The VII Foundation presents a new book by photographer Gary Knight. Imagine: Reflections on Peace (also published in French as Imagine: Penser la paix), created in collaboration with several photo reporters and journalists, is a collection of 200 images accompanied by reflections on the imperfect construction of peace.
Category: War
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Blind – When War Reporters Document Peace
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A searing elegy on war in Iraq and Afghanistan
A searing elegy on war in Iraq and Afghanistan
From 2003 to 2008, Ben Brody worked as a combat photographer in Iraq, capturing the immense brutality that defined the war.
via Huck Magazine: https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/a-searing-elegy-on-war-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/
From 2003 to 2008, Ben Brody worked as a combat photographer in Iraq, capturing both the immense brutality and unseen, candid moments that defined the war.
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Guerrero at war: chronicling southern Mexico’s forgotten conflict – photo essay | World news | The Guardian
Guerrero at war: chronicling southern Mexico’s forgotten conflict – photo essay
Alfredo Bosco came to Guerrero on assignment to document southern Mexican villages emptied out by conflict. Over repeated visits he documents the region’s story
via the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/16/guerrero-at-war-chronicling-southern-mexico-forgotten-conflict-photo-essay
Alfredo Bosco came to Guerrero on assignment to document southern Mexican villages emptied out by conflict. Over repeated visits he documents the region’s story
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Photos: The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War – The Atlantic
Photos: The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War
After six weeks of armed conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, a peace agreement, a handover of disputed territories, and mourning
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/11/photos-2020-nagorno-karabakh-war/617123/
One week ago, on November 10, a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement was signed by the president of Azerbaijan and the prime minister of Armenia, ending six weeks of warfare over disputed territory in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. It is estimated that thousands of fighters and more than a hundred civilians were killed in the fierce conflict. Nagorno-Karabakh—officially part of Azerbaijan, but controlled by ethnic Armenians—broke away from Azerbaijan in a six-year-long war that ended in 1994, but was never completely resolved. In September of this year, simmering conflicts broke out into war once again, with each side blaming the other for escalations. The new ceasefire agreement cedes control of large areas of disputed territory back to Azerbaijan, and places 2,000 Russian soldiers in the area to act as peacekeepers. As the handover date approached last weekend, some villagers set their own homes on fire before fleeing to Armenia.
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The Life and Times of War Reporter Robert Fisk
The Life and Times of War Reporter Robert Fisk
If you want a great primer on Fisk, who recently passed away, look to the documentary This is Not a Movie.
via Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/599459/robert-fisk-documentary/
If you want a great primer on Fisk, who recently passed away, look to the documentary This is Not a Movie.
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‘War was my life.’ Gary Knight on a career spent in conflict | British GQ
‘War was my life.’ Photographer Gary Knight on a career spent at the heart of conflict
Gary Knight has documented conflicts in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Northern Ireland and farther afield. The photographer looks back on a career characterised in equal parts by violence and hope.
via British GQ: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/gary-knight-imagine-reflections-on-peace
Gary Knight has documented conflicts in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Northern Ireland and farther afield. In this extract from a new book, Imagine: Reflections On Peace, the photographer looks back on a career characterised in equal parts by violence and hope and asks what it really means to be at peace
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Thana Faroq: “I documented women displaced by the war. Now I’m one of them” – British Journal of Photography
Thana Faroq: “I documented women displaced by the war. Now I’m one of them”
Faroq left her native Yemen a year after the war broke out in 2015, and never returned. The experience recast her practice, and she began to turn the camera on herself
via British Journal of Photography: https://www.bjp-online.com/2020/09/thana-faroq-i-used-to-document-the-lives-of-women-displaced-by-the-war-and-now-im-one-of-them/
Faroq left her native Yemen a year after the war broke out in 2015, and never returned. The experience recast her practice, and she began to turn the camera on herself
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How Photographers Have Captured War and Unrest in Lebanon
How Photographers Have Captured War and Unrest in Lebanon
Lebanon Then and Now at the Middle East Institute creates a dialogue between two generations of Lebanese photographers.
via Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/584776/lebanon-then-and-now-photography-exhibition/
Lebanon Then and Now at the Middle East Institute creates a dialogue between two generations of Lebanese photographers.
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How losing both legs and an arm covering the war in Afghanistan gave photographer Giles Duley a reason to live | South China Morning Post
He lost both legs and an arm to a bomb but still fights for others
Photographer and triple amputee Giles Duley – who lost his legs and an arm to an IED on assignment in Afghanistan – explains why losing his limbs has made him even more passionate about highlighting human suffering.
via South China Morning Post: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/3094178/how-losing-both-legs-and-arm-covering-war-afghanistan-gave-photographer
“People have asked me if I regret going to Afghanistan and whether any one photograph is worth losing your legs for,” says Duley, who is currently engaged on a long-term project photographing health workers in Britain and their battle to contain the coronavirus.
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Abood Hamam: ‘A picture can kill you or save your life’ – BBC News
‘A picture can kill you or save your life’
For years Abood Hamam sent war photos out of Syria anonymously. Now he’s using his name, and urging exiles to return.
For years Abood Hamam chronicled the war in Syria for news outlets all over the world without ever revealing his name – and despite being employed by different warring parties. He began as photographer to the presidential couple – Bashar and Asma al-Assad. Later he filmed Islamic State’s victory parade. Now, finally, he’s broken cover, to encourage exiles to return to his beloved hometown, Raqqa.
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Crisis in the Sahel Becoming France’s Forever War – The New York Times
Crisis in the Sahel Becoming France’s Forever War
Riding along with French troops hunting Islamist militants in France’s unwinnable West African war.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/world/africa/france-sahel-west-africa-.html
Riding along with French troops hunting Islamic militants in France’s unwinnable West African war
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Guillaume Chauvin takes an unexpected approach to wartime photography in Ukraine
Guillaume Chauvin takes an unexpected approach to wartime photography in Ukraine
In signature documentary style, the French photographer has been capturing the ongoing conflict in the Donbass region.
In signature documentary style, the French photographer has been capturing the ongoing conflict in the Donbass region.
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I Went to Iraq to Take Photographs. I Stayed On as a Medic. – The New York Times
I Went to Iraq to Take Photographs. I Stayed On as a Medic.
My plan was to photograph women displaced by ISIS. But in Mosul, I quickly found myself trying to save lives.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/magazine/iraq-mosul-medic.html
When I first arrived in Iraq a week earlier, I had no intention of going to Mosul. In addition to being a nurse, I’m a photojournalist. My original plan was to photograph women living in displaced-persons camps. But then I met Pete, an E.M.T. and a former United States Marine. For the past several months, he had been in Iraq running a mobile medical team founded by Slovak medics and made up of foreign volunteers. Most of the medical facilities operated by humanitarian aid organizations were located far from the fighting, too far to treat severely wounded trauma patients in time. Because civilian trauma care was not close by, and the Iraqi security forces’ mandate was to only treat military victims, Pete’s team made a deal: Bring us civilians, and we will boost your capacity to treat your own men. They agreed.
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Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up – 7 February, 2020 – Photojournalism Now
Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up – 7 February, 2020
This week on Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up – the 10th annual Women’s show at Magnet Galleries, Melbourne, plus a review of Dr. Lauren Walsh’s exceptional book, Conversation…
via Photojournalism Now: https://photojournalismnow43738385.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/photojournalism-now-friday-round-up-7-february-2020/
For those of us who work in journalism the myth of the cavalier photojournalist who rushes toward conflict with zeal is well established. Robert Capa’s famous comment about photographers needing to get close to the action in order to capture the best picture is part of industry folklore. Don McCullin has spoken about the adrenalin rush of going to war, likening it to drug addiction. Tim Page’s antics during the Vietnam War have been immortalised in pop culture, Dennis Hopper’s character in the movie Apocalypse Now modelled on the British photographer. Yet while there are those who are lauded as celebrities, the vast majority of conflict photojournalists work in the background, committing themselves to covering some of the world’s darkest moments, to bearing witness to history, largely invisible to the outside world. Glory and money do not motivate them. In fact, these days it is more difficult to make ends meet than ever before. So what drives an individual to the frontline or to document the depths of human misery?
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What’s the Point of Conflict Photography? – Witness
What’s the Point of Conflict Photography?
“I don’t see why I should care about that person.”
via Medium: https://witness.worldpressphoto.org/whats-the-point-of-conflict-photography-ee565909f778
At the time, I was teaching a course that concentrated on conflict photography and ethics. At one point during the semester, we were studying the coverage of a famine in Sudan in the early 1990s. My students had to read about the history of that famine and about the political forces that shaped it. They studied the photojournalistic and documentary coverage of this crisis and they read critiques of that work. On the day we were to discuss the coverage of that famine, I put up an image in class; it came from the homework that was assigned to the students. It’s a black-and-white photo taken at a feeding center in Sudan and it portrays a man who is severely emaciated, as thin as you can imagine a person to be. In fact, he is so weak that he cannot stand; he’s crawling on the ground. In this sense, it’s a painful photograph that confronts you with how dire situations of suffering can be.
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What is life really like for a conflict photographer?
What is life really like for a conflict photographer?
Cengiz Yar has seen a few things in his time. But it was away from the frontlines that he came to value a universal right: having a patch to call one’s own.
via Huck Magazine: https://www.huckmag.com/playlist-archive/cengiz-yar-the-grass-conflict-photography-iraq/
Photographer Cengiz Yar has seen things – from the rebels’ battle to oust Assad in Syria, to the human fallout of conflict in Iraq. But it was away from the frontlines that he truly came to value a universal right: having a patch to call one’s own.
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“Relentless Absurdity”: An Army Photographer’s Censored Images | The New Yorker
“Relentless Absurdity”: An Army Photographer’s Censored Images
Ben Brody’s book has no narrative, because, from the perspective of an American infantryman in Baghdad, the war had none.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/relentless-absurdity-an-army-photographers-censored-images
In his new book, “Attention Servicemember,” Ben Brody recounts being sent to a Rotary Club luncheon near Fort Stewart, Georgia, to present a slide show of pictures he had taken as an Army combat photographer in Iraq. Brody’s mandate overseas had been “to photograph the war in a way that justified its existence and exaggerated its accomplishments.” At the luncheon, however, he found himself telling the Rotarians about an American soldier killed by friendly fire and showing them images of night raids and executions. “I wanted them to feel the murderous heat and arbitrary death and relentless absurdity that came with my job,” Brody writes. The effort failed: “No one stopped eating during my talk, and when I was done they clapped a little.” With “Attention Servicemember,” Brody tries again. This time, he will make you stop eating. He might make you stop breathing and blinking.
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It Was All Started By a Mouse (Part 2) – Opinionator
It Was All Started By a Mouse (Part 2)
The conclusion of a closer look at a child’s toy among bombed-out ruins, and at what it’s like photographing a war.
via Opinionator: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/it-was-all-started-by-a-mouse-part-2/
BEN CURTIS: So there should be 19 pictures, numbered 101 to 119. Basically, I spent the whole day out and then came back and sent pictures. The numbers represent the order of when I filed the photos, not necessarily when they were taken. If you look at the pictures of the very small baby, that was what I did first in the day. That’s unrelated to the bombing incident with the Mickey Mouse.
ERROL MORRIS: Where are those taken?