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@ROB wrote:
I was beginning to wonder about the increasing coverage of afghanistan – like why now?
Guess its cos the trust fund babies needed a new gig to give them depth of character. :wink:
Iraq is pretty much “over” as far as the media is concerned – yesterdays news.
With the scaling back of military forces in Iraq vs the increase of troops in Kaboomistan, the media circus has moved on. Don’t think today’s huge explosion in Iraq will make any difference to that.Obama will commit the 40,000 + sooner or later, not including the contractors of course . The show must go on until we all get thoroughly bored it…and by that point, the will be yet another war being manufactured elsewhere to ply our attention. its just business after all.
@Lee wrote:
I’m just in the process of adding a flash slideshow to the front page of my gallery site, too.
Not tackling it myself, though. Getting a mate to do it for me, while I trudge through the HTML and CSS books that I bought a few weeks ago.
Boring stuff. I cover about two pages a night before I fall asleep.
:cry:
That’s relatively easy to do. You just make a flash motion tween swf file and simply drop it straight into the HTML page. You can make one in half an hour
The thing Ive gotta try and figure out is how to link flash buttons to various layers in Dreamweaver. uggh!!.
The motivation for most of today’s war photographers is to highlight injustice and to hopefully bring about change. Of course there are some very prolific war snappers out there whose motivations come down to nothing more than simple grief tourism. They are adrenaline junkies who eventually become hooked on war. I happen to know quite a few of them. But i’m not going to name names.
I should have made my point clearer in the previous post, but the problem is not with war photography itself. Its with photojournalism.
Sadly, these days there are less and less assignments from magazines and newspapers who will publish photo essays,or so they say. There’s certainly plenty of room for pictures of coked up celebrities. Its not like the good old days when LIFE magazine was still alive and kicking. This is one of the reasons why photographers publish books instead. Personally, Im not very interested in the aesthetic and compositional qualities of a war photograph. It takes the attention away from what the whole point of what war photography is about- to show the insanity of war.
As much as i respect James Nachtwey, I dont feel that he is the greatest war photographer. What the hell does that even mean anyway – “greatest war photographer”. i think Nachtwey has done an impeccable job of highlighting the injustices of war, but I think there are many relative unknown’s out there who have taken images of war that are just as, or even more hard hitting , as anything Nachtwey has done.
Take for example, the simple images of the Abu Graib prison.
Those pictures did more to damage the “iraq war effort” than anything else, and they were taken by the soldiers themselves.I only have three favorite images of war. One is an photograph by Roger Fenton taken during the Crimean war, entitled “valley of the shadow of death”. The image does not contain a single dead body, but hundreds apon hundreds of canon balls littered across a barren landscape.
The second is the famous image by Kevin Carter of a starving child and a vulture in the background.The picture speaks for itself. Its not an arty image.Its simple and raw.
The third is Don McCullins image of the starving Biafran boy holding the can of corned beef. This again, is a very simple yet hard hitting image.One of my favorite quotes by McCullin:
“I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don’t practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: “I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.” That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.”
I haven’t brought a “war photography” book in i don’t know how long.
i think the last one i purchased was James Nachtwey’s book Inferno.
A huge book ,which I think Ive only ever looked at no more than five times.In their review, the British Journal Of Photography described the book as quote: “500 pages, 15×11”, 10lbs, fabulous paper and printing, cool, elegant design and 400 exquisite pictures of horror, suffering, misery and death from the last decade of the 20th century”
And that was when I realized that the most depressing thing about this book, was not the horror and suffering contained within its thick pages, but the very way in which the content is presented. “
“exquisite pictures of horror”?….
War photography has no place in the world of “art”. Why should it?.
When war photographers go out into the world and take these marvelously composed pictures of death and suffering and then stick them up in an art gallery somewhere in London or New York City, It really makes me question who the fuck these people really are.That isn’t what the power of photography is about.
