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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A mid-career retrospective, this exhibition explores the issues of land and landlessness in two parts. The first section reveals Larry Towell’s family and their relationship to their land in Ontario. Most of the photographs in this section were taken within 100 yards of his front porch. The second section reviews Towell’s work over the past twenty years documenting the crisis of human landlessness throughout the world, from Central America to the Middle East. Writes Towell, “We must address these crises in order to achieve a more stable and peaceful world.”
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Documentary photographer Eugene Richards – who famously quit Magnum twice – has now left the VII Photo Agency. Speaking to PDN today, he said he left about a week ago and the choice was “personal preference,” motivated by the agency “going in a different direction.” He said he wishes VII well. “Sometimes you don’t fit,” he added. Richards said he has no plans to join another agency. Richards was voted into VII in 2006.
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One thing that never changes on a White House trip, no matter where in the world we are travelling, are the extremely long days on the go. You are running off planes and into the back of deafening military helicopters which sometimes spew hot oil all over your clothes, and then jump into the motorcade. Repeat three more times in one day and you start to get the picture. Actually I love all of it. It’s definitely an adrenalin rush and sometimes it’s adrenalin alone that will get you through a tough day. We normally assemble at 6-7am and sometimes finish at midnight if there is a state dinner or such. On one of the days, we awake in Tanzania, fly to Rwanda for a full day’s schedule, then get back on the plane and fly six hours to Ghana. On the last day, we leave Ghana, cover Bush’s historic trip to Liberia, then overnight on Air Force One back to Washington. The long days working in unfamiliar environments, hoping you don’t have to break out the satellite phone to transmit your pictures (we never did), and constant time zone changes eventually take their toll on everyone and thankfully most trips don’t last more than a week. But the longer it goes, the more “silly” things start happening to people, sometimes with painful consequences.
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Lawrence Looi, 31, who has been a staff photographer with news agency News Team for the last three years, had been sent to cover a protest on public roads outside the International Conference Centre on Thursday morning when he was approached by a police constable who objected to having been photographed.
According to the written complaint, a copy of which has been seen by EPUK, the officer held Looi by the upper arm and asked him to delete any photographs that had been taken of police officers. The officer also asked Looi to identify himself, but refused an offer to see Looi’s NPA-issued National Press Card.
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Detroit Free Press photographer Rashaun Rucker was named Photographer of the Year by the Michigan Press Photographers Association Saturday in its 55th annual Pictures of the Year contest.
Rucker, 29, is the first African American to win the award, which celebrates a year’s worth of exemplary visual storytelling.
“I almost cried,” Rucker said. “Even though I won, this is recognition for all the people at the Free Press who helped me throughout the year.”
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I’ve always considered myself a serious photojournalist. I’ve covered hard news and social issues, documenting the history of Utah through grief and pain, joy and wonder. Throughout my career as a documentary photographer I never thought I would ever have to ask a subject, “Do you want to take your shirt off?”
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This was the summer of 2006, and Melanie Blanding, a photographer from Roanoke, was in the Democratic Republic of Congo to take a series of portraits of women scarred by war. The women are victims of violent, often monstrous sexual assaults, and their numbers appear to be growing.
Picture a photographer in Africa to document wartime casualties and you might envision a strapping, grizzled veteran loaded down with cameras. But that’s not Blanding.
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David Griffin is the director of photography for National Geographic magazine. To talk about the power of images, he shows us some of the best photojournalistic images published in National Geographic. Of twelve images, including Steve McCurry’s famous photo of an Afghan refugee, and an amazing shot by Nick Nichols of Jane Goodal touching an ape, one was an amateur, submitted through Geographic’s new amateur site, Your Shot
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Documentary photojournalist Eugene Richards has a long career of producing powerful projects on social issues such as drug abuse, mental illness and aging. He is now working on a project on the impact of the Iraq war titled “War is Personal.” Helped by a grant from National Geographic Magazine, he is traveling around the U.S. to work on a series of stories mainly about veterans and their families. PDN recently sat down with Richards at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., to talk about the project.
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I made these pictures a few months ago. I took vacation for 3 days and drove about an hour south of portland to shoot a mini – story about a homeless family moving into a home. its not a unique story – i have even shot it before. but, that doesn’t matter. we often choose to not do a story because its been done before. what does that mean? homelessness has been “done” to death. so we shouldn’t cover it?
the photos will never be published anywhere but here. so i suppose i shot them for the blog (which seems weird to me). but, i shot them for Geana and the kids too.
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Outlets including The Associated Press and Sports Illustrated, and groups including the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) and the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE), are asking MLB to change the credentialing terms for the upcoming baseball season.
This is the latest in a series of disputes between the press and sports leagues, which are increasingly trying to take control of photographs and other elements of media coverage.
In the new set of conditions for issuing 2008 press credentials, MLB states that “still pictures or photographs of any game cannot be used as part of a photo gallery.”
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