The Online Photographer

Congratulations to Daniel

Photo by Daniel Berehulak

Freelance photographer Daniel Berehulak has won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting, for his documentation of the peremptory execution of drug suspects in the Philippines by the Duterte government and associated vigilantes.

If you are someone capable of feeling the content of photographs, these pitiful scenes of violent murder and its aftermath will not be easy to look at. But thanks to photographers such as Daniel Berehulak, such scenes can become immediate for us in our comfortable armchairs, amplifying our understanding without submitting us to the heat, the shouts and screams and shooting, the press of danger, and the night rain. It would seem strange to apply superlatives to pictures of calamities like these. Congratulations to Daniel for an award well-deserved will have to suffice.

Mike
(Thanks to Speed)

P.S. There's an excellent interview with Daniel Berehulak by Jim Colton at PhotoJournal.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Chris Y.: "God help us all...."

Walter Glover: "Please indulge me as I momentarily engage in a spot of uncharacteristic flag-waving as I applaud Daniel Berehulak as living proof that Australians are capable at far more than just sporting success. This is Daniel's second solo Pulitzer prize: his first was for covering the ebola outbreak in West Africa (2015). He was also a Pulitzer recipient 2011 in partnership with Paula Bronstein for portraying the floods in Pakistan. Born in Sydney to Ukrainian immigrants, he is now based in New Delhi."

Darlene: "I shared Daniel's work (and E. Jason Wambsgans') with my students yesterday. Daniel's pictures shocked the students, along with the reality that Daniel is a foreign news photographer covering gruesome human rights atrocities in a land governed by the authority that is responsible for the atrocities. When the slide show was over, I asked if being a photojournalist was a cool job after all; not a sound was heard for what seemed like an interruption in time."

Random Excellence: The Girl in Red

Photo by O.G. O'Gorman

To this day, many photography enthusiasts find ready subjects in their own families. They're tolerant subjects, close at hand, and, of course, to each of us, highly worthy of recording!

This picture comes from a set of early autochromes taken in 1913 by Mervyn O'Gorman, "O.G." to his friends, who, says Amanda Uren at Mashable, was "superintendent of the Royal Balloon Factory, later the Royal Aircraft Factory. He was an enthusiastic early motorist, and published O'Gorman's Motoring Pocket Book in 1904."

The girl in red is his daughter, Christina. (Autochrome, just like early digital, was good at recording reds.)

Recent research suggests there is a hard "ceiling" to human lifespan at age 114, so Christina is all but certainly gone now. But according to the article, history gives us no details of her life. All we can see now is a young girl in red, her life ahead of her, posing patiently for her father.

Mike
(Thanks to Nigel Levy)

UPDATE: The Daily Mail has solved the mystery of the Girl in Red. First, the autochromes are owned by the Royal Photographic Society and are currently on display at the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK.

The young lady is not the photographer's daughter after all. Her name was Christina Elizabeth Frances Bevan, and she was the daughter of a King's College philosopher, Edwyn Robert Bevan. The Bevans were family friends of photographer O'Gorman's. She would have been 16 when the pictures were taken at Lulworth Cove in Dorset, and she died in 1981 at age 84, with no known husband or children.

Apparently the search for her identity engaged the attention of a number of amateur sleuths in the UK...which you can probably understand if you've ever watched PBS!

Here's the article if you're curious for more. Thanks to Richard Parkin for sending the link.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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