th April 2011. Tim Hetherington/Magnum Photos

The death of Osama Bin Laden

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Picture: Pete Souza/White House

South Sudan independence

South Sudanese men wrestle as they celebrate independence in Juba on July 9, 2011. Photo by Tim Freccia / Enough Project

Pakistan, one year on from the floods

Daddla Junego, 11 years old, lives in Garhi Haleem village in Sindh, Pakistan, with her mother and 12 other family members in a one room house. She goes to the local school, one of many to have been recently repaired thanks to UK aid following last year’s devasting floods. Vicki Francis/DFID

Horn of Africa drought and famine

A woman holds a prescription for oral rehydration salts that she has been given for her sick child, who has diarrhoea, at a temporary health clinic in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Picture © UNICEF/Kate Holt

Children climbing a tree in the Dadaab refugee camp, north-east Kenya. Picture: Alistair Fernie/DFID

Margaret, a resident of Kataboi Village in Turkana, northern Kenya, is one of 60,000 vulnerable people benefitting from an innovative ‘hunger safety net programme’, supported by British aid. Picture: Marisol Grandon/DFID

Tiru with her baby daughter, receiving nutrition support in southern Ethiopia, thanks to CARE International. Picture: Tanya Axissa/DFID

Looking to the future

Dominic Ekomeva, 43 – Looking to the future. Picture: Rankin for Oxfam

“This drought has taken my manhood. I don’t feel manly anymore because I don’t own anything that I am proud of. All I have left is a few goats and I think they will die soon. I left three lying down this morning – they are so weak that they can no longer stand. There is one baby but its mother has no milk for it. It’s really tough. I have been forced to seek degrading jobs like selling firewood. A man should never have to do such jobs, but I had no choice. I have to feed my family.

My family used to live by the lakeside. I came here to find a job with the Catholic mission. With the money I made I bought five goats. They were healthy and quickly multiplied. Things were good then, we were all eating well and the boys were in school. Everyone had cows, donkeys, goats and sheep. At that time I had more than 200 goats. I felt brave to have all those animals. I felt like a man. I could sell one whenever I wanted, I could buy whatever I wanted. I could have tea and sugar whenever I wanted. I could buy wheat flour.

I felt like I could do anything. There was grass everywhere and there was water. It was green as far as you could see. Everyone was busy taking care of something because there was a lot of work to do. I knew one for thing for sure – in those days my children would never go hungry.

In our culture we believe that a beautiful lady needs ornaments. I used to buy my wife and daughters necklaces. I would exchange two female goats for one large necklace. Who will buy my daughter her necklaces now? She doesn’t have enough. My daughters are beautiful and their father should be able to buy them ornaments.

I know that I will feel like a man again. One day, when my boys finish their education and my daughters get married. Then I will be a man again.”

I’ve written previously on how photography can often be as much about what it doesn’t show us, as about what it does. It can sometimes be about what we can and can’t see. But sometimes some photographs come along that tell us something about seeing itself and – though it sounds like stating the obvious  - remind us why sight is so important to the act of photography.

Sophie Gerrard’s photographs of patients and staff at the the Akhand Jyoti Eye Hospital in Bihar, India, for the Savitri Waney Charitable Trust, reveal not only the challenges of daily life for thousands of people suffering from treatable cataract blindness, but also the transformative effect that simple treatment can offer. Her images contrast powerful, empowering portraits of sufferers and carers with simple, beautifully observed, domestic details.

As a ‘visual’ person, I would (probably unsurprisingly) rate sight as the most precious sense. The irony – and tragedy – that Sophie’s photographs would be unseen, invisible, to most of the people she has photographed cannot be ignored. Certainly, without access to the treatment that the Akhand Jyoti Eye Hospital provides, most of her subjects would become incurably blind.

I’d been meaning to blog about Sophie’s work for a while, but I was prompted to finally do so today by a related announcement. The Financial Times today launched its Christmas Charity appeal in support of the charity Sightsavers. Sightsavers carries out similar work to the Savitri Waney Charitable Trust, providing treatment and support to visually impaired people across the world, and many photojournalists have worked with the organisation to help it promote its work. So I’m particularly pleased that the Department for International Development (where I work) is supporting the FT/Sightsavers appeal this year through a scheme called UK Aid Match. This means that the UK government will match every pound raised by the FT appeal in the run-up to Christmas, effectively doubling the money that Sightsavers will receive to help them carry out their important work.

Please take a few minutes to check out the work of SightSavers, the Savitri Waney Charitable Trust, and of Sophie Gerrard. And, if you can, donate whatever you can..

To donate to the FT/Sightsavers appeal, go here.

To donate to the Savitri Waney Charitable Trust go here

To see more of Sophie Gerrard’s work, go here. Her Protectors of Sight exhibition can be seen at the Royal Society of Medicine in London for just another few days (ends on the 25th November).

Why? Because globally, nearly a billion of the world’s nearly 7 billion population are short of food. That’s nearly 15% of the total number of people on the planet. Over 10 million of them are in the Horn of Africa region of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. In Somalia, 750,000 are at immediate risk of death due to the famine that is gripping parts of the country. But what can be done about it?

I was going to try to pull together some collected thoughts about how – if at all – photography and multimedia play any part in our understanding of what this problem of food and hunger means. Looking at the numbers though, it seems almost trite to even contemplate that the act of taking a photograph could remotely make any difference.

But the fact is that it does. It matters that journalists and photographers keep telling the story of what is going on in the Horn of Africa, and in other crisis zones around the world. People say that we’re tired of images of suffering, that the media only represents a very narrow stereotyped view of drought and hunger and famine.

Maybe this was true a few years ago. But the rapid advances in internet access, ‘social media’ websites, digital cameras and internet-enabled smart phones have changed the way many of us see and find out about the world, and are arguably on the cusp of fundamentally challenging the so-called traditional media, forcing it to re-invent itself.

Blog Action Day is just one example of this, uniting thousands of people around the world in one simultaneous conversation around a topic that affects us all. The United Nations has been running ‘World xxxxx Days’ on dozens if not hundreds of issues for years. But now, more than ever before, information, images and video can travel around the world and be seen by millions of people in moments.

What we do with this information, whether a photograph or a story or a piece of grainy video footage compels us into action or behaviour change, is still and will always be a subjective decision. After all, what can we do with it? Many of us will look ghoulishly and click away (or ‘turn the page’ as it used to be called). But some of us will hit the ‘click to donate’ button, or pick up our mobile phone and text a five digit number to donate a fiver.

The video posted above was shot by a colleague of mine a couple of weeks ago, in Turkana, northwest Kenya; I had a small hand in editing it. It attempts to tell just one small part of a huge story; Turkana is a vast county where 95% of the population live on less than a dollar a day. Like much of the rest of the Horn of Africa, it is suffering badly as a result of the drought, though not as badly as some places. Even so though, many people here are in desperate need of help. We are helping some of them, but the images shot by my colleague tell me that we need to help them a lot more.

Visit the DEC East Africa Crisis website to donate whatever you can.

I just noticed that it’s almost exactly a year ago that I first set up Developing Pictures and posted to this blog. So, to mark this momentous anniversary, I thought I’d just share a list of the 24 posts that I’ve written over the year – once a fortnight on average, which is not bad I reckon. I’m going to try and up this to once a week for year two, although some posts may have to be nearer to 500 words than a thousand if I’m going to achieve that (and those who know me will know just how much of a challenge that’s going to be!). Anyway, I hope some of what’s below is interesting and makes some kind of sense. Do let me know!

1. File under development

2. Beauty, photography and the MDGs

3. Breaking photos and a state of emergency

4. AFP, OGL and CC-A: big questions for photography and the internet

5. Can’t live without it: Blog Action Day 2010 #water

6. From real people to virtual villages: Katine to Kroo Bay

7. Surviving the floods in Pakistan – a view from Sukkur

8. From Haiti to Pakistan

9. Haiti, one year on – in pictures around the web

10. A serious game? Interactive inside the Haiti earthquake

11. Archival images – some thoughts on libraries and photography

12. Faces of hope – powerful portraits of two women in Afghanistan

13. From Hokusai to horror – an evening with Chris Steele-Perkins

14. The spider trees of Pakistan – a tale of two photographs and the web

15. World Photography Festival, Bruce Davidson and a wedding

16. And the winner is? Jim Goldberg and the Photographer’s Gallery

17. Sleeping soldiers: remembering Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros

18. A little bit of history repeating: some thoughts on Burke+Norfolk in Afghanistan

19. World Refugee Day – in pictures

20. Conversations in photography: 25 years of Panos Pictures

21. In the midst of hunger, one happier picture from east Africa

22. Looking into the past: 10 years on from 9/11 – the illusion of stopping time

23. Sean Smith and Thomas Struth: between the moment and what came before

24. From Transit to transitions: do we need multimedia to tell a story?

Chad: Sudanese refugees living close to the border, having fled the violence in Darfur. © Espen Rasmussen/Panos

About a week ago I went to the Frontline Club, to see a talk and presentation of Transit, a photo-essay project by award-winning Norwegian photojournalist and picture editor Espen Rasmussen. Espen has spent much of the last seven years photographing the plight of refugees and displaced people around the world, having first become involved in the stories of Iranian refugees in Norway. The project has just been published as a book by Dewi Lewis, exists as an interactive website (www.transit-project.com), and is currently being exhibited in Norway.

Transit is an impressive achievement by any standards. Covering ten countries across Europe, Africa, south Asia and south America, it is a remarkable series of photo-essays, similar in breadth (although very different in approach) to Jim Goldberg’s work, which I blogged about when he won the Deutsche Borse prize earlier this year. Rasmussen spent weeks at a time in each country, researching stories, meeting people and gaining their trust; he states that he spent far more time talking to and interviewing the people that he met than he did photographing them.

As is becoming increasingly commonplace in photojournalism projects like this, Transit also features a number of audio-slideshows (you can watch some of them on the Panos website), or photofilms, as part of its narrative.  To some extent they give a voice to the characters portrayed in the photos, add another dimension to the stories, or provide a more immersive experience than simply looking at pictures on a page. However, powerful as Rasmussen’s work is, I’m not quite sure how successful some of these particular audio-slideshows are. But, as Harry Hardie, curator of HereOnTheWeb, pointed out in his introduction to Espen’s talk, the book version of the project is itself very film-like. The sequencing of images, establishing shots, introducing characters without giving too much detail,  does have a cinematic quality to it. It is this element that started me thinking about the word transition – and about whether if a book can be more cinematic than a film, do we really need the film?

The literal definition of transition is the act of passing from one state or place to another. A transition in the cinematic sense is the process of moving from one shot to another in sequence – whether that’s a straight cut, a fade out and in, a cross-dissolve, or so on. And its becoming an increasingly important word for photographers who are getting involved in audio slideshow/multimedia/video production. A couple of days after the Transit talk, the Photographer’s Gallery and British Journal of Photography staged one of their monthly ‘social’ events, this time (by coincidence?) on the theme of photofilms and the challenges for photographers (and photography) in making the transition from still to moving image storytelling.

Speaking at the Photographer’s Gallery event, photographer/filmmaker CJ Clarke imparted an obvious but fundamental piece of advice to anyone from a stills photography background trying to make the leap into producing moving image pieces – that (and here I apologize if I paraphrase slightly – but he did say something very much like this in essence): ‘as soon as you introduce the element of moving time into your project, you have to start using the language of cinema’. By this he meant precisely the conventions of transitions, the tracking movement or drift of the camera on a shot, the interplay of sound combined with images – all of the basic elements that make up the video sequences that we see every day on television and in cinema, but rarely stop to deconstruct and analyse.

Photofilms are being increasingly seen as an effective way to tell stories visually without going to the full extent of shooting and making a fully-blown film. But it would be a mistake to assume that this means photo-films are easier to produce. In fact, in many respects I would argue that they are more difficult to make. Their success relies in many ways on the quality of audio that is captured, as well as the selection of voices/narrators, music, on-screen text or elements of video that are incorporated – as well of course on the sequencing of the images and the transitions between them. Advances in technology have presented traditional photographers with small lightweight digital cameras that can capture all of these different media elements, but it’s still difficult for one person to successfully gather all of them at the same time and produce and edit them. The most successful examples that I’ve seen have almost all been collaborations, involving other several other people besides the photographer themselves. And so it is here that understanding the language of cinema is essential, even done to the basic, non-technological approach of sketching out a story-board first.

I don’t know how much or how little of this Rasmussen knew or understood when he was producing the stories that would become Transit. He spoke of how his ‘day-job’ as a picture editor (for Norway’s largest newspaper) helped him bring some discipline to the process, but also hindered him as he is used to editing other people’s photographs rather than his own. But whatever the process, the result is unquestionably an important body of work, photo-films included. It’s a compelling document of our times, a period of great upheaval and uncertainty that has prompted the mass migration and displacement of people on a huge scale.

Refugees sleep outside on mattresses because of the heat in the Mayfa'ah reception centre, Yemen. © Espen Rasmussen/Panos

There are currently more than 43 million people registered as refugees or internally displaced people around the world. The stories of just a tiny number of those 43 million that Rasmussen presents us with are harrowing and could be unremittingly depressing. But, as the former UN Emergency Relief Co-ordinator Jan Egeland says, in his essay that accompanies the book, Transit is “as much a book of hope and promise as it is a portrait of a world of injustice and brutality”.

For his part, Rasmussen says that pretty much every displaced person or refugee he interviewed simply said that their dream was to one day go home. Transit concludes with a powerful series of photographs of the (mainly makeshift) empty beds that the people he photographed along the way would sleep in.

Ironically, in some ways it is these pictures – devoid of the people we’ve been introduced to in the preceding images – more than any of the others, or any of the multimedia elements, that tell the story of what it must really be like to be a refugee.

I was lucky enough to see two powerful, compelling photography exhibitions in London today, that couldn’t be more different in many ways – but I’m going to try to make some connections between them anyway. So here goes – please bear with me.

Photojournalist Sean Smith’s Frontlines in the King’s Place building near King’s Cross and Thomas Struth’s retrospective at the Whitcehapel gallery have, on the face of it, little in common with each other.

Smith’s uncompromising, up-close photographs of a decade of war and conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and across the middle east make for visceral and difficult viewing. There are lots of bloody scenes, many of them shot just moments after people have been badly, horrifically injured – or worse.

Struth on the other hand has been photographing urban architecture, museums, culturally significant landmarks and family groups in Europe, America and Japan for over 30 years. His images are presented as huge, glossy prints, many of them the result of years of planning, thought and consideration, shot on a large-format plate camera.

But they’re both being exhibited in London, in slick, modern art galleries, in the form of large-format expensive-looking prints hung on the wall. And, in very different ways, they each present us with something unseen, views of the world that are difficult to get elsewhere in the mainstream media.

Much of Smith’s work has been produced for the Guardian newspaper over the last ten years or so. It is unapologetically photojournalism of the rawest kind. The exhibition is in the same building that the newspaper occupies.

They are brutal, graphic illustrations of what the effect of Rocket Propelled Grenades or Improvised Explosive Devices really look like. The kind of images that TV news anchors say are ‘scenes too graphic to broadcast’. This is the view of war that we don’t generally get to see. The exhibition is punctuated by signs warning parents that some images may be unsuitable for children. There is no commentary from the photographer, or from the curator. Just a list of captions, brief and to the point. Despite the very intimate, harrowing images of people, only two of them are named, out of some 40 images. They are images that are difficult to look at and difficult to see. I’m sure that some of the images displayed here would not have been printed even in the Guardian itself.

Struth’s work meanwhile is very much art photography, in the sense that it presents scenes of beautifully framed (deliberately composed) cultural heritage sites, museums and technological landscapes that both require and demand contemplation. His work is anti-photojournalism in some senses, it is diametrically opposed. Some of his pictures take him years to make, a result of long periods of research and reflection. Yet he also presents us with images that are difficult to see and that touch on issues that, ultimately, Sean Smith’s work also leads to. Let me explain.

Both exhibitions take the format of large-format glossy prints hung in glossy gallery spaces, although there are differences here too (Some of Smith’s prints are unframed, loosely pinned to the wall, whereas all of Struth’s are super-polished, massive dia-secs, incredibly expensive to produced.

But both also feature one piece of film in addition to the prints. Smith’s is a looped piece of unedited video, shot on a digital SLR camera, showing the chaos and confusion of a search of a house in Baghdad by US troops. There is no narrative, no story, no voice over.

The film in the Struth exhibition by contrast is a kind of extended interview with the photographer. In it he talks of his photographs being ‘about between the moment and what occurred before it’, which seems like photojournalistic language in some senses. But he also talks about wanting to make pictures that question modern technology, that interrogate the complex technology that we take for granted now. He refers to his methods of working (shooting on a plate camera with large format film) as being from an age when technology was about the Eiffel tower and steam-liners – very visible technology that could be clearly seen and relatively easily understood.

So one presents us with a gruesome, unpleasant view of the world that we seldom get to see – the chaos that results out of the attempt to impose order. The other with views of the world that celebrate the chaos that exists within the order once imposed. Smith’s photographs are all about what is in the frame of the viewfinder at the moment the shutter was released; for Struth, his pictures are as much about what isn’t included in the frame. And they both use the medium of the big print to do this.

An old photography tutor of mine once said to me (only slightly in jest), “if you can’t make it good, make it big”. Clearly, Struth has long established his ability to achieve both. And while Smith’s work has its problems and challenges (is the gallery wall really the right place for this kind of imagery, presented in this kind of way?), it is necessary, and both are equally compelling. I urge you to go and see them for yourself. But you’ll have to be quick to see Thomas Struth -it closes at the Whitechapel today, 16 September (it is open until midnight though!)

Sean Smith: Frontlines is on at Kings Place until 30 September.