Photojournalist Tomas van Houtryve doesn’t enjoy simple projects. For his photo series Blue Sky Days, he made a drone and travelled across America to photograph people gatherings similar to the ones from U.S. drone strike reports from Pakistan and Yemen. The powerful series got him the Infinity Award, one of the most important prizes for a photographer.
Berta Tilmantaitė, photojournalist and co-founder of NARA met Tomas in Vilnius before the opening of his exhibition. They discussed drones, military, social media and why photojournalism is experiencing its “jazz phase” now.
Tomas van Houtryve posing in his photo exhibition in "Vartai" gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania. ©Berta Tilmantaitė
Tomas van Houtryve posing in his photo exhibition in Vartai gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania. ©Berta Tilmantaitė
Children play at a birthday party in Sacramento County, California. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that over 200 children were killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia between 2004 and 2013. ©Tomas van Houtryve, Blue Sky Days
A public park is seen from above in San Francisco. California is a major center for the development and manufacture of military UAVs — General Atomics builds its Predators and Reapers in the state — and the Bay Area in particular is a hub of the expanding consumer-drone market. ©Tomas van Houtryve, Blue Sky Days
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See all the photos of Blue Sky Days project at Tomas van Houtryve’s website.
Traces of Exile, the new project by Tomas Van Houtryve, that we talked about in the podcast.
Music for this episode is composed by Martynas Gailius.
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