Category: Photojournalism

  • PDN's World in Focus: The Ultimate Travel Photography Contest 2008

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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

    Check it out here.

  • the life of m: Meet Dani

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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.

  • Magnum Blog / It should be a dream – the photo blog of Magnum Photos

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    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.

    Check it out here.

  • redlights and redeyes: art of art

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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.

    Check it out here.

  • The Year in Pictures: Jehad Nga

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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.

    Check it out here.

  • Near the Cross: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta

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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.

    Check it out here.

  • State of the Art: Last Dispatch from Ernie Pyle

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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.

    Check it out here.

  • Rowland Scherman gets another shot at fame – The Boston Globe

    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.

  • © John Vink / Magnum Photos » 21 years ago

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    21 years ago on Feb. 3rd I was celebrating my 39th anniversary shooting pictures…

    Check it out here.

  • Journalism.co.uk :: Guardian special report wins Journalism.co.uk multimedia storytelling competition

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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.

    Check it out here.

  • A Photo Essay's Long Journey – – PopPhotoJanuary 2008

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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.

    Check it out here.

  • APhotoADay News

    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.

    Check it out here.

  • One Minute Left – Real Life – Real News

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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.

    Check it out here.

  • road trip: incomplete…

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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….

    Check it out here.

  • Leading Off: It was cold!

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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…”

    Check it out here.

  • ekathimerini.com | ARTS & LEISURE – NEWS

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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.

  • Black Star Rising – I Survived Another Layoff; What's Next for Newspaper Photojournalists?

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    As I survive my sixth layoff in five years, I question the future of photojournalism and am worried about the path we are headed down. Almost every newspaper in the county has laid off, bought out or done away with positions in the last few years. Everyone is trying to cut back on expenses, trim the fat, and keep profit margins up as the economy starts to take a dive. “This is necessary, these are hard times, it has to be done,” we’re told. Newspapers cannot afford to have investigative reporters, or fat staffs, or experienced journalists with higher salaries.

    Check it out here.

  • From Robert Capa to Ray Charles: What's in your Mexican Suitcase?

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    All of this got me instantly thinking (and worrying): What kind of Mexican suitcase will we leave to our future generations to find? A SyQuest cartridge from the early 1990’s? A floppy disk? A Zip drive? I’ve always laughed at the prospect of one of the great ironies of the digital era: In the end, only paper will survive. Our grandchildren might venture into an attic sixty years from now and find a stack of gorgeous prints–made from digital cameras and film cameras alike–and then again, they might find the original files to those prints on a CD with faded Sharpie writing. The prints, of course, will be treasured while the CD will get thrown into the trash faster than one can say, “what’s a SCSI drive?”

    (To be fair, there are plenty of atrocities on both sides of the fence. Back in the late eighties, someone at a major Washington newspaper, looking to clear some space, threw away negatives from a 16 year period, including many of those belonging to a minor political dust-up called Watergate.)

    Check it out here.

  • Is Reuters Publishing Fake Photographs? – mediabistro.com: FishbowlNY

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    Something is fishy over at Reuters. The news wire has been caught distributing what appear to be staged photographs of Gaza power outages. Check out the two photographs above, taken by Gaza-based Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem.

    The captions for the pictures read “Palestinian lawmakers attend a parliament session in candlelight during a power cut in Gaza January 22, 2008.”

    Except… look closely at the pictures. Is that sunlight steaming in through the windows? Yes. Yes it is. They’re holding a parliamentary session by candlelight during the daytime.

    Check it out here.

  • PDNPulse – State Of The Union Made Interesting!

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    When does photographer/blogger John Harrington sleep? We are not sure. Sometime between last night (when he covered the State of the Union address) and this afternoon, he produced an extremely informative 12-minute video about how photographers cover the president’s annual applause-fest. (Take note of Dennis Brack’s spot-on prediction that the Obama-Clinton cold shoulder would be the most important photo of the night.)

    Check it out here.