Over the years, novelist Neal Stephenson (wiki), has had at least a couple different pages where he’s explained why he’s chosen to limit the access he provides via email, interviews, and phone calls. It appears to be something he’s given a lot of thought to.
Check it out here.
Iraq’s oil income will more than double this year, even as Baghdad continues to spend only a small percentage of its own money on reconstruction and services while it banks billions in surplus funds, according to projections by U.S. government auditors.
Between 2005 and 2007, only 10 percent of Iraq’s expenditures went toward reconstruction, with just 1 percent spent on maintaining U.S. and Iraqi-funded investments in roads, water, electricity and weapons, according to a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. Even when Baghdad has allocated larger sums, the report said, it has spent only a small portion of the budgeted money.
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photos by DAVID WALTER BANKS
Traveling and meeting new folks in this photographic community never ceases to give me the jump-start I need. Here’s some images from the excursion.
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The beating of two Japanese journalists by police in western China drew an official apology Tuesday, but Beijing also set new obstacles for news outlets wanting to report from Tiananmen Square in the latest sign of trouble for reporters covering the Olympics.
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She was found curled up in a filthy room, unable to speak or make eye contact.
They called her a feral child.
Could nurturing make up for a lifetime of neglect?
The girl in the window is a story about a 9-year-old girl named Dani. Ultimately it’s a story about hope.
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The book is out on the 5th of September but we are having a book launch event on Sunday 31st August in London – The Little People Treasure hunt! I will be placing four installations at various locations around London and it is up to YOU to track them down and find them.
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This coming Friday night in New York at the IFC Center marks the US theatrical debut of Beautiful Losers, the movie. Like the exhibition and book that proceeded it, Beautiful Losers is a true labor of love that makes you want to go out and create something. It’s wonderfully shot and includes a ton of terrific interviews with a fantastic group of artists. The film is the perfect companion to the exhibition and book.
Check it out here.
Spectators watching the Beijing Olympics Games will not be allowed to carry ‘professional’ camera gear into the stadium with them, according to strict rules laid down by organisers.
Such cameras are banned alongside guns, grenades, gunpowder and explosives.
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Need to resize images for your Blog every day? Need to send 10,000 images out to a client at a certain size – and then a second batch in a different size and format? If you’re like me – you hate doing repetitive tasks on a computer – after all that’s why you bought the darn thing thing for in the first place! (Oh – and did I mention you didn’t need to buy anything to get this done…)
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When I received a review copy of Peter Granser’s Signs in the mail, I had quite a few questions about the work. And since I had always admired his earlier work about Alzheimer patients, I asked Peter whether he would be up for a conversation.
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Two of our galleries in edition ten deal with oppression – one in a country currently much in the headlines, Burma otherwise known as Myanmar, the other in the Czech Republic where minority Romany people are, according to our photographer, the victims of racism and discrimination.
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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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When we look back at how things changed with the arrival of Lightroom 2, I think the new DNG Profile Editor (presently kind of a sleeper technology) will stand out as transformative. The technology was largely developed by Eric Chan, a bright young guy on the Camera Raw team (and aspiring photographer). I’ve always found his explanations lucid and highly readable, so I’m delighted that he’s written a guest blog post on the subject.
Check it out here.
KHARTOUM, Sudan — Sometimes, the things reporters do here in Africa can seem harrowing from afar. But up close, the experiences tend to be more Seinfeld than 24, more surreally mundane than high adventure. My recent eight-hour non-detention detention by Sudanese intelligence agents in Khartoum was a long, sleepy day of waiting and more waiting with no definitive beginning or end.
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Tomorrow is the big day. I fly off to Beijing (w/ an overnight layover for some kimchee in Korea) and am very much looking forward to setting foot in China for the second time. I went to Shanghai and Beijing in early 2001 with one of my best friends Harry How (who will also be covering the games for Getty Images.) A lot has changed since then – 9/11 happened a few months after our return and clearly the world has changed quite a bit since then. But mostly – I’m looking to see how China has evolved since my first visit.
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With the Olympics just around the corner I thought I’d check in with Simon Barnett of Newsweek, because he’s hired his very own dream team of photographers (Laforet, Miralle and Powell) to provide coverage of the event.
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Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
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“It took me a while to get over being ‘the baby guy’, now I’m known as ‘the gorilla guy’.” Brent Stirton, senior staff photographer at Getty Images and four times a World Press Photo winner, talks to CPN’s Mike Stanton about celebrity portraiture, dancing with his camera – and how he gained access to one of the most remote and volatile regions on earth armed only with an EOS-1Ds Mark III.
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Late last year a video started to circulate the internet showing the Mercedes-McLaren SLR in an internet film. Not surprising, but the amazing aspect of this 10-minute movie was that a large part of it was shot using still cameras – EOS-1D Mark II N and EOS-1D Mark III bodies. David Newton met up with Roman Kuhn, the man behind the idea, to find out where it came from and what was involved in the shoot.
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Three of Heller’s dictators considered themselves artists and eagerly participated in marketing their brands. Mao fancied himself a poet and master calligrapher; Mussolini wrote a pulp novel and portrayed himself as a hypermasculine sex symbol. Hitler was an aspiring architect and avid watercolorist before adopting what Heller calls his “sociopolitical art project.” The Führer sought to control all aspects of the Nazi brand, from the swastika “logo” to his own image, with mustache but without glasses. Heller argues that Mao with his “Mona Lisa smile” and Lenin with his proletarian cap functioned in much the same way as “trade characters” like Joe Camel or the Geico gecko, putting “a friendly face on an otherwise inanimate (or sometimes inhumane) product.” Like modern corporate competitors, these leaders borrowed freely from one another, with Hitler taking the straight-armed Roman salute from Mussolini and Mao adopting Socialist Realism from the Soviets.
Check it out here.