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Post-Katrina Trials and AP White House Photographer Alex Brandon

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
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Photographer Alex Brandon got a lot of recognition for the photographs he took in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when was effectively embedded with the New Orleans police. Now there are questions about what else he may have witnessed. In recent months there have been two high-profile trials of New Orleans police officers accused of “denying the civil rights” of citizens, which is the way the Federal government charges folks with murder. Henry Glover was shot in the dark by a police officer with a rifle, and when he was taken by a passerby to the compound that the police were operating out of, the car was confiscated and taken, with the body in it, to the levee and torched by police officers. The coverup that followed was elaborate and so far, four former police officers have been sentenced to long terms in jail, including the shooter, David Warren who is serving a 30 year sentence in the prison.

On the Danziger Bridge, a group of officers responded to a radio call of an officer “down” under the bridge, speeding to the site in a commandeered moving van, and according to testimony and video evidence, emerged from the van with guns blazing, running up the bridge and chasing down the families on it, shooting Jose Lopez in the back as he curled up on the concrete, seeking shelter from the onslaught. Two were killed and five injured. And as was the case with the Henry Glover incident, an elaborate cover-up on a high-level was initiated, guns were planted and stories concocted. The testimony coming out in Federal court becomes more disturbing as each day passes.

The Henry Glover case was so effectively covered up by the New Orleans police that it took the determined work of an independent filmmaker and The Nation to bring enough attention to the case for the Feds to get involved. The Danziger Bridge case was effectively bungled by local prosector Dustin Davis and could not be pursued through the courts in New Orleans, and had it not been for the Federal Government there would have been no charges at all.

At least some parts of both these events, and one other questionable shooting were witnessed by Alex Brandon, at that time a photographer for the Times Picayune, who now works for the AP as their White House photographer. Brandon was effectively embedded in the New Orleans police as a result of his extensive connections in the department and made many dramatic images of the police “restoring order” in the city, but had nothing to report to his editors at the Times-Picayune as far as their possible use of excessive force against African-Americans. According to his own testimony, when he had asked his friends in the police about the Henry Glover incident, officers signaled to him in sign language that it was a “closed-case.” And it remained that way. It took years for an independent film-maker to create enough interest in the case for the FBI to take an interest it it.

According to the Times Picayune nothing in either of those incidents seemed enough like news for Brandon to tip off some of the experienced beat reporters for the Times Picayune or his editors that there might have been something more to these events that the police restoring order in New Orleans. I agree with Brandon’s editors at the TP–it concerns me that arguably the most important news-gathering organization in America has entrusted so much to some one who apparently got the pictures, but didn’t get the story right in the biggest news story in America since 9/11.

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The Most Important Rule of Photography

Thursday, April 21st, 2011
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As many others, I am devastated by the events in Misrata yesterday and the deaths of two great photographers in Chris Hondros, and Tim Hetherington.
They were dedicated and extremely talented men, courageous and compassionate.

My condolences go out to their families and close friends.

A few weeks ago on Facebook, I had an animated conversation with Teru Kuwayama, in which Teru talked about his own experiences in Pakistan, of hurtling down a mountain road with no seat belts, with the tragic death of his driver, and the unwillingness of news organizations to compensate the man’s family. Safety, said Teru, was the last thought in their minds.

Are photographers taking too many chances?

Looking at the last images of Chris Hondros , in which he accompanied Libyan fighters entering an isolated, burned out building to search room to room for loyalists, its hard understand why anyone would face those dangers of this sort. No shithole on earth is worth getting killed for, much less the burned out hulk of a building that Chris went into in Misrata. Knowing as many war photographers as I do, and something about the business, I am aware of all the conflicting emotions and thoughts that go into work with this level of danger. One of my first memories about photography was hearing about the death of family friend Paul Shutzer in a half-track in the Sinai Desert in 1967.

Competition in real, and either friendly, or not. Ego is real too. Wanting to do the right thing, and to be contributing to some betterment of the world, exposing injustice, all of these ideas are swirling about. And so is fun…..because as Eros Hoagland has told us, the reality is that despite everything, war can be fun. Even funny. There is no one motivation, or reality. Yet, facing down death is so much at the heart of the craft–its at the heart of the great war image. You photograph the man dying, or die yourself…….or both, as did Capa, and sadly, Eros own father, John.

Are photographers taking too many chances?

Its up the individual how far to go. I recall a story that James Nachtwey told me about a patrol that he was offered a ride-along in Sri Lanka, and how his instinct told him not to go. The patrol never returned. I have to ask whether it would be harder to make that decision of there were ten photographers there, and many were willing to take the chance, or didn’t share the same instinct. Yes, the benefits of working in a group are easy to understand, but there is a downside as well. And if safety is not a consideration, as my friend Teru Kuwayama has told me, then what is? Is war photography so much thrill seeking, with a moralistic rationale?

Then is financial need, photography is a business….some of the photographers in the Misrata group were working solo, with no assignment, or minimal backing as freelancers. My fear is that photographers will continue to push the envelope, feeding what I can only call the voyeuristic appetite of the public. I am willing to bet that there are images made of the deaths of Hondros and Hetherington. And what of that? If these pictures exist, to what standard are they held. Is it only the anonymous images of the dead that we had been so accustomed to seeing from Libya, like those taken by Michael Christopher Brown with his iphone, that are to be published? Or is there a bit of a double standard, or perhaps its the parallel worlds that Tim Hetherington depicts in his personal videos, that the battlefield has one set or rules, and that our lives in Brooklyn have another? What does this say about us?

The most important rule of war photography, or any photography is to come back alive……and the second is to be respectful of those that we photograph. Certainly Hondros and Hetherington were all of that. What they didn’t do is come back alive and that idea can not be lost on others who follow in their path.

Andy Levin

 

 

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The Introduction to “Body Feeling” that Wasn’t

Monday, February 21st, 2011

 

 

For most women, the current issue of 100Eyes will probably contain no surprises, but describes something that they already are familiar with, which is the complex and intimate that they relate to their bodies. For males, I think Linda Troeller’s work contains a heavy dose of reality, and maybe a realization that many of us are wired quite differently than females—and that although we are the same species we are quite different creatures. I am always cautious about talking in generalities about sex, because as humans, we are diverse and unique. So with that in mind, if you are interested, read on.

Sex, of some false vision of it, is almost inseparable from much of Western culture, and the image of women that it presents is commercialized through the mass media, which is itself a marketplace. Sex is shown as an act, like a football game, that men perform–under any circumstances. This is not illogical because men are asked to perform when their companions are ready–and if this isn’t the case, there is always whatever product will enhance their abilities—notably Viagra or Cialis. Males are seen as having none of the buffers and conditions that for women are the gatekeepers of their sexual experience. Although I suppose and argument could be made that gates are gates, and true liberation requires their removal, I suspect that many women would prefer to express themselves as they do, using the filters already in place: desires for commitment, intimacy, trust, honesty and of course passion, as well as more practical issues. involving sustenance and even survival. To combat these filters, or at least create the illusion that the filters can be changed, advertisers and capitalists promote the effect of expensive cars, diamond rings, champagne, essentially pimping out women to make the cash register ring. Nothing new here, but ideas that are worth writing down.

Linda Troeller has quite courageously set out to document women’s pleasure, not for the benefit of men, but for the elucidation of all of us, and to cut through some of the false messages that mass media delivers. My role was to help give Linda’s images their first home on the web, and to try and stay out of the way. I look at this work as an opportunity to see women through their own eyes, and although this may be disturbing, something I want to reject in favor of a myth that will help me prop up my own dick, to be direct, I am willing to take that small step.

The work has been widely seen, we have had more that 8,000 vistors in only a few days, but there seems to be a reluctance to comment publicly on the story. A lot of the discussion that I anticipated, hasn’t happened. I think its in part due to the same syndrome. Men prefer not to know. Women already understand much of what is shown and written, but maybe prefer to cultivate the myth themselves, or just don’t want to go there? These aren’t just issues that are expressed in art, they are part of the landscape that we have to navigate in our daily lives. In the internet age, we are increasingly exposed to more and graphic depictions of sex, at an early age, than ever before. Sexual movies and images are no longer peddled from under rain-coats. They are easily searched on Google and the iconization of sexual objects apparently has no limit. For those who are shy about searching out pornography, there are a wide range of artists who provide a close proximity to them, including photographers who profit by degrading themselves or the people around them and photographing the results. And perhaps for obvious reasons we feel more comfortable talking about sex shown in this less intimate way, because its reduced to a act that has no relation to our feelings. The reason we are reluctant to really look at Linda Troeller’s work on orgasm is that it shows that women are more likely to really enjoy sex when it is connected to actual love and the feeling of being loved and nurtured, in short something that males may find a distraction, in are perhaps wired to ignore. Not all, of course, but many, including me.

 

 

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Linda Troeller: The Auto-Erotic Lives of Ordinary Women

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What’s Wrong With Photography? Haiti, and more…..

Thursday, November 4th, 2010
Self-restraint in the midst of an avalanche of excess doesn’t come easily. Just to get the easy part out of the way, there are better photographs being made today than ever before. There are better photographers at work now than in the past. But don’t be surprised if you rarely see their work, or the general audience is numb to the effect of the pictures. This much we all know: we are awash in a sea of images. Anyone with a digital camera seems to have a website, and if not a website,or a Flickr account, which allows for an endless stream of images that can be uploaded and accessed by anyone with a computer, anywhere. No news here.

Taking digital photographs, after the purchase of the initial equipment, is essentially cost free, and so is uploading– no more counting the cost of each slide (25 cents in fact.) For most the idea that more is better rules. Family snapshots, the kind that would make you flinch when a friend pulled out a stack of 5×7′s in the 90′s, are all over the web. Photographs who are just learning who to use their cameras post hundreds of images. We are supposed to sort out the good ones from the bad ones. The public is overwhelmed with these images.

The professional photographic community has not been much better. The desire to see imagery, any imagery, is answered almost daily on dozens of sites across the web, including many on mainstream news portals that in most cases don’t pay for the imagery. The same freedom from economic constraints that has digital photographers filled compact flash cards at a rate that would exhaust the daily film supply of a traditional photographer in a half an hour allows for an unlimited access to imagery for the growing ranks of photographers all over the world. In 1990 there were few documentary photographers in Bombay, now there are dozens, and the recent scene of hordes of young Western photographers chasing off in taxis during the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai led one photographer to comment that the real story was the photographers themselves, hanging off the taxis, driving off to find a rumored “second” attack.

The unseemly pictures of a large group of photographers surrounded the corpse of a young girl in Haiti, killed by police after ironically taking a small framed picture from a store in the rubble of the earthquake, left many shaking their heads. The pictures of the murdered girl were important, and needed to be taken. The problem is, when there are now ten people doing the job that had previously been done by perhaps two, the photographers themselves overwhelm the event and become part of the story . If anything Haiti has shown us, that it doesn’t matter how many cameras are there, that there is no accountability, not from governments and certainly not from the press. Does this mean that photographers should stop going to Haiti? Certainly not, better too many than none. But many photographers that I know are having reservations about the ethics of documenting the events there. The imagery is consistently used by the commercial press to sell magazines and newspapers. When the time comes for the hard and often expensive work of showing the reasons for the lack of change, they simply turn on the faucet to a new stream of images from somewhere. Although well-intentioned I am afraid that many of the independent photographers that go when there is an election, and amplify that killings that occur beyond representation of the overall reality, are really helping no one at all, not even themselves. Or maybe it really is about the “trophy” shots, like some sort of big game hunting? Not one of us, myself included, has been able to document in Haiti any differentiation in Haitian society between the poor, and those who live up “on the hill.” And if someone has accomplished this, the work has been left unseen.

At this point the problem is not in Haiti, it is in ourselves, a thought that occurred to a young Haitian boy who I photographed in one of the camps. As much as I looked at his situation as perilous and endangered, he looked at my bald head and sadly fungal fingernail and shook his head. “Look at yourself, amigo,” was how I interpreted his gestures, and a valid point it was. I am not headed to Haiti this week, certainly because I have no assignment, but partly because I really feel that we need to back off and let Haitians take care of their country without the attention of the international media circus and the environment it creates. An environment in which anyone with an agenda has only to spill blood and the images are be disseminated. And you can bet that the person killed will be some poor Haitian who is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, a pawn for a rich man whose face we never manage to capture on film, or whatever passes for it these days.

We need less photographs and we need to see the better ones prominently displayed. We need more thoughtful pictures and we need media outlets that are responsible enough not to saturate their readership with sensational voyeurism and then retreat from the more significant underlying issues….

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We need bloggers who show ten great images instead of a hundred, photographers who will show five images instead of 50, and journalists who are willing to consider not getting on that plane instead of participating in what are becoming larger and uglier media frenzies. We need amateur photographers who are patient enough to wait until their work is right, before shooting up streams of images from Lightroom to the web. And we certainly need the mega photo agencies to step up and ask for more money, not less, for our work.

I am not holding my breath. Human nature being what it is, and with each generation willing to make more and more compromises, the stream of images is not likely is diminish anytime soon. Companies long ago learned to exploit our weakness for immediacy, and for the latest in technology. But next time you go to snap that picture, consider that through restraint, you actually make all the other images that you take more valuable. Then extend that though to Flickr, or to your website, or to the images that you upload for free to the site of a news organization that asks you to report for them. Consider also that the more you think about what you are doing, the more you self-edit, and the more self-restraint you have, the more meaningful your work will be, and the more sustainable photography will be in the future. And if you are thinking about heading to Haiti for that election, maybe consider one time, not going. Just a thought.

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Photographing Fabienne’s Death

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Blogger Pete Brook of prison photography has taken on the task of interviewing photographers who documented the death of Fabienne Cherisma, a 12 year old Haitian girl who was shot in the head by police in the midst of the chaos the enveloped down town Port au Prince in the days immediately following the earthquake. Fabienne’s death was documented by more than ten photographers and images of her corpse appeared in papers all over the world, and Brook asks important questions about the murder of Fabienne, those who documented it, and what happened thereafter. The latest report culled from the search engine Google indicates that there has been nothing published about her death since January 25th. And as Brook points out in his conclusion, despite the apparent simplicity of identifying the police office who shot Fabienne at close range–there had been no effort to seek justice for Fabienne.

Among his insightful comments Brook questions why photographers, who were apparently grouped together around Fabienne’s fallen body, made a conscious effort to not show other each other in the frame. It was a spontaneous “spot news” event, unplanned, and including the other photographers in the frame would have only been a distraction. The idea is to make the audience feel that they are experiencing the events themselves, and I think the photographers did a brilliant job in a tragic and difficult situation. We are all angry at the death of Fabienne, but blaming the photographers, even if there were so many, is missing the point a bit.

Of course, if the end result is that the death is simply ignored, and the image is just one of a series of brutal depictions that are simply one version of what happened in Haiti, how can we not ask questions about the uses of photojournalism? Yet even then, photographers are really like ants on the back of the beast which is the media, whatever that means in the digital age. We can’t control the uses of our images, and we are often struggling just to survive ourselves.

For the most part the first two weeks of coverage from Haiti was drawn from a very limited area, and drawn from images taken by photographers, like myself, who were not Haitian. Although Haitian born Daniel Morel, was in Port au Prince when the quake struck, and documented the courageous Haitians who pulled each other from buildings, once the news photographers arrived, the press rarely ventured into the residential neighborhoods of Port au Prince, but instead reported from a small area of downtown that was close to the Plaza and Park Hotels where most where staying. This is coincidentally where almost all of the “looting” was taking place, and was also of the most heavily damaged areas of the city, certainly the most visual as far as showing the magnitude of the devastation. One of the difficulties in photography is that pictures are limited…..one image can’t convey the feeling one gets from seeing miles of devastation. The picture must be symbolic of a greater reality. Certainly the downtown area could be a symbol of Port au Prince as a whole in showing the effects of the earthquake, but it was not a residential area at the time, and the events there were certainly not representative of a greater reality, in which Haitians were heroic, did not loot, and in the first hours wandered about the city in search of their families and loved ones. Coincidentally, some of this reality was conveyed in Morel’s take from the first hours after the quake….

The result, and no fault of the photographers, was that the coverage was skewed, especially as the sensational looting scenes always play big in the newspapers. In fact there were many more people murdered by police after Katrina than in Haiti, but the proximity of the killings and the presence of so many photographers, gave a vastly different impression. In fact, although all of us who have spent time in Haiti know that the Haitians are for a most part peaceful people, we also know that argument can result in escalations to horrific and very public violence that included brutality unacceptable in most of the world– and that random violence of police against people have certainly marred the history of the country. But in this specfic case, the aftermath of the earthquake, the images of shot “looters” fueled a very negative perception of Haitians and in fact the police. The fact is that these were the exceptions rather than the rule, but they became the focal point of essays like the one produced by James Oatway for a South African paper, that although truthful does not really show the bigger story of what happened in Port au Prince after the earthquake, when most Haitians did not riot and many Haitians acted heroically. Unfortunately this perspective was often neglected in the press, who tends to stereotype Haitians as both violent and victims, of which the later may be slightly truer than the former, but neither of which really captures the Haitian personality in my opinion. I try to go out of my way to include in my edits some images that balance the violence with some humanity, and even beauty. Granted that this is easier because I do not work much in the food chain of the commercial press anymore, one that seems to take any event and simply use it up, and drop it, rather than deal with the longterm issues involved.

You can read all of the Pete Brook’s commentary and interviews with the photographers here.

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Daniel Morel Sued by AFP for Aggressive Assertion of Rights

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Haitian Photographer sued by Agence France Presse (AFP) for “antagonistic assertion of rights” Award winning Haitian born photojournalist, Daniel Morel, has filed an answer and counterclaim to the French international wire service Agence France Presse’s lawsuit filed on March 26, 2010 in Manhattan federal district court. The French international wire service which distributes to approximately 110 countries, which provides text, photographs, videos and graphics to customers on a worldwide basis, asserts that Mr. Morel “has made demands that amount to an antagonistic assertion of rights in his photographs of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010 at 4:54 p.m. taken in the hour immediately following the quake.

The Complaint asks the Court to declare AFP had the right to use Mr. Morel’s images without authorization or compensation and further claims damages for commercial disparagement based on Morel’s attorney Barbara Hoffman’s cease and desist letters to AFP subscribers customers, and clients, including Getty Images, Inc., the Boston Globe, the Denver Post, Time, Inc., Vanity Fair, USA Today, and the Age, Australia requesting that they cease and desist from the display on their websites, and online photo galleries, the images licensed from Agence France Presse or Getty and in the case of the Washington Post, correct the misattribution to a Lisandro Suero.

Mr. Morel’s answer and counterclaims admit that his lawyer sent such letters and further argues that AFP states no claim against him. Mr. Morel’s counterclaims assert that AFP willfully or in reckless disregard of his copyright and other intellectual property rights infringed thirteen (13) of the images of the earthquake in Haiti by distribution, license and sale of the photographs to its subscribers, clients and customers, with a credit to AFP and Getty Images and that these images were credited incorrectly to one Lisandro Suero, tweeting from the Dominican Republic at the time of the earthquake and with no prior history as a photographer.

Mr. Morel’s complaint also asserts claims against Getty Images, and CBS and ABC. Getty Images, an image distribution company is associated with AFP to distribute and license images in the United States. The latter two news companies, it is claimed, have independently infringed Mr. Morel’s copyright in seven (7) and nine (9) images respectively, in a variety of ways. When the earthquake struck, Daniel Morel was with an American journalist, Eric Parker in a school in Grand Rue, Port au Prince. Mr. Morel had been teaching the young students for the past three days on how to make their own Facebook pages and Mr. Morel was taking photographs to put on their Facebook pages, while his friend was buying art from the students. He states in his complaint that, “I was about ready to leave and the earth started shaking. I got out in the street, it looked like the street was hit by 500 cruise missiles at the same time. My journalist friend was buried. After we dug him out, we hit the street to obtain daylight shots. Everybody was panicked. Sobbing and dazed, people wandered around the street. It was rush hour. Lots of people were dead. Then I photographed until dark. I saw a lot of injured and dead—people crying for help. Buildings collapsed—the Cathedral of St. Trinity, the Cathedral, the Iron Market, the Presidential Palace, the Palace of Justice, my father’s bakery. The principal manifestations, institutions, and symbols of my Haitian childhood were destroyed in less than a minute. There were aftershocks every 15 to 20 minutes which lasted from three to five seconds.”

Few professional journalists and photographers were in Haiti at the time of the quake and even fewer had access to the internet. Mr. Morel’s Haiti earthquake photographs, including the thirteen, were among the first photographs by a professional photojournalist taken before sunset on January 12, 2010 to show the evolving tragedy tothe world. Mr. Morel’s complaint further describes the situation on the ground: “At sunset, it was dark, there was no electricity or communication—all phone networks were down. Mr. Morel, nevertheless from the still-standing landmark Oloffson Hotel, with the assistance of Isabel Morse, the daughter of his friend Richard A. Morse, manager of the hotel, was able to use a laptop to connect to the internet and have Ms. Morse open a Twitter account with the username “PhotoMorel” for him at 5:20 p.m.” Mr. Morel intended to retain copyright in and credit to his images, at the same time he informed the world of the disaster and advertised his images for license. Perhaps, it’s just the nature of an unfolding disaster that early pictures tend to be more sensational and less about telling a story. Daniel Morel was interested in licensing his images if the price, terms and conditions were right. He was not interested in selling or licensing cheap. It was enough that he and the world were witness to what had happened and what was happening. Later, he would tell the full and complete story of the Haiti Earthquake and the impact on the history of Haiti.

Apparently on or about 5:28 p.m., Lisandro Suero of the Dominican Republic, pirated Daniel Morel’s thirteen images and put them on his Twitter page. Daniel Morel’s claim then goes on to state that at approximately 9:45 p.m. EST, AFP uploads the earthquake images from Lisandro Suero’s account, without Mr. Morel’s knowledge, or permission. He alleges, on information and belief, that AFP conducted no investigation into the identity, profession, authorship or location of Lisandro Suero. The images were distributed to subscribers clients and customers worldwide. Mr. Morel alleges that at 2:06 a.m. on January 13, 2010, Ben Fathers (34Benjie) of AFP tweeted to Mr. Morel as follows: “Hi Daniel, great pictures from such a difficult environment. I work for AFP, please e-mail ben.fathers@afp.com.”One image seen below, appears on January 13, 2010 the front page of major newspapers worldwide, credited to “AFP/Getty Lisandro Suero.”

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Unreal.
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Bangladeshi Photographers Protest Police Shutdown of Crossfire Exhibit

Monday, March 29th, 2010

 

Bangladeshi photographers have created a “human chain” to protest the police closing of an exhibit by acclaimed Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam depicting recreated crime scenes of assassinations by government “death squads” carrying out extra-judicial killings. The images, recently show on the New York Times Lens Blog, here, are interpretations of the sites of “cross-fire” killings, in which suspected criminals were killed under similar circumstances, during arrests conducted by the RAB, a extra-judicial force under the control of the Bangladeshi military. Crime is seen in Bangladesh as a major impediment to economic development of the nation.

 

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Shoot for 100Eyes: Gade, Haiti!

Friday, January 15th, 2010




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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From David Belle in Jacmel

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

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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Shepard Faery for LEADUganda

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

auction_FINAL

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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Gade, Haiti!

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

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

Under the waterfalls at Saut d'Eau

Under the waterfalls at Saut d'Eau

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A Week in the Life of Haiti Cherie!

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

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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Google is God? SEO Need to Knows!

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

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?

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When a Photo Editor Calls…..

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

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.

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Only in New York: Book Dummy “Discovered” in Susan Sontag’s Trash

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Here is another bit of shameless self-promotion: this from my friend Steve Simon, writing in his blog on O’Reilly, about how I hooked him up with Life Magazine a few years back:

 

“Last week I talked about persevering with your projects. Continuing last week’s post, after getting a flurry of rejection letters from publishers about my proposed book, Empty Sky: The Pilgrimage To Ground Zero, I tried a different way of approaching my publishing problem. The late Susan Sontag lived in my building. She was connected to photography through her seminal volume entitled: On Photography. She was also an opinionated and well-known New Yorker. I thought that if she would agree to write a forward for this project, then maybe book publishers would take more notice of the work.

 

So I got the doorman Ralph Garcia to get my book dummy to her, which he did. The very next day I got a call from her assistant telling me how busy she was and it might take a few months for her to even look at it. I mentioned that I had extra copies and no expectations; I really just wanted her to see the work, and he promised me that Ms. Sontag would see the book dummy. That was that.

 

Months passed, I continued to seek a publishing deal, but kept getting rejection letters. I never heard back from Susan Sontag or her assistant. But one day I did get a call out of the blue from a photographer named Andy Levin, who told me he was looking at my work from Ground Zero, and that he liked it very much. He told me that he had purchased a book dummy of my work from a guy who sold it to him on Seventh Avenue in New York, for four dollars.

 

“What? Who are you?” I asked.

 

He went on to tell me that the guy who sold him the book dummy, plucked it from Susan Sontag’s garbage! I don’t use explanation marks often, but this was a lot to take in.

Andy Levin told me about his friend at Life Magazine (Barbara Burrows) who was publishing a commemorative volume of images post 9/11 that would be published on the one-year anniversary and asked if he could show her the work. To make a long story shorter, Life’s book, The American Spirit, with an introduction by George W. Bush–published 8 pages of my work from Ground Zero. I got my biggest paycheck since moving to New York in 2000, and with the credibility of the Life Book, I was able to find a small publisher in Montreal who published Empty Sky-The Pilgrimage to Ground Zero.

 

You can seeSteve’s website here.

He has a remarkable eye, and he is a nice person as well!

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