Photographer Klimchuk and journalist Grigol Chikhladze died after their vehicle came under attack by Georgian forces at a roadblock Monday, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Klimchuk was the head of the Georgian photo agency Caucasus Images, according to the agency’s Web site. Chikhladze was working as a reporter for Russian Newsweek, according to friend and fellow journalist Timo Vogt.
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On Thursday, August 7th, Georgian armed forces entered into the breakaway region of South Ossetia to assert Georgian governance of the region – a de facto (yet largely unrecognized) independent republic that has support from neighboring Russia. Russia responded on August 8th by sending its own military into Georgia – not only into region of South Ossetia – but also into the nearby breakaway republic of Abkhazia and deeper into Georgia itself. Many Airstrikes and ground skirmishes have taken place since, with several parties calling for a cease-fire, but no agreement as yet. Those paying the highest price for the war are the South Ossetian civilians, which may have suffered (depending on who is reporting) between 100 and 2,000 deaths to date
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The border between Georgia and Russia, in short, has been the driest of tinder; the only question was where the fire would start.
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The latest moves come amid concern over the civilian death toll on both sides, which appeared to have reached 2,000 yesterday. The first horrific images began emerging from the Georgian town of Gori, bombed yesterday by Russian jets, where up to 60 civilians died when bombs landed on two apartment blocks in a town that Georgia has been using as a military staging post for its assault on South Ossetia.
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In California’s Mojave Desert, the US Army has built a “virtual Iraq” – a billion dollar urban warfare simulation – and populated it with hundreds of Iraqi role-players. FULL BATTLE RATTLE, a feature documentary, follows an Army Battalion through the simulation, as they attempt to quell an insurgency and prevent Medina Wasl, a mock Iraqi village, from slipping into civil war. Comic, surreal and poignant, the film provides a revelatory look at the soul of the American war machine
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TWO hundred twenty-one American soldiers and Marines have been killed in Iraq this year, but until eight days ago, The Times had not published a photo of one of their bodies.
The picture The Times did publish on July 26, of a room full of death after a suicide bombing in June, with a marine in the foreground, his face covered and his uniform riddled with tiny shrapnel holes, accompanied a front-page article about how few such images there are.
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If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists — too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts — the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.
It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.
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By Warren Zinn
The e-mail was a punch in the gut: “the soldier you made famous — killed himself last Saturday — thought you should know.”
I thought I’d put photojournalism and war behind me four and a half years ago when I traded in the dusty battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan for law school in Miami. But those words reminded me that you never truly leave the battlefield behind.
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Photo by Zoriah
After the post was online, I was told that the Marine Corps would not allow even the pants or shoes of a injured or killed Marine to be depicted in images. This was a rule I had never been told or even heard of. I refused to remove the blog post. It seemed insane to me that the Marines would embed a war photographer and then be upset when photographs were taken of war.
A few minutes later my embed was terminated and a convoy was arranged, despite a fierce sand storm, to bring me to Camp Fallujah where I would wait for the first flight out of the Marines area of operation and into the Green Zone.
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Eric Bouvet covered the Second Chechen War from October to December of 1999, and returned in February 2000. Bouvet traveled with three Russian officers during his second visit to the region and witnessed up-close the destruction and decay of a country ravaged by war. In Grozny, Chechnya’s capital city, buildings were all but leveled, tens of thousands were dead, and radioactive material polluted the area in the wake of storage facility bombings. “Nothing remained,” Bouvet recounted, “just a huge, imposing void.” When he returned in March 2008, Bouvet found Grozny as a city in the process of rebirth. Civilians, totaling only about 5,000 in number, were carrying on with daily life and were starting the task of rebuilding a once magnificent city. As he revisited places he had photographed in his earlier trips to the region, Bouvet not only documented the modernization of a city, but the will and determination of a people rising from the ashes of war.
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Combat photojournalist Stacy Pearsall was named the Military Photographer of the Year recently for the second time. One of only two women to take home the honor, she is the first woman to take it twice. Having just finished serving as a mentor for the annual Department of Defense Worldwide Military Workshop, Pearsall talked with American Photo about how she proved she could hang with the boys and her fast rise through the ranks.
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Ziv Koren is a world-renown combat photographer whose coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has vaulted him to international acclaim. Now, he’s helping invent a whole new visual aesthetic that digitally combines still photos with moving images, seamlessly.
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The first time my father told me about Sean Flynn’s disappearance, I felt as if a spider had walked down my spine. “Just gone?” I said, looking down at a picture that was taken of Sean hours before he vanished into the Cambodian countryside in April 1970 — a heart-stoppingly handsome young man on a motorcycle with thick sideburns and a battered Nikon around his neck. “Yeah,” my father said in a papery voice that made him suddenly sound much older. “Just gone.”
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“I’m embedded with the Americans in Iraq. As a Westerner, there is no more access to the insurgents’ side. I don’t claim to have any overview. History made my choice—it’s fine!”
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With state TV cameras set up across a dusty field, he surveyed a row of battered and bullet-holed Hilux trucks that government forces had seized from the rebels. Bashir raised an ivory-tipped baton, and hundreds of security forces cheered, waving shoes, T-shirts and other clothes allegedly stripped off the doomed fighters.
Then he strolled past a 200-yard-long photo gallery, a grotesque display of burned and dismembered bodies, allegedly those of the rebels. Each image was underlined with the same caption in Arabic: “summary of failure.”
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The question kept coming up. How do you explain the smile? What does it mean? Not only is she smiling, she is smiling with her thumbs-up – over a dead body. The photograph suggests that she may have killed the guy, and she looks proud of it. She looks happy.
I should back up a moment.
This is one of the central images in a rogue’s gallery of snapshots, a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib prison in the fall of 2003. It is a photograph taken by Chuck Graner of Sabrina Harman – posed and looking into the lens of the camera.
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From Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic who is near Garmser in Helmand Province, Afghanistan with the U.S. 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit come these 4 frames from a sequence taken when the unit came under fire from Taliban fighters May 18, 2008.
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Most people who remember the album “Combat Rock” by The Clash might remember a song called Sean Flynn, but they probably don’t know exactly who the early punkers were talking about.
The son of Hollywood movie actor Errol Flynn, he could have lived his life a thousand different ways.
Sean Flynn had a semi-successful acting career and all the money, looks, fame and fortune that any man of his day could have wanted, but instead he spent years covering the war in Vietnam.
During that time period, war photographers were a rare and important type of person, and their lives were imperiled as a result of their chosen profession. A risk that war reporters continue to face today.
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In light of the current uproar over the Pentagon’s “propaganda” program involving retired military officers deployed on the media, it is worth recalling that famed military reporter Joe Galloway took issue with the official line long before he retired nearly two years ago.
In fact, two years ago this month he went out with a bang in a lengthy re-mail exchange with Pentagon spokesman (and a key cog in the “propaganda” program), Larry DiRita.
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A Soviet soldier heroically waves the red flag, the hammer and sickle billow above the Reichstag. Yevgeny Khaldei photographed one of the iconic images of the 20th century. But the legendary image was manipulated to conceal the fact that the Soviet soldiers on the roof had been looting. An exhibition of Khaldei’s work opens in Berlin this week.
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