I’d also seen samples of his work from a dozen stories, as varied as a LIFE photographer’s world could be, including one of the first sets of pictures of the ‘Great Cats of Africa.’ It was another time altogether from the world we know today, and so I was all the more pleased to be able to taste a great cappuccino made in the cozy kitchen of John Dominis. I’d known of John for a long time, arriving as I did at the end of the LIFE weekly, but it wasn’t until he became the picture editor of People in the ’70s that I really got to know him.
“The day I came across that boy was a killer day for me. There were 800 dying children in that schoolhouse. The boy is near death. He is trying to support himself. And to see this kind of pathetic photographer appear with a Nikon around his neck…”
He falls silent again for a moment. “Some times it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It’s as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.”
Second, no video recording of his initial remarks – only his final statement. Audio recording, and of course note-taking, were to be permitted throughout.
Third, no questions from the news media.
When reporters balked, Ford sternly reminded them, “You’re in our building – you know that. You’re in a university building.” The counter-argument that a university building is public property – and that Kiffin, at least until he quit, was a public employee – didn’t seem to have an effect on Ford.
I’ve worked in Haiti twice before, and have seen horrible things including the freshly bullet-riddled body of an anti-Aristide lawyer, mother of three, and someone whom I had spent days filming on a previous trip. But the scale of this destruction went way beyond anything photographs could capture. We traveled 50 miles south towards the epicenter following a caravan of refugees out of the city, just to find their village of Petite Goave in total ruins.
We worry about the weight America’s young people are putting on, but nobody worries about their DSLRs. Come on, folks, these cameras have a serious weight problem too.
Whether you shoot with the Canon 7D, 5D, Nikon or anything else, HD-DSLRs are now taking over a large segment of the videojournalism and motion picture markets. All are not really made to shoot video, but with various adapters and add-ons you can make it work and get results not obtainable in the past.
What was missing from this reportage—both still and moving—was the opportunity for Haitians to tell their own stories. One blogger stated on Internet site Newspaper Death Watch, “When Diane Sawyer arrived on the scene she got to practice her O-Level French but, apart from that, there was nothing she said that could not have been said better, more concisely, more urgently, by anybody whose house had been reduced to splinters and rubble and whose family members were buried under it all.”
You’ve mentioned in several podcasts and a few blogs that you test all your lenses to determine where they perform best. How do you go about doing your testing?
eyecurious is a blog written by Marc Feustel about photography and all thing related. My background is in Japanese photography, but eyecurious travels to as many photographic territories as possible through exhibition and book reviews, photographer interviews, random thoughts and a few experiments.
This week showcases work from Rosalind Solomon’s book, Chapalingas, which Vince Aletti describes as “the first comprehensive overview of Rosalind Solomon’s work… a moving record of a 30-year journey of discovery by a photographer whose commitment to her own flinty, humanist vision places her, as Ingrid Sischy writes in the introduction, among an ‘endangered species.’ Organized poetically, Solomon’s book embraces her subjects with unusual warmth—a combination of candor, curiosity, concern, and almost helpless yearning.”
What happens when photographers cannot sell images anymore ? What do they do if magazines do not pay for their coverage? Well, they turn around and start selling to other photographers. Not images, but workshops.
I keep receiving those anonymous tips (three so far) about a new Nikkor AF-S 50mm f/1.2 lens: Nikon are working on an autofocus upgrade of the classic 50mm f/1.2. It is still rather far from production however the optical formula is very similar to the Ai
Kathryn Cook (b.1979) is a freelance photographer represented by Agence VU’ and Prospekt Fotografi in Italy. Kathryn grew up in New Mexico and studied Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In what is looking to be more like a military occupation than a humanitarian relief effort, a group of United States Marines confiscated the camera of a journalist who was photographing a demonstration outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince this week.
New York City-based photographer Alex Brown recently discovered that a pair of Glaswegian artists, Craig Little and Blake Whitehead, known as Littlewhitehead, had “appropriated” an image he made of a young boy in a Darth Vader mask sitting in a diner booth.
