StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

Soldier and Photographer Giles Penfound: Iraqi lives through a lens

[Boy with a gun. Young children playing in the backstreets of al-Amarah and reacting to a British Army patrol. "It is a dangerous place and time to be a child pointing a toy pistol at soldiers with real weapons" (LINK). © Giles Penfound]

The BBC News UK Edition features some photos and lines from british soldier and photographer Giles Penfound:

Giles Penfound is a soldier in the British Army's Royal Logistics Corps and chief media operations photographer for the army.
While working in the southern Iraq cities of Basra and Al Amarah he began a personal project, documenting ordinary Iraqis' lives.

(Thx to Photoblogs.org/Anders Jacobsen)

["These people are snapshots, a reminder of my prejudices and lack of understanding but also, thankfully, a reminder that despite our differences we are very much the same." (LINK). © Giles Penfound]

Iraqian Frontline and the Images from Moblogging Soldiers: Final Epilogue

After some weeks of investigating and reporting "Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers, Part I - Part VIII" (read all these stories in the Category "Iraq|War: Photos + Reports" and additionally "Iraq|War|Photography: The Meta Level") John Schott of Camera/Iraq ("Camera/Iraq: New Website Launched") recently wrote in "Soldier Photos":

Camera/Iraq has a continuing interest in soldier photograhy from the Middle East, and we would like to collaborate in the creation of an online exhibition of such work. We were first inspired by excellent early efforts at Phototalk... .
Unfortunately, while scouring soldier photo-blogs or cam-phone collections for that one-in-a-hundred outstanding image, Phototalk encountered pictures lifted from other sources, frequently work by professional photographers. This shouldn't be surprising, really, since the pragmatic goal of a photo-blog is to visualize one's military experience in Iraq rather than to sell photo rights or garner professional notoriety. Content and context trump artistic provenance in soldier photo-blogs.
For a photo editor, however, borrowed pictures creates the possibility of mis-attribution. Contacting soldiers by email has proven difficult because they are otherwise engaged in fighting a war, often gather and present work as a unit rather than exclusively from their own "personal vision," and frequently don't encourage communication by including email addresses or are so flooded with messages that they can not respond. Plus, of course, soldiers are under new scrutiny about what images they are placing online.
Still, the notion of editing an online exhibition is compelling. Please email us if you would like to undertake or contribute to such a project.

This is not entirely the complete story: there is a difference between telling your own war history in your words using (sometimes) other peoples images as an illustration for your text and the (how to say: very euphemistic) categorical statement: "Hey, I took these pix, I created them", which is just a stupid lie. On the other hand, time has shown that at a least one army press officer (with a certain background in photography) had taken private photos with a quality and meaning far beyond the day. It is the old question "who is doing what and how". An undisputed claim: 95 percent of all people reading this blog would present/moblog their own images and never ever other people´s images, except under very special circumstances.

John Schott writes: "The pragmatic goal of a photo-blog is to visualize one's military experience in Iraq". This is absolutely right, but who can visualize your own military experience, your daily life, better than you yourself, in your special situation? No one needs to steal pictures for that.

John Schott writes: "Content and context trump artistic provenance in soldier photo-blogs." With stolen photos? Blogged together with complete book chapters "borrowed" from famous writers? All that without a clarifying explanation?

Where (as a soldier) is your very own experience, your "content and context", if you only cite and quote and/or grab and steal for "visualizing" your "military experience"? Is is still your experience you present (as a moblogging soldier)? Borrowed presentations and visualizations of personal experiences? Do they coexist? What is the next step? Borrowed personal experiences? Where is the real life?

Brian Palmer´s Digital Diary: Witnessing the War in Iraq 07-03-2004 until 08-21-2004

[© Brian Palmer/SIPA Press]

Brian Palmer (Sipa Press; see his bio) has published (PixelPress) a text and photo diary with his experiences in Iraq, 07-03 until 08-21-2004. Palmer writes in the Epilogue of "Digital Diary: Witnessing the War":

All told, I spent about seven weeks with various elements of the 24th MEU. I was expecting plenty of rah-rah triumphalism and USA-first hyperpatriotism but found only a little, not a lot. There were a few folks who hooted at John Kerry when he appeared on the chow hall's TV screen, and then cheered when Bush came on. "John Kerry is a fucking communist" for tossing his Vietnam War ribbons, asserted a cocky young Marine from Arkansas, Corporal Michael Euler, a soon-to-be father who knows what he knows and will tell you so in a heartbeat. There was the major who paused mid-sentence when a US fighter jet flew overhead. "You hear that," he asked me. "That's the sound of freedom." More than a few Marines I spoke with, however, accepted without question the Bush administration's casus belli for going into Iraq -- the 9-11 connection with Saddam Hussein’s government and the alleged weapons of mass destruction -- an argument I do not buy.
[...]
It has been difficult to find venues for these stories and photos. They are quieter, more mundane and subtle than, for example, the graphic coverage of the fighting in Najaf. Gauging the progress of nation-building is difficult, time-consuming, expensive, beige. Flying bullets and screaming protesters provide ready-made drama for networks and newspapers that compete moment to moment for consumers' attention. It may seem counterintuitive, but it's less risky from an economic standpoint (though not from a personal one, as is the case with Najaf) to cover the story everyone else is covering. The very presence of the media transforms an event into news. Their absence, well...
Will the media start measuring the progress in Iraq, both in fighting the militants and nation-building, against the administration's promises? Will the Iraq story evaporate as Afghanistan did (as well as Haiti and Somalia and Liberia), or will Americans begin to demand accountability for this open-ended effort, which costs lives and limbs, Iraqi and American, every month, and billions of dollars? Will citizens, myself included, press both presidential candidates for their one-, two-, and five-year plans for Iraq? I'm skeptical, but not without hope.
[...]

Links to his entries of Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, with photos by Brian Palmer and Christopher Smith.

Pixelpress states

This is Brian Palmer's final installment of his 'Digital Diary: Witnessing the War.'" Other photo essays by different authors on various aspects of the War in Iraq and the political situation in the USA will follow as part of the "Democracy in America" series.

Questo blog è chiuso per ferie, fino all' 8 Agosto 2004

[© Grace and Katie]

Chiudo, per un circa settimana, questo weblog. Infatti, a mio modesto parere, per scrivere bisogna prima pensare e, i blogs spesso ti tolgono lo spazio per pensare.


(Hint for the person/CEO/BizDeveloper etc. who is constantly looking for "DigitalVision 2003 revenues", ""Image source" 2003 revenues" or "Index stock imagery 2003 revenues" and other good stuff-- Google hits are a tricky thing, especially with your really nice -- and static -- IP! So, no one has to work for Pixlogic, the company ("Visual Search") with Venture Capital from the CIA, just to know who you are...).
=:-)

War Feels Like War: Photojournalists Onto The Battlefield Without Military Protection

John Schott over at Camera|Iraq reports about the "P.O.V. - War Feels Like War | PBS" ("This film documents the lives of reporters and photographers who circumvent military media control to get access to the real Iraq War"):

"The Iraq War introduced the concept of the "embedded" reporter to the world. Their highly choreographed, round-the-clock reporting gave the Pentagon extraordinary control of war reports back home, and also allowed the military to quietly contain those journalists who wanted to report the war independently: the so-called "unilaterals." war_like_war"War Feels Like War" is the story of an international group of journalists who refused to be "embedded."
[..]
'This is the story of journalists caught up in a new era in war-reporting, says director and cameraman Esteban Uyarra, 'and of a media world now divided in two camps — 'embeds' and 'unilaterals' — and what that means for how we see and feel about war.'"

Here´s the story of an embedded photojournalist (Link to all details)

"Dust to Dust" (big quicktime file! 275.7 MB!) by Pulitzer Price Winner David Leeson (presented at "Dirck Halstead presents The Digital Journalist - A Multimedia Magazine for Photojournalism in the Digital Age") in the May issue: "The film tells a personal story of what it was like to be an "embed" and presents a war you didn't see on TV." [Update: Link moved]

Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers VIII

[© Still Unknown; does anyone know?]

The TiredAnDirty Soldier@Yafro is back -- the previous entries were explaining that he had been wounded -- and shows again a very intense image we consider to be a stolen one (resolution, size, composition etc.). He has shown this image earlier here together with a different text. The previous photo has been removed (this had been the initial link here, now pointing to nowhere), together with the text, but a backup copy is available.
So now we got the same picture with two different background stories being very dramatic: the first text said

they dont seem to learn that even when they have the element of surprise it still wont turn out in their favor

and the text to the previous (the one that disappeared) image said

we had 5 soldiers killed on wensday this is not a picture of it i am not going to post a picture of it untill i have edited it they were rideing in a m-113 that is the track vechial in the picture that is right in front of the camera the insurgents used 400 pounds of c-4 and when it went off it blew that armored m 113 into nothing 5 were killed instantly and one was criticley wounded the blast crater was 10 feet deep and 20 ft wide the good thing is that the guys who were killed never knew that they had been hit it was so quick i hope it is like that for me" (Link, 10th image)

So he stated to have been an eye witness to the scenery the images are showing, someone driving in the tanks. Now it reads:

today was a bad/good day 4 hrs ago we were engaged today in a manner we havent seen in a long time it was well organized and exicutied we were returning from a trip to a out poast when we were attacked it was one of those ones you could see coming but it was too late a child tip us off by covering his ears when we drove by but by then it was too late the it was the biggest explosion i have seen my entire time here from an i.e.d. but usualy after the detonate it they run but this time they had pre positioned men to surround us and surround us they did we were engaged from all sides by small arms and r.p.g's i dont know how to describe what gose on in the mists of it we had rounds hitting the ground all around they make a popping sound when they hit i am not going to go into details becouse i dont know what is cleared to divulge but the last i hear we had killed 21 and wounded 41 and i dont know how this happened but we had no wounded and no killed but by all rights we should have had we been any other army ambushed and surrounded i think they would have gotten alot of us so for all of you that have been praying for us thank you these are your prayer min. at work if anyone sees anything on the news about it let me know what they said later ill share more (Link)

Someone is taking the same image (pardon, but very likely to be stolen from the web) which obviously has a special meaning for him and tells two different stories. There are three months between the usages of this photo. The previous entries on his site shows that he indeed had been injured (he said that another soldier took those pix: "another soldier that was on the convoy took these"). Can we trust his words, his stories now ("this photo wasn taken today i dont think anyone got the chance to take pictures" he explains later in a comment to the second usage of the photo)?
Reviewing his site again and again (especially the previous images which have been removed but had been stored here) it seems that he doesn´t have taken a picture himself -- all images are coming from various sources. Someone starts a photoblog/moblog and not one single image is not, how to say, borrowed? All this because only strong images from excellent photojournalists are outstanding enough to express your own feelings in such a situation?

Photoblogging US Soldiers at Buzznet?

Hello Marc from Buzznet [a photoblog community, Marc is a co-founder], thx for recommending. If you casually got a list with some photoblogging US soldier from Iraq (something comparable to the Yafro list (1; 2), let us know. Best!

"Real-Time Moblogging" And Reporting from Iraq by US Soldiers: Should Things Work This Way?

Is it "SEE, SNAP, SEND" or is it "SHOOT, SEE, SNAP, SEND"? What is happening?

Just imagine a civilian car driver -- maybe drunk -- approaches a US check point in Iraq. Maybe he has lost control where his car is driving. His intentions (passing traveller?) are not clear. Anyway, the soldiers killed him, probably they were in fear what he intended to do. Afterwards, a soldier takes his digicam and some images of the male corpse in the car. He sends the images to his moblog at Yafro (Link1, Link2, Link3):

"See, there's his Beer. If you look closely at his right hand, you can see his Cig." and "If you ever wondered what it was like to be drunk, the[n] Run a US check point. Then 3 SAWs 2 M4 and a few M-16 open up on you."

A reader responded:

"why are u even posting this shit [?]"

The moblogging soldier (alter ego: "crashthesoldier") writes:

"Because people deserve to see the truth. I'm tired of watching CNN and always hearing how " The soldiers skrewed up". This is our side of the story." (Link)

So far about some complaints that the images might be censored*. The comments ("no seatbelt") are outstanding.

"This is our side of the story": we have a medium, a message and an audience.

________________________________________
*That had been discussed earlier here and here. A new non-military example is "Iran censors photo blog" (JD Lascia).

Soldier Photography/War Photography

This is a special entry for John Schott over at Camera|Iraq and an update to "Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers VII/ Soldier Photography vs. War Images from Professional Photojournalists"

From all the images moblogging US soldiers have shown at Yafro (1; 2)
it turned out that 95% of those images which have a photographic value and meaning beyond the day and were presented here -- were simply stolen. From all these images the images at the bottom (post continuation) MIGHT not have been stolen.

If a soldier shows 20 images on his website and 18 of them are stolen, you simply cannot trust the other 2 images -- stolen or not. Some images even show up on more than one moblog under different names and with different texts (does a soldier maintain more than one moblog? Does the napster generation share private war pix, mixing them with images from other people?)

Not to be misunderstood: that a soldier grabs pictures from a professional photojournalist to add his personal remarks, thoughts and feelings to create some kind of a personal diary, that is understandable and it appears for him to be a legal behaviour, given the special circumstances of his situation.

But now - regarding some good shots a talented soldier photographer might also take --it is impossible to draw the fine line of distinction: What is Soldier Photography? What is War Photography by professional photojournalists? The origin of most photos is very, very doubful.

Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers VII; Soldier Photography vs. War Images from Professional Photojournalists

This is an update to a lot of messages: all stories in the categories "Iraq|War|Photography: The Meta Level", "Iraq|War: Photos + Reports" and especially these entries showing images:
"Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers"
"Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers II"
"Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers III"
"Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers IV"
"Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers V"
"Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers VI"
"Q: "What's wrong with this picture?" A: "It's the only one like it we could find""
"Invitation to all our readers"
""It’s not the cellphone, stupid": "There is no ban on camera phones, or digital cameras in Iraq. Do I need to send in a picture to prove it?""
"WHO DELIVERS THE ICONIC WAR IMAGES - PROS OR AMATEURS?"
"Rumsfeld won´t be happy: In-the-shadow-of-a-gun"
"Rumsfeld won´t be happy: THE TIRED AND DIRTY SOLDIER is back"

It is a new phenomenon: soldiers fighting in a war steal images from more or less well-known professional photojournalists and declare: "Hey, I took´em."

It all started with this message: "James Hong of Hot or Not and Yarfo has a page of links to moblogging from soldiers on the front line in Iraq on Yarfo" (Joi Ito) [btw: there are now two directories: "http://www.yafro.com/frontline.php" and "http://jhong.org/frontline.html"].

Following the link, about 20 sites from moblogging US soldiers from Iraq showed up. Clicking through the sites we found images that didn´t correspond to the impression the traditional medias were delivering. Some images even were outstanding. Finally it turned out that these images were mostly stolen from professional photojournalists working in Iraq.

We presented some of those images in the believe that one can trust a person reporting to a public audience  -- given the circumstances of being a fighting soldier -- and with the hope that someone with a personal history (and finally skills) in photography might have taken some of the outstanding images -- although we had early complaints described here in the last weeks.

So we did another review of all images under the aspects:
-Light conditions (will a soldier use a 1.0/50mm for his shooting?)
-Point of view (will a soldier use a 2.8/14mm and a DSLR for his shooting?)
-Resolution/Size (will a soldier use a 11 MP camera?)
-Photo finishing (will a soldier intensively use Photoshop?)
-"Image Hunting Instinct", image composition etc.

Dumb questions. Sad to say, but in the end real evidence that an image had not been stolen and is a testimony of a soldier´s real life and surrounding -- at least in this moment -- is only if it is an amateurish image with a daily life scenery. Anything else is highly doubtful.

Statements if an image shown had been stolen or not, if had been taken by the one who testified he did take it, the probability if it´s amateurish or professional -- all this can be found in the above mentionend posts over the next days; comments are assigend in parenthesis [].