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December 19, 2007. Charlotte, NC. The body of Cpl. Joshua C. Blaney was returned to his family in Charlotte, NC. Cpl. Blaney died from injuries sustained when an IED exploded near his vehicle in Afghanistan. He was 25.

July 3, 2008. Washington, NC. The funeral of Spc. Joel A. Taylor, assigned to the 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Hood, Texas; died June 25 in Mosul, Iraq, of wounds sustained when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device on June 24, 2008. He was 20. Hundreds of local people lined the 14 mile route to the Taylor family cemetery. The short trip took almost an hour as the procession slowed to honor the people who showed up to support the family.

Saturday, August 8, Aberdeen, NC. A memorial service was held for Brent Gray, a former special forces soldier and private contractor killed in Iraq on August 18, 2006, at Bethesda Cemetery. After the cemetery, the memorial was continued at a favorite bar of Mr. Gray in nearby Southern Pines. Jill Jernigan, left, a childhood friend of Mr. Gray and Courtney Gray, Mr. Gray's widow, console each other at the memorial event.

April 16, 2009. Pope Air Force Base, NC. Members of the North Carolina National Guard's 30th Brigade Heavy Combat Team leave Pope Air Force Base for a 12 month tour in Iraq. In all, approximately 4,000 soldiers from the 30th HBCT are deploying and this will be the Brigade's 2nd deployment since 2003. Several soldiers passed the time before departure playing spades.

March 19, 2008. Chapel Hill, NC. Joe Gill, an Iraq war veteran and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, served two years in the Army, including six months in Iraq. He now lectures and speaks out against the war.

March 17, 2008. Fayettevile, NC. Family of members of the 1st and 2nd Brigade Combat Teams of the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, wait for their loved ones to return home after a 15 month deployment in Iraq.

October 14, 2008. Camp LeJeune, North Carolina.The Wounded Warrior Battalion East, at Camp LeJeune Marine Base in Jacksonville, NC. The battalion was set up to provide a place for wounded Marines to recover as they work through the issues of their injuries and wade through the paperwork involved with possible discharge or reassignment within the Marine Corps. With little to do and at times heavily medicated, many of the Marines spend much of the days at the Battalion sleeping.

August 26, 2007. Kinston, NC. Spc. Steven R. Jewell was killed in a helicopter crash near the Iraqi city of Fallujah on August 14, 2007. Cindy Wisener, Spc. Jewell's mother, cries over her son's coffin. She is comforted by her husband, Jack Wisener.

Wednesday, July 11, Jacksonville, North Carolina. April Ponce De Leon, 22, a Marine corporal on active duty based at Camp Lejune in Jacksonville, NC. She is being deployed to Iraq in 2 weeks. After previously supporting the humanitarian aspect of the war, she now calls it an "occupation" and no longer supports the war effort.

I first met Jeremy M. Lange at a lecture we were both attending at ICP in 2006. We’d corresponded by email before, and he somehow recognized me in the crowd. I left New York later that year, and shared my last meal in the city with him. He continued freelancing in the city for a while before moving to North Carolina, producing along the way a strong and varied body of work, ranging from (legal) kidnappers for hire to Mexican presidential politics to barbershops to religious faith. His recent project, “The War At Home” is a wide-ranging piece covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars from the perspective of those in the US. Do yourself a favor, and spend some time on his site. I asked Lange if he’d be willing to share his perspective on “The War at Home” over email. The discussion is below:

dvafoto: First, for our readers who might not be familiar with your work, where are you based and what publication do you work for? What sort of time on the job do you have to work on personal projects? How open is your publication to your story pitches?

Jeremy M. Lange: I am based in Durham, North Carolina, my hometown, which I returned to in 2007 after 3 years of school, 6 months in Mexico, and 3.5 years in New York City. I have a slightly odd arrangement in that I am a staff, or contract photographer, for the Independent Weekly, an alt weekly that covers the Research Triangle area of NC. I work 6 months a year guaranteed for them, one month on, one month off, and freelance the other 6, but I am able to take freelance jobs for all 12 months of the year, provided that I have all my responsibilities taken care of for the paper on the months I am on. The Indy is great in many ways, but especially in that me and the other photographer have almost complete artistic freedom in how we shoot the stories we are assigned and we get a little more time to invest in denser stories because it is a weekly. Deadlines do build up, but we have the ability to work our schedules out as we please as long as everything is done on time. Also, we can pitch stories at will and with a good argument, they tend to run them, as long as the story fits into the general guidelines of the paper, news, social justice, culture, it is pretty broad. Personal projects are much more easily blended into the paper than in others I have heard of. It can still be hard to find the time, and money, for personal projects, but that is always the case it seems. I think it falls more on you to make that time than anything else.

As a freelancer, I work a lot for the New York Times, who I have been working with since I lived in NYC and ran around for the Metro section, RIP, several days a week. They were the first real paper I worked for and have been great to me over the last few years. Thanks.

Other than that, I fill out my schedule with other editorial jobs, band shoots, portraits, whatever comes down the pipe. I think in smaller markets we are all forced to generalize a bit, but it is fun in that I learn new things from shooting different types of stories all the time. My background is in news and documentary, but I really enjoy shooting just about anything, with a few exceptions. Challenges keep you on your toes and I like the idea of photographing James Taylor one day and Christmas tree farms the next.

What got you started on “War at Home”? When did you know you were on to a bigger story with so many different threads to follow?

I met a soldier named Kristian Hofeller when I lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn in 2006. A package was misdelivered to my apartment and I rode up the street to drop it off at the right house and while speaking to the lady who answered the door, she mentioned that her son had just gotten back from Iraq. I asked if he might want to talk to me about it and take some photos, and I gave her my number and he called me couple of days later. We met at his house and drank some coffee and talked a little but he seemed sort of uncomfortable in his mom’s house so we went out to his truck and he basically broke down the last 5 years of his life to me. 1st responder to the WTC, off to Afghanistan, got in some trouble there, back home, marital problems, divorce, back to Iraq, back home… it blew my mind. He must have talked for over an hour with me just sitting in his truck listening and saying nothing really, I mean what the hell did I know about that? He got in some legal trouble while back in the US and therefore could not get a job, or at least a decent one, so he was considering going back to the military fulltime, he was on Reserve, or with a private contractor. They, the contractors, were offering him big money, he came from a blue collar family, but he did not really want to go. He had lost his wife and friends because of the war, but he really had no other options. We smoked and sat in the truck and he talked and then I went home, saying we would get together soon and shoot some photos. I had no idea what to do with what he told me, so I wrote down as much as I could remember, this is why an art degree can be a disadvantage, I should have taken notes, but I got it down for the most part, I like to listen.

We met again a couple of weeks later and went all the way out in Long Island to shoot some guns with an Army buddy and an older guy from his neighborhood. He would not really let me make any photos of him, but I got a shot of an Osama bin Laden target in a sand pit that has stuck around through all the edits, as well as one of his truck with a backwards “American Hero” emblem in the windshield. So I shot some really cool guns and we talked a lot, Kristian, me and his Army buddy, and then they took me home. We never talked again, he did not return my calls after that, not sure why, but I heard he went back to Iraq not long after. It stuck with me but I was trying to hustle in NYC and that was it for a while.

Not long after I got back to NC I shot a NYT story about a private contractor killed in Iraq, Brent Gray. We went to the grave with his wife and sister and some friends and then to a bar where we met some other guys who had served with him. I was so interested in what they were talking about and how little I knew about it. This is 5 or 6 years after we invaded Afghanistan and 3 after Iraq and I knew next to nothing about what people here were going through. I am not from a military family, but I have always been interested in it, the guns, the adventure and was about one stamp away from Marine basic training after high school. So I started looking around to find stories related to returning soldiers and other aspects of the war’s affects on the country and realized I had a huge pile of ideas.

Your “War at Home” project is pretty far-reaching. What ties it all together? What’s it about?
Read on »

Picture Black Friday

Picture Black Friday is a photojournalism project that aims to revisit and analyze a combination of forces- a worsening economy, financial desperation, excitement, fear, absurdity, and a distinctly American cultural tradition- that culminate the morning after Thanksgiving.

Having been on a couple Black Friday stakeouts too many, Picture Black Friday strikes me as a wonderful idea. Yes, the hordes of people lined up to buy a cheap laptop or Wii is part of the story, but much more happens the day after Thanksgiving. The project, which will be exhibited on Conscientious and Too Much Chocolate, hopes to get photographers documenting the day “on their terms”, independent (or not) of the usual consumerist portrayal.

(via Conscientious)

William Vragovic - Steve Coddington and his family need your help

This is the story of one man, fighting alone against a giant insurance company, to get necessary rehabilitative care for his young wife, Marian. Please help us, Steve’s friends, save his family. None of us can give him all he needs, but a lot of us can give a teeny bit. Together, we can help.”

Seven days after asking for donations for vital medical care for his wife, St. Petersburg Times photojournalist Stephen Coddington has raised nearly US$8,000, but he still needs help. On April 1, 2008, Stephen’s wife Marian suffered a brain aneurysm. What followed was 6 months of intensive hospital care, care at one of the best rehabilitation centers in the US, and then what has become a year-long struggle against the CIGNA health insurance company. Steve has become his wife’s sole caregiver, the insurance company having denied crucial in-home nursing care and other necessary treatment; they have decided that Marian hasn’t made sufficient progress in her recovery to justify further expenditure. This is a travesty. Now, Steve is asking for help from his community and the larger worldwide community of photographers in his family’s hour of need, all trying to care for his two children and retain his newspaper job. Help Save Steve’s Family.

Each morning, Steve has to gamble – rushing the children to school, barreling through the grocery store for the day’s supplies and bolting home, praying all the while that nothing has happened to Marian in his absence. He is trying to keep his family together and happy and to meet everyone’s needs, but he’s drowning.

In addition to donations, print and book auctions (signed copy of Sam Abell’s The Life of a Photograph) are being held as a benefit for the family. Any size donation is appreciated, either via the paypal link at Save Steve’s Family or by writing a check to “Marian Coddington Trust” and sending it to:

Suntrust Bank
Attention Special Handling VA-RIC-9292
P.O. Box 27572
Richmond, VA 23261

Also, in another tale of the American health care system destroying lives, British fashion photographer Corinne Day is seriously ill and in need of urgent and expensive care in Arizona. Her agency has organized a benefit sale of a well-known picture of Day’s of Kate Moss.

(via APAD and Stellazine)

David Lynch - Interview Project

You’ve probably seen David Lynch’s feature films (Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and the like), but you probably haven’t seen his daily weather reports (and with a weather balloon for a head), him and cow campaigning for an Oscar, his missives on things such as iPhones, product placement (my favorite!) and the nature of ideas, or “Rabbits” (and let’s not forget the weirdness of his proselytizing for Transcendental Meditation).

Now Lynch has unveiled a teaser for “Interview Project,” which will debut June 1, 2009. In Lynch’s own words, “Inteview Project is a road trip where people have been found and interviewed…there was no plan really…. [It] is a 20,000 mile road trip over 70 days across and back the United States…the people told their story….” It looks fascinating, and could serve as video update to Studs Terkel’s interviews from the Great Depression (and don’t miss the recent This American Life collection of Terkel’s Depression-era work). That’s setting the bar a bit high, though. I’ll be happy if it’s just an interesting assortment of people talking about themselves and their lives, as in Story Corps’ excellent years-long project.

John Francis Peters - from Just a Dream

There’s been no shortage of coverage of the current economic crisis affecting the US, but John Francis Peters‘ “Just a Dream” project has really drawn me in. To see the essay, go to Peters’ website and find “Just a Dream” under “New Work.” As in other essays on the topic, especially in essays on “destination du jour” Detroit, the decay and abandonment are prominent. This essay, though, in the still-inflated balloon or the damp spot on the garage floor under the house, communicates the currency of the economic violence ripping through towns across the country. Not only have these houses been ripped out from under their previous tenants, but the removal happened swiftly, fiercely, and probably just last week. I saw these pictures a few weeks ago, but the communication in these little details keeps drawing me in.

From the artist statement:

After a few minutes wandering through oddly colored rooms and taking in the dull smells of animal dander and black mold, something else begins to absorb into my sense. It can only be described through how I feel the energy in the rooms, distress, sadness, loss. Something else is still in the home and it hints at its existence through violent holes in the wall, children’s stickers, an old lamp, curdled milk, a pink rubber ball, a suicide note written in magic marker.”

Alec Soth’s work from the US and China from last summer seems downright prescient in hindsight. Time and the New York Times Magazine have been playing catch-up with recent pieces on Cleveland and Detroit. And of course, there’s Anthony Suau’s excellent work from Cleveland, which we’ve recently written about previously, and which just got the Digital Journalist treatment.

And while Soth’s work was created for the Telegraph, the pictures seemed to have vanished from their website, except for a couple of instances. I grabbed the video above, created by the Telegraph, from Exposure Compensation. And a few pictures are available in the Magnum archive.

Errol Morris takes a page from BagNewsNotes in his latest New York Times blog post about the visual record of George W. Bush’s presidency. Morris has a history of photographic deconstruction on his NYT blog, and but this differs in that, rather than forensic investigation, he asks the heads of Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse, to show and discuss the images they feel best represent the character of Bush and his administration in the over the past 8 years. Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP), and Jim Bourg (Reuters), choose a lot of the usual suspects: there’s Bush watching Hurricane Katrina’s damage from an airplane, hearing about the World Trade Center attacks, and standing on the rubble at Ground Zero. But in addition to seeing the differences between the 3 agencies’ takes on the same situations, there’s some discussion on the nature of covering a president, how these photos come about, and what they mean. Midway through the piece, Errol Morris also happens upon a very crucial point in modern politics: photographs have the power to define public figures more than just about anything else.

Bush, at his final press conference, was asked if he regretted something; it’s that regret question. And when Bush said he regretted “Mission Accomplished,” it was as though what he regretted was the photograph. Regret that this photograph had made him look bad, had compromised his public image.”

Santiago Lyon of the AP, continuing the thread, mentions the so-called “Turf Builders” in the Reagan administration:

There were the “Turf Builders,” photographers who accompanied the White House advance teams in the Reagan era, sending one photographer to reconnoiter the photo opportunities on foreign presidential travel. They visited the scenes where the president was going to be photographed and took notes on the locations and distances to assist the photographers who would later travel with the president. They produced a guide that told you what lens to use and what the light was going to be. They no longer do that, but I feel that the existence of such a procedure spoke to the orchestration of White House photo opportunities.”

Although the ACLU has just released their map of the United States’ “constitution-free zones” and although reports of photographers’ confrontations with police and security guards spread like wildfire on the internet, the United States has risen 12 spots to number 36 on Reporters Without Borders’ annual survey of international press freedom. Huffington Post has a nice summary of the report, which examines “every kind of violation directly affecting journalists (such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment). And it includes the degree of impunity enjoyed by those responsible for these press freedom violations.”

The report explains the United States’ rise (tied with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde, South Africa, Spain, and Taiwan, well below Iceland, Luxembourg, and Norway, and well above Iran, China, and North Korea) on the chart:

“The release of Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj after six years in the Guantanamo Bay military base contributed to this improvement. Although the absence of a federal “shield law” means the confidentiality of sources is still threatened by federal courts, the number of journalists being subpoenaed or forced to reveal their sources has declined in recent months and none has been sent to prison. But the August 2007 murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey in Oakland, California, is still unpunished a year later. The way the investigation into his murder has become enmeshed in local conflicts of interest and the lack of federal judicial intervention also help to explain why the United States did not get a higher ranking. Account was also taken of the many arrests of journalists during the Democratic and Republican conventions.”

(via lightstalkers)

M. Scott Brauer - Inside an artist's painting studio in Shanghai, China.

Thanks to 2point8 I found ArtsVote2008, which aims to collect information about Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s various statements about the arts, funding for the arts, and arts education.  While McCain has yet to issue an official campaign statement about the arts, Obama’s is pretty wide-ranging (PDF).  The candidate’s main positions have been summarized in another document (PDF) which I have included below:

http://www.artsactionfund.org/ - Arts Vote 2008 - Summary of US Presdential candidates' positions on the arts.

In a pitifully small statement released by the McCain campaign, the candidate states his position, worth including here in full:

John McCain believes that arts education can play a vital role fostering creativity and expression. He is a strong believer in empowering local school districts to establish priorities based on the needs of local schools and school districts. Schools receiving federal funds for education must be held accountable for providing a quality education in basic subjects critical to ensuring students are prepared to compete and succeed in the global economy. Where these local priorities allow, he believes investing in arts education can play a role in nurturing the creativity of expression so vital to the health of our cultural life and providing a means of creative expression for young people.”

That sounds fine, but it’s 4 relatively meaningless sentences. Lip service. John McCain opposes the existence of the National Endowment for the Arts. The Salt Lake Tribune has great analysis of the two candidate’s positions.

Obama’s arts policy proposal, on the other hand, was called “the most comprehensive platform on the arts” by Arts Action Fund CEO and president Robert Lynch. It provides for the creation of an Artists Corps (which reminds me of the Farm Security Administration, which begat modern photojournalism), national initiatives for funding and recognizing arts achievement, and widespread arts education based on research in Chicago’s failing schools. More than that, freelancers reading this will be interested to note Obama’s recognition of the impossibility of obtaining health insurance as an independent artist outside of traditional employment, noting that his health care policy would make it easier for artists to afford federal health insurance. And our international audience will be happy to learn that Obama’s platform includes explicit provision for cultural artistic exchange, both through funding American artists’ travel and exhibition internationally and through the streamlining of visa processes in order to make the USA an attractive place for international artists to come and create and exhibit their work.