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Foto8 was established in 1998 as an online web journal featuring quality photojournalism by professionals worldwide. Today, it continues to produce innovative online presentations of photojournalism, including providing the online resource for buying essential photography books and tickets to events, publishes the physical quarterly magazine EI8HT and houses the new gallery of photography in London, HOST. Over the years Foto8 has become known for its award-winning documentary photography presented in an exciting online and print format. From classical photo-stories to contemporary multi-media shows the website and magazine, and now the gallery, continue to stimulate and innovate. By showcasing this work Foto8 aims to inform and involve the viewer whilst pioneering new ways to tell stories. Foto8 believes that documentary photography performs an essential role in modern society. It is a valuable tool of communication as well as a vital part of educating ourselves about the lives of others which are often distant from our own. Photography allows us to look into, as well as at, lives of other people, to learn about their world, and in the process to define the issues that are important to us.

Photographer and MacArthur fellow Susan Meiselas is best known for her work covering political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 80s. The International Center of Photography (ICP) is hosting the first U.S. overview of her work, "Susan Meiselas: In History." It's on display through January 4, 2009.

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.