November 2, 2024
How Will White Women Vote? It’s a Question With a Fraught History.
White and Black women have joined together to power progressive causes — from abolition to civil rights — but it’s a tenuous alliance. --Click for full article
This photograph is featured in the current Monroe Gallery exhibition "The Best of Us".
White Hot Magazine: The Photography Show (AIPAD) 2024 returned this year to their previous home, the grand Park Avenue Armory.
"The Photography Show truly stepped up their game this year, bringing a new breath of Spring air by including new galleries. They have created a great visual atmosphere of the classics and newest trends of the photography world of today."
"..a wandering sweep through the booths in search of eye-catching works worth thinking about more."
Via National Press Photographers Association
September 5, 2023
Sept. 5, 2023 - The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has agreed to historic settlement terms with five photojournalists who were attacked and arrested by NYPD during the racial justice protests of 2020. The agreement reinforces the First Amendment rights of the public and the press, provides new protections for journalists operating in New York, and according to the terms of the agreement will improve police training and reinforce proper behavior toward the press.
The settlement resolves a federal lawsuit brought three years ago by attorneys from the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), along with the nationally recognized law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and noted civil rights attorney Wylie Stecklow, on behalf of the five photojournalists, Adam Gray, Jason Donnelly, Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi, Mel D. Cole, and Amr Alfiky.
The agreement includes the following terms:
Journalists with press credentials issued by New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) will not need to leave the area when an order to disperse is issued to the general public and members of the press will not be subject to arrest for documenting police activity or for not leaving the general area;
NYPD will not arrest journalists with government-issued credentials for alleged low-level offenses (such as disorderly conduct or obstructing governmental administrations) without prior approval by an incident commander or a Deputy Commissioner, Public Information official. Any summons for such arrests will presumptively be issued to the journalist on site instead of at a police station, thereby discouraging the practice of unlawfully detaining journalists at police stations for hours before charges against them are dropped;
NYPD officers are prohibited from arresting, restricting, or interfering with members of the press for merely observing or recording police activity in public places;
NYPD will recognize the legitimacy of press passes that are issued by jurisdictions outside New York City;
NYPD is required to provide journalists with access “to any location where the public is permitted,” and NYPD officers are barred from putting up crime/accident/incident scene tape or establishing “frozen zones” for the purpose of preventing members of the press from viewing or recording events in public places;
Neither a press pass nor any other form of press identification is needed to observe or record police activity occurring in public places, including areas where protests, crimes, or other matters of public concern are taking place.
In the agreement, the NYPD also—for the first time ever—formally acknowledges that the press has a clearly established First Amendment right to record police activity in public places, and commits itself to respect that right. (See Settlement Agreement, ¶¶ 14, 89.) No press pass or other form of identification is needed to exercise this right. Pursuant to the agreement, the agency will update its guidelines, amend its current policies and training and will specifically train members of the service on treatment of the press and the clearly established right to record police activity in public. The agreement also makes clear that the increased protection for members of the press does not in any way diminish the right of citizens to record police activity in traditional public places.
“Journalists are an essential part of a functioning, civil society and it’s essential that they be allowed to conduct their work free of harassment and assault, especially from state actors,” said Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counsel to the NPPA. “On behalf of our members and all visual journalists, who perform a vital role as watchdogs and witnesses to history, I am very pleased with the terms of this agreement and the changes to police behavior that it demands.”
“This is not an agreement that will simply sit on a shelf,” added NPPA deputy general counsel Alicia Calzada. “It has real teeth and real mandates for improved training of police at all levels. We are hopeful this will truly change law enforcement culture when it comes to First Amendment activities.”
Attorney Robert D. Balin, who led the litigation for Davis Wright Tremaine accentuated the importance of the case. “The treatment that our clients received at the hands of the NYPD was not only unconstitutional, it was unconscionable, and a direct threat to our democratic principles,” Balin said. “I’m proud that these brave photojournalists chose to hold the police department accountable for their actions and I look forward to seeing the terms of this far-reaching settlement implemented for the benefit of all journalists.”
In addition to the policy changes, the settlement agreement also requires that the NYPD provide extensive annual training to all of its officers—ranging from Police Academy cadets to high-ranking executive personnel—on the First Amendment rights of the press and establishes a police-media relations committee to monitor and discuss future incidents involving the press. Additionally, for a period of three years, a committee headed by the New York City Department of Investigation will monitor police activity at protests to ensure that the NYPD complies with its commitments to respect the rights of peaceful protesters, journalists, and legal observers.
While pervasive mistreatment of journalists covering the George Floyd protests was the catalyst for the civil rights suit (see, Testimony of NPPA General Counsel Mickey H. Osterreicher June 15, 2020, OAG Hearing on Interactions Between NYPD and the General Public, p. 207), the scope of the agreement they ultimately hammered out with the NYPD reaches much further. The provisions in this settlement agreement related to the press are not limited to protest situations, but are crucial First Amendment principles that apply whenever members of the press are covering police activity in public.
“The NYPD’s abuse of the media has been a systemic issue for decades, and today’s injunctive settlement hopefully provides a brighter future for protest and the ability of the press and public to document police interactions at First Amendment activities and beyond in this great City,” said Wylie Stecklow, who in addition to his work on this case, regularly represents photographers and protesters whose rights have been violated by the NYPD. “But today’s announced settlement is not the end, it’s just the beginning of re-training and new NYPD policies to ensure there is respect and protection for the press, up and down the NYPD hierarchy. We cannot expect the rank and file to follow these rules related to the respect of First Amendment rights of the media, if high ranking officers are able to violate the rights of the media with impunity and immunity.”
The five plaintiffs in the case are award-winning visual journalists who have published their work in a variety of leading global news outlets, including Reuters, The New York Times, The Times of London, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Paris Match, Le Monde, CNN, BBC, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and more.
Adam Gray, former chief photographer for the British press agency South West News Service and repeat recipient of the Photographer of the Year Award by the British Press Photographers’ Association, was the first plaintiff to join the case following his wrongful assault and arrest while covering the protests. He was pushed to the ground without warning, arrested, and detained overnight while covering protests in and around Union Square. “I’m extremely grateful for the no-cost representation provided to me and the other news professionals by Rob, Mickey, Wylie and their teams,” said Gray. “These protests happened during a critical inflection point for U.S. society and I am hopeful this settlement will mark a major change in New York’s police culture as well.”
Jae Donnelly, a well-known photographer, and regular contributor to The Daily Mail, was violently assaulted by a baton-wielding officer while photographing protestors in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. “Our lawsuit has fought to change the NYPD rule book on how NYPD from top to bottom treat us news gathering professionals with the professional courtesy,” said Donnelly. “We deserve to be kept safe before one of us is eventually killed at work. My attack by an NYPD sergeant put myself and my family through much pain,” he added.
Amr Alfiky —who was arrested while photographing police activity on the Lower East Side in February 2020, and, in a second incident, violently attacked by an officer while covering protests at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn—celebrated the agreement. “This settlement is indeed historic and goes beyond the compensation for the profound damage caused by excessive use of force and unlawful arrests towards visual journalists and photographers in New York City,” he said. “Hopefully, this is the start of a new era of how journalists are perceived and treated by NYPD.” Alfiky is now a staff photographer for Reuters in the Middle East.
Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi, a renowned documentary and news photographer, who was hit in the face by a baton-wielding officer while photographing police beating a young man in Lower Manhattan said, “as a photographer working in conflict zones around the world, I was stunned when the NYPD struck me with a baton, splitting my lip, when I was simply doing my job on the public streets of NYC a few days after the murder of George Floyd. It was the first time I'd suffered an injury while on the job, and it wasn't in war-torn Congo or South Sudan, but in the New York City. I'm glad to see that in the USA, however, when the rights of the press are so egregiously infringed upon, there is a legal system that can come to our support. I do hope our trial will move things in the right direction for us journalists to be able to do our jobs without fear of unlawful arrest or harm, and ultimately for freedom of the press and a more just society.”
Mel D. Cole, a widely published visual journalist and music photographer, was documenting police-protester clashes from the Brooklyn Bridge footpath when he was arrested, stripped of his cameras, and held for seven hours. “Going to jail for doing your job as a photographer should never ever happen. I'm happy that I can now put what should have never been behind me, but I will never forget the feelings that I had that day while being handcuffed and not being able to free when I should have been!” he said.
These terms are all part of a larger settlement announced today of claims that were brought on behalf of peaceful protestors by the New York Attorney General’s Office, the New York Civil Liberties Union, The Legal Aid Society, Gideon Orion Oliver, and civil rights firms Cohen & Green and the Aboushi Law Firm. The NPPA had previously filed public comments and testified during public hearings regarding the mistreatment of the press during the 2020 protests. Along with the agreed upon terms of the settlement, the photographers will all receive monetary compensation.
This significant civil rights litigation was supported by NPPA counsel Osterreicher and Calzada and a team that consisted of Davis Wright Tremaine counsel Robert D. Balin, Abigail Everdell, Alison Schary, Kathleen Farley, Alexandra Settelmayer, Nimra Azmi, Megan Amaris, Jean Fundakowski and Veronica Muriel Carrioni, and paralegal Megan Duffy, along with attorney Wiley Stecklow of Wylie Stecklow, PLLC.
About the National Press Photographers Association NPPA is a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of visual journalism in its creation, editing, and distribution. NPPA’s members include video and still photographers, editors, students, and representatives of businesses that serve the visual journalism community. Since its founding in 1946, the NPPA has been the Voice of Visual Journalists, vigorously promoting the constitutional and intellectual property rights of journalists as well as freedom of the press in all its forms, especially as it relates to visual journalism. For more information, go to nppa.org.
Photojournalists settle long fought case against the NYPD (nppa.org)
Via NPR
February 23, 2023
What Happened to Us
By Jon Mooallem
Via National Gallery of Victoria
Looking back over the photographs that he made of New York in 2020 Australian photographer Ashley Gilbertson wrote, ‘The resulting photo essay is my requiem to the New York that we knew before the pandemic, but also a love letter to the resilient people who never gave up.’
One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic was the shutting down of much of New York and the suspension of national and international travel. For Gilbertson, this enforced a shift in his focus had a profound impact on his life and work. Already a regular runner, his practice during 2020 involved daily distance running and using the camera in his phone to photograph the events unfolding around him as he ran through the streets of the city. Over the course of the year, he documented the trajectory of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the US presidential election, creating a visual diary of the unfolding events across the city.
Thursday, 5 May, 11am (AEST) Free entry
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square Level 2
Booking is not required
General enquiries
Ph +61 3 8620 2222
ngvenquiries@ngv.vic.gov.au
9am–5pm, daily
Speakers
Susan van Wyk
Senior Curator, Photography
Ashley Gilbertson was born in Melbourne in 1978, lives and works in New York, and is a member of the VII Photo Agency. Gilbertson’s early work focused on refugees around the world, an interest that in 2002, led him to Iraq. His work in that country, made largely on contract for The New York Times, earned critical acclaim and he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his 2004 work in Falluja. One of the leading photojournalists of his generation, Gilbertson has been recognised for his photographs in conflict zones, empathetic pictures of the global refugee crisis and his humanist approach to photography as a documentary medium.
Via National Gallery of Victoria
April 28, 2022
Melbourne-born Ashley Gilbertson has crafted a career from his human, empathetic approach to photojournalism, most recently channelled through his images of New York City in 2020, when the metropolis was in the deepest throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gilbertson’s astute eye captured both sadness and moments of joy. Full article here.
View Ashley Gilbertson's photographs at The AIPAD Photography Fair May 20-22 in New York City, booth #113, Monroe Gallery of Photography.
Via the Daily Hampshire Gazette
It’s arguably one of the most iconic album covers of all time, certainly in the folk and pop world: a young Bob Dylan, on the cusp of stardom, walks down a slushy street in Greenwich Village in New York City, hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold, as his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, clings to his left arm.
That image, from the 1963 disc “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” came out of a session that Don Hunstein, a longtime director of photography for Columbia Records, had staged with Dylan in the singer’s nearby apartment, capturing the rising folk star as he played his acoustic guitar, sprawled in a beat-up armchair, and tried at one point to smoke and sing at the same time — another memorable shot
Those are just two of hundreds of impressive images that are now preserved on a website dedicated to Hunstein’s work, a site put together by Hunstein’s daughter, Tina Cornell, who lives in Florence with her family, and cdeVision, a Holyoke web studio specializing in advertising, website design and more.
Along with taking many shots of Dylan in his early career, Hunstein, who died in 2017, photographed a huge array of stars on Columbia’s roster from the late 1950s into the 1980s: Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Barbara Streisand, Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Billy Joel.
The photographer also shot hundreds of album covers, including Loretta Lynn’s memorable “Coal Miner’s Daughter” from 1970, as well as the records of classical musicians including pianist Glenn Gould.
Hunstein, born in 1928 in Missouri, grew up in St. Louis but settled in New York in the 1950s. He made his mark as a documentary photographer — his adopted home was a favorite subject — whose unobtrusive style, Cornell says, helped put his subjects at ease.
As one of his obituaries noted, “Don had the ability to listen with his camera. Instinctively he under stood that to capture artists at their best moments, patience, trust and humility were needed.”
Now Cornell and her mother, DeeAnne Hunstein, who also helped develop the website, are hoping to bring some more attention to Hunstein’s work, in turn highlighting an era when photography became an important tool for documenting the cultural history of music.
“My dad was humble to a fault, just very self-effacing,” Cornell said during a recent phone call. “He didn’t act like a fan [of musicians] or put himself out there like he was some kind of big shot … He saw this as a job, and he always said he was lucky to be at the right place at the right time.
“And yet he created all these great images,” she noted. “People liked him — they felt comfortable around him, he was good at making a joke, and that’s why he was able to do what he did.”
Case in point: Cornell says Johnny Cash could sometimes be testy with reporters and photographers, but her father and the gritty country singer hit it off, with Cash inviting Hunstein to visit him on his Texas ranch in the late 1950s.
Though Hunstein mostly took black and white photos, his website offers a couple especially atmospheric images of Cash in color. In one, wearing a checked shirt and a straw hat, he leans on a worn wooden fence rail and looks off moodily into the distance. In another, the singer, this time decked out in dark suit and white shirt, sits with his guitar on a huge woodpile, his nearby open guitar case revealing a bright purple interior.
“I love that mix of colors!” Cornell said.
hen there’s the near-silhouette of jazz great Thelonious Monk, hunched over a piano, a cigarette dangling from his mouth (there was a lot of smoking in Columbia’s studios in those days). And Cornell says one of her father’s favorite photos was an image he took of Duke Ellington, his “all-time hero,” as she puts it.
“My dad used to say he was really lucky to have this job, because he was such a huge music fan himself,” she said.
‘Don Hunstein did all this?!’
Bill Alatalo, a co-partner of cdeVision with Antonio Costa, says the company actually first designed a website for Hunstein’s work perhaps a dozen years ago after Cornell first approached them. It was a simpler affair, with far fewer images, Alatalo notes, in part because Cornell and her mother were busy at the time trying to help Hunstein, who struggled with Alzheimer’s disease for about a decade before his death.
Then Cornell got back in touch about a year ago, Alatalo said, and asked if cdeVision could develop a new site. “The old one kind of got lost in the shuffle, and at this point Tina had a lot more photos for us to work with,” he said. “Antonio and I were amazed — we were like, ‘Don Hunstein did all this?!’ ”
As a music lover and record collector himself, Alatalo says the Hunstein website “has just been a cool project to work on, to really give it some play and give people a better sense of what he did.” The website also dovetails with other music-related work cdeVision has done in recent years, Alatalo said, such as designing a new site for Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in Greenfield.
For Cornell, who was born in 1968, her father’s website is a deeply personal project. She was inspired by his work as she got older, she says, and studied photography herself as well as drawing and painting. She came to the Valley about 20 years ago with a former partner, and the couple had plans then to create a pottery studio. Today she works as a jeweler and goldsmith and also is involved with a local chapter of an environmental group, Mothers Out Front.
She can remember going as a kid to her father’s studio at Columbia Records, then located in a building on 52th Street near 5th Avenue in Manhattan, and “playing with the props” while her dad was arranging shots of various artists.
“It wasn’t until I was older that I really developed an awareness of the full scope of his work,” she said.
Cornell and her mother have also established the new website as a means of protecting the provenance of Hunstein’s work. Some of his photos now crop up online, such as on people’s Instagram sites, and go uncredited, she noted, and she’s had to ask people to remove the pictures.
In addition, the Sony Corp. bought Columbia Records (and Columbia Pictures) in the late 1980s, acquiring all of Hunstein’s work for the record label, and Cornell and her mother have since worked with Sony to gain access to many of those images.
Ultimately, Cornell says, the website is designed to reacquaint people with her father’s work and his era as a photographer. He never took to computers or digital photography, she notes, instead working with contact sheets in his darkroom, giving his photos a distinctive style and pedigree that she believes is worth commemorating.
More are added to the website regularly, she says, and the site also has many images her father took of Puerto Rican communities in New York City in the early 1960s, part of a book project for an English publisher.
“My dad was just a huge part of my life,” she said. “This is my way of honoring that.”
Santa Fe, NM -- Monroe Gallery of Photography announces an exhibition of photographs commemorating the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center that became known as 9/11.
The twin towers design process started in 1965 and construction began in 1972. The twin towers were the tallest buildings in the world for a very short time. Photographs in the exhibit document the construction of the World Trade Center, its prominence in the skyline of Manhattan, and the devastation of September 11, 2001
Photographer Eric O'Connell discusses his 9/11 photograph of the Greek Orthodox Church near the World Trade Center and its relationship to Tony Vaccaro's photograph of the World Trade Towers in Sunset, 1979
View the exhibition 9/11: In Remembrance here
Date: Monday, March 22, 2021
09:00–10:15AM EDT
Join NY Times Editor Renee Melides and VII Photographer Ashley Gilbertson to discuss “A City Ruptured” on March 22 at 9 AM EDT.
The duo will discuss their year of COVID-19 coverage in New York City, the concepts behind the work, the production of a months-long story, and the importance of collaboration on projects.
Renee Melides
Renee Melides is a Photo Editor at The New York Times and is currently based in New York. Renee also worked for The Times in both their London and Hong Kong bureaus. Prior to this, she was the Deputy Photo Editor at Monocle Magazine in London.
Ashley Gilbertson
Ashley Gilbertson is an Australian photographer and writer living in New York City widely recognized for his critical eye and unique approaches to social issues. Gilbertson is a member of the VII Agency, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and a collaborator with the United Nations.
View the exhibition "History Now" featuring several of Ashley Gilbertson's photographs.
View a selection of Ashley Gilbertson's prints
March 10, 2021
