Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali Photographs Tell Stories of Two American Icons

Andrew Berg, 12, of Souderton, Pa., views photographs of Muhammad Ali by Neil Leifer, right, and an anonymous photographer, left, at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pa. Two American superstars have crossed paths in suburban Philadelphia at the museum, where a pair of photography exhibits called American Icons offers a peek into the lives of Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali. AP Photo/Matt Rourke.

Via artdaily.org

By: Kathy Matheson, Associated Press


DOYLESTOWN, PA (AP).- In a culture saturated with celebrity magazines, paparazzi and red carpets, it's hard to imagine capturing an image of a young Elvis Presley alone on the sidewalk in New York. Or a picture of Muhammad Ali at play with neighborhood kids in a parking lot.

No screaming fans, no camera flashes, no entourages.

These unguarded moments are among dozens featured in "Ali and Elvis: American Icons," a pair of photography exhibits sharing gallery space through May 15 at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pa., about 25 miles north of Philadelphia. This is the first time the exhibits have been displayed together.

The Smithsonian-curated "Elvis at 21" show offers a glimpse into Presley's life just as his star begins to rise. Needing publicity photos, Presley's record company hired photographer Alfred Wertheimer in 1956 to shadow the rock-n-roll prince who would become The King.

Wertheimer had extraordinary access, said Smithsonian project director Marquette Folley.

"After this year, 1956, no one can ever get this close again," Folley said. "The walls go up."

The images of Ali, taken by multiple photographers, chronicle his years from teen boxer to his reign as The Greatest to a beloved figure battling Parkinson's disease. They were first displayed at a Hofstra University symposium on Ali in 2008.

Putting the exhibits together was simply an effort to take a broader look at the concepts of fame and the making of icons, said Brian Peterson, chief curator at the Michener Museum.

Certainly the two superstars had similarities. Both sons of the South, Presley and Ali enjoyed worldwide popularity but also alarmed some people with their swagger and attitude — Elvis with his thrusting pelvis and use of African-American rhythms in his music, Ali with his braggadocio and conversion to Islam.

Wertheimer's 56 images — most enlarged to 3-by-4-foot prints — capture Presley's electrifying stage persona but also his more intimate moments: standing in solitude in front of New York's Warwick Hotel; sprawling on a couch reading fan mail; and interacting with his family.

Wertheimer also chronicles one summer week that found the American idol rehearsing alone at a piano for an appearance on Steve Allen's show in New York, kissing a giddy fan backstage in Richmond, Va., and splashing in his swimming pool at home in Memphis, Tenn.

"I was basically putting Elvis under my microscope," Wertheimer, now 81, told The Associated Press. "He permitted closeness."

The bulk of "Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon" features shots of the heavyweight champ in and around the ring: training in Miami; absorbing blows from George Foreman in Zaire; and looming over a floored Sonny Liston in Neil Leifer's famous frame from 1965.

But the exhibit starts with less familiar and more personal images from when Ali was known as Cassius Clay — shadowboxing with his family, preening in front of a mirror and riding a bike with adoring local children. It ends with pictures of Ali the celebrity and humanitarian, lighting the Olympic torch in Atlanta and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Curator Hava Gurevich said the power of the 50-image show lies in its combination of fine art, documentary and news photography.

"It's like a kaleidoscopic view of Muhammad Ali's life," Gurevich said.

Peterson, the Michener curator, said he didn't find out until after booking them that Presley and Ali had actually crossed paths. Elvis visited Ali's training camp in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains and gave him a rhinestone cape; Ali gave The King an autographed pair of gold boxing gloves.

"I can't say it was part of our grand plan," Peterson said. "(But) it made us feel we were kind of on the right track."

The next stop for "Elvis at 21" is the William J. Clinton museum in Little Rock, Ark. The next stop for "Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon" is the Historic City Hall Arts & Cultural Center in Lake Charles, La.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press

Memorials Planned for Photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington

Via Photo District News





Memorials Planned for Photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington


The families of two photojournalists killed in a rocket attack on Misrata, Libya, on April 20 are organizing memorials.

Dean Hondros, brother of photographer Chris Hondros, announced that a memorial service will take place Wednesday, April 27, at 1 pm at Sacred Hearts St. Stephens Church in Brooklyn. Directions and information are available on the church’s Web site, http://www.delvecchiorc.com/; the phone number is (718) 246-8342.

In lieu of flowers, Hondros’s family and fiancee have suggested donations be made to The Chris Hondros Fund, which has just been launched: “This fund will provide scholarships for aspiring photojournalists and raise awareness of issues surrounding conflict photography.”

The Chris Hondros Fund
c/o Christina Piaia
50 Bridge Street #414
Brooklyn, New York 11201

The family of Tim Hetherington have created a web page, Timhetherington.org/condolences, where remembrances of their son are being posted. On the site, a note from Alistair and Judith Hetherington says, “We will be setting up a charitable organization to continue Tim’s humanitarian work around the world,” and adds, “Information will be posted here in the coming days.

Editor and Writer David Schonauer on the Risky History of the War Photographer

David Schonauer
Former editor-in-chief, American Photo magazine


Via The Huffington Post
Hetherington, Hondros, and the Risky History of the War Photographer



To the list of photographers who have died while covering war and conflict, we must now add the names of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, killed in Misurata, Libya on Wednesday. They join the likes of Ken Oosterbroek, a member of the so-called Bang Bang Club of photojournalists immortalized now in a new movie. Oosterbroek was killed in 1994 while covering the violence in South Africa during the final days of apartheid. They join Olivier Rebbot, killed in El Salvador in 1981 while on assignment for Newsweek. Rebbot was a model for the photographer played by Nick Nolte in the 1983 film Under Fire. They join Robert Capa, killed near Thai Binh, Vietnam in 1954, who was the model for all who would follow in his profession. If the war photographer has come to be seen as a romantic figure, we have the Hemingwayesque Capa to thank.


It was Capa, famed for covering the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, who said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough," and the photographers who followed him into Vietnam took his advice. Vietnam was a particular deadly place for photographers, who jumped aboard helicopters alongside soldiers to fly into firefights. The names of the dead -- Larry Burrows, Gilles Caron, Henri Huet, Robert Ellison, Dickie Chapelle, Charles Eggleston, and Oliver Noonan among them -- have become legend. The haunting 1997 book Requiem memorialized these journalists -- 135 photographers from different nations known to have died in Vietnam. In the book's introduction, David Halberstam described why their job was so dangerous:

"War correspondents always know who is real and who is not. A war zone is not a good setting for the inauthentic of spirit and heart. We who were print people and who dealt only in words and not in images always knew that the photographers were the brave ones, and in that war... they held a special place in our esteem. We deferred to them, reporter to photographer, in that venue as we did in few others."

They were real because they had to be real; they could not, as we print people could, arrive a little late for the action, be briefed, and then, through the skilled use of interviews and journalism, re-create a scene with stunning accuracy, writing a marvelous you-are-there story that reeked of intimacy even though, in truth, we had missed it all. We could miss the fighting and still do our jobs. They could not. There was only one way for them to achieve intimacy: by being eyewitnesses.

I knew Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, but not especially well -- in the case of Chris, we went out for beers on a couple of occasions and spoke on the telephone a few times when he wrote a story for the photography magazine I edited. (He was a fine writer, too; urgent, clear, and caring.) My acquaintance with Tim was very brief -- I interviewed him last November, over coffee at a hotel lobby in New York, about his book Infidel, which had just come out. In similar ways, Chris and Tim impressed me, immediately and lastingly, as superior people -- humble, humorous, dedicated, and very intelligent. Real, as Halberstam put it.

Halberstam noted that the Vietnam War began "in an era of black-and-white photography and ended in one of color videotape beamed by satellite to television stations all over the world." The world of photography has changed just as radically in the past ten years. On 9/11, when photographers raced to downtown Manhattan to document the devastating scenes there, most carried film cameras. At the time, the first professional-quality 35mm SLRs were just coming onto the market. News organizations and photo agencies anticipated America's reaction to the terrorist attacks and retooled, almost overnight. When American troops went to war in Afghanistan a few weeks later, photojournalists covered the story with digital cameras and satellite uplinks, ramping up the speed with which they could deliver pictures. Later in the decade, as the Internet took hold and the old-media world imploded, photographers began doubling as videographers and writers. (Underscoring the evolution, last year the Associated Press dropped its time-honored byline, "Associated Press Writer," with the more ambiguous "Associated Press.")

Tim Hetherington thrived in this new journalistic landscape. A skilled filmmaker as well as a photographer, he could tell a story through a number of media platforms. In his Oscar-nominated film Restrepo, and in his small but powerful photo book Infidel, he told the story of a U.S. combat unit in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, never veering far from the everyday reality of the soldiers' lives. "Symbols or representations of soldiers are often claimed by the far left and far right to mean a certain thing," he told me, "and we do these men an injustice by not digesting fully their reality."

An image from Hetherington's book Infidel

It's a dangerous job they do, and like others who do dangerous jobs they learn how to cope as best they can. A correspondent friend of mine who traveled with Chris Hondros on several stories in Iraq later told me that the photographer had taught him a valuable lesson about working in a combat area: to sleep when sleep was possible, in the lulls between action and danger. Chris, a recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal, a prestigious award for the highest level of war photography, knew what he was doing and why. And he no doubt understood the implications of another of Capa's famous comments: speaking of his work on D-Day, Capa said, "The war correspondent has his stake, his life, in his own hands and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave."


Please take a moment to write a message to Tim Hetherington's family and share it with his friends

'Images' exhibit features photo icon's work

Bill Eppridge: Bobby Kennedy campaigns in IN during May of 1968, with various aides and friends: former prizefighter Tony Zale and (right of Kennedy) N.F.L. stars Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, and Deacon Jones

The Westport News
Friday, April 22, 2011

A retrospective of photojournalist Bill Eppridge's work will headline "Images 2011," the Fairfield Museum and History Center's third annual photography exhibit.


The show opens May 1 and continues through the end of August. A preview party is scheduled April 30.

Eppridge worked for Life magazine in the 1960s and took many of the decade's notable photographs -- the Beatles arriving in the United States for their appearance on the "Ed Sullivan Show," Barbra Streisand in Paris, the Woodstock Festival, the civil rights movement, the 50th anniversary of the Soviet revolution, the Vietnam War and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential candidacy.

Kennedy befriended the photographer during the campaign. One of Eppridge's best-known photos is of busboy Juan Romero cradling the fatally wounded candidate in the seconds after he was shot in the kitchen of a Los Angeles restaurant after the California primary.

In addition to Eppridge's photos, the museum said, "Images 2011" will include a juried exhibit of more than 50 photographs by professional, amateur and student photographers from the region.

The juried show attracted entries from about 400 photographers from Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. A panel of six photographers, including Eppridge, selected works in six categories for exhibit.

The museum has also developed a range of related programs in conjunction with the exhibition. These programs, focusing on the challenges, rewards and ethics of visually documenting history, news and events, at home and abroad, will be open to members, nonmembers and students.

At the April 30 preview party, guests will have an opportunity to meet Eppridge, a New Milford resident, along with collectors, gallery owners and patrons. Tickets for the reception may be purchased in advance and are priced at $100, 200 and $500. Proceeds from the preview benefit the museum's education programs.

To purchase tickets to the preview party and for information on the exhibit-related programs, call 203-259-1598 or visit the museum's website, http://www.fairfieldhs.org/.


Related: Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure

If you knew the cause would take a limb or your life, or leave you beaten or raped, would you do it?

Tim Hetherington

Award-winning photojournalist Tim Hetherington (right) known for his work in war zones, died Wednesday in the Libyan city of Misrata when he was hit by a mortar round. He is pictured here with Sebastian Junger, his co-director of the film Restrepo, which was nominated for the best-documentary Oscar this year.

Via NPR's The Picture Show

The Toll Of Covering Conflict

by Jacki Lyden



Joao Silva. Lynsey Addario. Tyler Hicks. Tim Hetherington. Chris Hondros: the names of photojournalists grievously wounded, kidnapped or killed in the line of duty since October 2010. The names and casualties of journalists harmed during conflicts seem to be mounting, leaving many of us who knew them or who have worked with them or - even those a few steps more removed - feeling a bit more vulnerable.


Nearly all journalists in conflict areas, or areas of disaster, take risks. Photojournalists, I think, are the biggest risk-takers for the cause because they must be more proximate, and the lens attracts attention.

If you knew the cause would take a limb or your life, or leave you beaten or raped, would you do it?

Phil Robertson, a New York based writer, has been close to Chris Hondros since they covered Iraq together beginning in 2002. As he told me today, "Conflict is a meat grinder and it destroys people's lives. We've seen way, way too many people get killed or injured, but this is OUR part of the war. It makes me realize more and more what the local civilians go through and how they feel."


I agree. And not only them, but the many local journalists who work for foreign organizations – like NPR. War is a terrible, uncertain, lethal condition. There will be other Misratas and Fallujahs and Korengal Valleys. I think the legacy, the honor, is to remember the people who put faces and feelings and emotions in front of us from those places, and reflect that there have always been stories, songs, and images of war and disaster. Perhaps their details blend over time, but we would not have the details except for those brave enough to gather them.

Photojournalist Chris Hondros poses with a a former Liberian government soldier, at his home in Monrovia, Liberia, in 2005. Hondros' picture of Duo jumping into the air in exultation during a battle with rebel forces in 2003 was distributed around the world. Hondros was killed April 20 in Misrata, Libya

Robertson is writing a book at home now, in New York. He's the father of a toddler. But he has certainly taken risks and is thinking of Chris Hondros today. They shared rides in Afghanistan and a terrifying open-air truck ride in Fallujah.

And he and Hondros shared another ride. "He drove my wife and me and our new baby home from the hospital the day after our daughter, Zaina, was born in 2009," he said. "We were together on the most terrifying and beautiful days I have ever known."

Original post and slide show here.

Jacki Lyden is a correspondent and host for NPR.

Photojournalist Tim Hetherington Killed In Libya

© Matt Stuart

 
Via Photo District News


By David Walker


Photojournalist Tim Hetherington died today in Libya while covering the fighting between rebels and troops loyal to Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the New York Times has confirmed. Hetherington died after being hit by rocket fire in the city of Misrata.


Hetherington was an award-winning photographer, and was regarded by peers as being among the best photojournalists currently working. News of Hetherington's death, first reported at about 11am EST on Facebook by photographer Andre Liohn, shocked the photojournalism community. Hospitalized at the same time were Chris Hondros, who Getty confirmed is in critical condition, Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown.

Hetherington covered social and political issues worldwide, and was most recently based in New York as a contributing photographer to Vanity Fair magazine. He is best known for his year-long collaboration with writer Sebastian Junger, documenting a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan. The collaboration resulted in a film directed by Hetherington called Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Sundance Film Festival in 2010, and was nominated for an Academy Award earlier this year. Hetherington also published a book from that project called Infidel, which was published last year. He won the top prize at World Press Photo of the Year in 2007 with his photo of a solider in Afghanistan, and an Alfred I duPont Award in 2009, among other awards for his photography.

Previously, he was known for his work in West Africa, including Liberia, where he was a cameraman for a film called Liberia: an Uncivil War (2004). He also completed several photographic projects in Africa. In 2009, he published Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, about that country's recent history.

Hetherington was born in Liverpool, UK in 1970. He studied literature at Oxford, and earned a post-graduate diploma in photojournalism from Cardiff in 1996. He began his photojournalism career working for a magazine sold by the homeless, before becoming a regular contributor to The Independent newspaper in London.

He was dedicated to producing long-term narrative projects, and reaching audiences beyond traditional print media. Hetherington told PDN in a 2006 interview that he was interested in reaching TV audiences, academics, and policy makers to gain maximum exposure for his subjects and effect change. "For me, the utility of my work is very important," he said. "Where can we push documentary? where can we put it? because for me, that’s what differentiates me from an artist."

Eric Smith Photographs "Murdertown, USA"

Steve Howe patrols the mean streets in his Chevy cruiser.

Eric Smith for The New York Times

The New York Times
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
Published: April 15, 2011

You Are Here

Riding Along With the Cops in Murdertown, U.S.A.

A sign taped to the entrance of police headquarters says it all: “Closed weekends and holidays.” Every weekday, the doors are locked at dusk.

It’s not that the cops here are scared; it’s just that they’re outmanned, outgunned and flat broke.


Flint is the birthplace of General Motors and the home of the U.A.W.’s first big strike. In case you didn’t know this, the words “Vehicle City” are spelled out on the archway spanning the Flint River.

But the name is a lie. Flint isn’t Vehicle City anymore. The Buick City complex is gone. The spark-plug plant is gone. Fisher Body is gone.

What Flint is now is one of America’s murder capitals. Last year in Flint, population 102,000, there were 66 documented murders. The murder rate here is worse than those in Newark and St. Louis and New Orleans. It’s even worse than Baghdad’s.

After the door is unlocked and I enter police headquarters, it is easy to see why. There are only six patrolmen on duty for a Saturday night. So broke is Flint that the city laid off two-thirds of its police force in the last three years. The front desk looks like a dusty museum piece.

I am assigned to ride along with Officer Steve Howe, a 20-year-veteran of the department. Caucasian. Late 50s. Medium build. Mustache. Clump of very well-kempt salt-and-pepper hair.

I sign a release form and am given a bulletproof vest.

"Isn’t that a little bit much?” I ask the sergeant on duty.

“You have to sign your life away,” he tells me.

Cops can be a suspicious, insular lot when it comes to reporters. But Howe and the others are blunt and self-effacing. “We ain’t cops anymore,” Howe says. “We’re librarians. We take reports. We don’t fight crime.”

He guides me through the yellowing jail cells upstairs that had to be closed down recently because of lack of manpower. “If you break into someone’s house, we can’t hold you,” he says with a straight face. “If you’ve got a weapon or you’ve murdered somebody, then county will take you. I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel. Only darkness.”

We leave headquarters and head out into the night. Howe turns up the heat in his Chevy cruiser and switches on the computer.

“That’s something,” I say hopefully. “Some squad cars in Detroit don’t even have computers.”

“Hold on a sec,” he says. “Let it warm up.”

When it does, I see that there are more than 12 runs stacked up, including a kidnapping call that is more than six hours old. A home-invader call is two hours old. A “man with a gun” call is 90-minutes old.

“Sometimes, we don’t get to a call for two days,” he says. Last fall, an elderly couple called after being held up at gunpoint in their driveway. The police arrived on the scene five hours later.

Traffic tickets?

“Don’t make me laugh,” he says.

We drive 50 miles through the evening, and the city flashes by us in all its monotony. Liquor store. Gas station. Liquor store. Hi-C, 25 cents. Catfish steaks, $1.25. Regular unleaded, $3.65.

The action isn’t heavy tonight, either. Domestic disputes, mostly. A woman will not let her brother into the house, having already destroyed his furniture with a pipe and thrown his clothing into the snow. Another man has beaten his girlfriend and locked himself inside a neighbor’s house. Howe takes reports. The kidnapping call gathers dust.

We pass by an abandoned Victorian with a sign neatly spray-painted on the peeling door: “Please don’t burn.”

“Sorry, slow night,” Howe apologizes. “Last weekend we had four murders.”

Nature calls. Howe pulls into the 7-Eleven for a toilet break and a Big Gulp. As we get out of the car, I see a blue flash of light near the side of the store and the sound of gunfire. A shadow runs toward the apartment complex.

“Back in the car!” Howe barks at me.

Someone might have just become the 14th homicide victim of 2011, and winter hasn’t even broken yet.

Howe calls in: “Shots fired.” He gives the following description: A shadow wearing a hood. And in less than two minutes, the entire Flint police force on patrol swarms the area. All six of them. They find no gun and no victim. They do, however, round up a fidgety kid in a hood, but since he doesn’t have a gun, they kick him loose.

Frustrated, Howe heads back to the car and watches the kid walk away. Two more people are killed in Flint the following week.

Related:

Eric Smith: The Patriot Guard and The Westboro Baptist Church

NPR: Eric Smith Photographs historic Michigan Central Station

The Pulitzer Eddie Adams Didn’t Want

April 19, 2011, 5:00 am
By DONALD R. WINSLOW

For a long time after Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for “Saigon Execution,” he wouldn’t speak of it. He turned away questions about the picture, grumbling some dismissive rebuff like, “Everything’s already been said about it.” Or: “There’s nothing new. I don’t want to talk about it now.” I experienced this firsthand in the 1970s as a college student. At an Indiana University seminar, I asked him about “Saigon Execution.” Before an auditorium packed with photojournalism students, Eddie cut me off at the knees, then pointed to the next raised hand.

I was stunned. After the slide show we’d just watched, we were collectively in awe. Eddie seemed like some kind of photojournalism God. I had no idea I’d stumbled onto such a sore point. It didn’t make sense. Who wouldn’t want to talk about one of history’s most iconic war pictures and winning the Pulitzer Prize? Why on earth would someone shun such an honor?

Eddie and I were later to become friends. But even in 2004, when he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at 71, I still didn’t have the full story.

Indeed, the reason for his seemingly inexplicable feelings remained a mystery until just recently. His widow, Alyssa Adams, donated his archive to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin on the fifth anniversary of Eddie’s death. The archive includes more than 50 years’ worth of material from a journalist who covered 13 wars, six American presidents and nearly every major film star. With his family’s permission, Alison M. Beck of the Briscoe Center allowed me an advance peek into the archive as the staff categorized 200 linear feet of slides, negatives, prints, audio and video materials, diaries, notes and tear sheets. Everything captured my interest, but Eddie’s journals were the gems.

It turns out that he did, in fact, very much want to win a Pulitzer Prize. Desperately. Almost obsessively. But what I didn’t know until I sat in the basement of the Briscoe Center reading his 1963 and 1964 journals — scrawled in little red leather notebooks — was that Eddie wanted to win a Pulitzer long before he’d ever encountered a Vietcong prisoner named Nguyen Van Lem or Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese national police.

There, in his own handwriting, Eddie acknowledged how deeply he wanted to win a Pulitzer for his photograph of the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, holding the folded flag that had been handed to her at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in November 1963. Eddie was angry when he didn’t win a Pulitzer and then furious when he found out that an administrator at The Associated Press had submitted other A.P. pictures to the Pulitzer jury instead. His photo hadn’t even been entered.

The photo that did win the Pulitzer Prize that year was by Bob Jackson of The Dallas Times-Herald. It showed Jack Ruby lunging out of a crowd to shoot and kill the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, during a perp walk. It was what’s known as a “reflex” picture; taken when there isn’t time to think, when some movement or sound screams to the brain, “Push the shutter now!”

So Eddie watched the Pulitzer for coverage of the Kennedy assassination go to a reflex picture rather than one so intentionally poignant, one that captured a national moment of mourning, a timeless and heartbreaking milestone in America’s history.

Associated Press

Eddie Adams in Vietnam. 1965.

But that doesn’t seem enough to keep him angry about the Pulitzers for so many years. After all, Eddie often felt slighted, overlooked; in the shadow of others who seemed to get the spotlight for lesser accomplishments. Especially in his early career, he suffered from what friends called “insufficient adoration.”

I scanned his journals, thought back on our conversations and recalled the many times I’d listened to him speak to student photojournalists and professionals in classrooms or in bars or on street corners waiting for news to happen. I cobbled together the bits and pieces of insight he’d share sparingly with one friend or another over time. That’s when it dawned on me. As I held both photos side by side, I realized what he’d been hinting at and saying indirectly.

Eddie thought he’d won the Pulitzer for the wrong picture.


There’s something you have to take into account about Eddie. Before he was a photographer, he was a Marine. And some Marine principles took root in his heart: honesty, fairness and the importance of holding and protecting a higher moral ground. Bear this in mind as you contemplate the two photographs.


Eddie made the picture of Mrs. Kennedy on purpose. It was intentional. Methodical. It spoke to the deep photographic talent of Edward T. Adams. A perceived moment was approaching, it came, and he captured it. Magnificently. This is a shining example of the best of the best of his photography.

Now consider “Saigon Execution.” Eddie himself said it was a reflex picture. That day in Saigon in 1968, Eddie saw the general reaching for his pistol as he walked up to the prisoner’s side. When the general raised his hand, Eddie raised his 35-millimeter camera to his face. In a pure reflex he released the shutter. He wasn’t certain of what he’d photographed until the film was developed and an A.P. editor, Horst Faas, picked out that negative.

And that, for Eddie, was that. In the following days there’s barely any mention in his journal of “Saigon Execution.” What’s clear is that in 1968, this ex-Marine saw the shooting as something that simply happened in war. It was just another day in Vietnam. No big deal. A prisoner had been shot. As time passed, Eddie came guiltily to believe that the general had gotten a bum rap for the execution and that he — as the photographer — had played a significant role in “ruining a man’s life.” To a rough-and-tumble, blue-collar Marine from New Kensington, Pa., this wouldn’t have fit the definition of higher moral ground.

Years later, while laying out the pages one day for News Photographer, the monthly magazine of the National Press Photographers Association, I received a surprise phone call from Eddie. He said he knew I’d have to write his obituary sooner or later and he told me what he didn’t want the first sentence to say. He also grumbled that he’d made a similar phone call to The New York Times but that he knew, when the time came, “they probably won’t be able to help themselves.” (The Times’s obituary.)

Boat of no smiles, Vietnamese Refugees, Gulf of Siam, Thanksgiving Day,1977

Related: Armed With A Camera

“You don’t understand. This is history. I have to photograph it now. Later is too late.”

Via The American Society of Cinematographers

April 11, 2011 by John Bailey, ASC

Lynsey Addario: Back From the Brink

 

Khalid, age 7, wounded by shrapnel in Korengal Valley, Afghanistan

"After all I have done to get these images of war, up close, personal, soldiers and civilians, please stick your neck out in the most minimal way. To hear that you don’t want to “risk further scrutiny” after I risked my life for two months is the most offensive thing I have ever heard."

You don’t understand. This is history. I have to photograph it now. Later is too late.” New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario is talking to Army Captain Dan Kearney at 6 a.m. on the side of a mountain in the dawning Korengal Valley of northeastern Afghanistan. It is fall, 2007, and Kearney’s forces have dropped into a village to confront insurgents following nighttime bombing by American planes. There likely has been “collateral damage.” Afghan civilians have been wounded and Addario wants Kearney to help her get to them to document the injuries. Khalid, a seven-year-old boy with shrapnel wounds and watery eyes becomes a haunting portrait that underscores the absurdity of a term like “collateral damage.”

At first, the photo was going to be the cover image for a NY Times Sunday magazine feature story. But it was quashed. Then it was to be in the story inside, then on the Times website on a slideshow—also all quashed. Kathy Ryan, the photo editor argued for inclusion on the website; editor–in-chief Gerry Marzorati refused, citing that it could not be proven that Khalid’s and other villagers’ wounds were caused by American bombs; so, the photo was not run despite strenuous pleadings by Addario. Later, Captain Kearney affirmed that most likely the wounds were caused by shrapnel from American bombs.

Burial in Falluja, chaos even in death

This sense of urgency and fierce dedication to her assignments pervades all of Lynsey Addario’s photographs. Here is part of what she wrote to the then current editor-in-chief of the magazine in defense of her work.

"After all I have done to get these images of war, up close, personal, soldiers and civilians, please stick your neck out in the most minimal way. To hear that you don’t want to “risk further scrutiny” after I risked my life for two months is the most offensive thing I have ever heard."

She takes no prisoners in her fierce focus. There are few images of stasis or quiet moments of idyllic peace in the maelstrom of her work.

Five years after graduation from Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, Addario was working as a professional photojournalist for the Buenos Aires Herald. Shortly after, she was in Cuba for AP. The past decade she has worked for the NY Times and its magazine as well as for National Geographic. Always on the move, she somehow made time to marry Reuters journalist Paul de Bender in July 2009.


Addario may be an anomaly as a conflict photojournalist: a woman in a field dominated by men. On many of her assignments she is paired with another woman, journalist Elizabeth Warren, covering stories from each of their perspectives, in images and words. It is Warren who recalls the incident that opens this essay. Embedded in the fall of 2007 in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, much as Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger had been for their Oscar nominated documentary film, Restrepo, Warren was already months pregnant. She and Addario are self-described “partners in crime” on assignments throughout the decade’s conflict zones. Here is a PBS slideshow of the Korengal Valley story.

And here is Warren’s account of her and Addario in the Korengal.

Rubin also discusses her relationship with Addario and their history in northeastern Afghanistan in a recent feature article in the Winter 2010 issue of Aperture magazine. It is worth getting, not just for Rubin’s detailed account of her relationship with Addario, but as a lesson in the daily rigors of the conflict journalist:


Rubin writes about Addario’s penchant for using wide lenses, for working in close:

Wide angles lure me into Lynsey’s work. The intense focus that opens to another layer and then another and another. I asked her once about that. “I don’t know. I just see that way.”

There is no better introduction to the way Addario “sees” than going to her website. The stark, severe black field comes up right away. A seven-image slideshow follows.

Links to the left side of the homepage lead to slideshows of other photo essays.

Hotspots of international conflict, all the usual countries run amok with warring men, are listed, a veritable Zagat guide into hell. But what else emerges as you look, are links to essays that document women’s issues: women in the military, women’s health and maternity in Africa, female-self-immolation in Afghanistan, an Indian beauty pageant, transsexual prostitutes. She’s on the front lines in war zones, alongside the boys—but she also stalks a space and themes that most male photojournalist eschew. As you get to know her work, you realize that covering women’s issues is not an ancillary assignment. It is as much the core of her identity as an “engaged observer” as her higher profile war stories. She does not just caption the images; she narrates the story beyond.



”I saw two women on the side of the mountain, in burkas and without a man. In Afghanistan you seldom see an unaccompanied woman. Noor Nisa, about 18, was pregnant; her water had just broken. Her husband, whose first wife had died during childbirth, was determined to get Noor Nisa to the hospital in Faizabad, a four-hour drive from their village in Badakhshan Province. His borrowed car broke down, so he went to find another vehicle. I ended up taking Noor Nisa, her mother, and her husband to the hospital, where she delivered a baby girl. My interpreter, who is a doctor, and I were on a mission to photograph maternal health and mortality issues, only to find the entire story waiting for us along a dusty Afghan road.”

Here is a slideshow of an essay on maternal mortality in Sierra Leone.

Addario works so close up that she has run smack into numerous situations that could easily have meant her death: a kidnapping; a car wreak that left her driver dead and her with a broken collarbone—and most recently, an arrest, detention and beatings that put her and three other NY Times journalists in the world spotlight when they went missing in Libya for six days.The story of their capture and eventual release highlight the risks taken every day by the men and women who give witness of the world’s traumas.

Four “NY Times” journalists with Turkish ambassador (center) after their release in Tripoli.

Here is an audio interview with Addario and Renee Montagne of NPR on April 1, describing the ordeal she and her three times colleagues endured:

Margaret Warner on the PBS Newshour interviewed both Addario and Anthony Shadid who is the NY Times Bureau Chief in Beirut and who was arrested with her.

One section of Addario’s website features images of Afghan women who have tried to immolate themselves to escape violence and oppression.

“Bibi Aisha was 19 when I met her in Kabul's Women for Afghan Women shelter in November 2009. Her husband beat her from the day she was married, at age 12. When he beat her so badly she thought she might die, she escaped to seek a neighbor's help. To punish her for leaving without permission, her husband, who is a Taliban fighter, took her to a remote spot in the mountains. Several men held her while he cut off her nose, ears, and hair. She screamed—to no avail. "If I had the power, I would kill them all," she told me. I wanted to be strong for Aisha to give her hope she would be fine again. But when she described that moment, I began to cry.”

I took the bottle of petrol and burned myself," Fariba, who is 11 and lives in Herat, told me. "When I returned to school, the kids made fun of me. They said I was ugly." She now says, "I regret my mistake." The reasons for her action are unclear; Fariba claimed a woman came to her in her dreams and told her to burn herself. Many Afghan women burn themselves because they believe suicide is the only escape from an abusive marriage, abusive family members, poverty, or the stress of war. If they do survive, women fear being shamed or punished for what they did and may blame a gas explosion when they were cooking. Doctors know when the burns were intentional from their shape, location, and smell.”

 

“In Esteqlal Hospital in Kabul, doctors tried to save 15-year-old Zahra, who had doused herself with petrol and set herself on fire after she was accused of stealing from her neighbors. The teenager, from Mazar-e Sharif, suffered burns over 95 percent of her body. She died three days after I took this picture.”

Her passion to document the horror of their fate led her to move beyond these still images to a video documentary with her voiceover narration of the women’s plight. Be warned, this is a difficult video to watch.

But hope for a brighter future for Afghan women is documented in this beautifully arrayed essay for National Geographic titled Veiled Rebellion. It covers a full spectrum of the lives of women in this hardscrabble country struggling to engage the contemporary world outside its boundaries, even as powerful internal forces try to quash it. The essay speaks to the long reach of Addario’s mission letting the world know the reality and the aspirations of Afghan women.

But hope for a brighter future for Afghan women is documented in this beautifully arrayed essay for National Geographic titled Veiled Rebellion. It covers a full spectrum of the lives of women in this hardscrabble country struggling to engage the contemporary world outside its boundaries, even as powerful internal forces try to quash it. The essay speaks to the long reach of Addario’s mission letting the world know the reality and the aspirations of Afghan women.

“With face, hair, and arms in full view, actress Trena Amiri chauffeurs a friend around Kabul on a Friday. She blasts her favorite songs off a cassette and shimmies and sings along, tapping the steering wheel as she dances in the driver's seat. Even in relatively progressive Kabul, men and women glare, honk, and scream at her. It provokes men in Afghanistan to see strong women. It symbolizes a freedom they just aren't comfortable with. Amiri fled her husband of seven years, who, she says, kept her home and beat her. She left her three sons behind. She doesn't plan to remarry but knows she might have to in order to survive in Afghanistan, where women are dependent on men for so many things. When I ask about her current boyfriend, whose name is on the gold bracelet around her wrist, she says she couldn't marry him: ‘He won't let me act anymore, and I want to continue my art.’”

The photojournalists that I know personally do not seek the spotlight. The stereotype of the gung ho, half mad provocateur played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, is mostly fiction. Being a weeklong international media sensation is not a fate that either Addario or Tyler Hicks would have chosen. But like my photojournalist friend, Jehad Nga, who was also arrested and interrogated in Libya a few weeks before them, the facts of their ordeals brings into all too sharp focus for the rest of us just what is the cost of these so compelling photos—images made in the face of danger, that they bring to the rest of us, who over a cup of morningcoffee impassively scan the tribulations and exaltations of our fellow man.

 

 



LA Times, Washington Post Photographers Win Pulitzers for Photos

Via PDNPULSE
April 18, 2011


Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for her story on innocent victims of gang violence. Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn and Ricky Carioti of the Washington Post were awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for their images of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. The Pulitzers were announced today at Columbia University in New York.

Both prizes come with a $10,000 award; the Washington Post photographers will share their $10,000 prize.

Finalists were also announced today. In the Feature Photography category, Todd Heisler of The New York Times was cited for his photo essay on a Colombia family carrying a genetic mutation that causes early Alzheimer’s; Greg Kahn of The Naples Daily was cited for his study of how the recession in Florida has meant loss of jobs and homes for some, and profits for others.

In the Breaking News category, Getty Images photographers Daniel Berehulak and Paula Bronstein were cited for their images of people surviving the floods in Pakistan. Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times was named a finalist for her images of the oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico and her documentation of its widespread devastation.

The jury for the Pulitzer’s photography prizes was chaired by Nancy Andrews, managing editor/digital media, Detroit Free Press. The other jurors were Francisco Bernasconi, senior director of photography, Getty Images; Colin Crawford, deputy managing editor, photography, Los Angeles Times; Richard Murphy, photo director, Anchorage Daily News; and Steve Gonzales, director of photography, Houston Chronicle.

The full list of 2011 Pulitzers can be found at http://www.pulitzer.org/. Davidson’s gang story can be found on the Los Angeles Times web site. Images from “Haiti Profound Sorrow” can be viewed on the Washington Post web site.