Over the past two or so weeks of protests in Istanbul surrounding Gezi Park and Taksim Square, we’ve seen a lot of stories and photographs. Some of the first and best pictures I saw though were by my friend Andrei Pungovschi, a photographer based in Bucharest. While he was in Istanbul he was making a series of daily posts on his blog about what he was seeing and photographing in Istanbul. I wanted to share some of his work from the past week and his responses to a few questions I had about how he was covering this difficult and fast moving story.

Rollover for navigation

All photos presented without captions and (c) Andrei Pungovschi.

dvafoto: When did you arrive in Istanbul?

Pungovschi: I arrived in Istanbul on Thursday evening, last week.

Did you go specifically to cover the protests?

When I first saw the protests on TV I thought it was just a local issue in Istanbul about Gezi park and didn’t really think it was something that could get any bigger. However, the brutality of the police intervention on what was a relatively small and peaceful protest triggered a very strong reaction in Istanbul. The movement turned from an ecological issue into a political one. That’s when I decided to go.

How have things changed in the time you’ve been there, what is the atmosphere in the park and the square?

By the time I got to Istanbul the police had backed off to such an extent that you could not spot a policeman anywhere around Taksim Square. Each evening, the square was filled with people and the whole scene looked more like a festival rather than a protest. The park and the square are two different scenes. The square is the place where each day after work people from all over Istanbul come to express their protest, sing, dance, or simply watch from the sidelines. The park is a community of people who want to express their support for their mutual cause by living together in this place in spite of the authorities who want them out of there. Most people I’ve spoken to in Gezi seem determined to stay there until their demands are met.

Tuesday seems like it was the most dramatic day in the last week, what was it like to photograph?

Everything changed on Tuesday morning around 7am when the police decided to clear the square (not the park). They attacked with what seemed like excessive use of gas and water canons. People fought back with rocks and Molotov cocktails. These things tend to get chaotic and this was no exception. Photographing under these conditions is not complicated, because there is always something going on. I prefer to get close to people, so I don’t use a telephoto lens. The problem then is that you have more than your frame to worry about. Plus the gas. Unless you have a proper gas mask, there is not much you can do at close range.

How are the police and the protestors treating the media and photographers? Is it difficult to work?

The police ignored us for the most part, which was good. I wish I could say the same about the protesters. They seem to be very discontent with their own media, so they would often throw rocks at groups of photographers and cameramen. Once you get close to them and get a chance to explain who you are and what you do, things get easier. The other problem I encountered was the way the police used the gas. The gas projectiles are supposed to be shot upwards at a 45 angle degree. More often than not, they would shoot horizontally, actually taking aim at protesters. A guy was shot in the face a few meters away from me while trying to throw a rock.

Overall, I can’t say it was particularly difficult to photograph. It’s not war photography. Common sense rules that apply everywhere apply here as well. With a little bit of luck and a lot of caution, you can get your job done.

Conflict reporting is a dangerous undertaking increasingly dominated by the work of freelance journalists (as high as 80% of journalists working in Syria are freelancers), most of whom lack the legal, financial, and security resources of large news organizations while working in risky environments. Vaughan Smith, of London’s Frontline Club, and a group of freelance photographers and other journalists have organized the Frontline Freelance Register to address the issue of freelancers putting themselves at risk without the institutional backing of large news organizations (two French freelancers freelancers were just abducted in Syria; James Foley has been missing for 204 days as of the writing of this post). The FFR is billed as “a representative body for freelance journalists exposed to risk while gathering news” and will work to establish and promote industry-wide safety standards and best practices for journalists working abroad in difficult and dangerous circumstances.

If you work in dangerous environments, you can apply to join the FFR here.

Related: RISC trains freelance conflict journalists to treat life-threatening injuries in the battlefield.

(via BJP)

Chicago Sun-Times front cover parody after photography staff lay-offs (via Romenesko)

“Being in the room with John White when we got laid off was a highlight of my career. About 30 of us got the axe. As soon as [Sun-Times editor] Jim Kirk said they were going to have the reporters produce multimedia for their rapidly changing platforms, I just had to walk out.” -Rob Hart, former Sun-Times Media photojournalist, speaking to News Photographer

We’ve covered lay-offs before (the Paper Cuts website is a good primer on recent history), but this week the Chicago Sun-Times took the unprecedented move of laying off their entire photo staff. Twenty-eight full-time staffers, including photographers and photo editors, were given the ax, and now there’s a major metro newspaper in the US without a photo staff. Among those laid off was the great John H. White, 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner and elder statesman of news photography, who’d worked at the paper for 44 years. Read Scott Strazzante’s ode to the photographer, The Great John H. White. Now, here’s a photo of White and others receiving their walking papers.

The Sun-Times says the reason for the lay-offs was a general move toward video and multimedia, and that still photo needs would be filled by freelancers and reporters who will be trained in “iPhone photography basics.” I always find it curious that newspapers expect reporters to fill the roles of photographers and newspapers after lay-offs; I’ve never heard of photographers being asked to take on the writers’ roles after a round of cuts. Here’s a May 30 story published by the Sun-Times featuring an awful photo taken by the writer of the article to give you an idea of what the paper’s visual coverage might look like going forward.

Here are a few reactions to the news that are well worth a read:

• Poynter: John White on Sun-Times layoffs: ‘It was as if they pushed a button and deleted a whole culture’
• Alex Garcia: The Idiocy of Eliminating a Photo Staff
• Vincent Laforet: How to ensure your extinction: look at what newspapers are doing
• Jeff Jarvis: To the Dauntless Lensmen
• Allen Murabayashi: How the Internet Killed Photojournalism
• Black Chicago in the 1970s, through the lens of John H. White
• An open letter to the Sun-Times owners, by Jerry Burnes, news editor at the Williston Herald
• New York Times: Do Newspapers Need Photographers?
• Fake craigslist soliciting iReporters for the Sun-Times (mirror)
• some photos of Sun-Times photo staffers after receiving the news

And for anyone who’s been laid-off (in news local to me, Boston University just laid-off their entire photo staff), know that things will get better. Here are resources from the NPPA for laid-off visual journalists. And here’s Chip Litherland’s open letter to newspaper photographers.

Our monthly posting of dvafoto’s deadline calendar. The calendar can be accessed in a web browser, or with ical or xml applications. If you know of any upcoming deadlines not on the list, please send them to deadlines@dvafoto.com or use the submissions page.

Rogers Photo Archive on eBay

This is weird. Old press card photos of staffers from the Miami Herald are up for sale on eBay. Above is a 1981 image of columnist Edwin Pope, a print of which can currently be had for $28.88. Wait…what?!

I knew that newspapers have been selling off their photo archives, and had heard about the Arkansas-based John Rogers Photo Archive buying up many major newspapers’ photos. But I didn’t know what Rogers was doing with the photos. He started with the Detroit News and then eventually acquired the licensing and print sales rights to the photo archives of the Boston Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, the Denver Post, and other storied news organizations and individual photographers. It’s a good deal for the newspapers. The cash-strapped publications get a one-time payment and a searchable digital archive of their work. For Rogers, the deal was less clear immediately. He’d managed to parlay old sports photographers’ archives into major deals with trading card manufacturers. Images of celebrities and politicians in the newspaper archives would be valuable, but Rogers also began to put ordinary newspaper images up for sale on eBay and the money started to roll in.

The Rogers Archive is now one of the largest stores on eBay, with over 2 million images for sale (I’m not sure if there are other seller profiles operated by the Rogers Archive, but here’s one with 50,000+ images). In a 2012 interview with the Arkansas Times (That’s a great link, by the way, and where Rogers calls his archive the “Walmart of Photography”. Read it for a good background on all of this), Rogers says that eBay sales of old newspaper images bring in $120,000 a week. That’s not a typo. And that’s not the Rogers Archive’s only source of income. But that’s why and how prints of old press card photos of newspaper staff are showing up on eBay.

The Rogers Archive website says that a stock licensing portal will be made to facilitate licensing these images, but promises says it will be coming soon in 2011. Digital Stock Planet‘s website just says “under construction.”

Weird.

(via Romenesko)

Think Tank Retrospective bag

I’ve been using a Think Tank Retrospective 7 bag for the past 6 months, and I couldn’t be happier. Now, Think Tank is offering a free test drive of the bag (and others in the series). You get the bag for a couple of weeks and decide whether or not to keep it. Return it with a written evaluation of the bag, and you won’t be charged. Or decide to keep it and pay for the bag. There are a couple of restrictions: you must be in the US, you must use a credit card (not a debit card), and you have to sign up for the test drive before June 15.

The bag isn’t perfect, but it’s the best I’ve used. It’s small and has a nice variety of pockets. The flap closes with velcro (not my favorite), but comes with flaps to cover up the velcro so the bag is silent in quiet situations (this is great!). The strap is really durable and the strap pad doesn’t get in the way–the strap on my previous Domke bag, for instance, frayed to the point of breaking pretty quickly. And the bag comes with an attached rain cover so you don’t need to worry about bad weather. I’m not particularly fond of the divider system, though. Instead, I replaced the dividers with a 2×2 insert from my Domke bag, but others I know like the Think Tank dividers.

Do yourself a favor and try out the bag for free. Or, if you’re planning to buy anything else from Think Tank, click through this link to send a little love our way with your purchase.

By the way, if you click through our links to buy anything here, we get a small cut of the sale. It’s a way for us to keep the lights on here at dvafoto. Thanks to those of you who have clicked through us in the past!

We all know that if you wear Google’s new glasses (Google Glass), you are an asshole. Now, Youtube channel Grovo has made a parody video imagining what it would like to actually use Google Glass as a still camera.

I still haven’t seen Google Glass in the wild. While some people think privacy fears relating to having a video and still camera always on are exaggerated, that hasn’t stopped some places from banning the technology preemptively.

(via reddit)