Ozl Photography

New York Times
Lens

Photographers Facing Danger and Death
BY JAMES ESTRIN

Though the conversation at the Visa Pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France, often turned to the lack of editorial assignments and support for news photographers, last week’s dominant theme was not the slow death of big media.

It was the violent death of photographers.

On the final evening of the projections, Jean-François Leroy, the festival’s director, called for all the working journalists in the audience to come to the stage to remember the freelance journalist James Foley who was beheaded by his ISIS captors last month after almost two years of captivity.

Many on the stage had worked alongside Mr. Foley in difficult and dangerous circumstances.

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Coverage from the 2014 Visa Pour l’Image festival featured on Lens.
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Standing next to Mr. Leroy, was Manu Brabo, 33, a Pulitzer Prize-winning freelancer who spent more than six weeks in captivity with Mr. Foley in Libya during the spring of 2011. Earlier in the week, Edouard Elias, 24, who was held by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria alongside Mr. Foley for over eight months, was at the festival. When his fellow captive, journalist Steven Sotloff, was beheaded last week, there were tears and anger throughout Perpignan. Nonetheless, both Mr. Elias and Mr. Brabo are back photographing internationally.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that there are about 20 journalists still being held captive in Syria and that there have been 36 journalists killed worldwide this year, most of them working in their own countries.

In Perpignan there was an exhibit of images by Anja Niedringhaus, an Associated Press photographer who was killed in April in Afghanistan. Chris Hondros, who was killed in Misurata, Libya, along with Tim Hetherington in 2011, also had an exhibition. In addition there was a show of images from the past winners of the Ian Parry award, named after the young British photographer who died during the revolution in Romania in 1989. And the Rémi Ochlik award, named for the young photographer killed in Syria in 2012, was given to Maxim Dondyuk for his photographs from Ukraine.

Photo
Civilians seeking medical attention after a militia attack near Boali that left 12 people killed and 14 children wounded.
Credit Camille Lepage/Polaris
Civilians seeking medical attention after a militia attack near Boali that left 12 people killed and 14 children wounded.
At the festival there were also many panel discussions about the dangers of working as a freelancer in war zones and the obligations of news organizations to provide safety equipment and training to both foreign and local photographers.

And a new award for young photojournalists benefited from proceeds from the sale of a photo book by Camille Lepage, who was killed in the Central African Republic in May.

Mr. Francois had met Ms. Lepage at the New York Portfolio Review in April and was taken by her intelligence and determination. He offered to project her photographs from Africa at Perpignan. She wrote her mother two days later telling of the meeting and her excitement of going to the festival to see her work.

Mr. Leroy did project her work from the Central African Republic last week, but Ms. Lepage was not there. On Thursday, Mr. Leroy sat in his office sobbing inconsolably as he talked about her.

“It’s sad because Camille Lepage died for pictures that almost nobody was interested in,” he said. “Nobody in the photography business cared for Camille Lepage before she died. Nobody gave her a guarantee. Nobody gave her insurance. Nobody gave her a helmet or a bulletproof vest. Suddenly she dies, and everyone says she was a talented young photographer.”

“I would love for people to care about young talented photographers before they are killed.”

The festival’s award winners were:

Tyler Hicks of The New York Times won the Visa d’or News prize for his photographs of the Westgate Mall Massacre in Nairobi, Kenya. He won the same prize in 2002 for his coverage of Afghanistan.

Guillaume Herbaut received the Visa d’or Feature award for photographs from Ukraine while Meeri Koutaniemi and Helsingin Sanomat were awarded the Visa d’or Daily Press Award for their report on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Samuel Bollendorff and Olivia Colo won the Web Documentary Award and Viviane Dalles received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award.

Follow @Visapourlimage, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
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Showcase, Anja Niedringhaus, Camille Lepage, Canon Female Photojournalist Award, Edouard Elias, France, Guillaume Herbaut, Helsingin Sanomat, James Foley, JamesEstrin, Jean-François Leroy, Manu Brabo, Maxim Dondyuk, Meeri Koutaniemi, Olivia Colo, Perpignan, Samuel Bollendorff, Steven Sotloff, The Committee to Protect Journalists, Tyler Hicks, Visa Pour L’image festival, Viviane Dalles, Westgate Mall Massacre
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Vietnam’s Photographic History, Told by the Winners

http://lightbox.time.com/2014/08/13/iraq-yezidi-refugees-helicopter-crash-moises-saman/#1



The Yezidis – one of Iraq’s oldest and most secretive sects – believe that following the great biblical flood, Noah and his ark came to rest on Mount Sinjar, a range of mountains that run parallel to what is, today, the border between Iraq and Syria. But, for up to 50,000 of Iraq’s Yezidis, this sacred land has become a deadly prison.

Forced from their homes by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Yezidis – most of them women, children and elderly – were given two choices: face certain death at the hands of fanatics or flee to the uncertain refuge that is Mount Sinjar.

“It’s a spectacular mountain range,” says Magnum photographer Moises Saman, who was on assignment for TIME this week. “Everything is flat and suddenly, you see these mountains pop out of nowhere. On one side you have the town of Sinjar, where most of the refugees are coming from, and on the other side, there’s Syria.”

With temperatures reaching 100 degrees, the conditions on the Sinjar Mountains are dire. Most of the Yezidis ran for the hills without food and water. “That’s why it’s been such a dramatic situation for them,” says Saman. “Without supplies on a mountain like that, nobody can survive more than a couple of days.”

Kurdish fighters from Iraq and Syria have been trying to establish a humanitarian corridor to provide relief to the thousands of trapped Yezidis, but their resources are limited. “They are using two or three old and rusty, [Soviet-era] helicopters,” says Saman. “There hasn’t been a mass airlift effort – there’s not that much aid that’s getting there, and that’s one thing that I was surprised about.”

While the U.S. sent 130 military advisers Tuesday to help repeal ISIS’ forces, the Yezidis continue to endure their ordeal. “I would think that by now there would be more of an international, concerted effort to help them, but I haven’t really seen it,” says Saman. “I think the Kurdish authorities are doing their best with what they have.” And that’s not much, especially after these militias lost one of their helicopters on Aug. 12, when it crashed with refugees and journalists on board.

“When I first saw the helicopter, the thought obviously crossed my mind, ‘Oh man. I hope nothing happens’. But it happened,” says Saman, who boarded the doomed helicopter at a Peshmerga [Kurdish forces] base on the outskirts of Fishkhabur, in Iraq’s Dohuk province.

“We flew in with supplies – bread, water, bananas, ready-to-eat meals,” he explains. “The situation was chaotic because people, obviously, were trying to get in. I was standing in the middle of this group of refugees, holding on with one hand and taking pictures with the other when the helicopter lifted up. I just lost track of time, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute when it banked to the right and crashed into the side of the mountain.”

Then, everything turned black. “The next thing I remember [was the thought] that I was still alive,” says Saman. “I felt that nothing was hurting, but I was pinned down [by the weight of some of the other passengers]. It was very hard to breathe, and I just couldn’t move. At that point, I really thought I was going to asphyxiate.”

One of Saman’s colleagues, freelance photographer Adam Ferguson, who suffered minor injuries, was able to help him up. “Most of the passengers were hurt, several of them badly. And the pilot was dead. Everyone was in a state of shock.”

It took an hour before another helicopter was able to rescue them. In that time, Saman was able to photograph the crash’s immediate aftermath. A few hours later, after receiving three stitches at a hospital in the city of Dohuk, he filed his work, which were first published in color as news broke of the crash. But, says Moises, “when I started talking with TIME about this assignment, I really saw it as a black-and-white story,” he explains. “I wanted to give a sense of timelessness to the situation because, one way or another, the Kurds have been refugees for decades. We’ve seen these scenes of Kurds stuck in the mountains back in the 1980s and ’90s, and now it’s happening all over again.”

Like many photographers who have covered humanitarian crises before, Saman hopes his images will force authorities into taking action. “I hope people will realize how bad the situation is for these people, I also hope that they will find a way to relate somehow,” he says. “I know it’s going to be difficult because these things don’t often happen in the West. But, it’s such a dramatic and sad situation.”

Moises Saman, on assignment for TIME, is an award-winning photographer represented by Magnum Photos.

Football's glory days – in pictures
A new book, The Age of Innocence: Football in the 1970s, captures the years when footballers still smoked and the game was rooted in the local community

The Age of Innocence is published by Taschen (£34.99).



http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/aug/10/footballs-glory-days-in-pictures

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/no-longer-an-invisible-photographer/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=fb-share&_r=1&


Vanessa Winship had gotten very good at getting the picture without getting noticed. But unlike street and documentary photographers who strive to be invisible, Ms. Winship was not happy.

“One of the problems with this is that it allows a certain kind of passivity from the position of the viewer, and of course the viewer includes me,” Ms. Winship said. “In this context it functions in a way that allows us not to take responsibility.”

So, during a project in Turkey, she gave up the easy invisibility granted by using a 35-millimeter camera to take up a view camera, slowing down her process as she engaged in a dialogue with her subjects. She chose uniformed schoolgirls from eastern Anatolia as her first subjects for this new process. The girls may be dressed alike, but each has a different expression, which gives them, perhaps, a chance at individuality.

Photo
From the series Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction. 2002-10.
From the series Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction. 2002-10.Credit Vanessa Winship
Some of these images, as well as photos from Ms. Winship’s “invisible” days, are now on display in her first retrospective at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid. The show, which runs through Aug. 31 in the museum’s new exhibition space, covers almost as many regions as it does years, with 188 photographs that span her travels from the Balkans in 1999 to Almería, Spain, in 2014.

Looking at her retrospective has enabled Ms. Winship to see her work as a whole. When asked whether there are similarities between people of all these different worlds, she had a reply and her own query. “Human beings need to find meaning, and there are always more questions than answers,” she said. “Perhaps that’s the best you can hope for with photography?”

It was her curiosity about a photograph from Albania showing a person emerging from a landscape that led her to join, in the late 1980s, the Anglo-Albanian Association in London, where she studied the region’s history, politics and literature. A decade later, during the refugee crisis, she felt compelled to go there.

She and her partner, George Georgiou, a fellow photographer with whom she always travels (they do not collaborate, but assist each other), went to Kosovo. While there, she moved away from what she calls “simply descriptive” journalistic photography. Instead, she wanted to allow the viewer space to interpret her images.

In one, a smiling boy sits on a donkey, inside a burned-out shell of a room where shadows slice the space. A soccer bell rests beneath him. Ms. Winship took the picture in 1999, months after the home had been bombed.

“It is enough for me to say that written on the wall behind the boy on either side is UCK — Kosovo Liberation Army — and on the other the Serbian Chetnik nationalist symbol,” she noted.

Photo
From the series Imagined States and Desires: A Balkan Journey. 1999-2002.
From the series Imagined States and Desires: A Balkan Journey. 1999-2002.Credit Vanessa Winship
About a year later, she and Mr. Georgiou moved to Belgrade, then Athens and finally to Istanbul, where they spent five years, and where she employed her new approach using a view camera.

Four years ago, she returned to her childhood home, Barton-Upon-Humber, a small town on the northeast coast of England, to concentrate solely on landscapes for the first time. This project was also a meditation on her early childhood, which she spent roaming the countryside with her sister. Her mother was a “lollipop lady,” or a crossing guard for schoolchildren, and her father, a marine engineer and bird-watcher whose pictures and stories gave her a sense of the world beyond their little town.

“My dad was the first person in our family to go to the grammar school; it meant something then,” she said. “I was the first person to go to university.”

In 2011, she became the first woman to receive the Henri Cartier-Bresson award, which funded her photographic road trip across America for “She Dances on Jackson.” In one photograph, a girl with lip piercings, a tattoo, a necklace and a flower in her hair gazes almost through the camera. Her expression tells us that she has more to say. But, her lips are shut. The photograph was taken during a St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

“I like both her strength and vulnerability in the same expression,” Ms. Winship said.

The final series in her retrospective, “Where Gold Was Found,” was commissioned by the Mapfre Foundation and took her to Almería, where many spaghetti westerns were filmed. To Ms. Winship, this legacy of gold represents “a search for a kind of El Dorado in Spain.” She hopes to continue this work and make it into a small book.

Ms. Winship currently resides with Mr. Georgiou in Folkestone, on the east coast of England.

“I’ve had a fairly active few years. I’d like to do something very gentle to do with the land, perhaps in the U.K.,” she said. “I don’t know exactly, but I’m not in a panic.”

Vanessa Winship’s exhibit is on display at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid until Aug. 31.

TRICORN HOUSE built in the 1970s in the charming Cotswold town of Stroud. This must rank as one of the UGLIEST buildings in the UK. This is my short You Tube clip......http://youtu.be/HRb37wYmf0w

ROME (May 25, 2014) – The Italian Foreign Ministry today confirmed that photojournalist Andy Rocchelli, 30, and his interpreter, journalist Andrei Mironov, a Russian citizen from RU Memorial, died from wounds suffered yesterday in Slaviansk.

Rocchelli, who has been living lately in Pianello and Pavia, was one of the four founders of the photographic collective Cesura. Most recently he was widely known for a photograph of children hiding from shelling in a shelter in Slavyansk.

The Italian photojournalist and his Russian translator were reportedly traveling in a car along with French photographer William Roguelon when they were caught in an ambush near Andreevka in Donestk.

Roguelon told journalist Roza Kazan that the attack came from the Ukrainian side. He told her that at first there was heavy machine gun fire, and then they were in the middle of a mortar attack. He ran for cover, he said, and when he looked back the bodies of his two comrades were on the ground. Only Roguelon and the driver were able to escape.

Callegari told News Photographer magazine that Roguelon was taken to a hospital for treatment after the attack, and that he was treated for wounds and that now he is now okay. Kazan is reporting that the bodies of Rocchelli and Mironov are expected to be taken to a morgue in Slavyansk later today.

Photographer Chiara Callegari in Milan today said that Rocchelli is survived by his girlfriend, Maria Chiara, and their young son Nico, who just turned three years old yesterday.

“He always said that he chose to be a photoreporter because he had the urge to tell the stories that no one else tells,” Callegairi told News Photographer magazine today. She last heard from Rocchelli three days ago, via eMail.

“He told me what the situation was, with tanks and bombs and crazy people, and bombings every night,” Callegari said. She said that Rocchelli may have been reporting for a Russian human rights group RU Memorial at the time he died.

“He always assured me that everything was fine,” Callegari said. “He was a great guy, and such a talented photographer.”

Rocchelli’s mother and father left today for the Ukraine to bring back their son's body, Callegari said. It is unclear whether Rocchelli and his fixer were shot or, as many reports say, hit by the Ukrainian Army's mortar shells.

This was the last known dispatch filed by Rocchelli, according to Kazan.

Rocchelli had appeared twice at the Cortona On The Move photography festival, the first time with an exhibition and the second time to present a book produced by the Cesura collective.

Italy’s RAI News reported that Rocchelli had a master's degree from the Politecnico di Milano, School of Visual Design, and that he worked for Grazia and Blacks Photo Agency in 2007 as an assistant in the studio of Alex Majoli.

Since 2009, Rocchelli has been documenting the abuse of civilians in the states of the Caucasus Checenya in Ingushetia and Dagestan, RAI says. In 2010, in collaboration with Human Rights Watch documents the ethnic crisis in southern Kyrgyzstan. Since 2011, covers the events of the "Arab Spring" in Tunisia and Libya.

Mironov was a former Soviet dissident, a journalist and an activist for human rights for 60 years. He spent two years in a Soviet labor camp, internazionale.it reports. Engaged in conflict zones and an expert in issues related to Eastern Europe, Mironov worked in the Caucasus and Chechnya, had supported the protests against Putin, and reported on the situation in Kiev and Crimea. He lived in Moscow but was often in Italy, becoming a reference point for many foreign journalists who were in Russia or countries of the former Soviet Union

Tomorrow's World 1985 Electronic 'World's First' Digital Camera.

These images last forever and they won't fade!

More here: <http://bitly.com/zkLdPZ>

I have had many requests for copies of images from my gallery to made availble for sale. From the 18th July 2012 all photographs on the gallery will be availble to purchase.

UK government proposes massive copyright snatch.

Photographers, illustrators and authors will be amongst those to lose
their digital rights.

More here: <http://bit.ly/MNRuLU>

Take a look at www.daddancingthemovie.com , great fun, helping to raise funds for Prostate Cancer Charity.