This slide show is taken from the memory card that was in Joao Silva’s camera on Oct. 23 when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine at Checkpoint 16, near the village of Deh-e-Kuchay, Afghanistan. Mr. Silva, a contract photographer for The New York Times, and Carlotta Gall, a Times correspondent, were on patrol with a squad of 10 or 15 American soldiers and a unit of Afghan soldiers and police officers.
Link: ‘It’s the Photographer’: Joao Silva’s Fateful Assignment in Afghanistan – NYTimes.com
The first thing I noticed on going to see Joao at the Walter Reed (after all the uniforms, of course) is that there are dispensers with antiseptic hand gel everywhere. And god forbid you try to enter a patient’s room without cleaning your hands. The obsessive hygiene is like a sickness itself, to the ignorant eye, what with people washing their hands compulsively. The bacteria they most fear is a little critter called Acinetobacter baumannii.
One Russian soldier’s account offers a departure point for confronting the ways that war can unravel its participants.
via At War Blog: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/the-diary-of-a-killer-in-chechnya/
Every so often a lengthy newspaper or magazine article arrives that all but demands a fuller and even longer treatment. Such was the case in the Oct 31. issue of The Sunday Times magazine in London, which published translated excerpts from the diary of a Russian spetsnaz officer who served for more than a decade as one of the Kremlin’s shadowy fighters in the Chechen wars.
Shots of battle from the war in Iraq in 2006, taken by the photographer Joao Silva, helped lead to a Bronze Star for a brave Marine sergeant who saved a fallen Marine’s life.
via At War Blog: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/courage-recognized-joao-silva-in-combat/
During a few frantic minutes late in 2006, Joao Silva, a photographer for The New York Times, made a series of photographs of a Marine sergeant, Jesse E. Leach, retrieving from the line of fire a radio operator, Lance Cpl. Juan Valdez-Castillo, who had just been shot by a sniper on a foot patrol in Karma, Iraq.
via Columbia Journalism Review: http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/q_a_war_photographer_moises_saman.php?page=all
“If you do this long enough, you will eventually find yourself in a bad situation”
The following interview was conducted in Baghdad on Dec. 9, 2009, by Michael Kamber, a seasoned conflict photographer himself (“Hard Lessons From Somalia,” “A Long and Dangerous Road,” “Minders, Fixers, Troubles”). He is working on a book about photojournalism and war photography. This condensed version of their conversation begins with Mr. Silva describing his background.
Link: Joao Silva: ‘Acting Despite Fear.’ An Interview by Michael Kamber – NYTimes.com
FOR A HANDLE ON THE US MILITARY’S COMPLICITY IN WIDESPREAD TORTURE IN SAMARRA, IRAQ, WATCH THIS. FRAGO 242 FRAGO 242 is the US military’s abbreviation of a “fragmentary order̶…
via Prison Photography: http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/frago-242-and-how-the-us-military-duped-photog-john-moore/
When US military became aware of Iraqi torture of other Iraqis, to quote The Guardian‘s David Leigh, “FRAGO 242 meant that no further investigation was necessary.”
Usually I avoid rubbing your face in it, but not today. This image, which has been sitting on my desktop for a few months, is offered out of anger, grief, and extreme frustration with press, public, and the Obama administration–and most of all with the
via Reading The Pictures: http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2010/10/when-we-decide-to-know/
This image, which has been sitting on my desktop for a few months, is offered out of anger, grief, and extreme frustration with press, public, and the Obama administration–and most of all with the public.
The photograph records a badly maimed soldier being delivered to a military hospital in Kandahar.
Joao Silva is known for his bravery and his caution in covering battle zones. Friends and colleagues were shocked by news he had been severely injured in Afghanistan.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/widespread-impact-from-an-afghan-mine/
Friends, colleagues and competitors of the photojournalist Joao Silva — there are many people in the first two categories, very few in the third — struggled to make sense on Saturday of the news that he had been severely injured when he stepped on a mine in Afghanistan.
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“Those of you who know Joao will not be surprised to learn that throughout this ordeal he continued to shoot pictures,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, in a memorandum to the staff.
John Moore has dedicated himself to covering America’s wartime prisons and detention centers. James Estrin and David Furst of The Times interviewed him.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/in-american-custod/
John Moore of Getty Images has visited American-run detention centers in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper; prisons for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan run by that country’s National Directorate of Security; the Pul-e-Charki prison outside Kabul; and, more recently, the Guantánamo Bay detention center. He is gathering these images in a longterm project, “Detained.” James Estrin and David Furst interviewed him by telephone
Joao Silva, a longtime contract photographer for The New York Times, was severely wounded when he stepped on a mine while on patrol with American soldiers.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/asia/24silva.html
The photographer, Joao Silva, 44, suffered leg wounds from the bomb, which detonated as he was moving through an area near the town of Arghandab. Mr. Silva, a longtime contract photographer, was evacuated and taken to Kandahar Airfield, an American and NATO base, where he was receiving treatment.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102201682.html?wprss=rss_world
A massive cache of secret U.S. field reports from the Iraq war provides grim new details about the toll of that conflict, indicating that more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed during a six-year stretch and that American forces often failed to intervene as the U.S.-backed government brutalized detainees, according to news organizations given access to the documents by the WikiLeaks Web site.
Reading the NYT’s stories about the Iraq War logs, I was struck by how it could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — wit…
via Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/22/torture.html
Reading the NYT’s stories about the Iraq War logs, I was struck by how it could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — without using the word ‘torture.’
After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in U.S. history. Mea
via WIRED: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/wikileaks-iraq/
After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in U.S. history.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100707341.html?wprss=rss_world
The head of Pakistan’s military has ordered an investigation into a video, circulating on the Internet, that depicts the country’s soldiers executing blindfolded men in civilian dress.
Tim Hetherington’s “Infidel” is more of a family album for a platoon in Afghanistan than a traditional photojournalism book.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/infidel/
Tim Hetherington’s “Infidel” (Chris Boot Ltd., 2010) is more of a family album than a traditional photojournalism book. There are of course powerful images of life for a platoon in the Korengal valley in Afghanistan that Hetherington and Sebastian Junger documented in the film “Restrepo.” But there are also thorough catalogs of the soldiers’ tattoos, their official Army ID photos and the magazine centerfolds in their barracks, and remarkably revealing interviews with seven of the soldiers. The book stands on its own, separate from the movie.
A domino chain of resignations at the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks followed a unilateral decision by autocratic founder Julian Assange to schedule an October release of 392,000 classified U.S. documents from the war in Iraq, according to former WikiLeak
via WIRED: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/wikileaks-revolt/
Key members of WikiLeaks were angered to learn last month that Assange had secretly provided media outlets with embargoed access to the vast database, under an arrangement similar to the one WikiLeaks made with three newspapers that released documents from the Afghanistan war in July. WikiLeaks is set to release the Iraq trove on Oct. 18, according to ex-staffers — far too early, in the view of some of them, to properly redact the names of U.S. collaborators and informants in Iraq.
I’ve been working here for nine years and it’s become worse and worse.
via At War Blog: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/report-from-the-taliban-heartland/
New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks gives a first-hand account of a firefight in Afghanistan.