It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. At the risk of sounding terribly cliche, I have to say that my understanding of war, the pain of war, the humanity that is able to rise above war, the valiant spirit of mothers and children caught in the midst of war….were ever so slight until I stumbled upon the miraculous work of the award-winning war photographer called Zoriah.
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Not every moment can be a Kodak moment, photojournalist Vincent Laforet said, which is why sometimes a photographer’s job is to make “something out of nothing.”
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The Story Behind the Photographs
Each image awarded by World Press Photo tells its own story. But there is much more to tell. About what it was like to work in a war zone, or what restrictions were placed on a photographer at a major sports event. Or about what happened before and after a winning image was made. In our interviews with prize-winners you can hear the full story, first-hand.
Last week I had to put down my newspaper in the Metro for a long time. The front page news photo — connected with the story “U.S. Role Deepens in Sadr City” — was this:
Two-year-old Ali Hussein is pulled from the rubble of his
family’s home in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad,
Iraq, April 29, 2008. (Karim Kadim/AP photo)
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I was on my way to visit members of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) at a jungle camp deep in the rain forests of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The FDLR is comprised of Hutu extremists who fled Rwanda after their involvement in the 1994 genocide, as well as Hutu members of the former Rwandan army and a mix of displaced Rwandan Hutus. The people number approximately 10,000; they have lived in the jungles of Congo for the past 14 years and have been one of the fundamental causes of the Congo conflict.
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10.65 GB.
That’s what I have to show after being laid off after five years at The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.
While transferring files from the newspaper’s archive system to a 500 GB external hard drive it became painfully clear that only a fraction of the hard drive would be used to store my work that appeared in print.
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The photo op.
Sen. Hillary Clinton had another one Wednesday. They’re usually staged before 1 or 2 p.m. to give crews time to edit the film and prepare their stories for the dinnertime news.
What TV viewers eventually saw was Clinton at a South Bend, Ind., gas pump with high prices. (See how she’s perfectly positioned so you can also see the prices? No accident. Although, truth be told, $3.75 a gallon looks pretty good to many Californians).
Clinton had along as a human prop commuter Jason Wilfing, allegedly on his way to work at a sheet metal factory. A real normal guy, no doubt, recruited by a Clinton advance worker for 12 of his 15 minutes of fame.
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I met Kristen Ashburn in 2002 when she guest lectured at a class I was taking at the International Center for Photography with Andre Lambertson. She had been self-financing trips to Africa to photograph the effects of poverty and HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe in black-and-white with her Rollei, and the images were stunning.
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was back in court today working on my Drug Court series and I finally managed to get this shot that I was wanting. I spent the afternoon with the judge, and after court I talked the transport cops into letting me follow them back to the van
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it was a beautiful day on the last day of april. clear skies, sunny, perfect temperature, and i was inside prison.
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I spent some more time with Russ and some with his family this evening. Russ was rummaging through his burnt down house for a while trying to find anything that survived the flames. A couple things of interest made it. The bible, Book of Mormon, Sim City CDs and some wedding photos.
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The different photographs that The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald ran this week of a Vietnamese girl with a massive facial tumor raise questions of when a picture is exploitive of its subject or offensive to us as readers.
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I am back in Afghanistan for the fifth time in two years. I have a lot in common with the British, Canadian and American soldiers deployed in the country. Like many of them, I have been here before and I have been under fire. And, dubious though the honour is, I am a member of an even more exclusive club: I have been shot during a gunfight.
There are differences between us, too. I am a photojournalist, not a soldier. I carry cameras and a notebook, not a gun. In the heat of battle, I am trying to stay alive, not trying to kill. The biggest difference – the one that surprises all the soldiers I meet – is that more than volunteering to be here, I overcome many obstacles to be an observer in this war zone.
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BACK in the 1970s, a gutsy blond named Jill Freedman armed with a battered Leica M4 and an eye for the offbeat trained her lens on the spirited characters and gritty sidewalks of a now-extinct city.
Influenced by the Modernist documentarian André Kertész, with references to the hard-edged, black-and-white works of Weegee and Diane Arbus, this self-taught photographer captured raw and intimate images, and transformed urban scenes into theatrical dramas.
Her New York was a blemished and fallen apple strewn with piles of garbage. Prostitutes and bag ladies walked the streets, junkies staked out abandoned tenements, and children played in vacant lots.
“The city falling apart,” Ms. Freedman said one day recently in recalling that era. “It was great. I used to love to throw the camera over my shoulder and hit the street.”
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An interesting challenge is how to tell the story without including the subject in the photographs. It’s interesting because, by avoiding the obvious and familiar, sometimes a greater sense of the occasion, and the emotions involved, can be conveyed.
For example, take the current visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the United States. Clearly the Pope was the centre of attention, and there are very good photographs of him that were taken and published in newspapers and on websites around the world. Photographs of him bring pleasure and comfort to millions.
The fact that he is in the States is of interest too, and it is important to take photographs that locate him there. On the other hand we are familiar with photographs that show the Pope in person, and what strikes me when looking at the Reuters coverage of the current visit is just how much the passion, reverence and joy felt by so many, can be conveyed in photographs that don’t show him in at all.
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DUTCH photographer Robert Knoth describes himself as a sissy, then laughs.
If Knoth is a sissy, he is not the sort of sissy most of us would recognise. His travel resume is a catalogue of the bleakest, most dangerous places on earth: Afghanistan, Angola, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tajikistan, to name a few. It seems he is drawn back time and again to suchplaces to document the suffering of theforgotten.
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Jessica Dimmock has been a whirling dervish since graduating from the Photojournalism program at ICP in 2005. A project she embarked upon while still in school, The Ninth Floor became a three-year intense documentation of the lives of 20 to 30 heroin addicts who lived in a run-down apartment in a well-appointed building in a fancy Manhattan neighborhood.
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Enter Michael von Graffenried. This much-lauded 51-year-old Swiss-born photojournalist has worked in this region for nearly two decades. He has a special relationship with Algeria, where he first shot photos in 1991 and returned to shoot the country’s agonizing and bloody decent into civil war.
Von Graffenried’s Algerian work is the stuff of “Algerie: Photographies d’une Guerre sans Images,” the exhibition currently on show at The Hangar in Haret Hreik. A meta-exhibition, it features both a sample of the photographer’s riveting work alongside “War Without Images: Algeria I Know That You Know,” Mohammed Soudani’s 2002 documentary about Von Graffenried’s work. The Hangar is playing the film in a loop alongside the photos.
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Quote:”I don’t care so much anymore about ‘good photography’; I am gathering evidence for history”.
Gilles Peress joined Magnum Photos in 1970 and is a Magnum Contributor.
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