I’ve enjoyed watching Starved for Attention unfold after I first heard about it. The campaign is a multimedia partnership between VII and Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). The project aims to raise awareness about the global malnutrition crisis. It’s an ambitious and far-reaching project, and the website is substantial: video and photos by Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer; calls to action; and a blog with periodic updates on the campaign and additional information about malnutrition.

I managed to snag a few moments (over email) with Jason Cone, executive producer of the Starved for Attention films and MSF’s Communications Director based out of New York, and Ron Haviv, one of VII’s founding members. I wanted to ask the two about how NGOs and photographers work together, how a campaign such as this is produced, and how NGOs and journalists work to get stories out to a wide audience within such a fractured media environment.

First, could you tell us a bit about the project. We’ve seen the website, but what other components does it have?

Jason Cone/MSF: Besides the websites, there have been multimedia exhibits of the documentaries as well as still images slideshows in New York City, Toronto, and Milan. We are planning additional exhibits in the coming months in Washington, DC; France; Switzerland; Greece; Italy, Belgium; Canada; and the UK. Other countries may be added as well. We are also making plans to present some of the films in several West African countries in the Sahel region, a major malnutrition hotspot. These showings will take the form of conventional museum exhibits along with presentations in major public spaces or even mobile trucks displaying the films. We recently created an “Action Kit” that allows the general public, students, and others to screen the films on their own and put on a Starved for Attention event to spread the word about malnutrition and join our international petition drive to rewrite food aid policy. The kit can be ordered at the Starved for Attention website here: http://www.starvedforattention.org/action-kits.php

MSF has been commissioning documentary photography for some time. How does documentary photography fit into the organization mission and goals?
MSF: MSF has been working with photographers almost since our inception in 1971. Some of the most significant and planned earlier collaborations took place with the photographer Sebastiao Salgado in Ethiopia during the 1984 famine, and with the late French photographer Didier Lefevre, who embedded with our clandestine medical teams crossing over from Pakistan into Afghanistan in the 1980s. Lefevre’s work resulted in several photo books, and the graphic novel trilogy the Photographer, which Lefevre co-authored with Emmanuel Guibert and Frederic Lemercier. (http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/events/exhibits/thephotographer/). We have worked with hundreds of other photographers over the years.

The impetus for our collaborations with photographers is that while our main priority as an organization is providing direct medical care and assistance to people struggling to survive amid conflicts, natural disasters, and epidemics in more than 60 countries around the world, we aren’t so bold to believe that our response alone is sufficient to alleviate the suffering inflicted by conflict and disease. When assistance is not enough to save lives or we face obstacle to providing aid to these populations, MSF speaks out from the perspective of what our medical teams are witnessing on the ground. Often it is photographs of an emergency that act as a catalyst for action. And the best photographers can open the eyes of the world to the suffering of people languishing in the shadows of forgotten wars and neglected diseases. This is definitely the case with a largely invisible crisis like childhood malnutrition.

I know VII and MSF have worked together before. Where did the impetus for this project come, from VII or from MSF?

MSF: Malnutrition is medical priority for MSF. We treat hundreds of thousands of children every year. Over the past few decades, the image of emaciated, fly-ridden children on the brink of death from famines and other catastrophe has come to define the visual representation of childhood malnutrition. And in this media saturated world, flush with information documenting the daily toll of human suffering, it is understandable that a visual immunity has developed as a line of defense against this clichéd imagery provoking any kind of an emotional response to tackle the crisis of childhood malnutrition head on. It was in this context that we challenged VII to capture a new visual identity for malnutrition. We had the strong experience of working together in Congo, and this offered another compelling opportunity for collaboration between VII and MSF.

Who was driving the editorial message behind it?

MSF: This was true collaboration with VII in the sense that we identified together the places to send the photographers. It was up to the photographers to find the stories. They worked alongside MSF teams in Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Congo, and India. In Mexico, US, and Bangladesh, the photographers were going after the story through other contacts and we really relied on them to find the images and footage that would bring the story home.

At the same time, I see each film as a chapter in a book. With Marcus Bleasdale piece from Djibouti, you see through the eyes of an MSF team the frustration that no matter how many children they treat this crisis is so much bigger than the response of one organization. Then we go to Burkina Faso with Jessica Dimmock to see the malnutrition through the experience of one mother, and to Bangladesh and India with Ron Haviv, and Stephanie Sinclair, respectively, to the heart of the malnutrition crisis in South Asia, and then the war zones of Congo, and finally to Mexico and the US where we see how early childhood malnutrition has been virtually wiped out with national level programs.

Bangladesh – Terrifying Normalcy / Ron Haviv and MSF

Ron Haviv, how did you get involved in the project?

Ron Haviv: Several VII photographers including myself had been looking for a follow up to our Congo project.

How does a project like this get put together? Where does the funding come from? I see LG is a sponsor–what does that mean (money, technology, staff, distribution?)?

MSF: LG’s support for Starved for Attention came after the project had already entered development in terms of the field work. Their willingness to not only support Starved for Attention but also provide funds for MSF’s malnutrition field programs bridges the two critical aspects of our work—providing assistance and speaking out. LG provided a $500,000 grant to this end, and also television screens to make the exhibits possible. Their support opened the doors to the multimedia exhibits, which was not in the original conception of the project. The project was originally solely intended for online distribution.

How does an NGO/photojournalist work with corporate sponsorship?

MSF: LG has been very easy to work with in the sense that they have been responsive to our requests for additional TV screens and other technology to support exhibits as opportunities have arisen.

Haviv: I don’t think that there is large differentiation between working for traditional media which is solely based on advertising and direct sponsorship. In actuality projects such as these give us more control over who we are funded by.

Who is involved in the production? How long did it take from the first ideas to the final product?

MSF: MSF and VII worked together with a production called Herzliya Films. The photographers and MSF project staff were in the editing rooms with Herzliya throughout the process. The project was first discussed with Ron and Stephen Mayes, managing director of VII, in January 2009. It took us about 9 months to identify all the locations, make the appropriate contacts, and schedule the photographer visits. The field work was completed in early January 2010, and the film production ran from early March and the project was launched online and in an exhibit in New York City on June 2.

Who is the intended audience for this project?
MSF: The audience ranges from the general public to policymakers. As mentioned, we will be screening the films in West Africa during a meeting of the West African Health Organization in Ivory Coast. We have sent the films to policymakers and key decision-makers at the World Food Program, World Bank, and other important players in the field of malnutrition programming.

What is the goal of the project?
MSF: The project aims are awareness raising about the issue of malnutrition—the scope of the problem but also how it is a preventable and treatable conditions with existing tools and strategies—and the petition to pressure the top food aid donor countries to ensure they provide food assistance that meets the nutritional standards and needs of young children.

Is the goal of the project to get donors, and if so which kinds? People off the streets? How do you know that the intended audience has been reached?
This project is not driven by an ambition to increase donors or fundraising. It is purely meant to advocate on behalf of the children affected by this crisis. We know we will reach the public through the website, media coverage, and events over the coming the months. We also know through direct feedback from policymakers that they are hearing our message from the project.

Where are you marketing the project? How are you getting people to know about it?
MSF: We are marketing the project in the various cities and regions where exhibits are being held. We are doing direct outreach to our donors and supporters online through email newsletters, Facebook postings, and a concerted social media campaign through Twitter (MSF-USA, MSF-UK, MSF_canada, and MSF_Australia). The more grassroots efforts with the Action Kit will take hold in the coming weeks as supporters of Starved for Attention put on their own events.

Is the general public tired of stories of starving people in far-off places? If so, how do you combat this indifference and disinterest as an organization/photographer?
MSF: I think we have tried to combat this fatigue with compelling stories about the problem but also real solutions that exist today. We are not talking about a condition requiring a new vaccine to prevent it. We know if we can find ways to get nutritious foods in the hands of mothers and the mouths of young children who need it most we can save lives right now.

Haviv: Successful stories, messages and communication occur when the photographer is able to humanize the people in the images. When someone is able to digest a statistic like 195 million and relate it to a story that touches them we are able to succeed.
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A complicated mix of politics, media and the freedom of both are colliding again in Venezuela after a national court ruled that “for the next four weeks, no newspaper, magazine or weekly of the country can publish images that are violent, bloody, grotesque, whether about crime or not”. This comes as national legislative elections are to be held in the next month and from reaction to the country’s largest newspaper El Nacional publishing an image of an over-filled morgue on its front page last week. After the ruling on Tuesday the paper published blank images with the word “censored” across their front page in protest.

The Guardian reports that “crime regularly tops Venezuelans’ list of concerns. In the absence of complete official figures, which are no longer published, watchdog groups estimate 16,000 people are murdered every year.” Today’s El Nacional led with the question “do you feel that the national feeling of insecurity is to be mostly blamed on the information transmitted by the media?” and they reported that 88% said “no”, their rebuke to the Government’s assertion that “media opponents were using gutter press tactics to sensationalise crime, sell newspapers and damage the country’s socialist revolution”.

I’m sure this all needs to be considered in the complications of local politics, but it is interesting to me that there is a newspaper publishing such shocking images (in whatever context, especially considering the image seems to have been taken last December) and is taking a bold response to censorship. It also amazes me that the censorship could be so ham-fisted, with claims to protect the “psychic and moral integrity of children and adolescents” yet only be in temporary effect until the elections. We’ll see what comes.

Update (8/20): CNN is reporting “Venezuelan judge says newspapers can print violent pictures”: “A judge has lifted an order banning Venezuelan media from printing violent photographs, an official said on state-owned VTV.” Seems like international pressure from press advocates contributed. (via @foodforyoureyes)

I just heard some great news from our friend Ethan Welty who we wrote about in April after he was arrested in Colorado after an environmental protest. As of this week, the charges against him have been dropped. At the time I wrote,

Shortly after the four who had trespassed on the plant’s property were arrested and escorted out police approached Welty, who was on property outside of the power plant, and arrested him. All five were charged with 2nd Degree Criminal trespass, which carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $750 fine. Welty is trying to set the record straight, as media is reporting that simply five were arrested at the protest and no one (including the police) is acknowledging that he was there covering the event as a member of the press and that he was obviously not with the four protesters inside the plant.

The arraignments for all five arrested on that day were scheduled for June. To Welty’s knowledge, the four who had been documented trespassing on the coal pile have had their meetings rescheduled to July. Welty had his arraignment rescheduled after a telephone meeting between the District Attorney and his attorney, who is a University of Colorado professor who took the case pro-bono. Following this meeting the DA dismissed the charges. Welty provided this run-down of the reasons:

- the DA, not yet having reviewed the case, was assuming that I had been on the coal pile, so my attorney asks the DA to take a closer look at my case, sending a few of my pictures and mentioning I have several testimonies from witnesses present during the action
- the DA proceeded to contact the police, who informed her that no officers had seen me trespass, and that they had not recorded the name of the Excel Energy security guard who had pointed me out
- with no evidence against me other than the word of an unnamed Excel employee, the DA decided to dismiss my charges rather than to bring my case to trial

This is great news and we are happy for Welty. However he has mentioned that his next step will “be to find a civil (rather than criminal) attorney to scrub official records of my arrest, which to my surprise does not happen automatically when charges are lifted.” There also remains the faulty news accounts of his arrest which we discussed in our original post and were picked up by other websites including re: photo and the always troubling and enlightening Photography is Not a Crime blog.

As well we should mention that Welty has been incredibly busy lately even besides his legal issues. He recently had the cover image of Backpacker Magazine, and was interviewed by the magazine itself to tell you how he did it. He also won an International Conservation Photo Award for an image he made in the North Cascades of our home state of Washington. Oh, and he wrote:

Meanwhile, I’m involved in (too) many projects. In Boulder County, partnering up with photographer Morgan Heim to document local biodiversity for MeetYourNeighbours(.org); in the North Cascades, photographing areas being proposed for national park and wilderness expansion by the conservation community; in Boulder doing my own research on mapping urban agriculture potential which my professors are urging me on to publish. And all that in addition to my classes, glacier research and the more mundane mechanics necessary to maintain momentum as a photographer. I’m excited to be convening (curating) a session on quantitative applications of photography in the Earth Sciences at the huge American Geophysical Union meeting in SF in December.

I’ve already got plans to write about many of those things here on dvafoto when Welty has them finished. Cheers to an energetic and passionate photographer for keeping up the good work and settling up fairly with the law.

Photographer Aaron Huey has been doing great stories for years, especially with his work on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In this recent TED talk he describes the long lines of history and bad faith that has led to what he calls the genocide of the Sioux people in and around Pine Ridge, alongside a slideshow of his work. Affecting, and shows the great lengths journalism and informed photographers can go.

(h/t Melissa Lyttle and APAD)

For the second entry in our new Dvafoto Book Club I’m thinking about J.M. Coetzee’s novel Slow Man, which I’ve been reading this week while on assignment in Budapest. This a book, shortly, about an Australian photographer who loses a leg in a bicycle accident and the succession of day nurses who tend to him and his depression, before a Croatian immigrant and caregiver becomes the focus of his attention. It is no wonder why a good friend of mine thoughtfully shipped me a copy of this from the States last month, especially after I mentioned how great Coetzee’s novel Disgrace was.

I’m still in this book but a passage leapt out at me this afternoon. I don’t know where it leads in the novel or really the character’s context for saying this, but I’m sure it’s worth a thought for artists and photographers. The narrator is the photographer Paul Rayment, he mentions his collection of first-generation photographs of early South Australian miners which he will donate to a University, his nurse Marijana Jokić and the young man in a car who caused his accident on Magill Road.

More than likely the Jokićs brought with them from the old country their own picture collection: baptisms, confirmations, weddings, family get-togethers. A pity he will not get to see it. He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable. Whereas stories – the story of the needle in the bloodstream, for instance, or the story of how he and Wayne Blight came to meet on Magill Road – seem to change shape all the time.

The camera, with its power of taking in light and turning it into substance, has always seemed to him more a metaphysical than a mechanical device. His first real job was as a darkroom technician; his greatest pleasure was always in darkroom work. As the ghostly image emerged beneath the surface of the liquid, as veins of darkness on the paper began to knit together and grow visible, he would sometimes experience a little shiver of ecstasy, as though he were present at the day of creation.

That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitve emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in the techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past.

Does it say something about him, that native preference for black and white and shades of grey, that lack of interest in the new? Is that what women missed in him, his wife in particular: colour, openness?

The story he told Marijana was that he saved old pictures out of fidelity to their subjects, the men and women and children who offered their bodies up to the stranger’s lens. But that is not the whole truth. He saves them too out of fidelity to the photographs themselves, the photographic prints, most of them last survivors, unique. He gives them a good home and sees to it, as far as he is able, as far as anyone is able, that they will have a good home after he is gone. Perhaps, in turn, some as yet unborn stranger will reach back and save a picture of him, of the extinct Rayment of the Rayment Bequest.

I think there are some ideas in here that our readers will recognize or react strongly to, and I hope to read your responses. I’ll post my thoughts and perhaps conclusions after I finish the book, with part two of this post.

Following up on our previous coverage, Marco Vernaschi let us know that the Pulitzer Center has published another post about the subject, “Uganda: Response to Critics.” The post includes both a response by Vernaschi and a note from the Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer. The response specifically addresses questions raised by A Developing Story and Vigilante Journalist and includes a link to an interview with a Ugandan lawyer about the inadequate police response to the murder of Margaret Babirye Nankya, as well as a video of Vernaschi’s interview with the girl’s mother. Of specific note, also, is Vernaschi’s statement about removing another photo from the project, this one of a child’s coffin. Three bodies were exhumed in a separate case and this coffin was one of the exhumed bodies.

Congrats to our friends over at BagNews with their wonderful and expansive redesign. Already the preeminent source for the analysis of “political” photography, Michael Shaw has outlined his plans to develop the project and their increased focus on original photography created for BagNews. The new site is easily organized in to three sections: the Notes, the Originals and the Salon. Absolutely worth digging in to the archives even if you follow the site regularly now, especially with their Visual Archive.

In the Originals section, which is organized by Alan Chin, they are featuring a serial by Anthony Suau, continuing his World Press-winning work on the “Great Recession”. The first post, with photos from the Detroit Auto Show, is called Success or sarcophagus?.

If you’re interested at all in how pictures can be read and interpreted once they’re out of the photographer’s hands, this site is a must read. Even my mother adores them.

What started as a long accusation in a lightstalkers thread has turned into a large-scale discussion involving a Pulitzer Center apology and coverage on the Guardian website. Marco Vernaschi’s coverage of child sacrifice in Uganda (another with the offending image removed and another) for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting initially looked like a hard and gritty glance into a little-known-outside-of-Africa problem of ritual child sacrifice. Issues of exoticism and the colonialist view notwithstanding, numerous bloggers began lobbing serious allegations of paying for access, illegally exhuming a child’s body to take pictures of the corpse, child exploitation, and outright fabrication. A Developing Story raised some strong questions of both Vernaschi and the Pulitzer Center. The Pulitzer Center took time in responding to the allegations. Other bloggers led the charge, with Anne Holmes of Vigilante Journalist providing invaluable investigation into the case with Ugandan authorities. Holmes had previously interviewed Vernaschi for her blog and has retracted those articles due to concerns about Vernaschi’s ethics and journalistic process. The Pulitzer Center has issued a statement responding to these allegations, in which it agrees that the bounds of journalism, ethics, and human decency were crossed. Asim Rafiqui has a great perspective on the issue, as does Tewfic El-Sawey. Pay special attention Rafiqui’s analysis of the motivations for a photographer to manufacture a story as regards the media eco-system of photojournalism awards, publications looking for sensationalism, and historical portrayals of Africa. “Mr. Vernaschi’s transgression is not just that of an individual, but of an industry that never fails to trip over itself chasing the insane.”

As for the case at hand, a particular picture (now gone from the photographer’s site) depicted a young boy, nude, whose penis had been cut off and replaced with a catheter, all in full view. The image, duckrabbit argued, and which the Pulitzer Center eventually agreed with, violated the dignity of the child and, as such, went against various protections for children created by the UN, the UK, and other legal systems. The BBC, in fact, had previously run a photo of the boy, but did not show his face out of concern for the boy’s safety and dignity.

More worrying (well…I’m not sure there are levels of ethical reprehensibility here…it’s all pretty bad), Vernaschi asked a family to dig up the body of their murdered daughter so he could photograph the corpse (that picture has also been removed from the internet), as he explained in a post on the Pulitzer Center’s Untold Stories blog. The photographer said he was gathering evidence. Whether or not this is the role of the photojournalist, these actions cannot be excused. The exhumation violated local laws as well as most journalism and human ethics. While we can’t fault a photographer trying to drive home a story with shocking, hard-hitting pictures, staging a situation with money and violating bodies of the dead is well beyond any acceptable practices in journalism or human decency.  These ethical transgressions poison the entire story.

And while this controversy has gotten the pictures (and perhaps the story) to a wide audience, Joerg Colberg at Conscientious sums up the problem quite well at the end of this post, “Lastly, lest we forget this, there actually is a real story that needs to be talked about: child sacrifice in Uganda. But what will people remember? Will they remember the facts about child sacrifice in Uganda? Or will they remember a photojournalist who needed to get photos so badly that he had a dead child dug up (using money to achieve his goals)?”

And while some would say that after the Pulitzer Center’s apology, the problem has been satisfactorily dealt with, Asim Rafiqui entreats us to go further: “Not enough has been said on this issue. There will be some who will argue – move on! I say, No! Remain, think and consider. This touches on the very fundamentals of the future and meaning of our chosen craft. What is the intent of the work we do, and who are it’s audience? What is the role of journalism in our society, and in particular, what and how shall we engage with the world around us so that we see them not as alien, but human and worthy of being taken seriously? Too many young photographers are seduced by the mythologies of the craft. Mythologies that are woven by the practitioners and their publishers. Its time to stop, take stock, and weave better stories, and suggest better and more meaningful means of working. Its time to produce real stories and do so by finding real humanity and a sense of equal dignity and respect.”

You should be reading Mike Davis’ blog if you aren’t already. Now a freelance editor, Davis started at the Albuquerque Tribune and has worked for numerous books, the White House, the Oregonian and National Geographic; his awards are too many to name and he’s edited the winning entries of many top awards numerous times. In short, the guy knows what he’s doing. His blog now serves as a sort of oracle into the process of picture editing, and it’s full of practical advice. The posts are varied–there are interviews with photographers he’s worked with (here’s one with Matt Slaby on creating long term bodies of work (Slaby previously interviewed on dvafoto)), discussions of compositional theory, ideas behind how bodies of work should be edited, career advice, and on and on. Bookmark it, subscribe to the RSS feed, read it every day.

We see a lot of photo websites as we bring you dvafoto, and looking at work online is often a frustrating process. Here are a few things that I think every photo website needs. Each one of these is something that has prevented us from easily linking to work online, and if it’s made the process difficult for us, you can be sure an art buyer or photo editor won’t put up with it. Search engine optimization has a role, but this list is mostly intended for photographers looking to improve the user experience for people who want to see their portfolio. Read the comments on this discussion about a photographer’s work at metafilter to get an idea of what many people think about photo websites; at least 35 of the 40 comments complain about the website interfering with or completely impeding their viewing of the photographer’s work. Your viewers should be paying attention to your photos instead of fighting with your website.

While some of these are more important than others, these are things that your photo website absolutely needs:

1. A website. This should be a no-brainer. Flickr, blogspot, lightstalkers galleries, and other free solutions make viewing pictures a pain. Each of these tools have their time and place, but their function is not to be the best showcase of your work.

2. Your photos. This, also, should be a no-brainer, but it’s surprising how often I’ve had to search for pictures on a photographer’s website. Sometimes, the whole website is hidden behind a page that says “enter” or something similar. Sometimes, the photos are hidden behind words that don’t mean anything to me, such as “people,” “places,” and “things.” With that, I might expect portraits behind the “people” link, but what about “places” and “things”? The casual viewer of your website should not be confused about how to see the types of photos they want to see.

Minimize the number of clicks it takes to get to photos, while you’re at it. I’ve seen some websites where it takes 4 or 5 clicks to see even a single photo. Most people will just give up. Loading time for the website or individual photos is also a concern. Many flash websites take forever to load, while others take forever to move from picture to picture. Often I can only stand to sit through the wait of 2 or 3 pictures in a gallery before I give up.

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