War Enabling: Duckrabbit vs. Haviv and VII in a Larger Context — BagNews

“This week, photo-blogger Benjamin Chesterton took photographer Ron Haviv, and his agency, VII, to task for commercial photographs Ron did for arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems. Benjamin accused both of hypocrisy given the firm’s reputation and pride for its humanistic conflict work.

To the extent this debate fixes around who is more justified — if Chesterton is, and Haviv is a sellout; or Haviv is, and there’s a clean line to be drawn between the types of work — we will have missed an opportunity to look at larger issues at play. Simply put, moral compromise is rife when it comes to war and photojournalism.”

Quietly Finding Haiti’s Audacious Beauty

“To much of the outside world, the image of Haiti — when it pops up at all — is one of catastrophes, both natural and man-made. Violence, grinding poverty, flood, earthquakes all leave a lingering image of a benighted nation bereft of tender moments.”

“Held in abandoned lofts and obscure malls in Chinatown, fought by male models and veteran Marines, publicized through spur-of-the-moment phone calls and digital word of mouth, the illegal boxing matches that Devin Yalkin has photographed for more than a year are unsanctioned underground events.”


Via -> NYT

discoverynews:

picturedept:

Found Photos in Detroit

When Italian photographers Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese set foot in Detroit, they had planned to document the fast disappearance of the city’s structure. The tragic tales of modern day decadence and ruin were very much on their minds. But Detroit, in a last gesture of pride decided to reveal itself on its own terms. What they found, streets filled with thousands of polaroids, letters, prints of photographic evidence, police documents, mugshots and family albums, are all on view in their fantastic new book Found Photos in Detroit.

The book is limited to 1000 copies, and can be ordered here. You can also see more images from the project, which was featured in this week’s Newsweek International edition, on our website.
CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE

This is breathtaking. We love this new Newsweek Tumblr. The design is amazing. Amazing enough to bookmark now.

(via writtenbylight)

Source: picturedept

America’s Last Living POW


“During the ten and a half years that Americans have been fighting in Afghanistan, as tens of thousands of troops have rotated in and out of the combat zone, only one soldier has ever been captured by the Taliban. His name is Bowe Bergdahl, and since June 30, 2009, he has been America’s last living Prisoner of War.”

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/05/17/pow/#ixzz1v9pIntZQ

Syria’s Year of Chaos: Photos of a Slow-Motion Civil War

“Slightly more than a year ago, Arab Spring–inspired protests kicked off in the impoverished Syrian agricultural town of Dara‘a. The mini-uprising met a brutal response, one that few observers at the time could have anticipated would blow up into a far wider rebellion against President Bashar Assad and the entrenched, decades-long rule of his family. With Syrian authorities clamping down on journalistic access and freedoms, we saw glimpses of the unrest there for months only through grainy YouTube footage, images as uncertain and hard to corroborate as the events on the ground.”


Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/04/02/syrias-year-of-chaos-photos-of-a-slow-motion-civil-war/?iid=lb-photos#mideast-syria-4#ixzz1ubVXtAYB

Spring 2012, Mostar, Bosnia
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Spring 2012, Mostar, Bosnia

Legacy in Leaves: The Vietnam War Remembered

When Binh Danh was a child he noticed the impression of objects left on a grass lawn over time. This observation, combined with an early fascination with science and a personal legacy of war—Danh immigrated to the States as a child refugee from Vietnam—would later coalesce into the series of images for which he is most widely known. Danh appropriates iconic images of the Vietnam War and prints them on organic material such as leaves and grass, using a unique printing process he calls Chlorophyll printing. The images—ethereal and fragile, endowed with a sense of heart-wrenching loss—speak poetically of memory, impermanence and the remnants and aftermath of war.

April 30th marks the 37th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the official end of the Vietnam War. For Danh, a Vietnamese American, the legacy of that conflict is complex and profoundly personal: photography is his means to connect with the painful shadows of that legacy by empowering a narrative that grounds him in his own identity. “It’s something that my parents I think want to talk about, but it’s difficult for them to communicate because they have such a direct relationship to what happened,” he says.

The artist uses two different processes to create his images. The first resembles traditional black and white printing where a negative is placed on a living patch of grass or leaf. Like the imprint of a hose on a green lawn, light-blocking material removes the green chlorophyll pigment from organic matter. The image transfers when the dark portions of the negative block light, removing the pigment, while the transparent sections keep the underlying portion of the grass or leaf alive. In the second method, grass is cut and layered on a board to form a canvas onto which the artist projects a positive. The clear part of the transparency that lets sunlight through gets washed out, forming an image.

In an ode to the impermanence and fragility of memory, it is impossible to chemically fix the photograph like a silver gelatin print. The artist recommends pressing the material in a book to retain color, and displaying and storing them away from direct sunlight. However, Danh takes this a step further and casts his work in resin, which, for him, becomes a way to preserve the leaf to hold onto that memory. “I feel that when we forget about the memory of war, war can happen again,” he says. “And of course in this country we forget very quickly.”

Binh Danh is an artist presented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, Ariz. 

Via -> Time Lightbox

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/04/30/legacy-in-leaves-the-vietnam-war-remembered/#ixzz1tXPigB9B

Tracing the Consequences of War In Divided SudanRead more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/04/23/tracing-the-consequences-of-war-in-divided-sudan/#ixzz1str5RUc7
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Tracing the Consequences of War In Divided Sudan

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/04/23/tracing-the-consequences-of-war-in-divided-sudan/#ixzz1str5RUc7

Winter 2010, Sarajevo, Bosnia. © Nat Brunt 2012.
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Winter 2010, Sarajevo, Bosnia.

© Nat Brunt 2012.

Half a World Away, a Familiar Name

“A lot of people know about Syd Greenberg in China. Mind you, he hadn’t been back there since the mid-1940s, when he was an Army Signal Corps photographer assigned to the China-Burma-India theater of operations, documenting how American and Chinese Nationalist troops fought the Japanese.

For decades, China’s Communist government erased that episode from the collective memory. But efforts by amateur Chinese historians in recent years have shed a new light on that era, with a traveling exhibit culled from 23,000 photos from the United States National Archives.”

Via -> NYT Lens Blog

As of the summer of 2011 Vietnam has one of the highest rates of disability of any country in the world. This phenomenon is widely attributed to the chemical legacy of the American war. In Vietnam, a predominantly Buddhist country, disability is often viewed as a curse for a family’s sins in past lives. As a result of this stigma, children born with mental or physical disabilities are often abandoned and left to lives of little hope in long-term care facilities and orphanages. Those Cursed (2011), documents the day-to-day life of the staff and children in one such institution in Ho Chi Minh City. © Nat Brunt 2012.
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As of the summer of 2011 Vietnam has one of the highest rates of disability of any country in the world. This phenomenon is widely attributed to the chemical legacy of the American war. In Vietnam, a predominantly Buddhist country, disability is often viewed as a curse for a family’s sins in past lives. As a result of this stigma, children born with mental or physical disabilities are often abandoned and left to lives of little hope in long-term care facilities and orphanages. Those Cursed (2011), documents the day-to-day life of the staff and children in one such institution in Ho Chi Minh City.


© Nat Brunt 2012.

On the Front Lines With the Kachin Independence Army

“Burma is changing. On April 1, Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi led the opposition National League for Democracy to victory in by-elections hailed as a landmark for the Southeast Asian nation. The win capped a raft of other shifts since the country’s military rulers ceded power to a quasi-civilian government last year. President U Thein Sein—a former general and one of this year’s TIME 100honorees—has freed selected political prisoners, loosened the state’s grip on the media and signed peace agreements with ethnic rebels. But there are exceptions to the positive news from the country, notably the ongoing conflict in Kachin State.

As this series of photographs taken by Mexican photojournalist Narciso Contreras illustrates, the remote northern region is still at war”


Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/04/19/kia/#ixzz1sWSUlJLx

“A new book, Photographs Not Taken, conceived and edited by photographer Will Steacy compiles personal essays written by more than 60 photographers about a time when they didn’t or just couldn’t use their camera. The book, released by Daylight, is a fascinating compilation by a wide cross-section of image makers from around the world and is often filled with thoughts of regret, restraint and poignant self-realizations.” Via -> Time Lightbox
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“A new book, Photographs Not Taken, conceived and edited by photographer Will Steacy compiles personal essays written by more than 60 photographers about a time when they didn’t or just couldn’t use their camera.

The book, released by Daylight, is a fascinating compilation by a wide cross-section of image makers from around the world and is often filled with thoughts of regret, restraint and poignant self-realizations.”


Via -> Time Lightbox