While I appreciated the free wi-fi at the San Angelo airport, what is up with the filtering? I love that the “forbidden category” is Games, when I’m trying to look at Soviet propaganda posters. Why would games be forbidden, anyway? I also got the one below, telling me that the newspaper LA Weekly is adult content:
What a joke.
Countless times while I was in Eldorado covering the raid on the YFZ Ranch, I pictured the events that were taking place out of sight, miles beyond police roadblocks and Texas scrub brush. We could see dozens of police vehicles rushing into the ranch, the police helicopter hovering overhead, and we could hear reports that police were preparing to breach the sect’s holy temple. But we could see nothing. It was frustrating beyond belief.
I wished for a way to get onto the ranch and photograph the historic events taking place. Little did I know, the people of the FLDS church were documenting their own history. And now they have put photos and video from the raid on a new site called CaptiveFLDSChildren.org.
While they didn’t have my professional-grade equipment or years of experience, the photographers who took these photos had access. And as you can see, access is more important than equipment or eye.
These photographs give us just one side of the story, that of a people who feel their families were unjustly separated by overbearing government agents. Only time will reveal whether that is the way history will remember this story.
A new front in the battle for public opinion over the Texas Polygamy Raid opened up last week after FLDS spokesman Rod Parker released photographs of law enforcement taken during the raid by the people of the YFZ ranch. Parker told the Deseret News that officials confiscated most of the photographs and video that FLDS members took of the law enforcement operation.
To counter the images of helmeted, machine gun-carrying officers sitting in an armored vehicle, photos were released by the other side (I assume by members of law enforcement) to The Eldorado Success newspaper. These photographs were obviously intended to show you the lighter side of the raid, showing officers conducting a show-and-tell of the armored vehicle with a group of young FLDS boys.
Amazing how these images, both released to shape public opinion, tell such an opposite story of the armored personnel vehicle used in the raid. One side is telling me this was a military assault on a group of unarmed farm folk. The other side is saying that it was nothing like that, more like a carnival with free APC rides.
What a shame there wasn’t an objective photographer present to document the events. When the government undertakes such a large operation against a group they accuse of such insidious acts, we deserve a little more transparency.
The site Raw Take published an interview with Sydney Morning Herald sports photojournalist Tim Clayton today. Clayton excels at his craft, and is known as one of the best. This interview is so good, so healthy. He says a lot of important things that everyone should hear (photographers, editors, reporters, readers, etc.)
Some of my favorite quotes:
We are like most newspapers, run by word people for word people. Generally they want pictures for ten-year-olds and have little or no understanding of photojournalism at the top level. The paper has no space for story telling through photo essays.
He said it, not me.
What has actually happened is many photographers have evolved beyond the wants and needs of the newspaper. We are shooting stories that don’t get published and shooting personal projects to keep our brains stimulated. The ‘cat sat on the mat’ images pay the bills. In many ways it is a sad reflection of photojournalism today, there are so few places where top end photojournalism can be seen.
This is a great statement. I know photographers who have so much to contribute but they’ve given up. They see a lack of support and devote their energy and passion to personal projects away from their newspaper, shortchanging the reader of their finest work. And year after year some of the best work recognized in contests was unpublished for whatever reason.
it’s all about attitude. In the UK where I learned my trade, they used to say “You are only as good as your last picture,” in Australia they say “You are only as good as your next picture.” Attitude is everything!
What a great line. Why didn’t I ever realize that the “only as good as your last picture” line that I’ve heard for years was complete crap?
I had about six more quotes that I wanted to put into this post, but why don’t you read them at the Raw Take site instead of mine. Here’s the link to the interview: http://rawtake.net/2008/03/30/tim-clayton-sydney-morning-herald/
The lede of the story in the Sunday Herald said it all:
One of the nation’s most acclaimed young photographers has pledged to burn his folio of entries for the Scottish Photographer of the Year awards in a protest against the event’s organisers.
Finally, I thought, somebody so fed up with contest judges that they were going to take action, even if it was photographic hara-kiri. What a great bit of press!
Roddy Mackay was on the list of finalists for the Young Photographer of the Year. He must have been so excited, like he was nominated for an Academy Award or something. But then when the awards were presented, no award was given in his category. The judges explained by saying the entries were, “not good enough.” Ouch!
Mackay was quoted saying the judge’s actions harmed him, “mentally and physically.”
For the record, Mackay (or someone using his name) left a comment on the Herald’s story saying he was misquoted and had no intention of burning his photographs.
I, for one, would like to encourage Mackay to go through with it. Burn those images! The mere threat of burning your work has brought you a lot of attention. Think of all the attention you’d get if you actually did destroy the photos, Roddy.
A lot of people try to comfort the losers of contests by saying that winning contests doesn’t matter, that it’s not important. But the fact is, everyone who says that has won awards and used those awards to get better jobs.
For young photographers who haven’t yet won an award, maybe burning your photographs in protest is the new way to move up the ladder. And the first one who does it will get the most points for originality. Not since Brett Weston threw his work into the fireplace in 1991 have we had a good old negative burning!
Okay, now I’m being serious. To all of you young photographers looking to be the next big thing: Invest your emotion into your work, not into contest wins. Contests are not science. The results are subjective and unpredictable. If you work hard and stay focused on your art, then recognition will come.
I’ve had more than my share of contest success. But if I burned all the photographs that didn’t win, most of my portfolio would be in ashes.
March is Shakespeare time at the boys’ school. Days of memorizing lines, sewing costumes, building sets. It’s really fun watching my kids quote from The Tempest or MacBeth.
But being the photographer dad isn’t always as fun. I’ve taken photographs of these plays over the past couple of years and never really got anything I liked, let alone anything I wanted to share with the other kids’ parents. It’s always very dark and more than anything I’m wanting to watch rather than photograph. Then I’m faced with the dilemma of getting a good shot of every single kid. It’s impossible.
I was faced with that dilemma again this year as I sat in the front row before the 6th grade production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How was I going to make meaningful photographs of this play, in this dark classroom, with a cast of thirteen kids coming and going?
Some other parents walked into the room, looked around and said, “Wow, look at the set. How beautiful!”
That’s when the lightbulb went on and I knew exactly how I wanted to photograph the play. Here is the result:
As always with my composites, I wish you could see the 13×30 inch print sitting on my desk right now. Way better than the 550 pixel version.
It all started when a friend approached me with, “Have you ever thought about doing a book?”
I’d heard that about a million times so I gave my usual, “Yeah, that sounds like fun,” never expecting it to go anywhere.
Well, this time it went somewhere. I ended up writing a complete guide to photography (as I see it) for Zibtips.com, complete with a selection of my photographs. At the Zibtips website you can find my guide, which covers photography theory and technique at the basic and intermediate level.
Writing is a tough job. There were many times in the project where I felt like I was running a marathon and my brain just wouldn’t go any further. In those dark moments I would turn to the Xbox360 and play a thirty-minute (okay, sixty-minute) session of Crackdown, a videogame where you play a superhuman-type cop in a rough city.
(Description from xbox.com: Low on ammo? Never a problem. Thanks to an amazing amount of props and a deep physics system, you can use whatever you get your hands on as a weapon: Trash cans, vehicles, even people.)
Yes, using people as weapons turned out to be a great way to relieve the stress and get my mind back on task during these intensive writing sessions. Such are my memories of June 2007. I was so proud when I earned the “Body Juggling” achievement. Who knew I was so skilled with a rocket launcher?
