100Eyes Blog

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.

Comment

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.”

Comment

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.