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PhotoInk

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Via Sanjiv Sirpal

I love it when members of the audience raise their hand and say – “Yo, check this out!” Sanjiv Sirpal, a photographer, writer, designer – shall we just call him a Renaissance man? – wrote in to suggest a wonderful photo agency based in Delhi called PhotoInk.

I'll let you surf out to the site and check it out, but let me tell you that some of India's best known photographers are represented there. It's great to see a home for social documentary photography in India. Bangladesh has Drik and Pathashala, wonderful, progressive organizations doing great things thanks to Shahidul Alam's leadership.

I was pleasantly surprised to know that Robert Pledge's Contact Press Images was connected to PhotoInk. Devika Daulat-Singh, PhotoInk's director interned at Contact Press Images a while back. These sort of relationships run deep. Students reading this ought to take note – internships do pay in the end. It is what you make of it that either sustains you or cripples you in this business.

Sense or Censorship?

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Despite what Mr. Bush and his cohorts say, the war in Iraq is far from over. There have been some rumblings about it becoming another Vietnam. Perhaps one of the most significant factors in the defeat of the US in Vietnam was the constant stream of images (still and television) of America's war-dead being brought back in body-bags. Some 57,000 soldiers died in that war.

Day in and day out as Americans supped by their television sets or broke open a newspaper, images of a distant war rumbled the psyches of all Americans. The images fueled the protests against that abysmal and ill-timed war. We weren't winning the “hearts and minds” of people in Vietnam or back here in the US. As America's international policy was coming unraveled, the administration clearly saw their failure in curtailing media access to “sensitive” areas of the war. Since the end of Vietnam war in 1975, administration after administration, save for perhaps Jimmy Carter's, has practically hand-cuffed journalists to a line of thinking and delivery that prevents the general public from knowing the whole story. History has a funny way of repeating itself and the current administration knows it all too well.

As more and more Americans loose their lives in Iraq, I have been following the brewing controversy of showing or censoring images of American flag-draped coffins arriving on transport planes. The Seattle Times was perhaps the first newspaper to publish an image, shot by a contract worker for the Department of Defense, now distributed widely on the internet, showing soldiers busily tacking down the coffins in the bay of a transport plane. The response, according to Editor&Publisher, has been favorable. Mike Fancher, executive editor at The Seattle Times, defends his paper's use of the image as newsworthy. And, I have to agree.

The New York Times today reported that, “The Web site, The Memory Hole, had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware, the destination for most of the bodies. The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command's decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.”

The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have their own take on the situation.

How these images play out with the American public is yet to be seen. Despite the controlled and perhaps programmed nature of the news in the US we are hearing reports that things aren't going well for the Iraqis and it is likely to only get worse as the US leaves at the end of June. Will they actually hand things off to the Iraqis? Will there be peace?

Please Sign This Petition

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Via Melissa Lyttle

For the last three years there has been a split between the National Press Photographer's Association and the University of Missouri's Pictures of the Year. The purpose of this letter is to begin a dialogue with the hope of bringing the two groups together and offering a united community to photographers who enter these contests.

There is such a fine tradition behind the original contest as it was affiliated with the NPPA. Members looked forward to this one contest as a way to measure their work amongst their peers. We believe that having two similar contests based in America dilutes the honors and ultimately does not serve the profession. Resources are limited, and duplicating the effort amounts to wasted time and money on all sides.

The original mission of the unified POYi competition was simply to recognize good work and to elevate the craft of visual storytelling. It is in this spirit that we implore the leaders of POYi and NPPA to out their egos aside and begin discussions to come together to forge a new relationship. This new beginning is something photojournalism will benefit from.

In order to do this, please take a moment and go to this link:

http://www.aphotoaday.org/petition.html

Add your name to a petition to show your support for this movement among photographers both in and out of the NPPA membership.

I sincerely thank you for taking time to address this issue. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please email them to petition@aphotoaday.org and we will try to address them.

We are stronger together than we are apart.

Thank You,

Melissa Lyttle

Going The Distance At The Short Course

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If you missed the Northern Short Course this year, I urge you to go next year. For some of you outside the New England area, it may not much sense to make the trip, but several workshops and panels made the two day drive from Hartford to Warwick, Rhode Island really worthwhile.

Topping the charts was Karl Kuntz‘ beginning and intermediate workshops using Adobe PhotoShop CS. Kuntz, the Managing Editor for visuals and graphics at The Columbus Dispatch, is also known in photo circles as a PhotoShop guru. I took copious notes and learned to color correct and knock down digital noise from my images. The upgrade to PhotoShop CS is a steep one in price, but after Kuntz showed us a few tricks, it just makes sense to make the leap. Kuntz is a wonderful teacher and his own notes are available for download here. [it's a 3.1 mb PDF file]

John Harrington‘s professional seminar was useful and we all received a binder filled with case-studies and sample forms that we can quickly apply to make our business run smoothly. Want to know how to incorporate business practices in photography? Check out Harrington's other website LIFES WORK.

Stock photographer Seth Resnick‘s no-nonsense approach to digital workflow was an eye-opener. If you are still using film (as I am), the pace with which the photo world is spinning around the digital format should make you giddy. I certainly felt like I needed to sit down. Digital has approached the quality level of film. Sure, you need a $8,000 camera, a slew of lenses, a high-end post-production computer studio to make it all happen. The cost of doing business has simply sky-rocketed.

I was sorely disappointed by the lighting workshops that I signed up for. They seemed utterly remedial. Despite the gusty winds or the cold weather, I had had hoped we could have gone out into the sunlight and used our strobes for that classic Annie Liebovitz effect. God, I would love to shoot editorial portraits like her.

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