“These photographs, shot with an iPhone I carried in my flak jacket pocket, are not about the fight for Marjah,” Guttenfelder says. “Instead, they are an attempt, during my downtime, to show something of the daily lives of Marines and Afghan soldiers as they moved through the city and set down their packs each evening in a harsh, isolated place.”
Category: War
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Associated Press Photographer David Guttenfelder goes to war with… an iPhone – 1854
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A Photo Student › Shooting Gallery – The limitations of photojournalism and the ethics of artistic representation
Intro
Website of visual Artist James Pomerantz
The winning press photos by Hetherington and Guttenfelder on the one hand and McQueen’s art work on the other can be seen as two poles defining the spectrum of possible representations of war with a camera – one employs the rhetoric of reportage, the other uses a conceptual strategy, or the rhetoric of the metaphorical. Arguably, the photojournalist has a professional and ethical imperative to capture the immediate circumstances, while the artist has the license or luxury to turn his camera away from these events, even to question the photograph’s ability to accurately represent them. Does one approach function more effectively than another? And by what criteria can we judge their effectiveness? When it comes to images of the events and consequences of war, how close is too close? And how much distance is too much?
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Stellazine: A Photographer Reviews "Restrepo"
I met Linda Covello when I worked at Newsweek and she was shooting for cover stories about American kids. She is first and foremost a portrait photographer with a great connection to people and their environment. Linda is also a serious film buff, and after talking to her about Restrepo, the award-winning film from photographer Tim Hetherington and writer Sebastian Junger, I asked her to write about her feelings.
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Picturing War's Wounded and Dead – NYTimes.com
Picturing War’s Wounded and Dead
There is no telling how people will react to realistic images and written reports that show war for what it is. But such images do serve a purpose.
via At War Blog: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/picturing-wars-wounded-and-dead/
“For centuries pictures of the dead and wounded have been part and parcel of war communications. Often the intentions were clear, ranging from medical instruction to anti-war protests. The public’s response could coincide with or diverge from the publisher’s intention.”
Anyone who has survived or covered a conflict, and interacted with the people who have suffered grievously from war, would recognize the ringing truth in the third sentence of this statement, which opens the preface to an article in an issue this summer in the journal Medicine, Conflict and Survival.
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Bonding With Subjects in Harm's Way – NYTimes.com
Bonding With Subjects in Harm’s Way
The divide between journalist and subject can often blur in the combat theater, especially when the subject is under fire. Finbarr O’Reilly of Reuters explains.
via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/bonding-with-subjects-in-harms-way/
But that didn’t make it any easier to photograph him on Monday after a rocket-propelled grenade fired by an Afghan policeman patrolling with the Marines accidentally hit a power line and exploded near the sergeant, briefly knocking him unconscious during an intense firefight and giving him a concussion.
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Do Damon Winter’s iPhone pictures make a mockery of New York Times policy on digital manipulation? | duckrabbit
Once again we are talking about how ‘beautiful’ the photos are, or what a great device the iPhone is, but not about the war in Afghanistan (although many people do comment that the photos bring them close to the lives of the soldiers). Would we really be talking about these pictures if they hadn’t been processed by an app on the iPhone?
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Eyes Open, Back Into the Afghan Crucible: Michael Kamber Returns – NYTimes.com
Eyes Open, Back Into the Afghan Crucible
How does it feel to be a photojournalist preparing for an assignment that’s left a friend of yours badly injured? Michael Kamber shares his thoughts.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/eyes-open-back-into-the-afghan-crucible/
The night before I leave Paris, Alissa J. Rubin, the Times’s bureau chief in Kabul, e-mails me to say that our embed is postponed. The unit we’re to join has suffered a tragedy. “Yesterday, they had six soldiers killed by an Afghan border policeman-in-training,” she writes. Six families have just had their lives torn apart.
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Unhurt by Two Mines, but Not Untouched: Damon Winter's Close Call in Afghanistan – NYTimes.com
Unhurt by Two Mines, but Not Untouched
In the middle of photographing for the “Year at War” series, Damon Winter was confronted by choices that could have made the difference between life or death.
via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/unhurt-by-two-mines-but-not-untouched/
It was probably the toughest situation I’ve ever been in as a photographer.
When the first mine went off, it was surreal. I think I was just completely shocked. Petty Officer Kremer was maybe about 50 feet away from me.
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The Toppling: How the Media Inflated the Fall of Saddam’s Statue in Firdos Square – ProPublica
The Toppling: How the Media Inflated the Fall of Saddam’s Statue in Firdos Square
How saturation media coverage of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square fueled the perception that the war had been won and diverted attention from what in reality was just the start of a long and costly conflict.
via ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-toppling-saddam-statue-firdos-square-baghdad
The media have been criticized for accepting the Bush administration’s claims, in the run-up to the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The W.M.D. myth, and the media’s embrace of it, encouraged public support for war. The media also failed at Firdos Square, but in this case it was the media, rather than the government, that created the victory myth.
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The Medevac Stories, with Daniel Etter | dvafoto
I was especially interested in this discussion because an old colleague of Scott and mine, Daniel Etter, recently completed an embed himself with a US Medevac unit and worked on his story Medevac, which we are also featuring in this post. I thought to ask him what his view was on the current hubbub, given his own personal knowledge of the process and decision making, and to learn more about his own project. He wrote back with some thoughtful ideas and insights and we have chosen to publish the entire piece.
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Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario, Two Other NY Times Journalists Missing In Libya
Four New York Times Journalists Are Missing in Libya
The Times said Wednesday that editors were last in contact with the missing journalists on Tuesday morning.
via Media Decoder Blog: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/four-new-york-times-journalists-are-missing-in-libya/
The missing journalists are Anthony Shadid, the Beirut bureau chief and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting; Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009 and rescued by British commandos; and two photographers, Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, who have worked extensively in the Middle East and Africa.
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Getty's John Moore On Covering "Epic" Battles In Libya, Arab World
Yet despite his relative comfort with being on the frontlines, Moore told the NewsHour from his hotel room in Cairo that his latest assignment -a six-week trip that took him to the uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya – might have been his most dangerous. Moore recorded the interview for us after sneaking out of Benghazi, Libya en route back to his home in Denver.
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Atrocity exhibition | Xeni Jardin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Atrocity exhibition | Xeni Jardin
Xeni Jardin: The internet is generating new sources of shockingly graphic images of conflict, which the media have to figure out how to use
via the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/04/digital-media-xeni-jardin
The internet is generating new sources of shockingly graphic images of conflict, which the media have to figure out how to use
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Embedistan: Unembedded vs. Embedded
Embedistan: Unembedded vs. Embedded
Aside from the long list of tactical information we can’t report or photograph, the soldiers and commanding officers censor themselves. They are afraid of the repercussions of saying the wrong thing, and are on the lookout for journalists with an agenda.
via At War Blog: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/embedistan-unembedded-vs-embedded/
I have spent six months in Afghanistan, 85 percent of it unembedded.
For many journalists, embedding has become an integral part of reporting in Afghanistan. I know journalists who spend months at a time with the military. One of my colleagues calls it “Embedistan.”
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Tim Hetherington, 40, Killed in Libya | VF Daily | Vanity Fair
Tim Hetherington, 40, Killed in Libya
Photograph by Matt Stuart.Tim Hetherington, photojournalist, filmmaker, and Vanity Fair contributing photographer, was killed today while covering the conflict in Misrata, Libya. “Tim died about two hours ago,” said Peter N. Bouckaert, of Human Rights Wat
via Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/04/tim-hetherington-41-killed-in-libya.html
As recently as yesterday, Hetherington tweeted about “indiscriminate shelling” by pro-Qaddafi forces in Misrata, and he sent an e-mail to a Vanity Fair editor: “Am currently in misrata – would have made interesting article with SJ” (meaning Junger).