Investigations and other resources
A look at investigations into Abu Ghraib; plus, other reports, legal documents and further reading about prisoner abuse and torture.
Wars have a way of reducing themselves to moments, single memories, tiny episodes.
Here, pictures have a thousand-to-one advantage over words.
The 10-year Vietnam War was summed up in four photographs:
Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams captured the instant in 1968 when South Vietnamese Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street. Nick Ut snapped a picture of Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese girl, fleeing naked down a highway in Vietnam after a napalm attack in 1972. Ron Haeberle took a picture of the limp bodies of the My Lai massacre victims after they were shot in 1968. John Filo caught Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the body of a fellow student slain by National Guardsmen during a war protest at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970.
These photographs, it could be argued, tilted the whole balance of public opinion against the war. What occurred on the battlefield was rendered largely irrelevant by what occurred when certain photons massed themselves into images and rushed into the retinas and minds of the American public.
FREE DOWNLOAD - The UK Photographers Rights Guide.
Permalink 19/11/04 22:33 , Categories: Photographers Rights
I'm pleased to announce the launch of the UK Photographers Rights PDF. This is intended to provide a short UK guide to the main legal restrictions on the right to take photographs and the right to publish photographs that have been taken.
The guide was written by Linda Macpherson LL.B, Dip.L.P., LL.M, who is a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, with particular experience in Information Technology Law, Intellectual Property Law and Media Law.
Images shape our perceptions. The manufacture of consent has rarely been more engineered. With everything from wars to presidential campaigns being stage managed and with mainstream news increasingly fed by official sources, reliance on usual sources of news images has become increasingly dangerous.
Majority world countries suffer particularly from stereotypical representations, and while the media worldwide is increasingly being dominated by a few players, it becomes particularly important for news sources to be diverse and varied. With Getty and Corbis controlling the stock market, and Reuters, AP, AFP and EPA dominating the wires, communities in the west are looking for new ways to challenge established media, especially through citizen journalism. The majority world has traditionally been represented by white, middle class, western photographers. But having local photographers is not in itself sufficient. While editorial control remains in the North, stories will continue to have a northern slant, and the only way in which this can be challenged is through alternative sources being formed that are independent of western and corporate media.
DrikNEWS is designed to fill this void. This agency, an independent body of Drik Picture Library, aims to cover news photography and investigative reporting by disseminating both locally and internationally through the web.