Syrian Deaths February 22, 2012
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- Reporter Marie Colvin and photographer Remi Olchik, who were killed in Syrian government shelling in Homs on Wed. Ivor Ivor Prickett, Sunday Times/Associated Press and Yoan Valat/Associated Press)
Two foreign journalists have been killed by Syrian government troops shelling the southern city of Homs.
In Paris, the government of France identified the two as Remi Ochlik, a French photographer, and Marie Colvin, an American reporter. Colvin was reported elsewhere to have been working for the Sunday Times in Britain.
Omar Shaker, a Syrian activist, said the two journalists were killed Wednesday when several rockets hit the garden of a house used by activists and journalists in the besieged Homs neighbourhood of Baba Amr.
The CBC’s Susan Ormiston, who reported from Syria in January, said Wednesday that Colvin “had snuck in … smuggled in through the Lebanese or Turkish border, with escorts, Free Syrian Army escorts. She said in [a] report on Sunday that her house had already been shelled, and they must have moved to another accommodation which was hit by … shelling this morning.”
“It’s reported that as these journalists escaped this house, they were hit with rocket attacks, and that’s how Marie Colvin was killed. The second journalist is a young French photographer who won a World Press Award this year for covering Libya. His name is Remi Ochlik, and he was there covering the crisis in Homs. By my count, we are now looking at four journalists who have been killed in the Homs area since January.”
The website of photo agency IP3 Press – which was founded by 28-year-old Mr Ochlik – said he was an award-winning photojournalist who had covered events including the 2004 rioting in Haiti and the Arab world upheaval last year.
Hijacked III launches at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art February 19, 2012
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Hijacked, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art , add a commentHijacked III: Contemporary Photography from Australia & the UK.
18 February – 8 April 2012
All galleries
Mark McPherson at launch of Hijacked III at PICA
Take a trip into the fantastic and foreboding world of Hijacked III: Contemporary Photography from Australia and the UK. More than 24 artists from opposite sides of the globe offer unique photographs ranging from oblique takes on portraiture and collage to snapshots of society at its best and worst. This exhibition presents far reaching photographic practices which question what it means to look, catch or construct images for the 21st century.
Curated by Louise Clements, Mark McPherson and Leigh Robb and presented as part of the Perth International Arts Festival and FotoFreo, the exhibition coincides with a simultaneous exhibition at QUAD Gallery, Derby, UK and the launch of an 400 page publication featuring 32 artists.
Burmese Daze: Julian Tennant February 13, 2012
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Burmese Daze from julian tennant on Vimeo.
Samuel Aranda wins World Press Photo of the Year 2011 February 12, 2012
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Corbis, Samuel Aranda, World Press Awards , add a commentMetaphor Online posted this sensitive thought provoking photo by Samuel Aranda in an earlier post. Yesterday the international jury of the 55th annual World Press Photo Contest announced the picture by Samuel Aranda from Spain as the World Press Photo of the Year 2011. The picture shows a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on 15 October 2011. Samuel Aranda was working in Yemen on assignment for The New York Times. He is represented by Corbis Images.
Comments on the winning photo by the jury
Koyo Kouoh: “It is a photo that speaks for the entire region. It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring. But it shows a private, intimate side of what went on. And it shows the role that women played, not only as care-givers, but as active people in the movement.”
Nina Berman: “In the Western media, we seldom see veiled women in this way, at such an intimate moment. It is as if all of the events of the Arab Spring resulted in this single moment – in moments like this.”
Aidan Sullivan: “The winning photo shows a poignant, compassionate moment, the human consequence of an enormous event, an event that is still going on. We might never know who this woman is, cradling an injured relative, but together they become a living image of the courage of ordinary people that helped create an important chapter in the history of the Middle East.”
Manoocher Deghati: “The photo is the result of a very human moment, but it also reminds us of something important, that women played a crucial part in this revolution. It is easy to portray the aggressiveness of situations like these. This image shows the tenderness that can exist within all the aggression. The violence is still there, but it shows another side.”
Now in its 55th year, the annual World Press Photo Contest is universally recognized as the world’s leading international contest for photojournalists, setting the standard for the profession. The judging is conducted at the World Press Photo office, where all entries are presented anonymously to the jury, who discusses and debates their merits over a period of two weeks. The jury operates independently, and a secretary without voting rights safeguards a fair procedure.
The jury gave prizes in nine themed categories to 57 photographers of 24 nationalities.
- World Press Photo 2011 Samuel Aranda/Corbis
Avatars at Perth Centre for Photography February 7, 2012
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : PCP, Robbie Cooper , add a comment
- Photo Robbie Cooper
Perth Centre for Photography
With Foto Freo coming up and the Perth Centre for Photography reopening in a new city space Perth will be awash with exciting new exhibitions. Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego’s dyptychs of subject and avatar is one.
As a part of the core programme the Perth Centre for Photography (PCP) has two exhibitions, Alter Ego, by Robbie Cooper and, A New Kind of Beauty, by Phillip Tolenado.
Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego exhibition explores personal and social identities being shaped in the meta verse at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Portraits of online gamers and virtual-world participants from America, Asia and Europe are paired with images of their avatars, with profiles of their real-world and virtual self-created characters.
For Phillip Tolenado’s exhibition he explains, “I’m interested in what we define as beauty, when we choose to create it ourselves. Beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make? Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? Or is it defined by the surgeon’s hand?”
Just a reminder that the PCP has moved and is now located at 100 Aberdeen Street Northbridge. And if you are in Perth this week the PCP is celebrating the opening of its new gallery on Wednesday the 8th of February at 6pm.
- Photo Robbie Cooper
Extreme Weather Ukraine Eastern Europe February 5, 2012
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Ukraine, Weather Photos , add a commentIn Ukraine, thirty-eight more fatalities were reported from frostbite and hypothermia on Friday, raising the nation’s death toll to 101. Emergency officials have said many of the victims were homeless.
Mykola Blyznyuk of the Health Ministry told the Kiev Post newspaper that many of the victims of hypothermia had broken their legs in falls and spent a long time on the ground in freezing temperatures while waiting for help to arrive.
Of the Ukrainians who have died since the cold weather hit Jan. 27, 64 were found frozen on the streets, 11 died in hospitals and 26 in their homes, emergency officials said.
It was so cold there, that some 1,500 swans, sea gulls and ducks froze to the ice in a small harbor near Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odessa, forcing emergency workers to use ships to break up the surface and free the birds, officials said.
The weeklong cold snap — Eastern Europe’s worst in decades — is causing power outages, frozen water pipes and the widespread closure of schools, nurseries, airports and bus routes.
- A view of the frozen River Dnieper in an air temperature around minus 4 Fahrenheit in snow covered central Kiev, on Feb. 3 Photo Gleb Garanich / Reuters
- An elderly woman is wrapped in thick winter clothes as she tries to sell cigarettes to passers-by in downtown Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 3. Sergey Dolzhenko / EPA
- A man walks in the center of Kiev where temperatures dropped to minus 20 Celsius on February 1, 2012. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)
- An Orthodox Christian cathedral stands amid a winter landscape in Kiev on January 30, 2012. (Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press)
- A homeless man drinks tea in a shelter in Donetsk, Ukraine on February 2, 2012. (Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty Images
- A woman looks out a bus in Bucharest on February 2, 2012. (Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press)
Bill Cunningham February 4, 2012
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Bill Cunningham, Street Fashion , add a commentA sweet award winning film film about The New York Times street/fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. Saw this on David Dare Parker’s blog. A reminder of all the reasons why street photography remains magic realism for all of us.
Magnum Emergency Fund Announcement February 2, 2012
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Arthur Bondar, Metaphor Images , add a comment
- Scholarship winner Arthur Bondar Aleksandr lives close to the fence of the exclusion zone, in Gornostaypol village in Ukraine. He went into the zone for hunting, fishing, and picking mushrooms.
The Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund has made an exclusive announcement to LightBox disclosing the winners of its 2012 grants. The fund, which began in 2009, awards the annual prize to photographers from around the world who use their cameras to shed light on underserved issues and communities.
This year’s winners are:
Evgenia Arbugaeva for Tiksi, the Far North
Rena Effendi for Capturing Coptic Life: Egypt’s Sectarian Struggle
Eric Gottesman for Baalu Girma
Sebastian Liste for The Brazilian Far West
Benjamin Lowy for iLibya: Libya’s Growing Pains
Justin Maxon for Murder That Goes Unsolved and Unheard
Donald Weber for War is Good*
Paolo Woods for Poor Rich
The eight grantees were selected from a field of nearly 100 photographers nominated by ten professionals (including, in the past, TIME’s own director of photography, Kira Pollack). The winners will receive, along with funding, editorial guidance and research support to continue their work, which explores such diverse topics as peasant works in China and violence in the Pennsylvania projects.
The Emergency Fund, which was founded to counteract the shrinking of opportunities for long-form, socially-conscious photographic storytellers, is now in its third year of granting prizes. The program continues to grow, says Emma Raynes, the Emergency Fund’s program director. “We’ve been able to put more energy into helping photographers put depth into their work,” she says. Increased integration of social media has also made a difference; the Emergency Fund had already used Kickstarter to add to its power to help photographers, but the organization has expanded its presence on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.
Raynes says that this year’s winners tended to step away from traditional documentary and photojournalism styles and put a new emphasis on creative visual language. Benjamin Lowy, for example, made use of the Hipstamatic iPhone app in his photographs of Libya. “We wanted to invest in projects that were incredibly ambitious,” says Raynes.
In addition to funding the work of established photojournalists, the Magnum Emergency Fund awards scholarships to emerging photographers from nonwestern countries, for them to attend a 5-week summer program about documenting human-rights issues.
The 2012 Human Rights Fellows are:
Poulomi Basu, 29, of India
Arthur Bondar, 28, of Ukraine
Liu Jie, 30, of China
Pooyan Tabatabaei, 28, of Iran
And for all its support of photographers, the Emergency Fund aims to do more than help them do their work. The Foundation wants “to reach beyond the photography community into communities that are concerned about the issues,” says Raynes. “The main goal of our program is to get the work seen.”
Patrick Brown Endangered Species Emphas.is February 1, 2012
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In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.
Almost as great a task, however, has been trying to sell his project, “Trading in Extinction,” to book publishers on four continents. Many turned him down because of what they perceived as unpalatable subject matter. Others just demanded he pay for the privilege of being published.
“One publisher didn’t even want to see the work,” he said. “He just wanted to know if I had $30,000. I didn’t have it, because I spent my entire life savings producing this body of work.”’
The experience left him frustrated and demoralized — but still determined.
His luck changed when Emphas.is, the photography crowd-sourcing Web site, invited him to participate in its book publishing venture which began Monday. The photographers Peter Dench and William Daniels are also featured.
The founders of Emphas.is Publishing — Karim Ben Khelifa, Tina Ahrens, Walter Tjantele and Fanuel Dewever — are trying to fill a void for photographers trying to publish documentary and photojournalism projects.
“The publishing world today is not really sympathetic to photojournalists and probably with good reason,” Mr. Ben Khelifa said. “I think publishers do what they can, but photojournalism is a small niche. And that makes it hard for them to get the return.”” words by James Estrin
Patrick Brown/Panos Pictures A large bull elephant in Chitwan National Park with its leg chained. The 50-year-old animal was restrained after having killed five mahouts (handlers) in its lifetime.
The goal of Emphas.is Publishing is to help photographers produce books affordably while retaining full editorial and design control. Emphas.is will assist in financing, printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution and promotion.
All production costs will be raised in advance by pre-selling 100 limited-edition signed volumes, packaged with an archival photographic print, for $100. Larger prints and other services, like workshops, may also be used to defray production costs. Printed in Italy, a typical press run would be 1,000 copies. The remaining 900 books will also be pre-sold or made available through bookstores, social networks and the Emphas.is Web site.
Mr. Brown, who is represented by Panos Pictures and won a World Press Award in 2004, does not see himself as an animal activist. He wears leather shoes and enjoys a good steak. But the story of the exotic animal trade was not being told when he started a decade ago. The profits were enormous — for the smugglers, not for him — with rhinoceros horns selling for more per ounce than gold.
If enough people pre-order Mr. Brown’s book, he will have completed what he set out to do 10 years ago: expose the devastating effects of the trade on endangered animal species. Much more attention has been paid to the issue since he started, and he said he hopes that as enforcement increases, smugglers will look elsewhere.
“A smuggler is a smuggler,” Mr. Brown said. “He doesn’t care whether it’s half a tiger, guns or heroin. At the end of the day, it’s all about making a profit.”
Syria Protests February 1, 2012
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Photojournalism, Time Lightbox , add a comment
- Syria Protests
- Syria Protests
Syria’s people continue to protest. Time has posted a chronology of images from the ongoing protests against President Bashar al-Assad by the Syrian people and the Syrian Free Army.
Syrian troops have crushed pockets of resistance on the outskirts of Damascus hours before key UN talks.
Soldiers early on Tuesday moved into the two remaining towns still in rebel hands, activists said.
“Intense shooting was heard in Zamalka and Arbeen as the tanks advanced,” the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, citing its network of sources on the ground. Regime forces made sweeping arrests in the nearby town of Rankous, activists said.
Government forces on Monday regained control of most of the capital’s eastern suburbs after dissident soldiers captured the territory last week.
Monday’s death toll rose to 100 people, making it one of the bloodiest days since the uprising began in March, according to activists.
The bloodshed has increased as western and Arab countries step up pressure on President Bashar Assad’s ally Russia to overcome its opposition to a draft resolution.
The draft resolution demands that Assad halt the crackdown and implement an Arab peace plan that calls for him to hand over power to his vice president and allow creation of a unity government to pave the way for elections.
If Assad fails to comply within 15 days, the council would consider “further measures,” a reference to a possible move to impose economic or other sanctions.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2061413_2333495,00.html
