picturedept:

Paul Hansen’s photograph that recently won the World Press Photo award as the picture of the year was apparently modified to increase its drama, a technique to make colors more vivid and saturated that seems to be becoming more widespread in photojournalistic circles. As such, it remains…

The Collaboration and Responsibility

We saw it over and over again in the projects presented at Photography, Expanded: a laser-like focus on audience and goals.

Whereas traditional social documentary photography imagines the photographer’s role as bringing images from remote areas to a wider audience, many #PhotoEx projects begin and end with a small community, often documenting itself.

Take, for example, Pete Pin’s project on the Cambodian diaspora. He is himself a refugee from the Killing Fields, and one of the early iterations of his project brought together members of his community to talk about their experiences, using photos he’d made as a starting point for conversations. Now he is prompting young Cambodians to ask their elders for artifacts from the old country as a way to create inter-generational dialogue.

Wendy Ewald, who is well-known for her projects educating communities to document themselves, gave cameras to the Innu people of Labrador when she visited decades ago. More recently she has returned with photographer Eric Gottesman, and they are working hand-in-hand with community organizers to create a game that will engage young Innu with the history of their people.

In these ways, photography becomes a means of empowerment, a way to process trauma, a way to educate oneself, or a way to start a dialogue. At the same time, the photographer’s own documentation can take a back seat to their role as a teacher of documentary techniques.

Another hot topic at #PhotoEx was Human Centered Design (a great primer here). One of its foundations is the importance of bringing together and interviewing all stakeholders as early as possible, including community members, NGOs, teachers, policy makers, technology and design. This helps ensure goals and strategies that serve the intended community, but it can also present needs and strategies that are conflict with a photographer’s more purely artistic ambitions. I’m interested to see how photographers (or multi-platform storytellers of any kind) will evolve in their approach to authorship as their role in such projects becomes more of a director or organizer.

Which seems to beg the question, is the photographer even the leader of these projects anymore? Is anyone? Maybe this is the time to employ a truly collaborative model. Something where several people equally “own” a project.

If that’s the case, it’s doubly important to spell out each collaborator’s responsibility. As we also saw during #PhotoEx  online projects can have a long tail. Sites are being built that are designed to live for five or ten years after their creation. Who will continue to make the small changes and upgrades necessary for that kind of timeline? Who will be responsible for continuing to pay for servers and services? The earlier these questions can be addressed, the more successful a project is likely to be.

-Miki Johnson, blogging for #PhotoEx

Photography as Entry Point

We are eager to keep the conversations going that started during Photography, Expanded, a two-day exploration of multi-platform visual storytelling and audience engagement presented by Magnum Foundation and Open Society Foundation’s Documentary Photography Project. Miki Johnson, our #PhotoEx blogger, has put together a few posts that will touch on top themes. We will post them here in the coming weeks; we hope you’ll share your thoughts in the comments.

Of all the revolutionary ideas shared last weekend, I was struck most by one that seemed to go without comment. 

Marcus Bleasdale mentioned that for him “photography is just an entry point,” a way for him to gather information about a situation (in this case, the conflicts over precious metals in the Democratic Republic of Congo), to share that information, and to prompt positive change. It seemed like such a logical idea within the context of the weekend, one many presenters echoed, that I almost didn’t catch its deeper implications. In other words…

The photograph is no longer the goal, the apex, the end—it is now merely a means to reach a goal.

Maybe this idea is already passé, already obvious. But if so, the sheer fact of its widespread acceptance is worth noting, considering that, a few short years ago, such a statement would have ruffled the feathers of any “objective observer” documentary photographer.

Marcus’ project for Photography, Expanded might never directly employ one of his images. With the help of Patrick O’Luanaigh, the founder of game-design firm nDreams, and Daniella Steadman, who specializes in multimedia production and audience engagement, he is developing an emotionally engrossing adventure game for tablets, which will subtly educate players about the conflicts perpetuated when they purchase those same tablets. 

For the game, Marcus’s photographs are secondary to his contributions as a local resource, a link to people involved in the conflicts, a protector of their stories. Although the game will take cues for visual styling from his photos, and players will be able to browse his images to learn more about the conflict, the game’s most direct impact may be the ability to send emails from within it, urging electronics companies to label products made with conflict-free materials.

Before the conference, I caught up with Teru Kuwayama, who created Lightstalkers and Basetrack, and he put a sharp tip on this point.

“In a world of billions of cameras, I’m not sure what ‘documentary photographer’ really means,” he said. “We live in the most recorded era of human history, so photographers should ask themselves what value they add to a very densely populated ecosystem.”

The project Teru presented, Duristan, will be a multimedia platform for sharing, aggregating, and publishing information about South and Central Asia. Teru’s own photography never enters the equation, and, maybe more striking, photography itself is only a small component of the larger project.

As photography is seen more as a tool, and one of many, to achieve a goal, what new skills must photographers learn and employ? We might look to the former lives of Photography, Expanded photographers for instruction: Marcus worked in finance for years before picking up a camera; Pete Pin abandoned his doctorate in Political Science to pursue documentary photography; Eric Gottesman studies politics and economics before turning to art. 

So a broad understanding of politics, economics, and maybe sociology helps. Then there are the various storytelling languages: video, audio, interaction design, code. Thankfully, we no longer expect any one person to master all of these, opting instead for collaboration with specialists. Still, storytellers today must be able to converse intelligently about these languages in order for those collaborations to be successful.

Finally, do we need a whole new name for practitioners of these techniques? Action-oriented storytellers? Socially conscious multi-platform artists? As the Photography, Expanded organizers are well aware, a group without a name—or at least a cohesive philosophy—is harder to find funding for. One of their goals was to help funders understand (and get excited to fund) this new storytelling movement. 

It’s up to those of you who are shaping this revolution to do the same. As a storyteller, I encourage you to also add these techniques to your toolbox:  asking hard questions, taking creative risks, sharing your experiences, and educating others. 

-Miki Johnson, blogging for #PhotoEx

(Image above: Marcus Bleasdale, from project Zero Hour Congo)

Sim Chi Yin featured on Financial Times

Sim Chi Yin’s photography series, Rat Tribe, examines the underground dwellings of low-income workers in Beijing, China.

To read full article please click here.

emergencyfund:

Ben Lowy

Storyboard, iLibya

For the next week, EF 2012 photographer Ben Lowy will be providing Storyboard with exclusive images from his hipstamatic lens from his project iLibya.

storyboard:

Capturing Libya: Through a Hipstamatic Lens

To photojournalism purists, it was pure blasphemy: a prestigious prize, third place for photo of the year, granted to a New York Times photographer who’d used not a 35mm to document U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but simply, his iPhone — and an app called Hipstamatic. Immediately, traditionalists went berserk: “What we knew as photojournalism at its purest form is over,” one photojournalist lamented. Using Hipstamatic in a news report, another commentator proclaimed, was “cheating us all.”

And yet, to Ben Lowy, a conflict photographer who has made a career out of a certain brand of iPhonography — and will debut the first ever photojournalism-inspired Hipstamatic lens with his namesake later this year — the award was a well-needed wake-up call for photojournalism fundamentalists. Last February, Lowy set out to capture the uprising in Libya from his iPhone (alongside millions of protesters who’d document the Arab Spring on their mobile devices) in photos that would fuel reporting from the region in outlets around the globe. In October, Lowy’s Hipstamatic images of everyday life in wartime Kabul were published in the New York Times Magazine, prompting the magazine’s photo editor, Kathy Ryan, to defend their use on the paper’s 6th Floor blog. And since then, Lowy has published an iPhone photo a day — from dramatic images of war to mundane life in Brooklyn — on his Tumblr, captured under the title, iSee.

Read More

Magnum photographer John Vink has just released new iPad app for his decade long documentary of Cambodian land issues. This app beautifully integrates reports, articles, and 700 images to create a comprehensive history of the complex Cambodian struggle for land. 

Download this app here. 

“Quest for Land” is a comprehensive photoreportage about land issues in Cambodia over a time span of more than 10 years. Photojournalist John Vink, a member of the renowned agency Magnum Photos, has been covering Cambodia since 1989 and is based there full-time since 2000. He has singled out what probably is the most important issue in this country recovering at a very fast pace from the Khmer Rouge era. That speedy recovery in an unbridled market economy highlights issues which are common to many developing countries.’

The iApp contains over 700 photographs in 20 chapters covering land grabbings and their consequences, slideshows with sound tracks, a series of texts written by former Phnom Penh Post editor and journalist Robert Carmichael, and links to a number of reports about land issues put together by local and international Human Rights organisations.

emergencyfund:

Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund (EF) is proud to announce the launch of an initiative
with Mother Jones to feature the work of Magnum Foundation EF photographers.

In partnership with the EF, Mother Jones will publish 10 photo essays at MotherJones.com or in Mother Jones magazine, reaching a combined audience of 4 million people. Mother Jones creative director Tim J Luddy describes the new partnership as based on mutual ambition: “What documentary photographers capture in pictures – those fraught human moments in the face of adversity, outrage, or absurdity – is what Mother Jones captures in journalism. Everybody wins with this unprecedented partnership: Photography supported by the Magnum Foundation gains an expanded network with a widely-respected venue and we get to share extraordinary photo essays with our readers.”

“In today’s media landscape, we need to work together to support photographers committed to doing in-depth reportage on critical issues not covered by today’s main headlines,” adds Susan Meiselas, acclaimed photographer and president of the Magnum Foundation. “Mother Jones, a publication that continues the important tradition of fearless investigative journalism, is a powerful platform for photography independently produced through the Magnum Foundation.”

The first photo essay under the new partnership is online now! Karen Mirzoyan’s story “Unrecognized Islands of Caucasus,” is a series that chronicles the transitional state of unrecognized republics in a region torn apart by years of war. 

For more information about the Magnum Foundation-Mother Jones partnership, or to schedule an interview, please contact Elizabeth Gettelman or Emma Raynes.

sebastianliste:

The man who changed my course

(via emergencyfund)

sebastianliste:

He was born in the State of Maranhao, the poorest Brazilian State, so in his life he has been dedicated to follow the Trans-Amazonian Highway over and over again looking for fortune. He lived the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway and he witnessed of all their devastings consequences for…

(via emergencyfund)

Nazik Armenakyan, 2011 HF Fellow, spoke at a TEDx conference on her project “Survivors,” which won the Grand Prix at the Karl Bulla International Photo Contest in Russia. The project documents the survivors of genocide interacting with photographs of their younger selves. 

(Source: youtube.com)