Group items tagged

"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

"Corentin Wauters: Gamma is one of the most famous photojournalism agencies. Some even call it legendary. How important has it been for photojournalism? Michiel Munneke: I think Gamma - but also others like Magnum, for instance - played an extremely important role from early years on, especially in documenting crucial news events around the world. It's important to realise that in those days you had magazines like Life and the Picture Post who very generously allocated tens of pages to events like the war in Vietnam, for example. Those publications and photographs made a huge impact on their readerships. I think it's fair to say that the founders of Gamma, like Raymond Depardon - although he moved to Magnum at the end of the '70s - and Gilles Corron, who died in 1970 in Cambodia, can be classified as legendary. They played a very important role in news documenting in those years. Raymond Depardon said that in 1966 you only had to travel far away and take three shots to get published in magazines Paris Match or Le Nouvel Observateur. How has the profession of photojournalism changed since Gamma was founded? If Depardon was saying that competition for space in publications like Paris Match or Le Nouvel Observateur is stronger, then he's absolutely right. Competition is far more severe. Circulations are going down, advertising revenues are shrinking, and consequently budgets for journalism and for photography are being cut. image Nowadays its very rare that publications send photographers for assignments overseas. Take a renowned magazine like Time. They still have photographers on staff but they very rarely get assignments to go overseas. It's a sign of the times. Gamma, but also other big photojournalism agencies like Sipa, were founded in Paris. The city had a big name as a centre for photojournalism. To what extent is that true today? I think for those years it was really true. But now, in the era of globalisation and digitisation, it doesnâ

This article looks at the role, impact and response to the internet, new media and citizen journalism during the 2007 protests.\n\nIt starts by going over the history of burma and the junta and the events leading up to the 2007 protests. This protest was different than previous burmese protests due to the amount of information coming out. Cyberspace was flooded with grainy pictures and videos taken by burmese citizens,\n\nThe internet allowed people in Burma to send information and pictures out to show what was happening bringing a new type of political activism and global advocacy. The burmese protests were influenced greatly by this new media, but the protests still failed and many were killed.\n\nThe article talks about Yochai Benkler who argues the internet has opened possibilities even for those living under brutal regimes. Cheap cost and decentralisation is the main factors that are good about the internet in this situation.\n\nThe burmese media used to be free when under colonial rule. This free expression may have sparked the independence movement, but was then restricted when the army took over and restricted the media. Old media is easy to control by controling the sources (eg newspapers and TV stations). The internet is the new media model. BurmaNet, funded by the Soros foundation was one of the 1st news sites. Others followed, many based in thailand and with contacts to pro-democracy movements\n\nThe government stepped up its efforts to stop this content and prohibited the ownership of computers without approval. It also made its own propaganda websites. The 2007 protests show that even though the gov attempted to control the media the internet is uncontrollable and info will get out. Web 2.0 was also in full swing with citizen journalists uploading photos, video and blogging. The main news outlets were al using grainy amateur footage.\n\nDuring the protests the gov blocked the internet and cell phones sometimes. \n\nMuch of the blogs were outsite the co

The photograph, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros. The diners, eleven men, sit facing the viewer--though none looks toward the camera--on the far side of a long table that runs the full width of the picture. (To take this in the viewer must begin his or her engagement with the work by standing ten or twelve feet back from it.) One has the impression that the lunch has not properly begun. For the most part the men are talking quietly with one another, and to the left a chic young woman, possibly a waitress, bends over the table as if serving or taking an order. The image is by far most arresting toward its center, where the elegant, dark-haired and mustached Musharraf is shown talking earnestly to Soros, while a third man, to Soros's left, listens in. And what is arresting is precisely the extraordinary accuracy, as it seems to one, of the depiction of an entire range of small-scale, unemphatic, but nevertheless intensely photogenic gestures, expressions, postures, and pieces of behavior: for example, the small-scale gesture--scarcely more than a tensing of the wrist--of Musharraf's partly open left hand as he makes his point; the downward cast of Soros's head and his inscrutable, almost sullen-seeming facial expression as he plays with something on the tablecloth with his left hand; and the diffident demeanor of the third man who sits with both elbows on the table and his hands clasped.

"Description Vietnam was America's most divisive and unsuccessful foreign war. It was also the first to be televised and the first of the modern era fought without military censorship. From the earliest days of the Kennedy-Johnson escalation right up to the American withdrawal, and even today, the media's role in Vietnam has continued to be intensely controversial. The "Uncensored War" gives a richly detailed account of what Americans read and watched about Vietnam. Hallin draws on the complete body of the New York Times coverage from 1961 to 1965, a sample of hundreds of television reports from 1965-73, including television coverage filmed by the Defense Department in the early years of the war, and interviews with many of the journalists who reported it, to give a powerful critique of the conventional wisdom, both conservative and liberal, about the media and Vietnam. Far from being a consistent adversary of government policy in Vietnam, Hallin shows, the media were closely tied to official perspectives throughout the war, though divisions in the government itself and contradictions in its public relations policies caused every administration, at certain times, to lose its ability to "manage" the news effectively. As for television, it neither showed the "literal horror of war," nor did it play a leading role in the collapse of support: it presented a highly idealized picture of the war in the early years, and shifted toward a more critical view only after public unhappiness and elite divisions over the war were well advanced. The "Uncensored War" is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Vietnam war or the role of the media in contemporary American politics."

THEORY - "Boris Mikhailov: A Terrible Beauty" A Terrible Beauty by Sue Hubbard Boris Mikhailov: Case History The Saatchi Gallery 13th September- 25th November Boris Mikhailov is sixty-three, has dyed black hair, a white moustache and a young wife. Born in Kharkov in the Ukraine, he has recently exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, just been awarded the Citibank Photography Prize and is now showing his work, Case History, which consists of over 400 photographs taken in the Ukraine, at The Saatchi Gallery. For anyone with a taste in postmodern irony, there is plenty to be found here. For Mikhailov takes pictures of the bomzhes, the homeless down and outs, victims of the economic and social collapse in the former USSR. But Boris Mikhailov is no Bill Brandt or Don McCullen capturing life's gritty realities with a clear humanist agenda, nor is he an objective eye simply documenting what he sees from behind his lens. Rather he is a director, a creator of mise en scènes, who seeks out the alcoholic, the drug addict, the ill and the dispossessed and then pays them not only to pose for him, but to expose themselves - genitals, scars, menstrual blood and hernias - to his scrutinizing gaze. This is the ultimate market exchange, the sale, for a few kopeks, of these peoples' only resource, their bodies. Like all capitalists and entrepreneurs they sell what they have for the best offer, in this case to a photographer who takes their pictures, which will then be consumed by the international art world. The irony is brought full circle, in a game of signifiers and signs, by the fact that it is Saatchi, the advertising guru who gave us 18 years of Thatcherism, who is playing host to these photos of some of the world's most abject. What, I kept wondering, would these subjects make of the private view, where the likes of Tracy Emin quaff champagne in her latest Agnès B, surrounded by their exposed and blistered penises, black eyes and filthy bodies; and what does it

New York Times Magazine Withdraws Altered Photo Essay UPDATE, 5:57 p.m. ET: The New York Times has published a new editors' note about the altered photo essay that was published in Sunday's Times Magazine. The newspaper says "most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show." The note does not address which photos were altered, or whether the photographer misrepresented them to the editors. PDN has tried to reach Edgar Martins, the photographer, but has not heard from him. Here's the Times' note: "A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled 'Ruins of the Second Gilded Age' showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, 'creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.' "A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com."

The New York Times is running a slideshow by photographer Jan Grarup about life in the Daadab, reportedly the oldest refugee camp in the world. "The strength of the project rests within its immediacy," Mr. Grarup said. "It has an honesty to it." I was in Daadab not so long ago myself. I may not have been there for long but I was there long enough to notice that life in the camp wasn't one you would wish on the  worst of your neighbors -Kenyans and Somalis from Somalia aren't the best of neighbors. In the camps there is of course suffering but I would also have loved to see images of the children that were playing in the camp, images of the schools set up, images of the street with all the shops where refugees who've refused to be victims of circumstances are taking charge and rebuilding their lives. Where are the photos of the weddings that happen in the camp and where are the photos of people who despite their many tribulations, still observe prayers without fail? Where are the photos telling the other side of the story?

THEORY - "Walker Evans and American Life" Scavenging the Landscape: Walker Evans and American life Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Melissa Rachleff The Great American Depression, spanning the 1930s, inscribed into the culture a psychic crisis. Faith in industrial ingenuity, heralded as "progressive," came unhinged. By 1933, four years after the stock market crash, one quarter of the work force was unemployed.(1) Into this dilemma came a multitude of photographic projects, the most famous of which were sponsored by the federal government in the form of agencies that provided relief to farmers, the unemployed and others. The most completely realized project was the documentation of conditions faced by displaced farmers, recorded by the Historic Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The socially-oriented photographic book made its appearance, as did the photographic magazine, best exemplified by Life in 1936. Many of the best known American photographers came to prominence during the Depression, including Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Margaret Bourke-White. Of all the photographers from that era, one represented the quintessential photographic style of the Depression while remaining an elusive figure in photographic history: Walker Evans (1903-1975).

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.

Brighton Photo Biennial Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War festival review and interview with curator Julian Stallabrass by Guy Lane The Brighton Photo Biennial offers an in-depth exploration of the photography of war. Ten exhibitions, in locations across the South Coast, examine various aspects of the production, use and circulation of imagery during wartime. At the heart of the Biennial is a comparison of photojournalism from the Vietnam and Iraq wars, featuring - amongst others - the work of Larry Burrows, Don McCullin, photographers from the North Vietnamese Army, Bilal Hussein and Stephanie Sinclair. Harriet Logan's photographs of women in Afghanistan are afforded a solo show; as is Philip Jones Griffiths' Agent Orange project. Dutch photojournalist Geert van Kesteren presents edits from his books, Why Mister Why? and Baghdad Calling. Themes of censorship and obscenity are addressed in an installation by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. The representation of war by contemporary art photographers - including Simon Norfolk, Paul Seawright and Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin - is the subject of a further exhibition. Julian Germain hosts a display of pictures made by military personnel based in Portsmouth. And separate shows of material from the First World War (by Frank Hurley), and the Mexican Revolution, suggest historical parallels to the more recent work. The Biennial, titled Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War is described as an opportunity for visitors "to experience a range of imagery and to reflect critically on the different elements and contrasts." It runs from the beginning of October for six weeks. Below, curator Julian Stallabrass discusses some of the diverse issues and topics raised by the show.

" I was introduced to the work of Trent Parke (born in Australia in 1971, a member of Magnum since 2007) by a mutual friend, the photographer, Matt Stuart. He showed me two books by Parke, both self-published. The first was The Seventh Wave (2000), photographs of Australia's beaches, by Parke and his partner - now wife - Narelle Autio. A more intimate and egalitarian collaboration is hard to imagine. Without the list at the end explaining which pictures are by whom it would be impossible to tell them apart. Much of the action takes place in or under the waves. You don't look at this book. You open it and plunge in. Whoomp! Immediately, you're immersed, submerged. They're like pictures of being born, of people exploding into life beneath the sea, or bursting through the surface and into being. It's as if evolution has been speeded up and compressed so that the origins of life on the planet turn, in a split-second, to the creation of an individual human life. In the same breath it's mythic and candid - street photography from Atlantis! In one photograph we get a blurry echo of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Here it's two hands almost touching underwater, one clutching a ball of burning light. In a related picture - included in the Minutes to Midnight series - we see the birth of the photographers' own son, erupting from the water, dragging the umbilical cord like a lifesaver."

Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection is a digital collection of over 250 images of African Americans dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, selected from the George and Huestis Cook Photograph Collection at the Valentine Richmond History Center. The digitally scanned images on this site are of prints from glass plate negatives or film negatives taken by George S. Cook (1819-1902) and Huestes P. Cook (1868-1951), primarily in the Richmond and Central Virginia area. The Cook Collection consists of over 10,000 negatives taken from the 1860s to the 1930s in Virginia and the Carolinas. The lens of a camera can both reflect and refract reality, and it is important to understand that a photograph, like any work of art, can tell us as much about the photographer as the photographed. These photographs of African Americans provide an interesting combination of examples of African American life and the white photographers' perceptions of that life, often at least tinged by stereotypes. While some photographs more obviously represent one or the other, it is an interesting exercise to attempt to determine which photographs were taken in a completely spontaneous manner and which ones were posed or staged by the Cooks. These photographs of African American life in turn-of-the-century Central Virginia are valuable both as conveyers of unique historical information and as examples of the nascent art of photography. Their preservation by the Valentine Richmond History Center and their digitization by VCU allows everyone from historical researchers to school children to access and learn from this fine and rare resource.

The Beauty of the Slideshow - Now Available to Everyone By Stanley LearystanleylearycloseAuthor: Stanley Leary See Author's Posts (38) Recent Posts * Still Images Plus Audio Can Be More Effective Than Online Video * Teaching Is a Great Way to Learn * Telling Stories with a Telephoto Lens * If Your Pictures Aren't Good Enough, You're Not Close Enough * What Kind of Photographer Are You? Stanley Leary is a Black Star photographer who has been telling stories for more than 20 years as a photojournalist. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Business Week, Sports Illustrated, Wired, Chicago Tribune, NY Times, World Book Encyclopedia, Information Week, Popular Mechanics, Technology Review, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and many other publications. in Video and Multimedia on January 20th, 2008 Even before the Internet, I appreciated the slideshow. I created presentations with multiple projectors and audio, and I was always impressed with what the combined media could communicate. Even compared to video - where you move right through a moment so quickly you can miss the subtlety of it - the slideshow has its unique charms. The problem, in the old days, was that you had to have the audience present to deliver the program; it was a lot of work for a small number of people. The printed page reached a much larger audience. Today, with the Web becoming the leader in delivering the news, we are no longer limited to printed words and still images on the page. Rather than publishing a quote, we can deliver audio of the interviews and the experience, giving a story authenticity in a way that we couldn't achieve before. We can create slideshows for everyone - to watch whenever they choose.

Afghanistan: Pictures Not Taken 'When the press started to feel empowered to show and tell the truth, it was only a matter of time before the military and government powers would retaliate.' By Travis Beard Journalist Ash Sweeting rides in a pickup with the Afghanistan National Police. Photo by ©Travis Beard/Argusphotography. Nothing has more power to communicate the destruction and despair of our time-especially from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan-than photography. But in the sanitized and censored environments now of government and military control, taking the picture can be as difficult as getting it published. In coverage of these wars, freelance photojournalists are indispensible. One after another, news organizations have abandoned the task of informing the public. For editors back home, photojournalists-and the images they transmit-are problematic. But it's not the photographers who pose the problem; it's the truth their images tell. During the Vietnam War, there was the searing image of nine-year-old Kim Phouc running down the road with her flesh melting and fusing into her body after a napalm strike and her brother running in front of her with an expression that recalled Edvard Munch's "The Scream." This photograph spoke to people in ways that words had failed to do. These children were ones the Americans were supposed to be saving, not bombing. Images such as this one did much to turn the tide of that war, but if they did, it was because they conveyed important truths.

'Meta-reading': the generational differences in consuming news May 13th, 2009Posted by Judith Townend in Events, Online Journalism, Social media and blogging Turi Munthe, CEO and founder of the citizen journalism site, Demotix, shared an interesting thought with participants of the Voices Online Blogging Conference on Monday. The young Demotix interns consume news differently from the way he does. He elaborated to Journalism.co.uk after the panel. 'Meta-reading': "There is a generational split, but not in the way everyone imagines. It's much more recent than that," he said. People only ten years younger - he is in his 30s - consume news differently from the way he does, Munthe told Journalism.co.uk. The interns in the office ('who play a hugely important role: they're regional editors and they get properly stuck into what we do') read slightly differently, he said. "They are getting the Twitter feeds, and the blog posts, and the Facebook messaging and the free papers, and everything else, and are very happy with it. Much more happy with it than I am." "Essentially, they process information differently. It's a 'meta-reading'. It's not about individual brands. They are fully aware of all the back-stories of all the stories they're getting," he says. It's a 'degree of sophistication,' he said, 'which reads the interests behind the news as an integral part of the news'.

Aims & Scope Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation is devoted to the study of images and their uses. While images of architecture and works of art constitute its main focus, it also includes other subjects and contexts in a wide range of formats. Its scope delves into the past and looks toward the future, revealing how images have influenced the perception of art and how the interpretation of images conditions and enhances academic disciplines such as archaeology, history, and particularly art and architectural history. Visual Resources explores how visual language is structured and visual meaning communicated and also illustrates how picture collections are acquired, organized, indexed, and preserved. VR examines early attempts to document the visual, reports on the state of visual resources, assesses the effect of electronic technology on current and future uses, and provides a platform for reporting innovative ways to organize and access visual information - while aiming to increase the recognition and appreciation of visual documentation. Over the years, VR has published articles about verbal descriptions of art and architecture; copies, casts, and facsimiles; drawings, paintings, and prints; photography; library, archive, and museum collections; iconography; and computers and electronic imagery - and how these have functioned as documents of art and culture. Disclaimer for scientific, technical and social science publications: Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the "Content") contained in its publications. However, Taylor & Francis and its agents and licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness or suitability for any purpose of the Content and disclaim all such representations and warranties whether express or implied to the maximum extent permitted by law. Any views expressed in this publication are the views of the authors and are no

THEORY - "Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age" Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age By Martha A. Sandweiss The brief essays in this round table collectively explore how photographs can be used to understand the past. Their broad mix of voices-from the archivist and the historian, the photographer and the photographic subject-makes it clear that there is no one way to understand an image. Even a quick reading reveals interpretive tensions: the photographers' intentions clash with the ambitions of the subjects, and both appear at odds with the needs of the viewers, who bring to the image their own experiences and interpretive concerns. Despite their differences, the essays taken together pose two critical questions. What does a historian need to know to interpret a photograph as a historical document? And how stable are images as records of the past?

Collaboration the Key to Future of Investigative Journalism Mark Glaser by Mark Glaser, April 5, 2009 Tagged: future, investigative reporting, logan symposium, public media, uc berkeley BERKELEY -- The second day of the Logan Symposium at UC Berkeley is more of a half-day with one panel devoted to the future of investigative journalism and a brunch at the Frontline World offices near campus. Just like last year, I had trouble getting an Internet connection in the journalism school library so had to live-Twitter the panel and put up this blog post later. (You can see the earlier report on yesterday's sessions here.) The panel was lively, and included a lot of optimism for the future of investigative journalism despite the business cratering for newspapers and their investigative journos. The panel was moderated by Lowell Bergman, and included David Fanning of PBS Frontline, Esther Kaplan of the Nation Institute, Bill Keller of the NY Times, Chuck Lewis at American University, Robert Rosenthan of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Buzz Woolley, chairman of the board and primary funder of Voice of San Diego. The following are my notes from the panel.