Re-photo

I used to be a great fan of the BBC, but experience in reporting events over the years as well as some aspects of their output have at least to some extent changed my mind, though they are still obviously rather better than many other broadcasters.I strongly support the idea of broadcasting as a public service and they do produce some very fine programmes in various genres.

But of course they are still over-manned,  still over-complacent, and still deliberately misreporting many events. Still giving far too much air time to bigots, racists and climate change deniers. And still wasting far too much money on rubbish which may be popular but would be done more or less as well by commercial broadcasters.

One of the finest aspects of the BBC’s work has always been the World Service, today celebrating 80 years of existence, though celebrating this by massive cuts, leaving its long-time home in Bush House and insulting its retired employees.

Thanks yet again to Duckrabbit and a post by Ciara Leeming ‘The face of the Gujarat riots meets his photographer ‘saviour‘ for bringing an interesting piece from BBC News India to my attention.

In 2002, Arko Datta photographed tailor Qutubuddin Ansari praying for help during religious riots in Gujarat during which around a thousand people, mainly Muslims, were killed – the worst riots since Independence. It was a picture that summed up the fear and desperation of many, and was printed on front pages around the world.

A week later, Mr Ansari became aware of the picture for the first time, when a foreign journalist hunted him out in a refugee camp and showed him a newspaper with it across a whole page. It made him notorious and “followed me wherever I went. It haunted me, and drove me out of my job, and my state.”  He lost half a dozen jobs and continued to be hounded by journalists. Ten years on,  BBC Hindi’s Rupa Jha was present when a meeting had been arranged between the two men.

Datta has been in a military vehicle and had taken a few frames of Ansari with a telephoto lens as he had pleaded with the soldiers to rescue him and a few other Muslims from a Hindu mob. Then he told the soldiers to stop and do something, and he and others in the van said they were not leaving until they did something to help the trapped people.

Although Datta’s photograph caused Ansari considerable grief, the journalists’ insistence that the military take action almost certainly saved the lives of the trapped Muslims, as well as bringing what was happening in Gujarat to the attention of the world.

Towards the end of their meeting, Ansari tells the photographer “Nobody is to blame, brother. You did your job. I was doing mine, trying to save my life. Your picture showed the world what was happening here.”

Few photographs have the impact that this image does, either as a picture or on the subjects in it, or indeed on the world and on the photographer, but it is a reminder that photography can have consequences we fail to foresee.

This is not the only time Datta has returned to meet the subject of one of his award-winning images. You can watch a video in which he talks about photographing the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and how he retuned to find the Indian woman mourning a dead relative which was the World Press Photo of the Year in 2004.

I’m often surprised and amused by how things link together when I’m looking at pages on the web, often finding things that link to posts I’ve made or thoughts I’ve had but not quite got around to writing about.

One of the latter was about another of those annual awards, POYi, (Pictures of the Year international) which is unusual in conducting its business in public, web-casting the judging with 99 on-line publicly open seats in a chatroom.  The judging is spread out over most of the month, and has now more or less ended – so you will need to wait until next year to take part.

The Photojournalism Contest entry flowchart  on the Shit Photojournalists Like blog has more than an element of truth in it, judging from the various shows and lists of winners I’ve seen over the years. Certainly they lead me to the conclusion I’ve always had about such competitions, “Save your entry fee and buy gear.”  They also link to the POYi Chat Room Heroes blog, though I think you have to have been their to get much out of that.

One photographer who gets a particular mention is Melissa Little, whose work was apparently “pulled in, kicked out, pulled in, then kicked out again.” I don’t know what she had in for POYi, but you can see some interesting work on her own web site, where I find that in 2001 she was a student at the Eddie Adams Workshop and “have been honored to return for the last seven years as staff, where I’ve done everything from mow the grass and rake the leaves to documenting everything in sight as workshop photographer to leading, finding stories and coaching a team of 10 students. ”

I’ve not yet looked at all the awards for POYi, but did enjoy looking through the results for the ‘News Picture Story – Newspaper’ class, where first place went to
Michael Robinson Chavez (Los Angeles Times) for DECONSTRUCTING MUBARAK, second to Mads Nissen (Berlingske / Panos Pictures) for pictures of the LIBYAN REVOLUTION, third to Hiroto Sekiguchi (Yomiuri Shimbun) for TSUNAMI AFTERMATH and the ‘Award of Excellence to Craig Walker (The Denver Post) for his pictures of OCCUPY DENVER. And I mention this not just because there are some fine pictures in these stories (which are always of more interest to me than the single picture awards) but because of the controversy I may have mentioned earlier over World Press Photo, when some judges anounced publicly that they had seen no pictures of the Occupy movement worthy of an award. I don’t know if Walker’s work went to WPP as well, but certainly some other very worthy images did.

 
© Luca Tommasi – A changing China

I’ve just updated the pictures in Luca Tommasi’s A changing China on the Urban Landscapes web site that I run with Mike Seaborne.

Although Mike and I are both based on the outskirts of London and much of our own work on the site is from London, we intended this as an international site, and of the eleven photographers whose work is on the site only four are actually from the UK.

We welcome contributions to the site, but insist that these show a serious approach to urban landscape, and on the site I give a brief idea of what this might mean. It isn’t just pretty pictures of a city, and it isn’t just architectural photography. Here is my check list from the site which explains my idea of what we are looking for :

Urban landscape photography

•  in some way describe a town or city
•  represents an attempt to understand our experience of the city
•  shows a dedication to the subject, expressed through a body of work rather than isolated images
•  concentrates on structures or processes rather than on people
•  may deal in either details or a broader view

If you have work that you think would fit, you are welcome to submit work and we have a page on the site that tells you more. Now that most web users are on broadband rather than dial-up we normally use slightly larger images, typically 600-800px larger dimension. Projects have to be accompanied by some explanatory text, and we also welcome relevant essays on the subject – up to around 5000 words.

I wrote a little more about this definition and the site as a part of a lecture I gave five years ago, which I presented in a series of posts on this site, including Architecture and Urban Landscape photography.

Like many things on the web, we run the site for love not for money, and there are no prizes or payment for having work on the site, which got a respectable 165,000 hits last year.  Though of course – as with this blog –  it’s the quality not the quantity of our visitors that counts.

If you are a student or have less than 3 years experience working as a professional photographer (freelance or otherwise) you may like to consider applying for a place on this year’s Eddie Adams Workshop or ‘Barnstorm’, “an intense four-day gathering of the top photography professionals, along with 100 carefully selected students. The photography workshop is tuition-free, and the 100 students are chosen based on the merit of their portfolios.” Unfortunately only 10 of those places are available for non-US students.

It takes place from October 5-8, 2012 in Jeffersonville, New York, and although the tuition is free, those who get a place will need to pay their own fares to the event and also a flat fee for room and board ($375) at the Workshop. It all adds up, but the quality of the free tuition makes this seems a great opportunity.

For more information and to apply, see the Eddie Adams Workshop site.  Described as “the premier tuition-free photography experience” it exists thanks to many volunteers – who over the years have included many well-known names among photographers and editors with Adams “shamelessly exploiting a lifetime of friendships and contacts” who over the years included Gordon Parks, Joe Rosenthal, Alfred Eisenstaedt and editors and picture editors of Time, Newsweek, Life, Fortune, The New York Times Magazine and Parade magazine and is currently sponsored by many of the leading names in photography, including Nikon, Adobe, ASMP, AP, B&H, Getty Images, HP, Manfrotto, PDN, Photoshelter and Sandisk.

Most people know Eddie Adams (1933-2004) for one particular image from Saigon, but he took many fine pictures. He began the workshop in 1988 and this is the 25th Barnstorm.

Thanks to Jim Casper’s Lensculture blog for showing me Alex Webb‘s Chicago Street Photography slideshow, made in collaboration with Leica and Magnum. The pictures sometimes disappear a little too fast for my slow-working brain, and although there is nothing wrong with the sounds recorded by Webb and his commentary it perhaps more makes for an easy experience than adding a great deal to the pictures. As to be expected from Webb, there are some interesting images, though in the nature of a presentation like this there are those which are less so, but overall I found it largely held my attention.

The video (which incidentally I couldn’t see using Firefox, but played without problems on Internet  Explorer) is also on the Leica Camera blog, where it appears with a short interview with Webb about the work, along with a half a dozen comments.

One person asks for information about the audio recording and gets a rather poor answer from the Leica Internet team “Some of the information regarding the audio in the piece can be found at the end credits.” If you blink you miss these and certainly it is hardly possible to read past the first few lines crediting Alex Webb, though with a little fiddling around you can stop the video at that point (4m35s) and find that as well as Alex’s own recordings it also credits Freesound.org and ChicagoStreetMusicians.org. There is a kind of odd 14 seconds of blank screen with a couple of bursts of sound after the credits disappear, suggesting some kind of production error, so perhaps the credits were intended to be more readily legible.

In some respects I think that digital works better with Webb’s liking for deep shadows than transparency ever did, and although one of the comments calls for the contrast of these images to be ‘beefed up’, I can’t agree. But when I saw his first book in 1986 I thought it relied too much on the drama of large areas of darkness – to me at the time it seems too easy a way to create drama, and I probably still feel that way.

Nor do I agree with ‘Fred’ who says “Most of these are pretty dull shots.”  But it’s worth spending the 5 minutes to watch this and make up your own mind. You may even want to see it a second time, as I did, with the sound turned off.