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Kevin Carter, the Manics made him famous

November 20, 2008 – 7:24 pm

Kevin Carter was an award-winning South African photojournalist and member of the Bang – Bang Club. 

Carter had started to work as weekend sports photographer in 1983. In 1984 he moved on to work for the Johannesburg Star, bent on exposing the brutality of apatheid.

Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by “necklacing” in South Africa in the mid-1980s. He later spoke of the images; “I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan. Carter’s most famous photograph was of a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the little girl.

The photograph was sold to The New York Times. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor’s note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown.


November 12, 2008 – 2:03 pm

It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, on a Saigon street, on February 1, 1968, during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive.

 

Adams won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a World Press Photo award for the photograph (captioned ‘General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon’), but would later lament its notoriety.

Adams wrote in Time:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.
What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?’

Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to Loan’s honor while he was alive. When Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a “hero” of a “just cause”.

He once said that “I would have rather been known more for the series of photographs I shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to Thailand in a 30-foot boat, only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines.” The photographs, and accompanying reports, helped persuade then President Jimmy Carter to grant the nearly 200,000 Vietnamese boat people asylum. He won the robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club in 1977 for these series of photographs in his photo essay, “The Boat of No Smiles”. Adams remarked, “It did some good and nobody got hurt.”


November 3, 2008 – 12:43 pm

Zoriah Miller is an award winning photojournalist whose work has been seen in some of the world’s most prestigious publications. Initially trained in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Aid to Developing Countries, he worked for international aid organizations such as the Red Cross before returning to photography after a long absence. It was his extensive knowledge and training in survival and international aid which made him originally marketable to international photo agencies including World Picture News, Reporters Agency, The Image Works and EyePress Photo Agency. 

His work first won critical acclaim in the early 1990s when his photo series on homeless life in the United States was selected to tour the country in the Songs of The People project. He was also named Photojournalist of The Year in 2006 as well as winning the VII Photo Agency Portfolio Contest. He was among the photographers in World Picture News Networks Most Powerful Imagery of 2006.

As an adult, his images of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, The Gaza Strip and Lebanon have been widely published and have traveled to many countries around the world in museums and fine art galleries. His style of dark and moody imagery has become a trademark and he often releases feature stories containing graphic imagery of war, disease, social issues and strife which are considered both powerful and compassionate.


Lebovitz is coming to London

October 23, 2008 – 5:15 pm

To everyone that loves Annie Lebovitz read on… 

Annie Leibovitz’s Personal Collection

Over 150 striking images document Annie Leibovitz’s illustrious career as a photographer alongside intimate insights into her private life.

The photographs are arranged chronologically, with iconic portraits of famous public figures interspersed with personal photographs of her family and close friends.

Leibovitz’s personal collection forms the heart of the exhibition and records key moments in her life, including the birth and childhood of her 3 daughters. 

Annie Leibovitz’s Celebrity Portraits

Working for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue, Annie Leibovitz has built up a legendary body of work.

In addition to her magazine work, Leibovitz has created striking advertising campaigns for the likes of American Express, Gap and Givenchy.

The exhibition features many of Leibovitz’s renowned celebrity portraits, including:

  • Jamie Foxx
  • Daniel Day Lewis
  • Al Pacino
  • Nicole Kidman
  • Brad Pitt

Leibovitz’s assignment work on display includes searing reportage from Sarajevo in the 1990s and the election of Hillary Clinton to the US Senate.


Luc Delahaye a man not a boy

October 6, 2008 – 3:07 pm

Luc Delahaye a French photojournalistknown for his large-scale color works depicting conflicts, world events or social issues. His pictures are characterized by detachment, directness and rich details, a documentary approach which is however countered by dramatic intensity and a narrative structure.

Delahaye started his career as a photojournalist. He joined the photo agency Sipa Press in the mid 80s and dedicated himself to war reporting. In 1994, he joined the cooperative Magnum Photos and Newsweek Magazine.

He distinguished himself during the 1980s and 1990s in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Rwanda or Chechnya. His war photography was characterized by its raw, direct recording of news and often combined a perilous closeness to events with an intellectual detachment in the questioning of his own presence. This concern was later mirrored in minimalist series published as books, notably Portrait/1, a set of photobooth portraits of homeless people and L’Autre, a series of stolen portraits made in the Paris subway. With Winterreise, he explored the social consequences of the economic depression in Russia. In 2001, Delahaye conducted a radical formal change and began a new series. Shot at the scenes of wars and global events using large and medium formatcameras and sometimes edited on computers, his pictures are produced at an imposing size and shown in museums. While exploring the boundaries between reality and the imaginary, they constitute documents-monuments of immediate history, and urge reflection “upon the relationships among art, history and information”