A star in the sky - Thomas Lekfeldt

Every year 200,000 children develop cancer around the world. Vibe was one of them. In June 2007 the five-year-old Danish girl was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Due to the location of the tumor it was not possible to surgically remove it. Instead, Vibe went through a treatment procedure with many chemotherapy and radiation treatments. In January 2009 Vibe lost the fight against cancer. At the time of her death she was seven years old. Children get other types of cancer than adults. For example Leukemia is the most common form of cancer with children, while they almost never get lung cancer or breast cancer. Brain tumors are the most common type of tumors with children. Every year there are around 40 new cases of brain tumors with children in Denmark. In the developed countries treatment of child cancer has improved a lot during the last decades, but still cancer is one of the main causes of deaths among children, and the surviving children often have significant side-effects due to the treatment. Vibe's father Michael used to say that he would catch the stars in the sky for Vibe if she asked him to. Now he tells her sister that Vibe herself has become one of the stars in the sky.

Vibe receives a stem cell transplantation in Rigshospitalet, the main hospital of Copenhagen, Denmark. The fluid that gets injected into her veins by the nurse on the left is only 4 degrees Celsius. It is very painful for her, giving her nausea and stomach ache. The purpose of the transplantation is to help her immune system to recover after the last of Vibe's high dosage chemotherapy treatments. Vibe's mother Helle is on the right. During most of the treatment procedure Helle was with Vibe to take care of her when she was hospitalized.

Photographer Thomas Lekfeldt is the winner of the "World Understanding Award"

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James Nachtwey - War Photographer

James Nachtwey grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science (1966-70). Images from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement had a powerful effect on him and were instrumental in his decision to become a photographer. He has worked aboard ships in the Merchant Marine, and while teaching himself photography, he was an apprentice news film editor and a truck driver. In 1976 he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike.
Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.
Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984. He was associated with Black Star from 1980 - 1985 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. He has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Palazzo Esposizione in Rome, El Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Carolinum in Prague, the Hasselblad Center in Sweden, the Canon Gallery and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, among others.
He has received numerous honours such as the Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), the World Press Photo Award twice, Magazine Photographer of the Year (six times), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award three times, the Leica Award twice, the Bayeaux Award for War Correspondents (twice), the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, the Canon Photo essayist Award and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Grant in Humanistic Photography. He is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and has an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Arts.

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Military Camp in Hungary - by Árpád Kurucz

On November 3rd 2004, conscription and the conscripted army ceased to exist in Hungary, ending a 135-year old tradition. Conscription is no longer part of Hungarian military obligations, and nostalgia for the army is intense. This nostalgic way of thinking is felt so much that military camps are organized for children.

Military "style" has become more and more common, as we can see in diverse aspects of our experience, from parks to business training. For some people, military style is just a fashion choice. However, for the extreme right it is part of their mental and physical training. Military "survival" or army camps for boys and young men aged 8–18 have become very trendy. The only problem is that in Hungary, this kind of camp or military training can be organized by anyone. There is no legislation for the organizations: the only rule is the prohibition of live arms.

This loose attitude keeps alive not only "hobby" soldiers and military clubs, where the members merely act militarily, but also helps extreme right organizations to acquire military technology and ability, which is part of their ideology. One of these associations, where the members call themselves national socialists (though others might recognize them as neo-nazis), a skinhead fellowship holds meetings using code words such as "military discipline and comradeship". Their event was advertised as a 3-day sports camp, where scrimmage can also be found. We have to be ready for the fact that extreme right organizations will run for state sponsorship in the future.

The Military Traditional Association in Mogyorod has been organizing military camps for children for three years, and they recently became international. The aim of these camps is to educate children about how soldiers spent their daily life decades ago. During this week, children acquire the knowledge that was taught to conscripted soldiers in their month-long basic training. The camp dwellers take part in shooting exercises – with dummy ammunition, of course.
(photo and text © Árpád Kurucz)

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Mumbai by Giulio Di Sturco

Mumbai, the symbol of Indian miracles, will become the most populated megalopolis in the world by 2020. Over 40 percent of its inhabitants live in various slums which define the urban landscape of the city. In Mumbai, the most widely known slum is the Dharavi slum. It has one of the highest population densities in the world. In these "villages" within the city, the most disparate ethnic and religious groups live together in harmony, bound by the instinct to survive. In 2008, Dharavi inhabitants began to move to municipal residences and the land of Dharavi was put up for sale with the intent to build shopping malls and residential areas for the new Mumbai middle class.

In a short space of time, the inhabitants were catapulted into large concrete buildings, 20 stories high and divided into apartments along long narrow corridors. Unwilling to abandon their traditional habits, the residents modified the new spaces: they created places of joint ownership and doors to individual apartments were uprooted to make spaces communal. The structural limits imposed by the new housing were violated in order to preserve traditional lifestyles, thus transforming the compound into vertical slums.

One such “slum rehabilitation“ project forced people to move to places like the Lallubhai Compound in Mankurd, where buildings cluster ominously, each separated from the other by a small corridor full of garbage. More than 60,000 people live in this new kind of slum after their homes were demolished. Three kilometers from the Govandi station, close to one of Mumbai's only operating open garbage dump, the Lallubhai Compound looks like a "ghetto." The city's urban poor have been swept under the carpet where no one will see them--welcome to Mumbai's slum resettlement housing projects, the future of the big metropolis.

"VERTICAL SLUMS" ON VII WEBSITE

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