New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario is speaking publicly about sexual aggression she experienced while detained in Libya last month by forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi. Addario was held for six days with Times colleagues Anthony Shadid, Stephen Farr
You know, I actually wanted to shame the Libyans. It’s very important that they understand how embarrassing, how gross it is, and what a bad name it gives to other Muslim countries. I’ve gotten emails from translators and drivers all around the Middle East just saying, “I’m so sorry that this happened to you,” and “I’m so embarrassed that this has happened to you. We are not like that.” Libyans need to be a little more introspective about what kind of society produces these kinds of people. So when I went forward I wanted it to get out that this kind of behavior, which is just unacceptable, is going on.
It required pictures, first published by Der Spiegel and then Rolling Stone, to really focus the world’s attention on the case. The photo of one smiling soldier holding the head of a recently killed Afghan up for the camera is so inflammatory—with a grinning American appearing to enjoy the death of another human being—that comparisons to some of the more shocking photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal (such as Army Spc. Sabrina Harman and Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr. giving a thumbs up next to refrigerated corpses) were immediate and obvious.
Some of the commenters seem to think I am using news as an opportunity to make art. It is the opposite. I have been covering news for a long time and it frustrates me that people do not respond to it. I am trying to use cinematic techniques to make people connect to and care about news, not using news as an opportunity to make cinematic pieces.
Last July, while America was coming to terms with the fallout from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, China itself was dealing with the largest oil spill in its history in the city of Dalian. During the spill, a fatal act of bravery was caught on film by
“Had I not taken these picture of Zhang Liang, his sacrifice would have perhaps gone unnoticed and people would not have been aware of the extent of the oil spill,” says Lu Guang in Through the Lens: the Dalian Oil Spill, a short video produced by Greenpeace.
The discussion around photographing corpses can quickly lead to the argument that journalists in these situations are vultures, they’re exploiting the suffering of locals, they’ve become heartless, blood-thirsty creatures looking for the most sensationalist stories. I fundamentally disagree, with some caveats that I’ll touch later.
I knew something was going on when my blog stats spiked over the weekend. Prison Photography interviews with those who photographed Fabienne Cherisma’s body in Haiti were drawing readers R…
duckrabbit (Benjamin Chesterton) is publishing a document that suggests the people running the World Press Awards failed to investigate properly claims that a series of winning pictures were staged.
There’s no question that Maggie Steber is a top, top photographer. She’s hugely respected for all the right reasons and her voice carries weight. Tonight she’s written that duckrabbit’s (Benjamin Chesterton’s) questions regarding Jodi Bieber’s World Press winning photograph are ‘hysterical’ and amount to a ‘witchunt’. That’s quite a dressing down that deserves some thinking space.
Fantastic debate going on in the world of photojournalism right now as two of the top contests have awarded images that stretch the definition of photojournalism. Wait, there’s a definition of photojournalism!? No, and that’s the reason for the debate. If
I have stayed away from much of the online discussion of the use of camera phones and apps in photojournalism largely because I have not wanted to be seen as an advocate for their use and because I have wanted to avoid any appearance of endorsing any particular product or technique — which I absolutely do not. It was never my intention for these photos to be seen only in the context of the tool by which they were made.
Having said that, I will always stand behind these photographs and am confident in my decision that this was the right tool to tell this particular story.
Any discussion about the validity of these images comes down to two basic fundamentals: aesthetics and content.
World Press Photo 2011 makes for grim viewing, including shocking images of torture and suffering. Are these images semi pornographic? Three jurors defend their choice
If the answer is yes, then what we knew as photojournalism at it’s purest form is over and POYi just killed it. Well, they didn’t kill it so much as just dig another knife deeper into the back of its decaying corpse. It’s time to really address the crossroads we’re at in photojournalism and figure out where it’s headed versus what it was.
Court papers in the case, as described by people familiar with the lawsuit, shed a stark and unflattering light on the newspaper’s reliance on phone hacking as a standard reporting method. This conduct is at the heart of a growing array of civil lawsuits and criminal inquiries against the paper and News Group.
In the squalid camps where 800,000 people still languish, many Haitians routinely say their misery is exploited by NGOs to raise funds rather than raise them up from poverty. Children throw rocks at photographers from aid groups trying to take their pictures, demanding money.
It’s certainly not unheard of for photographers to cast themselves in the role of activist. Good photography helps to make an argument a whole lot more persuasive so the link is no surprise. But we should worry when they blur the line between activist and journalist because you can’t be both, although some examples of those who try can be found amongst photographers who cover war.
Just weeks prior to unveiling a giant cache of leaked U.S. State Department cables, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange threatened to sue the Guardian newspaper in Britain over publication of the documents, according to a fascinating Vanity Fair article publ
Assange, suddenly faced with having lost control of documents that WikiLeaks itself had received from a source, asserted that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released, the magazine reports.
The candid footage has come to light because Chevron’s lawyers persuaded a federal judge in New York to force a filmmaker who chronicled the legal fight, Joe Berlinger, to turn over more than 500 hours of outtakes from his film, “Crude.”
