By Rick Loomis, LA Times
How can you never forget someone you never knew?
I did take Marine Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin’s photo, but I take photographs of people every day and I can’t say I knew him.
It’s the picture I didn’t take that has left Austin burned forever in my memory.
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The women’s basketball game at Eastern Washington University on March 8 started out like any other, as the Eagles of E.W.U. faced off against the Montana State Bobcats.
Davin Perry, dressed as the singer Rick Astley, broke into a basketball game with an Astley hit from 1987.But a routine timeout turned into a 1980s flashback, as two men on the sidelines briefly hijacked the proceedings with a popular prank known as rickrolling. They surprised the crowd by blasting the British singer Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up” through the gym, while one, dressed as a look-alike in Mr. Astley’s signature trench coat, lip-synched and mugged to the music.
The stunt provoked a variety of reactions. Many older spectators looked, by turns, puzzled or irritated. But the under-30 fans danced and sang, happy to participate in a rapidly spreading phenomenon with roots in their favorite medium — the Internet.
Rickrolling is a descendant of an older Internet joke called duckrolling. A Web site or blog post would offer a link to something popular — say celebrity photos or video gaming news — that led unsuspecting viewers to a bizarre image of a duck on wheels.
Check it out here.
When I approach subject matter and consider how to photograph it, one my main considerations is whether forms in the shot should line up or not. By “line up” I mean foreground and background combine to create shapes distinct from the photo’s subject matter
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by Jenn Ackerman
What started out as an assignment for school has produced a piece that has changed my life and hopefully will do the same for the people that view it. That was my hope when producing it at least. Ten weeks ago, we (my grad class at OU) were given the assignment to create a magazine including the brand, the mission statement and of course the content.
For this project, I decided to focus on the mental health crisis, specifically in prisons. This brought me to the CPTU inside the Kentucky State Reformatory.
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John Gumm’s son, Jim Gumm, said his father was an accomplished photographer who worked for the Oklahoma Publishing Company in the 1950s and ’60s.
“I’ve been a photographer for 25 years, and I can’t even come close to him as far as the technical side,” he said. “He was a phenomenal man, just a very talented man.”
He said some of his father’s most interesting assignments as a photojournalist included photographing the Great Alaska Earthquake in March 1964 and an undercover assignment in which he lived among Chicago’s beatniks around the same time period.
“He grew out a beard and everything for that one,” Jim Gumm said.
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After nearly 20 years at the Monitor, the last 13 as photo editor, Dan Habib has left to pursue a career as a filmmaker. For us, it is as though a member of the family has moved out. For readers, it is a milestone, too.
Dan raised photojournalism at the Monitor to heights seldom reached by a newspaper our size. He seemed to lead the photo staff without effort, but there was always effort. He just figured out how to make a difficult job look easy.
It is hard to know where to begin to describe what Dan did for us and our readers, but the one trait that connects all his talents is humanity. He is the most decent person most of us know. His caring for others governed the way he dealt with the community and with his colleagues.
Check it out here.
Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World
Martin Fletcher, the NBC News Bureau Chief in Tel Aviv with a penchant for posing on top of destroyed tanks, provides a great look back at his life covering conflict.
War reporters face moral dilemmas all day: Is it reasonable to film a crying woman two feet from the lens? How about a lost child screaming for its parent? Should one film him or take him by the hand? If a man is to be executed and the soundman’s gear suddenly doesn’t work, what do you do? Delay the execution? That’s what the BBC’s David Tyndall did in Biafra in 1970, when he yelled, “Hold it, we haven’t got sound,” and the quivering man about to be killed had to suffer that much longer while the soundman sorted out his gear. Later, Tyndall was mortified by his instinctive response to the dilemma, as was the BBC, which severely reprimanded him. But every move in this job poses a different dilemma, and nobody can be right all the time. In fact, the most critical question is usually not moral in nature but practical: How far down this road can I drive and stay safe?
Fletcher takes us through his experiences beginning with the Yom Kippur War in Israel and then on throughout Africa (Somalia, Rwanda, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa), Cyprus, Afghanistan, etc. This from Albania, covering the Kosovo war:
Then there was the small matter of the bandits who preyed on travelers, especially foreign journalists flush with cash. One BBC television team hired a small truck and driver. Just as they were approaching the final leg of the journey into the country’s wild and poor northeast, they ran into a group of armed men who stopped their vehicle at gunpoint and demanded money. The producer handed over his shoulder bag with envelopes of cash, and they were allowed to proceed unharmed. The team was shocked, but the producer chuckled and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not dumb, that was just a token in case we got robbed. The real money is in my boot.” The team laughed with relief, whereupon their Albanian driver stopped the car, put a gun to the producer’s head, and stole the rest of the money. Then the driver forced everybody out and drove off with their gear. And he was one of the good guys.
Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World
Yesterday I wrapped up a rather anticlimatic day of covering the rising floodwaters in St. Louis. For days my name was missing from the flood coverage roster until Friday morning when the word came down that I was set to ride with the U.S. Coast Guard (Air Station New Orleans) air group who are up here staging in Chesterfield while conducting search-and-rescue operations.
Check it out here.
I must say that I have never lived in a place that has flooded before. After the midwest rains finally stopped coming down, I was amazed at what parts of town looked like.
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The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.
By Nicholson Baker.
sometimes it is the simple stark fact that makes you sit up straight for a moment, like this one from early in the book: “The Royal Air Force dropped more than 150 tons of bombs on India. It was 1925.” This, coming soon after an account of the proposed bombing of civilian targets in Iraq in 1920 (with Churchill writing: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes”), sets a theme for the book, which Baker will skillfully weave into the fabric of events mainly between 1920 and 1942 — that the bombing of villages and cities from the air represents “the end of civilization.”
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The REAL Photography Award exhibition will be on view at LP II Art Exhibition Centre in Rotterdam from 21 March – 4 May 2008. The exhibition will display the work of the 30 award nominees, including the six finalists. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to other countries later in the year.
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German photographer Hans-Christian Schink has won the first REAL Photography Award, which ING Real Estate presents biannually to an international photographer shooting nature, development or architecture. Schink received the €50,000 (about $77,100) prize at a ceremony in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on March 20.
Schink was awarded the prize for his black-and-white print of water and mountains, which he produced using a technique known as true solarization. The image is part of a series of 12 photographs depicting Earth’s movement.
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i seem to get the most energy going when i pair things down to what may seem like “nothing”…..which is, of course, in a Zen way, “everything”….i felt just like this back in 1989 when i “caught on fire” for what was to become the work in Divided Soul ….this period of work led to being nominated into Magnum by 1993….so, i know THE FEELING.. “the feeling” makes me get out of bed in the morning with the juices flowing KNOWING i am on to something….now is such a time….
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Judging in the Still Photography and Web categories of NPPA’s Best Of Photojournalism competition will start Monday at the contest’s host site, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, FL, and it’s NPPA’s biggest Best Of Photojournalism contest to date.
“More than 4,000 people entered the contest, up more than 25 percent over last year,” NPPA executive director Jim Straight said. “There are more than 21,000 entries totaling over 58,000 individual items (photographs, clips, and Web sites). That’s up 3 percent over last year, with a 20 percent shorter entry period.”
Photographers from more than 140 countries entered this year’s Best Of Photojournalism competition, which has remained a free contest with no entry fees since its beginning.
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Alyson Fox likes doing things. In her case, ‘things’ mean drawing, taking pictures, designing clothes, making shop windows pretty – and probably one or two more ‘things’ since we last talked.
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New from director Errol Morris.
Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed America’s image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant behavior of a few “bad apples”? We set out to examine the context of these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there. The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup
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photo by Veronique de Viguerie
The French Association of Women Journalists (AFJ) and Canon France are launching, with Images Evidence, the eighth Canon Female Photojournalist Award.
The Award is open to professional women photojournalists of any age and nationality and is supported by Le Figaro Magazine. It is presented every year during the Visa pour l’Image Festival in Perpignan, France. Canon France grants the winning photographer €8,000 to help her complete a photojournalistic project.
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Sze Tsung Leong’s project Horizons is meditation on the vast and varied landscapes found in disparate parts of the world. His panoramic images, although often geographically dissimilar, are linked through a continuous horizon line that when viewed as a whole creates visual and thematic relationships between differing images.
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Matt Borruso creates stunningly demented portraits of ugly children. The garish candy colors vibrate, making these unfortunate kids equally nauseating and mouth watering.
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German photographer Frank Breuer, a disciple of the Becher’s and propagator of the Düsseldorf aesthetic, captures the sterility of industrial and commercial architecture. Stylistically, his images do not stray far from those of his mentors, choosing to appease rather than challenge the well established German aesthetic
Check it out here.