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David Guttenfelder Photojournalist in Ukraine for the NewYorkTimes August 20, 2022

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David Guttenfelder has been to Ukraine before for the New York Times, covering the Orange Revolution in 2004, a seminal political election that moved Ukraine to the West and closer to its democratic aspirations. This assignment looks to be set for a long time.“ Russia has made little to no inroads in the Donetsk province, and U.S. officials don’t think they’ll take it this year,”. Colin Kahl, a Pentagon official, has pointed out that Russia’s minuscule progress in the east has come at a high cost — about 20,000 troop deaths and another 50,000 or so injuries. Michael Schwirtz, a Times correspondent who has been covering the war in Ukraine, calls these numbers “astonishing.” How accurate these figures  are is anybody’s guess. Morale is low in the Russian Army and the Ukrainian army, with 16 US Himars doing damage behind Russian lines, remains highly motivated. Odesa is close to the front lines but remains in Ukrainian hands. Grain shipments from the port of Odesa Ukraine to Africa have started in earnest.

Seth Jones, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “The Russians probably don’t have enough effective combat forces to fully take Donetsk,” and the Ukrainians are counter attacking, particularly in Crimea.

The HIMARS are one reason that Ukraine has been able to strike more deeply into Russian-held territory than before. One target has been Kherson, a region in southern Ukraine that Russia controls and where Ukraine may be gearing up for a counterattack. Ukraine has also carried out successful sabotage attacks in Crimea, an area of southern Ukraine that Vladimir Putin annexed in 2014.

“To walk right in and start blowing up military bases in Crimea is a real embarrassment for Russia.

With all this said, Russia still has some major advantages. Putin still seems in control of Russia’s government, allowing him to play a long game. And Russia has a history of winning wars of attrition, recently in Syria and Chechnya and less recently during World War II — although not in Afghanistan, which demonstrates that Russia can also lose these conflicts.

In the current war, Russian troops may not be making much progress, but neither is Ukraine. It still has not recaptured large amounts of territory in the east or the south. Ukrainian troops and civilians have also suffered heavy casualties. The Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant UKRAINE in Ukraine is a bone of contention between the opposing sides, with the Ukrainians accusing Russian of weaponising nuclear energy and the UN and nuclear inspectors involved  in solving the issue.

David Guttenfelder Photojournalist Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant

 

 

 

 

DANIEL BEREHULIAK Australian Ukrainian Photographer in IRPIN UKRAINE March 29, 2022 for the New York Times March 31, 2022

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Photo Daniel Berehuliak New York Times IRPIN UKRAINE

IRPIN, Ukraine — A stray dog accompanied Ukrainian fighters of the Odin Unit, as they took cover inside of a building after hearing incoming rounds, during a clearing-out operation of remaining Russian forces on March 29, 2022 in Irpin, Ukraine.
Creeping forward block by block, Ukrainian soldiers in a reconnaissance unit on Tuesday found signs of a retreating Russian army everywhere: a charred armored vehicle, abandoned body armor decorated with an orange and black St. George ribbon, a Russian military symbol, and the traditional blue-and-white striped underwear issued to Russian soldiers, cast aside in a forest.
What they did not encounter was the Russian army in any organized state. After a month of savage street fighting, one of the most pivotal battles in the war so far ended this week — at least for now — with an improbable victory in Irpin for Ukraine’s outgunned and outnumbered military. By Tuesday, Ukrainian forces had quashed any significant Russian resistance in this strategic outlying town near Kyiv, the capital.
Pockets of Russian soldiers remained, posing risks. A firefight erupted in the afternoon when Ukrainian soldiers destroyed a lone Russian armored personnel carrier in an otherwise empty neighborhood, according to a commander.
Text by Andrew Kramer
To read the full story: https://www.nytimes.com/…/ukraine-russia-kyiv-irpin.html

Apple Daily Publisher Jimmy Lai arrested in Hong Kong under National Security Law August 10, 2020

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Shared from the NYT’s a story

by Austin RamzyTiffany May

By Austin Ramzy and Tiffany May

The pro-democracy figure is the most high-profile figure detained under the sweeping law imposed by Beijing on the semiautonomous territory.

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong police on Monday arrested Jimmy Lai, the media tycoon and critic of the Chinese Communist Party, on charges of violating the territory’s new national security law, making him the most high-profile target of the sweeping legislation imposed by Beijing.

Mr. Lai’s company, Next Digital, publishes Apple Daily, a fiercely pro-democracy newspaper that regularly takes on the Hong Kong government and the Chinese leadership. He is often denounced by Chinese officials, pro-Beijing news outlets in Hong Kong and China’s state-run news media.

Apple Daily reported Monday that Mr. Lai, 72, was being investigated on charges of collusion with a foreign country or external elements.

Mark Simon, a senior executive with Next Digital, said that Mr. Lai had been arrested along with Mr. Lai’s two sons. They were also charged for violations of company business code. He noted that Mr. Lai’s sons were not affiliated with Apple Daily, which suggests that the authorities are investigating Mr. Lai’s private investments.

A number of senior Next Digital employees were also being questioned at their homes, Mr. Simon said. The Hong Kong police said in a tweet that so far, seven people had been arrested on suspicion of violating the national security law.

The publishing mogul was previously arrested in February and accused of participating in an unauthorized protest last year. He faces charges for joining an unauthorized vigil on June 4 to mark the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown by Beijing.

His arrest on Monday is his first under the new security law, which gives the authorities broad powers to target what they view as secession, subversion, terrorist activities and collusion with foreign powers.

Mr. Lai previously said he believed the new law would be used against him. Soon after he first wrote about the new law, the Communist Party-owned Global Times newspaper cited mainland experts who said his tweets had provided “evidence of subversion.”

“I have always thought I might one day be sent to jail for my publications or for my calls for democracy in Hong Kong,” he wrote in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times. “But for a few tweets, and because they are said to threaten the national security of mighty China? That’s a new one, even for me.”

 

 

 

Iran admission of guilt after shooting down of Ukrainian Airliner: January 12, 2020

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KYIV, Ukraine — Iran’s stunning admission that its forces errantly downed a Ukrainian jetliner — reversing three days of denial — did little to quell growing fury inside the country and beyond on Saturday as the deadly tragedy turned into a volatile political crisis for Tehran’s leaders and overshadowed their struggle with the United States.

Ukrainian officials criticized Iran’s conduct, suggesting that the Iranians would not have admitted responsibility if investigators from Ukraine had not found evidence of a missile strike in the wreckage of the crash, which killed all 176 people aboard.

Protests erupted in Tehran and other Iranian cities as dumbfounded citizens found a new reason to mistrust Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and other officials. Protest videos even showed some shouting “Khamenei is a murderer!” and anti-riot police tear-gassing violent demonstrators.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in his first reaction to Iran’s announcement, said his country would “insist on a full admission of guilt” by Tehran. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, home to many of those aboard the destroyed jetliner, demanded a “full and complete investigation” and said “Iran must take full responsibility.” Both spoke by phone with Mr. Rouhani.

Contradictions and miscues complicated Iran’s message even as it took responsibility. Iran’s military, in its initial admission early Saturday, said the flight’s crew had taken a sharp, unexpected turn that brought it near a sensitive military base — an assertion that was immediately disputed by the Ukrainians.

Within Iran, as citizens vented anger toward their government, officials offered a mix of contrition and an insistence that Iran was not solely to blame. Mr. Rouhani called the error an “unforgivable mistake.” General Hajizadeh, whose forces were responsible, said he had wished death upon himself because of the blunder.

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, wrote in an apology posted on Twitter: “Human error at time of crisis caused by US adventurism led to disaster.”

Some protest images posted on Iranian social media even showed torn photos of General Suleimani.

“Death to liars!” and “Death to the dictator!” shouted Iranians gathered in squares in the capital Tehran, videos shared on social media showed. “You have no shame!” shouted several young men, and the crowd joined in a chorus.

In another tense spillover from the protests, the Iranian authorities briefly seized Britain’s Tehran ambassador, Rob Macaire, for what news accounts in Iran called his “involvement in provoking suspicious acts” at a protest. Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, denounced the seizure as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

Many protesters carried candles and placed flowers at the gates of the universities and other public places in Tehran. Conservatives and supporters of the government accused the authorities of having intentionally misled the public about what had brought down the plane. Its passengers included many young Iranians on their way to Canada for graduate study.

The criticism of Iran over the crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, a Boeing 737-800, now threatens to eclipse whatever international sympathy Iran has garnered in its escalating confrontation with the Trump administration, which has faced widespread criticism over stoking a violent confrontation with Iran’s leaders.

For three days after the crash, Iranian officials not only denied their military forces were responsible but blamed what they called the aircraft’s mechanical problems and said suggestions of Iranian culpability were American propaganda. Satellite surveillance and video clips of the plane strongly suggested Iran’s own air defense missile system blasted the plane out of the sky.

The Iranians reversed themselves early Saturday.

The newly critical language by Ukrainian officials in the aftermath of Iran’s admission stood in sharp contrast to more cautious statements in recent days. It partly reflected the frustrations in a country that had been thrust in the middle of the conflict between the United States and Iran.

Mr. Danilov, the Ukrainian security official, said Iran had been forced into conceding its military had brought down the jet because the evidence of a missile strike had become overwhelmingly clear to international investigators.

He said Ukrainian experts on the ground in Iran had gathered such evidence since their arrival on Thursday despite apparent Iranian efforts to complicate the investigation, including by sweeping debris into piles rather than carefully documenting it.

“When a catastrophe happens, everything is supposed to stay in its place,” he said. “Every element is described, every element is photographed, every element is fixed in terms of its location and coordinates. To our great regret, this was not done.”

Mr. Zelensky’s office posted on Facebook photos of plane wreckage and a Canadian man’s passport showing small piercings — consistent with the hypothesis that shrapnel from a surface-to-air missile hit the plane.

“We expect Iran to assure its readiness for a full and open investigation, to bring those responsible to justice, to return the bodies of the victims, to pay compensation, and to make official apologies through diplomatic channels,” Mr. Zelensky said in a post on his Facebook page. “We hope that the investigation will continue without artificial delays and obstacles.”

Who Is Afraid of Shahidul Alam? August 24, 2018

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Photo of Protest by Monirul Alum a contributor to Metaphor Images Agency

Shahidul Alam is a Bangladeshi photographer and writer with a special interest in education and new media. He set up the award winning Drik Picture Library, the Bangladesh Photographic Institute, Pathshala — South Asian Institute of Photography the DrikNews photo agency and Banglarights, the Bangladesh Human rights portal. His work has been shown in leading museums including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Royal Albert Hall in London, Le Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Photo Shahidul Alam DRIK Majority World

 

The current question is. Who is afraid  of Shahidul Alam, a respected photographer and educator in his own country.

On Aug. 5, Shahidul Alam, the acclaimed Bangladeshi photojournalist, was dragged from his home by around 30 plainclothes policemen and taken into custody. The policemen forced their way into Mr. Alam’s apartment building at 10:30 p.m., snatched the cellphones of the building’s security guards and destroyed its video surveillance cameras.

Yet someone managed to record the moment via a cellphone video. Mr. Alam can be heard screaming. “I am innocent,” he says, repeatedly. And, “I want a lawyer.” It was horrifying to watch Mr. Alam, whom I know as an amiable, self-effacing, brilliant man, scream in the video. Thus does terror enter our daily lives these days.

Mr. Alam’s work over the decades has captured some of the most important political and ecological questions in Bangladesh and the region around it. A friend remembers waking up to the tragedy of the Rohingya people from Myanmar after seeing an exhibition of Mr. Alam’s photographs in New York. I first encountered his work after a cyclone in Bangladesh in 1991. I was involved in the relief effort and visited the affected area after the storm. Mr. Alam’s photographs captured the reality of my experience. Befittingly, in 2014, Mr. Alam was awarded the Shilpakala Padak, one of the highest honors for artists in the country, by the president of Bangladesh.

The trigger for Mr. Alam’s arrest was an interview he did with Al Jazeera, in which he spoke critically of the brutal repression of student demonstrations in Dhaka by the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. He also spoke about official corruption, years of misrule, the suppression of dissent and extrajudicial killings and disappearances under the watch of Ms. Hasina’s governing Awami League. Paradoxically, the imprisonment of Mr. Alam only proved his point.

Photo Shahidul Alam DRIK

After a speeding bus killed two students in Dhaka in late July, thousands of students — including schoolchildren — protested in the streets. As the protests intensified into a general outcry against the government, the government responded by unleashing mobs of the Awami League party faithful to attack the student protesters. Researchers from Human Rights Watch spoke to several eyewitnesses who described how the protesters were attacked by members of Bangladesh Chhatra League and Awami Jubo League, the student wing and the youth wing of the Awami League.

Mr. Alam was among the journalists who witnessed the Awami League faithful attacking student protesters while the police stood by. He photographed the protests and the repression.

The celebrated photojournalist wasn’t the only person arrested. Numerous student protesters were also arrested and were tortured in police custody.

General elections in Bangladesh are expected between October and December. It is the obligation of artists and intellectuals to be constructively critical of their country of citizenship. Ms. Hasina’s government must be deeply afraid of a credible, respected person like Mr. Alam, whose criticisms are taken seriously, both nationally and globally. His arrest and imprisonment is an attempt to silence critical voices.

Ms. Hasina’s government is not stopping with his arrest. It is trying to find ways of defaming him and tarnishing his reputation. Mr. Alam’s partner, Rahnuma Ahmed, an anthropologist, visited him in prison and was startled to realize their meeting was being secretly videotaped by the prison authorities.

“Friends in the electronic media tell me they have been instructed by the agencies to produce ‘dirty stories’ on Shahidul, there is even talk of constructing him as a pedophile — pathetic given his love for children known to everyone,” Ms. Ahmed said in an email.

This is not surprising, given the bleak drift toward authoritarianism in Bangladesh in the past few years. As reported by Human Rights Watch and numerous journalists, hundreds of Bangladeshis have been picked up by law enforcement agencies and have disappeared for weeks or months at a time. The whereabouts of many of them remains unknown. In the name of a war on drugs, hundreds have been killed by extrajudicial means.

Two days after Mr. Alam’s arrest, he was produced in a Dhaka court and charged under Section 57 of Bangladesh’s infamous Information and Communication Technology Act, for online speech that “hurts the image of the nation.” He was barefoot and limping when he was dragged into court. Witnesses said Mr. Alam showed clear signs of mental and physical abuse. He shouted: “I have been assaulted. My bloodstained shirt was washed and put back on me. I was threatened that if I didn’t testify as they directed, I would be further … ” Then his voice trailed off and the rest of what he said was unclear.

The court allowed the police to keep Mr. Alam in custody for a week and also allowed brief visits to a hospital for medical treatment. On Aug. 12, Mr. Alam was produced in court again and sent to jail until the investigations into charges against him are completed. If convicted, he faces up to 14 years in prison.

 


Stanley Greene Photojournalist Dies at 68 May 20, 2017

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A Tribute to Stanley Greene, Teller of UncomfortableTruths

By James Estrin  

Stanley Greene, who started as a music and fashion photographer and later became one of the leading international conflict photographers, died Friday in Paris at age 68. A founding member of the photographer-owned agency Noor Images, he had been ill with liver cancer for several years, associates said.

Mr. Greene, one of the few African-American photographers who worked internationally, was known for his visceral and brutally honest photographs of wars, including conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Afghanistan and Iraq, that at times were too raw for many publications.

“You want to sit there comfortably with your newspaper and blueberry muffin, and you don’t want to see pictures that are going to upset your morning,” Mr. Greene said in a 2010 interview with Lens. “That is the job of a journalist, to upset your morning.”

Mr. Greene’s commitment to telling the unvarnished truth extended to his candid assessments of the ethical questions facing photojournalism. At times he seemed like an Old Testament prophet, willing to speak unsettling truths no matter the consequences. He railed against the use of Photoshop to alter the scenes of news images, a practice that he said turned photos into “cartoons.” And he scorned photographers who staged images in an attempt to recreate a missed moment after arriving late to a news scene.

“The public has lost trust in the media,” he told Lens in 2015. “We have to be ambassadors of the truth, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard because the public no longer trusts the media. We are considered merchants of misery and therefore get a bad rap.”

Mr. Greene had once aspired to be a painter like Matisse or a musician like Jimi Hendrix, but he discovered his true instrument the first time he picked up a camera, he told Michael Kamber in the 2010 Lens interview. Mr. Kamber, a former conflict photographer himself and the author of “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq,” this week compared Mr. Greene to a jazz musician.

“Stanley is like the Charles Mingus of photography,” said Mr. Kamber, the founder of the Bronx Documentary Center. “Stanley is about his heart, his emotions and his feelings. His photos are very impressionistic, like a stream of consciousness. Stanley was living on the front edge; all out, all the time. He wasn’t holding anything back for the future.”

Mr. Greene received numerous honors including the Eugene Smith Grant in 2004, the Lifetime Achievement Visa d’or Award in 2016 and five World Press Photo awards. His books include the autobiographical “Black Passport” and “Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003.” Anne Tucker, the former curator of photography for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, featured Mr. Greene in “War/Photography,” a comprehensive exhibit and book.

“You have to acknowledge the strength of his eye, his capacity to encompass issues in a picture frame — to understand a story and put it into visual terms — as well as his courage and tenacity,” Ms. Tucker said. “He was one of those journalists who went towards the bullet because that’s where the story was.”

What he was not, she said, was a good self-promoter. “He cared about the story, he cared about the issues, he cared about getting it right,” she explained.

Stanley Greene was born in Brooklyn on Valentine’s Day in 1949 and grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. His father, also Stanley, was an actor, producer, filmmaker and director; while his mother, Javotee Sutton Greene, was an actress. His father, also an activist devoted to black culture, was blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and reduced to taking anonymous bit parts. Still, he had hoped his son would become an actor.

He had a “somewhat privileged yet traumatic childhood,” said his longtime friend Jules Allen. “There was a loneliness there that was insatiable, but he was blessed enough to at least partially deal with his pain through photography.”

As a teenager, he joined the Black Panthers and was active in the antiwar movement. His dreams of becoming a painter gave way to photography, and he was encouraged in that pursuit by the renowned photojournalist W. Eugene Smith.

In the 1970s, Mr. Allen and Mr. Greene shared a darkroom and a studio in San Francisco while Mr. Greene studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and photographed the local music scene. Among his early work was “The Western Front,” which chronicled the city’s punk scene in the 1970s and ’80s.

He cut as striking a figure as some of the acts he photographed. “Stanley was a punk rocker who drove a Mustang,” Mr. Allen said. “He wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, a black beret, two scarves, three watches and four bracelets as well as two great cameras and a bandolier of film strapped across his chest.”

Mr. Greene worked as a fashion photographer in the 1980s and moved to Paris where he later joined the Vu photo agency. He traveled constantly, working extensively in Africa and the former Soviet Union. He was the only Western photographer in Russia’s White House during an attempted coup against the president, Boris Yeltsin. Trapped inside, amid shelling and gunfire, Mr. Greene continued to photograph throughout the building, capturing two images that received World Press Photo Awards.

“The fact that I thought I was going to die gave me courage,” he told Lens in 2010. “Courage is control of fear. I think that this incident is the one that steeled me. I’m no hero, but it made me so that once I commit to a story, I have to see it through.”

A 1992 Moscow encounter with Kadir van Lohuizen, a fellow member of Vu, marked the beginning of a close friendship that would continue at Noor. “He was always my big brother,” Mr. van Lohuizen said in an interview on Thursday. “Stanley is my big brother, and Noor is his family”

The agency was born from a conversation between the two, who often worked together.

“Stanley and I wanted to be independent at the time of transition from analog to digital and from small agencies to a few large ones,” Mr. van Lohuizen said. “We believed that visual storytelling was the essence more than ever and that we should stake the ship and steer it in our own direction.”

In “Black Passport,” Mr. Greene talked candidly about how he felt while covering stories of violence or catastrophe in Rwanda, Chechnya, Haiti and New Orleans. He spoke just as openly about his personal life, including his marriages and numerous love affairs. His Noor colleague Nina Berman described him as “a hopeless romantic, forever falling madly in love — and being pained and hurt.”

He was a “gracious and generous mentor” and teacher to young photographers, she added, and one of “too few” black American photographers working internationally.

Not surprisingly, given the emotional and personal toll of his approach to life and work, along with the physical dangers, he discouraged others from following in his footsteps.

“Though I’m bombarded by young photographers who ask me how to become a conflict photographer, I tell them, ‘Get a life,’ ” he said in 2010. “If they persist, I tell them about the consequences. I tell them there is no glory.”

Even as his health was failing, Mr. Greene continued to work, returning last month from a road trip through northern Russia where he and Maria Turchenkova began a project on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

At the end of “Black Passport,” Mr. Greene reflected on the centrality of storytelling to the human experience. Wars are fought, he said, because people have different views of the same story.

“Photography is my language and it gives me the power to tell what otherwise is not told,” he said. “Eugene Smith told me vision is a gift, and you have to give something back. He haunts me like that. It’s not the bang-bang that compels me. It never was. At the end of the day it is not about death, it is about life. The quest is to try to understand why human beings behave the way they do. The question is, how does this happen? And sometimes, the only way to find out is to go to where it is happening. One day the neighbors are talking to each other over the fence, and the next they are shooting at each other. Why is it that we don’t consider life precious, and instead, we literally let it drip through our fingers?”

 

 

 

 

Heather Angel Capturing Pollination April 26, 2017

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Spend just a few minutes in a garden this time of year, and you will likely see a pollinator buzzing or fluttering from flower to flower. While most of us are aware of this vitally important ecosystem service, the act itself — the transfer of pollen from stamen to stigma via tiny feet, wings, antennas or mouthparts — is largely unseen.

In “Pollination Power,” Heather Angel, a photographer based in Surrey, England, exposes the process in macrophotography, which stands out not only for its range and aesthetics, but also for its scientific exactness: She was determined to show not just creatures in flowers, but the instant release of pollen itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/science/pollination-power-photography.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=Science&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article

Australian Photojournalist Daniel Berehulak wins Second Pulitzer April 14, 2017

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Heavy rain pours on the body of Romeo Torres Fontanilla, 37, who was killed by two unidentified gunmen riding motorcycles. Oct. 11, 2016, in Manila, the Philippines. Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Australian freelance Photojournalist Daniel Berehulak was awarded the Pulitzer Prize – his second – for breaking news photography for his coverage in the New York Times of the brutal antidrug campaign by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. E. Jason Wambsgans of the Chicago Tribune received the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for a story that chronicled the recovery of a 10-year old boy who was the victim of a shooting.

Police investigators gather evidence in the killing of Frederick Mafe, 48, and Arjay Lumbago, 23, as their bodies lay sprawled in the middle of a street. Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Over a span of 35 days, Mr. Berehulak photographed 57 homicides at 41 crime scenes where drug users and dealers had been murdered by vigilantes emboldened by President Duterte’s mandate: “kill them all.” He worked closely with Rica Concepcion, a veteran local journalist and fixer, to interview bystanders and the relatives of victims, go to jails and rehabilitation centers and to accompany police officers in different neighborhoods. The resulting interactive piece, “They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals,” featured both his images and the vivid text accompanying it.

https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/photography-pulitzers-recognize-aftermath-of-violence-here-and-abroad/

Inmates watch as drug suspects are processed inside a police station. Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

The Importance of History: An amazing Investigation into Black Lives on Brooklyn Street January 28, 2017

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This amazing story from Annie Correal who finds an abandoned photo album on a street in Brooklyn and tracks down the family

who put it together highlights the importance of personal and local history to record what is lost on a daily basis.

Personal history is ephemeral, like people’s lives and can easily finish up on the trash heap.

Annie Correal’s personal adventure and perseverance has given us an eloquent insight into black lives

and a wonderful history lesson.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/nyregion/love-and-black-lives-in-pictures-found-on-a-brooklyn-street.html?action=click&contentCollection=The%20Upshot&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

Love and Black Lives,
in Pictures Found
on a Brooklyn Street

A discarded photo album reveals a rich history of black lives, from the
segregated South to Harlem dance halls to a pretty block in Crown Heights.

By ANNIE CORREAL  

 

One night six years ago, on a quiet side street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, I came across a photo album that had been put out with the trash. I lived around the corner, and I was walking home when I saw it sitting beneath a streetlamp on Lincoln Place.

It looked handmade, with a wooden cover bound with a shoelace. But it had been tied up with twine, like a bunch of old newspapers, and left atop a pile of recycling.

Whitney Richardson New York Times: African Stories January 11, 2017

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Metaphor Online, New York Times, New York Times LENS , comments closed

 

The news is ethnocentric and parochial. Unless it has an international impact on business or economics or a countries vested interests it remains off the Western radar.  Whitney Richardson pushes an agenda for the use of local photographers and journalists to increase exposure to stories that are important internationally. When I covered the Orange Revolution as a freelancer in Ukraine in 2004 most of the working photographers for Western publications were from Western Countries. The wire agencies were not organised enough to be a threat to freelancers. That changed subsequently. As in Iraq and Afghanistan and now Syria local photographers are extensively used. Local contact and local knowledge are more than useful for quality journalism. Bohdan Warchomij Metaphor Online

Whitney Richardson NEW YORK TIMES

Akintunde Akinleye was at home one December morning in 2006 when a friend called him with urgent news. Hours earlier, a petroleum pipeline had exploded in a town outside Lagos, Nigeria, his home city, leaving more than 200 people dead. Hopping on his motorbike with his camera, Mr. Akinleye, a Reuters staff photographer based in Nigeria, swerved through miles of thick traffic and arrived on site in less than 30 minutes.

Pacing through flaming rubble, he spotted an older adult man carrying a bright blue bucket of water. Mr. Akinleye lifted his camera and took several shots of him rinsing his face as dark smoke stained the sky. His final frame was circulated to news media globally, and even made the front page of The New York Times. It also earned him a World Press Photo award for spot news single in 2007, making him the first Nigerian to receive the prestigious award.

Mr. Akinleye’s sudden thrust into news media prominence is rare for even the most experienced photojournalists, but it’s an even rarer occurrence for an African one. Of the most covered news events in sub-Saharan Africa over the past several years — including antigovernment protests in South Africa and Ethiopia, the Boko Haram kidnapping in northern Nigeria and West Africa’s Ebola crisis — only a handful of stories were assigned to African photographers by major international publications.

The absence of local coverage in international markets has also been reflected in the top awards. According to World Press Photo’s State of Photography 2015 report, only 2 percent of their contest submissions annually come from African photographers.

Since World Press Photo released its initial report in 2015, Lars Boering, the organization’s managing director, said accessing data about their contest applicants as well as surveying the photojournalism industry were critical first steps in closing this gap. The organization recently held its first Joop Swart Master Class in Kenya, working with photographers across East Africa, and plans to host another one, in Accra, Ghana, this March. Other organizations, including the Magnum Foundation and the Prince Claus fund, have also invested in supporting photojournalists on the continent.

“We needed to flip it open. It will make us vulnerable, but it was important to start talking about it,” said Mr. Boering, who is based in Amsterdam. “There are a billion people living in Africa. We should make sure the visuals we get reflect our worldview.”

Mr. Akinleye, who has spent the past decade covering West Africa for Reuters, said as digital cameras have become more accessible, he has seen a surge in the number of local photographers in the field. But better equipment hasn’t necessarily equated to more opportunities for aspiring photojournalists, he said. With the absence of formal photojournalism programs at universities, young photographers are not learning the fundamentals of storytelling and editing, Mr. Akinleye said. Independent newspapers in his country have also struggled to navigate hostile relations with government leaders known for threatening the local news media, he said.

“Young people are asking, how do we get work,” said Mr. Akinleye, who noted that the majority of working photographers he knew in Africa were stringers for wire services.

“I have told them to look for opportunities abroad to gain exposure and to learn the ethical standards of the industry,” he said. “If I wasn’t working with Reuters, I probably would just be part of the crowd.”

International news agencies, including The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, have long been entry points for local photojournalists, especially during times of extreme conflict. During the United States-led war in Iraq, news organizations heavily depended on local news photographers, out of concern for safety and financial pressures, to document the scene. Within months of training alongside other wire photographers, Iraqi photojournalists began dominating international coverage of the war — producing award-winning images of the political transformation in their home country.

“We had taxi drivers and former studio photographers and we gave them cameras,” said two-time Pulitzer prize winning photojournalist, Muhammed Muheisen, who is currently the chief photographer for the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan for the AP. “The region was getting a lot of attention, so it became a place where Iraqi photographers could develop and show their talent.”

Khalid Mohammed, AP’s chief photographer in Iraq, was one of those emerging talents. Mr. Mohammed, who worked for an Iraqi newspaper before the war, gained the reputation of beating foreign photojournalists to deadly scenes and was one of six Iraqis on the AP team that won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005. Many of his most striking images, including one showing the charred bodies of U.S. contractors hanging from a bridge in Fallujah in 2004, appeared in publications around the world.

“I choose to cover the war to expose the crimes and violations against my people,” Mr. Mohammed, who is currently in Mosul, wrote in an email interview. “You had to be ready to accept the sacrifice and know that this picture may be the last image,” he said.

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