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Alan Chin - A young woman walks down flooded St. Bernard Avenue on Sept. 2, 2005.

Alan Chin - Phil Johnson (looking out the door) in Clyde's Barber Shop, which he runs with his father, Clyde, on St. Bernard Avenue. They were the first barbershop that they knew of to reopen, several months after Hurricane Katrina.

“Five years feels like a long time, and many buildings have been rebuilt and a lot people have returned to the Gulf Coast devastated by Katrina. But many have not come home, and they may never. Some neighborhoods have never looked better; other areas are returning to nature. There, the vegetation grew wild and high after the ruins were bulldozed away.” -Alan Chin, Katrina: the Fifth Anniversary

Alan Chin has a wonderful piece revisiting Hurricane Katrina up at Newsweek just now. The presentation pairs images from the immediate aftermath of the hurricane with a look at how the life has moved on for the city and its people. Definitely worth a look.

Facing Water Crisis is Balazs Gardi’s latest project. The project incorporates stills, video, and a comprehensive website, and addresses the coming global water crisis. The work, as we can expect from Gardi, is beautiful and poignant. The project, moreso, serves as an example of what the future of visual journalism might look like, produced and published by the photographer through the website.

Love the music in the above video, by the way. Reminiscent of Lynch, perhaps. In the credits, come to find out, the music was made by fellow photographer Tivadar Domaniczky.

Starved For Attention - VII and MSF

VII and MSF (Doctors without Borders) have just unveiled their latest collaboration, Starved for Attention. The project, a multimedia campaign featuring photos, videos, interviews, petitions, exhibitions, panel discussions, and other events, seeks to “expose the neglected and largely invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition” worldwide. Photographers Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer, have produced documentaries for the project in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, India, Mexico, and the United States. Marcus Bleasdale’s piece, Frustration, from Djibouti is the only one online right now, but more will be released over the coming months. The exhibition is currently on display in Brooklyn at the VII Gallery (map), and will travel through the rest of the year. Check out the project blog, too.

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.”

Inside magazine - Inside Poverty

Inside Magazine has just launched, and it looks great. Sponsored by SlovakAid and Magna: Children at Risk, the project brings together photography, essays, comics, and other coverage to address a single topic with each issue. The first issue covers poverty with incredible depth. Subscription is, incredibly, free, though you must cover the cost of shipping.

(via Peter Hoffman)

“Some amateur photographers said, basically, good riddance to the pros. Some professionals said that they were struggling; others thought the story overstated the problem.” -NYT’s Pros and Amateurs Debate: Is Photography in Trouble?

The New York Times has a short followup with reader mail regarding yesterday’s article on the difficulties facing professional photographers.

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”

This picture:

BBC In Pictures - Search for Haiti Survivors

Reminds me of this pack of war paparazzi. I’m well aware that coverage of disasters is chaotic and involves a huge crowd of reporters. Photojournalism isn’t just one photographer out in the middle of nowhere sending back photos, but it shouldn’t be a pack of hungry wolves descending on the latest victim to emerge from the rubble. The world needs to know about disaster and it takes an army of reporters to do that. The pictures from Haiti have likely been the a driving force behind the private and public relief donations. But… I can only imagine how much worse the woman’s disorientation and confusion was made by so many lenses stuck in her face. I get so depressed every time I see a goat fuck. (via Conscientious Redux)

From the sounds of it now, Haiti needs money more than it needs more people on the ground. I’ve read fresh water is running out. Lightstalkers has a bit more info from the ground. Thankfully, text message donations have raised over US$10 million.

Word now comes that (no surprise here) photographers in Haiti face shortages of fuel, water, housing, and food. Here’s an enlightening perspective on untrained volunteers coming to help in Sarajevo during the war and the undue burden they placed on the people they were trying to help.

The very first thing I thought of when seeing this picture was of course Alex Webb’s work in Haiti in 1994, which has multiple levels of importance for this discussion and shows the long oft-complicated relationship between the media and Haiti. Links to Magnum stories don’t seem to persist very well; go to the search page and pick Webb in the “include photographer” section and type “haiti” in as a keyword. Here’s one such photo:

HAITI. 1994. A photographer takes an exposure reading to shoot a photo of killed Aristide supporter. Alex Webb/Magnum Photos

I’m left wondering if there is a difference of context between photographs/photographing man-made disaster (i.e. war) and natural disaster? In some sense I’m less pissed off by this photograph above than similar images from wars, but I’m not sure why. I think it feels less like the photographers are over-inflating the importance of an event (turning something into a press conference) or setting up this scene (or that something is a show being performed for their lenses). It still turns my gut as a journalist (beyond the human level which is most queasy, though I think we sometimes need to repress this as journalists) that there is pack activity like this happening in such a horrible zone. As much as I understand it (these photographers are doing their jobs in my opinion) I still don’t like seeing the sausage being made, probably because I’ve been there myself.

Simply, this is another expression of age-old contradictions and discontents of journalism itself.

This also brings me to some interesting things happening on twitter expressing much the same emotions. Time Magazine’s Jay Newton-Small is sending out wrenching tweets while she is reporting in Port-au-Prince, including:

Haitians are furious w/ Americans & the West. They yell “fuck you” and “put down your camera & dig” when u drive by. (link)

2late, 2late, they say. I tell myself that i’m doing more good writing than digging, but it’s hard not to agree w/them. Heart wrenching (link)

@ dinner tonite yucky drunken US expats grilling steak & drinking beer, watching 100s of homeless victims sing their pain.THIS IS NOT A SHOW (link)

There will be much more to talk about on the issue of media coverage of this horrible disaster but I think we should wait until we are closer to a conclusion, there is too much more to be done right now. I wish all the photographers heading there (I hear from more everyday; and check out the #haitiphoto) the best and implore them to do honest and compassionate work.

(dual post by Matt and Scott)

100eyes - Haiti / William Coupon - Jacmel Portraits

For some cultural perspective on contemporary Haitian culture, 100eyes has a strong presentation of work by Alice Smeets, William Coupon, Edwine Seymour, Rex Curry, Jan Sochor, David Zentz, Aurora Photos, Polaris Images, and Andy Levin. Well worth a look.

By the way: Huffington Post has a huge round-up of ways to help the relief effort in Haiti.