Slowly the eye’s of the world are turning away from Haitu, yet there are many important stories that are not being seen, and will continue to be under-reported in the months to come. 100Eyes we will be conducting an ongoing series of workshops for photographers who will fly in to Haiti, and work on stories all over the country. Workshops for February are sold out, but we are signing up people for March at this time–we are happy to help anyone wanting to travel to document Haiti, you don’t have to be part of our group to share in this information. Feel free to email at levin.pix@gmail.com.
Pricing for the workshop is set a $1,500 at this time. We expect to have groups of 6-8 working on the ground, the sessions will last for one week, and our dates are flexible and dependent on enrollment. Costs are exclusive of airfare and food, and participants will be responsible for bringing in essential supplies which we will detail for you, including enough food for your stay. There will also be limited housing possibilities and participants should understand that they will be working in a crisis area, and that a certain amount of risk is involved.
We are taking donations for food and medicine through our local friends Zanmi Lakay who have been conducting photo classes in for Haitian children since 2000.
To register for the project click here.
To donate to Zanmi Lakay go to theZanmi Lakay website.
About 100Eyes: Andy Levin has been photographing in Haiti since 1982. He has photographed 9/11 as a New Yorker, moved to New Orleans a year before Katrina, and documented that aftermath of that catastrophe for the Time Magazine, GEO and others. He photographs Gonaives in the wake of the 2008 storms for Medincins san Frontiere and Next American City.
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The earthquake in Haiti has brought many talented photographers to Haiti, with many more on the way. We would like to find a way to broaden the picture of Haiti that is currently in the news, by combining work with the disaster area with work from the rest of the nation.
If you are going to Haiti and will be there in February, I am asking photographers to spread out around the country and to spend day or two photographing something other than the earthquake ravaged area, to be included in a special issue of 100Eyes on Haiti.
I am hopeful that photographers can use the same resourcefulness in getting around Haiti as they have in getting to the disaster area…..and I know that there are many stories to be told beyond what we are currently seeing, many struggles that happen on a daily basis. There is beauty, there is laughter as well.
We believe that the effort made by photographers in doing this would more than make up for the relative small resources going into the project, by helping to create a broader picture of Haitian life, and to put the horrific, and important, images that are currently being taken in Port au Prince in context.
As part of the project we will be having Haitian children and students take pictures to show the events through their own eyes, an effort that was planned before the tragedy. In addition we ask that each photographer try and bring a compact digital camera and find a Haitian child to work with in whatever area of the country that you are working in.
Depending on the amount of work received we may have needs for volunteer editors and coordinators as well. For those more interested in a structured environment I am going be extending the 100Eyes Workshop in Haiti through the end of the month and possibly beyond.
For details on the workshops please contact me through our workshop page for Haiti: here.
For those interested in shooting and already headed to Haiti, feel free to respond with a comment below.
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Dear Friends,
Jacmel was hit very hard by the massive earthquake. Miraculously our Cine Institute team and students seem to all be alive. The town lost many many buildings and presumably many more lives. In an urgent email from our school director, Andrew Bigosinski said, “There is no local rescue plan or capacity. No emergency food, water, blankets or medicine. The Hospital St. Michel collapsed. I joined 3000 others to sleep at the airstrip last night. You could hear the howling of people crying in town. Nightmarish. I never could have expected the ferocity of this quake.”
Our own infrastructure at the Institute is badly damaged.
We are gearing up to work on three fronts:
get news out about Jacmel so help arrives there too
help family abroad confirm status of their family in Jacmel
Acquire and distribute medical care, medicine, food and water to the town and surrounding areas.
Internet is barely working so please be patient.
If you have family in Jacmel send names and their details to
info@cineinstitute.com
and we will attempt to get news of them for you.
Port-au-prince appears to be nearly flattened and dominating the current coverage. It appears that there is no substantial infrastructure remaining to launch search and recovery and treat wounded.
The national palace, the UN HQs, the General Hospital, Medicins sans Frontier are all leveled. We are still trying to figure out just who is left that can be effective. So much now depends on how quickly the US, UN and others can get in there and how effectively they can coordinate efforts.
Thank you for your support,
David Belle
Ciné Institute
SUPPORT THE RECOVERY EFFORT
IN EARTHQUAKE DEVASTATED JACMEL.
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(Originally published March 6, 2009)
The New York Times has revisited Gonaives, Haiti more than six months after the wave of hurricanes that sent a sea of mud pouring down onto it, and much of the rest of Haiti. Conditions seem to have improved slightly since August, when I travelled to that isolated city along barely passable roads, finding thousands of Haitians living on roof-tops and in abandonded schools, with sections of dirt streets impassable, trucks and cars digging trenches that became obstacles as much as allowing traffic to flow.
The Times report and the accompanying images by Lightstalker and UN prize winner Alice Smeets reveal just how little things have changed in Gonaives, but the problem in Haiti goes much further than the plight of one city, isolated in the north of Haiti, where mudslides like this have become almost a way of life.
The big picture is that the entire nation of Haiti is an environmental disaster waiting to happen; in which not only a thousands, but perhaps a hundred thousand die.
To set the backstory, Haiti’s environment has been compromised by centuries of unyielding poverty, forcing Haitians to life off the land, and exploiting the precious wood for cooking charcoal. Its most probable that Haiti was never blessed with the resources of its Dominican neighbors. Between Arbitonite, the lush rice yielding valley and Gonaives is a desert, complete with cactus trees. It rarely rains in Gonaives, which makes the hills above the city even more vulnerable to flooding when it does.
The Haitian mountains are slowly eroding, due both to the erosions of storms and the hand of man. Houses in Haiti are made of concrete and the stacks of slum houses in Port au Prince, built on mountainsides serviced by twisting roads, are the repository of what is carried from the mountains. There is no environmental policy in Haiti. Regulation does not exist, and the collapse of a concrete slab school in Port au Prince, and the death of dozens of children, brought that reality tragically home.
The question is not if, but when. It may be an earthquake, like the one that recently devastated Sichuan, or a Katrina-like hurricane, but overpopulated Haiti is in line with an environmental disaster of a inconceivable magnitude.
Exacerbating the danger is an transportation infrastructure that has grown worse since the Duvalier days, when at least Baby Doc, who enjoyed driving a sports car so much that he insisted on keeping the roads paved so he could speed down it. Whatever aid that might need to be administered here would have to be brought by air, and apart from the UN helicopters, and pilots operating out of the Dominican Republic, there are few resources available.
Although one would never guess it from the number of shiny relief agency SUVs motoring up and down the streets of Port au Prince, much of the country is left on its own, with many towns existing outside the meagre network of roads. Doctors from the Medicins sans Frontieres hired Dominican pilots to carry their doctors to areas of the country not accessible by road after the last series of storms.
The photo below taken in Gonaives in September of 2008 links to a slideshow of my images:
And here is a link to the recent NY Times story and Alice Smeet’s slideshow:
Gonaïves Journal – Living in a Sea of Mud, and Drowning in Dread – NYTimes.com
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” The remote areas where troops are stationed far from the military flag-pole, in valleys and on mountain-tops reveal the most about the occupation of Afghanistan. They are the corners of the world where details are hidden and guards are left down. ”
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Adam Ferguson, an Australian photojournalist and member of the VII Mentor program, has captured an emotion that I think has been proved illusive for many photographers– the war weariness of the average soldier, a weariness that is alluded to in words, but rarely shown in the one-sided coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. Just to be clear, the one sidedness is not caused by an unwillingness of journalists to take risks– it is one sided because only half the conflict is accessible to someone not willing to risk, to paraphrase Eros Hoagland, a photographer for the NYTimes, having one’s head end up alongside one’s body. Embeds are forced through a narrow window, pushed by the army toward its own spin on the war. Sometimes the troops seem too fresh, too clean, and the coverage sanitized by the rules of the embed– essentially calling for no dead, on either side, on either side. These are wars in which deaths have become inconvenient facts, with even the caskets, until recently, of limits to photographers. Remarkably news agencies have been willing to accept these restrictions, even in the years when thousands of American came home in body bags, and have run stories with no mention of the conditions under which the reports have been made.
The military shapes the coverage in Afghanistan in the way that an advertising agency might create a campaign for a Fortune 500 company. Not that there is anything wrong with the military doing its job. Its just that the war is impossible to report in another way. By embedding in a far off outpost in Afghanistan, Ferguson was able to gain an intimacy with his subjects that might not have been possible under more watchful eyes. Or perhaps he just got lucky and found a group of soldiers that was more willing to let me look under the robo-cop suits that US soldiers wear in Afghanistan.
As someone who cut his teeth in the photo business looking through the file cabinets at Black Star in the 70’s, I was very familiar with the work of Robert Ellison and Larry Burrows. I had pulled their slides out of plastic sleeves, peered at them through loupes, against bright light boxes, edited the images and sent them off to Time and Newsweek. Looking at Ferguson’s work cross my computer screen, I felt as though I had seen some of these images before, and perhaps I had, as Adam points out quite astutely that all the photographers of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are influenced by the work that has come before them, the images of Matthew Brady, World War II, and the great war photographers of Vietnam, many who paid for their work with their lives.
Adam Ferguson was recently part of a recent on-line symposium held by Centre for Documentary Practice in Australia, an entity that exists under the auspices of Griffith University in Australia, and publishes the Australian PhotoJournalist, an annual journal that seeks to address issues affecting photojournalists.
What follows is a transcription of Adam’s introductory comments, questions asked of him by the panel, and follow-up answers to questions that I presented to Adam last week.
Here are Adam’s comments:
“I am going to present two stories that explore the lives of US troops in remote areas of Afghanistan. Both stories are part of an ongoing documentation of life on the front lines in Afghanistan. The remote areas where troops are stations far from the military flag-pole, in valleys and on mountain-tops reveal the most about the occupation of Afghanistan. They are the corners of the world where details are hidden and guards are left down.
I’d like to make a point that this is embedded photography and I make no claim to present a balanced view of the conflict. This coverage is subjective. When the troops patrol I go with them, and in a sense we are in it together. Its common knowledge that insurgents do not want journalists to go with them. Many insurgents direct their own stories through the web and are ideologically opposed to non-Muslims. So as an Australian my access to the war is limited, so I am with the troops. Eating and sleeping. And in a sense I am a sympathizer, and let me be clear about that, I am not a sympathizer of the war, I am a sympethizer of the grunt. So my work isn’t pro-war, its intended to be anti-war, and its intended to highlight the people doing their job, and to look at their aspirations as soldiers.
Eight years after the US led invasion of Afghanistan there is no resolution in sight, and when I embedded with the troops they were confused and they talk about it. US President Obama has the dilemma of whether to increase or decrease the presence in Afghanistan. The morale is low in the outposts. Many troops joined the Army in the spirit of post-9/11 nationalism, but they have trouble seeing how their fight relates to a larger war on terror. Our government, and the media as well, use words like Al Queda and Taliban as generalizations, often generalizations that help justify the war. They simplify an enemy and the simplify the conflict. Military intelligence officers have often pointed out to me that the bad guys, the US troops refer to the enemy as “the bad guys” are locals, so essentially the US invasion of Afghanistan was justified as a hunt for Bin Laden, Al Queda it was an attempt to stabilize a country that supported terrorism. But when the troops realized that the enemy they are fighting is in fact local, and there is little presence of foreign fighters or Al Queda, they become disillusioned. The Taliban are a splintered group of miltants that I believe is very hard to define. The troops get injured and they wonder why. As they serve they try and understand how its working in a larger sense. The see that the fight is futile. And they ultimately understand that they are not wanted by the locals. They enter these valleys, these remote areas and the locals do not want them there.
I am trying to personalize the soldiers experience, and I guess the challenge in doing this, the challenge in photographing war, is telling an audience something that they don’t already know about it. War can be inherently mundane, and the trick that I have found is to capture moments within this boredom, this lack of drama that can symbolize isolation to an audience. One of the things that I realized about war as I started to cover Afghanistan is that many of the troops perceptions about war are informed by Hollywood. I can recall a number of conversations with troops in which they talk about movies like Black Hawk Down and how movies like this inspired them to be soldiers. The reality of war is obviously very different– there is little glory or heroism. One is the main motivations for the work I undertake is to dispute the romantization of Hollywood movies and other miss-conceptions about war that exist within popular culture. I wish to leave a record that will inform an audience of my experience of war, in the hopes that this document will change perceptions about war.
As an embedded photographer you become somewhat an accomplice of the troops. When they storm a house you go in too. You run with them side by side to get the pictures. You don’t take your shoes off as is the local custom. So as a photographer sometimes I feel like an intruder. Is the document you create worth this intrusion?
Maybe, maybe not. But in the moment you are no different than a soldier and you have to reconcile that.
And then you are out walking again in broad spaces and you are wondering again, is the work worth the personal risk, does the work stimulate change or a deeper understanding of the war. Photography did in previous conflicts, Vietnam, photographs helped sway public opinion, they rallied an anti-war sentiment. (Editors Note: this was true at the end of the conflict but for the most part the news media during the Vietnam War was either pro-war or neutral.) This set of pictures that I am showing recently received a large amount of space in one of the largest news magazines in America, coupled with an on-line presentation. As far as publishing through print and an online news presentation, this work received a maximun amount of play. Despite all of this I am not sure that my pictures will have an immediate impact on the war or an impact on decisions that are made about it in the near future. My inspiration to become a photographer and to cover a conflict came from the tradition of the magazine photographer people whose pictures did make a difference, but I think in a sense we live in a world that is a little more complacent, its a different time, and while the web allows us to engage with more audiences than before, and it gives us advantages as story tellers, it also overwhelms our readers with triviality. In a sense the journalism get lost in the crowd, the people who care and want to know find out stories, but when I say it gets lost, it gets lost to the others and they could be our most important audience. My career as a photographer is relatively, young, so what I showed today is a work in progress, its the start of a long journey, but I don’t see my work as something that stimulate immediate change on the war in Afghanistan. But that doesn’t make my work, or the work of any other photographers who cover conflict, any less important. It actually makes it more important. Its our visual history and the work will still be there in a historical sense. What I am trying to say is that we may be able to create tangible change today, tommorow, or even in two or three years, but if we continue to tell our stories, one day eventually they will be heard. In depth and independent accounts will not let us forget the mistakes that we have made as a global community and one could only hope that it could lead is to more confirmed and considered actions in the future.
(The following questions were presented to Adam by participants in the on-line seminar.)
Could these images have been made without being embedded?
No, they couldn’t have been, so all of these pictures were made and facilitated by the US Army.
Were you embedded as an independent, or as part of the VII Mentor Program?
I essentially embedded as an independent, but I had the support of Time Magazine.
I think its a struggle when you are embedded, you go through these moments of fear, you are embedded with the troops but you are there by choice. Its hard work, I don’t mean to harp about myself and my own emotions, but I guess you kind of put that into the work, everyone else is just as confused as you are, the troops are as confused as you are, and you talk about that with the soldiers, you talk about the confusion and you know the lack of clarity that everyone feels, and the discontent that people feel for the decisions that have been made in Afghanistan, and I try and create that isolation in my pictures.
Did you work with writers on this assignment?
I have the privilege of working with some really good picture editors at Time. The first group of pictures that I took, we worked as a team, and navigated that story. She wrote about Afghanistan in a broader sense, and we used pictures that I found on the ground to narrate that story in a broader sense. The second set of pictures, that was my baby, and I had the opportunity to push it visually, and try and find pictures that don’t normally make it into the mainstream press and a magazine, and try and develop those pictures over a period of three weeks.
I have deliberately referenced some of the photography that was taken in Vietnam in some of my pictures, and I guess I have used this in a sense that Afghanistan is being labeled as Obama’s Vietnam. And if I can find things that reference that war, I have tried to do that in a sense, and thats purely to create a visual that will push something to the public and maybe get them thinking in a pro-active way.
How did the soldiers feel about your being there?
Adam: The soldiers are very media savvy so if I start to photograph a local in a circumstance that shows them to be a victim there has been times where a soldier has objected to me doing that, and they tend to think that you are showing a negative view of the war, or showing the soldiers in a bad light, by showing the way they victimize the people of Afghanistan. The soldiers can get upset about that. Most of the time you just try and be as subtle as possible, and if the situation heats up a bit the soldiers tend to focus on what they are doing and you are left on your own.
Has your perception of the war changed?
Adam: The longer that I have spent there the more that I come to understand that our governments justify the war there by referring to this larger terrorist network but I tend to think that is a fallacy and the more I spend time there the more I speak to military intelligence officers the more that I come to understand it a very flawed concept. Whats going on in Afghanistan is that there are so many tribal areas and little isolated communities that don’t want an outside influence so when troops roll into these places in Robocop outfits there is a local objection, and thats a cultural thing more than it is some axis of evil, or some terrorist network that is trying to topple the West.
Are there so many embeds that we are creating a media circus of images?
Adam: I am not sure if there is a media circus for images, but what I see is that people fail to stay for longterm trips so there a lot of pictires that flood the wires, but I don’t think there is a flood of images of people who are trying to penetrate the daily life of the troops.
I thought that I heard you mention that the grunts were ordered
to shave daily because they were being photographed, even where water
was not plentiful. If so, what are we to infer from this kind of
seeming micro-management?
Adam- I think it is actually management on a large scale. The soldiers get in trouble with their superiors if they are documented breaking military protocol, their superiors have been spoken to by their superiors, and so on. The U.S. Army has an ingrained Public Affairs system. I think we can infer from this that there is awareness in the military of media representation and the power it can have, and they try to control it. The military has learnt from coverage in the past that has damaged their public image. This has happened with things more extreme, like the execution of a puppy dog, and simple things like not shaving. Although, I have found if I spend enough time on a small Combat Operations Post the guys let their guard down.
You said that you consciously referred to images from the Vietnam War
in your photography. Can you think of any particular images from any
specific photographers that you have alluded to in your work?
Adam: One naturally stumbles across scenes in war that feel and look very Vietnam. They look this way because of both a mental bank of photojournalism that we have of Vietnam, and images we have in our minds that are drawn from popular culture – movies, writing, possibly even music. I definitely try to dispute many notions about war that exist in popular culture, but there is also so much symbolism found in war because we have seen in represented so many times. I think a photographer can use this symbolism as an advantage when trying to make a statement about war.
There are photos captured by Larry Burrows, the one of Marines in Prayer, standing in a line looking down, that I had in my mental image bank. It is a very unsensational moment that he captured very viscerally. The conflict in Afghanistan is not as intense as Vietnam, there are not the amount of civilian and military casualties (I don’t mean to underplay the tragedies that happen there because they do) and there is an immense amount of time when there is no action, just boredom. I definitely attempted to capture the intensity in my images that Burrows captured in his quieter photographs. I am making this reference because photojournalism helped stimulate a public response that is attributed to the withdrawal from Vietnam. There is no clear success in the U.S. occupation, as there wasn’t in Vietnam, and if I can make an emotional parallel between the two wars it may help the cause of asking the voting tax paying civilian population to ask a few more questions of the coalition presence. Although Afghanistan and Vietnam are very different wars on the ground, they personify a confused long-term war commitment of the U.S. I am also aware that we live in different times now, but at the very least if this parallel can be drawn in a historical context, it may shape the way a public reacts to future military invasions.
The similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan are often debated by
the right and left in the United States. Do the soldiers voice any
opinions about how their job relates to the one done by US soldiers?
Adam:
I can’t recall soldiers relating their experiences to Vietnam, or showing an awareness of any similarities between the wars in any articulate way worth mentioning.
Is there a single image that could possibly change public opinion
about the war in Afghanistan. If you could imagine such a picture
what would it look like, who could take it, and could it pass through
the rules that the military has instituted for photo embeds?
Or could the image be made by someone not in an embed?
Adam: A child killed in an ISAF air-strike being held by their grieving mother, or maybe a wounded soldier moments before death. They would be graphic, in color, and used on the cover and homepage of some major news organizations. Maybe I am being idealistic but I do my job in the belief that images will change public opinion, if not today or tomorrow, in the future, a record is made that will be considered. I guess any competent photographer caring and daring enough to be there could take such an image. The picture of the soldier wouldn’t pass military rules, photographers are not supposed to photograph dead soldiers that can be recognized. It would a face, an identity, somebody we can relate, to stir public opinion. There has been photos like the ones I describe taken, but they have been seen by enough people, so have not changed public opinion. News outlets need to be a little braver with what they publish, I think the public needs to be shocked.
Do we really understand war? What is the purpose of war if the
ideology seems so skewed and the basic tenets so flawed, as I think
they are in Afghanistan. What is the purpose? Ideology, business,
power?
Adam: I don’t think we understand war in a present context, or if we do we choose not to because we are not ready to understand it’s stark realities. When we look at war in a historical context we see that war has been used as a mechanism of colonialism.
As a photographer, what do you see yourself doing in 20 years?
Adam: Living somewhere very green and close to the beach. Experiencing places where the quality of life isn’t good, by that I mean pollution, violence and poverty, and also spending a lot of time away, traveling, feeling isolated, one tends to crave a more grounded earthy existence, well at least I do. I also hope to have produced a few significant bodies of work that I consider a positive contribution to our visual history.
What music is in your ipod, if you have one? What is your favorite band?
Adam: Radiohead, Powderfinger, Damien Rice, Sarah Blasko, Dr. Dog, Paul Kelly, The Smiths…..and much more. I like such a diverse range of music that it’s hard to have a favorite.
Thanks.
Adam Ferguson was born and grew up in New South Wales, Australia. He received a Bachelor of Photography from Australia’s Griffith University in 2004, and in 2006 he interned with VII Photo Agency in Paris, going on to work as Gary Knight’s assistant. In 2007 Adam moved to New Delhi, India, where he is currently based, working as freelance photographer covering South Asia.
Adam’s work has explored the many tensions, both social and political, that undermine the images of an economically booming India. Recently, he has focused on the war in Afghanistan.
Adam’s photographs have been published internationally by Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, Courrier International, The Financial Times Magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald, UNICEF and Human Rights Watch.
In 2009 he was selected as one of the Photo District News 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch and joined the VII Mentor Program working under Christopher Morris.
(Thanks to Allan Hill, online Online Editor Centre for Documentary Practice for providing 100Eyes with the video of the interview. You can join the Centre’s Facebook page at by following this link. You can also see more of Adam Ferguson’s work on his website, http://www.adamferguson.com or on VII’s website http://www.viiphoto.com.
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Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu. Agnes Dherbeys. Aislinn Leggett. . Alain Nogues. Anders Petersen. Alan Wilson. Alessandro Franzetti. Alexandre Maller. Alice Smeets. Amanda Lucier. Anderson Schneider. Andrew Testa. Andrew McConnell. Alan Wilson. Antoine Agoudjian. Antonin Kratochvil. Antonio Olmos. Andy Levin. Andy Spyra. Aaron Huey. Aaron Joel Santos. Arthur Leipzig. Attar. Barbara Grover. Benedicte Kurzen. Benjamin Thomas. Bevis Fusha. Bret Culp. Brent Stirton. Brian L Frank. Bruno Baudry. Bruno Stevens. Bill Agee. Bill Biggart. Boogie. Boxman. Brent Foster. Candace Feit. Carsten Snejbjerg. Cedric Arnold. Carlos Lujan. CharlieMahoneyCaroline Bennett. Christian Als. Christian Cravo. Christian Keenan. Cristian Movila. Chris Schneider. Colin Finlay. Conrad Louis Charles. Conor O’Leary. Cole Thompson. Dai Sugano. David Gillanders. Davin Ellicson. Dhiraj Singh. Diana Probst. Dieter Telemans. Donna Ferrato. Emily Schiffer. Eddy Van Wessel. Edward Linsmier. Ed Ou. Edmond Terakopian. Eros Hoagland. Eric Lafforgue. Erica McDonald. Erin Siegal. Elliott Erwitt. Espen Rasmussen. Farah Nosh. Fan Ho. Felicia Webb. Frank Horvat. Francesco Zizola. Frédéric Sautereau. Gerald Holubowicz. Gérard Uféras. Giacomo Brunelli. Gidi Morris. Guido Gazzilli. Hartmut Schwarzbach. Hector Emanuel. Heidi Bradner. Herman Krieger. Ivo Saglietti. James Nachtwey. Jason P. Howe. James Whitlow Delano. Jane Hahn. Jan Joseph Stok. Jan Sochor. Jean-Michel Clajot. Jens-hoffmann. Jeff Hutchens. Jehad Nga. Jesse Marlow. João Pina. João Silva. Joachim Ladefoged. Jonnek Jonneksson. Joni Karanka. Jose Navarro. John Delaney. Joseph Gartenmayer. Joseph Rodriguez. Jean-Christophe Sartoris. Jay Wesler. Juan Buhler. Justyna Mielnikiewicz. Justin Maxon. Kadir van Lohuizen. Karl Grobl. Katharina Hesse. Kathryn Cook. Katja Losonen. Katie Cooke. Katie Orlinsky. Kenneth Jarecke. Khaled Hasan. Kim Haughton. Krisanne Johnson. Leo Maguire. Lol Owen. Lorenzo Moscia. Louie Palu. Lance Rosenfield. Lisa Hogben. Lizzie Sadin. Long Thanh. Lucas Mulder. Maciek Nabrdalik. Mark Edward Harris. Marizilda Cruppe. Matt Lutton. Matt Stuart. Michael Kamber. Michael Hassoun. Michael Johnson. M. Scott Brauer. Mark Seager. Markus Hartel. Mikko Takkunen. Marco Baroncini. Marco Vernaschi. Miguel Samper. Mitchell K. Moises Saman. Mustafah Abdul Aziz. Muge. Newsha Tavakolian. Nick Danziger. Nicole Tung. Nir Alam. Natalie Behring. Orville Robertson. Pep Bonet. Philip Jones Griffiths. Patric Donald. Q. Sakamaki. Qian Ming. Rafal Milach. Rian Dundon. Richard Mosse. Richard Vanek. Ritam Banerjee. Rafal Gerszak. Rafal Sagan. Rena Effendi. Rob Gardiner’s. Robert Brown. Roger Lemoyne. Robert M Johnson. Robert Sabo. Rodrigo Cruz. Sandy Hooper. Shaul Schwarz. Sylvain Lagarde. Stephanie Sinclair. Steve Mc Curry. Stephen Sakulsky. Sergey Merkulov. Simon Norfolk. Siegfried Becker.
Skippy Sanchez. Toshihiro Hayashi. Timothy Fadek. Tiana Markova. Tim Dirven. Trond Sørås. Tom Stoddart. Tomas van Houtryve. Tyrone Turner. Vicente Jaime “Veejay” Villafranca. Victor J Blue. Warrick Page. Weegee. Xie Hailong. Yannis Kontos. Zhu Xianmin. Ziv Koren
This isn’t a definitive list its a directory of sorts….if you are not here don’t worry. Leave a comment with your URL, and I will add your name to the list.
Andy — November 14, 2009
Andy- It would be an honor to be listed among these names. I hope all is well. Thanks.
Morgan Hagar
Morgan Hagar — November 18, 2009
Thanks for the list!
Craig Corl — November 20, 2009
Very useful blog, good magazine. Thanks a lot!
Jiri Dvorak — November 20, 2009
Great magazine and thanks for listing everyone. I would love to be included.
Thanks!
Jonathan Hanson — December 4, 2009
Thanks for including. Keep up the interesting work.
Joe Klementovich — December 9, 2009
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Instead of “borrowing” from photographers, artist Shepard Faery is now joining forces with one, and has collaborated with LeadUganda director and 100Eyes contributing photographer Stephen Shames on two prints that are available as part of the auction that is raising funds for the organization.
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Faery has created two separate mixed media works in editions of 450, using Shames’ photographs, which will be available at the November 12th auction at the Steve Kasher Gallery, 521 West 25th Street in New York, from 6:30-8:00pm. The prints will also be available from a forthcoming online store. LEADUganda is Shames non-profit that works with Ugandan children providing them with the “21st Century skills that will allow them to lead Africa into the future.” What a great cause this is!
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by Jack Zibluk
Why bother?
I hear the question all the time when I talk about photojournalism education, photojournalism internships and photojournalism careers.
Everybody knows about the what’s happening in the newspaper industry, broadcasts outlets and mainstream media all together. If there are no jobs, scant freelance opportunities and outright derision from the hate-the-media crowd, why bother?
Ironically, there are more reasons — and more important reasons — now than ever to bother being a true professional photojournalist, video journalist, multi-media journalist, visual communications journalist or whatever you want to call it these days.
There are practical reasons to bother, and there are ethical reasons to bother. And they’re all damn good reasons.
The practical reasons to go into the field and to do it well and to do it professionally are largely economic, believe it or not. Professional photojournalism education and experience offer a very high-demand skill set. Every company, every government, every service organization and every NGO in the world needs images to tell its story. They need media skills and media savvy to get their messages across in a highly competitive, saturated visual environment. They need web skills and production skills and great images, great design, and yes, visual people, great writing.
The good stuff will stand out, and it will bring attention to whatever you’re involved in. Several of my students are getting calls and job opportunities as web masters, producers, and public relations/communications professionals. Almost every organization in the universe has a website these days and almost all of them need images. Good images will stand out, and good production values and good writing takes the whole package a quantum further in quality and potential.
In the short run, many, probably most, outlets don’t want to pay for quality. They settle for second-rate content, and they don’t know the difference between good content and good images and the crap.
But that may just be the short run. We’re already seeing the backlash against low-quality content. Ill-informed, one-sided content and a myriad of ethical lapses have hastened the decline of traditional media and traditional jobs.
The decline is really a kind of creative destruction. As more amateurs produce crummy youtube videos, as more amateurs send pictures and videos on cell phones, as more people create and use all sort of visual material, the more they will appreciate how hard it is to do it well.
And that will create demand for good work.
When will the demand for quality work come? Nobody knows. But when it does come, and it will, your photojournalism and visual communication background will be in demand, and your work will stand out because the quality will tower above all the schlock.
What will the demand look like? That’s where the ethical part comes in. Ethics is about the effects of the choices we make. Right now, when everybody and their mother has a blog, we have an opportunity to shape that demand. When good professionals put their work out there , and when they promote themselves on whatever websites, social media, and other outlets they can, whenever they can have a discussion on ethics and the importance of good images and good journalism, and whenever they promote their work, they create an appreciation of professional practices and standards in whoever sees that work.
That’s how you build and audience, and that’s how you build demand. In the short run, there may not be much direct economic incentive, let alone income, to put your work and your ideas out there. But if enough people do it, and if we work together we have the ability to build that demand, and that will bring the income. Eventually.
Right now, we all have the choice of doing and promoting good work, and maybe doing it for low pay, or even for free, or waiting in the dark for the e-mail to come or for the cell phone to vibrate.
That’s where organizations like the NPPA come in. They provide a platform to define and promote professionalism, the opportunity to learn from others and the opportunity to reach out to audiences within the organizations and outside them.
And that’s where a good education comes in, and that’s where an internship comes in. That’s where you learn to be a professional, not an amateur with a point-and-shoot or a cell phone.
We face other ethical choices, too. If you use your skills for real journalism, to tell important stories, to bring important information to the audience, and if you do it well, the audience will see it. If you use your skills to sell vinyl siding or time-share condominiums, high quality work will stand out there, too. Making choices about how and where to use your professionalism are part of what ethics are about, too. And ethics are a big part of what the NPPA is about.
So, the economic meteor has hit and dinosaurs are rolling over in the dust. The mammals with brains and skills and warm blood will shape the future. We can shape the evolution of the future by building the profession and building demand for the profession; we help build new markets and new demand for quality work. Or we can wait in the cold and the dark.
Why bother, indeed?
Jack Zibluk, Ph.D., is associate professor of journalism at Arkansas State university. He is a former Vice President of the National Press Photographers Association.
The thing that concerns me is whether or not – institutionally – the mediocrity that passes for core content will be so easily reversed. There has been at any number of industry gatherings speakers – be they editors or producers – who express a philosophy of “good enough.” The very crap you refer to. But these are editors and producers; the decision-makers within individual products. Once you elevate mediocrity into management – either the philosophy or the leadership – can you ever get it out again?
Anonymous — October 19, 2009
I’m in a transition and planning to go into photojournalism full time. Already I can feel the pinch in actually getting a job in any of the local papers. Your article is like a glimmer of hope to me. Thanks. I still believe in quality professionaly produced work. But this is not an easy path to walk.
Lee — October 20, 2009
Nothing worth doing is easy……what might be easy is just walking away. Its a really exciting time to reinvent photojournalism, and we are honored to have this opportunity…..take advantage of it, because there are few moments like this in history.
Andy
Andy — October 20, 2009
I’m fairly new to the profession and based on my limited experience so far, I’ve always thought that this job requires a certain calling. Not everybody has the heart or the will to do work like we do day in and day out. Yes, we are in a transitional phase when everything seems dwindling down for the industry. But true to the article, quality and content will still prevail and will further push photojournalists and journalists alike to their limits in terms of story telling. A friend told me that photojournalism today has reached a level so high that it can been considered as another “golden age” of reportage, only that it is overshadowed by the financial and political aspect of the profession. We have been seeing amazing work from all over the world day in and day out so it is not the quality of photographers that are in decline but the means to sustain them. Nevertheless I do agree with Andy that this is an exciting time for photojournalism and I’m looking forward to be part of this generation.
John — October 20, 2009
At first, this read like the latest ‘doom-is-here’ article for the photojournalism industry. I’m glad it’s not, though it doesn’t mean I’m still not somewhat depressed. I’m just out from Columbia’s journalism school and I can’t get any photojournalist position at any of the smaller, community newspapers around the nation.
But you’re right when you say everyone needs good images – from businesses to governments. I have a short term stint working for a non-profit, shooting photos for their publication and publicity material. That’s when I realize there is a demand outside of traditional media outlets. Sure I’d still love to be shooting for the AP, NYT et al, but yes multimedia storytelling is far from dead. :)
Ted Chen — October 20, 2009
No easy answers – but the universe of commerce governs our compensation regardless of what we choose as professions. I became a successful journalist because I was able to survive thanks to my business background (spent 4 years in finance while freelancing) – if schools at least taught basic small business skills/self promotion and personal finance with a few courses – these kids would be better prepared for what awaits them.
My perfect example is the comparison between a VanGogh who was penniless all his life and an artist like Thomas Kinkade (good artist – even better marketing machine) – when I worked in finance during the late 70’s – 90% of all new businesses went under because they didn’t understand the nuts and bolts of running their own business. Artists need to know how to negotiate/generate revenue and allocate their income to get ahead.
It’s not comfortable territory for liberal arts – I know – but the economic landscape has forever changed our need to be well informed financially.
Wanda Doerner (via Facebook) — October 20, 2009
es I agree with Wanda, however, there is very little taught in the sense of running a successful business in photojournalism, part of the problem is that the academic establishments are producing photojournalists and photographers in general at a faster rate that the industry is growing, ( actually at the moment is imploding) however, some of these establishments, at leas in the UK have been accused of rising the expectation of their students.
To illustrate, a couple of years ago before the worst of the financial crisis hit the printed media industry the British Journal of Photography reported about students of London College of Printing with a long tradition of producing quality photojournalists was telling its students that they should expect to be earning about 20,000 Pounds a year ( Aprox 35-36,000 US at the time) within five years from graduation. Which of course would have risen the expectations of everyone.
However, the same report found that 7 in 10 of those students were working in a different industry within two years due to lack of opportunities and the need to earn a living and the remaining 3 out of the 10 were working either as assistants, desk jobs within news departments, or producing work with help of family, partners or friends and only a handful were receiving proper photographic assignments.
I think that universities and teaching establishment need to rethink their long term strategies and or close some schools in order to stop producing more photographer every year that the industry simply doesn’t need. If any it only aggravates the current situation as more and more assignments are handles by more and more “diluting” the earning potential of professionals who have made a living out of this industry for a long time as it is collapsing under its own weight.
A photo editor told me once that he was spoilt for choice as there were more photojournalists looking for assignments in this city than there were taxi drivers in London and the word amongst many editors was that the schools were producing far too many aspiring photojournalists.
Paradoxically, of all the big names in photojournalism which I have had the opportunity to meet, not one has been a graduate of a school of photojournalism.
An old friend and New York Times veteran journalist Jim Clarity always told me that during his annual lecture at Columbia school of Journalism he always emphasized that 1 year of field experience were in his opinion the equivalent of three years attending school.
Carlos Lopez-Barillas — October 20, 2009
This is a very important topic … no one questions the noble motives and passion of academia — but when students graduate – they are entering the world governed by the rules of economics. When the supply for artists (I’m using this term for ALL arts) exceeds the demand – the business world and institutions that do the hiring start treating the pool of people available as disposable commodities with no appreciation. Artists are often pitted against each other competing for the same scraps. The glut of journalism graduates in general has actually lowered wages for all.
The opposite is true for professions where the demand exceeds the supply – such as nurses in the US. They can’t churn out nursing grads quickly enough to fill the need. Starting salaries are $50-60K for these grads.
Had Michelangelo, VanGogh or singer Eva Cassidy (who died before her music developed a mainstream following) and many other brilliant artists understood the function of the marketplace and how to promote themselves – things might have been different. Perfect case in point – the Beatles – had it not been for their brilliant business savvy manager Brian Epstein – they might never have made it out of the clubs?
Sadly our passion for art alone does not pay the bills.
Wanda Doerner (via Facebook) — October 20, 2009
Personally, I think the days of the photographer who just makes stills are over. There are definitely great opportunities this is a fantastic time to be in the communications industry, much more interesting than the early 80s for which everyone is so nostalgic. Few in the 80s really went further than what was easily available……now there is so much room for new ideas, and we can reinvent ourselves.
Andy Levin — October 20, 2009
So here I am. 04:42am. Struggling at this hour not to become an alcoholic full time, and I stumbled across your blog which strangely spoke of some PJ’s who have faith. I have to have faith and I take strength in the fellow men who rage against the dying of the light…or people with iPhones. After graduating in Photojournalism a year ago at university, I have landed an internship in London at The Frontline Club. A members club for Journo’s, Tog’s and other media personnel who ply their trade on the front. I know I will have to sell all my belongings to move their and take this gamble.
Frontpage news these days tell of woe, 20 thousand pound debt average students have in this country. Unreported was the fact that my 3 year Photojournalism course was the most expensive 3 year course of 2008. Food for thought. I have faith though. Im still using film….some may snigger, yet I will use it in places that the iPhone generation will never tread. I understand the power of a story that can help change.
I know that the more I promote, learn about audio voice over and sub editing I will become stronger. A better package for the world to see.
Stephen Sidlo — October 20, 2009
Bravo on your arguments in favor of quality and professionalism, Jack! I’ve built my five year old podcasting and multimedia content business (after 30 years in corporate PR) on the premise that social media tools like podcasting are great, but only when professional quality production enters the picture. I hear podcasts with no sense of pacing, editing, or technical production values, and I see the same thing in photos where people are content to get boring grip-and-grin photos taken with a point-and-shoot camera, red-eye and bad color balance, and seem unwilling to pay for better.
The good news is that there is a market for quality visual journalism, for quality content overall. If you look at the top 100 podcasts downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store, the vast majority of them are professionally produced radio and tv content created by well-known brands in the mainstream media. That’s what people expect and that’s what they trust. We shouldn’t give up trying to create that.
George Lucas made the point in an interview with Cara Swisher a couple of years ago, when she asked his opinion of YouTube, and he replied that he never posted any work there. “It’s amazing how many people are willing to work for free,” he said.
If your work is valuable, then you should refuse to work for free (or cheap) too. It may take longer, but they will come back to you when they realize they can’t get what you provide for free or cheap.
Steve “@PodcastSteve” Lubetkin
steve@professionalpodcasts.com
http://www.professionalpodcasts.com
Senior Fellow, Society for New Communications Research
Member, NPPA, PPA, ONA, RTDNA
Steve "@PodcastSteve" Lubetkin — October 21, 2009
I believe in Jack Zibluk’s views or I at least hope his vision comes true.
What is crap and what is good in photography world, especially In the Documentary and Photojournalism spectrum is open to interpretation and personal preference. But the Citizen journalism element of Photography seems to be growing, but the quality is not increasing so I can only believe that this will create a wider gap between amateur and serious practitioners ,that will create as Jack said a greater appreciation and need for distinctive and finer crafted work.
My only worry is that the decision makers such as Art-directors,picture editors and designers that dictate the quality of images etc will not change and will always try to find cheaper alternatives, apart from the few independent magazines that don’t pay for work anyway.
I am considering the ‘Art’ direction but this is also hard without peer and industry recognition that seems to often be handed out within the tight circles of photojournalists anyway, but even though its as hard if not harder to become recognized in than te Documentary photography field, once you’re there It feels like you can maintain yourself and be appreciated for what you do, rather than have to learn the latest software and know the right people at the next festiviel to keep going.
Jack may be right, I may be wrong; one thing I know is that I don’t have the lifespan and wallet to hang around hoping and waiting.
KE — October 29, 2009
Back in the lates mid to late 80s, I saw a similar situation happening in the graphic design industry, which is where I originally came from. New software and technology came out and the term ‘Desktop Publishing’ was coined. The result was that everybody became a graphic designer overnight and there was a glut of badly designed printed materials that continued until people began to realise that using 100 different font faces in one document was not a good idea. Although there are probably still people who like to ‘do it themselves’ – I get the impression that design buyers have returned to appreciating and commissioning design professionals.
I hope of course that the situation will be the same with photography in general and not just photo journalism. The trouble is that the global nature of news gathering and the demand for instant and graphic news means that there will not always be a professional photo journalist on hand to record important events that cannot be predicted and therefore there will always be a place for the citizen journalist who possesses what is excellent, affordable technology. To deny this would be sticking your head in the sand.
The news providers are also finding the economics of the ‘new world order’ a difficult place to navigate in terms of revenue generation as hardcopy readers decline in favour of on-line news. I am one of these as I find that I rarely buy a newspaper and prefer to get snippets of news from Yahoo and then do further browsing to more info if I feel interested. The point being that if the news providers cannot make money, then how will they pay for a photojournalist when they can get free content from bystanding citizen journalists and the like?
I do not have any answers to the conundrum. I love photography and I love the photo journalism aspect, which I really would like to pursue 100% over my commercial work, but there is a new reality and the only way to deal with it from my point of view is to be as active as possible. Use every opportunity. Create as many opportunities as you can. Meet as many people as you can. Offer 200% commitment. Be a reliable honest and extremely nice person with integrity. Be available at any time. Be prepared to travel.
What could we do as a group? Maybe we could make sure that every citizen journalist out there does not give their content away for free and that they appreciate that they are contributing to the deterioration in livelyhoods for thousands of creatives around the world. I know there is at least one website aiding them to make a charge, but what about more local public information? A genuine effort to inform, embrace and perhaps educate those in the new reality.
What about publishing our own content? And charging? The web makes that possible and we should have enough people to make it happen globally. Let’s face it that is what the news corporations have been doing. Let’s have our own news co-operative. Let’s have our own photo libraries instead of allowing corporations like Getty free reign to buy up everything in sight and control vast swathes of content.
Forgive me if it has already been done or is being done – but I don’t know about it, so there is a lack of quality information dissemination if there is.
Let me know if there are any initiatives out there that are worthwhile.
Derek Schultz — December 7, 2009
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Every aspect of Haitian life is imbued with vision. From the fabulous voudou rites in remote waterfalls to the horrific killings and ritualistic murders that accompany political change (or perhaps a lack of it) Haitians have an acute visual acuity, not surprising given their history. Riguad Benoit, Hector Hyppolite, Wilson Biguad are some names, if I can mention only a few, painters who made Haiti famous through their visionary painting skills. Some might call it magic.
Haitians may have not the resources to build great cathedrals or temples, although there are some, but they have the talent to create stunning art and ceremonies with minimal tools. This visual sensibility extends unfortunately to death as well. When a victim of political violence is tossed in a trash heap, it should be no surprise that that the imagery created is both symbolic and highly visual, as well as of course, horrific.
For photographers Haiti has been a wrong to try to right, the material for powerful photojournalism that articulates the seeming pathos of Haitian life, as well as creating a symbol for a school of photography that examines, in almost microscopic detail, the suffering of others. This suffering takes place in a void, absent the smiles, and laughter, and yes, even fun, that often exists side by side with tragedy. Its a paradox that photographers love to talk about in war stories, but very rarely is visible in images.
Yes, for Haiti to move forward in history, the skills of the children must be given an opportunity to flourish in a more rewarding atmosphere than a garbage heap and its requisite pig provides.
In Alice Smeets award winning image of 9 year old Landa Joseph in Cite de Soleil, Port au Prince’s notorious slum, there is both poignant beauty, and a feeling of hope as she steps through the muddy water in her clean pink dress.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw a picture that truly burned in my mind for more than a moment, much less a photograph that is able to capture an idea or even a turning point in history. We are starved for these images, even if, as with this image by Smeets, they are right in front of us.”
I can’t remember the last time I saw a picture that truly burned in my mind for more than a moment, much less a photograph that is able to capture an idea or even a turning point in history. We are starved for these images, even if, as with this image by Smeets, they are right in front of us.
This is one of those pictures. Hold it up for awhile, admire it. Better yet, plaster it on a billboard in Times Square. It belongs there, as what we used to call a “Kodak moment.”
Yet as Ms. Smeets notes in her caption, Haitians, no matter how poor, are extremely proud about their appearance. And that pig, which to a westerner may be symbolic of poverty, to a Haitian pig might very well be a symbol of wealth, like the cell-phones that every Haitian these days must have, even those living without electricity!
In this edition of 100Eyes I have intentionally left out much of the violence and misery that we are accustomed to seeing in work coming out of Haiti. This is not to deprecate the problems of the country or to minimize the importance if the reporting, but to suggest that there is another Haiti which greets us after emerging from Mais Gate, and it is not all bad, or violent, or angry.
Just the opposite, we walk through Haitian towns and villages and are amazed that despite the poverty, and the over-population, that Haitians live for the most part civilly, that theft is not tolerated, and that amazingly, Haitians appear happier than those we might run into on the sidewalks of Manhattan, or driving in cars through Southern California. Haitians dream of these places as if they are the promised land, sometimes fleeing the island in small overcrowded boats, tragically often drowning in the process, yet those of us who come in the other direction, from Paris, Miami, and New York, are equally romantic and even nostalgic about Haiti.
When I first visited Port au Prince in 1982, after having grown up in a household filled with Haitian paintings bought from Seldon Rodman in the 60’s, I was struck first by the masses of people–they seemed to occupy every inch of space. This was during the last days of Baby Doc Duvalier, when my fixer (this was before there was an official name for this) had to report to his bosses, who were of course carefully monitoring what an American photographer was doing in Haiti. In those days there were not the fleet of black SUVs in the streets carrying representatives of international aid workers, or the UN soldiers, and the hills that line Port au Prince’s valleys were not choking with cheaply built slum dwellings. In the old Holiday Inn near the Presidential Palace, while waiting to photograph then Priest Aristede, I had a memorable romp in the pool with a blonde Brazilian bombshell.
Sadly in preparing this issue of 100Eyes, it seemed to me that Haiti is not as well documented as it could be. The great changes in photojournalism that have given us the Bangladeshi photographers, who are creating a cottage industry in Dhaka, are not happening in Haiti. The photographers who fly-in are predictable and rightfully attracted to the stories of the struggle–the violence that springs from the elections, the plague of AIDS, and the poverty that is represented by the Cite Soleil, each one capturing what appears to be the same pig?
But there is much more to Haiti, and hopefully we can begin to address that in the future. With this in mind I am holding a photo workshop in Jacmel, Haiti, in February of next year. Besides photographing the Kanaval, and learned new skills in photojournalism, we will surely be talking about the kind of photography that can uplift as well as reveal. And hopefully we will have some young Haitian students to tutor as well, something that groups like Zanmi Lakay and Cine Institute have been doing for years. Many ask why they would fly to Haiti and spend so many dollars for this? To them I will say show up, and find out.
Andy Levin/New Orleans
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I am addicted to checking my Google search engine rankings, otherwise known as SERP. Last week, when the listing for 100Eyes under “photo magazine,” that normally ranges from #30 to #11, disappeared entirely, I was practivcally in mourning.
My obsession with Google listings is admittedly irrational. No one really clicks through under “photo magazine” or “photography magazine” or even “professional photography magazine” anyway, but it was and is a great source of pride for me, that my little magazine could be listed ahead of so many other “heavyweights.”
I got a lot of response from the last blog on SEO, so I thought I would follow it up with some other tips on the topic.
Google has much information for webmasters, and I strongly suggest that you sign up for Google Webmaster tools, which is a free service. Webmaster tools takes you under the hood and shows you the searches that your site is found on, and what the position your site is shown at. Here are the search results for Frank Relle, a photographer that I featured a few months agothe listing comes up in the fourth of fifth position, which is pretty good!
In order for you to activate your account, you will need an FTP program, log-on to your site, and place a little bit of code that Google will give you in the “head” section of your homepage. In Wordpress this is in your theme “header.php” file. Back on the Webmaster tools page you ask Google to verify that you own the page, and it will pull in the page and look for your code in the “head” section. Thats all there is too it!
Webmaster tools shows you when your site was last crawled, if there were pages that were not crawled, and if there were problems (404 errors) finding certain pages. You can also download a list of all the backlinks to you your site, that is all the links to your site out there on the World Wide Web. At last count 100Eyes had something like 5.000 backlinks, which is a nice number, and probably the reason for the high ranking in some searches.
Using webmaster tools you can start to get an understand of how the Google bots work, and especially if there are problems on your pages, for example a robots.txt file that might be instructing crawlers not to crawl certain pages. It also helps if you have an sitemap.xml file that gives the search engines a picture of what your site. If you are using Wordpress, like I do, there is even a plug-in that will create this .xml file for you, and you can then use Webmaster tools to check and see if the Google bot has found it.
By the way, after Googing “SEO listing lost” I found some very good advice, which was to take a few days off, and the listing would rep-appear, and happily the listing for 100eyes.org re-appeared. So what Google taketh Google giveth back, at least this time.
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Haitian born Phil Anglade has a dream. For ten years he has been intrigued with the idea of producing a photo book about the Haiti. Unlike most photography that we see from Haiti however, Phil’s book would be full of positive images, of natural beauty, of a rich culture, ….all of which are very much a part of of Haitian life, but dwarfed by the epic problems of the country. Why, one might ask, should photographers go to Haiti and portray the island as a the kind of destination that one might see in a glossy travel magazine? Anyone who is familiar with the kinds of images I shoot knows I like work that is hard-hitting and doesn’t flinch from showing the hard pictures, including my own horrific images from Haiti. So you maybe surprised to learn that Phil has won me over. In fact I am going to be with him in Haiti next February shooting images for “A Week in the Life of Haiti Cherie.” Why? Because I think just as we need photography to tell the incredible story of the struggles of Haiti, we also need to show the other side of Haiti, and encourage travelers to bring themselves and their dollars through Mais Gate– and experience Haitian life for themselves.
So far Phil has lined up 20 photographers from around the world to shoot all over Haiti from February 13th to the 21st, and he says that he could easily get twenty more. What has been a somewhat harder sell is the signing up sponsors, from airlines to car rental companies, and hotels, who find it difficult to see the value in a glossy book that puts a positive spin on Haiti. The hundreds of NGOs that are now located there, the most of any country in the world, are less interested in promoting tourism than showing the faces of those who need to be fed–and rightfully so, of course. Yet the fact remains that in highlighting the neediness of the poor, or the violence of the elections, one also diminishes the opportunity for possible development, not only of light industry, but of tourism as well, at least tourism of the non-disaster variety. It just so happens that I am organizing a photo workshop and gathering in Jacmel, Haiti the week before Phil’s project, from February 2nd-9th, and although I had very different reasons for choosing Jacmel and Carnival for the subject of the workshop, the two projects have in common that they are looking at another side of Haitian life.
I am the first to say that I am not certain that Haiti is ready for mass tourism, or that the typical tourist, or even the typical photographer is ready to deal with Haiti alone, as she can be a somewhat problematic place to work in. But we are going to give it a shot and after the successful 360 Degree workshop in Jacmel, I will be off to Port au Prince for the festivities there, and to donate my own photographic talents to realize Phil’s dream…..I may have to sacrifice my persona of the “concerned photographer” for a moment, but thats OK. Things in Haiti aren’t going to change that fast, but lets all hope that they change for the better, and I want to be part that change. I know that we can do it, and that Phil would his way. Now if only Digicell, American Airlines, Satellite Network Solution, Babancourt Rum, the Montana, Haitian Tourism would extend some much needed support…..
Contact info for sponsors:
Phil Anglade
weekinhaiti@gmail.com
PSC 450 Box 435
APO, AP 96206
Ph: +8210-6696-8323,
Skype: angladep
website: http://members.tripod.com/~HaitiPhoto/
Bio: Phil Anglade is many things. As a strategic planner, he envisioned several projects to attract college and university students and others worldwide, to the wealth of opportunities available in Haiti, both as contributing volunteers in community service projects and for personal growth. Lastly as a marketing and media subject matter expert, he is concentrating his efforts to promoting the story of Haiti in positive ways from soccer to photography and everything in between, using all available venues. Mr Anglade retired from serving as an officer with the US Navy in 2000 and currently resides and works as a civilian contractor in Seoul, South Korea. He additionally teaches as an adjunct faculty for the University of Phoenix MBA program.
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I am a photographer first, an editor second, a teacher, and these days, like many of us, a web developer. I’d like to share a bit that I have learned about a topic that many of you are interested in, search engines and how they rate your website.
There is a lot of talk about SEO optimization these days. (For those of you who do not know what that means, SEO stands for search engine optimization, or organizing your website in a way that will improve the way that Google and other search engines see it.) Much is written about SEO, and I thought I would break it down for in a way that people can understand and talk about some of the basics that have helped me in improving the results for my pages.
1) Common sense. As photographers we are identified our name. The number one element of SEO optimization is that you have a unique name for your site, so when you create your photographic identity, it makes sense to have a unique one. There are not going to be to many James Nachtwey’s out there, but if your name is Mike Smith, you may have some trouble. So common sense tells you that if you want to create a public identity, its better to be unique so that people can find you easily.
2) The title attribute on your home page is the single most important element in your search ranking. I am going to say that again, the title on your home page is the most important element in your search ranking. Choose your title carefully and once you establish your title, stick with it. You will be penalized if you change your title, whether this be on a website or on a blog. To see the title “tag” on any website, go to “view” on your browser and chose “view source.” Look for the title tag…..
3) The first words in your title count the most. Word your title so that it is interesting but also so that a machine can “understand it.” For example, photo and photography are similar words but a machine does not understand that, so perhaps getting both words into your title makes sense. If you are a corporate photographer, or a wedding photographer, you want to make sure that the words “wedding” or “photographer” are featured in the title. Make sure the description that follows the title reads in an informative and interesting way.
4) Create a website with quality content. Your photo essays may be among the best in the world, but if there is no content aside from images they may not do much for your searh results. Search engines like links in your page that connect to other high density content areas. So in some ways it might make sense for photographers to group together to create sites that are content rich rather than building individual sites, which are unlikely to have enough content to attract visitors. Think about content as something other than just your own photographs……think big.
5) Backlinks and Pagerank. These are truly the twin peaks of SEO, and you must understand what they are. Backlinks are links on other websites that refer to your site. As Google sees it, the more backlinks to your page the more important your page, as long as the page linking to yours has a “page rank” that is higher than yours. The Page Ranks go from 0-10, and you can see them in the Google toolbar if you install it on the Firefox browser. Below it is a pull-down menu to see which sites are linking to yours. These are the backlinks, and you need lots of them. Thousands.
The higher the ranking of pages that link to yours the higher your ranking will be. The higher your rank, the higher the more detailed information in your site, the titles of each individual page, the headers, and your word content will come up in searches.
6) All links are not equal. Many people think that by including their URL in many posts on various blogs, this will improve their Google ranking. Save yourself some time. It won’t. As the “bots” crawl over sites, they have an understanding, through the html and where the links appear on the page, of whether they are important or not…..a link that you enter in the comments section of a blog, has much less value than a link that appears in the context of an article on that blog. And the exact wording of the link text, that is, the highlighted words that feature the link are very important too. If a link to http://www.billsmith.com has the link text Bill Smith photography Google is going to associate that link with photography.
7) Publish, publish publish. Get your name on as many quality websites as you can, especially if they will link back to you. Then if you are careful with your title, you are going to see your rating improve steadily. This is the best way for a photographer to improve the SEO rating of their site.
7) Don’t spend too much time on keywords. Keywords are not factored in strongly to searches because they have been an area of great abuse. Since they are “invisible” on the site, ie, they are not real content, webmasters load them up with irrelevant critereon, and google knows this. Save yourself some time and stick to the basics. Make sure that all of the really important words is in your page title tag.
8) It is unclear to me if keywording each image is a good idea or not, but you should have at least a few jpegs that do reflect the general subject matter for the crawlers to harvest. Crawlers have issues with pictures because they can not verify what the pictures are. Google has actually created a game where viewers identify pictures in keywords, and play against other viewers. The goal of the game is to get people to help verify pictures on the web– without paying them, of course.
9) Have quality internal links in your site– these are the navigational links that move your readers from page to page. If your site is all Flash, it can’t be crawled…. although some have gotten around this limitation by creating html duplicates of Flash site pages. I don’t like all Flash sites….but if you have to use one , make sure that there are html pages that contain the internal navigational links to your pages.
10) No one can give you tools that are going to help your search ratings other than an understanding of what is important about getting high ranks in search engines. If you have a high quality website, with content that people want to see, you will get high rankings. If your images are published on websites with a high page ranking and if you are featured on important websites that link to you, you will benefit much more anything that you can do locally on your site.
Want more? Here is a nice case study. Lee Celano is a New Orleans based photographer who works for Reuters and the NY Times and the LA Times among others. Using the terms “photographer” and “New Orleans” Celano’s name would rarely come up in the top thirty two years ago. But Lee’s site has made gradual process and is now consistently on the first page of the search results.
Why?
Although the backlinks shown on the Google toolbar show only five, if you search Lee’s name there are hundreds of listings of photographs credited to Celano, which is itself a very unique name–many of these are high quality sites that have a very high page rank score, for example, the New York Times which carries a score from a 6 to an 8. Lee’s page, although it has only five backlinks, has a page rating of 3. That is very good for an individual photographer’s page! Now look at the title of Lee’s home page…..get it?
Andy -
Brilliant, much needed. Thank you.
Pierce
Bill Pierce — September 2, 2009
Nuts and bolts all the way…..if folks want more of this I am glad to continue the diatribe, by the way if you have any insights I could use some guest bloggers on here. I don’t want to steal you from Dircker but maybe he will share…..all the best, Bill.
Andy — September 2, 2009
Nice one … really appreciated
Obi — September 22, 2009
Great article Andy. Editorial photographers need to know this stuff nowadays. Continue on with it. For example I see that lee is coming up #17 for a search of new orleans photographers. But I see he could help himself by getting an account with Google and adding a listing to the local business results for Google Maps. That is the listing at the top of search results for local specialities. Usually there are ten such listings and an offer to see more on another page. Recently though Google is moving to listing only one. You really want to get listed there too.
best wishes
Daniel
daniel sheehan — September 30, 2009
As the Google turns……thanks Daniel, I signed up for Google business a very nice tip, thanks.
I will definitely update with Part Deux, Google likes nothing better than to read about itself.
Andy — September 30, 2009
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I have two photographers call me this week with similar stories. Both had approached a major magazine, or whatever that passes for these days, with a controversial and high profile story, and gotten financial guarantees for their work. Both had visualized the kind of impressive magazine spread that their stories warranted……and now, after a few months, both were disillusioned and a little frustrated.
Plenty of things that can go right when a magazine, editor, or an art director takes interest in your work, but there are also things that can go wrong, and I would like to make some suggestions about ways that you can negotiate the best arrangement with a magazine (or anyone really) that you can.
Here are the some suggestions:
1) Never assume anything. Most photo editors are going to be very enthusiastic, especially if they want something from you. So be certain to listen very carefully to what the person on the other end of the phone or across the table is saying, and make sure that you are not filtering their words with what you would like to hear.
2) Know what they do. You should be familiar enough with the publication to know what the magazine has done in the past, and factor it into your negotiations. If you are dealing with a magazine that never runs a a photo essay without a substantial text, you should understand that when you approach them you are going to need a text. If the magazine that never runs black and white photographs, there is a pretty good chance that the essay you envisioned in black and white will probably have to run in color.
3) Know what you want. Do you think that you your work justifies a ten page layout? Make sure to make that clear to the editor, and don’t just assume that if they show interest in you, this is what they have in mind. They might have an entirely different agenda for your work, read Rule #1.
4) Try and get what you want. Its a your story, your work, its about a subject that is meaningful to you and important. Your subjects deserve it, and you deserve it too. Be polite, but be demanding. Your work is about quality, not compromise, and you expect to be treated with respect as a professional. I am not suggesting that you resort to prima donna antics, but I will say that some of the better photographers are known to pull whatever strings they need to get what they want.
6) Don’t try and be friends. This is a business arrangement, not a social interaction.
7) OK, everything has gone great. The magazine wants to use your work, and you are going to negotiate the terms. Negotiation is in itself, an art. Some are more blessed than others. But these are some of the things that you need to think about.
– Don’t leave your work without getting some commitment. This is exactly what the magazine wants.
– If you make a deal make sure to negotiate how long can the magazine sit on your work without publishing it. That $1000. is not going to feel too good if after 6 months your story has not run. If your work has not been published in that time, then you need to be free to offer it elsewhere– its an important story, you did it right? Start at 30 days.
– If its an exclusive story that the magazine really wants the sky is the limit. If the story is right, you can get what you want, not the typical space rates that they would like to pay. For really exclusive images, the fees can go higher– much higher. In the event that you have an image that the world is really clamoring to see– get a really good boutique agency like Polaris, Redux, or Contact, or whatever the equivalent is in your country, to negotiate for you. You can in turn negotiate an arrangement with them, perhaps 35% commission for them, or maybe 40% under a certain level of sales, and then a sliding figure down to 25% if the sales are over a certain level.
– Don’t leave things hanging. If a period of time passes, call the editor or email before you start to feel uncomfortable.
– Trust your instincts. They rarely fail you. If it looks like a bad deal, then bail out.
Developing a good relation with a magazine or an editor takes a long time, and like any relationship, too much power for one side or another is not a good thing. So make sure to respect yourself and your work, be specific about what you want, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. No one will think less of you for it.
Good business advice. Thanks for looking out for others.
Tana — August 27, 2009
Good common sense advice. For photography and other life endeavors.
Ron — August 27, 2009
Another thing I learned from my PJ career (back when I was much younger of course and there was not auto metering, no auto focus, no auto anything) was to ask for the agreement in writing. I had a photo editor who had the audacity to die before I turned in the assignment and while the editor was aware of the work, he was not familiar with the payment arrangements.
Fortunately I had done a lot of work for this publication and they paid what had been agreed to.
OC Garza — August 30, 2009
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(This interview originally appeared in 2008– Hamzawi’s work is now appearing in Visura Magazine, link to follow the interview. )
“Iraqis Today” is the work of Amro Hamzawi a photographer currently living in Los Angeles. Mr. Hamzawi traveled around the Middle East, photographing and interviewing refugees from Iraq, and has created a remarkable body of work that is a stark contrast to much of the current reporting in the West. Over the past few days I have talked with Hamro about his life and work in the Middle East.
What is your background and how did you get interested in photography?
Born in Lebanon of Syrian parents, I spent a large part of my early adult life in France before moving to the United States to study filmmaking. I’m 34 and I can look back and so far I have lived a third of my life in the Arab world, a third in Europe and a third in the United States.
How I initially got interested in photography is kind of an interesting anecdote actually… My father, who was a business man in construction (nothing to do with photography), passed away when I was quite young. I was 10 actually. So, like many people who experience the loss of someone they love, when that happened I decided to keep a couple of items in remembrance of him. I’m not sure why, but I grabbed two items. One was a pair of his sunglasses…. the other an old Minolta camera, along with its prime lenses.
Is there any particular photographer whose work you admire or wish to emulate?
Certainly people like James Nachtwey, Marcus Bleasdale or Stanley Greene are great inspirations to many photographers I think.
Are you familiar with any Arabic photographers?
I assume you’re asking me whether I’m familiar with any Arab professional photographers (my father was a businessman, not a photographer!). I know of a few, but not many. And I would probably differentiate between does living and working in the Middle East, and those like me who have become citizens of a Western country (France in my case). I only make the distinction because the ones living in the Middle East often work in much more difficult conditions and deserve praise for their courage. There’s the case, for example, of Iraqi photographer Bilal Hussein who was jailed earlier this year and accused of providing support to insurgents.
Can you compare your experience living in the Middle Eastern and here in America?
I understand and appreciate each of the cultures for what they have to offer. There are a lot of things I admire about the United States and its people. The idea that a common belief in democratic ideals is what brings people together– not the belonging to an ethnic or religious group — is as modern and progressive a philosophy as there can be. From this perspective, it’s much easier to assimilate in the United States than in any European country.
Having said that, my experience as a man of Arab roots living in post 9/11 America is quite complex and I’m afraid it would require a much longer conversation to share my impressions and experiences… I would just say that my name attracts more attention today than it did 8 years ago.
Had you done other other work in the Middle East before your “Iraqis Today” project?
I did a series in Southern Lebanon last year entitled “Bint Jbeil, Martyr Town” which got a certain amount of attention… Like most Arabs and Muslims, I have an interest in the Middle East in general, not just Iraq. Iraq happens to be more in the news right now because of the cost of the occupation and the U.S presidential campaign… but let’s not forget the plight of the Palestinians for example. The Palestinians have been living in terrible conditions for a number of years and sadly the media, particularly in the U.S, seems to find it acceptable that an entire indigenous population lives under occupation, deprived of its basic human rights.
Tell me a bit about the Iraqis project. How did you conceive of it?
Like many people, I’ve been following the news from Iraq for a number of years. At some point, I guess I just grew so frustrated by “the official coverage” — and the apparent total inability of the major papers and networks to ask the hard questions — that I decided to travel to the Middle East and start my own project. The main idea was to expose exactly what the mainstream media doesn’t want to show and talk about… the brutality of war and the terrible suffering of civilians.
Most of the work was actually done in the neighboring countries, not in Iraq itself. There are over 2 million Iraqi refugees outside of the country. These are the people I decided to approach… Iraq itself is way too unsafe right now to conduct that type of project over there. The country’s completely destroyed and there is no legitimate state to defend people’s basic rights, which is why the various militias have taken over.
It is very sad, of course, to see young U.S soldiers dying and being injured, but to a certain extent that story is already being reported in the press. It seems to me that the forgotten ones from the Iraq war are the Iraqis themselves.
Why is it too dangerous to do this kind of project in Iraq?
Well, first and foremost, it’s too dangerous for the subjects I was photographing and interviewing. Most of them left Iraq because of direct threats to their lives. So, logistically speaking it’s much easier to find people and get them to talk outside rather than inside. And with over 2 million Iraqis having fled their homeland, sadly there is no shortage of cases.
Secondly, you must realize that the country is in a situation that resembles anarchy today. People don’t know who they’re dealing with and who they can trust. Do you know how much a human life is worth in Iraq today? People kill other for 200$ a head.
How did you find people to interview and was it difficult for them to open up to you?
The hardest thing isn’t to find people — sadly there seems to be an endless number of sad stories emerging from Iraq — but to convince them to agree to be interviewed and photographed. Most people are suspicious and reluctant. Given the awful things they’ve been through, it’s hard not to understand them.
Were your subjects aware that there comments would be read by a Western audience and what does this mean?
Yes, they were. I, of course, explained to them very clearly what I intended to do, which is to relay their stories to Western audiences in Europe and the United States, so that the world can see the horror of war for what it really is. Some of them really wanted their stories to be heard, others were so disillusioned that they had very little expectations and were only interested in the immediate connection, meaning a chat and a cup of tea with another human being…
How can you be sure that the stories were not fictional? For example, is there a way to confirm that the man you interviewed was in fact the person in the famous Abu Ghraib image?
All of the people I photographed, I also interviewed at length. I think thorough interviewing is probably the best way to separate the real stories from the fictional ones. A lot of them also had written documents that validated, if not their entire stories, at least a large part of it.
The man you mention, for example, showed me documents that proved he had indeed been incarcerated at Abu Ghraib at the dates he talked about. I don’t think there’s a way to prove he is indeed the man from the infamous image, which is why I’ve been cautious in my wording.
Many here are fixated on the Sunni/Shia differentiation… what is your take on this? Were the people who you photographed from different religious groups? Do you think Americans tend to overemphasize these differences?
I interviewed and photographed Iraqis from all across the board. Sunnis, Shias, Christians, and so on. There’s a countless number of small sects in the Middle East; some of them even predate christianity… Even though they all acknowledged the existence of a certain amount of sectarianism under Saddam’s regime, the Iraqis I spoke with also agreed that it had no common measure with what is happening today. As a matter of fact, a lot of them felt that the Sunni/Shia divide was being cynically fueled by the occupiers in order to implement a “divide and conquer” strategy.
What do you think of the coverage, both photographic and written of the Iraq War by the US Press?
To a large extent, the press has failed to report the real issues and ask the hard questions. There seems to be an official line dictated by the administration and I don’t hear many voices questioning that official line. Lately, it has all been about the “success of the surge” and what it means. If you look at the news, you’ll see that we are being fed that line over and over, as a backdrop to the presidential election… but how can anybody with moral honesty talk about success when an entire country has been destroyed and we’re not even close to finding a political solution? To me, that just sounds like more brainwashing and propaganda.
Do you think that publications in the US and the press in general has done enough to provide Iraqis and Muslims in general, enough of a voice?
There are obviously differences depending on which publications you’re talking about, but overall I think there’s still a lot to be done. Not just in the press, but in the media in general. Evidently, there are still huge misunderstandings in the West about Arabs and Muslims. The problem in the U.S starts with the leadership. Politicians have deliberately created a “US versus THEM” mentality” to advance their own agendas… I think it’s up to Arabs living in the West, such as myself, not to forget their roots and make sure their people are depicted in a way that does justice to their history and culture, and the realities on the ground.
Have you approached any Western magazines with your work? What were the results?
I have approached a number of them, both in the U.S and in Europe, with little luck so far. But I’m hopeful that’s a just a matter of time before someone picks up on the importance of these stories. I understand that they may be seen as politically sensitive, as anything related to the Middle East, but I’m trying to appeal to people’s moral consciousness and engage them into a humanitarian debate, not a political one.
It seems odd that we are fighting to provide Iraqis with democracy, yet we seem to be unable or unwilling to hear their voices. How do you think we can get more reporting from an Arab perspective into our publications?
Whether “we are fighting to provide them with democracy” or not is open to debate. A lot of terrible crimes have been committed by powerful empires throughout history in the name of civilization, freedom and democracy… so I think it’s important to be cautious when using such expressions. Colonialists have always used “freedom and democracy”, as an excuse to exploit indigenous populations.
But to answer your question more specifically, I believe that change becomes possible when people start asking themselves real questions, when they start to challenge themselves and challenge their leaders, rather than silently accept the status quo. Photojournalism — and journalism in general — can help raise these questions.
What do you think of the photography that comes out of the embeds?
Some stuff is more interesting than other, of course, buts its limitations are obvious.
What is your assessment of Iraq today? Is it even possible to simply summarize the situation?
I met with a wide range of Iraqis, people from different religious groups, with different views and opinions… the one thing they all agreed on is that the security situation in Iraq is a disaster today. Basically, as long as the country is under foreign occupation, it will remain nearly impossible for the Iraqi government to find the political legitimacy it needs in order to be able to govern. At the same time, there is concern that a reckless withdrawal will generate a dangerous vacuum effect…
I think that there needs to be a wider regional solution that goes beyond Iraq alone and involves countries like Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia directly. The long-due creation of a Palestinian state is definitely part of the solution. It will have a deeply positive impact on the psyche of the Arab street… but there needs to be a U.S administration with the courage to address the real issues.
Although Iranians are seen in the media as America’s enemy, it seems as though in many ways the countries have mutual interests, especially in Iraq. How do Iraqis view Iranians, and what role do you think Iran will have in the eventual outcome, if there ever is one, in Iraq?
This is a crucial question; one that would require a much more complex analysis than I am able to provide here. It is basically a question of which is stronger, the national identity or the religious identity… Is a Shiite Iraqi an Iraqi first or a Shiite first? And what about Sunnis?
Iraqis would probably give you a different answer depending on what their background is. To simplify things, I would say that — because of historical, religious, economical and social reasons — the Shiite majority in Iraq is overall more approving of closer ties with Iran than the Sunni minority, which continues to view the Iranian regime with great suspicion. You have to remember that the two countries fought a brutal war for over 8 years…
No matter what perspective you choose, there’s no doubt that Iran has an important part to play in helping to stabilize Iraq, as do all the other neighboring countries. Again, I think that this is a regional crisis, not just an Iraqi crisis. Which is why I urge the West to help create a Palestinian state today rather than tomorrow.
What role do you think photography can play in bringing people together?
What I’ve always liked about photography is that it’s very immediate and allows to raise complex questions rather than give simple answers. I’ve always thought that raising the right questions was the best way to begin finding solutions…like I said before, photography has a part to play in that it can help expose realities that the public may not necessarily be aware of.
Thanks, Amro! I look foward to seeing more of your work in the future.
Check out Hamzawi’s work Visura Magazine
from Ciné Institute on Vimeo.
Check out this piece from students from the Cine Institute in Jacmel, Haiti filmed at last year’s Carnival…..great stuff David, keep in coming!
Bonjour!je suis un cinephil,d’autant plus,les activites cinematographiques m’iterssent beaucoup(scenario;montage;comment filmer et tant d’aures).J’ai deja essaye d’ecrire quelques scenarios.Apres avoir ecrri quelques scenarios,j’ai pu decouvrir mon amour pour le cinema.Je veux m’integrer dans le domaine de cinema pour arriver un peu loin.Malheureusement,je ne sais qoi faire.
S’il vous plait auriez-vous l’amabilite de me prodiguer quelques conseils,de me donner quelques suggestion qui me permettront d’ller plus loin dans ce domaine.Vous pouvez me contacter par telephone au numero 36101051ou36836443;par mail:robenson.cenatus@yahoo.fr
Je pense que vous comprendrez mes raisons de vous ecrire. En vous remerciant d’avance et en attendant votre reponse je vous prie de croire a mes salutations, mes considerations les plus distinguees. Merci
Robenson Cenatus
Robenson Cenatus — August 4, 2009
Bonjour!je suis un cinephil,d’autant plus,les activites cinematographiques m’iterssent beaucoup(scenario,montage,comment filmer et tant d’aures).J’ai deja essaye d’ecrire quelques scenarios.Apres avoir ecrri quelques scenarios,j’ai pu decouvrir mon amour pour le cinema.Je veux m’integrer dans le domaine de cinema pour arriver un peu loin.Malheureusement,je ne sais qoi faire.
S’il vous plait auriez-vous l’amabilite de me prodiguer quelques conseils,de me donner quelques suggestion qui me permettront d’ller plus loin dans ce domaine.Vous pouvez me contacter par telephone au numero 36101051ou36836443;par mail:robenson.cenatus@yahoo.fr
Je pense que vous comprendrez mes raisons de vous ecrire. En vous remerciant d’avance et en attendant votre reponse je vous prie de croire a mes salutations, mes considerations les plus distinguees. Merci
Robenson Cenatus
Robenson Cenatus — August 4, 2009
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good to be able to read adams comments on his amazing work…really interesting…I bumped into him in afghanistan but didnt have a chance to talk to him……cheers!!
baptiste giroudon — November 17, 2009