mapjd@lcc

Stephen Mayes, Managing Director of VII Photo Agency, served as Jury Secretary for the World Press Photo Awards from 2004-2009. On May 3, 2009, he gave a lecture at the awards ceremony highlighting his personal observations and insights about the process of awarding the most prestigious prize in photojournalism. Introduction by Michiel Munneke, Managing Director of World Press Photo Foundation.

here is talk about a crisis in journalism, which generally takes the form of angst-ridden journalists, editors and news folk in general asking, "How do we maintain the commercial status quo without which journalism as we know it will be gone?" The question is sincere and extends beyond the fear of losing jobs; there is a genuine concern that the investigative and informative roles of the news media will be lost with a high cost to the civic health of our society.

If done properly, crime scene photography greatly assists the profiler in developing a psychological and behavioral profile of the offender.

Authenticity, in the broad sense of the word, is fundamental to litigation. It acts as a dynamic -- as the conceptual glue holding together the pieces of a case. As part of its most basic function, therefore, a jury constantly assesses authenticity. Once falsehood is detected, or truth perceived as misrepresented, a party's case unravels. Indeed, tribunals could not serve their function without an ability to assess whether proffered assertions are what they "purport to be." Each type and piece of evidence must therefore be subject to a test for authenticity. The testimony of witnesses is a familiar example. Such evidence is examined for bias, for interest and for the human capacity to exaggerate or mislead, among other things. Cross-examination, including the comparison of testimony with records of various types, is the chief tool by which we probe witnesses, whose genuineness or authenticity is usually called "credibility."

As photographer Simon Norfolk claims in the following interview, his work documents an international "military sublime." His photos reveal half-collapsed buildings, destroyed cinemas, and unpopulated urban ruins in diagonal shafts of morning sunlight - from Iraq to Rwanda, Bosnia to Afghanistan - before venturing further afield into more distant, and surprising, landscapes of modern warfare. These include the sterile, climate-controlled rooms of military command centers, and the gargantuan supercomputers that design and simulate nuclear warheads.

The photographer Simon Norfolk finds moments of beauty and wonder in the world's most forlorn landscapes. From Afghanistan to Auschwitz, Norfolk documents the imprints of war-sometimes physical, sometimes physic-on its surroundings. His book Bosnia: Bleed is an impressionistic testimony to the mass slaughter that accompanied the war in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, he focuses on the sites of "secondary mass graves," where the perpetrators tried to hide the evidence of their crimes. He writes, "They thought that, by intimidation and subterfuge, their dirty secrets could be preserved, held, trapped. Frozen."

This a guest post by Ken Jarecke, a world-renowned photojournalist and founding member of Contact Press Images, an illustrious photo agency based in New York. Please also visit and read his blog, Mostly True. The past few years it's been hard for me to pick up a camera. We all know that the industry, at least the editorial side of it, has been at an all time low. Sure, I've worked to put a good face on it, like in this piece on the New York Times Lens blog, but more often than not, my desire to make wonderful images has been absent. My heart has just not been there.

Turnley writes about Voja Mtrovic -described as one of the greatest printers of black and white photographs in the history of photography .

Have you ever seen one of those photos where there's a starving child with distended belly, looking forlornly up at a camera, asking you to save them? On the TV news, in magazines, and occasionally on advertising for charities. Playing on our fears and sympathy, they try to push a giant button on our forehead labeled "GUILT." These images make me angry. They make me angry because that's just not what extreme poverty is really about. Yes, it's real - people really do live in such challenging circumstances, but when it's the only image we see, it sends all the wrong messages. It's poverty porn - gratuitous and explicit images that strip away people's identity and personality, making them out to be little more than meat. It makes out that people in extreme poverty aren't willing or able to do things for themselves. It makes out that people in extreme poverty are victims, that they need us to save them. And, without really even thinking about it, it reinforces the idea that people in extreme poverty are somehow less than us - less valuable, less capable, less intelligent … and less human.

We've all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out.  Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things. I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008.  I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to.  How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?

In the vanguard of the Marines, the press corps had already stormed Somailia. Now we will see more of the famailiar pictures of grotesque human degradation, with foreign angels of mercy ministering to starving children, juxtaposed with images of trigger-happy teen-age looters. Such pictures prompted President Bush's military adventure-now they will justify it. The camera can't lie, we are told. But anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the "right" image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in Somalia. Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her feeding a little girl-three times. This is disaster pornography.

One surefire way to irritate blind people is to think that you can put a blindfold on for an hour or two and understand what it is to be blind. It sounds like a good idea until you really start to think about it. I should know. I once set out to make a radio documentary for the BBC about the contrasting ways in which the visually impaired and the sighted experience the countryside.

Much has been written about the questionable research, writing, and presentation of indigenous people in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Jared Diamond's New Yorker article, "Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"  I would like to place the article and discussion of it in a more general context of media ethics and media coverage of indigenous people. Moreover, I would like to consider it in the context of the important work that indigenous people around the world are doing, to tell more accurate stories - in their own voices - and to create their own media outlets and networks.

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?

Over the years it seems they've done exactly that, funding the kind of international journalism that often is without a sponsor in the USA.   But for journalism to retain any integrity it cannot simply rely on something as intangible as 'a deep sense of responsibility', it must be grounded in a solid set of ethical principles and it must be accountable.   Without these principles journalism doesn't shine the light into dark places, it becomes the dark place. Several weeks ago I came across  a set of pictures on Facebook and Photoshelter by the talented photographer Marco Vernaschi which focus on the subject of child sacrifice in Uganda. The work is both being funded and promoted by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It's a decent enough story, but not one that is in any way new. The pictures are black and white, often blurred, without hope and even evoke a sense of nihilism.  Nothing however in my journalistic career could prepare me for the disturbing truth as to how a number of the photos were taken.

Photojournalism and ethics - How far would you go for a photo? Duckrabbit takes Pulitzer Center to task over ethics Posted on April 21, 2010 by mirandagavin| 4 Comments Benjamin Chesterton from duckrabbit alerted me to the following story. He has just published his views on A Developing Story with quotes from his letter to the Pulitzer Centre. Briefly, and according to Chesterton: "The Center has recently funded the photographer Macro Venaschi to do a story on child sacrifice in Uganda. His highly stylized black and white photographs are deeply disturbing on a number of levels. One of the pictures shows an abused boy with a catheter protruding from where his penis has been cut off. I believe that if published in the UK, this picture would be illegal on the basis of indecency. Beyond that, there is an account on the Pulitzer website of how Vernashi persuaded grieving parents to have their murdered child's body exhumed so that he could take photographs of the body. A payment was then made to those present.

In 2007, Dóchas members adopted a Code of Conduct on Images and Messages. The purpose of this Code is to provide a framework which organisations can refer to when designing and implementing their public communication strategy. The Dóchas Code offers a set of guiding principles that can assist organisations in their decision-making about which images and messages to choose in their communication while maintaining full respect for human dignity. By signing the Code, Development NGOs commit to a set of principles, ensuring that they will avoid stereotypical or sensational images. The adoption of the Code means that aid agencies will choose images and messages that represent the full complexity of the situations in which they work, and that they will seek the permission of the people portrayed in the photos they use.

"My best shot: Marcus Bleasdale The documentary photographer talks about capturing child soldiers and conflict zones - and explains why the reason he takes pictures is because he gets angry"

useful links to tips on multimedia journalism

" It's been very fashionable to focus on the weakness and the banality of America, but what I wanted to say is that it's also a very exciting and fascinating place. - Joel Sternfeld, 1987 Joel Sternfeld's projects can perhaps be divided into two general groups: site-specific landscapes somehow connected to human presence (though people are rarely present in them) and shot during distinct periods of time, and a more ranging, long-term examination of the United States accomplished largely by photographing Americans contextualized by their environments. "