"Is there too much press freedom? Ask 72 dead journalists"

Via The Guardian


"Journalists murdered or killed in action in the first six months of 2012: 72. That's well on course to break all macabre records before the year ends...

But that's the dreadful truth at the heart of today's world press freedom fight. It's sliding backwards, getting worse year by year. Democracy, on the evidence of the world's weightiest human rights rapporteurs here assembled, is sinking, not swimming. And you can't merely measure such things by the thump of a car bomb or the clank of a prison door. Try looking much closer to home – at Romania or Bulgaria, in the EU, starting to slip towards seedy repression; at Hungary, driving Brussels to outright alarm."




Related exhibition - People Get Ready: The Struggle for Human Rights

Sunrise, sunset

Photographer shows morning and night in New York in a single frame

Sunday, July 1, 2012

 

 

 

Via The Daily

 

 

It’s called the city that never sleeps — and for good reason. Photographer Stephen Wilkes captured New York City from morning to night in one frame to create what he calls a “fluid narrative.”

“I have always been fascinated by the way the city’s energy ebbs and flows from morning to night,” Wilkes told The Daily.

His surreal-like “Day to Night” series of cityscapes comes from shooting 10 hours from the same perspective. His photography is what he describes as “a visualization of the energy that is New York.”

Wilkes just completed his first international piece of the same effect in Shanghai, and plans to shoot in Los Angeles, Chicago, Europe and Jerusalem. Visit his website for more images.

Elizabeth.Semrai@thedaily.com
@easemrai

IRAQ PHOTOJOURNALISTS ON WAR

With previously unpublished photographs by an incredibly diverse group of the world’s top news photographers, Photojournalists on War presents a groundbreaking new visual and oral history of America’s nine-year conflict in the Middle East. Michael Kamber interviewed photojournalists from many leading news organizations, including Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, the Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, Magnum, Newsweek, The New York Times, Paris Match, Reuters, Time magazine, VII Photo Agency and The Washington Post to create the most comprehensive collection of eyewitness accounts of the Iraq War yet published. These in-depth interviews offer first-person, frontline reports of the war as it unfolded, including key moments such as the battle for Fallujah, the toppling of Saddam’s statue, and the Haditha massacre. The photographers also vividly describe the often shocking and sometimes heroic actions that journalists undertook in trying to cover the war, and discuss the role of the media and issues of censorship. These hard-hitting accounts and photographs, rare in the annals of any war, reveal the inside and untold stories behind the headlines in Iraq.


Only 30 signed and numbered special edition copies available. Pay now and reserve your copy.
Release date: winter, 2012.


Each book is accompanied by a signed 8×10 inkjet print of Joao Silva’s ‘Sniper’.
Each book is signed by five photojournalists interviewed in the book.
Each book comes in presentation box.
Price is $500

Full details and ordering information here.


NY Times Lens Blog: "It is a brutally honest account of the war in Iraq from the point of view of the men and women who photographed it."


--This important book is almost ready for publication. Subscription of these 30 special-edition books will clear the final financial hurdle to publication. Monroe Gallery has placed our orders, please consider placing yours!

"It is neither a police officer’s duty or right to decide what is appropriate news coverage of any story"

 An Albuquerque police officer first told a news videographer that he would not be allowed to continue filming an incident where the body of a motorcyclist remained trapped underneath a car this morning.


Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, who will be sending a letter to Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz, provided the following statement:

Watching the video of a senior officer who should know better illustrates how important proper guidelines and training are regarding these issues.

It is neither a police officer’s duty or right to decide what is appropriate news coverage of any story. So long as news personnel are in a public forum and not violating any ordinances they have a right to gather news unfettered by the personal feelings or opinions of law enforcement. Anything less may be considered a form of prior restraint or censorship. It is all well and good that the police set-up a media staging area but that does not mean it is the only place that media are allowed to be. They can go wherever the public is allowed, which in this case is outside of the "crime scene" perimeter. To expand that area for the sole purpose to preventing photographs or video recording is not a reasonable time, place and manner restriction and limits more First Amendment protected activity than is necessary to achieve a governmental purpose.

This department would be well-advised to take a page from the Crime/disaster scene guidelines of San Diego Sheriff's Department Media Guide, specifically:

Do not establish artificial barriers. For example, do not hold the press at bay a block from the crime scene, while allowing the general public to wander freely just beyond the crime scene tape.

Do not prevent the taking of pictures or interviews of person(s) in public places. The media, when legally present at an emergency scene, may photograph or report anything or interview anyone they observe.

Do not isolate the media outside the crime/incident scene unless the area has been secured to preserve evidence or their presence jeopardizes law enforcement operations.

PRIDE 2012

Ken Regan: Gay Rights March on Washington, April, 1993

All across the nation today, America’s LGBT population and their friends, family, and allies will unite in parades across the country celebrating the yearly tradition of Pride, always the last weekend in June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969, widely recognized as the first gay rights manifestation.


NY Daily News Slideshow: Gay Rights Movement in New York City


Related exhibition - People Get Ready: The Struggle For Human Rights

Steve McQueen: Unpublished Photos of the King of Cool

 John Dominis/Time Inc.: At his home in Palm Springs, McQueen practices his aim before heading out for a shooting session in the desert

Via Life.com


In the spring of 1963, Steve McQueen was on the brink of superstardom, already popular from his big-screen breakout as one of The Magnificent Seven and just a couple months away from entering the Badass Hall of Fame with the release of The Great Escape.

Intrigued by his dramatic backstory and his off-screen exploits — McQueen was a reformed delinquent who got his thrills racing cars and motorcycles — LIFE sent the great photographer John Dominis to California to hang out with the 33-year-old actor and, in effect, see what he could get.

Three weeks and more than 40 rolls of film later, Dominis had captured some astonishingly intimate and now-iconic images — photos impossible to imagine in today’s utterly restricted-access celebrity universe. Only a handful of those photos were ever published. Here, LIFE.com presents a series of previously unpublished gems from what Dominis would look back on as one of his favorite assignments, along with insights about the time he spent with the man who would soon don the mantle, “the King of Cool.”

Full slide show here.

Today in News History: June 21, 1964: Three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Miss.

Today in News History: June 21, 1964: Three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Miss. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.


A CIVIL RIGHTS LEGACY: "NESHOBA: THE PRICE OF FREEDOM"

“I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can. I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”

Self Portrait, February 1955   ©Maloof Collection

Self-Portrait in a Sheet Mirror: On Vivian Maier
Via The Nation

"We can’t know the full story behind this self-portrait, or behind the many thousands of images left in a storage locker in Chicago. But we can look at the range of Maier’s work and see the tantalizing evidence of artistry and ambition, and we can look at the expression of the woman reflected in the sheet mirror and see her indisputable pleasure. This is no frumpy old bird woman looking at her own pathetic destiny. This is a woman who knows what she wants, who has chosen to do her work free of judgment and commerce, and who is in charge of the scene."  Full article here.

WORLD REFUGEE DAY 2012

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



Theme for 2012: Refugees have no choice. You do.

THE BOAT OF NO SMILES

 Here’s my story: in early 1977 I noticed a couple of paragraphs in the New York Times about people escaping from Vietnam. Associated Press had just signed me up with carte blanche to cover the whole world, and complete editorial control. (The first person before or since to get it–that was the deal I made with them.) And I went to the president and said, "Boat people. Here’s a story I want to do," and started making calls all through Southeast Asia to AP bureaus to find out more. No one, no country, was letting the refugees land. You couldn’t even find out about them. At first, I went back and said the story was impossible to cover. Then I had an idea and got in touch with the Thai Marine police (I knew Thailand very well) who had been shoving the boats right back offshore to certain death. I told them would like to go with them on patrol in the Gulf of Siam. They OK’d it, so we headed for the most likely point in northern Thailand, getting there at 4am when a refugee boat had just pulled in; the Thai authorities were getting ready to cast it off again. It was Thanksgiving Day in 1977. I suddenly asked the Vietnamese if I could go with them— I bought gas and rice – they had no fuel or food. There were forty-nine people aboard that fishing boat, including children— in the hold that same day a baby was born. The Thais towed us back out to sea and set us adrift. On that boat, there was no room to lie down, so they all had to sit up straight, waking or sleeping. I cannot describe the despair. There were dramatic pictures of mothers with half-dead children in their arms but something even worse was there. Whenever you go to refugee camps in a war zone where terrible things have happened, where bodies might be stacked up, and disease everywhere, you still find children who gather before the camera with a smile. This was the first time in my life that no child smiled. I called the pictures, "the boat of no smiles." The boat was hardly moving- they didn’t even know where to go. Then we were approached by another Thai boat with a megaphone ordering me off at gunpoint— they were afraid someone would let them dock knowing there was an American aboard. I had mixed feelings about getting off. I wrote the story and sent the pictures immediately, and they ran. Peter Arnett did a story also and a few others. Within a couple of days the administration asked the AP to present the photos to Congress. And Carter said let them come to America. The Congress had been thinking about it, sure, but the pictures did it, pushed it over. To me that was the only thing I ever done that I cared about, valued. Pictures do work, at least sometimes. They carry conviction. Go back to the pictures in Speak Truth to Power and you can look at them in another way. These people, those faces, are the person next door. These are real people, and the pictures prove that no one made this up– they are the evidence that they exist. Ordinary people, doing extraordinary things.  --Eddie Adams

Related: Forthcoming Exhibition -

                        People Get Rady: The Struggle For Human Rights

                        July 6 - September 23, 2012

LIFE : Robert Kennedy dying by Bill Eppridge

Dying Robert Kennedy by Bill Eppridge © 1968 Time Inc



"I looked, and I did something that you should never do. I didn't take a picture."


-- Bill Eppridge



Via La Lettre de la Photographie