I recently returned from almost two months in Nicaragua where I worked and volunteered for several organizations. Lending my photographic services to needy charitable organizations is something I have been doing for 20 years as I feel strongly in the power of the still image to effect public change. By donating my services for organizations…
Category: Nature
Sunday afternoon Baseball in a Nicaraguan cloudforest.
I recently spent a month in Nicaragua working, volunteering and travelling the country. A highlight was the time I spent with a small agricultural community living within a Nature Reserve in the North Central mountainous region. MiraFlor lies in a cloud forest, a tropical forest with lots of moss, wet vegetation and yes, low-level clouds….
Two Brooklynites experience Timkat, The Ethiopian “Day of Epiphany”.
Two Brooklynites do Timkat by Nina Granados (Nina and I travelled together for two weeks in Northern Ethiopia in January of 2015 when I was working there on a Getty Images/Lean-In.org grant.) Most of us westerners have a romanticization towards what is foreign from our daily scraps of living in an industrialized landscape. For a…
Madagascar images used for NYC Subway art proposal.
The MTA, the NYC Subway transit authority, has a call for artists to design installations for several stations. I submitted these images with the concept of taking people on a journey thru Madagascar with a dynamic, color filled dose of nature, culture and adventure while they hustle along underground. The images, mostly shot on a point and…
Watch this video while you run on the treadmill! A 30 minute film for Girls Gotta Run of Southern Ethiopia.
I recently completed my first film which was funded by a 2014 grant I received from Getty Images and Lean-In.org. The piece was made for Girls Gotta Run, a nonprofit organization out of Washington D.C. that facilitates running clubs in Southern Ethiopia for young women. The video was crafted to be watched as one runs on a treadmill and to immerse the runner…
Video on the Ethiopian coffee ceremony
In Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, the daily drinking of this ancient beverage is part of a ritualized cultural ceremony rich in history and sometimes hours in length. The beans are freshly roasted, incense is burned and multiple cups are passed around. The 30 minute video I recently completed for an Ethiopian nonprofit has this 2 minute video about the ceremony with-in it….
Ethiopian Coffee Country
In January of 2015 I spent a week photographing in the Ethiopian coffee regions for Green Mountain Coffee. Here is a small sampling of the 3000 images I made. The job called for mostly landscapes (to be used on the boxes of a new product) but I couldn’t help but to capture the workers as well and also show the…
Film images from a short trip to Kenya
After three months in Ethiopia (https://instagram.com/joshuakristal/) I was in bad need of some beach time. Diani Beach, which is two hours from Mombassa, Kenya on the Indian Ocean was bucolic, relaxing, affordable and the scuba and snorkeling was damn good. It was working as I could feel my brain sinking into a more relaxed state but…
The Machu Picchu that never really made it up onto Machu Picchu This.
Was digging thru the archives recently looking for landscape photography for a possible upcoming job and found lots of stuff I never really posted. All from a couple weeks up at Machu Picchu and in Cusco, Peru.
Sky Garden, A much needed Crown Heights oasis.
The roof on my 8 family 4-story Pre-War Apartment in Crown Heights has been a place to garden, eat and chill for the last couple years. We used to garden in the huge, un-used backyard space but found that it’s north facing position with some big trees didn’t allow enough light to grow food ( it also…
Sakura Matsuri in Brooklyn: Where cherry blossoms, Cosplay, Autism and acne finally intersect.
The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens had their Cherry Blossom Festival last weekend and the Cosplay (costume play) that transpired was much more vibrant and colorful than the trees themselves (they actually have yet to bloom). I wandered around in jaw dropped amazement at this sub-cultures breadth and was shocked to see how its practitioners sat so comfortable in what seemed to…
Detroit’s Palmer Park: Where ghosts of past and present collide
Sven Gustafason and I did a story for HOUR Magazine on one of the largest and most historical public parks in Detroit and its current iteration and rebirth. Here is a post with more photos and an updated and more in-depth version of Sven’s story. Sven Gustafason To me, there might be no better microcosm for the Detroit experience…
Joshua Kristal, Photographer 