Via Mitra Kalita and Manisha Gangopadhyay

A magazine called the Monitor on Psychology (www.apa.org/monitor) will soon be looking for people to fill three positions: reporter (public policy), editorial assistant, and freelance proofreader.

The reporter will write 4-6 articles a month focusing on areas of public policy, especially policy relating to psychology. This is a full time position with benefits.

The editorial assistant is a full time entry-level position for people interested in getting a start as a magazine writer. This person will help to edit and proofread articles, as well as write small pieces.

These two positions are not posted yet, but will soon be listed with full descriptions on: http://www.apa.org/jobs/

Finally, if you are interested in doing freelance proofreading work, and are familiar with AP style, let me know and I'll
forward your information to the editor.

TiffinBox posts job/internship notices as a service. We do not verify or guarantee the accuracy of the information presented, nor does it make any representations or endorsements conveying the background or reputation of the parties listing positions. Any reliance on the posted information is the sole responsibility of the user, who holds Tiffinbox.org harmless and releases it from any claim for damages, injury or other liability arising from the use of any of the information contained in the posted job or informational notices.

A couple of years back I visited London. Before my trip, I pestered Shahidul Alam for names of photographers, photo editor and photo agencies. People he knew well and whom I could meet to show off my own portfolio. On the top of his list was Kalpesh Lathigra.

I called. We talked. He was busy. But, we could meet. For a bit. At lunch time. Perfect!

Lathigra, is a London-based photojournalist. His images are full of energy. They are emotionally charged and have the sense of intimacy that many photographers simply lack. His web site displays a large breadth of work that also belies his age.

I am really not sure who said that. But it is hard not to hear the spin out of Washington these days without wondering – have we heard it all yet? Is there more of this double-talk coming our way? What new rationale for the war in Iraq will they spit out at us? As citizens of the world do we not have the basic human right to challenge the policies and the practices of our government?

Politics and international relations aren't for the faint at heart. NYTimes op-ed writer Tom Friedman's book Longitudes and Attitudes offers one perspective. Meanwhile, here is another – Lakshmi Chaudry, a prolific writer and political scientist, has co-authored a book, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. She and her co-authors Robert and Christopher Scheer may have just given us what we need to begin questioning the current illusionary path we are on. Her writing can be found here and here. (Via Sreenath Sreenivasan)

Who is SHE? She is Ami Vitale, one of my favorite photojournalists who currently works out of India. If you haven't seen her work online – RUN and check it out here. The images will inspire you and the Flash-based presentation will wow you. It's clean, simple, elegant and amazing.

Ami is internationally recognized for her documentary work. The National Press Photographers Association recently awarded her the much acclaimed Magazine Photographer of the Year title. At the recent PhotoPlusExpo in New York City, the World Press Photo folks had assembled her winning portfolio of images from Gujarat (after the riots). With her permission, I'll try and post those images here. She is also Canon's 2003 Female Photographer of the Year.

Meanwhile, here is your chance to learn from this young master of photography! Leslie Scott Photography and Tours is offering a special workshop with Ami from January 31 to February 14, 2004. The workshop will take place in Rajasthan. Again, I wish I could go. But if any of you do make it there, do send me a report at: tiffinbox[at]pipalproductions[dot]com.

Leslie Scott Photography and Tours is presenting a special workshop on Jan.
31 through Feb. 14 to Rajasthan with Ami Vitale, 2003 Best of Photojournalism
“Magazine Photographer of the Year” by the National Press Photographers
Association. This will be a true learning experience. Ami will spend a half or full
day (to be determined by the group) with each person on a one-on-one basis. The
others that are shooting on their own will be accompanied by myself, if they
choose, or will have time to roam around and shoot on their own. That night
Ami will discuss with them what they shot. This will take place part of the time
at Jaisalmer. Ami will accompany everyone as a group the rest of the time. In
addition, we will spend time with Ami as she shows us how she transmits her
images and works as a freelance agency photographer on a day-to-day basis (she
is one of Getty Images top photojournalists). Ami will also talk about how to
sell your work on a daily basis to different outlets. Ami is also the
recipient of some of the most prestigious grants in the industry. If anyone is
interested in more information, they can contact me by email at lscottpht@aol.com or this toll-free number: 1-888-381-0854.

How many of us have whined about lacking new equipment (like that's going to make us the next Cartier-Bresson!)? Are we not wide-eyed and get utterly silly when we see the latest and greatest in trade shows like PhotoPlusExpo? Yes, we all drool and we do tend to get quickly flustered don't we?

Shedding gear is quite frankly, liberating. I try and do it on assignments from time to time. I photographed a desi singles event about a week ago and took with me just one camera body, a lens and a flash (knowing that I may need to use it in dim lighting). It worked. I couldn't have used my longer lenses (even though they are fast at f/2.8). Simplifying what we use can better help us focus on what's in front of the camera, our subjects.

Aaron Huey, a photographer, echoes the sentiments expressed to me a while back by a New York Times photo editor – “Go Simple. Go Wide. Go Deep.” Try his technique and let me know how your experiment panned out. If many of you wish to post your images here on TiffinBox, I would be happy to create a photo album. Email me your thoughts at: tiffinbox[at]pipalproductions[dot]com.

I have seen a whole lot of graffiti that is plain UGLY. Yes, that's a subjective assessment but I reserve the right to comment on anything, so why should this stop me?

And, then again, I have seen murals on city walls that are absolutely fantastic! I can think of murals in Berkeley, California and Los Angeles that are quite clearly a focal point for the community. The artwork depicts either the community's history, a sense of pride in their leaders or just a beautiful sunrise.

Mexican scientists have apparently found a way to discourage artists from expressing themselves. What's wrong about this is that it lumps together artists with gang-bangers, who post their nonsensical signs willy-nilly just to warn their enemies off of “their” turf. It makes it impossible for artists commissioned or voluntarily charged to create works of art in a community space for all to share and appreciate. I think this is plain wrong!

I know Diego Rivera, Mexican's foremost muralist, must be rolling in his grave.

Economist.com | Deleting graffiti

Via John Laxmi, the NY Times review of two photo exhibitions based on India, at Yale University.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/arts/31COTT.html

October 31, 2003
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ART REVIEW | ‘TRACES OF INDIA'; ‘Company Culture'
Composing Indian History, One Carefully Framed View at a Time
By HOLLAND COTTER

NEW HAVEN – Life happens, but history is made, as in invented, cooked up. You blend together events, people and places, stir in ideology, and presto, you have a docudrama version of reality. The truth is in the mix somewhere.

Art, in its role as visual history, naturally shares this formula, most obviously in history painting, commemorative sculpture, religious and political architecture. They are all out to sell a point of view, and the more inventively or insistently they do so, the readier we are to overlook the manipulation or buy the message.

Few art forms are as magnetic as photography. None can record more faithfully or dissemble more convincingly. This paradox is the impetus behind two finely chiseled exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art, “Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation,” and the smaller, complementary “Company Culture.”

Both are visual essays, think pieces. If you are allergic to such things, can't bear to read wall labels, or are firm in a belief that art speaks for itself, you might not consider the larger show to be an art exhibition at all. But if you're comfortable with an expository format and have the time and energy to engage with – which doesn't necessarily mean agree with – the show's arguments, there is a lot for you here, not least dozens of extraordinary images.

The story the two shows share begins with a historical coincidence: the invention of photography and the consolidation of British rule in India in the first half of the 19th century. The monopolistic merchant corporation called the East India Company, under the auspices of the British government, had been on the subcontinent for 200 years. The company initially came to buy spices and silks, but soon took over the shop. Britain supplied troops to protect its interests, and India was paternalistically embraced as part of the fabric of a greater Britain.

As part of this proprietorial arrangement (and as a way to make it popular at home), British artists were enlisted to capture the subcontinent in images. And their role is examined in “Company Culture,” a smart introductory show gleaned from the Yale Center's collection and organized by Morna O'Neill, a doctoral candidate in Yale's art history department.

Among the first arrivals in the late 18th century were William Hodges and the uncle-nephew team of Thomas and William Daniell, and they came with conflicted agendas. Although their job was documentary, even quasi-scientific, they were landscape painters steeped in the Romantic tradition. Not surprisingly, they filtered their new and overpoweringly exotic subject through a Romantic lens, softening and domesticating it. They also brought to it a distinct gloss with a built-in contradiction, depicting India as a classically timeless culture but one in sad decline.

Timelessness – the notion that the best ancient Indian art and architecture corresponded to a Keatsian ideal of imperishable beauty – suited British needs: it confirmed that India was indeed worthy of acquisition. The concept of decline had uses, too, justifying a protective stewardship and turning India into a vast museum filled with relics of better days.

India's architectural monuments, at once sublime and picturesquely crumbling away, offered evidence for both bolsters of the imperial ideal. And photography, with its vaunted objectivity, was well suited to conveying them. This is where “Traces of India,” organized by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, a former associate curator in the photographs collection at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, picks up the historical thread.

The medium, with its reputation as a mechanical recording device, unprejudiced, all-seeing, held instant appeal for the era's equivalent of art historians, intent on collecting, archiving and codifying India's elite ancient culture.

Pioneering archaeologists of South Asia like Alexander Cunningham, James Fergusson and James Burgess were enterprising and in many ways admirable men, who came to their task from unlikely backgrounds. Fergusson, for example, was an indigo planter who picked up archaeology out of sheer curiosity, and went on to uncover some of the greatest Indian Buddhist monuments. He was an enthusiastic proponent of photography as a scientific instrument, and back in England he researched portions of his highly influential books from photographs alone, often of sites he had never seen.

One section of the show is made up almost entirely of early pictures of archaeological sites, and they are thrilling. Sculptures now long since housed in museums seem to be sprouting straight from the earth; details of their carving come through with electrifying clarity. The photographers themselves – among them Linnaeus Tripe and later Felice Beato, Samuel Bourne and John Murray – worked with prodigious diligence.

Tripe recorded, in a series of 21 pictures, joined end to end in a scroll, an inscription running around the entire base of an important Hindu temple in South India. His undertaking, technologically awesome given the primitive equipment he was working with, seems to have been entirely self-assigned. It is also thanks to him that we have pictures – a few are in the show – of sculptural reliefs from the Buddhist stupa of Amaravati. He took them in 1858; a year later a group of these fabulous objects were sent to London, where, left outdoors on a wharf for a year, some of them were half-obliterated by the English weather and Victorian air pollution.

Apart from the Amaravati material, though, most Indian monumental art and architecture reached England in the form of photographic reproduction. And images like Beato's immaculately composed views of the Taj Mahal, and Murray's radiant three-part panoramic shot of the Moti Masjid, or Pearl Mosque, in the Agra Fort, inspired a vogue for Indian tourism, yet another form of invoking proprietary privilege.

Also with the aid of photographs, Britain concocted at-home adaptations of Indian design. Architectural forms – particularly those associated with the Mughals, Britain's imperial predecessors in South Asia – turned up in public buildings like the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and in festive spectacles like the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. In India itself, meanwhile, the British were designing government buildings in so-called Anglo-Indian style, with each new example duly recorded by the camera for international viewing.

But by midcentury, long-simmering anti-British sentiment in India exploded in a popular revolt that the British referred to as the Mutiny of 1857. Many soldiers and civilians, British and Indian, died in the conflict, and overnight the political climate in India changed. A retributive British government grew more controlling, and architectural photography found a new role as part of a propaganda campaign to promote images of British valor and Indian treachery.

Places where Britons had been killed were converted into shrines, their sanctity perpetuated and broadcast in pictures. In an infamous example of staged history, British military might was extolled in a photograph by Beato of the ruins of the Sikandar Bagh Palace in Lucknow, where 2,000 rebel Indian soldiers had been killed. Beato arrived on the scene a year after the battle. But to recreate its flavor, he had the remains of the rebels disinterred and scattered around the courtyard for the shoot.

>From that point on, the British Raj itself went into decline and ended, to assume a dramatized life in photographs, memoirs and “Masterpiece Theater.” And an independent India took charge of its own history, past and present, sometimes delineating it in part through ideologically charged representations of architecture.

The Taj Mahal sustained its Romantic allure: Indian movie stars and rock groups continue to pose in front of it. The Red Fort in Delhi, once a Mughal stronghold, became a symbol of the new nation, as illustrated in a school textbook picture from the 1970's in which Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addresses a crowd from the fort's ramparts while resistance heroes from earlier eras hover protectively in the sky.

Although many elements in this image are photographically derived, they are joined together as a painting in which naturalistic scale is off kilter and visionary events are treated naturalistically. In post-Independence India the role of documentary photography changed somewhat, at least officially. As the historian Partha Chatterjee notes in the indispensable catalog to “Traces of India,” Indians preferred to present historical events and cultural symbols in terms associated with sacred art rather than with the “profane realism of photography.”

Increasingly, he suggests, under colonialism Indians came to view the Western concept of reality – based on rationality and exemplified in a linear impulse to organize, categorize, collect and record – as morally problematic and intellectually delusional. Whatever its philosophical underpinnings, however, the politics of representation embedded in architecture and photography, and examined in these illuminating shows, is still operative in India today.

The 1992 destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya, built on the supposed site of an ancient Hindu shrine, ignited religious violence that still burns. And three generations of post-Independence Indian photographers – men and women, a mere handful of them known in the West – continue to record, interpret and invent an Indian history, that supremely charged epic that Fergusson described as “written in decay,” and that Rabindranath Tagore, with exquisite theatrical flair, declared resistant to “the cyclonic fury of contradictions and the gravitational pull of the dust.”

Holdthefrontpage reports that the British Press Photographers Association's web site is getting an unusually high number of visitors. Check them out to see what all the buzz is about.

W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and the Nikon Spirit Initiative announced Trent Parke the overall winner of the annual contest. Parke documented daily life in his homeland, Australia. Read about it here.

Editor & Publisher has announced that this image by Jerome Delay, a photojournalist for the Associated Press, has won the Grand Prize for this year's Photo of the Year. See other winners here. Read about the contest here.