Million Dollar Squatters

Here's the latest project born from yet another collaboration with photojournalist Alex Masi, a multimedia slideshow about squatting in London, UK.

Between June and November 2007, we followed a group of squatters with a penchant for mansions worth millions of pounds. In just over five months they occupied three different homes in one of the most exclusive areas of London, Hampstead Garden Suburb, in the north west of the capital.

During one of their incursions they found themselves sleeping in the lavishness previously enjoyed by former Indonesian president Haji Mohamed Suharto....watch the video to see how it worked out.

A complete reportage — text and photostory — is available to be syndicated. More info on alexmasi.co.uk

NEED magazine | Cooperation | Building Community

Published on NEED Issue 4, out in the US in November 2007, this is the story that started my ongoing collaboration with the humanitarian magazine.



It focuses on the collaboration between two Minnesota-based nonprofits that sparked the rebuilding of Sri Lankan Communities annihilated by the Asian Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004.














Get the full story and all the images here.

Con Buddha nell'astuccio - D, La Repubblica delle donne

Dharma is an ancient Indian spiritual concept that signifies the underlying order present in nature and life.

Dharma is also a private faith school that provides alternative education situated in the balmy seaside resort of Brighton, in the south east of England.


Inspired by, and informed with, principles of compassion and non-confrontation, its curriculum has encountered immediate success among progressive-thinking parents and their children since it opened to business in the late 1990s.



Mind you, not everybody here is a practicing Buddhist.

What has appealed to hundreds in the course of just a few years is the school's commitment to providing the kids with a high standard of well-being and creative stimuli.


More images can be found on alexmasi.co.uk











This story has so far been published only in Italian on D, the weekend supplement of leading daily newspaper La Repubblica.

An English version can be provided on request, and pictures and text are available to be syndicated separately.

Education, not proselytism;
Spirituality, not religion;
Acceptance, not confrontation.

Dharma school motto.

Bedouins of the Holy Land, TheMiddleEast - August 2006

This article was my first major project to be published in the UK. Photographer Alex Masi and I spent more than a month and a half among Bedouin tribes in Israel in order to document their lifestyle, and the difficulties they endure daily as they try to integrate with the mainstream Israeli society.

Published on The Middle East magazine. More images can be found on Alex's website.

Pictures and text are also available to be syndicated separately.

A bit more on Bedouins of the Holy Land

The following extract comes from an essay I wrote about Theory and Practice in the work of a journalist. It says a bit more about my experience with the Bedouins.

In November 2005, photojournalist Alex Masi and I travelled to the Middle East to follow a project on Israeli Bedouin tribes, thanks to contacts we had made with Bustan’l’Shalom, a NGO working in the region, staffed by both Jewish and Muslim activists. That trip and the following one in March 2006 resulted in my first major story to be published in the English press. (Bora, 2006)

From the very beginning, I understood that a traditional journalistic approach — a modus operandi that, ideally, wants to be completely detached from the subject of a story in order to preserve impartiality — was not going to work as well as theoretical models studied at school would have put it. The reality of the Bedouin society struck me more deeply than I had expected, and I could not help but proving sympathy for their plight. Israeli citizens in every aspect, they constitute a sizeable minority of Israel’s total population — about 180,000 in a nation of 6 million — but they often struggle to raise the international public attention, overshadowed by the more familiar Palestinian conflict.

Furthermore, they are at a crossroad of historical importance that is alienating older generations from younger ones, thus threatening the very foundations of their patriarchal, herding society. Modernity infiltrating their uneducated lives, and their supposed integration with the wider Israeli society, have so far had as their sole effect the creation of two groups that face different problems in very different situations. About half the Bedouin population has accepted the government’s relocation offers and has become urban proletariat, while the other half has staunchly refused to resettle and still lives scattered in the desert, without electricity, water or sewage systems, in villages that the authorities do not recognise.

A few days into my trip were enough to understand that it was a story that needed to be told. But this is how far my journalistic instinct and my theoretical preparation could take me, while more pressing questions regarding the validity of a standard approach multiplied as I went along. Was objectivity achievable? Did I need, as a foreign reporter, to be a witness only and leave aside my own opinions? Could the emotions, smells, and tastes I have experienced living among the tribes have a role in my reporting and foster a better understanding of their reality?

Reference: Bora, D. (2006) Bedouins of the Holy Land. The Middle East, August/September
2006, pp. 54-58.

Journalism Training supplement - Press Gazette UK

For this very same supplement, I have also interviewed a number of editors and asked them what makes a good journalist. Interviewees included Roger Alton, editor of The Observer, Simon Grant, editor of Tate etc., and Kevin Bakhurst, head of BBC news 24.

Press Gazette UK - NUJ centennary special issue

These are few of the interviews I made with young and old(er) members of the NUJ, which this year is celebrating its 100th birthday.

It was touching and fascinating to speak to individuals that have played such an important part — well, at least some of them — in the history of the union.

All extremely nice people these union workers, more often than not I would find myself just amicably chatting with them at the end of the interview.


Visit the NUJ web site for more info about their activities.

Global Report - Press Gazette UK

Global Report - Press Gazette UK

Press Gazette UK