To celebrate James Nachtwey’s 30 years as a contract photographer for TIME, we have organized an exhibit of 54 layouts that have appeared in the magazine featuring his work from Chechnya to Somalia and from Afghanistan to Burma, along with a series of his powerful, previously unpublished photographs. Below, James Nachtwey, and TIME’s Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs, reflect on the relationship between photographer and publication.
“Since its inception, photojournalism has competed with the movies, then television, and always seems to have been facing a crisis,” says Samuel Bollendorff in the introduction to the fascinating exhibition Amateurs à la Une (Front-Page Amateurs), now on view at the Visa Pour L’Image festival in Perpignan
The PR war. The pixel war. The virtual front. The social front. The battle for thoughts and memes. The planting of minds. The ambient space. War jamming.
So Mr. Sullivan, along with Mr. Parry’s friends and family started the Ian Parry Scholarship to keep his memory alive and to help other promising young photographers follow their dreams.
A recent slew of situations resulting in catastrophic violence and death, including the Israel-Gaza war, the armed expansion of the Islamic State, the downing of a Malaysian Airlines plane in the Ukraine, the ongoing conflict in Syria, and also the spread of the Ebola virus, has led to a renewed debate as to what kinds of imagery media outlets should be expected to show.
“If Visa pour l’Image 2014 is violent, it’s because the world is violent,” said festival director Jean-François Leroy this week in an interview with the Catalan press.
For Samuel Bollendorff, a French photographer and documentary filmmaker, amateurs are just scapegoats for a profession that has refused to accept its share of responsibility in its economic struggles. “My role as a photographer, at least the way I see it, is to try to understand how people around me produce, distribute and consume images,” he tells TIME. “For the past few years, we’ve heard the worse things about amateurs, which are accused of having brought photojournalists to their knees. I thought it was important to take a look back at these claims and uncover these amateur images that have made the front pages over the years.”
I’ve spent the past week down in Ferguson, MO covering the protests and police response. What I never expect was to find myself embarrassed to photograph
I’ve spent the past week down in Ferguson, MO covering the protests and police response. What I never expect was to find myself embarrassed to photograph but it happened on Tuesday
“When all the world’s media leaves, this is still our neighborhood,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s director of photography Lynden Steele recently told TIME. “We have to work knowing that what we do now will come back to us a month from now. We have to be able to stand by what we’re doing now because we’re going to be in that neighborhood weeks, months, years from now.”
I’d like to focus on a few main topics in relation to the aftermath of the police killing of Michael Brown, a young unarmed black man: the representation of black men in the media, the “Don’t shoot me” extended arms pose, the look of militarized police, and police targeting of reporters
I was told to pack my riot gear and head to Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis in Missouri, to cover unrest that had broken out there following the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer.
As I was behind a hedge taking photos of a television position that had been abandoned when reporters fled from the tear gas, police caught up with me.
Many reading this blog are familiar with the protests in Ferguson, Missouri over the shooting of an unarmed teenager a few weeks ago and the heavy police action with both the community and the press covering the news. Three regular contributors to this blog give their tips on dealing with spot news, often with police in a riot or crime scene.
The photographs of unrest in Ferguson after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer have drawn comparisons to pictures of the Deep South in the 1960s.
“It didn’t look like America. It looked like Soweto,” Danny Lyon said, referring to the South African township that was a hotbed of protests against apartheid. “It looked like soldiers. And soldiers’ job isn’t to protect. Their job is to kill people and to be ready to die.”
Reading a Philadelphia Magazine report about the decision by editors at the Philadelphia Daily News to change a cover photo in response to some outrage on social media left us wondering: Did photo editors at the Philadelphia Daily News change their minds
Did photo editors at the Philadelphia Daily News change their minds because they thought they’d made a mistake? Or did they change their minds to avoid controversy and public outcry?
I am troubled by what I have seen. In recent weeks, we have witnessed terrible, on-going episodes within our borders through photos and video that speak volumes about the tragedy of race. Racism is as old as human history, and there is a long, rich histor
Photos have been historically considered as a means to record history. But the proliferation of digital devices and social media have turned photography into a visual language. Photos go viral for a multitude of reasons (e.g. humor), but it’s often storie
I’ve recently come across two examples where good stories arguably beat out better photos as shown by the viral spread throughout social media. Do you agree?
After three days of very loud and very angry protests, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Director of Photography Lynden Steele followed his staffers’ Twitter feeds, text messages and listened to scanner chatter for perspective.
How the Post-Dispatch’s photo staff is covering Ferguson