The War on Aid

The remains of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. (photo courtesy of the UN)

Today is the fifth anniversary of the bombing of the United Nations offices in Baghdad that killed the UN's leading diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 others. The bombing was a turning point in the international body's work not only in Iraq, but worldwide.

Journalist Samantha Power has a well-written story in the OpEd section of the New York Times about how protection of aid agencies and non-governmental organizations has diminished as militants target aid workers.

Georgian TV Reporter Shot by Russian Sniper

This is the dramatic moment a TV reporter was shot by a sniper as she reported live from war-torn Georgia.

read more | digg story

Polaroids by Philip-Lorca diCorcia at LACMA

When Polaroid announced that it was getting out of the Polaroid business earlier this year, many photographers, including myself, felt a deep loss of a very unique medium whose practitioners included some of the most influential image makers of our time. Among them is Philip-Lorca diCorcia, an American art photographer who creates images that alternate between found moments and staged theater.

In the video below, diCorcia talks about his Polaroid photographs from his show titled, Thousand, on exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until September 14th.


video used with permission

Related:









Spam on Flickr

Chris Hedges on the dying newspaper industry

What do the tectonic shifts in newspaper journalism mean as publications struggle to make money amid economic downturns and loss of readers? Former New York Times correspondent and Harvard Divinity School graduate Chris Hedges thinks it is a collision of forces that will ultimately result in our decline much like ancient Rome. Here's an excerpt from his essay:

"The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print."

• More stories and essays by Chris Hedges on Alternet
  
• Reaction to the essay from Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine
• Jay Rosen writes more about the changes in the journalism "tribe."
  

Latest Images from Pakistan

Tampa Trib Re-organizes

The Tampa Tribune will merge its newsroom with WFLA amid a new round of layoff and re-focus toward the web, according the The Feed, a blog by Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times.

The Trib layoffs made news headlines when newsroom intern Jessica DaSilva reported in her blog about a speech Tampa Tribune editor Janet Coats gave amid the most recent layoff announcement. In responding to questions from staff, Coats said the news industry is, "worth fighting for."

Jeff Jarvis has a perspective on the story at BuzzMachine.

The entire newspaper industry is trying to figure out how to re-shape itself amid a growing recession and rapidly declining readership. A number of people are writing about the industry. Here are some highlights:

- Nick Eaton, a sports multimedia producer at The Spokesman-Review, writes about a newsroom re-invention challenge.

- The blog PaperCuts is tracking layoff industry wide.

- Jay Rosen writes about the migration of the "Press Tribe" on his blog PressThink.

Pix Channel

PixChannel is a series of interviews with photographers such as Eddie Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Nick Ut, Arnold Newman and others that is run by photographer Randi Lynn Beach and graphic designer Doug Beach. The interviews are insightful, interesting and sometimes funny.

When asked what he thinks about while photographing, Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt says, "lunch."

The AP and the iPhone

In case you missed it, The Associated Press has launched an application for Apple's iPhone and other mobile devices that allow the user to receive news updates. The updates can be localized by either reading the built-in GPS location of the device or by having the user input a zip code.

The service was launched back in May but announced at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week.

Photo-terrorism?

"Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required," writes Bruce Schneier, BT's chief security technology officer in this story in the Guardian newspaper.

"Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything," he says. Schneier questions the growing concern: "Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don't seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets?"

Sustainability

Faircompanies.com is an information-packed website that serves as a place to meet and gather info on the sustainability of our planet. The site contains micro-docs on topics such as sustainable fish consumption, eco-fairs, cooking, etc. It is worth exploring.

Steve Ballmer on the future of media consumption

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer tells the Washington Post that, "there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."

Brooklyn Museum on Flickr

The Brooklyn Museum has joined a growing number of organizations and foundations that are posting rights-free images, such as the one above, on Flickr.

You can see - and download - their archives of early lantern slides here.

According to the museum, Philadelphia daguerreotypists William and Frederick Langenheim introduced the lantern slide: a transparent image on glass that could be projected, in magnified form, onto a surface using a "magic lantern," or sciopticon in 1849. This new technology expanded the uses of photography, allowing photographic images to be viewed by a large audience. With lantern slides, Museum curators and educators could illustrate their lectures, letting audience members see detailed studies of objects and sites from around the world.

The Brooklyn Museum's lantern slide collection was started by the Museum's curator of fine arts, William Henry Goodyear, in the late nineteenth century. With the assistance of the photographers Joseph Hawkes and John McKecknie, Goodyear reproduced images of archaeological and architectural sites in Europe as well as images of the Paris Exposition, which Hawkes often hand-colored for more realistic effect. The lantern slide collection also developed through the efforts of the curator of ethnology, Stewart Culin, and his successor Herbert Spinden, who created and purchased images of objects and sites. The Museum’s Library now holds 11,710 glass lantern slides. Read more about the history of the lantern slide collection.

Multimedia Workshoppin'

The NPPA's Multimedia Immersion Workshop has ended in Louisville. It was a wonderful gathering of talented students and staff. Everyone, including the coaches, have surely come away with a deeper understanding of multimedia storytelling possibilities. It is good to see that the organization is dedicating the time and resources to help move people forward.

A very cool website for the NPPA's 2008 Immersion Multimedia Workshop can be viewed here.

Traveling Europe on a budget

New York Times travel writer Matt Gross, who writes the Frugal Traveler column, has begun writing about his "Grand Tour" of Europe on a budget in his blog here. The latest entry is about Paris. As usual, it is very informative.

Library of Congress on Flickr

The Library of Congress has posted more than a thousand images from 1910 and the 1940s on the photo-sharing site Flickr. All the images are copyright free.

The front-page of the LOC Flickr site can be found here.

Cornell Capa

Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center of Photography and former Life magazine staff photographer, died in his Manhattan home of natural causes today. He was 90.

Magnum Photos has a tribute to Capa here.

The New York Times obituary can be found here.

A Day in Pictures

Micro-journalism idea gets grant

California State University-Los Angeles journalism students and faculty will partner with community groups to launch Cool State Online, using “micro-bureaus” to cover the San Gabriel Valley’s largely Asian and Latino community. Computer science grad students will help build a news management system for the project.

New Voices is an incubator for pioneering community news ventures in the United States. It helps fund the start-up of innovative micro-local news projects. It spotlights independent citizens media initiatives. And it provides technical support with online training in creating, developing and sustaining Web sites grounded in journalism ethics.
New Voices is a project of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.

National Geographic Commercial Service

According to a company press release, National Geographic has launched National Geographic Assignment, an agency representing 27 of the Society's photographers. National Geographic Assignment debuts at www.nationalgeographicassignment.com. The commercial agency was created in response to market demand for the high-production-value, reportage-style photography. The full text of the release can be found here.

Photographing Cambodia

Photo used with permission: © lecercle via Flickr
Defaced and Graffitized portraits of former Khmer Rouge soldiers on the walls of the Toul Sleng Genocide museum.

Phnom Penh-based Magnum photographer John Vink has posted a new set of images from the Crimes against Humanity by the ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia) on his website here.

The first public hearing of the ECCC took place on Nov. 20th, nearly 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.