APAD says:
This is a really great look at covering a war — through a photojournalist’s lens. LA Times photojournalist Rick Loomis takes you from his storage locker in California into battle in Fallouja. The self portraits over time are very telling, and there are some fun stories about drinking Saddam’s wine seeing a woman for the first time in weeks.
From State of the Art:
In the past couple of weeks, New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks has been publishing a series of astonishing war pictures from Afghanistan.
From Pirates Beware: Soon Rifles That Kill from a Mile Away – TIME:
The highly-classified EXACTO program began a year ago, when the U.S. military’s band of scientists and engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — which played a key role in the creation of both the Internet and GPS — let the military-industrial complex know it was seeking a supergun. “The ability to more accurately prosecute targets at significantly longer range would provide a dramatic new capability to the U.S. military,” DARPA’S solicitation for bids said. “The use of an actively controlled bullet will make it possible to counter environmental effects such as crosswinds and air density, and prosecute both stationary and moving targets while enhancing shooter covertness.”
Over the last year, reports have been that the situation in Afghanistan was getting worse. When I hear that I say to myself, “…getting? It already was worse.” From my first visit to Afghanistan in 2006, I felt that the situation had already started its downward spiral; however, all eyes and most journalistic resources were elsewhere. I returned in 2007 and few publications were interested in Afghanistan. It was like a major war was on and nobody was really interested. I went again in 2008 and found myself in the midst of one of the most violent times the country had seen since 2001. It was the peak of what many call the fighting season, a time beginning in the spring when the weather improves and the fighting picks up over the summer.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
