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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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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From 1989 to 1997 Andrew Bush took photos of people driving in Southern California.
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IN these last few weeks, the full nature of Robert Mugabe’s repressive regime in Zimbabwe has been cruelly exposed. With his increasingly brazen resort to torture and hit squads to terrorize his own people, Mr. Mugabe has crossed a moral line. Some United Nations lawyers now say there is enough evidence to charge him with crimes against humanity.
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Last Saturday I had a feature run about a man I met who raises deer in his back yard. 14 to be exact. He also is a Vietnam Veteran who suffers from PTSD and was exposed to Agent Orange. He’s kind of a quiet guy who doesn’t like crowds but finds his joy and sense of peace when he is spending his time with the deer.
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Probably the question that I get asked more than any other is about my photography workflow. I actually feel like my photography workflow is pretty simple so I thought I’d write up a brief post documenting my process all the way from photo capture to photo publishing.
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Something weird is going on. When Sigma first announced the new 50mm f/1.4, I expected it to be smaller and cheaper than their 30mm f/1.4. Why? In 35mm world, 50mm lenses are *always* smaller and cheaper than fast wide-angle lenses — even when the 50mm lenses cover a full 35mm frame. It’s owed partially to the relatively simple glass arrangement that most 50s have been using since they became standard.
I was wrong. At this moment, the 50mm is more expensive, but that could make sense because it’s a new lens, and may see discounts from retail price upon release. What makes very little sense at first glance is that it’s huge. At 505 grams, it’s almost twice as heavy as the Nikon 50mm, and it takes 77mm filters — the same size as, say, 70-200mm f/2.8 lenses.
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A Q&A with photographer James Mollison about his new collection of concert portraits.
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