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Jessica Dimmock dove headlong freakin' into it. There she was, in 2004, all innocent and walkin' around, playing with her fancy new digital camera, still a student... then a chance meeting with the jail bound coke dealer, the door in the floor opened and into the rabbit hole she went. Into the darkness, into the-land-of-broken-childhood-dreams, into the pain, into the dead end, into the heroin-is-god parallel universe. The 9th Floor was waiting for her... and in she jumped. The apartment in NYC, 4 W. 22nd St, the place of the pain, the upside down world of the empty shell living… dead folks walking... it would become a second home of sorts for Jessica. There she was, in the fray. This was amazing for a photographer, right? Insane to have this opportunity of chance, a chance that would turn into a VIP pass to document the drug fueled descent, to document the decay, to have free reign in the world of dashed dreams... to make it, with open arms, to be accepted into this world of the barely living... amazing, wasn't it? Well, I guess that all depends on the way that you look at it… doesn't it. Let's hold our thoughts on that for a bit and let's get back to our story.

n asbestos fibre the diameter of a human hair is actually a cluster of two million individual fibres which could fit onto the head of a pin. If inhaled, minute fibrils can work their way deep into the lungs, where they cause asbestosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma, an otherwise unknown cancer of the lining of the lung or the abdominal cavity'. All of the three principal types of asbestos, white, brown and blue are carcinogenic, blue being the most deadly. Mesothelioma is invariably fatal and associated with the inhalation of asbestos fibre, usually blue asbestos. Even the most trivial exposure might result in mesothelioma, which can be latent in the body for forty or more years. Once the cancer becomes active, death follows inexorably within about twelve months. After witnessing the excruciatingly painful death of a friend who contracted mesothelioma I did some exploring of the aftermath of the mining of blue asbestos in Australia and South Africa. These are some of the photographs that resulted. In this introduction I briefly review a few of the factors at work in that aftermath.

NEW YORK-The panoramic photograph of a bootless soldier, sprawled almost gracefully in death in Afghanistan, might have made readers pause for a moment if it had appeared in a newspaper or magazine. But when "Taliban Soldier" filled a New York City gallery wall-blown up to near life size-it made the art world take note. Taken with a large-format camera, the monumental 4- by 8-foot print was presented for $15,000 four years ago at the Ricco Maresca Gallery, a Chelsea stop usually favored by folk and fine art collectors. It catapulted the Paris-based photographer Luc Delahaye, who shot the image on assignment for Newsweek, into international prominence. And it signaled a turning point for a small club of international war and "conflict" photojournalists, who now see their images appearing regularly in gallery and museum shows. Suddenly, the reality of war, famine, poverty and pain has turned into fine art. "Great collectors are always looking to be delighted by something that they don't know about, and this excites some of them," says Bill Hunt, the former Ricco Maresca co-director of photography who introduced Delahaye to gallery crowds.

Readable and informative review of Sontag's book

THEORY: "The ethics of seeing: Susan Sontag and visual culture studies" The ethics of seeing: Susan Sontag and visual culture studies By Marc Furstenau There are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. --Susan Sontag

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add