The photograph was a stunner. Displayed across four columns at the top of Page One of Thursdays New York Times, the image showed a baby boy with casts on both legs, the apparent victim of the violence marking the presidential election in Zimbabwe.
In these times of mass video delivery and saturation of visual messages, this still image offered cause to pause. It demanded attention, insisting that readers and viewers not look away.
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I had an opportunity to spend a week working with the new Phase One 645 camera and a P45+ back on a shoot in Newfoundland. The camera I used was the first off the assembly line with final production firmware, and was provided for testing by Kevin Raber, Phase One’s Marketing VP for North America.
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Look At Me is an online archive of found photographs that attempts to preserve a legion forgotten photographic moments.
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Photos by Sol Neelman
EUGENE, ORE. — Day 2 from the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials.
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Here’s what I saw while sitting on my ass all day.
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This is a piece on the atmosphere of the lower downtown Denver club scene following a fatal shooting last weekend
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Evil Dead: The Musical last Thursday proved the show has legs. And fangs. And lots of blood left. After 300 shows and 140 gallons of fake blood, the Toronto production is still going strong, building a loyal cult following.
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Watch the London community support officers (they’re not real cops, but deputied volunteers who fancy themselves real ones) as they confront a videographer who has the temerity to take footage of a public street.
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Julie Blackmon’s new book “Domestic Vacations” is filled with conceptual images taken from her everyday life as a mother of three.
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Zimbabweans soon faced a stark choice: attend midnight indoctrination sessions, where ruling party supporters chanted slogans and opposition activists were whipped and clubbed, or face similar treatment themselves.
A poster captured the tenor of the runoff campaign. Beside a smiling Mugabe, sporting his trademark tailored suit and a strip of facial hair stretching from his nose to upper lip, a block of boldface letters carried the slogan: “The Final Battle for Total Control.”
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Ask Conrad Lant – whose working name is Cronos – if he sees any parallels between the absurd events chronicled in This Is Spinal Tap, and the experiences enjoyed by Venom, the legendary heavy metal group he has fronted, on and off, for almost 30 years, and he is instantly dismissive. “That movie was never pointed at us,” says the singer/bassist, evenly but firmly. “It was aimed at bands like Saxon, and Samson, and Iron Maiden. They all lived that ludicrous lifestyle; we never did. We were always down to earth, we always had friends who’d give us a slap if we got too full of ourselves.”
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Vincent Laforet was born in Switzerland in 1975. He is one of the true young lions of photography. His photographs are characterized by great inventiveness, technical sophistication, and a sure compositional eye. He was a staff photographer for The New York Times from 2000 until 2006, when he modified his contract to became the newspaper’s first national contract photographer. He has been sent on assignment by Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Time, Stern, Paris-Match, Newsweek and Life Magazine. His work has been published in most major magazines around the world, and exhibited at The International Center of Photography in New York and Visa Pour L’Image in Perpignan, France
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It’s one thing to write about soaring food prices. It’s another thing entirely to photograph the story in a visually compelling way. But Washington Post Michael Williamson, who has documented America’s economic struggles for more than two decades, was up for the challenge.
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This month we focus on Robert “Bert” Hanashiro, 53, a staff photographer with USA Today since 1989. Known worldwide for his online sports photography community, SportsShooter.com, Hanashiro will join thousands of other journalists in Beijing this August for what will be his sixth Summer Olympics. In anticipation of the 2008 Olympic games, Hanashiro talked with American Photo about the Olympic experience, which can often include 15- to 18-hour workdays and covering four events in a day.
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I’ve heard Allison V. Smith’s name in the blogosphere here or there, and I finally spent some time on her blog and ordered her zine, and I am officially a huge fan. She’s seriously good. I had some questions for her, and she was kind enough to let me post our conversation here.
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Fearing imprisonment or worse, I said I was a journalist, held up my cameras and gestured I wanted to take their picture.
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Over 50 years ago, one of the greatest media hoaxes ever was foisted upon New York City and the world at large.
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In his notebooks Camus excoriates “the newly achieved revolutionary spirit, nouveau riche, and Pharisees of justice.” He names Sartre and his followers, “who seem to make the taste for servitude a sort of ingredient of virtue.”
He mocks their conformism: cowardly, besides, he implies, citing the story of a child who announced her plan to join “the cruelest party.” Because: “If my party is in power, I’ll have nothing to fear, and if it is the other, I’ll suffer less since the party which will persecute me will be the less cruel one.”
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The war against terrorism has evolved into a war of ideas and propaganda, a struggle for hearts and minds fought on television and the Internet. On those fronts, al-Qaeda’s voice has grown much more powerful in recent years. Taking advantage of new technology and mistakes by its adversaries, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has built an increasingly prolific propaganda operation, enabling it to communicate constantly, securely and in numerous languages with loyalists and potential recruits worldwide.
Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda’s commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network’s in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005. (As-Sahab means “the clouds” in Arabic, a reference to the skyscraping mountain peaks of Afghanistan.)
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With its vibrant oversized photographs and minimalist design, the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture weblog launched on June 1 to instant global acclaim. It’s designed, programmed, and written by Alan Taylor, an old-school web programmer and blogger, in his spare time while working on community features at Boston.com.
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