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One of the most powerful photos of the tornado damage in the southern U.S. is by photojournalist Gary Cosby Jr. of The Decatur Daily in Alabama. Cosby’s shot was picked up by the AP and ran as today’s lead photo in the USA Today and The New York Times, among other newspapers.
The photo shows one man, James Devaney, searching through the flattened debris of the home where his daughter, along with her son and her husband, were killed early Wednesday morning.
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Jeff Mermelstein walks around New York with his Leica taking pictures. Great commentary on his style and process including his work on 9/11 below.
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Lockport came from six runs down to beat Oak Park 8-6, and Banks headed onto the field to take the “jubilation shot”—the photo of ecstatic teenagers hugging and tumbling and screaming. It’s the shot that goes on page one of tomorrow’s paper and into the photo albums of every player on the team.
But a volunteer from the Illinois High School Association blocked Banks’s way at third base. “She knew who I was and she said, ‘I can’t let you out,’” he says. “I asked why. She said, ‘This is my instruc tion.’” Banks looked around. He spotted the photographer from Visual Image Photo graphy, the firm under contract with the IHSA to take pictures of its major events, heading for the field from the first base side. Banks trotted after him and got his picture.
Banks also calls the jubilation shot the “money shot,” and that’s not just a metaphor. Papers point out that for 100 years they’ve sold copies of their pictures for a nominal rate to readers seeking mementos. Now a lot of papers have digitized the process—their photographers post pictures and readers order them online. An outside company that handled the order and made the print took a cut and Banks and the Southtown split the balance. Banks says his yearly take was something under $2,000.
The revenue stream is pretty small—it didn’t come close to sparing the Southtown its recent drastic economies, merging with the Star papers and laying off a lot of people, Banks included. But visit the Web site of what’s now the SouthtownStar and you’ll see the paper means business. “Welcome to Southland Photo Shoppe,” it says. “Your shopping choices range from traditional prints to T-shirts, mugs, computer mouse pads and other items on which our photos are imprinted.” A simple eight-by-ten is $25.
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Photographers captured the devastation from killer tornados that wreaked havoc across five southern states. We found galleries from National Geographic News, the New York Times and The Tennessean.
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The more than 80 images showcased on the following pages were submitted by photographers who found picture-worthy moments in places as diverse as Antarctica and the Libyan desert, as well as locations that hit a little closer to home. So whether it’s Faisal Almalki’s snapshot of a man and his camel in Cairo or Ramin Talaie’s photograph of more than 2,500 Lubavitcher Rabbis in Brooklyn that catches your eye, these entries will give you a glimpse of the world.
The contest was judged in six categories: Human Condition, Extreme Exploration, Urban Landscapes, Snapshots, Wilderness and Open Series. The judges’ choices for Grand Prize and First Place in each category are shown on the followin
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My favorite writer and I are starting an absolutely heartbreaking story on a little girl named Dani, who was removed from her biological mom’s home a year ago. When the police found her she was locked in a room about the size of a closet, living in her own excrement (and that of a cat that was locked in there with her), with nothing more than a baby bottle and a bare mattress. That’s apparently where she spent the first 7 years of her life.
Check it out here.
Bruce Gilden:
I went to Haiti because I wanted to do something to supplement my New York work. It wasn’t far, it’s three and a half hours direct flight from New York City. They have a Mardi Gras in February so that means people are on the street.
A very important factor is that historically Haitians weren’t against being photographed. Whereas if you go to some other Caribbean countries, it would be much tougher to photograph. In other words, you’d put your life really in danger. Like Jamaica, if you don’t have an ‘entre’ it’s a tough place and they don’t take to being photographed as well. If you’re going to the areas I go into, you’ll lose your camera or you lose your life.
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I got sent to Miami for three days for The New York Times for a piece on the Miami art scene post Art Basel. I can’t really say much more than it was an amazing time, met some really chill people and got a chance to just wander and make photos I wanted to make. We don’t get to do nearly as much of that these days in our business, so I took full advantage of making wrong turns, finding random wi-fi spots (thank you Denny’s), and taking in some spectacular shows.
These are only a fraction of the 80-picture edit I sent, but I’ll drop a few more on this blog in a few days when I get around to editing my stuff from my random side-trip to the fashion district – which is about as close to painted wall heaven as I have ever been.
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One of the most striking new bodies of work I’ve seen recently is a series of photographs made by the 30 year old photojournalist Jehad Nga. Taken in a Somalian café and lit only by a single shaft on sunlight, the images illuminate their subjects in the clandestine manner of Walker Evans’ subway pictures or Harry Callahan’s “Women Lost in Thought”.
Nga was born in Kansas, but moved soon after, first to Libya and then to London. In his early 20s he was living in Los Angeles and taking courses at UCLA, when he came across the book “Digital Diaries” by Natasha Merritt. The book, a collection of sexually intimate photos made with a digital point-and-shoot, convinced Nga that he could become a photographer. One year later he was traveling through the Middle East taking pictures.
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Tom Rankin began photographing the sacred landscapes and spiritual traditions of the Mississippi Delta in the late 1980s when he moved there to teach at Delta State University. He returns to Mississippi regularly to photograph some of the same churches and cemeteries as they evolve and change over time, reflecting the ongoing life of these holy spaces. Rankin expresses his deep connection and attraction to the Delta and its religious practices in his book Sacred Space.
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It is just a photograph of a body at the side of a road—another death among the millions of deaths of World War II. Yet this photo, long lost and never before published, has surprised historians. The dead man in the picture is Ernie Pyle, the famed war correspondent whose dispatches painted vivid portraits of the lives of common GIs. Pyle famously covered several theaters of war, including the brutal Italian campaign of 1943-1944, and was killed on April 17, 1945 on the island of le Shima, off Okinawa in the Pacific.
Even historians who have specialized in studying Pyle’s work and collecting his correspondence had never seen the image. The negative is long lost and only a few prints were known to exist.
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In those days, you could get close. Very close. That’s how Rowland Scherman worked. With his hand-held Leica, he shot Mississippi John Hurt strumming a guitar on a rickety bed, Robert F. Kennedy strategizing with campaign advisers, and Bob Dylan at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival.
“I was so close, I could have said, ‘Bob, could you hold this camera?’ ” Scherman jokes. “Nowadays, they would take you and throw you out.”
Nobody threw Scherman out. For roughly a decade, the photographer had an uncanny knack for making sure he was in the right place at the right time, whether shooting for Life magazine, National Geographic, or Time. And just as quickly as he arrived, he disappeared, drifting across the ocean and out of that glossy world for good.
Check it out here.
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21 years ago on Feb. 3rd I was celebrating my 39th anniversary shooting pictures…
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A special report looking at the provision of education in an area of Mali has won the inaugural Journalism.co.uk multimedia reporting competition.
Judges praised the combined use of voiceover, stills and video footage within a series of slideshows, that made up the Learning Lessons in Africa report, calling it a ‘compelling story’ and a ‘seamless piece of journalism’ that set it apart from other more technically adventurous projects.
Photographer Ami Vitale and videographer Dan Chung complied footage in Mali for the report (pictured above), which was then produced by Elliot Smith with interactive design by Paddy Allen and published online by the Guardian.
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From his first job at a small south Chicago paper to his current position as a staff photographer for the Chicago Tribune, Scott Strazzante has carried with him a personal project about a family farm near Lockport, Illinois. Now presented as a slide show for the Chicago Tribune Magazine titled Another Country, Strazzante’s diptychs pair images of the Cagwin farm with subsequent shots from the subdivision that was built on their land. After American Photo senior editor Miki Johnson wrote about the project on the magazine’s State of the Art blog, Strazzante got in touch and the two struck up a conversation about the ongoing project.
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The White House News Photographers Association Student Contest Committee announces a new contest open to students from around the world to compete for the honor of WHNPA 2008 Student Photographer of the Year. WHNPA sponsor, Digital Railroad, will host the competition website and the award for the winning student photographer.
The contest submission page will open on February 1, 2008 and entries will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. on March 1, 2008.
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Every assignment/subject/event I have ever photographed in my life has taken less than one minute to capture. It takes a lot of frames at 1/250th of a second to add up to a minute, but it’s all the things we do between this time and that, which make all the difference in the world. Sometimes I wish the people in upper level management would spend more than 1/250th of a second deciding which stories we run centerpiece photos with and which ones we ignore all together. Photography at The Spectrum is an afterthought in most cases, used to fill space between the words on the page. I always ask myself ‘how can I best serve the story, how can I best serve the reader’ with my photos, and when I cover a city council meeting like I did tonight I wonder if my time would be better spent covering an assignment that would be enhanced with visual story telling.
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yesterday a brief discussion came up under “student work/workshops” that i thought might be interesting to bring up right here….herve brought it up, after seeing my India student essays, with regard to what he described as a “trend” by workshop students in particular and many photographers in general to photograph what he described as “incomplete” or “not quite” photographs….photographs which could possibly require just too too much imagination on the viewers part…not enough “explanation” perhaps….
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How cold was it?
Cold enough to pop both of the lenses out of my glasses.
Cold enough to freeze my breath on the camera viewfinder.
Cold enough to wear not one, but two sets of long underwear. (Expedition weight no less!)
Cold enough for Peter Miller to go through a whole box of chemical hand warmers.
Cold enough to freeze your nose hairs.
Cold enough to REALLY believe those immortal words: “The frozen tundra that is Lambeau Field…”
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A seven-year period may seem short compared to a full-span professional career, but in the case of the independent photojournalist Dimitris Soulas (born 1938) this hardly matters.
Soulas worked as a photographer in Germany between 1967 and 1974, a period that coincided with the junta regime in Greece. It was a short but highly creative period that earned him success and recognition. “Dimitris Soulas, Snapshots, Photographs 1967-1974,” an exhibition currently being held at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, reveals the strength and richness in the work of this artist whose commitment to photography, although brief, was substantial. The first large presentation held on the work of Soulas worldwide, it is a touring exhibition that begins from Greece (at the artist’s request). It has been organized by the Museum of Photography in the City of Munich to which Soulas donated his archive, to mark the photographer’s 70th birthday. It is being held in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and is jointly curated by Ulrich Pohlmann (director of the German museum) and Heracles Papaioannou, curator at the Thessaloniki museum. An album with researched essays that place the work of Soulas in its time has been published by both museums on the occasion.
Check it out here.