Five years was about how long Lori Grinker thought it would take document the stories of former soldiers; she was only off by a decade.
Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict (de.MO), a 248-page collection of intimate color portraits and searing first-person accounts of postwar existence was published in March, 2005 — 15 years and 30 countries after she began the photographic odyssey.
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Decades of government corruption, drug trafficking and unethical free trade agreements with the U.S. have sparked the re-emergence of La Santísima Muerte, “Most Holy Death,” which is beginning to pervade throughout Mexican culture as a fashionable, deified, archetype, according to a Mexican photojournalist.
Assistant Professor of Communication Scott Carrier invited Julián Cardona, a photojournalist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to speak and present a slideshow of his work at the first installment of the Real World Lecture Series on Tuesday, Feb. 26 at 1 p.m. in the Ragan Theater.
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Danfung Dennis:
Then the riot police surged forward at a full sprint. I ran alongside, photographing them. Did they push me or did I trip? All I know is that the next moment I was airborne, hurtling through space, then crushed to the ground. The riot police trampled over me as they charged towards the rioters. When they passed I sat up, dazed in a swirling cloud of dust, bleeding from both my arms, my leg, back and side. Pieces of my camera and lens lay in pieces around me. I limped back to my car where my driver said, “This is when the police will start shooting people,” as if to prod me back into the melee. I considered returning into the vast sea of tin shacks that is home to over a million people. Then I took a look at the remains of my camera and the blood soaking through my clothes and realized that I needed to go to a hospital more than I wanted to photograph any more police and rioters.
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Bill Pierce:
A number of blogs and Web sites have devoted a great deal of space to discussing the recent and somewhat abrupt dismissal of Steven Lee as CEO of Leica. There has been much conjecture as to the reasons and much of that has been centered around the Leica M’s introduction into the digital world. Truth is, the M8 was well underway long before the arrival of Steven Lee. And Leica’s problems started long before the M8 or Steven Lee were around, long before.
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There is also, on the wall above his desk, a framed photograph of a white student attacking a black man with the American flag. The picture, taken by Stanley Forman at an anti-busing rally held at Boston’s City Hall Plaza on April 5, 1976, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Boston Herald American spot news photographer.
What follows is the story of the photograph that would come to be titled “The Soiling of Old Glory,” and the story of the man who was attacked with an American flag and had every reason to flee a city viewed as racist, but who remained in the hope that he could make a difference.
Check it out here.
These photographs of McClellan Street by David and Peter Turnley, taken in 1972-73, help us understand how America came to be the country that it is today.
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New photo collective with photographers Elyse Butler, Matt Eich, Yoon S Byun, Andrew Henderson, Chris Capozziello, Matt Mallams.
Check it out here. Via MultiMediaShooter.
A new book by Joachim Ladefoged, featuring 62 colour portraits and 16 black-and-white action shots from bodybuilding competitions in Scandinavia
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Dith Pran, who survived torture under the genocidal Khmer Rouge after helping The New York Times’s Cambodia correspondent for three years, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January. He was hospitalized for three weeks starting in mid-February, and was released to the Roosevelt Care Center in Edison, NJ, on Friday.
After escaping his country in 1979, Dith, 65, became a photographer for The New York Times in 1980, where he remains on staff. [His given name is Pran; Dith is his family name.] He was made famous by the 1984 film “The Killing Fields,” which depicts him in his role as a translator and journalist assisting Sydney Schanberg, then a foreign correspondent for The Times.
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My story on Ben finally ran yesterday, on my last day of work. I felt like I went out with a good note. It was nice to see my vision for the story play out through fruition. All the photos ran in black and white over three pages starting on the A1.
Check it out here.
When you close your eyes and think of Iraq, what do you see in your mind’s eye?
Is it a picture of charred bodies hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River in Fallujah? Is it a picture of a Marine climbing a massive statue of Saddam Hussein to place an American flag on its face, hours after the fall of Baghdad?
Or is it a picture of an Iraqi prisoner standing on a box, arms outstretched with wires attached, a fabric bag covering his head
Check it out here.
Born in Kabul, the 23-year-old is one of the few female photojournalists in Afghanistan. And even six years after she picked up her first camera, Farzana Wahidy says she still hears the grunts of disapproval or feels the sticks that are thrown at her, the sentiment that comes with being a female photojournalist in a male-dominated profession, and in a country where women are not seen as equals.
“Every picture that came out of Afghanistan, they were mostly taken by men and foreign photojournalists.” And most were pictures of bloodshed, she says. “So I thought that could be something for me to do, show a picture of what Afghanistan is. I like pictures that show the difficulty of the lives of women, their daily lives.”
Check it out here.
© Raymond Depardon / Magnum Photos
This weekend in 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan after having occupied the country since 1979 with much resistance from the mujahideen. Civil war, refugee crises, and Taliban rule followed, then the United States struck the Taliban in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Magnum presents a short history of Afghanistan in pictures.
March 9 marks three months since a judge in Baghdad placed a gag order on the hearing of Bilal Hussein, the Associated Press photojournalist accused of being a security threat.
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The day after Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the Ohio and Texas primaries, the New York Times ran this image, by Win McNamee for Getty Images, showing Obama talking to reporters on his campaign plane. The Times unfortunately cropped out the best part, which is the reporter at right holding a bunch of cell phones or tape recorders or something. Gawker happily showed the entire image. What in the world is she doing?
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Wang Lili, a 52-year old photojournalist, received his pink slip from Tongzhou Newsletter where he had been working more than 3 years and the only reason for the dismissal was an incomprehensible “political incident” that in one of his picture reports for the local People’s Congress, the warden of Beijing Tongzhou District “bowed the head with closed eyes, presenting an off-colored image”, Southern Metropolis Weekly Reported last Friday. The problem photo taken by Wang was concluded as a picture report which biased its readers against the government, exerting extremely bad political influence.
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I spent the past two days playing host to Ken Speake, a master storyteller and a longtime journalist. We put him in front of as many students as we could without completely wearing him down to a nub, and it might have been the most valuable 50 minutes each of those students has spent all year.
Check it out here.
Sometimes I get tired of talking about marketing and business because the reality is I really just like looking at pictures and I get a real buzz out of sending photographers off to take pictures and wish I didn’t have to deal with any of the other shit and I know photographers just want to take pictures so I thought I’d take this opportunity to say that if you want to be like Seamus Murphy and work hard to develop your craft then go do it.
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Two of the photographers who participated in the 2008 World Press Photo judging, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, have written a fascinating article for foto8 about the judging process.
Check it out here.
