Obama’s Burden from Christopher Morris on Vimeo.

You probably already know Christopher Morris‘ work. One of the founding members of VII, his conflict photography is unparalleled and his recent work on American politics, including the book “My America,” has redefined visual coverage of the White House. You might not know that Morris has been making videos in addition to his still coverage of American politics. Emotionally resonant and forceful, these videos look like none others produced in the 5DMarkII-fueled push toward moving images in photojournalism. The videos resemble Morris’ still work, but their use of music, black and white imagery, and tone make them something altogether different.  He’s released four videos, all worth watching:

Christopher Morris recently started a thread on lightstalkers to discuss his videos, and the response was varied. Make sure to read through that thread. The discussion there is interesting and touched on many aspects of Morris’ video work not covered in this interview (if you don’t have a lightstalkers account, email me), and I thought Morris’ videos would be a great subject for one of our periodic interviews here at dvafoto. I was delighted when Morris agreed to the interview. The discussion, conducted over email, is below. Our questions are in bold, followed by Morris’ full responses. If you’re reading on the front page, be sure to click through to the post to see the full interview.

dvafoto: What are you showing us with the videos? When “Dear Leader” first came out, the title (equating Bush with Kim Jong Il) and the tone and the video itself suggested to me a critical portrayal of the previous administration. Now seeing a similar tone in the Obama videos, it strikes me that you aren’t focusing directly on the man in the office, but the office itself and its theater and cultural baggage.

Christopher Morris: I’m showing you what I feel. Each one of these has a very distinct clear meaning for me. As for the viewer? That’s something I’m not quite sure of. This is the beauty of this whole process. They are whatever you want them to be.

I seem to remember you speaking or writing about what would become “My America” as appealing both to the Bush administration’s supporters and detractors. From the same photos, one side saw images of patriotism and strong leadership, while the other saw demagogy, jingoism, and blind, wrong-headed faith in a politician. Have you gotten the same reaction from your videos? From your coverage of Obama? How do you feel about this emotional ambiguity? is it your goal?

Each one of these short films has a distinct meaning for me. I know exactly what I’m trying to convey, what mood and emotion I’m trying to bring out of the viewer in each one of these… The exciting thing about the whole process though… is the emotion that I may want to convey… will actually with some, be the complete opposite or even something that I’ve never even thought of.

Your lightstalkers thread called your videos “experiments,” why are they experiments? Will they become more than an experiment for you? What got you started shooting video? How do you fit in the video shooting with the stills and deadlines? What influenced the style of your videos?

Here I’ll give a short synopsis of each of the Obama works and how they really came about. The first one I did was “The New Leader“. I didn’t wake up and think oh I’m going to make a statement about the Presidency today. It really started as I was sitting in the balcony of Capitol Hill while the President was about to step out to address the Nation on his Health Care Reform. I had been loaned one of the new Canon 7d’ cameras to test the day before. So literally 5 minutes before he came out, I decided to attempt to shoot some video of him at the start. Still images from a balcony 100 feet away of someone walking down the center aisle really do not make for great photography. So why now shoot video instead.. Later the next day when I put the clips into my laptop. I was stunned, with the whole quality and the mood of the images. In the next few day’s the President left for Wall Street to make an address on the Economy in New York. Basically here is a man that is trying to sell the nation on Health Care, the Economy, the War. The urgency of everything. This is what I’ve attempted to convey in “The New Leader” short.

All of this was really just an experiment to test out the 7D. There were and still are many parts that should be edited out. This is why on returning to DC in November, my initial plan was to attempt to record some more clips of the President to re-edit into the film. Then on Veterans Day, Obama was to visit Arlington National Cemetery and deliver a speech. This time using the Canon 5D, I basically shot non-stop from the moment the motorcade left the White House until it returned. Right away during the drive I could sense how visually stunning the motorcade footage was, with the added historical importance of the President’s visit, and that this couldn’t be edited into my earlier video. It would stand on its own ["Obama's Burden"]. What struck me is that roughly 10 cars in front of me is the President in his limousine looking out at the constant and never ending tombstones of our war dead.

And then in December, Obama was to fly to West Point to address the nation on his decision regarding Afghanistan. Hence, “Obama’s War.” The choice of the music here is really interesting. What I do, is while playing one of the clips, I will cycle through some songs to see if anything fits the mood I’m attempting to convey. Having already downloaded some music files from pumpaudio.com, I had something in mind. By mistake I inadvertently played this Russian folklore song called Jolly Talk, by DrevA. For me it was perfect, here was this Russian voice taunting us with her simple words. Taunting us, for now it was our turn to send our young cadets to Afghanistan. The same thing Russian cadets were doing 30 years before. As for the images of the C5A cargo plane, they were shot the same night at an Air Force base near West Point. They are from the window of the helicopter as we taxied for take-off. For me they represented the planes that would carry the young cadets to war. They had almost this coffin like quality to them.
Read on »

Mimi Chakarova and the Center for Investigative Reporting - The Price of Sex

It would have been better for me not to be born” -Jenea

Our usual headline, “Worth a look,” seems inadequate here. “Need to look” is more like it. Mimi Chakarova and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s recent project, The Price of Sex, is a harrowing account of human sex trafficking told by those who have lived to tell their story. Combining still photography, video, and nearly six years of investigation, the piece explores the sex trade from the villages where women are abducted or tricked into being trafficked to the clubs in Dubai and streets of Turkey where the women are held captive as sexual slaves. This is a difficult story to watch, much less document, but it needs to be told. The Price of Sex also provides information about how to help fight human trafficking.

The statistics are astounding: there are now 10 times more humans trafficked as slaves than during the peak of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For more information, watch PBS Frontline’s excellent special, “Sex Slaves,” and read the New Yorker’s profile of countertraffickers, those who fight to rescue victims of the sexual slavery.

Newsweek - The Valley of Shadows - photos by Ken Light

Newsweek’s just published a brilliant and far-reaching investigation into California’s growing economic and water crises. The Valley of Shadows, a five-part series comprising wonderful photos by Ken Light, original reporting, interactive maps, and audio, is a great example of what most journalism might look like in a few years: hard-hitting visuals backed up by well-researched facts and figures in a relatively easy to navigate package. It’s exciting to see this sort of long-form journalism continuing in uncertain economic times; producing this sort of content isn’t cheap (just look at the list of names involved in the production: Photographer: Ken Light. Reporter: Katie Paul. Photo Editor: Margaret Keady. Audio Editor: Dylan Isbell. Project Editors: Mark Coatney, Kathy Jones, Carl Sullivan. And those are only the people that get listed; there’s a slew of people behind the scenes making sure all the i’s are dotted).

(via Dylan Isbell, audio editor for the package)

Seamus Murphy and Charles M. Sennott - Life, death and the Taliban

The GlobalPost, a leading purveyor of internet-focused international journalism, has just published the multimedia package “Life, death, and the Taliban.” Featuring the photography of dvafoto favorite Seamus Murphy, the pieces mixes written reporting, video, and still photojournalism in a remarkably comprehensive analysis of the contemporary Taliban. There’s almost too much here to take in, but it’s all worthwhile. While you’re at it, check out Murphy’s “A Darkness Visible,” a website devoted to some of his early coverage of the Taliban.

(via Fresh Air interview with GlobalPost executive editor Charles Sennott)

Another site that is producing a surge of great writing, pictures and video in the past couple of weeks is Dispatches Magazine. Starting with their video series on War and Photography they are now featuring an illuminating multimedia piece “Hell Hole: Living on Jharia’s Fiery Mines” produced by a (new to me) outfit in India called Bombay Flying Club as part of their current issue, “Out of Poverty”. The piece is about the illegal and dangerous coal mining taking place by the poor at the Jharia mine. Harrowing, Dante-inspired scenes.

Bombay Flying Club’s website says they produce “online journalism as it could be” and are formed by two Danish photojournalists and a Canadian: Poul Madsen, Henrik Kastenskov and Brent Foster. (Madsen and Foster were credited with the photos and videos in “Hell Hole”).

Judging from a few of the multimedia pieces on their site (I particularly liked “Bucharest Below Ground”, sorry no direct link available) they are doing a good job with interesting and powerful stories. They’ll be a good reference point as more of these productions are made widely available, through magazines and websites like Dispatches.

Tuition-free VJ Multimedia Workshop - Jun 21 deadline

Paul Myers just wrote in to tell us about the new VJ Multimedia Workshops for students and recently laid-off journalists. Myers, a faculty member at the Brooks Institute of Photography, created the workshop as a way to foster development and innovation in the field of visual journalism. There’s a great roster of staff and guest speakers and editors on board for the weekend. The workshop will take place July 30-Aug. 2, 2009 in Ventura, Calif., USA, and the deadline for applying is June 21, 2009.

Dispatches - Carry on up the Gulag: Interview with Seamus Murphy

Continuing our posts on Seamus Murphy, here’s “Carry on up the Gulag: Interview with Seamus Murphy” at Dispatches’ site. Murphy talks a bit about the process of photographing Russia for Dispatches’ issue “On Russia” and shares some stories behind individual pictures. And if you’re in London on Wed., April 29, 2009, at 6:30 p.m., head on over to the Honduras Street Gallery for a conversation between Seamus Murphy and Gary Knight. (both via the Dispatches group on Facebook)

Let’s have a look at an interesting monologue, in the form of a letter to a friend of his, from the always engaging Asim Rafiqui on his wonderful young blog The Spinning Head about What Ails Photojournalism.

Photos are not journalism. Journalism is an endeavor with a commitment to communal and social responsibility. It is a public service with the objective of keeping check on abuses of power, the rights of the individual, the protection of the well fare of the community, the exposure of the illegal, the tracking down of the downright unjust. I said this before in a lightstalker post, journalism will rely on amateurs the day it itself become amateurish. It is not multimedia that will save journalism or photojournalism, but a commitment to quality and a commitment back to the public service. We are far from this realization.

There is a lot in here, and while he admits that it “was written in a single breath and hence carries within it errors of insight and judgment” I definitely agree that it “remains interesting enough”. He calls to task the whole culture and ‘machine’ of publishing and photojournalism. “There is another underlying reason why photojournalism is dying, and that we are still not prepared to confront. The reason is that most photographers and photojournalists are purveyors of cliches and repetitive, predictable stories.”; he calls for innovation in both our stories and our way of storytelling. Culture all around us is moving forward and evolving through new media and at new speed. What has been good (W Eugene Smith-type) remains so, but it is not enough … innovation must take place, the same in any field.

Not to quote too much (just go read the whole thing, it is worth your time and I’d love to hear the different reactions it is sure to bring up in our diverse readership), but this seems to me to hit directly on the point. As a photographer banging his head against walls trying to get stories produced I’ve gotten to the point where I really am taking into consideration what kind of story each publication would want to see by looking at what they’ve done before and exporting it. In some sense I’m honestly trying to find the cliche that will mesh with an editor’s preconceived notions of what is happening here, just to sell a picture. Its not what I want or why I became a photographer, but somehow it is becoming ingrained as ‘how its done’:

We have lost our love of the story. We are no longer telling interesting stories. In fact it could be argued that photojournalism today is basically middle class voyuerism. It carries with it the stifling and infantile morality of a middle brow suburban family and attempts to deliver ’shock’ stories to titilate them into watching. Or it just reduces to historical and charter-tour cliches stories that could be rich, complex and eye-opening.

Just look at National Geographic – if its Iran, its Persipolis. if its Bolivia, its the Antiplano. if its Pakistan, its the Taliban. Tiresome, boring, repetitive, predictable, uncreative, uninteresting stories about some of the most interesting and evolving countries in the world! Even the formulas and mechanics of photojournalism are boring and predictable. This magazine refuses to go and explore places in new ways, to produce angles that are creative and interesting, and that challenge our thinking and ideas about a place. Is Persipolis really all that one has to stay about Iran today? This incredibly complex and incredibly interesting country is left silenced! (sic)

As someone who just recently moved to Belgrade in part to put a lot of my time and focus on the Balkans it kills be to be told again and again, by editors and photographers alike, that this “story is over”, that I missed my chance to photograph here now that the wars are over. Are you kidding me? There is so much happening here, worthwhile stories around almost every single corner that I’m convinced would be engaging and interesting for audiences if there were presented to them. But I’m told that people aren’t interested, that they’ve moved on. Or is that the editor’s inference? I honestly think that if you make an interesting story with interesting photographs, the readers and viewers will come. The disconnect is that access to viewers, and while plenty of us are trying to publish our work ourselves (see below) there is a realistic gap in time and technology to gaining a critical mass of viewers. It will take time, yes, but we’re not being helped very much. I think Rafiqui would agree that our community itself is stifling these possible stories, forcing us to look for the exotic or sensational (or worse, “newsworthy”), in other words, the cliche. Yes there is news, and sensational exotic moments and places in our world. But that is so very far removed from most anyone’s daily life and I really don’t think our interest is limited to this. A ‘day in the life’, no, but a creative look at something we’ve never seen before is worth much more of our time, and I think our audience would agree with their own attention span, than another look at something we’ve seen time and again. I’d ask what came first, the audience for celebrity-based, false-exotic ‘journalism’ or the publications that provided it? I think there must be some element of the top-down here, something must have started with the publications and their editorial decisions.

Not all of Rafiqui’s arguments are new, but I give him credit for putting this all together into an essay and not being afraid to really call out the mainstream institutions (publishers, festivals, editors and photographers) for their assumed wisdom and conservatism toward moving beyond antiquated traditions and conventions of storytelling and of what is an ‘acceptable’ story in the first place (see Part II/III especially). They and our peers don’t understand what is happening (not that I, Scott or Asim necessarily do either, as Rafiqui rightly admits at the end of his piece: no one knows the future. But I think we can agree with some thought that there are wrong paths and bad ideas to be following right now). Conventional wisdom and the most popular outlets and photographers are doing us wrong; that is the problem. It is up to individuals and small teams to push new models forward, and we’re all on our own for now.

And people are doing it. I’ll start from this old post of mine titled Doing It Yourself where I look at Alec Soth’s observation about Magnum needing to become its own producer to survive. A precursor to this discussion and Rafiqui’s piece I think. Along these lines look at the Luceo Images crew who are pulling things in tight and developing their own systems for distribution, promotion and funding. Of course Magnum Photos is actually the best example in my mind of attacking these issues head-on with their growing social networking (Facebook, Twitter, blogging) and the development of their Educational arm alongside their existing Cultural wing to expand their brand and marketing opportunities with partnerships with media-related companies like HP, Photoshelter and Blurb to create a series of Grants (Burn) and Awards (Expression Award) for photographers outside of Magnum while retaining some funding for parallel opportunities with their own photographers. Old school business tactics I’m sure (I’d have to ask my brother the business major…) but innovative all the same in this market.

Good pictures are not enough. We all need to be smarter and more creative in how we do stories. From the very idea to the approach to funding, distributing and publishing the pictures. If we want to keep doing work that matters to us we are being forced to find a way around the current logjam. Left out on our own (M Scott and I are perfect living examples of this) we must adapt and survive somehow. There aren’t many scraps to be had from the MSM at the moment so we look elsewhere. Where to is the question, and I think Rafiqui’s astute pressure for elevated and evolved stories and storytelling is part of the answer.

And so he ends with a positive look at the coming opportunities, which is somewhat similar to Vincent LaForet’s much ballyhooed essay on Sportsshooter titled The Cloud is Falling (which I think Rafiqui calls out earlier in his piece). This is not a contradiction though: we agree that in this time of shrinking budgets we must see that there are other markets and outlets beyond the ‘old guard’ of magazines that will have potential for growth, profit and excellent work that are just now developing or are yet to. We’re thinking too narrowly. A lot of people are talking about this point right now (and Colberg follows up with another interesting post citing examples), and no one either knows or is willing to share exactly how to exploit it (with the exception of LaForet who is essentially flaunting his recent successes on his blog, especially around the ridiculously fawned over film “Reverie” that debuted last year as an example of the ‘next big thing’.. DLSRs with HD Video capability. Personally, this falls right into the sights of Rafiqui’s quote about multimedia). Scott is quite correct in pointing out that LaForet’s latest successes are not in photojournalism. There’s nothing wrong with this work, but there’s little use advocating it as a savior model for real photography. $10,000 budgets for a 5 minute video don’t come from nowhere, no matter what ridiculous music you put in it. They’re based on advertising calculations and in LaForet’s case they’re directed toward photographers themselves (is that sustainable?). These budgets don’t, and probably won’t, materialize for the stories we need to see; It is great for LaForet to be able to pursue his interests with these sponsored videos but I dare say they’re not “a public service” nor apropos to our society’s needs of finding a sustainable source of photojournalism in the future. We need to produce work that engages on its own merit.

And on multimedia not being a savior (a cry both M. Scott and I have been shouting for ages): “multimedia is merely a mechanism that can never hide the banality or predictability of a subject. It is a means to an end, but if the end if poor, no amount of flash and dash will save anything.” Scott has always said something to the effect of, ‘unless a multimedia piece has a perfect photo story coupled with perfect audio (think This American Life) the sum will be less than its parts’ and thus the multimedia would be less important, useful and worthwhile than doing just pictures or just audio.

I say this as I sit here and stare into the void – confident that I have strong new ideas, scared that no one will value them, determined that i have no choice but to step into the void itself. Your second reference about ‘tenacity’ was right on the mark. Like any field where you pursue a passion a love and a need to be free of the machinery of the capitalist, you must be prepared to pay a heavy price. Our societies do not value those who do not serve the interests of others, but merely their own whims, curiousities, loves and fears.

Amen. And good luck to us all. I know we will succeed but it will be a rough road. I am scared too that no one will value the pictures, ideas and vision I have and that I know seriously talented friends and colleagues, all of us underemployed and struggling, possess. Rough going now and for some future, but the good ideas and great stories and images will rise. I hope this is just the start of a dialogue, I know my thoughts are not fully reasoned out, and that we need to keep thinking and talking about this. Let it rip in the comments please!

Be sure to follow up with some of Asim Rafiqui’s own work. He is the 2009 winner of the Aftermath Project grant for his innovative project The Idea of India that I think is a great example of this new storytelling and distribution that he is preaching in this essay. Have a look, tell us what you think.

(And lastly, sorry if there was any funny business with double-postings or with the RSS as this went up, I was having some backside publishing problems)

Seamus Murphy - East of the Sun / from the Dispatches issue On Russia.

Just got a facebook message from Dispatches about the newest photos and slideshow on the magazine’s site. “East of the Sun,” part of the issue On Russia, is beautiful and strange. I’m not convinced of some of the close-up crops in the video, but the music and editing made me chuckle (in a good way) more than a few times. Beautiful and strange work from Russia by Seamus Murphy.

Unfortunately, it’s a little difficult to find Seamus Murphy’s other work online. There was a little blurb about him over at Rob Haggart’s A Photo Editor blog that started out:

One of my all time favorite photographers has no agent, no website, doesn’t send out promo mailers, no logo, isn’t in any of the sourcebooks, not listed in the free workbook phonebook, has never called to see if I’ve got anything for him and if I hadn’t scoured the web and made a few phone calls years ago I would have no clue how to contact him….”

There’s a little feature at Outside magazine about being in the field with Seamus Murphy in Syria. Granta has some of his work online focusing on soldiers getting ready for deployment. There’s also a small interview at Culture 24. And definitely don’t miss his POYi 62 World Understanding Award portfolio of work from Afghanistan, which is also the subject of what looks to be a great book, “Afghanistan: A Darkness Visible.”

Just stumbled upon the new issue of Gary Knight (et.al.)’s newish magazine rethink-dispatches titled Beyond Iraq. In a nice twist for us here at ДваФото (dvafoto .. meaning ‘two pictures’ in Russian) the brilliant and enlightening main photo essay for this issue was done by Russian Noor photographer Yuri Kozyrev and is titled, in Cyrillic script, Ирак. (that is, for you english speakers, Iraq).

I’ve yet to see a physical copy of the magazine (cannot wait to .. saving my pennies for a subscription) but the content online is first-rate and innovative. If you haven’t spent any time there, start digging in to the smart essays, editorials, multimedia pieces and of course the photo essays. Their first issue, Beyond America, featured a great essay titled “In God’s Country” by Antonin Kratochvil.

Further, I must implore you to look Christopher Morris’ multimedia piece that showed up on rethink-dispatches a week or two ago: “The Dear Leader”. Scathing and timely, investigating further (I assume you know his book My America) the (cult of) personality and insulation of US President George W. Bush. Fascinating cross over for a photographer in to documentary film making. It also generated some interesting discussion over at lightstalkers.

Still frame from Morris' The Dear Leader