Category: Photojournalism

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.

A man stands in a darkened room, shirtless, his body all muscles and ink. His left shoulder is adorned with an arc of onion domes and an icon. On his lower torso is a Russian Orthodox priest. His tattoos mark him as a former zek, or prisoner, and an “honest thief.”

The man is one of the subjects of Canadian photographer Donald Weber, who has immersed himself in the world of Russian and Ukrainian ex-cons, visiting them at their homes and documenting their elaborate tattoos.

“What intrigues me about the zeks is that their life is very rich in nuance and consciously layered with meaning,” Weber said in a recent telephone interview from Kiev. “Russian criminals take their tattooing very seriously, because whatever’s on their body defines who they are or what they are going to be. They can never escape it.

Check it out here.

On September 11, 2001, Keith Meyers cut short a vacation and raced to New York to help with coverage at Ground Zero. Four days later, Meyers climbed aboard a Coast Guard helicopter to shoot a series of historic pictures, the first aerial news photos of the still-burning World Trade Center site.

As he leaned out of the helicopter, Meyers could feel the rising smoke.

“It was like breathing fire, and I could feel my skin tingling and burning,” he says. A doctor later told him he probably had been exposed to chemicals as caustic as Drano.

Check it out here.

Jason P Howe:

Sitting naked on the edge of the bed in a cheap, sweltering hotel room in the heart of a war-torn, drug-producing region of Colombia, I lit a cigarette and listened as the girl I had just made love with told me a secret dark enough to shake anyone from their postcoital bliss.

I had been in Colombia for a few months to learn how to become a photojournalist. Not by attending some theoretical university course, or taking portraits in a cosy studio, but by pitching myself in at the deep end.

Check it out here.