StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

JPG Magazine: Another New Mag

Behind JPG magazine are Heather Champ [when she reads your blog you´ll notice that she uses Kinja =:-) ] and Derek Powazek:

"They're called "photobloggers" - a sloppy term for sloppy times.
[...]
In another time they would have been called artists. Personal documentarians. But we have a simpler word for them: Photographers.
[...]
JPG Magazine is for people who love imagemaking without attitude. It's about the kind of photography you get when you love the moment more than the camera. It's for photographers who, like us, have found themselves online, sharing their work, and would like to see that work in print" (read the Manifesto).

The first issue (theme: origin) will be published in November (submissions Due: 4 October 2004), but "only one submission per person, per issue, please." JPG Magazine will be published 6 times a year, every other month. Issues will be published as full color, perfect bound books, as high quality as possible.

So, after the hassle to convert your workflow from analogue to digital, photobloggers are starting to re-enter the publishing world of analogue and printed paper. After the launch of File Magazine ("File Magazine: A Collection of Unexpected Photography") another new and perfect place for picture researchers and buyers to scout for new talents.

The Moblogging Chaos At The Republican National Committee

"A moblogging operation should be taken as seriously, and as with as many resources and people, as a regular news operation ... Moblogging is suitable for breaking news or events with good visual images. It is not good for in-depth stories... ."

[© Image: guess who?]

A nice story ("Lessons learned from the RNC", Learning about mobile weblogging at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism):

Ladies and Gentlemen: it is now possible to leap to the forefront of journalism with technology available on the street. This is moblogging. The future is now.
Sort of.
Whoever thought of this was on to something when he or she decided to hire journalism students to use camera phones and the Internet as a nouveau wire service on the cheap. The idea was to be able to capture the ambiance of a political convention by assembling a mosiac of grainy images of the events via the camera phone. The images would give the viewer a near-real-time sense of the convention, taking advantange of the fast upload capabilities of the phone without the need to download images to a computer to edit or send. We would be a swarm of imagetakers and reporters, filing a photo every ten minutes on average, for the entire convention. Our editing team at the University of South Carolina’s Newsplex would edit our pictures and text, and receive dictation for longer stories, and post them to the moblog.

In practice, this operation worked only somewhat. The problems:

The picture quality is pretty poor...
[...]
We found it difficult to shoot some pictures, then take a time-out to jam out a sentence on the keypad. Typing any text of length on a numerical pad is s-l-o-w. Even with intelligent text... .

Continue to read the list of the little mishaps here.

New Blogs On The Block: New Digital Image

John Schott, creator of the blog Camera|Iraq and Director for Media Studies Concentration and Media Studies (MEDA) at the Carleton College, Minnesota, recently created a new blog called "New Digital Image".
The blog -- Schott is the producer of "American Photography: A Century of Images" -- is dedicated to moblogging in general (actually to teach his class) and brings up some interesting links.

Pictures of Jakarta Bombing: Has Flickr Beaten Textamerica In The Race To Beat CNN?

After the Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta "Photos ... appeared on Flickr before any of the major news services had gotten it up on their sites." (Caterina Fake/Flickr, via Hypergene Mediablog: "Citizen reportage, digital photography and Flickr").
Similar at MetaFilter: "Found a photo from a bombing before the story even broke on any of the major news sites". Two reader commented: "I think it's significant that news could be received first from a "raw" source such as those, rather than pre-packaged and pre-interpreted (and pre-linked to al Qaeda) through CNN" (Link) and "no damnable copyright/license issues as money isn't involved" (Link).
So, "How much specialization and differentation can we expect in the moblog arena?" (Link)

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?

Camera Phone Obsession: First Book on the Culture of Camera Phones

Peter Aitken has published a new (the only in this field) book called "Camera Phone Obsession":

These wildly successful devices can only be described as a cultural phenomenon, and the way people think about their camera phones can only be described as an obsession ... Users are obsessed with the technology features of their phone and love to share their experiences and thoughts with other users - creating another cultural phenomenon, the moblog...The book features numerous hands-on projects as well as tips and techniques to create art. (Link)

Art... . Xeni will be happy.

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...).
=:-)

A Small World: Photobloggers Are Stealing Images...From other Photobloggers

Photoblogs.org has a story of photobloggers/moblogers who are stealing the images of others photobloggers/moblogers AND claim that these images are their own work:

copyright violations
Does anyone have any idea what to do about other sites ripping off your work? I got an email a few minutes ago telling me that sithlords.hu (recently registered at photoblogs.org under the member name of everyesno) has used one of my images for their July 7th entry. My image can be seen here.
I've emailed them and told them they're in violation of my copyright but any other suggestions as to how to deal with the pilfering scumbag(s) would be gratefully received. (Link)

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?

"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).

BlogTalk 2.0: Presentations Related To Video- and Moblogging

The three presentations related to video- and moblogging at the BlogTalk 2.0 have been presented here earlier. Here are links to excerpts from two of them:

Jon Hoem: "Videoblogs as 'Collective Documentary'" (excerpt and here the full presentation)
Stephanie Hendrick / Therese Örnberg: "The blog as an immersive space: Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004" (excerpt)

The third presentation (the one we´re waiting for) called "Mobile Blogging: Who, Where, Why?" by Nicola Döring was withdrawn because "We just received an email from Nicola Döring, she is heavily involved in negotiations in context of her professorship.The program changed slightly for Tuesday" (Link).

Related/just discovered: "Introduction - Creating Streaming Video", 7 pages (MediaCollege).

INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE examines Visual Blogs

Into the Blogosphere [Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs] is a new

online, edited collection [that] explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities.

by the UofMN. The blog has a very interesting section called"Visual Blogs" (Meredith Badger, University of Sydney):

This paper focuses on the use of figurative photography and illustration within the blogging medium. It examines the ways images shape and alter how we view blogs and how blogs shape and alter the way we view the images placed within them. It suggests that ultimately both images and the weblogs that contain them stand to benefit from the relationship.

Heather Champ is mentioned, also Kevin Sites. Meredith Badger concludes:

Visual weblogs present a new aspect of visual literacy grammar, where images must be read in direct relation to the passage of time and as indivisible from the personality of the blogger themselves. Visual blogs show the process; how I got there rather than what I saw once I arrived. It is this aspect of visual blogs that make them a useful tool for pedagogy; they become a tool for examining how images operate online and how they interact with text. Visual weblogs are a starting point for debate and discussion. They emphasise the present tense – this is what I saw today, this is how things look to me from where I stand right now.

The Big Picture by Dennis Dunleavy - One Of The Best Photo-Related Blogs Around

Let´s be serious: 95% of all mobloggers have a very rudimentary understanding what photography (not to talk of photojournalism) is or could be. This is the sad news.
The other sad news is that a versatile genius like Xeni Jardin/BoingBoing simply lacks the time to enlighten us what photography is or could be. In the meantime she preaches what or what not she thinks ART is ("This, by the way, was art" or "Update: I F*CKED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S" mixing all this up with some new fashionable buzz words besides her very valuable work of co-curating "SENT-Amercia´s first phonecam art show"/"Come all ye bloggers").
However, the good news is that some people -- moblogs are a public medium enabling the comparison -- feel the need to train their skills (at least the ones who are visiting photoblos.org regularly). No matter if they are involved into a journalistic profession or not.
And the better news is that for these some people something like an instant training session is available. It´s called "The Big Picture?", written by Dennis Dunleavy.
Dennis started this blog some weeks ago and, regarding his background, it is a instant training ressource. It´s about visual communication and not about "Will my girlfriend still love me when the white balance of my new Leica Digilux 2 has a pink touch?". This is the place all those mobloggers should visit. Then, in the end, there might be some progress in this world.
And, frankly, we are pissed that other blogs quoting the content of Dennis´ blog are getting all the comments and attention that originally belongs to the blog of Dennis because HE HAS THE CONTENT and YOU ONLY TRY TO MAXIMIZE YOUR GOOGLE RANKING FOR MAKING ANOTHER 5$ FROM PAYED ADS.

[© Image papadakistaverna]

Moblogging vs. Photojournalism: The Medium is NOT the Message

[© Univ. of Tokyo]

Dennis writes in "Is Moblogging a Unique Form of Photojournalism?" about a phrase he discovered in "Photo Sharing Gone Wild" (PC World): "moblogs provide a unique form of spontaneous photojournalism".

No. It can be the digital extension of certain skills, competence and experience. It depends on who is doing it:

The medium is not the message. Imagine how tedious newspapers would be if every other story proclaimed "We use INK!!!" The writers don't care, and the readers don't care, how this message was delivered: but readers do care about quality. (Andrew Orlowski)

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message." Well, in the world according to John Hibbs, the medium is not the message, should not be the message; in fact, there should not be a message [...]. Rather, you focus on the preliminary content and the audience, and the medium is just a means to the end. (Richard Seltzer: "Beyond McLuhan -- many parallel media, and discussion, no message")

Orlowski more malicious regarding a blogger conference:

"The only way I would attend such a conference is with 'a bottle in front of me or a frontal lobotomy'," wrote Dwight Meridith.
"A convention for blogging is like a convention for... I dunno, handwriting. Or cassette tape recording," noted John Kusch, acidly. But John, techno-utopians can't understand that computers are simply tools, not artifacts that should be revered in their right.

Senate Upholds Ban on Photos of GI Caskets

Update to the stories in the Categories "Iraq|War|Photography: The Meta Level" and "Iraq|War: Photos + Reports"

We have to report the sad news that

A divided Senate votes to uphold a Pentagon ban on media coverage of the return of war dead. Two months ago, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Air Force released hundreds of photos of flag-draped coffins. The Pentagon says no more will be made public. (June 22, 2004, NPR.org)

Obviously they haven´t learnt a thing at all. The next Tami Silicio is right behind the next corner.

[via Ed/Mira]

SENT: All you need to know about America's first phonecam art show

[© SENT]

What is this?

1. This was one of the first photos on the SENT website demonstrating the very high and irresistible level of this contemporaneous approach to Big Bang art

2. Careful, these are a very expensive homegrown japanese vegetables, even more expensive than japanese Koi fishes

3. Heck, no, this is art

4. This pix recently achieved a Pulitzer Price and a World Press Photo Award in the category "arts and entertainment"

5. This pix was used by Alfred Adler to demonstrate the conditional branch of hypernervous anxiety in the space-time-continuum of the early austrian cognitive epistemology

6. This pix is a screenshot of the Stephen King film "The Mystery of the Secret Garden Monsters"

What qualifies Xeni Jardin to co-curate SENT?

1. She is the next generation of tech writers after handsome guys like Po Bronson

2. She knows more about wireless cameraphones than Alan Reiter

3. That´s why she doesn´t respond to his emails

4. She has been a highly recommended long term curator of over a dozens of very valuable art exhibitions writing history

5. She has a cameraphone (heck, no, she has two) and a Prada messenger bag, isn´t that enough?

6. She knows someone who knows someone who recently met someone else

7. She thinks these pix in red and yellow are real personality images and invented just casually, just incidentally the groundbreaking SARS art project

8. Moblogging is somehow involved into all that Next-Big-Thing stuff, so hell, there must be some money in it

9. She is a contributor to BoingBoing and they got over 3,5 mill. hits/month, so what do you want?

10. Hey, all these people who have previously worked for Venture/Silicon Alley Reporter have to pay bills, so why not hype the next hip hype again?

What qualifies Mark Cuban to participate as an "invited artist"?

1. His entire lift is totally dedicated to the arts

2. Sometimes he calls Cartier-Bresson to supervise him carefully

3. He has a "whatever-it-takes attitude"

4. He publishes a weblog

5. He has personally responded to thousands of emails

6. For Cuban the NBA is the "National Board of Artists" where he serves as the COO

7. He can smile

8. His SENT-pix show the distraction and diversity of life (his cat, his indoor slippers and his nail file)

9. None of this is true

10. He is a major contributor to Getty´s Photographers Choice with a proven track record

[Select the appropriate answers carefully. Please print out this form, fill it out and mail it to: Credit Suisse First Boston, One Cabot Square, London E14 4QJ, United Kingdom, or fax it to: 011 44 20 7888 1600. The last five transmittals will receive a free jpg-file of a Motorola or Nokia cameraphone. And don´t forget: Sony, Samsung, Siemens & all the others might soon initiate some other cameraphone exhibitions to report the latest developments in art, daily life of sport freaks, chimney-sweepers and homegrown japanese vegetables, so stay tuned!]

Phonecam Art Project SENT online

Update to these stories: "Moblogging Art Exhibitions MPPS and SENT: No more Hot Air Marketing Speeches this Time, please" and "Stunning and unselfish: RX Gallery in SF invents "Metaphotography" at Mobile Phone Photography Show"

The phonecam art show SENT exhibition has open its gates:

The SENT phonecam art project is comprised of two portions: one, images submitted by members of the public; the other, images submitted by a group of invited artists (photographers, filmmakers, and others). Images submitted by the public will be displayed at sentonline.com. They will also be displayed digitally during the gallery show in July, 2004. Images submitted by invited artists will be displayed at sentonline.com, and will also be shown in printed format on the gallery walls beginning July 9.

Manuel Wanskasmith, who participates in the SENT phonecam art show curated by Xeni Jardin and others, wrote in a comment here at Phototalk that he is working "on a different phonecam art project".

So next time we´ll post a review of the SENT show and hopefully something about the new project of Manuel.

New Tools for Uploading Photos, Videos and Audio to your Weblog

Upload of Video Content:

A weblogging tool, Ecto, has a new feature: Movie upload. It offers users an option to indicate how an uploaded movie is used in the weblog (blog) entry. There are two options: Ecto creates a link to the movie inside your blog entry. The second option: the movie is then inserted right into your blog entry. [via Cinema Minima]
[See also "NoteTaker, Ecto and TypePad taste good together"]

Upload of Photo Content:

Mac users on OS X who manage their photos in Apple's iPhoto will definitely want to try PhotoToTypePad. This neat little extension for iPhoto lets you export an album right into a TypePad photo album. [Typepad]

Upload of Audio Content:

audblog (signup for TypePad users) and Audioblog (check out the Audioblog TypePad site) are two services for posting audio to your Typepad weblog. [Typepad]

Photoblogging becomes international

...writes Metafilter and points to Photoblogs.org.
But:

How about photoblogs that aren't necessarily listed on photoblogs.org? Due to its former, highly unfair and arbitrary voting system, I can't get my own blog listed at the site.

"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?"

Update to this story: "Rumsfeld, Moblogging Soldiers, Cameraphones, Dumb Media"

Edwin Yapp in "It’s not the cellphone, stupid" (The Star, Malaysia):

WHO would have believed that the tiny, ubiquitous cellular phone would become one of the greatest enemies of the mighty US Defence Department?
Well, it has.
[..]
But now it would appear that Defence is going after camera-capable cellphones as if they were public enemy No 1.
[..]
All this talk about cellphones and digital cameras and their anarchic ways just ends up being a smokescreen obscuring the real issue. If only the White House paid as much attention to getting to the root of the problem, instead of fending off the PR flak.
In any case, the cellphone is just too useful a device for Rummy and gang to control. Brig. General Mark Kimmitt, deputy coalition director of military operations in Iraq, seems to realise this.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” the LA Times quoted him as saying. “Soldiers have cameras in the battlefield. They have telephones in the battlefield. They have access to Internet cafés on the base.
“At a certain point you just have to trust them to do the right thing.”
[..]
Banning the phones only serves to clip away the symptoms of the problem, and does not address the root problem.
[..]
Then they should be thanking the humble little cellphone camera for playing such a pivotal role in exposing these heinous acts.
And the soldier who leaked the pictures to the press? He should be awarded the Medal of Honour.

Zaku, a junior soldier currently in Iraq, responded on June 2 (!) to a posting from Joi Ito ("Rumsfeld bans camera phones in Iraq"):

A ban, on digital media? What kind of farce is this? We get packages from Amazon.com I own a laptop, have two digital cameras and a camcorder. I like to send pictures to my mother of how great this place is. She especially likes the mutant roaches crawling around the buildings. :P
The point is clear, everyone is out to make Rumsfield look like a total prick, which may or not be true. It doesn't matter to me. I've been in Iraq for beyond a year. As part of the First Armored Division, I've been extended 4 possible months here, but our orders clearly state we may be here until September.
The Army will not raid my supply and steal my digital camera. And they won't be taking my pin drive either. And they can't ban us from mostly anything. And that's the saddest part. "Fixing" the chain of command will do nothing. We're human beings, we're men trained to do what most people wouldn't think of doing. Believe me, we'll find way to work around it.
There is no ban on camera phones, or digital cameras in Iraq. At least not in Baghdad anyways. Perhaps a few secretive units, such as some unspoken MP brigades have possibly been gagged. But I somehow doubt that too. I hope that somehow settles it. Do I need to send in a picture to prove it? :D
[...]
---PFC "Zaku", 47th FSB 1AD

Might be good news if true. So we hope to see the old pictures from TheTiredanDirtySoldier/Yafro fighting in Iraq again. And new ones:

[© Sigepdebo, same one as here. However strange, you have to know the exact URL@Yafro to get the image -- we do so because we discovered the image weeks ago. Sigepdebo is still listed at Yafro, but if you click thru his moblog you´ll see that it does not officially contain this image and some others anymore. BTW: this is an example of a "collaborative family" moblog from Bagdad, thx to Xeni Jardin]

Related: "More on blocked sites for .mil websurfers" (BoingBoing). In return Joi Ito has asked Zaku if he or anyone else can or cannot confirm this. So finally we might step into a real conversation -- all without the big medias.

However a strange situation: people at the front are asked from people behind the frontlines if the people at the front have access to information delivered from the media industry via internet and secondly if those people at the front could send infos in form of text or images that the media industry cannot deliver about the situation of the people at the front to the people behind the frontlines... .

[Update July 10, 2004: It turned out that finally some/most of the images presented by one or more moblogging soldier at Yafro as an image taken by himself/themselves, were probably stolen; very often from professional photojournalists. Explanation here. We tried to assign a proper copyright to all photos of doubtful origin. The image shown above MIGHT be a personal photo, however the image is of doubtful origin]

[Latest Update here, Xeni at BoingBoing, June 9: "Update: blocked sites for .mil websurfers":

Invitation to all our readers

[© Debbie here]

Update to this story: "Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers VI" and Debbie who took some of the images shown there.

John from Camera/Iraq has asked if we can be of any assistance to him in finding more images from Iraq.

You all might have read or noticed that obviously more and more images from the moblogging US soldiers from Iraq at Yafro are simply disappearing -- for whatever reasons. But other websites and blogs are pretty new and online containing more and more images the traditional media industry is not showing, not printing and not discussing. Google or any other search engine won´t find these new sites for the moment. So if you ever stumple across a website with images you think might be of interest to the public audience -- please drop us an email at [phototalk2004 a t yahoo DOT COM; please do not email any jpgs, tiffs etc., only a link: this is a standard yahoo emailaccount with a 20 MB limitation] or write directly to John [see his site for the emailaddress].

What Camera/Iraq intends to do:

Camera/Iraq is a project of Carleton College's Cinema & Media Studies Department and Ratchet Up to gather news sources and commentary about public and personal photographic image practices associated with the War in Iraq. Visitors are invited to send pertinent links or writing [Please use the email link at the left, or comments below sections]. The site is intended to be a clearinghouse for thoughtful discussion rather than a locus of invective.
We need your links—help build this site : Representative US soldier photo galleries/blogs; perspectives on images from a Middle Eastern point of view; analysis of Middle Eastern photo practices and cultural mores relating to photography and images; non-US [but English language] perspectives in general; pertinent contextualizing articles on war and photography; perspectives on "embedded" journalist photography; and your ideas!
Any site that collects controversial images and commentary runs the risk of becoming one-stop shopping for atrocity photos. This is not our intention.

And finally what Hobbsonline writes about Debbie:

I just stumbled across an extensive online photo gallery posted by Cpl. Debbie Prieve, a solider with the 101st Airborne, documenting what she saw and experienced in Iraq - the good and the bad. Many of the photos are simply stunning. [...] If you really want to know the complete picture of what is going on in Iraq, don't trust the media to tell you... .Get online and find the hundreds of blogs and photo websites being posted by Americans serving in the war and by Iraqis whose country is the central battleground.

Thank you for your help! Become a part of a huge project.

[© Debbie here]

Dirty for Dirty: A Grunt's Eye-View of the War in Iraq

As a supplement to the story "Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers VI" Kevin Sites Blog has new images and new interviews: "Dirty for Dirty: A Grunt's Eye-View of the War in Iraq". The incident reported at the end of the article

While Alpha Company spends the next few hours trying to tow the sunken $5 million Bradley out of the canal

was also covered by at least one moblogging US soldier at Yafro. Last time we saw those detailed 3 -4 images was three days ago. There were shorts sentences under each of the images describing the situation. We did not download those images, we did not store them. Now that Kevin´s Dirty for Dirty: A Grunt's Eye-View of the War in Iraq has the background and the greater picture:

But then we hear reports that a second vehicle has gone into the drink as well. This one from Alpha Company--and the situation is much worse. At the site, a quarter mile away, only the top of the Bradley's turret is exposed; the rest lies submerged in seven feet of water. The driver, relying on his night vision, didn't have the depth perception to see the deep canal.
The Bradley filled up with water in seconds.
[...]
Sgt. Christopher Lee Merrill was able to get the troop hatch open and get his soldiers out--but while he was struggling to get his body armor off he was sinking to the bottom.

"I forced myself up to the top one more time, screamed for help and one of my soldiers grabbed me," he says.

But the longest swim was left for the Bradley's driver, 18-year-old Ferdinand Delarosa, who couldn't open the driver's hatch above him because it was underwater.

"As soon as I tried to take a breath inside the driver's hatch I got pure water."

...it´s too late. The images were taken down... gone away. Could have been an example how an incident is covered by the soldiers who were present during the incident and a journalist reporting about the incident later. Taken down and why?

But when an American soldier does die, nearly 800 since the invasion of Iraq, each here says they don't want those sacrifices to be hidden. They're angry about a Pentagon ban on photographs showing American flag-draped coffins from Iraq being unloaded at Dover Air Base. They were happy to see the photographs made it into the newspapers anyway.

"It shows all the Americans who aren't here what's happening," says David Anderson, "how many are giving their lives for their country and what they're doing over here."

Read full article: "Dirty for Dirty: A Grunt's Eye-View of the War in Iraq".

Nokia 7610: New Box with a lot of Toys in it

Normally we don´t talk about hardware, but -- like the Ricoh Caplio GX -- no rules without exceptions:

Update to "Pro working with a Camera Phone", "Lifeblog by Nokia: No publishing to the Web and not for Mac" and these stories: (3; 4):

Nokia has begun shipping the camera phone Nokia 7610 with video-editing and mobile-blogging features in Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.
The phone maker said its 7610 phone can capture, edit, store, print and send pictures and videos. The handset comes with a Kodak application designed to let users upload pictures to a virtual photo album on the Web.
[...] Nokia recently announced a site called Lifeblog that lets subscribers archive cell phone photos in chronological order, along with other data, including text, video and audio, using a personal mobile Web log, or "moblog. (Dinesh C. Sharma, News.com)

The Nokia 7610 allows videos up to 10 minutes and ships with a 1 MP camera, Symbian, 8 MByte RAM/64 MB Reduced Size MMC and other meanwhile normal features as Bluetooth and USB.
Nice toy for adult children for something around $600.

"The point wasn't to make a lot of money. The point was to change the world"

About Joi Ito, one of the first mobloggers in the world, leading the international and mobile operations of Technorati and through his venture capital company Neoteny Co. Ltd. one of the investors behind SixApart (MoveableType and Typepad), in "Japanese Internet star spreads blogging gospel":

He is "visiting 190 blogs regularly and averaging five hours a day reading and writing blogs"

"People thought we were crazy. [Creating Japan's first Web pages] we had great confidence because we saw that it was going to be giant one day," said Cyrus Shaoul, one of Ito's international-school buddies. "The point wasn't to make a lot of money. The point was to change the world."

Ito believes blogging will one day prove as influential as the printing press."Blogging will fundamentally change the (way) people interact with media and politics"

Stunning and unselfish: RX Gallery in SF invents "Metaphotography" at Mobile Phone Photography Show (MPPS)

Update to this story:
"Moblogging Art Exhibitions MPPS and SENT: No more Hot Air Marketing Speeches this Time, please".

RX Gallery describes that the Mobile Phone Photography Show (MPPS) "allows participants from around the world to send photographs taken with their mobile phones. This participatory installation will capture and process thousands of mobile phone photographs sent in by participants from all over the world."

[©Mrs. Johnson]

After what has happened or will happen to the "OneWorld/OneDay Project" (1;2) of the C | summit Cameraphones 2004 ("A presentation about a proposed non-profit project is based on the goal of documenting the beauty and passion of all human life for one 24 hour period on Valentines Day of the year 2005 by 100,000 cameraphones, photographers and videographers throughout the world. The project will coordinate access to celebrities for student film makers and photographers. We believe that this would become the most valuable reference for anthropologists in five hundred years"), we predicted not fully unmalicious that these MPPS and SENT shows would somehow lead to something like this:

We´ll see. Our blasphemous answer to "This is, we admit, just a theory": this will end in an event with thousands, maybe millions cloned images of cloned John Smithes:

"Hi, I´m John Smith from Houston, TX. Here you can see my girlfriend kissing me."

"Hi, I´m John Smith from Wellington. Here you watch me kissing my girlfriend."

"Hi, I´m John Smith from Edinburgh. Here can you see my Ex-girlfriend kissing her new boyfriend."

"Hi, I´m John Smith from Vancouver. Here can you see the Ex-boyfriend of my Ex-girlfriend kissing my sister."

And finally someone might (utmost conjunctive mood available) say:

Hi, I´m with the XYZ Gallery; it is a Wine&Sake Bar/Lounge. You know, we got all these bills and payrolls, now that we are the Best Art Gallery in SF and around. You know, MPPS is nice: you bring in the pix, we add some meaning to it, somehow hazy, blurred, fuzzy and bit of buzz around...we got someone to write about it...finally somehow it´s art...everyone´s happy. ("You don´t have to be a genius. You don´t have to be superhuman. You don´t even have to be a techie. Just have an idea." Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift)

Jeanne Carstensen (SF Gate) finally has visited the Mobile Phone Photography Show at RX Gallery in SF ("Cellph Portrait, Mobile Phone Photography Show at RX Gallery") and has done an excellent job to metawrite about metaphotography. If the MMPS is only one tenth as interesting as the cascade of words at SF Gate, The Mobile Phone Photo Show on the other side of the Oakland Bridge is definetely worth a visit: on view through June 18, 132 Eddy Street @ Mason (hey, and remember, Typepad will be down later today, so no need to sit in front of your blank mac display tonight). Jeanne Carstensen writes:

[...]in short, casual visual jottings from inside the quiteness of daily life.
[...]Another thing that stands out is the insubstantiality of the images, the sense of impermanence.
[...]the thrill of zapping a photo to a friend in Brooklyn as you stand on a street corner in London. Who knows if you'll ever look at that photo again?
[...]Susan Sontag pointed out...this endless flow of personal imagery...means photographs have become "less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated."
[...]The final photograph -- will it even be saved on a hard disk or printed out? -- is not necessarily imagined as a permanent, possibly incriminating object.
[...]As the number of images grows -- they're up to about 1,500 [350 participants from 50 countries] -- a patchwork of an estimated 10,000 photographs will eventually cover most of the wall, creating what co-curators Kurt Bigenho and Greg Crowley call a global "metaphotograph."
[...]But the low-res aesthetic of camera-phone photography also has a homey appeal, reminiscent of the slightly soft or unfocused look of early Polaroid cameras or the plastic Holga, loved by art students everywhere for the effects of its light leaks and imprecise, watery lens.
[...]Two of the hottest issues surrounding camera-phone use, however, are not explored deeply in this show.

And for these issues and the truly remarkable last two sentences with "love" and "affair"-- read the article.

[via Alan Reiter, where we finally had to learn that his suggestions to Xeni Jardin regarding the SENT project never found an answer. Let´s see what the future brings.]
[Update May 31: see also "Camera Phone Mural"]