The Online Photographer

Photographer Desiree Rios

I was struck by the pictures in this interesting and somewhat offbeat feature in the NYT*: "A Luxury Dish Is Banned, and a Rural County Reels."

Politically you could have any of a range of reactions to the story, but let's not go there. In a nutshell, a traditional delicacy for wealthy people is banned in New York City as being gratuitously cruel to animals, echoing many other such bans worldwide, but the poor people who produce it—some of whom have had a dreadful odyssey to reach safe haven—are going to have their lives upended. The article tells the story from every perspective. I guess it touches me a few ways, as I live in rural Upstate New York, and my investment banker grandfather (d. 1993) happened to love duck liver pâté.

But...to the pictures.

They're the work of a young photojournalist named Desiree Rios (right). From the opening montage (I watched it several times through) to the inline illustrations, it struck me as a excellent job of photo-reportage. The pictures don't cry out for attention and don't insist on some forced signature style—they tell the story. But they're beautifully done all the same, and they work in concert with the written story. Words and pictures are full partners, you might say—something I look for, and like, in photojournalistic work.

As far as technique goes, they made me reflect that digital is finally coming of age, not looking like film but not overburdened by the old digital nasties either. And (importantly for me) not looking too much like photo-illustration, all fakey and manipulated. The opening picture ("Vacant buildings...") is perhaps the exception, the weakest picture in the set, too dark and too saturated and with too much perspective distortion, but let your eyes rest for a while on the picture of the duck food mill ("Last year, Cochecton Mills..."). An atmospheric photograph, informative but visually elegant.

Photojournalism is difficult. You have to put the story above your ability to pick and choose what works best visually.

"Desiree Rios (b. 1991) is a Mexican-American photojournalist and documentary photographer from Fort Worth, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Science in Photojournalism at St. John’s University in New York and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Rios is currently based in New York City and Dallas-Fort Worth." That's lifted from the "About" page of the photographer's website.

Nice work. She made a difficult task look easy.

Mike
(Inset photo by Ricardo Mexia)

*A.K.A. "the world's best photography magazine." Regular readers will recall that I recommend subscribing for the rich and varied photographic content. [UPDATE on this: see Ken's Featured Comment below.]

Original contents copyright 2020 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re '...it struck me as a excellent job of photo-reportage. The pictures don't cry out for attention and don't insist on some forced signature style—they tell the story. But they're beautifully done all the same, and they work in concert with the written story.' I heartily agree with your opinion of Ms. Rios' work, Mike. More generally, I highly recommend that all hobbyist photographers, from 17 to 70 years old, study featured story work in the NYT. It's about as good as it gets. But, more to the educational point, study how the images hold together. Light. Gesture. Context. Color. Figure spatial relationships. Damon Winter produces much of my favorite humanist work. But the NYT has many of today's best photogs producing a variety of work for them each week. It beats a workshop, at least in my book."

Gary Nylander: "Good to see that young photojournalists like Desiree are being championed and that the NYT is willing to give new talented photographers the recognition that they deserve. As an ex-photojournalist who was laid off due to declining revenues on a small daily paper, it makes my heart glad to see there is some photography work out there for these photographers."

Dave Millier: "Photojournalism is an interesting field. This series tells a great story. But it also shows that journalism always comes from a particular perspective or slant; it can't be objective, and the selection of the images demonstrates that.

"I have every sympathy for the livelihoods of the people involved in the production of this food product. Having their entire product line come under threat with minimal warning must be devastating. On the other hand, it is hardly unique: many, many, businesses close all the time with the commensurate misery to employees.

"Imagine if this photojournalism had been done from a different perspective, to tell the stories of the food animals rather than the workers. How would the photos have differed?

"People are cruel enough to one another but the cruelty dished out to animals in the food industry usually has to be hidden away safely from the cameras. A lot of people might by put off their lunch if they were forced to face up to exactly where it had come from and how their enjoyment came at the expense of, in some cases, some pretty extreme suffering.

"I've been a vegetarian for 25 years—at some personal sacrifice, because I do love my food. But one day when my then-flatmate saw me making meat food with carefully homogenised and disguised meat, he pointed out how hypocritical I was to eat products that have been designed to hide from me their true nature. I reflected on that and came to the conclusion it was true. I liked the taste of meat, hated where it came from and bought products that hid the truth from myself and thus circumvented my conscience for entirely selfish reasons. So I became a vegetarian.

"The food industry uses some pretty horrible practices and does a lot to hide this from consumers. A parallel story from the animals' perspective would make a useful counterpoint to this human interest story and demonstrate how story telling is always from one angle or another...."

Mike replies: I'm not sure journalism is ever supposed to be objective, truly, because what we are looking for from it is not an ethical stance or judgement. What it's supposed to do is present a coherent picture of the facts, which I think this piece does. What interests me about this piece is that the ethical and political issues are so complex and interwoven that a clear and plain values-based interpretation is impossible to arrive at quickly and surely. What's important to me about journalism is that I be made aware of the slant or bias of the journalists, so I can take that into account when digesting the information they're presenting to me—I don't have any problem reaching a personal conclusion that is opposed to that of the journalists.

Kenneth Tanaka adds: "With special regard to Dave Millier’s featured comment, readers may enjoy a recent essay by Jacqueline Lopez, an intern at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Photography."

Mike replies: Jacqueline's essay is good and on point, but the "context" I'd like answered is: who is the white guy really and what was his actual relationship with the black men sitting behind him? Who is the white person on the extreme left who the white man on the right appears to be talking to, and what were they talking about? Dorothea has already forced the issue somewhat with her image title, making all of them stand for something other than just themselves. But even so it's we the viewers who assume any relationship at all between the white man on the right and the black men. The word "plantation" is possibly leading, too (in 1936 people would have been widely familiar with Uncle Tom's Cabin in which the word is also used). One feature of photography, however, is its insistent specificity: those were actual people, and presumably they have actual stories. For instance, consider these imagined scenarios:

—The white man is a local farmer who is at the store hiring day laborers. He bucks the local trend by hiring black workers instead of poor whites who also want the work. They men behind him were hoping to be hired but the ones he hired are already seated in the car.

—The white man is an overseer at a huge local cotton plantation and has 75 black workers under his direction. He is known for being ruthless and a stern disciplinarian. He has a high position in the local KKK. The black men in the picture, who work for him, know they are safe in public but feel cowed generally by the power he has over their lives.

—The white man owns a local plantation but the black men behind him have nothing to do with him—they're local guys who often hang out at the store loitering on the steps. They're just listening to the white people talking only because that's what happens to be going on at that moment.

See what I mean? We really have very little context except that which is supplied by the title in concert with our own prejudices and assumptions. Which could be right or wrong. Dorothea was a truth-teller by nature and conscientious by the standards of the time, but we know there were others among her pictures where she got the title or caption substantively wrong.

I suppose the real details are lost to history, but it's what I'd want to know about that picture.

John Morris 1916-2017

Written by Peter Turnley

John Morris. Photo by Peter Turnley.

This morning I received a phone call in Cuba from my brother David in Paris to tell me that John Morris had just passed today. I went to see John just a few weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon. As I walked into his room in the residence where he was staying, John lay, part asleep. I didn't want to bother him, but needed to see him, and whispered into his ear, "John, I love you." He responded clearly, "Peter I love you too." These were our last words, but the most important to me. John was not only my friend for the past 45 years, but truly a father to me and David.

One day a few years ago, as I sat eating dinner alone with him, I asked John, as possibly only a lifelong friend could ask, "John, what would you like me to say about you when you are gone?" John looked at me, and gently responded, with a smile: "I tried." He not only tried, but succeeded in touching the hearts of most everyone he met, and his story, and his passion and care for the world and for life, and his ability to love life, and to be in love, will be an example that anyone that knew him will carry with them forever.

John's life story was the story of our world and of photography over the past 100 years. The names of the great photographers of the world, Capa, Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and on and on, were his family. I was very fortunate to be part of his family since first meeting him with my brother David when he first saw our McClellan Street photographs when we were 17 years old.

John's interest in success was not status, and no one felt more compassion for the left behind than John. His passion was in living life with love, doing the best one can, and fighting for a world where peace, care, decency, generosity, and honesty prevail—and his passion for public service was greater than anyone I've ever known. My relationship with John was not professional; he was my friend, and like a father to me. But he was demanding, and expected greatness—for him, there was nothing more natural. Every conversation was sprinkled with comments about Capa, Chim, Henri, and on and on, and these were not names on a pedestal, but lives of friends with feelings, stories, ups and downs, and heart. To achieve anything great in life, one must dream. Being around John always made dreams easy, because his life, like a dream, was reality.

Whenever I would return from some place where my heart had been scarred, Somalia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Irak, and on and on, the realities I had felt and witnessed were not, for John, something from a television set. They were part of his life blood and fabric and what he cared and lived for—trying to always somehow impact the world for the better. He also was extremely engaged politically, in a human sense. As we go forward, it won't be awards, or honors, or accolades that John will appreciate us for. It will be simply a kind and loving gaze upon our life with the question, did you do your best, did you try, did you try to make the world a better place? And have you loved. And when the answer to any of those questions will be a yes—John will raise his glass with a smile, and you will feel that as always, you are part of his amazing family of life.

John and Peter. Photo by Jan Kwarnmark.

I love you John. You are not gone, you will always be with me, and with us.

Peter Turnley
Havana, Cuba
July 28, 2017

[Ed. Note: There is a full obituary of John Morris by the critic and curator Andy Grundberg in the New York Times. Our thanks to Peter for sharing his very personal thoughts.]

©2017 by Peter Turnley, all rights reserved

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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Metzger: "Beautiful."

Steve Rosenblum: "Five years ago I had the great privilege to participate in Peter's Paris Street Photography workshop. The highlight of the whole week for me was an evening when Peter arranged for all of us to go to John Morris's apartment where he (at 95 years of age) stood for an hour and gave us a lecture about the history of documentary photography over the last 70 years and his involvement in it. He told us the intimate stories behind many of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century, the people who made them, and the struggle to get them published. Then we all went out for dinner together.

[Photo by Peter Turnley]

"My wife and I agree that it was one of the most amazing experiences of our lives. We will always be grateful to John for sharing his vast life experience with us and to Peter for arranging it."

David Elesh: "Like Steve Rosenblum, I met John and his partner, Patricia, at Peter's Paris Street Photography Workshop in 2011. My wife and I were amazed by John's stories, vitality, and engagement with the present at 95. He spoke of his history, his current political activities, and his gratitude of finding a loving partner in Patricia Trocmé. As Peter writes so aptly, 'his passion and care for the world and for life, and his ability to love life, and to be in love' were fully on display.

"The New York Times has a five minute interview with John on its website recorded in 2006. There are also several photos of John taken at various points in his career. They are worth your time as his autobiography, Get the Picture."

Jan Kwarnmark: "Thank you, Peter, for these words. From our workshop and meeting with John in September 2013 I remember especially that John, after having seen so many war photos, wanted to be an ambassador for peace. And thank you for using my photo, taken with your Leica, at this precious moment."

[Ed. note: Jan's work was featured once before in these pages, as readers might remember.]

Stephen Voss on Trump's First 100 Days

Photo by Stephen Voss

Longtime TOP reader Stephen Voss, a photographer who lives and works in Washington DC, has been "documenting the upheaval and psychological tumult of the Trump Administration here in DC on both a local and federal level," as he says, and now has a major portfolio published at Politico.

Politico's introduction: "For anyone who lives in Washington, it was clear Donald Trump campaigned against the city in two ways. He ran against 'Washington,' the metaphorical seat of unchecked government power, and also against the actual city of Washington, a multicultural, Democratic stronghold that embraces immigration, marijuana and seemingly every other progressive policy Trump voters rejected. Since the inauguration, photographer Stephen Voss has been documenting the city’s uneasy relationship with its highest-profile new resident."

Outstanding documentary photojournalism, well worth taking a look from a photographic perspective regardless of your politics. Big congratulations to Stephen.

Mike

P.S. Here's Stephen's website.

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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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."

The Great 'Decisive Moment' Photographer...Charles Hoff?!?

Talking about 'the decisive moment' yesterday reminded me of a few things.

Mainly, it brought old Charlie Hoff to mind. (This is as close as I can come to showing you what he looked like; sorry.) Charles Hoff was a quintessential old-timer "ƒ/8 and be there" photojournalist who was active from the 1930s to the '60s and died in 1975. He worked for the New York Daily News for many years. He was one of the 22 photographers who were waiting for the Hindenburg when it approached its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937 and burst into flames. You can bet Charlie Hoff got the shot. (This is as close as I can come to showing it to you; sorry again.)

Ezzard Charles and Rocky Marciano, 1954.
Photo by Charles Hoff, The New York Daily News.

I mostly know him from an out-of-print book called The Fights, which in my opinion is collectively one of the great virtuoso performances in the history of photography. Photographing with a large-format camera at ringside, he had a preternatural ability to anticipate the action and extract a marvelous moment—I use that adjective advisedly, meaning something to marvel at—from the fast-paced flurry arms, legs, and motion, many times capturing the instant of a heavy blow or a falling fighter just before he hit the canvas.

As photographers know, and can appreciate, a view camera gives you just one chance—just one shot at a time. (Hoff even had permission to set up lights at ringside—most of the conditions under which he worked in his prime were unreproducible in later decades.) Hoff's fight pictures were thus the very antithesis, the diametric opposite, of "spray and pray."

My reference library is in storage (I'm probably going to work all my life and finally be able to afford a proper office at the very end of it) so I can't even refer to the one book I have. But one thing I remember from the book is that Charlie Hoff said he would intently watch the fighters' feet—the set of their feet was the way he could tell they were about to throw a haymaker.

I'd love to see a collection of the best of all his work, not just the boxing photographs, but it doesn't exist. I look forward to the day when the culture of the Internet matures to the point where the work of many photographers will be accessible online in more than a random motley way. But you can Google him and hopefully find a few more examples, at least.

Action
And what Charlie Hoff reminds me of is that, still, today, one of the best tools we photographers have got is to constantly work on the skill of hitting the shutter button at exactly the right time—not a split-second early or a split-second late. I don't think any really good photographer of any kind of moving subject (all the way down to moving clouds) fails to ever be conscious of this. Nor do I think any good photographer ever stops working on it. It was one of the reasons I suggested "the Leica year" as a good learning experience...the old film Ms, with no finder blackout and very little shutter lag and a cost for every shot, were great for learning how to look for that just-exactly-right moment to expose the picture. Even if you're triggering 30 FPS, you still need to know exactly when to do it.

And even with the GH5 or some other variant of the very latest thing, I'll bet old Charlie Hoff could teach us all a thing or two.

Mike

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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Photojournalists To Get a Pay Hike?

PetaPixel reported on Tuesday that the New York Times—doubtless understanding its increased importance as a "survivor" traditional news source in a contracting and consolidating market—will "more than double" its day rate for original photography, basically from $200 to $450 with some exceptions and special conditions.

The Times itself has not confirmed this yet, but PetaPixel has indicated it will follow up on the story. If true, this is some rare good news in a field that has seen far too much bad news in recent years.

Mike
(Thanks to Aaron Greenman)

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.

$1 a month?
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Michael Perini: "If true, I think it was the right thing to do, and I'm happy for the photographers who work for them. (They have some great ones.) But given that they probably rarely get a full week of full day rates, it's still a tough way to make a living if you aspire to have a normal life with a family and a house, and maybe send the kids to college. I admire the folks who do it."

glenn brown: "Robbery. A plumber gets more than that."

Mike replies: Hmm, maybe, but it doesn't seem that bad to me. Standard full-time work is 250 days a year, which at $450 a day amounts to a gross salary of $112,500. Considering that only about 20% of American households earn more than $100,000 (according to Census Bureau figures via Bankrate.com), that's far from horrible.

I know that many photographers have to supply their own equipment and have additional overhead costs—the necessity of paying for some of their travel, perhaps—and many do not work every day. But even working two days a week, that's still $45,000 a year gross pay, which isn't shabby considering half of all working Americans earn less than $30k a year.  No, it wouldn't make you rich, but you'd have three days free per week by definition, and if you could find other ways to augment your income in your free time (as many photojournalists and indeed freelancers and sole proprietors of all sorts do), then it seems like a reasonable living.

Random Excellence: Dorothea Lange

April 25, 1942—San Francisco, California. Residents of Japanese ancestry appear for registration prior to evacuation. Evacuees will be housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration. [Anchor Editions caption —Ed.] Photo by Dorothea Lange.

One of the many joys of photography is the intermittent but regular rediscovery of historic photographers, bodies of work, or (perhaps to a lesser extent) previously unknown masterpieces. Sometimes these discoveries even include unknown or little-known work by indisputably great photographers of the first rank.

Published on the Internet back on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, December 7th, Tim Chambers of Anchor Editions created a fine photo essay of Dorothea Lange's photographs of the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry following Pearl Harbor. The photographs were originally impounded by the U.S. Army as being unfavorable to the war effort, quietly hidden away at the National Archives. They didn't fully come to light until W.W. Norton & Company published Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, in 2006.

Regardless of your political feelings about events then or now, the photo essay makes it plain why the Army thought the pictures would create sympathy for those affected by the relocation and internment. If you read the quotes and other written material, it's difficult not to gain a more human and compassionate understanding of what these citizens went through. And the photographs are first-rate documentary work, as you might expect.

Anchor Editions is selling prints of many of the photographs, although the one reproduced above is sold out.

Mike
(Thanks to John Flores, Peter Schafer, and Pete Su)

UPDATE Saturday, Feb. 4: "Hi, I'm Tim Chambers, publisher of the aforementioned photo essay and printer at Anchor Editions. Thanks for featuring Lange's photos! I'm a long-time TOP reader, so I was delighted when I came here and saw this post! I wanted to let you know that the captions below each photo were written by Lange herself, transcribed from her notes that she gave to the OWI along with her negatives.

"I agree that today a more accurate language of 'concentration camps' is more appropriate than the euphemistic 'internment' or 'relocation,' which is why I chose those words for the title and my commentary before the photos.

"Quite a few people have asked about reprints of the sold-out editions, and while I won't be extending the current editions, I do plan to produce new editions of some of the popular images, though it will necessarily be a different size and likely a different paper format as well. As with the current editions, though, I will continue to send 50% of the proceeds to the ACLU."

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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Kenneth Tanaka: "This is a rather grim subject for me. My father and grandmother were interned at Manzanar. Ironically, his brothers (my uncles) served in the Army in a 'special' Japanese unit. It's probably the most powerful statement about the Japanese-American culture of that generation that I knew none of this until my father's death. Just last year I came across Impounded. The print quality is not tops but the images paint the picture vividly.

"I just came across a fascinating book titled Colors of Confinement by Eric Muller. It features remarkable Kodachrome images taken in the Japanese interment camps. It's available in both book and Kindle form."

Rick D: "The images continue to haunt across these many decades. We are fortunate to have them and one can only hope they resonate more strongly than ever given events of the last month. I grew up in Seattle with many Japanese-American friends and the camps were not a topic of discussion outside school history, even though their parents had all been interned. I inferred they felt shame for their nation's actions more than sorrow over what they had endured--not discussing it was itself an act of patriotism. Today I'm represented in Congress by a woman born in the Poston, Arizona, camp. I have been to the Tule Lake 'Segregation Center,' which is largely preserved by the National Park Service. A haunting spot in California's remotest corner."

Should You Manipulate Your Images?

Of course they have repercussions in the broader culture, but a big reason for discussing things like "Photoshopping" (manipulation), journalistic integrity, and borrowing and copying or "deriving" works on a photo enthusiast website is to help each of us make decisions for our own practice. Whatcha gonna do your own self?

I think it's good to get clear. Think it through, work it through, and come to your own decisions.

What you decide is up to you, and it could be anything. Maybe this whole discussion has made you disgusted with dishonest photography and steeled your resolve to be as honest as you can possibly be in your own photographs; maybe you are scornful of the whole brouhaha and have decided not only that you like manipulating images but that you're going to take a class and learn how to do more of it, and better. You might decide to reject imitation and cliché and "classicism," or you might have gotten excited about the idea of recreating a certain kind of paintings.

You have to realize that different people are looking for different things in photographs. Some people go to enormous lengths to put things into photographs that I just don't care a fig about. And vice versa.

It's really up to you to draw your own lines in the debate, but I think it's helpful to consider the issues up front and make conscious decisions.

I spent my youth in art class (almost literally—one year I had four periods a day in the art room) where my favorite teacher had us incessantly copying things. I got famous as an "artist" in my small school because I was skilled at that. The great "j'accuse" of that history was provided ten or so years ago by the nine-year-old daughter of a classmate, gifted at drawing and painting, whose motto, bless her, was "never go from flat." That is, according to her, you go from three dimensions to two, not from two to two. Don't copy, in other words. I can always tell paintings that come from photographs.

Just applying logic, I reached the same conclusion when I was about 14 or 15. But I was so much worse at drawing from life than I was at "going from flat" that I would have essentially had to start over. That's when I decided that photography was much better than I was at reducing three dimensions to two. A year later I had my first photography exhibit, in the school dining room.

Years later, when I was a wet-behind-the-ears photo magazine editor, one of the regular contributors wrote an article about combining 4x5" negatives. He noted that often, his landscapes had great foregrounds but dull skies, or great skies but nothing interesting in the foreground, so he took these formerly "rejected" negatives and did a sort of primitive Jerry Uelsmann number on them, combining foregrounds and skies from different places and different times.

That horrified me then and still does. The reason I'm interested in photography at all is that it can tell me something about the world; if you know how photography works, there can be a sensical, dependable connection between some of the elements of a picture and what was in front of the lens when the picture was taken. The photograph isn't "truth," of course, but if you're smart you can usually retrieve from pictures something true about the scene; something at least provisionally true. With the big advantage that you can study things in depth and at leisure that either didn't hold still for long or don't exist any more.

Sometimes the true things you find might align with what you need or want to know; sometimes it's other things.

At the very last minute, we had an advertiser drop out, and I had a column to fill and only a couple hours to come up with something. The newly empty column happened to fall within that "combining negatives" article, so I wrote a short "counterpoint"—a rebuttal, as it were—expressing my misgivings about the practice, and signed it with a pseudonym.

That was wrong. It was a rookie mistake on my part. I shouldn't have done it. The author of the article was miffed at me, and rightly so. An editor's duty is to support the articles he or she publishes, and by extension support his or her authors, and not subvert either. I learned my lesson and never did that to one of my authors again.

Of course there's really nothing wrong, per se, with combining two negatives to make a "fantasy" landscape that doesn't exist in the real world. It's just that I don't want to look at horrible lying sh*t like that, and if I'm shown faked photographs without being warned they've been faked, then I feel betrayed and angry.

The one steady current of my writing about photography all these years, in every dimension, is that my sympathy rests firmly with the viewer, practitioner, or consumer. Bob Shell, who for many years was the influential editor of Shutterbug magazine (in its heyday known by everybody because it was sort of the national classified ads section, before eBay existed), once wrote me an extraordinary admonishing letter detailing the responsibilities of a magazine editor as he saw them. Primarily, he said, the duty of a magazine was to help the manufacturers sell their products. That got me on my high horse, and I wrote back a spirited rebuttal. When last I heard of him, Bob was serving a life sentence for murder and had disappeared from the photo scene, and I never agreed with him in virtually any way I can think of, but I thank him for one thing—making me clear that my mission was to look out for the magazine's readers, not the advertisers. (My duty to the advertisers was to put their ads in front of as many sets of eyes as possible, but that's where it stopped.) My sympathy was not with the advertiser who was trying to sell a $600 thingamajiggy to the reader, but with the reader who was thinking of parting with his hard-earned $600 and needed to know if the thingamajiggy was worth it.

Similarly, my sympathy is with the viewer of images, and that's what I suggest you consider when you're trying to get clear about your own practices. Personally, my conceit about photographic images is that I can see more in them than the photographer can put there. That's why I don't care for highly perfected, tightly controlled studio and fashion photography...because all that's there is what the art director and photographer and their corps of helpers can put in them, which means, for me, they're often...empty. There's nothing there I can discover for myself. It just bores me, is all. Potentially, in every photograph, there's more meaning and more information that you could possibly think to invent; so have some respect for the viewer and don't vandalize the image's connection to the reality you might not even see.

That's just my own viewpoint, of course.

On a more superficial level, just consider how you feel if you get shown something that appears to be one thing and then find out it's not that but something else. I think that would save each of us from the risk of sticky trouble. If you're combining negatives, make sure the viewer knows that. If you're staging pictures of Indian railway stations, don't pretend they are candid photojournalism.

Generally, my advice would be, whatever you're going to do, do it boldly. Julie Blackmon's type of constructed tableaux aren't my thing, exactly, but she does what she does boldly and unapologetically and I like that. If you're going to Photoshop, then do a lot of it and call it photoart—don't pretend it's a photograph. If you want to stage your photographs, then stage them, but make sure the viewers know it. Look at it from the viewer's perspective and see it how they'd see it and try to figure out how they'd feel about it. It's only when you pretend, or claim, or let others assume, that you're doing one thing, while you are in fact doing something else, that problems come into the picture. Ask yourself, if the viewer knew how I did this, would they they think I've cheated? That's what has the potential to transform you into a sniveling weasel. Not the practice or method, whatever it is.

So get clear about what you like to do and then do it. But be stand-up about it. There's nothing wrong with any practice as long as a) it's what you really want to do and b) being honest and up front about it wouldn't cause you (or anyone else in your situation) any embarrassment.

Mike

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Hank: "The whole 'McCurry Thing' reminds me of this passage from one of Werner Herzog's books:

I was on a panel discussion with other filmmakers who were talking about “reality” and how to capture it on film, how cinéma-vérité was the only way forward, that manipulation and staging in non-fiction cinema was a no-no. A young woman next to me kept raving about her own particular style, how she wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible, like a fly on the wall. It was just the kind of thin, trivial ideology I look upon with deep suspicion ...I say here to adherents of cinéma-vérité : I am no bookkeeper; my mandate is poetry. I want to be involved. I want to shape and sculpt, to stage things, to intrude and invent. I want to be a film director. I was the only person at the festival arguing against these morons. The subject was being so hashed to death that I couldn’t take it any longer. I grabbed a microphone and said, “I’m no fly on the wall. I am the hornet that stings.” There was an immediate uproar, so not having anything more to say, I shouted out, “Happy New Year, losers.” And that was that.

Mike replies: This reminds me that I meant to write a paragraph in this piece about how ideas can be formed in opposition. Sometimes confronting ideas that you don't agree with can be as important to growth as finding those you agree with.

Steve McCurry is Not a Jerk

When arguing about the ethics of "photoinvention"—going past the line of correction and into creation in constructing images—I strongly suspect that peoples' stance on the issue has to do primarily with justifying their own practice. That is, if you clone all kinds of stuff yourself, then you don't see anything wrong with Photoshopping. If you don't even when you're tempted to, then you can be critical of it.

But you see (apropos last Sunday), that's an example of my primary belief system or basic outlook being psychological; I tend to look for internal motivations in the actor/speaker first.  :-)

Funnamennals
Let's go over some basics.

When it's someone's job to give other people a report about what's going on, that person is enjoined, formally and by custom, to try to be honest, impartial, and objective. There are several parts to this. First, they're obligated to do the work of understanding what they're reporting on. There are a number of tried-and-true ways to go about that—go there; spend enough time; take a fresh look and see for yourself; talk to people who are caught up in it, whatever it is, or who are experts in it in whatever way; look into background information; attempt to see conflicting views from both sides; and so on. Most of these methods are well understood and are part of the process, resources permitting.

Next, that person is asked to suppress their own opinions, their partisanship, and their biases, so as not to give a skewed or one-sided report by omission or commission. To do this, they need to be aware of what those biases are. And, usually, they need another outlet to vent that bias and partisan opinion so it doesn't leak into their reporting, which is why editorials and opinion columns exist in traditional newspapers. In their respective opinion and editorial (Op-Ed) pages, the New York Times typically has a liberal and humanist slant, the Wall Street Journal a conservative and business-friendly one, and the Christian Science Monitor a religious and Christian one. But all three papers offer very good reporting outside of their Op-Ed content, because all three take their journalistic responsibilities seriously and try their best not to let their acknowledged biases intrude.

Does this mean that all reporting is perfectly true and objective?

Of course not. But we all realize that. People in the business (or who went to J-school) can cite chapter and verse: much thought and effort has gone into understanding all the ways that reporting can still be inaccurate. If you want a clean windowpane into the ways that current cultural assumptions influence reporting, for instance (just one of the ways in which reporting can be skewed), you have only to go back and read some articles from the 1950s, the 1920s, and the 1880s. The differences will jump out at you. We are of course not immune to the same thing—people will look back on 2016 and "see" our cultural assumptions—good and bad—clearly, in ways we cannot.

Similarly, photographs are (of course) not automatically "true." There are a myriad ways they can distort the report, so to speak. We understand most of those ways. And we understand them both in our roles as creators and as viewers. This is not a big secret.

But primary to good reporting, whether it is done with writing or with pictures, is the crucial matter of the intention to deceive vs. the intention to be honest. Reports have authors. Traditionally, those authors have editors riding herd on them, helping keep them on track and seeing to it that the necessary standards are upheld. When the medium is words, the authors are called reporters, and when it's pictures, they're called photojournalists and editorial photographers (i.e., photographers who illustrate fact-based articles). All the players follow the rules and do their best.

When this system works, which admittedly it does only a small percentage of the time, the results can be superlative. The greatest photo essays and the finest journalistic investigations can, and have, changed the world. But most good journalism doesn't change the world: it just informs us about it and gives us insight into it. Which is good, because you can't look into everything firsthand on your own. In fact, arguably the primary advantage conferred to our species by language and communication is that we can learn things we need to know from other people, such that we're not limited to knowing only what we ourselves can find out about firsthand.

When this is cynically manipulated, it's called "propaganda." Or, at a more basic level, "lies." (And if you're unclear about the distinction between "telling the truth" and "telling a lie," brush up. Go figure it out. It's not that tough.) And this brings up another crucial point: as viewers and readers, if our interest is in gaining insight about reality and furthering our understanding of the world and its affairs, we have a fundamental decision to make: how much to trust our various sources. And in that project—that ongoing, always provisional project—two things help a lot: one, that we understand the basic motives and interests of the authors of the reports we're getting (another important function of the traditional Op/Ed section), and two, that they tell us what they're doing, what set of rules they're adhering to.

Because, of course, not everyone is doing the same thing. Again formally and by custom, we've separated different pursuits into different categories. It's easier to trust an author when we know what they're up to and which category their work falls into. Some "fiction," you'll note, is designed as a way of getting closer to certain truths; inventing characters can sometimes allow an author to explore areas of human thought and behavior that can't be verified (various historians have resorted to novels not to distort history but to more clearly convey their understanding of it). Other fiction doesn't do this—it might be meant only to entertain, or to conjure the "sustained dream" of an alternative reality into which the reader can escape, as if in a reverie of his or her own. Even within specific genres, aims and intentions can be different: science fiction might be purely fantastical, a device for slipping the mundane bounds of the everyday, or it might be seriously speculative, allowing a well-informed author to propose things that might actually plausibly happen in the future.

Own the authorship
Given the recent dust-up, I thought it was an irony to happen across an article on the Web titled "See India Through Steve McCurry's Lens." Ironic because when you add and subtract elements, you're explicitly departing from the view through the lens.

As I see the whole affair from my distant viewpoint here in the hinterlands, the current problem with Mr. McCurry is simply that his background is in photojournalism and editorial photography, and he markets himself using those credentials, and his primary affiliations (National Geographic magazine and Magnum Photos) inhabit those universes, and his current work seems to all appearances to be a seamless continuation of all that earlier work—same look, same subjects, same approach. But, by the clear standards of his now-known-to-be-former profession(s), he got caught cheating. So now he has to engineer a clumsy coverup (really sort of a primer on why not to do a coverup and all the ways it can be done badly), and start mumbling about how, yeah, things really shouldn't be added or subtracted using Photoshop, and I promise to be good from now on, and whimper whimper.

But to heck with all that. If I were Steve McCurry, I'd embrace the new me. Revise the mission statement. I'd say to the world, Hey, you're right, I'm not a photojournalist. I used to be, and I was good at it, but lately I've become a storyteller, and I'm even better at that. My work is a lyrical, romanticized view of the exotic Third World of my imagination—my personal interpretation of how I like to look at the magical, mysterious qualities of distant lands and disappearing peoples. I used to be a reporter but then I discovered what I'm really interested in doing. My work is based on reality, and it starts out being photographic and sometimes stays that way, but I'm first and foremost a photo-illustrator and an artist.

Would anybody have any problem with that? Raise your hand. Anybody here? Anybody anywhere? I doubt it. I wouldn't, even though I'm partial to "straight" photography personally. Like I would have a problem with somebody growing as an artist and evolving thoughtfully and forthrightly into his more authentic self? Not a chance.

Why not just be who you already are? The guy shouldn't Photoshop less, he should Photoshop more. Heck, it's how he sees, even when he doesn't clone a thing. That article title should be, "See India Through Steve McCurry's Eyes." Own the authorship.

Embrace it. Go all in. It's clear that's what he wants to be and what he's best at. 

Just...be clear about it, is all. Don't be one thing while you let on that you're another. As a bonus, when you stand tall and walk straight, all manner of things are forgiven.

Mike

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Bill Pierce: "In the early and mid 'eighties, when we were all young, a bunch of us were covering the war in Lebanon. Don McCullin was the best among us, but it was a pretty solid group with Dirck Halstead, Robin Moyer, Gene Richards, Bill Foley and a bunch of others who have gone on to do fairly well as old photographers who don’t get shot at any more. Our publications wanted to see war. National Geographic had Steve McCurry shooting the religious leaders. Steve probably had just as much a chance of being somewhere in Beirut that got bombed as we had. We were shooting what our publications thought was important. Steve was shooting what his publication thought was important. Our pictures could never be as moving and life changing as the what we were photographing. Steve’s pictures might have been more dramatic than what he was photographing.

"All of us are shaped by what we did when we were young. The news publications gave some of us amazing educations that went far beyond what we learned in school. I don’t think Steve got the same education. He was unique. Geo sent him into dangerous situations that their other photographers never entered. But, somehow and not surprisingly, what they published always seemed more distanced from the events than what appeared in the news publications. Steve is currently getting criticized for using his computer to clean up his images and make them a little 'prettier.' I think the criticism is valid. But I also think Steve is a good guy who was told early in the game to make his pictures pretty."

Verve: "McCurry is still a great photographer—one of the best. I think he described the problem accurately in his mea culpa. The problem is confusion: people thinking he is still a photojournalist when he isn't. I don't know whether or how much McCurry himself contributed to that confusion. Considering his renown and reputation as a photojournalist, it seems that he should have put a disclaimer somewhere to avoid this confusion."

Bob Rosinsky: "Re 'Just...be clear about it, is all. Don't be one thing while you let on that you're another. As a bonus, when you stand tall and walk straight, all manner of things are forgiven.' The crux of the matter: Interpretative/embellishment is one thing and reportage is another. McCurry failed to acknowledge artistic license. Deceit is unacceptable. It's akin to bait and switch. His Photoshop skills are lacking. And I am glad for that."

Mike adds: Note that Verve and Bob are saying the same things, but Verve sympathetically, Bob less so.

Steve McCurry Defends Himself, Sort Of

You probably remember the discussion about famed photojournalist editorial photographer visual storyteller Steve McCurry's overuse of Photoshop cloning, which provoked heated debate here and elsewhere. Steve McCurry today addressed his critics—well, sort of—in an exclusive article published this morning at TIME magazine's website. 

It's a strange, unsatisfying little article. McCurry vaguely claims it's all a category error: "I’ve always let my pictures do the talking, but now I understand that people want me to describe the category into which I would put myself, and so I would say that today I am a visual storyteller."

Alternated with his comments are comments by National Geographic’s director of photography, Sarah Leen. She first explains how great he is, then says sternly that his manipulations would never be tolerated by National Geographic. He then tells the story of how a National Geographic cover photo of his was doctored, and she says yeah but that was a long time ago and "it would never happen now."

Who's on whose side here?

The article concludes with McCurry saying that he can do anything he wants to do but that "going forward, I am committed to only using the program in a minimal way."

The original PetaPixel story has been shared over 25,000 times, according to Sharkey James's PetaPixel Photography Podcast episode 76, titled "Is Steve McCurry’s Legacy Imploding?" An update to the second of PetaPixel's articles notes that McCurry's entire blog was taken down after a number of manipulated images were discovered on it.

Meanwhile, McCurry himself appears to be hiding—more than one outlet reports that they can't get an answer to repeated emails and requests for comment.

In the podcast, James compares McCurry's fall from grace to Bill Cosby's, given the high stature and wide admiration his work once enjoyed and the dismay and disillusion these revelations have caused. Which seems a bit over the top, unless you concede that the scandal is having wider repercussions across the whole profession. Perhaps most damning, though, are these harsh words from a long article published by the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association), in an article called "ETHICS MATTERS: A commentary from NPPA’s Ethics Committee regarding the photographs of Steve McCurry," written by Steve Raymer, professor emeritus of the Media School at Indiana University and a former NPPA Magazine Photographer of the Year:

NPPA Ethics Committee chairman Sean D. Elliot says that no matter what McCurry calls himself today, “He bears the responsibility to uphold the ethical standards of his peers and the public, who see him as a photojournalist. [...] Any alteration of the journalistic truth of his images, any manipulation of the facts, regardless of how relevant he or others might feel they are to the deeper ‘truth,’ constitutes an ethical lapse.” Elliot also called McCurry’s attempt to blame an assistant “disingenuous” and questions the professional standards of a studio in which a lab assistant “feels they have the authority to radically alter the work of Steve McCurry.”

So was it our fault, for thinking he was a photojournalist and editorial photographer and was following the very clearly delineated and universally accepted rules of ethical practice of those professions? Guess so. In this morning's TIME article he says, "Reflecting on the situation…even though I felt that I could do what I wanted to my own pictures in an aesthetic and compositional sense, I now understand how confusing it must be for people who think I’m still a photojournalist."

Doesn't sound like much of a mea culpa.

The moral of this mess seems to be, if you want to claim you're only tellin' stories, best do it up front.

Mike
(Thanks to Pak WAN)

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Steve Jacob: "Tellin' tales? Sounds about right...."

John Camp (partial comment): "This Sean Elliot quote really annoyed me: 'He bears the responsibility to uphold the ethical standards of his peers and the public, who see him as a photojournalist.' Oh, really? It's now the viewers who determine what the photographer can do? Maybe it's just me, but I haven't really thought of McCurry as a straight-up photojournalist for a while now...years, anyway."

glenn brown: "I do corporate headshots for blue chip companies and now people are asking for no Photoshop instead of lots.

"I also collect photographs, mostly B/W and pre-1980, but I did have a colour McCurry photo in pride of place in the entrance hall of my home. After a week I moved it to bathroom in the rear of my house. Just did not want it to hang with other images by Towell, Bailey and Newman. I feel better now."

Mark: "Let it be known that, while I am a photographer, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor do I ever plan to be, a photojournalist. Now, back to my Photoshopping. did i get the commas right?"

Mike the Ed. replies: You did. But not the capitals in your final sentence.  :-)

Rich Reusser: "...A more apt comparison than Cosby might be Lance Armstrong. Seems like Lance and Steve both blame the uneducated layman's expectations for their 'rule breaking' or simply doing what needed to be done as they'd have you believe."

Mike replies: The exact same thought occurred to me earlier. Cosby is better known, fell from far higher, meant more to more people, and did real harm.

Andrew Molitor: "It's just another nail in the coffin, another small step toward a world in which everyone assumes everything is 'Shopped.

"We've reached a world in which anyone who's paying attention knows that anything which looks like a photo could be 'Shopped. Anything that looks too good to be true should be viewed with suspicion.

"McCurry, with his venal 'Shopping of trivialities, is showing us that even if it doesn't look too good to be true, even if it looks perfectly possible, even mundane, it still could be 'Shopped, still should be viewed with suspicion.

"On the one hand, it was inevitable. That Pandora's box was opened a while ago, and it was only a matter of time before that particular creature escaped. On the other hand, way to go McCurry (heavy sarcasm)."

Ted: "Back around 15–20 years ago I considered trying to be a photojournalist/travel photographer. I had a lots of encouragement from friends and such and I had traveled extensively taking many photos. However I was always frustrated and discouraged by how my photos would somehow have so many more distracting elements and somehow just did not have the punch and pure style a guy like McCurry had, one of my absolute idols. I was a good photographer, very good, and still am. For a variety of reason I'm glad I did not pursue that direction (not that I would have succeeded but let's just say I found a way to make way more money and still very much enjoy my hobby), now seeing all this it all makes so much more sense now why so much of his work was so 'perfect.' It was a 'created/false perfection.' My impression of him and my awe of his work has shriveled considerably. Frankly I'm very depressed about it."

A Different Afghan Girl

Well, it was fun to make that little academic excursion into terminology yesterday, although today I have a bit of a hangover from it. I like words and write reasonably well, but I have no gift for names and naming.

I concede I didn't think of the problem with "correction" implying that a mistake had been made in the first place—one that needed "correcting"—which might make you look bad to clients. Acknowledging that none of these terms are going to catch on in any event, I think as a result I would prefer the word "finishing" instead of "correction." FER?

  Sir John Herschel drawn by Margaret Louisa Herschel, his daughter,
possibly with the aid of a camera obscura

And here's a fascinating twist. The king of the name-givers in our field was Sir John Herschel, who probably wouldn't be pleased to know that he is now mostly remembered in Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph of him in old age, in costume (left). He made protean contributions to the invention of photography, including the discovery of fixer and the words "positive," "negative," and "snapshot" (a term imported from hunting, as when a bird is flushed and the hunter makes a quick reactive shot). His greatest contribution to the lexicography, of course, was the word "photography," which, quoting Wikipedia, was "created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs), 'light,' and γραφή (graphé) 'representation by means of lines' or 'drawing,' together meaning 'drawing with light.'"

So instead of "reworking" (a word which Ctein supplied to CER, incidentally), shouldn't that be redrawing? (Or rewriting, if you prefer the translation "writing with light" for photos and graphe.

Because no matter how you feel about reworking or modifying or retouching or "photoshopping" a digital image file, all I know is that if you replace 40% of the honest pixels with different ones, the result was no longer "drawn with light." Not entirely. It was drawn by light and the retoucher. And, since there's no way to tell which was which, the viewer coming to it cold can no longer take anything in the picture as honest.

...But we're back in my personal value system, which (of course!) you are under no compulsion to adopt for yourself unless you want to. In any event, my advice to younger and beginning photographers regarding reworking or "photoshopping" is the same as photographer Frank DiPerna's advice on cropping. Frank once said, "I absolutely never, ever crop...except when I want to." Which is part good joke and part deep truth. I think it's generally good advice for reworking as well. My guiding principle is: I absolutely never, ever rework a photo...except when I want to. In other words, when it's really necessary and there's a very good reason to do it, then go ahead, but apply sparingly and use it a crutch. Of course your photography belongs to you, and you should do any tomfool thing you want to.

As the great photojournalist Bruce Haley said to me in a private e-mail (I received his permission to quote him here, but bear in mind he wasn't speaking for public consumption):

If I spell out my personal "rules" of photography then I risk sounding like a sanctimonious pr*ck. However, it's more just a matter of simplicity, of avoiding "tangled web" territory...I have always just used the KISS principle for my photography: I either got it or I didn't...if I got it, I might use/release it; if I didn't get it, it gets tossed in the rubbish bin, never to be seen by anyone else. I don't crop—I either got it right at the moment of the shutter's release or I didn't. If there is a pole or a tree growing out of someone's head, the image gets tossed. If my shadow is in the frame, it gets tossed. If someone is looking at me and smiling (like the now-vanished fellow on McCurry's rickshaw image), that photo gets tossed. Really simple: I "fix" things like that during my edit, by throwing the image out....

This is just how I want to work—I have absolutely no desire to set expectations or guidelines for others.

This is the same sentiment, phrased differently, as my long-held idea that a photograph is either a "yes" or a "no." If it doesn't work 100% for you, then it didn't work; and if it didn't work then it didn't work. It doesn't matter if it came close, or how much you wished it had worked, or how hard you worked to get it, or if you were just positive there was a great photograph somewhere in the vicinity when you shot it. (We all get our heads turned by those things occasionally, I think.) It just either works, and it's a yes, or it's a no. An addiction to reworking/retouching/"photoshopping," to me (we're still in my personal value system, remember), is like an addiction to plastic surgery: the more you try to correct, the more of an unnatural mess you make, until you've created a grotesque. Or perhaps I should choose words that are a little less loaded (!) and simply say that you're no longer drawing with light, so what you've got no longer quite fits John Herschel's fine old 19th-century word.

Bruce Haley's unretouched, unphotoshopped photograph of a wounded Afghan girl in a Médecins Sans Frontières clinic in Pakistan in 1986. Bruce took three photographs and then sat with her for a while until the doctors could see her. A photograph like this one either works or it doesn't, and its
connection to the real is where its power lies.

Of course, the meaning and uses of photography and its culture will change. New ways of understanding it and using it will emerge in the wake of new technologies and peoples' changed experiences, assumptions, and expectations. Our children won't have the same conceptual framework in place that we had. We're all taught to deal with a world that has already changed by the time we're living in it.

At least it's always interesting to watch those changes happen.

Mike
(Thanks to Bruce)

P.S. I still have more than 60 comments to add to yesterday's post, so please come back soon to check some of those out.

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Len Kowitz: "Mike, I understand where you're going with this thought and I think you're on the right track but why bother? You reminded me of an exhibition I saw at the Ransom Center in Austin. If my feeble memory serves it was an exhibition in conjunction with the Magnum symposium in 2013. One of the prints in the show was a 'work print' with the photographer's notes indicating the 'adjustments' he wanted in the final print. My first reaction to the picture was this is a piece that MoMA would fall all over itself to hang in a show of 'New Masters.' Dodge this 5%, burn this area 10%, all over the image. Photoshop just gives us a new tool (one that's easier to use) to do what photographers have always done with their prints. Thank you for making me think a little deeper about what I'm doing with my camera."

Mike replies: You answered your own question. Why bother? To make people think a little deeper about they're doing with a camera. Works for me. That is really the whole point of a post like "C-E-R": the goal isn't to change global terminology, it's to encourage thinking about what our own values and principles are and should be. Engaging with such questions helps clarify thinking, and clear thinking makes decisions easier and our practices more forthright.

It doesn't really matter where you fall on the actual issues—whether you conclude that you love photo-illustration and are going to stop looking at straight photography (i.e., disagree with me), or whether you want to stop at enhancement and keep wholesale reworking mostly off limits (agree with me). It's all good. The point is to become more clear about what we're doing and what our own values are.

Michael Perini: "Re Photographs are either a 'yes' or a 'no'...very appropriate for digital...either a 1 or a 0....

"I've always felt that getting it right in the camera (for me) was a very good discipline, and a worthy goal that helped me get more 'keepers.' But I do straighten horizons, and occasionally crop a picture within the 'picture' as I Correct-Enhance-Finish the work. I also tend to take far fewer frames than most others I know. It works for me. When I shot film, I developed and contact printed the roll and never excised bad frames, I just ignored them. I've been going through old negatives and scanning them and have found more than a few overlooked gems—so I'm glad I saved them. I do the same with digital, and occasionally find the same thing. All this is also effected by the kinds of work we do, and who we do it for.

"As you often say, it's a big house with many rooms. However there is value for each of us in deciding where we stand on these issues and then being true to that. Because the trouble always arises when our Implied Disciplines differ from our Actual Disciplines."

Photographers Can't Be Trusted? (Reuters and Raw Files)

Apparently photographers themselves can't quite be trusted...but their cameras can be.

The global news agency Reuters, which was purchased in 2008 by Thomson Corporation, is based in London and employs several thousand journalists, whose work ethics are governed by the famous Reuters Handbook of Journalism.

Perhaps that's not enough? This week Reuters sent notice to its photographers that it has stopped accepting photographs that started out as raw files of any type. Only original camera JPEG files are to be submitted, "with minimal processing (cropping, correcting levels, etc)."

"According to Reuters," writes Sebastian Anthony on arstechnica, "there are two reasons for this move. First, there's the matter of alacrity: RAW images need to be processed by the photographer, which takes time—and when you're reporting on a breaking story, sometimes you don't have time. The second reason is much more contentious: Reuters wants its photographs to closely reflect reality (i.e. be journalistic), and it's concerned that some RAW photos are being processed to the point where they're no longer real."

There might be one more reason...because cameras have advanced technically so much that camera-native JPEG files are good enough. Perhaps it's just no longer necessary to mess with the raw files. Just within the last year or two, it seems to me, I've encountered, for the first time, photographers claiming that even when carefully processing from raw in standalone conversion software they can't quite match the results of the camera's own JPEG engine. The common speculation there is that the manufacturers know best what their sensors capture and therefore, how best to design the conversion to JPEG.

Yet another possible consideration...I know that for some time, research has continued on ways to detect, just based on a file, whether an image has been manipulated. I'm purely speculating, but perhaps we're at or getting close to the time when news organizations will be able to protect themselves by analyzing image files to make sure nothing in them has been faked. Perhaps this is easier to do on camera-native JPEG files? Just a thought. I don't know much about all that.

My position has always been that the camera (and, by extension, any image file) can "mislead." Just as false or poorly-chosen words can mislead. And just as you need to trust a witnessing journalist to write honestly, you need to trust a witnessing photojournalist to be honest as well. If there's a problem with manipulation in either case, it's not the technology that's to blame—it's the journalistic ethics of the reporter. Good news photographers are journalists, and tell the truth in conformance to the ethics of standard journalistic practices.

But what do I know.

So were dpreview and Ken Rockwell were right after all? (Didn't both used to analyze only JPEGs from tested cameras? Not sure what the policy of either is now.)

Is the flexibility of those raw files really just too fatally tempting for news photographers?

(Once again, though, I feel glad to be an amateur "art photographer" with only myself to please.)

Mike
(Thanks to John Hogg and others)

Original contents copyright 2015 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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John Camp: "Reuters commonly buys photos from freelance photographers in conflict areas, which I consider questionable at best and in many cases immoral. Many of these people have immediate concerns that are much deeper than 'first world' problems with journalistic ethics, like the fact that they may operating in a sea of armed ideological crazies or that they may be so impoverished that any photo sale may be the difference between their family eating and not eating—hence the problem with biased or manipulated photos, and the reason that some of these guys take chances that border on the insane. (Or, they're so inexperienced that they simply don't know what they are doing, and get killed as a result.) As a matter of fact, I think the same applies to writing journalists, as well, although they don't need to physically expose themselves as photographers do. Limiting purchases to in-camera JPEGs doesn't really change any of that—it just gives Reuters another little hanky with which to cover their graver sins."

Joe Kashi: "Over the past several years, various academic researchers have been developing forensic software that can detect cloning and other covert manipulation by examining the unique noise patterns, etc. within image files produced by individual sensors. I would speculate that Reuters may have some version of comparable forensic software and in-camera JPEG files are required to produce valid results. Raw processing could blur the noise pattern and render any validity test less reliable."

Dennis: "One of the things that occurs to me when reading about this is dynamic range.  The amount of dynamic range a camera can capture varies according to the ISO setting (technically, with the amount of light that hits the sensor, but the two go hand in hand). Even a newer FF camera like the Nikon D4s at ISO 6400 has similar DR to my Nikon D7000 at ISO 1600, which is considerably less than either camera at base ISO. If you shoot an indoor sporting event with uneven lighting, or a stage event, your shadow detail and highlight detail can vary with your shutter speed. Speed it up to freeze action and you bump up the ISO and lose dynamic range. And somehow, what the camera 'sees' is more 'real' than a photographer's interpretation?

"I've submitted photos to our local small town weekly over the years including many of concerts and plays at our local school. At high ISO, the contrast of the uneven stage lighting is magnified, and some kids are whited out like ghosts or others are in deep shadow; either way, it looks nothing like what our eyes can see.  So I play with curves or dodge and burn to get a more realistic looking photo.

"Could this be done with JPEGs? It would certainly be better with a newer FF camera, though I often shoot at 200mm on APS-C, so would run into problems there (I'd have to crop or buy a 300 and then I wouldn't be at ƒ/2.8 any more). There might be JPEG processing options that preserve highlight and shadow detail better (I can't do multi-shot HDRs) but I've never been interested enough to experiment with the various menu options. I just have no interest in not shooting raw...just like some people have no interest in driving a car with an automatic transmission. If I were freelancing for Reuters, I'd just suck it up, but that's one of the joys of being an amateur...no reason not to do whatever I want."

Ron (partial comment): "Where I think this Reuters directive is aimed is precisely at improving image delivery times. Photographers can sometimes be their own worst enemies, wanting to endlessly tweak images to conform to their 'vision.' This can waste a lot of time, which I know from both being on the sending side shooting deadline sports events, and on the receiving side working in a newspaper imaging department (before it was automated). Many a time have I hounded a photographer to upload images from an event to meet deadline...."

[For the full text of partial comments, please see the Comments Section. —Ed.]

Roy Feldman: "I shoot press and always deliver JPEG but usually derived from raw. I have never had a image I didn't tweak a little always following the 'only what you could do in a darkroom' rule. I find it to be as fast a process as shooting JPEG. I have been a expert witness for the FBI and made the point that a raw image cannot be altered. You can alter it and save it as something else but you cannot change the raw image it self and re-save it as a raw. The real advantage I see going forth is being able to transmit and upload via cell phone wirelessly. For one paper I work for I use the Wi-Fi transfer on the Fuji to my phone to the mothership."

Ed. G.: "I think this is going to wind up biting Reuters in the butt. It seems to me that most of the photo-manipulation scandals have been proven only by asking the photographer for the raw file—either the comparison shows what was done or the miscreant runs away. Now, if there's a possible problem, Reuters can't ask for a raw file anymore. ('Sorry, since you don't allow processed raws, I shoot JPEG only, so the JPEG I sent in is the only photo that exists.') A smart organization would require raw (or raw+JPEG) shooting. ('You cannot submit photos unless you have a raw file you can give us in case of a dispute.')"

Gary Nylander: "I'm a staff photographer for a small daily newspaper. I always shoot JPEG for pretty well all assignments on a daily basis. Once in a while I might shoot raw for some special project. The JPEG quality I get from my cameras is exceptional, even from the 2007-era Nikon D300 I shoot with, one of my favourite digital cameras for PJ work. If were ever to shoot for Rueters it would not be a problem."

Adrian Malloch: "Yeah I got that Reuters memo too, but since it arrived in the text of an email, I could not possibly trust its veracity. We all know how infinitely flexible word-processing algorithms are and how words and meanings can be twisted so easily by ingenious and unscrupulous writers when using such devious gadgetry. If instead they had sent me a letter crafted on the standard office-issue Royal Quiet Deluxe Portable typewriter then I would know that it really was a Reuters document that could be believed."

Mike replies: Hee hee....

Ben Rosengart: "If you're interested in ensuring that an image is unmodified out-of-camera, it's dead simple: have the camera sign the image cryptographically, and verify the signature. The photographer doesn't have the camera's secret key, and therefore can't re-sign the image after modifying it. Canon markets this by including the signing tech for free, and charging for a 'verification kit,' but that's just an implementation detail."

University of Missouri Student Tim Tai Stands Up to Bullying Mob

Here's a fascinating six-and-a-half-minute video that provides a perfect microcosm of the challenges photographers face in standing up for their First Amendment rights. I think it provides a manageable opportunity for analysis and discussion of the issue. It shows a University of Missouri student photographer named Tim Tai calmly standing up for his rights...and by extension, all of ours.

The video, shot by Mark Schierbecker, shows Tim calmly facing down a mob of demonstrators that is attempting to bully him. Tim stands up for himself and repeatedly (and correctly) asserts and reasserts his right to be there and to take pictures; the students (and one professor, but I'll get to that) who are harassing him can resort only to the authority of the mob—they outnumber Tim, and they attempt to obstruct and intimidate him.

Other than "the mob rules," they have no other basis of authority.

Usually, the bullies we have to discuss are police or rent-a-cops and security guards. That sometimes clouds the issue because it makes it seem like the issue is photographers' stances regarding law enforcement officials and their authority.

It really isn't. Tim Tai is correct—as long as he is where he has a legal right to be, on public or community property, he can take pictures of anything and anyone who does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That right can't be taken away from him just because someone put up a hand-drawn lawn sign that says "No Media."

It really doesn't matter who is bullying him—it could be a chief of police or a renegade student mob, the bouncer of a nightclub or a worksite foreman worried about OSHA violations. He is within his legal rights.

Of course, that might not save him from violence.

In this case, a more serious issue is the woman seen at the end of the video (above). She is Melissa Click, an Assistant Professor of Mass Media* in the Communication Department at the University of Missouri. She's clearly seen assaulting the videographer (her blow jolts the camera) and then inciting violence against his person, asking for "muscle" to help her "get this reporter out of here." (Keep in mind the "reporter" is a student.)

Is this appropriate behavior for a University faculty member? Even when acting out some fantasy of being a neo-1960s lawn-chair revolutionary, or whatever she thinks she's doing? Doesn't seem that way to a lot of people. The video of her unfortunate behavior went viral, and has created considerable backlash against her.

Criticism of Professor Click's actions has since been taken up as a cause among conservative media. Mark Schierbecker appeared on Fox News, and last Wednesday filed a complaint against Click alleging simple assault. Professor Click issued a prepared statement of apology and regret, and resigned a courtesy appointment with the School of Journalism. However, she apparently retains her professorship in the Communication Department, so headlines on the Web such as "Melissa Click Resigns" give the wrong impression.

Student photojournalist Tim Tai, from his website

Freedom of the press
But back to Tim Tai. I agree with the Atlantic writer James Fallows, who wrote, "...in real time, under mounting pressure, [Tim Tai] shows intellectual and emotional composure anyone in our business would admire. The way the students (and some professors) are dealing with him is the way I’ve seen officials in China deal with reporters, which is not a comparison that reflects well on them."

Amen. The persecution and obstruction of journalists is indeed a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. And we all need to stand up for freedom of the press...whoever the bullies might be.

Mike
(Thanks to Mani Sitaraman)

*I tell ya, ya can't make this stuff up.

Original contents copyright 2015 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.

[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said, "He is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution" which I'm not sure it true, where it now says "he is within his legal rights." —Mike]

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Wes: "The University of Missouri consistently receives a top 10 national ranking for its journalism programs. It received the #1 ranking in 2014 by College Magazine. How does a university with the highest reputation for journalism education justify keeping employed a professor caught on video behaving contrary to everything they teach? I have lived in within 100 miles of Mizzou 46 of my 48 years and have always been proud of their standing in journalism education. But I can't say that right now. I know it's one rogue individual from a group of outstanding educators; but the university needs to make the statement that this won't be tolerated by letting this "professor" find a job elsewhere."

Art in LA: "It's ironic that this happened in the 'Show Me' state. From the mo.gov website... 'I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.' Go Tim!"

Dan Gorman: "I haven't followed this story closely, but I'd offer a few thoughts based on the linked video:

• I agree, the student journalist showed remarkable poise in a very difficult situation.
• The events in the video represent a finite slice of a much larger set of circumstances—what we see in the video is limited spatially, and chronologically, and may or may not be representative of the larger context.
• These events took place on a college campus, which by definition is a learning environment where people need the freedom to express themselves and to make mistakes—it may well be that some of the students in the video will have occasion to reflect on what took place, and may well choose to behave differently in an analogous situation going forward.
• Prof Click's behavior toward the end of the video certainly appears to be unfortunate for a teacher of journalism, and I respect everyone's right to express an opinion on this, but working as I do on a college campus I think we would do well to reserve judgment regarding her employment status—Prof. Click's faculty colleagues, college administrators, Mizzou students, and the people of Missouri are best positioned to determine what is in the best interests of the University, the students, and the state which supports them.

"We're all on a learning journey every day whether we're conscious of it or not, and we're all at different places on our individual journeys at any given time.  What's important is not to be right all the time, but to get better over time."

Nicholas Condon: "People can act entirely within their rights and still be rude jerks. Tai may be entirely within his rights, but he was behaving like a rude jerk."

Roger Bradbury: "Tim Tai held his cool far, far longer than I would have. The demonstrators are nothing but cowards and bullies. The video makes me angry. For much of this video, female demonstrators stand far too close to Tim, knowing that no matter how nasty they are, no matter how they force him back just by walking at him, if he pushes back an inch it will be a matter of, 'You can't hit me, I'm a girl!' While the big brave male demonstrators stand behind them, telling him he should go and ready to act in 'defence' of the women they hide behind.

"Like I said, cowards and bullies. I sincerely hope that Tim Tai is more representative of students in the USA than the deeply unpleasant members of this mob."

NancyP: "Click is on the way out, most likely. I suspect that she has been informed of non-renewal of contract. It can be hard to fire a prof mid-semester; one has to find a replacement, and that replacement has to cook up a course (assuming the course isn't canned) and get to know the students in a very short period of time so that grades can be given. Plus, the university lawyers have the final say on timing of firings.

"As for the protesting students, I was flabbergasted that they didn't have an appointed set of media spokespeople. What good does it do to have a famous J-school on campus if one can't be bothered to map a media strategy ahead of the event? The WHOLE POINT of the protest was to have their views heard and acted upon. They should have been in control by having a press conference with photo-ops. I take it that the guy fasting was elsewhere.

"Now as to their issues—yep, rural Missouri (and urban Missouri) can be quite racist. Administration can't do a darn thing about the non-student good ol' boys with confederate flags on their trucks yelling racist stuff at black people on the streets outside Mizzou. If the administration can figure out who did it, they could kick the sh*t-swastika guy out for vandalism. I can see that having some black counseling personnel at the student health center would be a wise thing to do. I have no idea how the administration can be successful attracting a sizable number of new black faculty from outside the state."

John (partial comment): "As a photographer who dabbled in protest photography, I feel his pain. Years ago I found myself between mounted NYPD officers and angry anti-war protesters (pre-Iraq II).

"The protesters took exception of me taking their images, asking for press ID (which I refused) and accusing me of being a police officer and the cops charged at me just like they did at the protesters.

"Can't win...."

Rob L: "As a Maneater [the student newspaper at the University of Missouri —Ed.] alum, and a Mizzou one as well, this was hard to watch. I still feel that the initial media reaction to some of this was a bit...navel-viewing, but Click was in the wrong. And she is a Communications prof, not a Journalism prof, and at Mizzou, that's a biiiig divide. She was removed almost immediately from an advisory role on the Student Media board, and her status as a guest professor in the Journalism school was revoked. I do think there is space to discuss that 'I have a right to take your picture' is a really bad argument to make to upset people, and that stepping back a few feet can help deescalate things. Props to Tim for keeping his cool, and if yall are curious, The Maneater has a great timeline of how we ended up here."

 

More About the Remarkable Mary Ellen

Mary Ellen Mark, "Rat" and Mike with a gun, Seattle, Washington, USA, 1983

TOP is usually off on Saturdays, but in case you have a bit of extra time today, I thought it would be valuable to list the best of the great links we collected yesterday.

First, Rat: the boy on the left in Mary Ellen Mark's famous picture "Rat and Mike" above (his real name is Rich) is now a 48-year-old tow-truck driver with a "beautiful wife, beautiful children and grandchildren." He cried when he learned of Mary Ellen's death.

You can read an update about his life and what he's doing now in an article by Chris Macias of The Sacramento Bee. This was suggested to us by Rick D; thanks, Rick.

In case you never have and you'd like to read the original 1983 LIFE magazine "Streets of the Lost" article first, you can find it in readable form on Mary Ellen's website. I'd recommend reading this before reading the update. It's a great classic of photojournalism and of the photo-essay form at its best.

Next, Kyle: Old friend-we've-never-met Kyle Cassidy, a fascinating photographer in his own right, wrote a very beautiful short piece about Mary Ellen on his Live Journal website, pointed out by Kathy Li. It's of special interest to practicing photographers, giving a window into Mary Ellen Mark's attitudes and determination and the way she taught. Not to be missed.

(Kyle says Mary Ellen used to introduce him by saying, "This is the weirdest photographer you'll ever meet. He's good, but he's weird. Aren't you?" Funny.)

Kyle's piece really points up the truth about what reader latent_image said in the Comments: "Following news of her death, I saw Mary Ellen Mark referred to in one article as a 'street photographer.' To me street photography is characterized by anonymity. Mark's work was always about connection and intimacy...just the opposite."

Finally, 'Mary Ellen presents': If you really have some time to spend today (the video is more than an hour long), Robert Hudyma found this great video of a slide lecture given by Mary Ellen, at Ryerson University's Ryecast. Many of us have heard her speak in person, but if you haven't, this will be the next best thing. The images are not always coordinated but it's valuable to be able to see better-quality versions of the pictures on the right. Studying the pictures in the slideshow emphasizes one of Kyle Cassidy's insights about the work: "You don’t need to know that someone’s a movie star or someone’s a prostitute or someone else just won a mustache contest, they’re all beautiful images first."

We'll be back on Monday with the Spring season's exciting Kate Kirkwood Print Offer announcement.

Mike
(Thanks to Rick D, Kathy Li, Robert Hudyma, and everyone else who commented yesterday)

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Jennifer Lawrence to Play Photojournalist Lynsey Addario

Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone

Photo: Roadside Attractions

A couple of friends and I have privately wondered about the eyebrow-raising publicity juggernaut behind photojournalist Lynsey Addario's new book It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War. She's been all over the MM hyping the book. Deservedly, but still—photographers don't usually raise quite this much interest.

Well, the plot thickens: just on Monday, Warner Brothers secured the movie rights to the book (apparently in exclusive bidding), and Steven Spielberg is already slated to direct current "It-girl" Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role.

It will be the first time in 30 years that Spielberg has directed a female lead. The last time was Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple in 1985.

Lawrence is both a movie star, raking in the cheddar in pop fodder, and a serious actress, one who is by some reports exceptionally avid for dramatic roles worthy of her very considerable talents. If you haven't seen her yet in something that isn't slathered and greased in CGI, check out Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, a harrowing tale of a young (and female) orphan caught between the vicissitudes of the drug trade and the strict (and sexist) traditional Ozarks mountain backwoods culture. Winner of the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and lastingly superb.

I'm eager to know more of the hidden story here—whose interest has been driving this, and when did it start? To my reading it's possible that the book was significantly ghostwritten (it's at least very well edited—you just don't write that well without practice), so the publicity behind the book and possibly even the book itself could have been driven by the interest of one or the other of these Hollywood bigs. And possibly from very early on. (Wish some real reporter would bird-dog this; smells like an interesting tale to me.)

Anyway, a big-budget photographer movie comin' someday to theaters near you, and that's good news.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Stan B.: "I've been wondering too. Seems she suddenly burst on every radio station and media outlet for a week there—same questions, same answers (almost verbatim, as if scripted). Good on her, but the whole affair did seem somewhat...odd. As for her story going Hollywood—definite mixed reaction. Hope I'm not the only one a tad leery about Spielberg reaching into his cinematic bag of tricks—I'm still smarting from his colorization gimmick in Schindler's list.

Mike adds: And Schindler's odd, sappy, retrospective outburst near the end, which you almost can't help but read as the character and actor being the mouthpiece of the director, and which catastrophically torpedoes the greatness of the film (it's still very good). Spielberg is the Norman Rockwell of movies, superbly skilled but with a core that essentially thrills and vibrates to the maudlin and the mawkish. It's almost guaranteed that his portrayal of Addario will be a) overcooked at least at points (a fault of all of Hollywood, though, so we can't lay that entirely at Spielberg's feet) and b) excruciatingly corny at one or more key junctures, infecting the toughness and naturalism of the story.

Stephen Scharf: "Don't forget about Jennifer Lawrence's performances in both Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Both incredible, superb performances. I personally don't have an issue with Lawrence working in pop fodder; it likely provides her the financial independence for her to do more serious work. John Cusack took the same approach so he could work in films like High Fidelity and The Thin Red Line."

Lynsey Addario's New Book

[Please note that TOP is offline Saturdays. We'll return Sunday afternoon. —Ed.]

-

Remember Lynsey Addario? She's appeared twice here on TOP, once when she won the MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2009, and once when Audi chose to profile her for a car advertisement and we posted it.

She's just sent me a copy of It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War, her memoir published by Penguin Press.

Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Photojournalist—and now author—Lynsey Addario

Strangely perhaps—write it off to chaos theory—I didn't write about it when she was kidnapped in 2011. Maybe that's good, though, because it means you can read her own account of it, as you should.

It violates the Pinker Rule to recommend a book before I've read it all the way through, but this one is turning out to be a particularly compelling example of its genre. I tried to contact Lynsey for permission to publish a short excerpt; she's doubtless off doing much more serious things than answering emails. In the breach, try this, maybe tomorrow when TOP takes the day off:

1. Go to the Amazon page.
2. Click on the book cover to "Look Inside."
3. Scroll down and click on "Prelude."
4. Scroll down and start reading past the three-dot break where it begins "I was there on assignment for the New York Times with three other award-winning journalists...."

Blurb-words are impossible to use, because of runaway blurb-word inflation and excessive blurb-word overexposure, but see if you don't think what follows gets more and more "gripping."

It's illegal to steal large sections of published text without permission (people who repost whole articles on forums take note), but Fair Use allows you to publish reasonable small selections for the purpose of discussion. I think I'll venture this, from page 123 of the hardcover:

"Is anyone here a journalist?" the driver repeated. " I have the body of a journalist in the trunk of my car and don't know what to do with it."

I definitely couldn't handle that. I walked back over to Eric and Elizabeth. Eric rattled off a phone number, and Elizabeth dialed and handed the phone back to him. It was a number for the wife of his dead colleague, and the answering machine picked up. He hung up. Eric uttered another number, and someone picked up. It was his office in Australia.

"Hi. This is Eric. Paul is dead."

Just like that.

I ran around to the back of the hospital and put my face in my hands. That phone call could have been for me, for Ivan, for Elizabeth. I didn't even have any phone numbers for Elizabeth's family. We were all there minutes before the car bomb detonated. Now there was some random taxi driver with the body of a colleague folded and dismembered in his trunk, asking what to do with it. How did one transfer the body of a friend out of a country we all snuck into illegally, when there were no functioning embassies, no police, no diplomats, and the only open border accessible from northern Iraq was with Iran? It seemed so obvious, but I didn't know war meant death—that journalists might also get killed in the war. I hid behind the hospital, ashamed of my weakness, my tears, and my fear, wondering if I had the strength for this job, and wept inconsolably.

The war had begun.

Frightening and sobering, as life. As writing, cracking good stuff. I suspect you'll find that the book's value as information about photojournalism begins to take a back seat, and what you're reading is actually top-drawer, page-turning true life adventure writing.

I do 95% of my reading on the iPad Air and Kindle now, and I have It's What I Do for the Kindle app and also in hardcover. In this case I'm going to recommend the hardcover. It's a compact, solid, well-made book printed on good paper, and the numerous color illustrations integrated into the flow of the printed matter are particularly well done.

I guess I have to finish this before I can say "highly recommended." So stay tuned for that.

Mike

P.S. She was profiled on NPR just the other day, but I can't go 44 minutes without music. And here's the book link for the U.K.

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Bryce Lee: "Wanted the hardcover copy of the book through Amazon Canada. One to three month wait before being allowed into Canada. And the price could also (after checking with my local retail outlet who are not bringing in the book) be twice or more the listed U.S. price. And I don't do tablets or readers."

Mike replies: Easy. Just go here. Free shipping worldwide, and in stock.

'Sports Illustrated' Does Away With Staff Photographers

A great shot of Terrell Owens and Tony Romo by Al Tielemans, one of the last six remaining SI staff photographers who were all laid off last Thursday.

The venerated photography-centric Sports Illustrated magazine let go all six of its last remaining staff photographers last Thursday, amid sad noises about restructuring, smaller quarters, and new working arrangements.

However inevitable, it's another sad ladmark moment in the transition from old media to new.

With distinct irony, the NPPA notes that the layoffs occurred "less than 12 hours after many sports shooters were in Manhattan for the premier of the ESPN film Keepers Of The Streak, a new documentary about four photographers who have shot every Super Bowl since its beginning." Here's a clip from the film featuring sports greats Walter Iooss (pronounced "yoss") and Neil Leifer, along with Joe Namath, talking about Walter's poolside shot of Broadway Joe—a great period piece.

Sympathies and solidarity to (in alphabetical order) Robert Beck, Simon Bruty, Bill Frakes, David E. Klutho, John W. McDonough, and Al Tielemans.

Mike
(Thanks to concern from many readers)

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Michael Barker: "Next time I go to a game, I'm cheering for the photographers."

Benjamin Marks: "Wow. Just wow. Where is the 'Illustrated' going to come from? Fans with iPhones?"

Steve Biro: "I've said this time after time but I'll repeat it here: I'm fine with the transition to new media, even though I love books, magazines, traditional broadcasting and, yes, photographic prints. But I have a major problem when that transition is used as an excuse to gut an institution of what made it great in the first place. This latest move by Sports Illustrated is more evidence that most of the media brain trust has yet to figure out this new-fangled digital thing."

John Camp (partial comment): "I'd point out that the photographers weren't let go because they were unnecessary—they were let go because SI is failing. The company will struggle along for a while, but not too long.

"I once worked for one of the largest, most powerful news publishers in the nation. That entire corporation is now gone. When I was there, the place was rockin'—when they thought they needed more money, they'd just push the advertising rates. The couldn't even conceive of something like Craigslist.

"There was a group of us who really did see this coming, but we weren't the people who got promotions—those went to the socially ept, the guys (and I do mean guys) with shiny teeth and square chins who were good with the wives of the top managers. Most of the people who saw it coming eventually did okay: they got out and found something more economically relevant to do. The guys with square chins got early retirement, because the company fell apart beneath their feet. Many of the newspapers they ran no longer exist."

Photojournalism

A reader, Christian K., put this question to me yesterday, and I put it to you: What's the best magazine left for original photojournalism?

Mike
(Thanks to Christian and Bobby B.)

Original contents copyright 2014 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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Featured Comments from:

Mike R: "Magazine? Is that something like a 'record album?'"

Mike replies: You mean like this?

psu: "I like the Guardian Eyewitness app on the iPad. Or is that not what you meant? :-)"

John Krill: "Harper's, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone. Just about any large city newspaper. We rarely give press photographers their due. Don't look just for photoessays but also how publications use support photography."

Vincent Bilotta: "The New York Times."

Howard Owens: "I subscribe to the New York Times on the iPad primarily for the photojournalism. If sports is your thing, Sports Illustrated is great of course.

Michael Shaw: "TOP honors (sorry...) to News Photographer magazine, published by the National Press Photographers Association. From the NPPA website, 'non-members can also order a subscription online or download the order form.'"

James Symington: "National Geographic is the only one that really comes close in my view."

robert e: "Didn't you link to Lensculture a few days ago? Impressive. Andy Adams' flakphoto.com is another excellent curator of photojournalism projects. Not as intense, but The New Yorker's "Photo Booth" is often worthwhile, featuring mini-slide-shows of photojournalism, both old and new, which I appreciate. I couldn't say whether it's part of the paper edition. I seldom bother to operate a printed magazine these days, but I expect to see good photojournalism any time I pick up the New York Times' Sunday Magazine, National Geographic, or ESPN Magazine."

JohnMFlores: "David Alan Harvey's Burn Magazine has some great work from upcoming photogs."

Tregix: "6 Mois."

'Kiev's Fatigue' by Eric Bouvet

Photo by Eric Bouvet, from the essay "Kiev's Fatigue"

Take a look at "Kiev's Fatigue" by Eric Bouvet. Really takes you there. Outstanding photography of a heartbreaking situation.

Mike
(Thanks to Norm Nicholson and Ken Bennett)

Original contents copyright 2014 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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Featured Comments from:

David: "Wow. I'm up here in Michigan in the trees and snow, happily working away, thinking about much different stuff than what these humans are enduring. Once again, science fiction trumps itself and comes to be. Road Warrior images that make Road Warrior look like child's play. Very scary to know that all over the world there are people who are embroiled in situations that defy imagination. Very powerful images and extremely disturbing."

John Stanmeyer Wins World Press Photo of the Year

John Stanmeyer of VII photo agency has won the World Press Photo Photo of the Year (Contemporary Issues, 1st prize singles) for this photograph taken on February 26th, 2013, for National Geographic. The picture, titled "Signal," shows "African migrants on the shore of Djibouti city at night, raising their phones in an attempt to capture an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad. Djibouti is a common stop-off point for migrants in transit from such countries as Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, seeking a better life in Europe and the Middle East." Here is his website if you'd like to see more of his work.

Congratulations to John!

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

Original contents copyright 2014 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.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Stan B.: "One subtle but oh so dramatic composition without the direct aid of war, blood, or catastrophe that still addresses the current world situation, both directly (immigration) and at large (technology). Stunning in its simplicity, relevance and beauty."

Dennis Ng: "It is very other-worldly. They looked like ETs calling home when I first saw it. Then the explanation...great photo. Just great!"