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)

Journalism Warning Labels - Tom Scott

I love these. Tom Scott has been surreptitiously placing homemade warning labels on newspapers where he sees problematic reporting. It’s a great reminder that everything printed in newspapers and magazines should be read with a skeptical mind. The stickers are available in a ready-to-print A4-sized pdf for Europe and a letter-sized pdf for the US.

Political cartoonist Mark Fiore produces weekly animations for Newsweek. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched any of his cartoons before, but this one, found via Newsweek’s odd Tumblr blog in turn found at the Nieman Lab, is well worth the price of admission. We’ve talked before about the environmental cost of new digital technology, and this cartoon sums up the issues all too well.

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.

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.

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.”

It came without warning, it was unexpected. Her death – resulting not from nature’s violence but from human action – stands out from other deaths as a particular injustice; Fabienne’s killing is salt in the wounds. While tens of thousands lay obscured beneath rubble, she lay limp and exposed on a bare roof-top. The image itself is an affront. -Pete Brook

You need to read this. Pete Brook has been doggedly pursuing the death of Fabienne Cherisma in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, particularly emphasizing the circumstances of the event’s visual representation in the global media. The series, now 15 parts all linked below, starts with an initial interest stemming from a single image and eventually grows to encompass interviews and analysis from many of the at least 15 photographers who covered the events before, during, and after Cherisma’s death. Read it all:

Part One: Fabienne Cherisma (Initial inquiries, Jan Grarup, Olivier Laban Mattei)

Part Two: More on Fabienne Cherisma (Carlos Garcia Rawlins)

Part Three: Furthermore on Fabienne Cherisma (Michael Mullady)

Part Four: Yet more on Fabienne Cherisma (Linsmier, Nathan Weber)

Part Five: Interview with Edward Linsmier

Part Six: Interview with Jan Grarup

Part Seven: Interview with Paul Hansen

Part Eight: Interview with Michael Winiarski

Part Nine: Interview with Nathan Weber

Part Ten: Interview with James Oatway

Part Eleven: Interview with Nick Kozak

Part Twelve: Two Months On (Winiarski/Hansen)

Reporter Rory Carroll Clarifies Some Details

Part Fourteen: Interview with Alon Skuy

Part Fifteen: Conclusions

As far as Benton is concerned, she has stumbled upon an artist who deserves to be in the canon of great 20th-century social-documentary photography, on par with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.

The New York Times Magazine a week or so ago published a very interesting story about the reassessment of photographer Roman Vishniac. He published a number of widely circulated books about Eastern European Jews in the years following World War II, lauded for capturing “a vanished world” of pre-Holocaust Jewish life. But work done by a young curator at Harvard and the International Center of Photography is broadening appreciation and important questions about Vishniac and his work.

There are a number of interesting points that are treated in a pretty lively manner, for example the role of heavy editing (sequencing, cropping, releasing only a few images) and heavy-handed captions in skewing perceptions of a documentary piece. This fits in to other reassessments of 20th century documentary and “concerned photographers”. Does the likely manipulation of scenes and commentary take away from the work or is it justified by the message?

Vishniac is an interesting character, as well known for his photomicroscopy as these images of 1930s-era Europe, which underscores the mystery and questions about his photography and self-constructed legends. Well worth a read.

Audubon Magazine - Picture Perfect

Audubon Magazine has just published a fascinating look into the world of wildlife photography and recent controversies regarding the use of captive animals. You may remember the recent disqualification of José Luis Rodríguez in the British National Museum of History’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for using a captive animal in the winning image.

A friend of mine recently sent this Guardian article on World Press-winning photos of a stoning in Somalia to me. It starts off with a typical Sontag quote, but it’s worth a read. I’m not sure if Colberg’s excellent recent post (on the recently-redesigned Conscientious) Why We Must See is a direct response to the Guardian piece (it does mention the photos in question), but it might as well be:

To say that we want to read, but not see… That just seems like an easy way out. Seeing is not the same as reading. What I read about I can file away, because it is being processed while I take it in. What I see – there is a lot of processing, but there also is the unbearable immediacy. -Jörg M. Colberg, “Why We Must See”