Akhtar Soomro: Pakistan

Photo © Akhtar Soomro/Reuters-All Rights Reserved

Full Focus, Reuters photo blog, seems to be regaining its footing amongst the remaining other large image photo blogs, and has recently featured the work of Pakistani photojournalist Akhtar Soomro.

Born in the Lyari neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan, Akhtar graduated from the Government College of Science and Technology with a degree in engineering but photography beckoned, and he started working for a studio covering fashion, industrial and interior design, and subsequently for an advertising agency.

He has since shot assignments for local and international newspapers, magazines and stock agencies around the world. In 2009, he was part of a New York Times' team that won a Pulitzer for its reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Most of Akhtar's impressive photographs in the Reuters feature are of refugees of the floods, and of displaced people from the Swat Valley...but it's the one above that caught my eye. Its caption informs us that a flood victim baby sleeps in a hammock as a man reads the Koran during Eid-al-Fitr celebrations while taking refuge in a relief camp for flood victims in Sukkur in Pakistan's Sindh province on September 11, 2010.

Wendy Marijnissen: A Year In Pakistan

Based in Antwerp, Wendy Marijnissen is a freelance documentary photographer from Belgium, who has a career in looking for, and reporting on, stories with a social context. She completed a long term reportage in Israel and Palestine, using music to show a different part of daily life in this stressful and violent region. She's currently working on a new project about childbirth and maternal mortality in Pakistan, of which some of her compelling photographs can be seen in the above movie.

Another of Wendy's compelling photo essays is on the dai. A dai (or dayah in Arabic) is a traditional midwife or birth attendant in the Middle East, and Pakistan. Midwifery skills are usually passed on from generation to generation and most practitioners have had no formal training.

The unhygienic conditions in which the dai work, their lack of education and the delayed referral to hospitals in case of complications are the major cause for the high maternal mortality rate in Pakistan.