Dennis Dunleavy

Mediocrity in the newsroom: Settling for second best

I wanted to repost a comment Jen Rose had about some recent observations concerning how news content at small dailies often fail to inform us.

Jen writes:

Too often in newsrooms it's about finding something--anything--to fill space, rather than about finding truly compelling stories and images. We write about things because we've always written about them instead of thinking about whether they're worth covering.

Quality journalism takes time. It means letting reporters invest themselves in thorough research. It means finding reporters who are willing to do that, and who have the skills for it. It means editors who are willing to coach young reporters. It means change, instead of just having lots of meetings and talking about change.

And it means making it worth my while, so that I feel like a professional who is actually doing important work. It's hard to feel that way when you tell your college friends what you make and they try to hide their horror and pity...and when your cousin with no education whatsoever makes more money managing the local McDonald's than you do as a full-time reporter at a small daily, with five years' experience under your belt.

Thank you Jen!

Whatever the excuse, much of what we see in print seems forced, conventional, but most of all, it's just mediocre in every sense of the word.

It's easy to feel all warm and fuzzy about the future of journalism and photojournalism, following this year's major contest announcements featuring excellence in the field. However, the good feelings pass quickly after ruffling through the pages of the local newspaper.   

Not surprisingly, it seems that most of the big time players, such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or the Washington Posts of the world, continue to walk away with the lion's share of these honors, while the rest of us have to read and look at content that seems to have been done by a hormone induced teen dribbling on MySpace. 

The quality of news and information most of rural America gets is not the content of the winners.  Even with the Internet, it would be nice to read the local news with a feeling of confidence that the material is correct and the reporters and photographers did their very best in producing it. Unfortunately, that's not always the case.

Smaller market newspapers cannot even come close to producing the quality of the A-Leaguers, but does this mean that those of us out in the boondocks have to live with whatever we are handed? To have to learn to settle for mediocrity? Five days out of 7, that's the way I feel when I step out onto the driveway at dusk to pick up our local newspaper. And it isn't just here in Southern Oregon, it could be just about any small town or city in America. 

Why do we feel like we have to settle to for something less from local news --  including TV?

Is there some deep and disturbing cultural pathology at play in rural America that allows us to put up with more editorial mistakes and more poorly made images that do not improve over time?

Every time I threaten to cancel the subscription, I am stopped by the harsh reality that it is important to have at least some idea of what is going on in our community -- even if the content is, well,  "less than" perfect.  We learn to settle with mediocrity not only because we learn to tolerate it, but because complaining about it seems like an exercise in futility. 

Now, it might seem like I am bashing my own hometown newspaper here, but the problems facing small dailies in America are universal. Small markets are famous for employing freshly trained, overworked, and underpaid people. Most small newspapers serve as farm teams for the A-leaguers, yes, but that doesn't mean that quality has to suffer for it.

Not all, there are exceptions, but  a large percentage of  what counts as daily journalism is far more mediocre than it is good.   

Sarah Pink suggests,  in her book “Doing Visual Ethnography,” there has always been a high level of subjectivity not only in interpreting the meanings of images, but also in the making of them.

Pink contends that in “creating images that reproduce or reference ‘conventional’ compositions and iconographies, individuals draw from personal and cultural resources of visual experience and knowledge. They thus compose images that they intended to represent particular objects or meanings; moreover they do so in particular social and material contexts.”

Could living with mediocrity be a convention at smaller newspapers?

Pink’s argument is relevant to how images and news are edited, positioned, and displayed by today’s mass media.

The typical photojournalist’s independence and imagination  is constrained by the conventions and standards of what is deemed acceptable by editors and audiences, or, in other words, what sells.

Today it is disappointing to open a newspaper and view what can only be thought of as a flood of mediocre pictures. It could be that photojournalists, are too overworked, too underpaid, or just too busy trying to create content for the web across multiple media platforms such as  audio and video to make compelling and powerful images.

Whatever the excuse, much of what we see in print seems forced, conventional, but most of all, it's just mediocre in every sense of the word.

 

The transition from print to digital display appears to be sucking the life right out of photojournalism. Newspapers are cutting staffs and trying to do more with so much less. Despite all the potential new technologies offer us, it is the content -- the stories and pictures -- that remain paramount.

Why shouldn't people living in smaller markets -- out here in rural America -- demand the highest quality information from their local newspapers? Maybe most of us just don't know the difference or maybe we have just learned to live with it.

Susan Sontag: The writer's life

Her writing has been called grave and sensual, complex and contradictory,  incendiary and hotheaded. Susan Sontag, whatever you may believe her writings to be, first and foremost, is a writer embodying the ideal of the modern public intellectual. Since her death in 2004, Sontag's voice has been anything but silent. Sontag's partner, Annie Leibovitz, published her "Photographer's Life: 1990-2005", which chronicles the many private and painful moments of the author's last years of life. Now Sontag's editors have compiled a new book of essays and speeches celebrating her clearheaded and often radical perspective on American culture. "At the Same Time" is a collection of 16 works highlighting Sontag's last years of writing. 

When writing about the culture of photography and images, Sontag's criticism was often preceived as controversial. In a review of the book, Regina Marler of the New York Observer does a beautiful job clarifying what Sontag has always done so well in her writing.

Marler observes:

"...in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and in “Regarding the Torture of Others” (collected here), she shrugged off some of the famous views she expounded in her great classic, On Photography (1977). Her new collection includes another short essay on the subject, “Photography: A Little Summa,” in which she argues that photography is not seeing but a way of seeing, and that this characteristically modern way of seeing—this fragmenting and framing, this way of accessing realities beyond our own lives—gives “shape and form to our experience” at the same time that it “denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real.”

 

That is why we need writers, whose job is to be aware—and make us aware—of more: the messy, thrilling world beyond the edges of the photograph. Although this book is full of vigorous arguments on various topics, its recurrent themes are the importance of literature (Sontag defines literature as works not just worth reading, but worth rereading, translating, advocating) and the writer’s job. She expects a lot from writers."

 

 

Oversight of vocational schools may end soon in California

For nearly 20 years, the State of California has protected its citizens from the possibility of unscrupulous business practices by for-profit colleges and vocational institutions.  In the past, some educational establishments have pushed students through in order to increase earnings.

Now, it appears, government oversight of these schools will end in July if all goes as planned according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

More than 400,000 students are currently enrolled in vocational training and for-profit colleges in the state, which raises fears that dismantling the legal system overseeing ethical standards may invite corruption and abuse.

The agency responsible for regulating the 1,800 schools has had a checkered past in terms of enforcement. Two years ago, Brooks Institute of Photography was investigated for misleading recruitment practices, only to have the case dismissed later by an administrative judge after finding the agency failed to follow state protocols.

According to the article:

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic-led Legislature are trying to reach an agreement on how to refashion the law, but none is on the horizon. The issues in dispute include how aggressive a regulatory role the state should have and what to do between July and January, the earliest that a new law could be enacted.

In 2005, an independent monitor appointed by the Legislature concluded that state regulation of the schools "has been plagued by problems for the past 20 years" and that shortcomings identified repeatedly in audits still persist."

All problems with the agency aside, overseeing and regulating institutions is an unfortunate reality at a time when the costs of vocational education, such as those services offered by Brooks Institute of Photography, can be extremely steep.  Continued vigilance of how educational instutions maintain ethical standards is needed primarily because students, in my opinion, are vulnerable to scams and exaggerated claims.

Educators, for-profit or not, are responsible to the public in terms of how they represent themselves. Oversight is necessary, in this case, because of it is too easy to sell snake oil and pipe dreams to young people looking to improve their lives through education.

Youthful design

 

Yesterday, I learned something new about design. While designing a page for a summer high school journalism workshop I coordinate here, I realized how flat my designs had become.

What I realize is that designing for younger audiences demands more unconventional treatment and design aesthetics than designing for older audiences.

As I was working, one of my photo design students, Ed, walked by.  I asked him about the typography in the design and he immediately spotted a feeling of flatness in the original. Ed suggested outlining the red letters in yellow to make the design pop. Bingo.

It was clear to me that Ed was seeing the world through youthful eyes.  Now I know that designing for younger audiences requires us to bring energy and dynamism to our work, even it if doesn't always hold with tradition.

The meaning of spring -- long shadows and light

For many, the meaning of spring is in the air -- sweet smells of blossoms, the brillant yellow of the daffodil popping out through browned earth, the songs of black birds around the marsh.  For others, especially photographers, spring is in the light. As the sun's arc rises in the sky, the world appears in sharper contrasts to the dull grays of winter.

This week, I started a project at the United Bike Institute, which is only one of a few schools in the United States that train bicycle mechanics. People from around the world come to the school for classes that cover a wide range of topics, from making frames to fixing flats.

Getting back behind the camera in a serious way after nearly a decade-long break to finish my education has made me more aware of the ways in which I see. Obviously, my studies in visual behavior and photography have transformed the way I think about pictures. However,  the actual process of making images pretty much stays the same.

What I am more aware of these days are the relationships I have with the things I see. There is a sense of purpose to seeing that I feel much more connected to now then in the past. In some ways, news work took the joy out of the experience of observing. Making pictures back in the day, capturing the decisive moment, seemed more about commodification and categorization than it did about experiencing and encountering life through  making sense of the things I  see. 

Seeing to make pictures takes patience, something that is rarely learned in school. Patience is a gift, just like anticpating moments, and the ability to read light well.

The truth is that anyone can make a photograph, but to make a picture that is meaningful to many is a different very sort of animal.

When you are working for someone else there are always implicit and explicit expectations to attend to beyond just making technically clean and compositonally appealing frames. There is always a bit of a guessing game going on between photographer and the user of the pictures that one hopes for the best with. 

As I return over and over again to the scene of what I am observing, I become more aware of my surrounding and to the sights and sounds in front of me. To just go into a situation with the motordrive cranking out pictures is a big mistake.

Inside my head I try to think about what photographers such as William Klein, Gary Winogrand, Elliot Erwitt, or Mary Ellen Mark might see in a similar situation. It's not that I try to copy their styles, but I do try to think about them standing in the same light as I am. I think about these photographers trying to solve problems with pictures and with light -- I think about how they tell stories with their cameras. Then, I try to solve the problem of tell a story in my  own unique way.  The hope is that if I like the way I make pictures, others will too.

I think one of the biggest problems today with digital technology is that has become too easy of a medium. Photography, in a digital format, tends to subordinate process by providing the false illusion that what you see is more than what you will get.

To fill up a 2 gigabyte memory card with images that may or may not be meaningful to others is a form of gaming the moment -- anyone can do it.

Digital technology gives us a false sense that just because we can see the picture immediately after capture doesn't mean we have something meaningful to look at.

In my work I use  just one 512 mb card at a time. I use a smaller memory card because I want to force the picture-making process to slow down more. After a card is full, I stop and download the pictures to my laptop without looking at them, and start again.

Although this may seem counter intutitive, because of the risk of "missing a moment," most of what we see in life will happen again. Life is cyclical and rich with patterned reoccurances.  I don't mind missing the so-called "moment" because for me, life is all about moments -- one after another.

What I am looking for, then, are the moments that are universally meaningful to the people I am making picture of -- signs of joy or despair, frustration or exhaltation.

Of course, this method would not work for a lot of folks on deadline, but for a photographer engaged in more ethnographic forms of documentary photojournalism, the idea of slowing down a bit makes sense.

And now it is spring, when life renews itself with hope and promise. It's a time when the sun rises higher and stays a little longer in the sky -- a time to make pictures.

Synergies in a digital age

Media Arts students on the set at Southern Oregon University.

For the past decade there has been increased interest in addressing industry demands for the perfect mix of producing content across the mediums of  print, video, audio, and the web.

Many universities across the country have already embraced a more interdisciplinary and intergated approach to preparing students for the Brave New Digital Universe that awaits them.  However, at smaller educational institutions creating new opportunities for students may present challenges.

Why do students need to be competent across the mediums of print, design, video, audio, and multimedia?

The answer is becoming increasingly clear. Potential employers may no longer just consider how well a candidate can tell a story with a still or video camera alone. What people are looking for now, and will increasingly in the future, are innovative and creative visual storytellers that are capapble of working across a variety of mediums.

The demand for knowledge in the areas of digital photography, design, audio editing, video production, video editing, and interactive web programming/design is on the rise.

Two weeks ago when the National Press Photographers Association announced a four-day intensive multimedia seminar in Portland, the program sold out in less than 24 hours. Convergence media in the arts and information sectors of society today refers to the cross-disciplinary practical and theoretical application of digital and technological literacy in the areas of arts, journalism, video production, multimedia, and computer science. 

For Saltzman (2001), “Convergence, multimedia, media synergy. The idea of the new century comes with a variety of innocent labels conveying a single conspiratorial idea: One media company sending out its collection of news to the public through a variety of media 24 hours a day."

A growing body of literature suggests that media content is increasingly moving online and that educators must do a better job preparing students for the broadband, high definition, multiple platform world of the future.

Convergence media education merges existing disciplines in the digital arts, art history, journalism, video production, computer science, information technology, and applied multimedia into a single focus.

Educators must continue to push for ways to understand the processes and institutions involved that creating and disseminating information in a digital culture today. We need to know more about how emerging technologies impinge upon the rights and rituals of media practice in cyberspace. We need to understand how technologies are transforming cultural expression and cultural identity within a global context.

The idea of developing curricula aimed at increasing technological and digital literacy is as relevant today as traditional literacy in reading, writing, and math is.  However, digital literacy should not only be concerned with content production and vocational enterprise but needs to find its place in the liberal arts and hard sciences.  Students must be competent in the skills of converging cross-platform mediums such as digital arts, video, audio, and web production, but they must also have a solid foundation of understanding why things work the way they do in society.

For smaller educational institutions who have already established disciplines in a given medium can be challenged by this need to create new integrated and synergisitc learning opportunities for students.  At the same time, the potential benefits for students remains very exciting.

When does human end and journalist begin?

I posted this observation more than three years ago now, but find it relevant even more so today. The idea came from a friend posing a question about the human side of being a journalist.

Before attempting to answer, here's the entire note.

When does human end and journalist begin? This is actually a question I ponder often, and have been during my walk from the train to campus every day. I try to set up scenarios in my mind where I have to cover a catastrophic event. Will I be able to separate myself from he human tragedy in order to survive and capture the story? In my mind it is crucial that I am able to do so in order to carry the very human story back to the public. I have to stop being human in order to bring the human story to focus. At least that is what I tell myself. Is it possible?

I've always held the belief that stories should not be sanitized for the public. They need to be told in their entirety in order for society to decide what it wants for itself. If the story is presented in any way less than complete than the information available for society to make those decisions is inaccurate. I believe all aspects of combat, fire, police actions, and the like should be made available to the public. It's the only way a free society can be held accountable for the decisions made in their interests.

But, of course, people need to be there in order to bring these images to society. How does the events affect the people who cover them? When does a person in our field stop being American/White/Male/Female/Human and become and an Objective Journalist?

What is the job of a journalist when confronted with a situation where he/she is the only one who can prevent a tragedy? Getting involved would seem to be very un-journalistic. Not getting involved may be inhumane, where is the line?

When we see a picture printed in a newspaper or a moving image on a television screen there is often little thought given to how our eyes and brain work together to reconfigure what is represented before us. Reality is re-presented to us not as continuous tones, shades and tints, but as a series of dots. The image on the TV screen or on the printed page provides the illusion of continuity and wholeness--but it is not the whole.

Look closely at a newspaper image to see how the dots blend and spread into one another.

Look closely at a single frame on a TV screen placed on "pause" to see the noise that a human eye cannot notice at 24 frames per second.

In the 1880's, printers invented a process that would allow continuous tone images to be reproduced through a halftone screen. The quality of the final product depends on many things, and as the saying goes, "a picture is only as good as the paper it is printed on."

Paper quality, absorbency, PH levels of the ink and the number of dots and lines per inch are all-important factors in getting a message across.

Like the halftone screen used to reproduce images on a printed page, journalists also screen, filter, and mediate the realities of human experience.

Like the halftone screen, the reader or viewer is provided the illusion of reality and of the whole. Through the rules and conventions governing professional conduct, concepts such as objectivity, balance, fairness, accuracy, truth, credibility, and authority become ritualized and normalized.

There is sense of moral agency in how journalists gather information to tell stories about the experiences they witness. How could it be possible to separate the human from the journalist, police officer, firefighter, judge, educator, nurse, or doctor?

In order for people to perform certain roles in society they must develop a kind of halftone screen that filters feeling from reality. Journalists place themselves in harms way in the hope that some greater purpose may be achieved. The halftone screen used to construct professional codes of conduct and ethics offers the illusion that what it means to be human somehow differs from what it means to be a "professional" journalist. In the hope of serving others there is a pretense that the journalist can report without judgement and feeling.
However, how we feel, think, and act as human being comes not only from what we see with our eyes or decode with our brain, but also through how we respond to the world with our hearts. Like the halftone screening process in print, how journalism mediates our reality depends on the unseen qualities of the human beings that practice it.

Tears of shame: Shame on us

Photo Credit: Ronald Reagan by David Hume Kennerly/Tear by Tim O'Brien

In today's hyper-mediated world of images, truth has become a casualty of commerce.

It is more important today, it would seem, to sell us an image representing a concocted truth, than it is to make images that honestly portray reality and that earnestly speak truth to power.

Ever since an altered picture of OJ Simpson appeared on the cover of TIME nearly 15 years ago, magazine editors and designers have been continually pushing the boundaries of believability and authenticity.

It's now appears acceptable to use images that once functioned within the context of news as something far more rhetorical in nature.  From a rhetorical perspective, the the Reagan Team image is loaded with meaning. Therefore, the interpretation of the image goes far beyond the literal and moves in the realm of the figurative and symbolic. 

We've seen this over and again when iconic images such as Rosenthal's "Iwo Jima flag raising" and Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" are altered to illustrate a specific idea or concept.

In other words, editors have been extending the meaning of news images for a very long time  by adding and subtracting elements, changing the tone, and most especially altering the context. In this instance, it's interesting to note that the editors credited not only the photographer for the portrait of Reagan (David Hume Kennerly), but also the photographer who made the image of the tear drop (Tim O'Brien) running down Reagan's cheek.

For photographer Patrick Ryan the manipulation does a disservice to a profession that has seeks to maintain its credibility in the eyes of the public.
"I'm insulted and, frankly, disappointed," Ryan write on a post to the National Press Photographers Association list-serve. 

Ryan continues:

"I expected better. Our credibility is being challenged more and more everyday, and Time goes and adds fuel to the fire. If you are going to clearly alter the intent of a photograph, you better label it an illustration or such."

From a sociological perspective, the public's capacity to distinguish between  legitimate and an altered new pictures is unclear. In today's hyper-saturated visual culture people have developed a tolerance for ambiguity between what is real and what it fake. 

As time blurs perception and reality , Reagan's tear may be perceived as authentic by many.  The collage presents Reagan as something other than what we have come to understand through  his media-mediated public persona.

In this sense, TIME, with its altered image, constructs how we think about Reagan. Even lacking verisimilitude, the assemblage of the two distinct visual elements -- Ronald Reagan face and  Ronald Reagan's tear -- is confounding.   

As Ryan contends, "I used to trust the content of images in print, but with the ease of Photoshop, etc., it's harder and harder to believe what I see. Time is supposed to be above that."

Another interesting point concerning this illustration is the placement of the tear.  In the picture, the tear seems to be away from the tear duct.  For example, in this image from "Feed the Children," it is clear that tears begin to well up at the tear duct.

Photo Credit: Feed the Children

The design of the TIME cover is clearly driven by the rationale of aesthetics and persuasive determinacy. It has long been argued that magazine covers do not function primarily as news. Instead, many designers will tell you,   magazine covers are designed to attract attention and sell magazines.

Writing on the same NPPA list-serve thread Gregory David Stempel sums up this issue well when he observes:

"Keep in mind, we have reached a point in our society where the foremost goal of any business (including "the news") is share holder satisfaction. And to that end it appears, anything goes. Just about everyone in the developed economies of this planet have figured out a way to justify almost anything they desire. We have without much hesitation, compromised truth, integrity, ethics, decency and fairness."

Flickr goes to China

Yahoo plans to launch a Chinese version of its popular online photo sharing site Flickr. In a move to expand its services to the world's second-largest Internet market, Yahoo is positioning itself well in the increasingly fast-paced growth of online photo services. China presently has more than 137 million Internet users, and about 10 million use photo services online.

 

A passion for patriotism and photography

Photo Credit: I love America Day

Some folks take showing their patriotism seriously through photography. The sponsors of Flags Across the Nation are holding their first annual I Love America Day photo contest. According to the organizers, the contest is already a hit with hundreds of people, mostly amateur photographers, sending in pictures before the March 19th deadline.

 

The press gaggle

Photo Credit: Ivan Kashinsky

The media, at times, seems of one mind.  Pack journalism is one of the downsides of media growth because it restricts alternative ways of thinking and seeing. When we view an image like this one of President Rafael Correa of Ecuador what is typically presented to us is not the throng of journalists. However, viewing the mob makes us think more about issues of power and access to the powerful. In a sense, photojournalists are the eyes of the world, yet how often to the powerful attempt to blindfold and bedazzle the media through staged photo ops?

 

 

NPPA announces multimedia work and photojournalism summit

From May 30 - June 1, the National Press Photographers Association is holding a workshop featuring a Who's Who in multimedia photojournalism. The workshop will be held in Portland at the Lloyd Center Doubletree and offers seminars by some of the leading professionals in the country including, Brian Storm, Dirck Halstead, David Leeson, Andrew DeVigal, Tom Kennedy, Rob Finch, Richard Koci Hernandez and others. The multimedia workshop is limited to 40 participants, but the summit, which will be held on June 1 -2,  is open to all. The summit will feature speakers on a range of topics and some of the best photojournalism of the year.

The "Good Picture" sometimes means bad news

 

Playing that funky music.  Photo by Dennis Dunleavy
A student at Southern Oregon University plays his guitar to a lunch time crowd.

 

 

There were times in the newsroom when a photographer would come dancing out of the darkroom with a smile on his or her face and a picture in their hands. Sometimes this picture would be a reminder of the grim frailties of life -- a train wreck, car crash, or gang violence.  The photographer was happy not because they were literally holding a representation of death, but because they got the shot -- they fulfilled their obligation. All the energy dedicated to capturing a moment in time was relieved in knowing that the picture was a "good" one. 

For me, publishing a picture displaying pain and suffering creates a paradox of consciousness. On one hand, the image may tell the truth about something horrible that needs to be shown, but on the other hand, there's an emotional conflict between what can be called a public moment and what is to be kept private. 

Journalists often will not allow themselves to contemplate their roles as moral  agents or arbiters of value and taste in society, because by doing so they will have crossed the blurry boundaries of impartiality and objectivity.

Often I feel that despite the importance of an image of suffering, there is also this overwhelming feeling that the photographer may be exploiting the worst moments of another human being.

How does someone reconcile the exploitative side of photojournalism?

Halla Belloff observes:

"A good photographer will take, and then further select, pictures that convey in the image the particular message of happiness, malaise, dominance, defeat modernity or tradition that is appropriate to his or her view."

The question emerging from this sense of the "appropriate" brings to mind that a photographer's view is always loaded with subjectivity and ambiguity. As photographers develop the thick skin needed to deal with difficult situations they learn to make images that meet the expectations of others and themselves.   

Noting the iconic in Berman's "Face of War"

How could a remarkably powerful image not possibly work its way into the  visual vocabulary of pictures we consider to be iconic?

Is Ty Ziegel's wedding portrait, made by Nina Berman, too disturbing for most Americans to contemplate? How could we deny this image a place in the history of war photography? 

Terrie's recent comment about this picture raises our discussion to a new level.

"I recoil from this photo. I feel as if I've paid admission to a freak show, as if I am taking advantage of someone else's misfortune. I sent the link to some friends in a discussion group which formed to talk about our stand against the war. if anyone looked it, they haven't admitted it. Or perhaps they haven't had words to describe their reactions. The silence is deafening."

Without sounding too academic, I'd like to try and describe how I believe images, such as Berman's, can speak truth to power if they are allowed to.

All culturally meaningful images documenting American military intervention abroad require evaluation as mechanisms of social integration, knowledge and power in society. 

When the power of a picture's meaning extends beyond its original occurence, as Berman's image clearly does, we begin to label it as iconic or meta because we can trace the rhetorical action of its significance back to specific historic events.

In 20 or 200 years, maybe people will look at this picture and be reminded not of a war in the Middle East where thousands of U.S. soliders were killed and seriously wounded, but that some of those involved in the conflict were remarkable for their fortitude and courage under and after shooting stopped.  Maybe in the future, people will look at this picture from the war on Iraq and view it with more clarity than we can today.

What is important to remember about this, and all images, is that it is not the object itself where meaning resides, it is in how people come to interpret the picture. 

The symbolic interaction that occurs between people about what an image means eventually leads to it becoming embedded in our collective memory as iconic.  For Ty Zeigel and his family, this picture is a wedding portrait -- part of the ritual of committing one's life to another human being through the sacrament of marriage.

However, for the tens of thousands that are venturing onto the Internet to view it, the picture carries the weight of politics and personal values along with it.

When the Berman picture takes on such extenuated meaning, it becomes a  construct of  ideology -- be it pro-war or anti-war.  Within our visual culture, iconic images have common characteristics, one of which is how pictures become susceptibile to a society’s moral and political value system. 

This appears to very much be the case in the Berman picture as it intensifies, facilitates, identifies, implements, and reaffirms the rights and wrongs of society.

The emotional war within: Listening to pictures of pain and suffering

How much of what we know about the human costs of war do we let in to impact us in profound ways?

Although there are remarkable and powerful images of war to remind us of the unthinkable horrors human beings continue to suffer, it appears that for the most part we rarely truly learn from them.

Although we appear fascinated by the sacrifice people endure for a cause, noble or ignoble, most of  the pictures that remind us of those sacrifices seem all about ignored.

The pictures we see of dead and wounded civilians and soliders in times of conflict become social artifacts that may or may not stir our emotions or move us to action.

In recent times, we have seen how Joe Rosenthal's picture of a band of Marines raising a flag on a tiny island in the Pacific could mobilize millions of Americans in the war effort during WWII.

Photo Credit: Joseph Rosenthal/World Wide Photos/AP

 

Later, we have seen how another  image could have just the opposite affect, as Nick Ut's picture of a young girl running naked down a road after she was burned in an aerial attack on her village by the South Vietnamese Air Force, with U.S. support.

 

Photo Credit: Nick Ut/AP

 

Images such as those by Rosenthal and Ut remain embedded in our collective consciousness because of how often they are repeated and recollected in our visual culture. When we speak of patriotism and sacrifice, or, of so-called the "good war", the Iwo Jima flag raising image seems to always come to the forefront of our common discourse. When we speak of atrocities and failed U.S. foreign policy, so too, do we find referencing the incident at Trang Bang, Vietnam, where a little girl and nations were changed forever. 

Recently, a photographer in Southern Illinois has made an image, or a series of images, that should become emblematic of what critics are beginning to call the current quagmire in Iraq. 

  Photo Credit: Nina Berman/Redux

The picture by Nina Berman of Redux, is a wedding portrait of a Marine who had been burned over much of his body. Although badly disfigured from a bomb blast in Iraq, his facial features all but melted away to bone, Ty Ziegel lives to tell his story to the world.

The picture, as simple as a picture can be, makes us want to listen. The picture makes us cry out in empathy, muster hope in the presence of such incredible human spirit and strength, or simply cringe in disgust. In the end, however, it is the couples resolve that makes us want to listen.

In a recent article in Salon.com, photographer Berman suggests, "What makes pictures interesting is that they provide the space for the viewers to contemplate."

Contemplation is a form of listening to our innermost feelings about the things we see.  Contemplation, if given  space,  moves us to act on our feelings. To contemplate the explicit and implicit meaning of Berman's image means to imagine our own lives transformed by war as Ty Ziegel's life has been.

Thomas  Merton, the Trappist monk and writer, once observed that  "True contemplation is inseparable from life and from the dynamism of life--which includes work, creation, production, fruitfulness, and above all love. "

Merton continues:

"Contemplation is not to be thought of as a separate department of life, cut off from all man's other interests and superseding them. It is the very fullness of a fully integrated life. It is the crown of life and all life's activities."

Berman's wedding portrait has received acclaim in photojournalism. In fact, it won top honors in the portrait category of the World Press Photo competition this year. But it is not the picture, as an object or artifact, that should be admired and remembered. What should be contemplated here, first and foremost, is that the judges recognize the saliency and value of the content within the frame.  The space Berman speaks of here moves beyond the rancor of congressional debates and presidential pomposity. The space Berman speaks of  gets to the core of some of the most essential qualities of being human -- love, loyalty, hope, and reconciliation.   Can a picture evoke the "big" ideas expressed here? Apparently so.

How will history remember Ty Ziegel's wedding picture? How could this   unassuming portrait of a wedding couple become the next Iwo Jima or Trang Bang in the collective memory of wars past and present?

What distinguishes the pictures is less a matter of aesthetics and more a more of politics. For the Iwo Jima picture the U.S. government adopted the image as mass marketed it as the embodiment of the "good war." In the case of the Trang Bang picture, the anti-war movement of the 1970s embraced  symbolism of the moment as proof of the so-called "dirty little war."

Pictures, in iconic terms, extend beyond the meaning of occurrences in several ways. Iconic pictures, such as the hooded prisoner of Abu Ghraib, signify ideological bench marks in history -- turning points -- in the cultural  memory of  American society.

It is only through the assimilation of an ideological benchmark image into our visual culture as a form of a larger societal discourse that an iconic permanance can emerge. Although the Berman image has been seen now by ten of thousands of web-watchers, it will not be until we see the picture on billboards, war posters, and TV screens that its status as an iconic image will endure as a product of social consciousness. 

Picturing homelessness

 

Many years ago, I made this picture of David on the streets of San Antonio, Texas.  The image reminds me of how often we label people as something other than human beings with needs and desires just like everyone else.

The camera is a tool which can be used to unite as well as divide us. Pictures can be used to represent things to be feared or things to be desired. We are continually using images as a means to compare one look against another, one way of being against another. Images can point out similarities as well as differences, but it often the latter than we remember.

When I look at pictures of  people who live on the streets or seemingly have less than I do I know that I have been conditioned to see their condition as different than my own. Somehow I have been trained to think of homelessness and meaning helplessness. I no longer assume that this is necessarily the case.

Homeless Camera Adventure is a project in Southern Oregon that seeks to empower people to express themselves through photography, tell stories, and experience how they see their world in ways only they can show. According to the Website:

The Homeless Camera Adventure came out of the desire to focus positive attention on homelessness. The homeless in America are too often ignored and contine to suffer as a result. By showcasing a visual perspective of some homeless individuals, we hope to personalize the plight of homelessness in America.

 

 

The project gives out cameras to homeless people and let's them document their lives in their own unique ways. What emerges is a refreshing look at an often misunderstood and misrepresented group of individuals.

Thanks to Richard for information about the site.

A rich life: Interview with Ivan Kashinsky

Photo by Ivan Kashinsky  

Carmalina Merino is put into her grave, in Penipe, Ecuador, on August 20, 2006. Carmalina, 82, died from breathing volcanic fumes when Tungurahua erupted sending lava through the village of Palictagua, killing 6 people and critically burning her grandson Frank Baus. Wednesday night on August 16, Tungurahua began to erupt sending lava down the sides of the mountain, throwing volcanic rocks the size of baseballs and covering the local communities with ash. The volcano erupted in July of this year and in 1999 as well. The last series of serious eruptions was between 1915 and 1925. It is said that Tungurahua will blow again in the near future, but nobody know when. People in the surrounding communities lost everything and almost 800 families are living in shelters.

 

Every so often a young photographer comes along that epitomizes the future of the field of social documentary photography. Ivan Kashinsky is such a photographer and a person that I've come to greatly admire for his determination, patience, and vision.

After completing his Master's Degree at San Jose State University,  Ivan has been pursuing his passion for documenting indigenous cultures in Latin America. For the past two years, Ivan has lived in Quito, Ecuador with his wife Karla Gachet, another wonderful and talented photographer.

Recently, Ivan won Honorable Mention in the Pictures of the Year International competition for a story on the eruption of a volcano in adopted homeland. I interviewed Ivan through e-mail today about what he has learned about photography and life through his experiences in Latin America.

DD:  How has working in Latin America changed your approach to photography?

Ivan Kashinsky: Working in Ecuador has changed my life.   It forced me to face a set of challenges that were overwhelming in the beginning.  First, the language. 

How do you work in an environment in which you can not communicate with the people freely?

At first, I had to communicate with body language, smiles, and eye contact.  This helped me to develop patients. 

Patience is everything. 

Sometimes I would spend hours with my subjects before beginning to take pictures.   After a few hours, the people realize you are not just some tourist passing through and you are dedicated to getting to know the people and understanding how they live. 

As the months passed, my Spanish developed to the point in which I could sit down and talk to people for long periods of time.  This patience helped me to push my photography to the next level. 

Instead of going in, photographing, and leaving, I would spend time.   The more time I would spend, and the more I would push myself, the deeper the images would become.

The people would slowly let me into their lives, opening up new opportunities, new situations, that I was totally ignorant of when I first arrived.

Photo by Ivan Kashinsky

A man points towards the path of lava on the side of "Mama" Tungurahau, an active volcano, on August 18, 2006.  Late Wednesday night on August 16th Tungurahua began to erupt sending lava down the sides of the mountain, throwing volcanic rocks the size of baseballs and covering the local communities with ash.  The town of Palictagua was hit hard by the disaster when lava came through the village killing six people and seriously burning a fourteen-year-old boy.  The volcano erupted in July of this year and in 1999 as well.  The last series of serious eruptions was between 1915 and 1925.  It is said that Tungurahua will blow again in the near future, but nobody know when.   People in the surrounding communities lost everything and almost 800 families are living in shelters.

 

DD: How do you get your worked published? 

IK: Yes. You can push your photography  as hard as you can, but what if nobody ever sees it..... then what?

I have found that in the past year I  have probably spent 5 percent of my time taking photographs, 20 percent planning and researching (finding the stories), and 75 percent networking. 

Agencies have been the key to publishing my work in other countries.

Unfortunately it wasn't enough.  I had to knock on doors and make phone calls to break into the magazine scene in Ecuador. 

Finally, I reached the point were I could sell images to the magazines in Ecuador and then push the story out through an agency to sell it a second time outside of Ecuador.

 

Photo by Ivan Kashinsky

A horse covered in volcanic ash stands in the decimated village of Bilbao, Ecuador, a town near the active volcano of Tungurahua on August 17, 2006.  Lava rocks the size of baseballs came raining down on communities located near Tungurahua.  Late Wednesday night on August 16th Tungurahua began to erupt sending lava down the sides of the mountain and covering the local communities with ash.  The town of Palictagua was hit hard by the disaster when lava came through the village killing six people and seriously burning a fourteen-year-old boy.  The volcano erupted in July of this year and in 1999 as well.  The last series of serious eruptions was between 1915 and 1925.  It is said that Tungurahua will blow again in the near future, but nobody know when.   People in the surrounding communities lost everything and almost 800 families are living in shelters.

 

 

 

DD: Getting back to the first question, has living in Ecuador changed your life and your photography?

IK: Working and living here has enriched my life in many ways.  More important than changing my photography, I have been exposed and developed like a piece of film.  Through my senses I have soaked up so many different tastes, colors, and smells.

Inside my mind I have tossed around ideas of cultural identity, history, and oppression, that were very foreign to me before I spent time here. 

The great difference between the individualistic nature of the United States and the collective, communal ideology of Latin American families has been both frustrating, challenging and enlightening at the same time.

To contact Ivan send correspondence to ivankphoto at gmail dot com

The pitfalls of social-networking

There's an interesting and somewhat troubling article in the Washington Post today about how highly qualified law students are losing out on jobs because of derogatory chats and posts on the Internet. Ellen Nakashima reports, "The students' tales reflect the pitfalls of popular social-networking sites and highlight how social and technological changes lead to new clashes between free speech and privacy."

This becomes important for all prospective job seekers as employers turn to the Internet for more details on potential candidates. For example, even if you present a portfolio of your best photography to a client or future employer, a post on MySpace or a less than perfect picture on Flickr may send the wrong message.

The visual communicator

 

We learn the language of the visual world through our experience with it.  The power of the visual form is pervasive: cultivated and conditions by a million moments.

Ours is a visual culture -- one which transcends the boundaries of nations, religions, and political systems. 

How is it possible, then, to make sense of the relentless stream of the visual in order to understand the cultural, political and social effects of media images on society and in the world?

The word “idea” is derived from the Greek language meaning  “to see.”  As we shall discover, ideas and images are closely linked to the ways in which our minds organize, conceptualize and categorize experiences through the senses.  In her book, The Burden of  Visual Truth, Julianne H. Newton (2001) explains:

“On one level, an image can be the physical likeness of an observed person, meaning the material qualities of a human face and body that reflect light onto a recording substance...An image also can refer to the psychological likeness of the observed, to the usually unseen interior of a human being, what is described as the ‘real self,’ the ‘unmasked self,’  a ‘side rarely seen by others,’ or a mood or state of mind that communicates a psychological attribute of an individual through an externally recorded form” (p. 37). 

Although we may think of an image as a likeness of a material object that is visually represented, there is much more going on here than meets the eye. 

As constructions of social reality, images we consume through media––print, television, film, or the web––are presented within a persuasive matrix that is part verbal, graphic, optical, as well as perceptual.   
Now the words -- imagine, image, and imagination -- come to mind as they are tied to the formation of our collective identity and memory. Even when we are provided an image of a jet crashing into a skyscraper we are still required to complete the scene, imagine, or construct a mental narrative through our imagination of what comes next, in this case death and destruction. The imagination is an active part of cognition and sometimes I think we often take it for granted.

We become dependent upon a collective social stock of knowledge, and the mind’s eye creates what is constructed from personal experience.

It is hopeless to imagine what death looks like when you are so far removed from the reality of daily events.  Sometimes death appears real only when it becomes relevant to my own existence, and somehow I could place myself on board a skyjacked airliner or in one of the buildings that collapsed after the crash. I am uncomfortable with the idea that this event shocks me more than others I read in the newspaper or see on television.

Today, the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib seem magnified in the mind’s eye. All of these events are horrific and symbolic, but it is the imagination that creates the most primal desires and fears.   

It is the last week of January 1991; the bombing of Iraq is in full swing. 

An elderly woman, back bent in a slow curving arch, shuffles towards the shrine.  She is very old; her eyes are fixed upon the ground in front of her. She moves haltingly with the help of a cane and rests every few paces.

The common person here is transformed into an icon of hope, but there is more. There is an image of Christ gazing up toward heaven.  Upon his head is a crown of thorns.  Below the image, cut out pictures of soldiers dressed in Navy blues, Army greens, and desert camouflage reveal smiling, dancing eyes.  Each image represents not only a singular petition for help and safety, but also a collective prayer.

Pictures of martyrs and Marines cling to cold limestone with masking tape.  Pictures hung in memorial to the dead and dying, the lost and the lonely. The face of a fallen Latino gang member stares out innocently next to another image of a Persian Gulf War veteran.  A young boy is diagnosed with a rare incurable form of cancer.  His eyes follow us through time.

We cannot rest on a single image, but are intoxicated by a virtual montage of humanity; a tableau vivant of lost souls.  Hundreds of pictures, some with writing scrawled across the bottom, are arranged around a statue of the Virgin Mary. Candles burn; time stands still. 

This is what is meant in being a visual communicator – the drive to speak of our fears, dreams, realities, and hopes through images and emotions.

The Digital Disconnected

There's an interesting story in the Washington Post about how universities struggle to keep students electronically informed in an age of hyper-mediated communications and personal technologies.

Susan Kinzie reports:

"College students now are wired, wireless, Sidekicked, Facebooked, YouTubed and bleeping with instant messages and text messages. But try getting an important announcement out to everyone on campus.

It's the flip side of all the technology: Students are more connected than ever -- but surprisingly tricky for administrators to reach."

One possible solution to this problem is the development of web portals, which can be individualized according to the needs of students. According to Wikipedia, a web portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources.

A university web portal would allow students to have access to a number of data bases as well as updates about life on campus all in one place.

Crossing the line: Press censorship in the War Zone

The U.S. military is confirming that soldiers had deleted media photographs and video after an incident which killed up to 10 civilians on Sunday.

Rahmat Gul, a photographer working for the Associated Press, said U.S. soldiers took his camera from him in order to delete pictures he made showing the wreckage of a destroyed four-wheel drive vehicle. The soldiers then returned the camera. A TV crew covering the same incident also had tape deleted.

Later,  a  U.S. military spokesperson said "The journalists had gone beyond a security perimeter and had been asked to remove their images to "protect the integrity of the investigation."

Even if the soldiers deleted the pictures, a simple $30 digital picture software recovery program could most likely restore the files. So, why did the soldiers want to stop the press from making pictures of the scene?

Could the Marines have been attempting to cover up the incident?

The Marines say no. In fact, the official response is that the soldiers were trying to keep the images from the world because they feared the scene had been tampered with prior to the arrival of the media.  Major William Mitchell later told AFP, "We have reminded our forces in the area that only in extreme circumstances is this practice condoned."

This is an interesting remark coming from a person of power, because in a war zone all circumstances are EXTREME.  In a split second, then,  how are soldiers, who are caught in the heat of battle or the aftermath of something else terrible, expected to make decisions about what or what not to allow the media to cover?

Given the recent history of this conflict, along with all the bad press the military is getting, Mitchell's logic is fuzzy and may be impossible to carry out in the future. In other words, what the major and others are telling us here is that we'll try really hard not to censor the press, but we can't guarantee it.  The big picture reality is that no matter what the truth may be in sorting this mess out, the wrong message has already been sent to the world.

For the U.S. military, another firestorm of criticism may be waiting to erupt as early reports of the incident raise more questions than answers about how the troops dealt with the press on the scene. 

It could be that any public relations efforts by the Marines may be already too late to restore public perception and faith in the war effort given the legacy of charges of abuse aimed at U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The culture of wedding photography changes with the Internet

Source: The Knot

If anyone still needs proof of how new technologies are replacing older one, there's a recent article on how digital photography is changing the culture of wedding photography.

Kathleen Nevin writes in the Monterey Herald, "You don't want to miss any of the drama or the details of the day, but you don't want to worry about who is preserving your wedding on film, and how your precious photographs will be distributed after the big day.  "Internet albums" have replaced the contact sheets and proof copies of yesterday."