"This is just two people protected under the Constitution, and it is seen as suddenly offensive. That's a huge problem."

 

This photo, shot by freelance photographer Grant Baldwin, was taken down from the Gaston County Museum at the direction of the county manager. 

(Photo: courtesy of Grant Baldwin Photography)

Via Gaston Gazette

June 15, 2022

Photo removed from Gaston County Museum to be displayed in Santa Fe gallery

Kara Fohner

The Gaston Gazette

A gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will display the photograph that the Gaston County manager ordered removed from a museum exhibit.

The photograph, which features two men kissing after one of them proposed at a Charlotte Pride parade in 2019, will be featured in an exhibit titled "Imagine a World Without Photojournalism" at the Monroe Gallery of Photography. The exhibit runs from July 1 to Sept. 29.

Grant Baldwin, the photographer who shot the image, said that he received an email from the gallery owners, Sidney and Michelle Monroe, asking to use the photograph in the exhibit with plans to include an explanation about how it was removed from the photography exhibition at the Gaston County Museum of Art and History.

The photograph was removed from the Gaston County Museum at the order of County Manager Kim Eagle. The county said in a written statement that Eagle reviewed the photograph and told museum staff to work with the photographer to find an alternative photograph to display "that would be more considerate of differing viewpoints in the community." 

The county said that it finds it important that the items the museum shares be "informational without championing political views," according to a statement released by the county Tuesday.

Baldwin, who has been a freelance photojournalist for 11 years, has mixed feelings about the situation. He is sensitive to the impact that the news of the photo's removal may have had on LGBTQ+ individuals in Gaston County, but he is also excited that the photograph seems to have taken on a life of its own. 

"I just feel like, you know, on those occasions when a journalist gets to make something that takes on its own narrative and life, ... that's really great, that excites me. And I feel honored that I got to make a piece of work that's doing that," Baldwin said. "So, as a journalist, I'm excited about what's going on, and I don't mean that in any sort of disrespectful way to the challenges that this poses for the LGBTQ community. I'm not happy with what they're experiencing with this."

Michelle Monroe, one of the co-owners of the Monroe Gallery of Photography, said that she learned the photograph had been removed from the museum exhibit from media reports.

"I'm using the photo for several reasons, but it is also a wonderful photograph. We are a gallery, and you know, we don't just want a photograph with substance. We want a photograph that is well done and beautiful, and tells an important story," she said. "We actually have had other work that would represent the human civil rights of the LGBTQ and decided that we would switch out one of those for this, because this was so current and apparently so threatening that we wanted to champion it."

She said that in terms of the arc of history, some moments are signals, catalysts that ultimately have historical significance.

She said the removal of the photograph from the exhibit is a clear signal that history is moving in the wrong direction.

"This piece of art is simply a photograph, right?" she said. "This is just two people protected under the Constitution, and it is seen as suddenly offensive. That's a huge problem." 

Related Coverage

"It is our understanding that the photograph has already been sent to a gallery in Santa Fe, where the gallery owner, Michelle Monroe of Monroe Gallery of Photography, recognizes that it is a substantial photograph that tells an important story about human civil rights."  -Opinion, Gaston Gazette

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When the Moment Occurs – Review of “Abandoned Moments: A Love Letter to Photography” by Ed Kashi

 Via Frames

Ed Kashi calls Abandoned Moments, his new collection, an autobiography, and the distinction is important. In this case, Kashi has curated his own oeuvre to make a statement. -Click to read full review

View Ed Kashi's available prints here.

A Sobering Documentary Shows the Fourth Estate Under Strain

 Via Variety

June 14, 2022

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's potent new HBO doc finds frightening evidence of the free press — and democracy — in multinational decline.

By Dennis Harvey

The resurgence of neo-fascist movements and authoritarian rule around the world has unsurprisingly coincided with a ramping-up of hostility against press freedom. Assassinated U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is the most notorious single example, but hundreds in his profession have been murdered in recent years, with many more assaulted, detained, harassed and so forth. Telling the truth has become a dangerous business in an era where politicians now frequently stoke anger towards “fake news,” as they often brand any reportage that doesn’t flatter them. All this is occurring at a time when professional outlets and standards continue to diminish, their existence eroded by competition from newer platforms where opinion and rumor often supplant factual reality.

That escalating crisis gets its pulse taken by “Endangered,” the latest documentary feature by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, whose stellar collaborations to date have tackled diverse subjects from U.S. evangelicals (“Jesus Camp”) to broadcast maverick Norman Lear (“Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You”). Executive produced by Ronan Farrow, this urgent yet admirably cool-headed look at an increasingly heated issue launches on HBO and HBO Max June 28, two weeks after its Tribeca festival premiere.

After an opening-credits montage of meaningful free-press moments in the 20th century’s second half (notably Watergate), we begin meeting the film’s principals. Each is embroiled in covering national politics in a climate where the more conservative leaders and supporters prefer to combat negative stories by “shooting the messenger,” sometimes literally.

In Sao Paolo, newspaper reporter Patricia Campos Mello attends a rally for Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a nationalist strongman who frequently directs his fervent followers’ rage towards the Fourth Estate. Having exposed fraud within his election campaign, she’s been a regular target for his often crudely sexualized attacks: She isn’t kidding when she says, “To half the Brazilian population, I am a whore who trades sex for information.” Finally deciding to sue him for slander in order to “send a message,” she provides “Endangered” with a rare encouraging development here, when the court duly awards her monetary damages.

In Mexico City, purple-haired photojournalist Sashenka Gutierrez is in an even more perilous position, noting “Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries to be a journalist … A lot of my colleagues have disappeared or been killed.” Their casualties are minuscule, however, compared to the estimated 3600 women murdered every year in a nation where misogynistic violence seems to be an epidemic. (That death toll is about twice as many as in the U.S., which has nearly three times the population.) “My mother taught me not to be afraid to tell the truth,” she says, wading with her camera into protests where fed-up women take a stance just as aggressive as the police who arrive in full riot gear to meet them. Despite this brave attitude, however, there’s undeniable tension underlying her daily work. When we see her arrive at home alone at night, we brace for the kind of unpleasant surprise that happens in fictional thrillers.

Such professional peril, more common to war-zone reportage, as yet seems a remote risk Stateside — but that may change. Covering a Black Lives Matter protest after George Floyd’s murder, Miami Herald photographer Carl Juste records the heavy-handed police response, his images becoming evidence as local law enforcement files false reports of their actions. On a similar occasion not long after, cops appear to actively target press persons for harassment, tear-gassing and strong-arm treatment.

Juste and reporter Oliver Laughland, who writes about American politics for the U.K. Guardian, actively feel infrastructure as well as popular support for a free press eroding around them. At Trump rallies, his base (often urged on by the man himself) demonstrate the venomous flipside of their adulation by spewing insults at the journos in the rear. When Laughland asks individuals how they feel about a variably shrinking and biased media landscape, he gets responses ranging from “I’m not gonna buy a newspaper that doesn’t reflect my view” to citing of YouTube videos as a better information source. Such deteriorating relations reach a logical climax when we see January 6 insurrectionists destroying the equipment of media personnel they’ve already forced to flee.

After introducing these main figures at some length, “Endangered” intercuts between them to find increasing parallels, particularly once COVID descends — and far-right voices spread related disinformation. In Mexico City, officials deny an emergency exists even as a hospital worker tells Gutierrez that her facility’s patient death rate is 90 percent. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro lies, “The whole coronavirus thing is a fantasy.”

Framed by an early-1960s U.S. broadcast program exalting the role of a free press in democracy — as specified in the Constitution — “Endangered” views so much open antagonism towards accurate reportage as a dire sign of decreasing institutional accountability in general. Every dictatorship begins in earnest with the forced dissolution of media that doesn’t parrot the administration’s talking points. A fifth major interviewee is Joel Simon, who comments on such trends as executive director (a post he left last year) of the NYC-based watchdog organisation Committee to Protect Journalists. He notes issues that formerly only arose abroad are now relevant here in the States, given rising public distrust towards the profession, and the growth of “news deserts” where no truly local newspapers still exist.

The prognosis looks bleak for “moderators of fact and falsehoods,” as Juste calls fellow journalistic practitioners. But Ewing and Grady deliver that bad news with a tonal emphasis on obstinate resistance, and a briskness that lets the darkening view register without succumbing to hand-wringing or nihilism. The complexity of unfolding events (and of a reporter’s job in interpreting them) is nicely captured by frequent use of split-screen imagery, the clarity of that busy editorial approach abetted by terrifically sharp photography credited to three DPs.

A concise call for awareness towards what’s already a considerable emergency, “Endangered” is too disciplined and focused to simply hit the panic button. But you can tell the filmmakers, like their subjects, are struggling to suppress a scream.

---Exhibition opening July 1 at Monroe Gallery of Photography: Imagine a World Without Photojournalism

Raft by Raft, a Rainforest Loses Its Trees: photographer Ashley Gilbertson traveled 500 miles along the Congo River and its tributaries to explore the forces driving deforestation.

 Via The New York Times

June 14, 2022

Dionne Searcey, a climate reporter at The New York Times, and photographer Ashley Gilbertson traveled 500 miles along the Congo River and its tributaries to explore the forces driving deforestation.

NY Times: Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman Recounts How He Held Off the Mob on Jan. 6.

 Via The New York Times

June 13, 2022

Ashley Gilbertson

Officer Goodman, The Stroming of the Capitol, January 6, 2020

"Officer Goodman, whose heroism was captured in widely circulated video recorded by a reporter inside the Capitol, said rioters sprayed him with what he believed to be bear spray, threw objects at him and tried to shake him and other officers off some scaffolding during the storming of the building. He also recounted throwing up in reaction to the tear gas deployed by the Metropolitan Police when they arrived to reinforce the Capitol Police, who had been overrun.

“It looked like something out of medieval times, where you see one big force fighting another force,” Officer Goodman said."

PROJECTIONS: David Butow - Guns in America - An Epidemic

 

PROJECTIONS: Guns in America - An Epidemic. Join us for a riveting week of searing imagery from seven highly acclaimed photographers.

About this event

From June 13th-17th PROJECTIONS - Guns in America will present imagery from seven internationally respected photographers who have covered gun violence in America for twenty-five plus years. These photographers: David Butow, Cheriss May, Kathy Schorr, Carlos Oritz, Jon Lowenstein, Barbara Davidson and Zed Nelson have won every major photographic award. Ms. Davidson is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

With the latest horrific massacres in Texas and New York and the continued lack of action from our elected officials were compelled to visit this multifaceted conversation. We invite you to reach out to those officials to join us and to experience how their political posturing is wreaking havoc on our society.

Here's the schedule of presenters:

Monday: David Butow

Tuesday: Carlos Ortiz

Wednesday: Kathy Schorr and Jon Lowenstein

Thursday: Barbara Davidson

Friday: Cheriss May and Zed Nelson

We thank our sponsors for their continued support: PhotoShelter, Epson, Archive Magazine, Pro Photo Daily and AI-AP.

Register here.

'Napalm Girl' at 50: The story of the Vietnam War's defining photo

Via CNN
June 8, 2022

Oscar Holland, CNN

In Snap, we look at the power of a single photograph, chronicling stories about how both modern and historical images have been made.

The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects' faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army's 25th Division follow helplessly behind.

Taken outside the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, the picture captured the trauma and indiscriminate violence of a conflict that claimed, by some estimates, a million or more civilian lives. Though officially titled "The Terror of War," the photo is better known by the nickname given to the badly burned, naked 9-year-old at its center: "Napalm Girl".

The girl, since identified as Phan Thi Kim Phuc, ultimately survived her injuries. This was thanks, in part, to Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, who assisted the children after taking his now-iconic image. Fifty years on from that fateful day, the pair are still in regular contact -- and using their story to spread a message of peace.

"I will never forget that moment," Phuc said in a video call from Toronto, where she is now based.

Photograph of New York City By Ashley Gilbertson Leads NY Times Magazine Feature

Via The New York Times Sunday Magazine

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Decade after decade, waves of migration have remade New York. What kind of city will the latest one create?

 

Queens, New York: lunch with the Maestro. Tony Vaccaro photographed by Ashley Gilbertson

 

Via Instagram

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Queens, New York: lunch with the Maestro. Tony Vaccaro photographed by Ashley Gilbertson

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ashley Gilbertson (@ashgilbertson)

David Butow Photographs For TIME

 Via TIME

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Uvalde Community Worships Together on First Sunday Since School Shooting Claimed 21 Lives