Category: War

  • We're Just Sayin: Closing the Circle

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    by David Burnett

    We had been lingering on the edge of battle in this small village when a droning noise came out of the distance. Two A-1 Skyraider planes, with Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) markings started circling Trang Bang. After a couple of passes they began diving towards the village. I had finished the first roll of film in my Leica III, and had started to reload. The planes came in, lumbering along as they do, and dropped big canisters of napalm. Moments later there was a fiery explosion, and a large fireball erupted on the edge of the village near a pagoda, followed by billows of dark smoke. I was still struggling to slide the Tri-x into my Leica, with one eye watching the planes and one on the camera. The planes made a couple of passes, the film still resisting to go into that narrow loading slot on the Leica. Then, all of a sudden everything changed.

    Check it out here.

  • Bruce Haley Pictures – Tao of War Photography

    Note: I’ve had some people ask me to put this on the website, so here it is… please keep in mind that this was written over a decade ago, so some of it is a bit dated..

    B.H.’s Tao of War Photography

    subtitled: “Never Ride an Asian Elephant While Wearing Shorts”

    Check it out here. Via Conscientious.

  • Tactical Success, Strategic Defeat – washingtonpost.com

    Exactly what happened next is disputed, but shots were fired and a man inside fell dead. Four other men were grabbed and arrested. Then the soldiers departed, leaving the women to calm the frightened children and the rumors to spread in the dark.

    By midmorning, hundreds of angry people were blocking the nearby highway, burning tires and shouting “Death to America!” By mid-evening, millions of Afghan TV news viewers were convinced that foreign troops had killed an unarmed man trying to answer his door.

    Check it out here.

  • War Paparazzi: Israel's War Against Hamas and Still Photographers – The Digital Journalist

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    As Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip ended, Barack Obama was taking the oath of office and became the 44th president of the United States. The last Israeli tank rolled across one of the gates from the Gaza Strip back into Israel, but no one knew when or where. That was a moment no media captured because the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) did not want the media to see the event, or anything else in the three-week conflict.

    Check it out here.

  • Contemporary city photoshopped with war-scenes from history

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    Sergei Larenkov has photoshopped together modern images of St Petersburg with photos taken during the brutal Siege of Leningrad during WWII

    Check it out here. Via BoingBoing.

  • Photographers’ Journal: A War’s Many Angles

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    Since I can’t easily link directly to the two slideshows, you can go to the linked article and pop the up.

    After Israel’s three-week air, sea and land assault in Gaza, aimed at halting Hamas rocket fire, it is worth pausing to note how difficult it has been to narrate this war in a fashion others view as neutral, and to contemplate what that means for any attempt by the new Obama administration to try to end it.

    Check it out here.

  • Few in U.S. See Jazeera’s Coverage of Gaza War

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    In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

    Check it out here.

  • Photojournalists Not Allowed to Enter Gaza

    The Australian newspaper reports that news photographers are playing cat-and-mouse with the Israeli military as they try to cover the fighting in Gaza.

    Check it out here.

  • "Vietnam: Unseen War, Pictures From the Other Side"

    Documentary (2002). “Many Americans think they know the full story of the Vietnam War, but there’s a side of the conflict few of them have seen — how the North Vietnamese media covered the war. National Geographic Video: Vietnam’s Unseen War is a documentary hosted by photographer Tim Page, who visits former soldiers and journalists on both sides of this 30-year struggle and uses the work of North Vietnamese photojournalists to offer an unusual perspective on the tragic consequences of the war, and how it shaped Vietnam’s political and economic climate.” ~ Mark Deming

    Check it out here. Via Jason Campbell.

  • THE MOST DOPED UP SOLDIERS THIS SIDE OF THE HINDU KUSH

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    Vice: There’s a long history of soldiers taking things like speed to improve their fighting, but smoking weed in combat seems really counterintuitive, right?
    You’d think so, but as I say to one of the main soldiers in the series with Jack, “Normally, that would make you more cautious, wouldn’t it?” And he said “Yeah, it would make me more cautious, but it makes these guys even more brave.” They just smoke for a few minutes then they get up and run toward the bullets. There was one day–it was the first time we were attacked while I was with the company. One of the Brits dove into a ditch and started firing, and the Afghan next to him stood up eating an apple.

    Check it out here.

  • Vice Magazine: CREATIVE 30 – CLANCY CHASSAY

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    Today we meet Clancy Chassay, 28, multimedia journalist from London.

    Check it out here.

  • THE DOODLES OF WAR – Bloodthirsty Child Soldiers Tag Liberia

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    The child soldiers of Liberia have taken street art to another level. Tim Hetherington, winner of the World Press Photo of the Year in 2007, took these terrifying photos during the blood-drenched civil war over there a few years back. The childlike scrawls of rape, violence and intimidation are pretty grim, but it all gets out of hand when you see the cupboard with “room of pain” etched on it. We spoke to Tim about Liberia, child soldiers and the 90s Liberian graf scene.

    Check it out here.

  • Book Review – 'The Angel of Grozny – Orphans of a Forgotten War,' by Asne Seierstad

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    They steal, they hit, they kill dogs. And for New Year, they decorate the holiday tree in the backyard with the skeleton of a Russian soldier.

    After some 14 years of war, terror and lawlessness, the children of Chechnya have been damaged in ways outsiders can barely fathom. Even now, with the war part of the war essentially over, Chechnya remains a place of hidden horrors, where life is fragile and exceedingly cheap.

    Check it out here.

  • Perpignan Friday Conference on Conflict Photography

    comments from the press conference this morning with Stanley Greene, Yuri Kozyrev, Lucas Menget, and Patrick Robert — the conflict journalist’s speak. These photographers have all made incredible images in the most difficult places imaginable

    Check it out here.

  • State of the Art: Did Fake Photos Skew Georgian War Coverage?

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    CLICK NOTE: After looking at all of the photos in question, this looks to me like a bullshit accusation.

    Several blogs are reporting that images by wire-service photographers from the conflict between Russia and Georgia were staged.

    Check it out here.

  • Shooting War: graphic novel about blogger embedded in Baghdad – Boing Boing

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    Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War is one of the strongest graphic novels I’ve read in years, a tough anti-war comic that provides trenchant, spot-on commentary about the relationship of the news-media to all sides of modern war.

    Check it out here.

  • An Uncertain Death Toll In Georgia-Russia War – washingtonpost.com

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    As they fled, rumors rose like smoke and clouded the air: Cossack, Ossetian and Chechen “irregulars” had razed Georgian villages, committed mass rapes, rounded up all the young people and marched them off to a concentration camp. Women vowed to drink poison rather than be captured alive.

    On the other side, Ossetians and Russians said Georgian shells had leveled Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, and targeted Ossetian villages for destruction, killing thousands.

    Exaggerated claims from both governments fed the panic.

    Check it out here.

  • My Long War – Dexter Filkins – NYTimes.com

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    I pulled on my running shoes and stepped into the sweltering streets. It was a Thursday in July 2003, twilight, and well over 100 degrees. I was feeling a little reckless. If this ended badly, the only thing anyone would remember was how stupid I was.

    We had set up the New York Times office on Abu Nawas Street. We lived and worked there: an Ottoman-style house with a gated yard and a veranda on the second floor that looked out on a boulevard that tracked the eastern bank of the Tigris River. In those first days, we didn’t fortify the place; no razor wire or blast walls, no watchtowers or machine guns mounted on the roof. Cars motored past our front yard on their way to the Jumhuriya Bridge a couple of miles up the road.

    Check it out here.

  • Bernard-Henri Lévy: Georgia at War: What I Saw

    I see almost no trace of the army which has supposedly regrouped in order to fiercely resist the Russian invasion. Here we see a police station. A little farther on, a handful of soldiers, their uniforms still too new. But no combat units. No anti-aircraft weaponry. Not even the trenches and zigzagging fortifications which, in all the besieged cities of the world, are set up to at least slightly impede the enemy’s advance. A dispatch received while we are driving announces that Russian tanks are now approaching the capital. The information is relayed by various radio stations and then finally denied, creating unspeakable chaos and making the few cars which had ventured outside the city turn back immediately. But the authorities, the powers that be, seem strangely to have given up.

    Check it out here.

  • Georgian Conflict Exposes Obsolete Hardware in Russian Forces

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    The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military. While Georgia’s armed forces operated Soviet-era T-72 tanks and Su-25 attack planes, both were upgraded with equipment such as night-vision systems to make them technologically superior to similar models operated by the Russian Ground Forces, said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

    “The Russian forces had to operate in an environment of technical inferiority,” Makiyenko said.

    Check it out here.