[CRAPLITE]

For all you STROBISTS out there...a before and after technique shot

2008-04-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

Photo with Flash...

2008-04-24T11:20:00.001-07:00

Ponies

2008-04-09T02:47:00.001-07:00

The pony parable

Once upon a time, there were two twin brothers. One was an absolute pessimist and one was an absolute optimist.

One day, some psychologists performed an experiment with the boys. In the experiment, the young pessimist was placed in a room filled with all the newest toys. The young optimist was placed in a room filled with horse dung.

They were each left alone in these rooms for two hours. Then, the psychologists interviewed the boys.

When the psychologists opened the door to the room filled with new toys, they found the young pessimist sitting in the middle of the floor crying. They asked him what was wrong.

He spent the next four hours detailing how he could be hurt or killed by each and every item in the room.

When the psychologists opened the door to the room filled with horse dung, they found the young optimist laughing and throwing manure around the room.

The shocked psychologists said to the young optimist, "We placed you in a room filled with horse dung. What could you possibly be so happy about?"

The young optimist turned to them, pointed at the manure and said with glee, "With all this horse poop, there's got to be a pony somewhere."

This is photojournalism. If you look for the ponies, you'll find them. Good luck with your search.

the public

2008-03-31T03:03:00.000-07:00

March 22, 2008
Street photographers fear for their art amid climate of suspicion
With public concern rising over paedophilia and terrorism, street photographers face new difficulties
Linton Chiswick

Matt Stuart photographs the unscripted drama of the London streets. Entirely spontaneous, his pictures are made possible by a combination of instinct, cunning and happy coincidence, revealing the beauty and significance of the everyday - what the rest of us see but don't notice, moments that vanish faster than the blink of an eye.

For his efforts, Stuart has picked up a little collection of pink stop-and-search slips, souvenirs of practising a century-old art form in a city increasingly paranoid and authoritarian. After 11 years, Stuart is something of an old hand. Using the street photographer's traditional tool of choice - the discreet and near silent Leica camera - he knows how to make himself invisible, make an image and move on. He rarely runs into trouble; when he does, he knows his rights.

Others aren't so adept. In the past year, the photography blogs have buzzed with tales of harassment, even violence. There's the war photographer who dodged bullets abroad only to be beaten up in his own South London backyard by a paranoid parent who (wrongly) thought his child was being photographed. There's the amateur photographer punched prostrate in the London Tube after refusing to give up his film to a stranger; the case of the man in Hull, swooped on by police after taking photographs in a shopping centre. “Any person who appears to be taking photos in a covert manner should expect to be stopped and spoken to by police ...” ran the Humberside force's statement.

Now, a new poster campaign by the Metropolitan Police is inviting Londoners to call a hotline if they don't like the look of a photographer. “Thousands of people take photos every day,” runs the text. “What if one of them seems odd?” The poster states that terrorists use cameras for surveillance. Life with a camera might be about to turn tougher.

“People need to understand the context,” Stuart says. “We've been mistaken for paparazzi and attacked since Princess Diana died. As far as the public's concerned, if you're a man with a camera you're probably a paedophile. And now, if we look ‘odd', we're also more than likely terrorists.”

To some, the very idea of covertly photographing strangers might seem “odd”, even distasteful. And yet a proportion of those same people will own a print of Robert Doisneau's Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville, or have sent greetings cards showing 1930s Paris, as recorded by Brassai. Street photography has given us a lot. More, perhaps, than we know.

Jeff Mermelstein is one of the art's great practitioners. He's been photographing New York since the 1970s and his book Sidewalk is a masterpiece. Speaking on a mobile phone from the street, he's concerned by London's poster campaign: “I think that's awful. Street photography is an important part of the documentation of our time. If that's discouraged, in the long term that will be a substantial loss. Some of the most significant images in any art medium in the last 150 years have been made in the street by people like Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus and Robert Frank.”

Street photography doesn't just document what our environment used to look like; it shows us how it really looks now, freezing the moment to reveal the weirdness and magic of the split second ... Stuart's photograph of a young dancer, in mid-air, upside-down, in Trafalgar Square ... Mermelstein's of a woman out walking her pet iguana. These images reveal the surreal in the real, force us to appreciate that our city spaces are collages of constantly shifting, surprising juxtaposition.

I ask Mermelstein whether he's ever hesitated before recording a complete stranger. He says he has ... “but I believe firmly that if something's in the public domain then one has the right to render them photographically. That if you're out on the street, you're in public.

“I try to avoid engagement,” he says. “It's very hard to explain to a layman in the midst of their anger that I'm a fine-art street photographer working in a grand tradition.”

Stuart dislikes the double standard that fights for the freedom to shoot documentary photographs of life in Iraq and Afghanistan but gets squeamish about invading privacy when recording our own cities. Instead, “the Sunday newspapers show aspirational images of what we'd like to be, not what we are.” But aren't there times when he'd rather not be photographed? “Living in London I'm filmed 300 times a day by CCTV, so I've got over that quickly.”

Sophie Howarth is a curator specialising in street photography. She says she's noticed - despite the difficulties - a boom for the art, enabled by technology, and with London at the centre. “In France, traditionally one of the great centres of street photography, the law now says you own the rights to your own image, so street photography's become a dead art. In London there's a growing community of photographers, using digi- tal technology, not just cameras, but blogs, too, to document the city and give each other instant feedback.”

And it's on these blogs that the Met's poster campaign has been getting reaction. There's a sense of anger and disappointment - suspicion, too - that the poster might be a stepping stone toward banning public photography. There's also humour, as photographers use their Photoshop skills to mock the poster. “Millions of people take photos every day,” says one. “Some of them are brown. Please do not shoot them.”

And, in a way, that's the point. Never stated, but clear nonetheless, is that Asian photographers and tourists are most likely to be affected day-to-day by this poster. For everybody else, it's about the cumulative damage done by suspicion.

Mermelstein was on the streets of New York on September 11, 2001. His images are among the most moving taken that day, arguably contributing significantly to our understanding of the grief and pain. But he's not impressed by the Met's campaign.

“I'm not going to belittle the issue of terrorism, but this is paranoia. And unfortunately, since Lady Di and now this link with terrorists, photography's seen by many people as something that's a little ... cheap.”

Stuart adds: “It seems to make the case that photographers are sneaky or sinister. It's irresponsible of the authorities to make life any harder for photographers. I think it was Elliott Erwitt who said, ‘I have never hurt anybody with a camera.' I go out there with a completely clean conscience; I don't have any worries about what I do. We all just want to be safe.”

Street photography on the net

www.in-public.com

A showcase of contemporary street photographers, including work by Matt Stuart, plus a “masters” section, featuring the brilliant and influential Joel Meyerowitz.

www.seconds2real.com

An international street photography collective, with a newsletter, and links to interviews by and films of masters of the art.

www.public-life.org

A German-based collective, including galleries, news and book reviews.

www.billcharles.com/merm/jeffmermelstein_1.htm

Work by Jeff Mermelstein, chronicler of New York.

www.magnumphotos.com

The world's most famous photographic agency includes work by some of the pioneers and masters of street photography, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt.

Sleep tight....

2008-03-28T04:05:00.000-07:00

Bulletproof "anti-terrorist" bed with air-supply, toilet
Posted by Cory Doctorow, March 28, 2008 3:15 AM | permalink
This appears not to be a joke: the Quantum Sleeper is a bed that hermetically seals itself as you sleep to protect you from "Bio-Chemical terrorist attack," "natural disaster," "kidnappers/stalkers" (only those who don't possess a forklift, surely) and affords "Bulletproof 'Saferoom' protection."

1.25" Polycarbonate Bulletproof Plating/Shielding
Bio-Chemical Filtered Ventilation
Rebreather
Control Panel Mode Selection (i.e., Basic System Ops., Intruder Setting, Energy Status, Lock Down, etc.)
Cover & Door Actuators w/ Emergency Release
One way see through head cover (reflective mirror on 2 sides and front)
Safety Features (Proximity Sensor, O2 Sensor, Smoke Det., Motion Det. Ect,)
Emergency Communication system (Cellular, Short-wave Radio, CB ect.)
Audio Amplifier (Amplify sound from out side unit)

Air/Water Tight Sealing
External Override Key Pad & Remote Control
Battery Backup Power
Toiletry system

worth the read...THE IMAGE OF IRAQ.

2008-03-26T03:28:00.007-07:00

Exposure: The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib
By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
The New Yorker

Monday 24 March 2008

All that the soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, a Reserve unit out of Cresaptown, Maryland, knew about America's biggest military prison in Iraq, when they arrived there in early October of 2003, was that it was on the front lines. Its official name was Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib. Never mind that military doctrine and the Geneva Conventions forbid holding prisoners in a combat zone, and require that they be sped to the rear; you had to make the opposite sort of journey to get to Abu Ghraib. You had to travel along some of the deadliest roads in the country, constantly bombed and frequently ambushed, into the Sunni Triangle. The prison squatted on the desert, a wall of sheer concrete traced with barbed wire, picketed by watchtowers. "Like something from a Mad Max movie," Sergeant Javal Davis, of the 372nd, said. "Just like that - like, medieval." There were more than two and a half miles of wall with twenty-four towers, enclosing two hundred and eighty acres of prison ground. And inside, Davis said, "it's nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot."

The prisoners - several thousand of them, clad in orange - were crowded behind concertina wire. "The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost," Davis said. "They're in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn't want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it - the place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy."

The M.P.s of the 372nd were told to make themselves at home in an abandoned prison block, a compound ravaged by looters and invaded by the desert. The sand lay several inches deep in places, mixed with decomposing trash. Moving in meant digging out and sweeping up, and when you'd purged the debris - weird stuff, some of it; for instance, used syringes, which just made you wonder - what you had were bare prison cells. The military term of art for the place where soldiers sleep and bathe and eat on base is L.S.A., which means "life-support area," and at other forward operating bases around Iraq an L.S.A. meant climate-controlled tents and a mess hall, electricity and hot water, a gym and an Internet café, phones and satellite television, PX shops and fast-food joints. A proper L.S.A. is an outpost of the motherland, and it affirms the sense of pride and tribe that is essential to morale and discipline. At Abu Ghraib, showers were wooden sheds with cold-water drums propped overhead. The unit had no field kitchen, so chow was combat rations - M.R.E.s, meals-ready-to-eat - breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a cardboard box; everything in a polymer packet.

Nobody had expected luxury at Saddam Hussein's old prison, but morale was low to begin with - the M.P.s just wanted to know when they were going home - and there was something about living in cells at Abu Ghraib that never felt right. "We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building," Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. "It was this huge circular thing. We just didn't know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people, for all we knew - bodies." Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. "It had bones in it," he said, and he called it the crematorium. "But hey, you're at war," he said. "Suck it up or drive on."

The autumn nights were getting cold in the desert, down to forty degrees, which felt colder in a concrete box, where the wind blew in through empty window frames. From some of those windows you could look out over the prison's perimeter wall into the windows of an apartment complex in the city of Abu Ghraib, a sprawling Baghdad suburb long dominated by Saddam's Baath Party functionaries, and the people in those apartments could look back at you. As the M.P.s unpacked their kit in their new quarters, they were told that snipers sometimes made use of this arrangement to shoot into the prison. The trick was not to make yourself a target: stay away from the windows, keep your lamps dim and covered - don't cast a shadow.

On her first night at the prison, Specialist Sabrina Harman, a twenty-six-year-old M.P. from Virginia, wrote a letter home to the woman she called her wife:

Kelly

Its 9:00 pm and we can hear shots - no white lights are allowed to be on at night no leaving the building after dark. I hope we aren't here long! We drove in and two helicopters were landed taking prisoners off.

I'm scared of helicopters because of the dream. I think I wrote it down before. I saw a helicopter and it looked like the tail was swaying back and forth then it did it again then a huge flame/round shot up and it exploded. I turned around and we were under attack, I didn't have my weapon (gun) so all we could do was hide under these picknick tables. So back to the prison ... we get to our buildings and I step out of my truck right in front of a picknick table. - I almost freaked out. I have a bad feeling about this place. I want to leave as soon as possible! We are still hoping to be home X-mas or soon after. -

I love you.

I'm going to get some sleep.

I'll write you again soon.

Please don't give up on me!

Sabrina

Like many young reservists, Harman had joined the Army to help pay for college. She had never imagined that she'd see war, and Iraq often felt unreal to her; "like a dream," she said. Then she had that dream - about a gunman shooting at a helicopter from a date palm while she hid, unarmed, beneath a picnic table - and it was all too real. "And it kind of came true, maybe two or three weeks later," she said. "Down the road, they started shooting helicopters from date trees."

That was in Al Hillah, a Shiite town near the ruins of ancient Babylon, sixty miles south of Baghdad, where the 372nd M.P.s had been stationed since they started arriving in Iraq, in May. Having sat out the Shock and Awe phase of the invasion at Fort Lee, in Virginia, they were sent in through Kuwait shortly after George W. Bush, standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner, declared, in May of 2003, that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" - and in Al Hillah, during that first summer of the war, they had. The M.P.s felt safe walking the streets; they made friends among the Iraqis, played with the kids, shopped in the markets, shared meals at the outdoor cafés. Their headquarters, in an abandoned date-processing factory, were minimally fortified, and were never attacked. Their mission was to provide combat support for the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which controlled the city, and to train local policemen for duty under a new national government. They understood their presence to be temporary, expecting that America would hand over the country to democratically elected Iraqis by summer's end, then get out of the way.

To Harman, the assignment felt like a peacekeeping mission, not a tour of combat, and she wasn't complaining. She was known in the unit as someone who hated to see or do violence. "Sabrina literally would not hurt a fly," her team leader, Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, said. "If there's a fly on the floor and you go to step on it, she will stop you." Specialist Jeremy Sivits, a mechanic in the company's motor pool, said, "We'd try to kill a cricket, because it kept us up all night in the tent. She would push us out of the way to get to this cricket, and would go running out of the tent with it. She could care less if she got sleep, as long as that cricket was safe." That made Sivits laugh, but he worried that she wouldn't survive a firefight. Joyner agreed. "As a soldier, you can't allow your heart to get in the way sometimes, because the moment you do you may get killed or may get someone else killed," he said. "But with Sabrina, I think she would have made a better humanitarian than a soldier, and I don't mean that in a negative way." Sivits couldn't figure why she had joined the military. "She was just too nice to be a soldier," he said.

Harman said that she had wanted to be a cop, like her father and her brother, and her idea was to become a forensic photographer. Pictures had always fascinated her. She made an album of the snapshots people took of her: a diapered toddler in a blue knit cap sitting beside a yellow telephone, her mouth wide open with mirth; a little girl with perfectly combed and bobbed bangs, kneeling in an elaborately frilled dress, white stockings, and white gloves, on a green carpet against a studio backdrop of rampantly blooming cherry trees; a girl riding a pony; a teen-age girl with head shorn to a boyish crop, wearing dungarees and boots and a loose oversized flannel shirt beneath a loose black leather motorcycle jacket; a young woman squinting in a sun-blasted parking lot, wearing full camouflage - helmet, flak jacket, cargo pants - and carrying a riot baton. It was an ordinary album except for one thing: the directness with which she met the camera, eye to eye, looking frankly through the lens as if she were the one taking the picture.

She liked to look. She might recoil from violence, but she was drawn to its aftermath. When others wanted to look away, she'd want to look more closely. Wounded and dead bodies fascinated her. "She would not let you step on an ant," Sergeant Davis said. "But if it dies she'd want to know how it died." And taking pictures fascinated her. "Even if somebody is hurt, the first thing I think about is taking photos of that injury," Harman said. "Of course, I'm going to help them first, but the first reaction is to take a photo." In July, she wrote to her father, "On June 23 I saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!" Later, she paid a visit to an Al Hillah morgue and took pictures: mummified bodies, smoked by decay; extreme closeups of their faces, their lifeless hands, the torn flesh and bone of their wounds; a punctured chest, a severed foot. The photographs are ripe with forensic information. Harman also had her picture taken at the morgue, leaning over one of the blackened corpses, her sun-flushed cheek inches from its crusted eye sockets. She is smiling - a forced but lovely smile - and her right hand is raised in a fist, giving the thumbs-up, as she usually did when a camera was pointed at her.

"I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hillah," Harman said. "Whenever I get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands, so I probably have a thumbs-up because it's just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo you want to smile." There are at least twenty photos from Al Hillah in which she is in the identical pose, same smile, same thumbs-up: bathing in an inflatable wading pool; holding a tiny lizard; standing at the foot of a wall that bears a giant bas-relief of Saddam (the button of his suit jacket is bigger than her head); fooling around with her best Army buddy, Megan Ambuhl, who is giving her the finger and flashing a tongue stud; holding a tiny figurine of Jesus; holding a long, phallic melon; mounting the ancient stone lion of Babylon at the ruins of King Nebuchadnezzar's city; leaning over the shoulder of an M.P. buddy who is holding a Fanta can on top of which sits a dead cat's head; and so on.

The cat's head was one of Harman's gags. She had a kitten that was killed by a dog, and since it had no visible wounds she performed a rough autopsy, discovered organ damage, and then an M.P. buddy mummified its head. They gave it pebbles for eyes, and Sabrina photographed it in various inventive settings: on a bus seat with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, wearing a tiny camouflage boonie hat, floating on a little pillow in the wading pool, with flowers behind its ears. She took more than ninety photographs and two videos of it. The series, in its weird obsessiveness and dark comedy, has the quality of conceptual art. At one time or another, at least fifteen of Harman's fellow-M.P.s posed for photos with the cat head; several senior officers and a number of Iraqi men and boys also took the time to have their pictures taken with it. The cat head had become a fetish object, like Huckleberry Finn's dead cat, which Tom Sawyer admires - a scene that Norman Rockwell illustrated in a folksy print captioned "Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff!"

Much of Harman's photo album from Al Hillah looks like a fantasy travel brochure for post-Saddam Iraq: here she is, skin aglow, beaming, amid swarms of joyous Iraqi children - children clambering into her lap, throwing their arms around her, mobbing her in the streets; here she is welcomed into local homes by mustached men in dishdashas bearing tiny cups of tea; here she is visiting the antiquities, with a Bedouin and his camel at the ziggurat of Borsippa, and with fellow-soldiers at the Ishtar gate of Babylon; and here she is in camouflage, with her arm around a pregnant woman swathed in black, her hand on the future-full belly, the woman grinning. Harman bought her Iraqi friends clothes and food and toys. She bought one family a refrigerator, and made sure it was stocked. Sergeant Joyner said, "The Iraqi kids - you couldn't go anywhere without them saying, 'Sabrina, Sabrina.' They just loved themselves some Sabrina. She'll get these kids balloons, toys, sodas, crackers, cookies, snacks, sweet rolls, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Twinkies, she didn't care. She would do anything she could to make them kids smile."

Still, the welcome in Al Hillah was brittle. The Americans had not brought what they'd promised: a new order. The war wasn't over, Iraq had no government, the liberators had become occupiers, and the occupation was slapdash, improvised, and inadequate - at best, a disappointment, and more often an insult. So, in the fever heat, month after month of a hundred and ten and a hundred and twenty degrees, alienation set in. Frustration gave way to hostility, hostility gave way to violence, and by summer's end the violence against Americans was increasingly organized. It was demoralizing. Every Iraqi might be the enemy. What was the point of being there, unwanted? Nobody from the 372nd was killed in Al Hillah, but on patrols there was shooting, in the night there were explosions, and Sabrina had her nightmare. At least the picnic tables had seemed to her fanciful, the random furniture of dreamscapes - until she got to Abu Ghraib, and there they were.

As the 372nd M.P.s arrived at Abu Ghraib, they learned that two Military Intelligence officers had just been killed there in a mortar attack that had left a dozen other soldiers badly wounded, and it didn't take long before the M.P.s had their own but-for-this and but-for-that stories of near misses. "A few nights after we got here ... we were sitting in a meeting and heard 3 thumps then explosion," Harman wrote to Kelly. A firefight ensued. "Next day," she wrote, "found out it was an IED (bomb planted in a Coke can wired to a clicker) blew up a vehicle (no one hurt) then they chased down the 3 men that did it and killed them."

It was said that Abu Ghraib was the most-attacked American base in Iraq at the time. The prison made an obvious target for insurgents: immense and immobile and poorly defended, an outpost of the military occupation in its most despised aspect - holding Iraqis captive. At first, the attacks came at nightfall, around the time that the muezzins' call to prayer was broadcast from loudspeakers atop nearby minarets. "When the mosque was playing, that was mortar o'clock," Sabrina Harman said. "In Al Hillah it was kind of soothing and relaxing, and when you get to Abu it was completely different. When they were praying, that's when you knew you were going to get hit at Abu Ghraib."

With time, the attacks ceased to adhere to such a tight schedule. Mortars began falling by day, and Harman said, "I was more afraid of walking outside or going to take a shower. I pretty much didn't. I would use baby wipes. I kind of went infantry for the time I was there, maybe shower once or twice a month if I had to. The showers were outside. They were made of wood, and if a mortar hit, you were going to die. If I could've peed inside, I probably would have." She said, "You had to go to the showers and the bathroom with your flak vest on." At Abu Ghraib, Javal Davis said, even sleep was no refuge. He hated the thought that he could be killed without knowing it: "I always used to say, 'God, if I go out, if I have to die, don't take me in my sleep. I want to feel it.'"

The soldiers had a drill to follow during an attack: run, grab your body armor, run, crowd into a shelter, and wait. After a while, hardly anybody bothered. "If you get hit, you get hit. There's really nothing you could do," Harman said. "If they got lucky, they hit somebody." For the most part, the mortars fell on empty ground: nobody was hurt, no property damaged. But the randomness and imprecision of the persistent bombardments heightened the sense that no place was safe.

Of course, the prisoners in the tented camps couldn't move, and as mortars kept falling on Abu Ghraib, prisoners kept getting killed and maimed. These casualties were promptly recorded in Serious Incident Reports on the military security networks. Then the dead were removed and their remains were sent to a morgue, while the wounded were treated at the prison clinic or, if the damage was severe, evacuated to a hospital before being returned to the camps. The Americans running the prison knew that it was their duty to protect their prisoners, and they knew that at Abu Ghraib that was impossible.

The 372nd M.P.s assumed they had been sent to Abu Ghraib because it was dangerous. They were combat M.P.s, trained to support the operations of front-line forces - to conduct route reconnaissance, escort convoys, run patrols, go on raids. They were abundantly armed and travelled with a fleet of heavy vehicles. "We thought we were going to go kick some behind around the prison and help them out," Sergeant Davis said. "But that's not what happened. Once we got there, they told our guys, no, we're going to be prison guards."

The new assignment - to run one of the overcrowded tented camps and the indoor prison complex known, on account of its concrete-bunker-like solidity, as the hard site - bewildered the company. Combat units don't run prisons. That is the province of another cadre of M.P.s, known as internment and resettlement M.P.s, who are trained according to the Army's extensive doctrine on handling all manner of wartime captives and displaced persons. The 372nd M.P.s had no such specialized experience. A couple of them worked as corrections officers back home, but that gave them no exposure to the Geneva Conventions, and the rest of them didn't know the first thing about prison work. Their company commander, Captain Donald Reese, was a window-blinds salesman in civilian life.

Although they did not know it at the time, the lack of experience and training in handling prisoners in wartime made the soldiers of the 372nd ideally suited to Abu Ghraib, where almost nothing was run according to military doctrine. Since May, 2003, America's war in Iraq had been waged as a chapter in the war on terror, and the military's long-standing rules for running prisons in wartime had largely been ignored. By midsummer, the great majority of prisoners of war who were seized during the invasion had been released. Those who remained in captivity - along with all new prisoners seized by the military - were designated "security detainees," a label that had gained currency in the war on terror, to describe "unlawful combatants" and other prisoners who had been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and secrecy, without judicial recourse. The great majority of the prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were designated security detainees, and placed under the authority of Military Intelligence officers, who instructed the M.P.s on how to treat them.

Later, when the photographs of crimes committed against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were made public, the blame focussed overwhelmingly on the Military Police officers who were assigned to guard duty in the Military Intelligence cellblock - Tiers 1A and 1B - of the hard site. The low-ranking reservist soldiers who took and appeared in the infamous images were singled out for opprobrium and punishment; they were represented, in government reports, in the press, and before courts-martial, as rogues who acted out of depravity. Yet the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President's office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.

The Abu Ghraib rules, promulgated by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, elaborated on the interrogation rules for Guantánamo Bay, which had been issued by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; they were designed to create far more license than restriction for interrogators who sought to break prisoners. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were enlisted as enforcers of such practices as sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory disorientation, and the imposition of physical and psychological pain. They never received a standard operating procedure to define what was required and what was allowed, but were repeatedly instructed simply to follow the guidance of Military Intelligence officers. An orthodox standard operating procedure leaves nothing to the imagination, and as Megan Ambuhl settled into her job it occurred to her that the absence of a code was the code at Abu Ghraib. "They couldn't say that we broke the rules because there were no rules," she said. And by taking pictures of the prisoners on the M.I. block the M.P.s demonstrated two things: that they never fully accepted what was happening as normal, and that they assumed they had nothing to hide.

By way of orientation, the soldiers of the 372nd who were assigned guard duty at the hard site were given a tour of the place. They saw the ordinary cellblocks for Iraqi criminals and the highly restricted M.I. block, where the most "high value" security detainees were held, during and pending interrogation, in single-occupancy cells. "That's when I saw the nakedness," Javal Davis said. "I'm like, 'Hey, Sarge, why is everyone naked?' You know - 'Hey, that's the M.I. That's what the M.I. does. That's the M.I. thing. I don't know.' 'Why do these guys have on women's panties?' Like - 'It's to break them.'" Davis was wide-eyed. "Guys handcuffed in stress positions, in cells, no lights, no windows. Open the door, turn the light on - 'Oh my God, Allah.' Click, turn the light off, close the door. It's like, Whoa, what is that? What the hell is up with all this stuff? Something's not right here."

A delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited the M.I. block of the hard site between October 9 and 12, 2003, and had much the same reaction that Sergeant Davis had. The Geneva Conventions require that I.C.R.C. delegates be given unrestricted access to military prisons, to monitor conditions and interview prisoners in private. At Abu Ghraib, however, they reported that there were "many obstacles" to their mission, "imposed, apparently, at the behest of Military Intelligence," and what they were permitted to see and hear did not please them: men held naked in bare, lightless cells, paraded naked down the hallways, verbally and physically threatened, and so forth. The Red Cross was not reassured when M.I. officers explained that these abuses were part of the interrogation process; and the delegates were indignant when they were told that they wouldn't be allowed to see some prisoners. They broke off their visit, and came back two weeks later to complete their inspection. Based on their two visits, the I.C.R.C. reported that the Military Intelligence operation at Abu Ghraib was plagued by gross and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions - physical abuses that left prisoners rattled by psychological trauma: "incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions ... suicidal ideas."

On occasion, interrogators told the M.P.s to reward a prisoner - give him a better meal or a pack of cigarettes and let him smoke in his cell - as an incentive for coöperation in interrogation. But mostly what interrogators wanted when they asked for "special treatment" was punishment: take away his mattress, keep him awake, take away his clothes, or "P.T." him - that is, put him through a "physical training" regimen that might range from squat thrusts and low-crawling naked over concrete to being slapped and knocked around while hooded and made to stand on a cardboard box all night.

The M.P.s on the M.I. cellblock never learned the prisoners' names. Officially, they referred to their wards by their five-digit prison numbers, but the numbering system was confusing, and the numbers told you nothing about a person, which made them hard to remember. So the soldiers gave the prisoners nicknames based on their looks and their behavior. A prisoner who made a shank and tried to stab someone was Shank, and a prisoner who got hold of a razor blade and cut himself was called Slash. A prisoner who kept spraying himself and his cell with water and was always asking for a broom was Mr. Clean. A prisoner who repeatedly soaked his mattress with water was Swamp Thing.

There was a man they called Smiley, and a man they called Froggy, and a man they called Piggy. There was a man with no fingers on one hand, only a thumb, who was called Thumby - not to be confused with the enormous man called the Claw or Dr. Claw, because one of his hands was frozen in a half-clenched curl. The man they called Santa Claus was also called Snowman. There was the man they called Taxi Driver, because he'd been arrested while driving a cab, and there was a gaunt man they called Gus, but nobody knew why that name had stuck, and he was also sometimes called Mr. Burns, after the scrawny villain on "The Simpsons."

The nicknames made the prisoners both more familiar and more like cartoon characters, which kept them comfortably unreal when it was time to mete out punishment. Hydrue Joyner took credit for many of the nicknames. "It was jail, but, you know, you can still laugh in jail," he said. Javal Davis, who had spent six years in the Army, "expecting to learn a career field, get some benefits for college, get a step ahead of my peers, get discipline, become a man," enjoyed gallows humor as much as the next guy. The problem was that when you spend your nights doing nasty things to people you've got to endure them yourself. Davis had violence in him, and he found that making life miserable for men toward whom he had no personal animus could work him into a mounting, generalized rage. But aggression could get you only so far before the depression caught up with it. There were many ways to torment a prisoner according to M.I.'s demands, and for the most part there was nothing funny about them.

"Smells," Davis said. "Put them in a cell where the toilet is blocked - backed up. It smells like urine and crap. That would drive you nuts." And you could keep shifting a prisoner's mealtimes, or simply withhold meals. The prisoners ate the same M.R.E.s that the guards ate, but you could deny them the spoon and all the fixings. "If you got Salisbury steak, they got the Salisbury steak, not the rice that comes with it, not the hot sauce, not the snack, not the juice - the Salisbury steak, and that's it," Davis said. "They were starving by the time they'd get ready to get interrogated." At that point, he said, it would be: "O.K., we'll give you more food if you talk."

And you could inflict pain. "You also had stress positions, and you escalated the stress positions," Davis said. "Hand-cuffs behind their backs, high up, in very uncomfortable positions, or chained down. Then you had the submersion. You put the people in garbage cans, and you'd put ice in it, and water. Or stick them underneath the shower spigot naked. They'd be freezing." It was a routine, he said: "Open a window while it was, like, forty degrees outside and watch them disappear into themselves ... before they go into shock."

Javal Davis had joined the Reserve in 1997, when he was in college. He was impressed by the R.O.T.C. drill he saw: "saluting, about-face - that looked kind of sharp, the rank and file, the order and everything." He thought it was both an honor and honorable to serve his country, and he was willing to die protecting its freedom. "Especially after 9/11," he said. He was born and raised in Roselle, New Jersey, across New York Harbor from the World Trade towers; he had won trophies in state championships in the hundred-and-ten-metre high hurdle, and he hoped one day to be a Roselle policeman or a New Jersey state trooper. "And to see that happen on my own soil," he said. "It turned it up a notch."

But after four or five nights of running the M.I. block of the Abu Ghraib hard site, Davis said, "I just wanted to go home." He felt that what he did and saw there was wrong. "But it was reaffirmed and reassured through the leadership: We're at war. This is Military Intelligence. This is what they do. And it's just a job," he said. "So, over time, you become numb to it, and it's nothing. It just became the norm. You see it - that sucks. It sucks to be him. And that's it. You move on."

Sabrina Harman also said she felt herself growing numb at Abu Ghraib, yet she kept being startled by her capacity to feel fresh shocks. "In the beginning," she said, "you see somebody naked and you see underwear on their head and you're like, 'Oh, that's pretty bad - I can't believe I just saw that.' And then you go to bed and you come back the next day and you see something worse. Well, it seems like the day before wasn't so bad."

Harman was a runner on the night shift at the hard site, filling in where help was needed. "I really don't remember the first day," she said. "I remember the first day of working in Tier 1A and 1B. The first thing that I noticed was this guy - he had underwear on his head and he was handcuffed backwards to a window, and they were pretty much asking him questions. And then there was another guy who was fully dressed in another cell they were interrogating also, or I guess they had already interrogated. That's the first time I started taking photos." The prisoner with the underwear on his head was the one the M.P.s called Taxi Driver. He was naked, and the position he was in - his hands bound behind his back and raised higher than his shoulders, forcing him to bend forward with his head bowed and his weight suspended from his wrists - is known as a "Palestinian hanging," because it is said to be used in Israeli prisons. Later that evening, Taxi Driver was moved to a bed, and Harman took another picture of him there. Then she saw another prisoner, lying on his bed fully dressed, and she photographed him, too.

As far as Harman knew at the time, nobody else had taken any pictures on Tier 1A, although later she saw one from a few days earlier of a naked man in the corridor, handcuffed to the bars of a cell door. She wasn't surprised. By the end of Harman's first night, three of the M.P.s had taken at least twenty-five photographs, and over the ensuing months the M.P.s on the night shift took hundreds more pictures on the M.I. block. The officer in charge of the block at night, Corporal Charles Graner, said that he made a point of showing his photographs to officers higher up the chain of command, and that nobody objected to what they saw. On the contrary, after a month on the job, and after showing scores of photographs of prisoners in torment to his superiors, Graner received a written assessment from his captain, a frequent visitor to the block, who said, "You are doing a fine job.... You have received many accolades from the M.I. units here."

Most of the photographs from Harman's first night show solitary naked prisoners in stress positions, cuffed to the bars of their cells or stretched and bent, forward or backward, over a bunk bed, with their hands bound to the far railing. Some of the prisoners are hooded with sandbags, some with underpants. One naked man is lying face down on a concrete floor. Several photographs show a row of prisoners in orange jumpsuits doing pushups in the hallway, and in one Staff Sergeant Ivan (Chip) Frederick - the night-shift officer in charge of the whole hard site - can be made out, in the background. Nobody in these photographs appears to be aware of the camera, and the pictures have the quality of stolen glimpses of men rendered into hellish statuary. Harman said that she began photographing what she saw because she found it hard to believe. "If I come up to you and I'm like, 'Hey this is going on,' you probably wouldn't believe me unless I had something to show you," she said. "So if I say, 'Hey this is going on. Look, I have proof,' you can't deny it, I guess." That was the impulse, she said. "Just show what was going on, what was allowed to be done."

On the same night that she started shooting pictures at the hard site, Harman wrote home:

KELLY,

The days are long here, 12 hour shifts. The prison has been quiet for the past two nights. The night before that another IED went off. No one was killed but it destroyed another Hmvv.

None of our unit has been in the mix of the mortars or IEDs. Not yet. Im afraid to leave the prison to go south to use the phones, they plant those IEDs on the roads and set them off as you pass. The sound is unforgettable....

The prisoners we have range from theft to murder of a US soldier. Until Redcross came we had prisoners the MI put in womens panties trying to get them to talk. Pretty funny but they say it was "cruel." I don't think so. No physical harm was done. We've even got Sadams sons body guard here.... Boy did he fail his job. It sucks working with the prisoners because they all have something wrong. We have people with rashes on their bodies and who-ever is in the cell with them start to get it....

I spoke too soon, its 3am, there's a firefight outside. Its never going to be calm here! We have guys with TB! That sucks cause we can catch that. Some have STDs. You name it. Its just dirty!

The food sucks. I live off cup o noodles, that's my meals. The meals they serve are T-REX which is out of a box. If I do come home, boy am I going to eat!

The next night, Harman was back on duty with Charles Graner on the M.I. cellblock, and she wrote again:

October 20, 03 - 12:29am

Kelly,

The lights went out in the prison so here we were in the dark - in the prison. I have watch of the 18 and younger boys. I hear, misses! Misses! I go downstairs and flash my light on this 16 year old sitting down with his sandal smacking ants. Now these ants are Iraqi ants, LARGE! So large they could carry the family dog away while giving you the finger! LARGE. And this poor boy is being attacked by hundreds. All the ants in the prison came to this one boys cell and decided to take over. All I could do was spray Lysol. The ants laughed at me and kept going. So here we were the boy on one side of the cell and me on the other in the dark with one small flashlight beating ants with our shoes.... Poor kids. Those ants even Im scared of.

So that was the start of my shift. They've been stripping "the fucked up" prisoners and handcuffing them to the bars. Its pretty sad. I get to laugh at them and throw corn at them. I kind of feel bad for these guys even if they are accused of killing US soldiers. We degrade them but we don't hit and thats a plus even though Im sure they wish we'd kill them. They sleep one hour then we yell and wake them - make them stay up for one hour, then sleep one hour - then up etc. This goes on for 72 hours while we fuck with them. Most have been so scared they piss on themselves. Its sad. It's a little worst than Basic training ie: being naked and handcuffed....

But pictures were taken, you have to see them! A sandbag was put over their heads while it was soaked in hot sauce. Okay, that's bad but these guys have info, we are trying to get them to talk, that's all, we don't do this to all prisoners, just the few we have which is about 30-40 not many.

The othernight at 3, when I wrote you, the firefight ... 3 killed 6 injured - Iraqis....

Its time to wake them again!!!

And later that same day, on her next night shift, Harman wrote:

Oct 20, 03

10:40pm

Kelly,

Okay, I don't like that anymore. At first it was funny but these people are going too far. I ended your letter last night because it was time to wake the MI prisoners and "mess with them" but it went too far even I can't handle whats going on. I cant get it out of my head. I walk down stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with an asp to find "the taxicab driver" handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture. One of the guys took my asp and started "poking" at his dick. Again I thought, okay that's funny then it hit me, that's a form of molestation. You can't do that. I took more pictures now to "record" what is going on. They started talking to this man and at first he was talking "I'm just a taxicab driver, I did nothing." He claims he'd never try to hurt US soldiers that he picked up the wrong people. Then he stopped talking. They turned the lights out and slammed the door and left him there while they went down to cell #4. This man had been so fucked that when they grabbed his foot through the cell bars he began screaming and crying. After praying to Allah he moans a constant short Ah, Ah every few seconds for the rest of the night. I don't know what they did to this guy. The first one remained handcuffed for maybe 1 ½-2 hours until he started yelling for Allah. So they went back in and handcuffed him to the top bunk on either side of the bed while he stood on the side. He was there for a little over an hour when he started yelling again for Allah. Not many people know this shit goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures and prove that the US is not what they think. But I don't know if I can take it mentally. What if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future terrorist. Kelly, its awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong.

Sabrina

Nobody called Sabrina Harman Mother Teresa at the Abu Ghraib hard site. But even on the Military Intelligence block she retained her reputation as the blithe spirit of the unit, obviously not a leader and yet never a true follower, either - more like a tagalong, the soldier who should never have been a soldier. In her letters from those first nights, as she described her reactions to the prisoners' degradation and her part in it - ricocheting from childish mockery to casual swagger to sympathy to cruelty to titillation to self-justification to self-doubt to outrage to identification to despair - she managed to subtract herself from the scenes she sketched. By the end of her outpourings, she had repositioned herself as an outsider at Abu Ghraib, an observer and recorder, shaking her head, and in this way she preserved a sense of her own innocence.

Harman said that she had imagined herself producing an exposé - to "prove that the US is not what they think," as she wrote to Kelly. The idea was abstract, and she had only a vague notion of how to see it through or what its consequences might be. She said she intended to give the photographs to the press after she got home and out of the Army. But she did not pretend to be a whistle-blower-in-waiting; rather, she wished to unburden herself of complicity in conduct that she considered wrong, without ascribing blame or making trouble for anyone in particular. At the outset, when she photographed what was being done to prisoners, she did not include other soldiers in the pictures. In these images, the soldiers, or the order they serve, are the unseen hand in the prisoners' ordeal. As with crime-scene photographs, which show only victims, we are left to wonder: Who done it?

"I was trying to expose what was being allowed" - that phrase again - "what the military was allowing to happen to other people," Harman said. In other words, she wanted to expose a policy; and by assuming the role of a documentarian she had found a way to ride out her time at Abu Ghraib without having to regard herself as an instrument of that policy. But it was not merely her choice to be a witness to the dirty work on Tier 1A: it was her role. As a woman, she was not expected to wrestle prisoners into stress positions or otherwise overpower them but, rather, just by her presence, to amplify their sense of powerlessness. She was there as an instrument of humiliation. The M.P.s knew very little about their Iraqi prisoners or the culture they came from, but at Fort Lee, before being deployed, they were given a session of "cultural awareness" training, from which they'd taken away the understanding - constantly reinforced by M.I. handlers - that Arab men were sexual prudes, with a particular hangup about being seen naked in public, especially by women. What better way to break an Arab, then, than to strip him, tie him up, and have a woman laugh at him? Taking pictures may have seemed an added dash of mortification, but to Harman it was a way of deflecting her own humiliation in the transaction, by acting as a spectator.

Her letters to Kelly functioned in the same way. "Maybe writing home was a release, to help me forget about what was happening," she said. Then, moments later, she said, "I put everything down on paper that I was thinking. And if it weren't for those letters, I don't think I could even tell you anything that went on. That's the only way I can remember things, is letters and photos." The remarks sound contradictory, but Harman seemed to conceive of memory as an external storage device. By downloading her impressions to a document, she could clear them from her mind and transform reality into an artifact. After all, she said, that was how she experienced the things she did and saw done to prisoners on Tier 1A: "It seems like stuff like this only happened on TV. It's not something you really thought was going on. At least I didn't think it was going on. It's just something that you watch and that is not real."

Real or unreal, participant or bystander, degrader or degraded, overstimulated or numbed out - Harman may have meant no harm but she seemed to understand that in the malignant circumstances of the M.I. block she could not be entirely harmless. Unable or unwilling to reconcile her most disturbing and her most appealing actions and reactions, she equivocated. When she wrote of "both sides of me," she said, "It was military and civilian - the tough side and the non-tough side. You battle out which one is more stronger, I guess.... You're trained to be tough. I was right out of basic, and you're just trained to do what you're told, and to not let things affect you. You're supposed to set all emotions aside, because this is war. I think it's almost impossible. It is emotional."

Megan Ambuhl, who was Harman's roommate at Abu Ghraib, regarded her as a little sister, in need of protection. "She is just so naïve, but awesome," she said. "A good person, but not always aware of the situation." Harman called Ambuhl "Mommy," and accepted the verdict of naïveté with equal measures of solace and regret. Harman wanted to be tough and she wanted to be nice, and she said, "I shouldn't have been there. I mean obviously I didn't do what I was supposed to. I couldn't hit somebody. I can't stomach that ever. I don't like to watch people get hit. I get sick. I know it's kind of weird that I can see a dead person, but I don't like actual violence. I didn't like taking away their blankets when it was really cold. Because if I'm freezing and I'm wearing a jacket and a hat and gloves, and these people don't have anything on and no blanket, no mattress, that's kind of hard to see and do to somebody - even if they are a terrorist." In fact, she said, "I really didn't see them as prisoners there. I just saw them as people that were pretty much in the same situation I was, just trapped in Abu Ghraib." And she said, "I told them that we were prisoners also. So we felt how they were feeling."

It was easier to be nice to the women and children on Tier 1B, but, Harman said, "It was kind of sad that they even had to be there." The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old - "a little kid," she said. "He could have fit through the bars, he was so little." Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military's effort to capture or break his father.

Harman enjoyed spending time with the kids. She let them out to run around the tier in a pack, kicking a soccer ball, and she enlisted them to help sweep the tier and distribute meals - special privileges, reserved only for the most favored prisoners on the M.I. block. "They were fun," she said. "They made the time go by faster." She didn't like seeing children in prison "for no reason, just because of who your father was," but she didn't dwell on that. What was the point? "You can't feel because you'll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off," Harman said. "You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the M.R.E.s to make their time go by better. But there's only so much you can do or so much you can feel."

On Tier 1A, Harman liked to sneak cigarettes and doses of Tylenol or ibuprofen to prisoners who were being given a hard time. These small gestures gave her comfort, too, and it pleased her that prisoners sometimes turned to her for help. But Harman was generally as forgiving of her buddies as she was of herself. When toughness failed her, and niceness was not an option, Harman took refuge in denial. "That's the only way to get through each day, is to start blocking things out," she said. "Just forget what happened. You go to bed, and then you have the next day to worry about. It's another day closer to home. Then that day's over, and you just block that one out." At the same time, she faulted herself for not being a more enthusiastic soldier when prisoners on Tier 1A were being given the business. When she was asked how other M.P.s could go at it without apparent inhibition, all she could say was "They're more patriotic."

One night in the first week of November, 2003, an agent of the Army's Criminal Investigative Division - an agency sometimes described as the military's F.B.I. - came to the M.I. block to interrogate a new prisoner, an Iraqi suspected of involvement in the deaths of American soldiers. The story, as the M.P.s understood it, was that the prisoner kept giving a false name and insisting that he was not who the C.I.D. said he was. He was given the nickname Gilligan and subjected to the standard treatment: the yelling, the P.T., the sleep deprivation. Graner, who took charge of Gilligan's harassment, gave him a cardboard box - an M.R.E. carton - which he was ordered to carry around or to stand on for long stretches. Gilligan was hooded, and normally he would have been naked, too, but, because of the cold, Graner had cut a hole in a prison blanket and draped it over him like a poncho. Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick later told Army investigators that he asked the C.I.D. man - whom he identified as Agent Romero - about Gilligan, and that Romero said, "I don't give a fuck what you do to him, just don't kill them."

Frederick said that he took Romero's words "like an order, but not a specific order," and he explained, "To me, Agent Romero was like an authority figure, and when he said he needed the detainee stressed out I wanted to make sure the detainee was stressed out." Frederick found Gilligan where Graner had left him, perched on his box in the shower room of Tier 1A. "There were a lot of detainees that were forced to stand on boxes," he said. Behind Gilligan, he noticed some loose electrical wires hanging from the wall. "I grabbed them and touched them together to make sure they weren't live wires," he said. "When I did that and got nothing, I tied a loop knot on the end, put it on, I believe, his index finger, and left it there." Frederick said that somebody then tied a wire to Gilligan's other hand and Harman said, "I told him not to fall off, that he would be electrocuted if he did."

Harman had been busy for much of the night, keeping awake the prisoner they called the Claw, and attending to another one they called Shitboy, a maniac on Tier 1B who had the habit of smearing himself with his feces and hurling it at passing guards. She was taking a break when she joined the others in the shower room, and although Gilligan understood English, she wasn't sure if he believed her threat. Besides, the whole mock-electrocution business had not lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes - just long enough for a photo session. "I knew he wouldn't be electrocuted," she said. "So it really didn't bother me. I mean, it was just words. There was really no action in it. It would have been meaner if there really was electricity coming out, and he really could be electrocuted. No physical harm was ever done to him." In fact, she said, "He was laughing at us towards the end of the night, maybe because he knew we couldn't break him."

Once the wires were attached to Gilligan, Frederick had stepped back, instructed Gilligan to hold his arms out straight from his sides, like wings, and taken a picture. Then he took another, identical to the first: the hooded man, in his blanket poncho, barefoot atop his box, arms outstretched, wires trailing from his fingers. Snap, snap - two seconds - and three minutes later Harman took a similar shot, but from a few steps back, so that Frederick appears in the foreground at the edge of the frame, studying on the display screen of his camera the picture he's just taken.

These were not the first photographs taken on the block that night, or the last. That afternoon, when the night shift M.P.s reported for duty at the hard site, their platoon commander had called them to a meeting. "He said there was a prisoner who had died in the shower, and he died of a heart attack," Harman said. The body had been left in the shower on Tier 1B, packed in ice, and shortly after the session with Gilligan somebody noticed water trickling out from under the shower door.

As Harman entered the shower room, she snapped a picture of a black rubber body bag lying along the far wall. Then she and Graner, their hands sheathed in turquoise latex surgical gloves, unzipped the bag. "We just checked him out and took photos of him - kind of realized right away that there was no way he died of a heart attack because of all the cuts and blood coming out of his nose," she said, and she added, "You don't think your commander's going to lie to you about something. It made my trust go down, that's for sure. Well, you can't trust your commander now."

Translucent plastic ice bags covered the dead prisoner from the neck down, but his battered, bandaged face was exposed - mouth agape as if in mid-speech. Harman, the aspiring forensic photographer, shot him from a variety of angles, zooming in and out, while Charles Graner swabbed the floor. When he was done, he took a photograph of Harman posing with the corpse, bending low into the frame, flashing her Kodak smile, and giving the thumbs-up with one gloved hand; and she used his camera to take a similar shot of him. After about seven minutes in the shower room, she zipped the body bag shut, and they left.

"I guess we weren't really thinking, Hey, this guy has family, or, Hey, this guy was just murdered," Harman said. "It was just - Hey, it's a dead guy, it'd be cool to get a photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them, I go, 'Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.' But when we were in that situation it wasn't as bad as it looks coming out on the media, I guess, because people have photos of all kinds of things. Like, if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they'll take photos of it."

Harman might more accurately have said that it's not unusual to take such pictures. Soldiers have always swapped crazy war stories - whether to boast or confess, to moralize or titillate - and the uncritical response of other soldiers at Abu Ghraib to the photographs from the night shift on the M.I. block suggests that they were seen as belonging to this comradely tradition. Javal Davis took no photographs there and he appeared in none, but he said, "Everyone in theatre had a digital camera. Everyone was taking pictures of everything, from detainees to death." He said, "That was nothing, like in Vietnam where guys were taking pictures of the dead guy with a cigarette in his mouth. Like, Hey, Mom, look. It sounds sick, but over there that was commonplace, it was nothing. I mean, when you're surrounded by death and carnage and violence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it absorbs you. You walk down the street and you see a dead body on the road, whereas a couple months ago, you would have been like, 'Oh, my God, a dead body,' today you're like, 'Damn, he got messed up, let's go get something to eat.' You could watch someone running down the street burning on fire, as long as it's not an American soldier, it's 'Somebody needs to go put that guy out.' "

The pictures of Harman and Graner with the corpse may have been taken as a gag - "for personal use," as Frederick said of his photos of Gilligan - but they are starkly at odds with Harman's claim of a larger documentary purpose. By contrast, her grisly, intimate portraits of the corpse convey her shock at discovering its wreckage; and later that evening Harman returned to the shower with Frederick to examine the body more carefully. This time, she looked beneath the ice bags and peeled back the bandages, and she stayed out of the pictures.

"I just started taking photos of everything I saw that was wrong, every little bruise and cut," Harman said. "His knees were bruised, his thighs were bruised by his genitals. He had restraint marks on his wrists. You had to look close. I mean, they did a really good job cleaning him up." She said, "The gauze on his eye was put there after he died to make it look like he had medical treatment, because he didn't when he came into the prison." She said, "There were so many things around the bandage, like the blood coming out of his nose and his ears. And his tooth was chipped - I didn't know if that happened there or before - his lip was split open, and it looked like somebody had either butt-stocked him or really got him good or hit him against the wall. It was a pretty good-sized gash. I took a photo of that as well." She said, "I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos." She said, "It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to. This guy did not die of a heart attack. Look at all these other existing injuries that they tried to cover up."

The next morning, after nearly thirty hours in the shower, the corpse was removed from the tier disguised as a sick prisoner: draped with a blanket, taped to an I.V., and rolled away on a gurney. Hydrue Joyner was reminded of the Hollywood farce "Weekend at Bernie's," in which two corporate climbers treat their murdered boss as a puppet, pretending he's alive to avoid suspicion in his death. "I was thinking to myself, Un-freaking-believable. But this came from on high," Joyner said of the charade with the I.V. "I took it as they didn't want any of the prisoners thinking we were in there killing folks." Joyner referred to the dead man as Bernie, but Army investigators soon identified him as a suspected insurgent named Manadel al-Jamadi. He was alleged to have provided explosives for the bombing that blew up the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad a week before his arrest, and he had died while under interrogation by a C.I.A. agent. Within the week that followed, an autopsy concluded that Jamadi had succumbed to "blunt force injuries" and "compromised respiration"; and his death was classified as a homicide.

Jamadi's C.I.A. interrogator has never been charged with a crime. But Sabrina Harman was. As a result of the pictures she took and appeared in at Abu Ghraib, she was convicted by court-martial, in May of 2005, of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners, dereliction of duty, and maltreatment, and sentenced to six months in prison, a reduction in rank, and a bad-conduct discharge. Megan Ambuhl, Javal Davis, Chip Frederick, Charles Graner, and Jeremy Sivits were among the handful of other soldiers who, on account of the photographs, were also sentenced to punishments ranging from a reduction in rank and a loss of pay to ten years in prison. The only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. No one has ever been charged for abuses at the prison that were not photographed. Originally, Harman's charges included several counts pertaining to her pictures of Jamadi, but these were never brought to trial. The pictures constituted the first public evidence that the man had been killed during an interrogation at Abu Ghraib, and Harman said, "They tried to charge me with destruction of government property, which I don't understand. And then maltreatment for taking the photos of a dead guy. But he's dead. I don't know how that's maltreatment. And then altering evidence for removing the bandage from his eye to take a photo of it and then I placed it back. When he died, they cleaned him all up and then stuck the bandages on. So it's not really altering evidence. They had already done that for me. But in order to make the charges stick they were going to have to bring in the photos, which they didn't want, because obviously they covered up a murder and that would just make them look bad. So they dropped all the charges pertaining to the guy in the shower."

As for Gilligan, the Criminal Investigation Department determined that he was not, after all, who he had been suspected of being during his ordeal. "So all of that, and the poor guy was innocent," Harman said. He remained on Tier 1A and soon became one of the M.P.s' favorite prisoners. Gilligan was given the privileged status of a block worker, and was regularly let out of his cell to help with the cleaning. Megan Ambuhl called him "pretty decent," and said she had a picture of him sharing a meal and a smoke with Charles Graner. Sabrina Harman said, "He was just a funny, funny guy. If you're going to take someone home, I definitely would have taken him."

Under the circumstances, Harman was baffled that the figure of Gilligan - hooded, caped, and wired on his box - had eventually become the icon of Abu Ghraib and possibly the most recognized emblem of the war on terror after the World Trade towers. The image had proliferated around the globe in uncountable reproductions and representations - in the press, but also on murals and placards, T-shirts and billboards, on mosque walls and in art galleries. Harman had even acquired a Gilligan tattoo on one arm, but she considered that a private souvenir. It was the public's fascination with the photograph of Gilligan - of all the images from Abu Ghraib - that she couldn't fathom. "There's so many worse photos out there. I mean, nothing negative happened to him, really," she said. "I think they thought he was being tortured, which he wasn't."

Harman was right: there were worse pictures than Gilligan. But, leaving aside that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily lie in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information, while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent, in large part because they have a terrible, reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death - or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?

The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability - in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot - or do not want to - understand about how it came to this.

asian heart

2008-03-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

Americans behind...again.

2008-03-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

Report: American Schools Trail Behind World In Aptitude Of Child Soldiers

You too heh?

2008-03-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

Expert On Anteaters Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters

RIP P.J.Griffiths

2008-03-21T10:33:00.000-07:00

Philip Jones Griffiths
Compassionate and courageous photographer whose images of the Vietnam War are a landmark in photoreportage
Philip Jones Griffiths

Philip Jones Griffiths on assignment in Asia (Magnum Collection / Magnum)
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All photographers record history; very few change it. Among those who have was Philip Jones Griffiths, whose book Vietnam Inc (1971) played a key role in altering the American public’s perception of the war in South East Asia, and determined — perhaps for the first time — that the abiding images of a war should not be of the combatants but of its victims.

Although the claim has been made before, it would be exaggerating to say that it was Jones Griffiths’s work that led to mass opposition to the war. That had been growing steadily since the mid-1960s, and had been substantially increased by the revelation in 1969 of the My Lai massacre in 1968.

Nonetheless, the US media broadly continued to support the American presence in Vietnam, and accordingly had largely refrained from publishing stories or photographs deemed damaging or harrowing. What Jones Griffiths did was to make widely available for the first time the other side of the picture, and to confront the US with the reality of what was being done in its name.

He had arrived in Vietnam in 1966 with the intention already of compiling a book, and quickly decided that the situation there was not as it was being portrayed to the press by their military minders. For him, the war was not an attempt to prevent the spread of communism but another episode in the post-colonial struggle by Asian nations for self-government.
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* Pictures: The photographs of Philip Jones Griffiths

In this view he was influenced by his own roots. An articulate, emotional Welsh republican, Jones Griffiths identified with the rural Vietnamese, seeing in the American imposition on them of an inimical, industrialised culture a reflection of Wales’s subjugation by England.

Cutting loose from the press corps, Jones Griffiths methodically travelled the country for four years. So unwanted were his resultant images of the suffering of the ordinary Vietnamese that in that time he barely sold a photograph to a news organisation. He saved money by living with a local family, and often had to decide whether to buy film or food.

His subject was not war, but the pity of war. He saw himself as producing a historical document, and (though often converted from colour film) printed his pictures in black and white to signal their profundity and to tone down the blood, believing that gore would make viewers look away.

Among photographs of his that were to become defining images of the war was that of a civilian victim of American fire, face wrapped in bandages, arm labelled as if an exhibit; and that of a GI with his feet up on a window ledge, rifle at the ready, a headless doll beneath his chair. Other shots showed innocent casualties of US rocket fire — giving the lie to American claims that the wounds were inflicted by Viet Cong — and Vietnamese girls prostituting themselves to Marines.

Ironically, given his seriousness of purpose, Jones Griffiths was able to publish Vietnam Inc only thanks to the payment he received for a paparazzo shot, having sneaked into Cambodia to photograph Jackie Kennedy on holiday with Lord Harlech, the former Ambassador to Washington, whom the press thought was her beau at the time.

The book came out at a turning point in the war, and his depiction of its hitherto unseen consequences forced many to contemplate a conflict that they had largely ignored, and helped crystallise opposition to it. Later it would be used as a source for influential films such as Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Time called the volume "the best book of photo-reportage of war ever published", while Henri Cartier-Bresson said: "Not since Goya has anyone covered war like Philip Jones Griffiths." The President of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, declared that he was top of the list of people barred from the country.

The photographer, however, repeatedly declared that he had no particular animus against the Americans or their Vietnamese allies. He was, he said, not so much seeking to tell the truth about this war, as about all wars.

Philip Griffiths — he later took his mother’s name too — was born, one of three boys, in Rhuddlan, Denbighshire, in 1936. His mother was a district nurse; his father worked for the LMS railway and, when war came, managed the transport of the National Gallery’s treasures to Welsh caves.
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* Have your say

Philip was my favourite customer at Keens Steak House in Manhattan where I worked as Barman for over 14 years. I never told anyone who he was, it was my big secret fairing he might get mobbed every time he came in. I also never told him that I was a photographer too.He presented me with his book Dark Odyssey in 1999 and it remains one of my favourite books to this day. His entrance to the clam bar, two leicas dangling from his neck was a breath of clean air, not knowing where he had recently visited and what stories he would tell. Quite offen he was with his young daughter and they both enjoined a simple burger, on other occations he had the legendary mutton chop. He would bring in many other photographers, news reporters and interns. A man who had a big impact on my life, I think he would have liked to know that now Im a gardener. We will miss him dearly

Edwin Hemsley, Brooklyn, New York USA

Philip was my favourite customer at Keens Steak House in Manhattan where I worked as Barman for over 14 years. I never told anyone who he was, it was my big secret fairing he might get mobbed every time he came in. I also never told him that I was a photographer too.He presented me with his book Dark Odyssey in 1999 and it remains one of my favourite books to this day. His entrance to the clam bar, two leicas dangling from his neck was a breath of clean air, not knowing where he had recently visited and what stories he would tell. Quite offen he was with his young daughter and they both enjoined a simple burger, on other occations he had the legendary mutton chop. He would bring in many other photographers, news reporters and interns. A man who had a big impact on my life, I think he would have liked to know that now Im a gardener. We will miss him dearly

in perpetuity.....

2008-03-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

UK Government Agency promotes Rights Grabbing Competition
Student Challenge 2008 Competition Claims All Rights "throughout the universe in perpetuity"

Pro-Imaging is an international organisation representing professional photographers worldwide and it is one of our foremost aims to ensure that the legal rights of photographers, professional and amateur, are respected.

Through our researches into “rights grabbing” competitions aimed at photographers, we discovered that One NorthEast, a UK Regional Development Agency for the North-east of England, responsible to the UK Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform, is promoting a competition entitled Student Challenge 2008, inviting students to come up with "a creative idea to demonstrate what you believe is great about North East England".

By submitting works to this competition students are granting One NorthEast:

"participants hereby assign all rights and grant all consents necessary to One NorthEast to enable One NorthEast to exploit or authorise others to reproduce, edit, use and exploit the products of any participation received by One NorthEast ...... in all media throughout the universe in perpetuity to the extent permitted by law and irrevocably and unconditionally waives all moral rights they may have in and to the products of the participation. All intellectual property rights in the winning ideas and any materials produced in connection with the ideas will become the property of One NorthEast."

Pro-Imaging are astounded that a government agency would so boldly claim such all encompassing rights from students, who would expect to look to UK regulatory bodies like BERR as examples of best practice for terms and conditions. With competition rules as published, students will find they have been stripped of all current and future rights to their creative submissions. This is not setting a leading example of good practice by the UK regulatory authorities, good practice being to apply the principles in our Bill of Rights for photographers.

We notified One NorthEast that UK law requires a written and signed agreement to effect a transfer of copyright, but One NorthEast have made no provision for that in the contest rules. The claim that they now own copyright to the submissions is at variance with paragraph 90 of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. Following discussions between Pro-Imaging and One NorthEast the Regional Development Agency have offered to investigate the matter as part of One NorthEast’s formal complaints procedures under which a full investigation will be completed and a report with findings prepared.

To combat this widespread practice of rights grabbing competitions being vehicles for freely acquiring images, Pro-Imaging publish an ongoing series of consumer reports which conduct tests on photography competitions. Those which fail our tests are published on our website at The Rights Off List, along with the reason why they have failed our tests. We test them against the conditions set out in our Bill of Rights.

Also included in this week’s consumers report is the Canon New Baby Photo Contest being run in the U.S.A. It likewise makes claims that it owns the copyright for all submissions, this is at variance with U.S. Copyright Law paragraph 204 . Such claims are made by contest organisers who seem unaware of the legal requirements of their own countries.

Pro-Imaging are engaged in a long term campaign to persuade competition promoters and sponsors to adopt practices which respect rights of photographers in competition T&C’s, and to alert all photographers, both professional and amateur, of competitions that are acquiring excessive usage rights. For a poetic view of our concerns read the Bill of Rights poem.

newz or is it?

2008-03-03T05:52:00.000-08:00

March 3, 2008 4:00 AM PST
Photo industry braces for another revolution
Posted by Stephen Shankland | Post a comment

Think of it as digital photography 2.0.

In the last decade, photography has been transformed by one revolution, the near-total replacement of analog film cameras by digital image sensors. Now researchers and companies are starting to stretch their wings by taking advantage of what a computer can do with sensor data either within the camera or on a full-fledged PC.

Some elements of this new era, which researchers often call computational photography, are refinements of existing technology. For example, some cameras can wait to take the photo only when subjects are smiling and not blinking, in effect placing the shutter release button in the hands of the subjects rather than the photographer.

But more dramatic changes could shift the definition of a camera more dramatically. One major area of research, for example, uses computational processing to create a 3D representation of a scene rather than just the two dimensions of traditional photography.

"There's a shift in thinking going on," said Kevin Connor, who manages professional digital imaging products for Adobe Systems. "People are starting to see the broader possibilities and where we can push things...People are realizing that maybe we shouldn't just be trying to make the best traditional photography experience."

What changes will the new era bring? It's hard to say for sure, but if history is anything to judge by, it'll be a rough but fun ride. On the unpleasant side, I expect market disruption, accelerated product obsolescence, and customer confusion. But I also anticipate genuinely exciting technology that could open up new creative and practical possibilities.

Digital photography 1.0 already has meant hard times for the photography industry. The film business expired almost completely overnight; Polaroid closing its film plants this year is only the most recent example, and Konica Minolta, a venerable camera maker, sold its camera assets to electronics giant and image sensor manufacturer Sony. People can share photos online rather than mailing prints. And camera makers no longer have years to recoup research and design investments in a particular model: although SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras hold their value reasonably well, compact cameras have a shelf life not much longer than a banana.

Early phases
Depending on your definitions, you can argue the computational photography revolution already has begun.

For example, editing software can correct camera lens flaws such as barrel and pincushion distortion, which makes parallel lines bow outward and inward, respectively, or chromatic aberration, which causes colored fringes along high-contrast edges. But that's generally a largely manual process.

At the 6sight conference in Monterey, Calif., last year Adobe's Connor showed computational photography techniques that lets a photo's depth of field be expanded or changed, or the photographer's vantage point be shifted. You can see Connor give a demo of that in the video at right.

More sophisticated possibilities are emerging. Hasselblad's high-end cameras come with software that can perform what it calls Digital Auto Correction, which fixes chromatic aberration and various other problems based specifically on the setting of the lens when the photo was taken.

Because it's a tough computational problem, though, and there's only so much horsepower in the camera, Hasselblad relies on post-processing in software to perform some of the fixes. In essence, the computer has become an extension of the act of pushing the shutter-release button.

Another early area for computational photography involves using a computer to combine multiple photos into one composite shot of the same scene.

Two well-established examples are panoramas and high-dynamic range (HDR) photography. With panoramas, computers can stitch multiple photos together to create a much larger view of a scene than a camera could take on its own. Taken to its extreme, work such as Carnegie Mellon's GigaPan project can produce images gigantic enough to get lost in, at least figuratively.

HDR is more complicated. With it, photographers take multiple pictures of the same scene at different exposure levels then use particular software to produce a composite image that doesn't suffer the common problems of blown-out bright areas and murky shadows. With HDR, photographers can create an image that shows both a cathedral's brilliant stained-glass window and its subdued stonework.

HDR is a painstaking process today. But that might not always be the case. Panasonic is working on an image sensor that takes three separate images of the same scene for better dynamic range. And it's certainly possible that a camera itself could take several images, align them, and create its own HDR image.

A more radical example is merging multiple images to take the best of each. For example, the high-end version of Adobe's Photoshop CS3 can convert multiple pictures of a tourist attraction, each picture cluttered by visitors, into a single scene with the ephemeral humans gone. In one sense, it's fiction, because the moment never happened, but seen another way, it's capturing some of the essence of a scene.

Another way multiple images can be combined is by using MotionDSP, whose software can be used to help intelligence agencies and movie-phone videographers get more out of their imagery. The technology relies on the fact that multiple frames of a video captured the same subject matter, and processing that can produce an image of higher fidelity than what any individual frame possesses.

MotionDSP CEO Sean Varah said it could be possible for a camera to take a burst of five or six images, then computationally combine them into a single, higher-resolution shot. "I think camera guys would love to have that in the camera because they're always trying to sell you a better camera or keep the price point up," Varah said.

Software that can sharpen edges in digital photos has been around for years, but more sophisticated processing is possible, too. MIT researcher Rob Fergus has been working on software to deblur photos marred by camera shake, analyze photos to infer exactly how your camera jiggled when you took it, then back out those changes.

Go deep
It's the 3D realm where some of the more dramatic changes appear. Stereo photography, otherwise known as stereoscopy, has been around since the Victorian age, but that technique relied on taking two images of a scene and letting the human brain reconstruct a 3D image.

Research under way now could let the camera, or a computer afterward, understand the third dimension. That could be useful as a way to help the camera figure how best to focus and expose the a shot. More dramatically, it could lead to three-dimensional hologram shots, assuming somebody crafts economical way to view such data.

One 3D idea comes from Stanford University, where Keith Fife and colleagues have created a camera image sensor that can gauge depth. That sensor works by using hundreds of tiny lenses over the sensor pixels; by comparing the subimages from each subarray of pixels, a computer can judge how far away various features are.

A related technology, from start-up Refocus Imaging, produces data files that can be processed to focus the camera after the photo has been taken. It also can be used to deliberately bring a background into focus or to blur it so it's not distracting.

Essentially, Refocus Imaging substitutes a computer for camera optics. "Computational optics is the next frontier...We can process in software to do what the hardware usually has to do," said Chief Executive Ren Ng.

Making that change could mean the centuries-old, highly refined, sedate optics field could be replaced by breakneck computer industry rates of change.

"You get the ability to scale performance much faster--a curve that looks like Moore's Law," the famous and largely accurate observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that computer chips get double the number of transistors every two years.

The Refocus Imaging technology is based on a concept called the light field, a much richer description of light entering a camera. Capturing the light field requires very different processes from conventional cameras, but Adobe thinks it will be built in.

The array of subtly different images of the same scene that Adobe's plenoptic lens produces.
(Credit: Adobe)

"If light field photography becomes much more prevalent, which we believe will happen over time, we think will be much more convent to have it built into your camera," Connor said in a recent speech at the 6sight conference on digital imaging. "We're trying to be a catalyst to get this to happen."

Adobe's plenoptic camera lens can help create a 3D representation of a scene.
(Credit: Adobe)

Adobe also is working in the new domain. It's been showing a prototype camera with a "plenoptic" lens--one made of many smaller lenses. A computer processing the subimages, each with a slightly different perspective, can reconstruct 3D attributes.

Adobe, seeing things in perspective to its image-editing business, envisions a tool that could let you edit only areas of a photo that were close to the photographer. For those who have struggled for hours with detailed masking operations to separate foreground from background, that sort of idea probably sounds like a potential godsend.

But such technology currently exceeds the power of ordinary computers, Connor said in an interview: "It's definitely more computationally intense than the stuff we're typically doing in Photoshop."

But as so many industries have discovered, it's generally a bad idea to bet against Moore's Law.

People never to forget....Steve Hilton Barber.

2008-03-02T01:22:00.000-08:00

Obituary Steve Hilton-Barber
Steve Hilton-Barber and his wife Monica
Steve Hilton-Barber and his wife Monica
A straight shooter - by Shaun de Waal - Mail & Guardian 31st May 2002
Steve Hilton-Barber, who died of a heart attack at age 39 (the 24th May 2002), was one of the most adventurous of South Africa's younger generation of photographers. (See Picture Gallery) His work ranged from news photography during this country's unrest years to portraiture, wildlife, music photography and work in the commercial realm. Most recently, he was the official photographer for the Idols reality-television show.
His 1990 photo-essay on a Northern Sotho initiation ceremony engendered much debate. With this series Hilton-Barber challenged the taboo of secrecy around such ceremonies, as well as that around the depiction of the male nude in the South African press - and issues of the relation of power between photographer and subject. Amid the controversy the photographs were stolen from the walls of the Market Theatre's gallery. The aesthetic value of the images, however, was unquestioned.
The scion of a farming family, and one of several siblings to distinguish himself in the media, Hilton-Barber was' a founding member of the Afrapix and Southlight photo agencies. He worked for the Saturday Star in 1992 and was the chief photographer on the Mat? & Guardian in 1993 and 1994. He subsequently worked as a freelancer, and earlier this year once again found himself involved in controversy when several of his 'funky" images were removed from a show commissioned by Nedbank.
Hilton-Barber is survived by his wife Monica and infant Benjamin.
"Steve always sought out contradictions in life," said his brother Brett Hilton-Barber. "He seemed to be drawn to the zaniness, the black humour, in life. "He was a fun-loving, engaging person with enthusiastic appetites; a man who, as his friend Michael Markovitz; put it, "thought crooked and shot straight".

signed sealed and delivered? what now?

2008-02-25T08:27:00.000-08:00

You just never know...

2008-02-16T13:36:00.001-08:00

You Just Never Know
Posted by: jeff in Photography

I was using my Stumble Upon to browse photography sites when I came upon some very thought provoking images. The title of the post is The Day Before and the photographs are part of an ad campaign from the Cape Times, a Cape Town newspaper in South Africa. The ads show images that look very simple and plain in nature until you know the context of what they represent. There is a photo of a park full of people enjoying a beautiful day with the twin towers in the background. The date of the photo? September 10, 2001. Following that is an image of an Asian mother and her son dated August 5, 1945, an image of JFK and his children in the Oval Office, November 21, 1963, and a group of African children walking to school dated June 15, 1976. I think most of you know the significance of the images but if you don’t, they are all from the day before a significant moment in history; 9/11, the bombing of Hiroshima, the assassination of JFK, and the Soweto riots. The tag line for the ads reads “The World can change in a day, don’t miss your daily edition of in-depth news”. Now I don’t know about the “in-depth” news part but the first part is so very true. And the really fascinating part of it is that as a photographer, you have the ability to freeze those moments in time, to capture the world in a way that will be forever changed after you press the shutter. It’s hard to know what the significance of an image will and can be. There is no way of knowing how the world will change and how the insignificant can suddenly become so significant. I’m sure the person who took the picture in the park that 10th day of September had no idea how poignant their image would be the next day.

Maybe that is the way we should approach every image that we make, as if it is the last time that anyone will be able to see it as it was because it could be forever changed the next day. Pretty deep, huh?

Street Photography in an Image-Filled Age

2008-02-14T05:16:00.000-08:00

By Sewell Chan
Our Secret“Our Secret,” one of the images on view in “Manhattan Noon,” an exhibition of street photographs by Gus Powell at the Museum of the City of New York. (Photos: Gus Powell)

In our media-saturated culture, everyone is a picture-taker and image-maker, adding a new wrinkle to the work of those who practice the time-honored tradition of street photography.

“It’s harder and harder to take a picture without somebody in the picture who’s also taking a picture,” the Brooklyn-based photographer Gus Powell said on Tuesday evening, explaining that the mere act of taking a photo hardly makes him stand out in a crowd. “We all take pictures — that’s what we do. It’s more that your camera doesn’t look like a phone — that’s the bigger issue.”

“Manhattan Noon,” a solo show of Mr. Powell’s photographs, opened at the Museum of the City of New York on Dec. 15 and is on view through April 20. To mark the occasion, the museum sponsored a panel discussion, “Eyes on New York,” with Mr. Powell and two leading street photographers: Jeff Mermelstein, who is based in New York, and Matt Stuart, who is based in London and runs In Public, a street photography Web site. Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photographs at the museum, moderated the talk.

The photos in Mr. Powell’s new book, “The Company of Strangers,” which accompanies the exhibition, were loosely inspired by the poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), whose 1964 book “Lunch Poems” recorded his impressions strolling around Manhattan at noontime.

In a similar vein, Mr. Powell used his lunch breaks from his job as a picture editor at The New Yorker to amble around Midtown, recording the serendipitous moment. In “For J. Singer Sargent,” he recorded a couple’s passionate but oddly emotionless embrace; the man has a rather blank expression while the strap of his companion’s blouse has slipped down, revealing her shoulder — much like the subject of John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” famously did, until the artist repainted the strap amid an outcry. For another image, “Our Secret,” Mr. Powell followed around a woman who, enigmatically, walked toward the New York Public Library’s main building, carrying a bouquet of flowers behind her.

Each of the photographers who spoke described encounters with street images as young men. Mr. Powell grew up in New York City and received a B.F.A. from Oberlin College in 1997. Mr. Mermelstein grew up in central New Jersey and studied at Rutgers University, urged by his mother to pursue a career in medicine or dentistry. Instead, he moved to New York in 1979 and got an internship at the International Center of Photography, where he studied with the photographer Garry Winogrand. Mr. Stuart, a street photographer for 11 years, was a skateboarder in London from the age of 12 and became captivated by photography after encountering the work of Henri-Cartier Bresson and Robert Frank.

Cartier-Bresson and Frank were among the historical influences cited by Mr. Corcoran, the curator, who gave a brief overview of the street photography tradition after the three photographers showed examples of their work. The overview included images by André Kertész, Helen Levitt, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Tony Ray-Jones and Joel Meyerowitz.

Mr. Powell spoke about taking photographs of life outside his doorstep before he even knew what street photography was, and described Mr. Meyerowitz as a leading influence who helped him in “learning to be seduced by the smallest of things out on the street.”

Mr. Mermelstein described the appeal, for him, of “straight photography,” of capturing critical or surprising moments in real life. “What has gotten me most excited making pictures is taking pictures of what’s in front of me, without changing it, with all the ingredients of spontaneity,” he said.

All three artists shoot in color and primarily use film cameras, not digital ones, for their street work. Mr. Stuart said he used to shoot in black-and-white in emulation of his heroes, Frank and Cartier-Bresson, but realized that it was not fruitful to try to emulate their signature styles. For him, color represented newness; for Mr. Mermelstein, who recalled growing up with television images around him, color has always been an integral part of his work.

One of the most interesting topics in the talk was the discussion of how to take images unobtrusively; all three artists have shot images that are startlingly frank, but in which the subjects seem utterly oblivious to the presence of the image-maker.

Mr. Powell, who is 6 feet 5 inches tall, said his height means “I really can’t do that invisible thing so much.”

Mr. Stuart described the death of Princess Diana in 1997 as a turning point in the public’s awareness of — and attitude toward — photographers. “Photographers were bad guys,” he said. “I remember the day and I just said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to go out and take pictures.’ And people got really aggressive. A lot more people will say, ‘Hey what are you doing?’ ”

Then there are concerns about terrorism; nearly all street photographers have been stopped by the authorities and asked what they are doing. In London, subway photography is no longer permitted, although in New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority backed down from a similar proposal.

Then there are concerns about privacy. Mr. Mermelstein recalled parents who have scolded him in the mistaken belief that he had photographed their children. Mr. Stuart said that Roger Hutchings, an acclaimed British war photographer who has done work in numerous conflict zones, was physically assaulted at a pond in his South London neighborhood, Clapham, by a man who thought that Mr. Hutchings had photographed his child.

Mr. Stuart said he often handles complaints about being photographed with a smile and a compliment. “If somebody comes up and asks me what I’m doing, I say, ‘Oh, I really like your hat,’ or, ‘That’s a great coat.’ If you compliment someone, it defuses it.”

Mr. Powell said his attitude helps. “Honestly, when I’m taking a lot of these pictures, I’m usually not trying to do something that is ironic or pointing at, making fun of something,” he said. “I’m pretty much always responding to something that has been seduced me or that I’ve been moved by.”

Sometimes, Mr. Powell said, he will just “pretend to be a Dutch tourist” and remain silent if asked what he is doing.

Mr. Mermelstein has a similar strategy. “I rarely talk to anybody I photograph, because I know I’m going to lose,” he said, adding that “if someone is going to engage me,” it’s because that person believes the photographer is doing something wrong.

Mr. Powell interjected, “But do you feel you’re doing something wrong?”

“A little bit,” Mr. Mermelstein replied, jokingly.

In the age of Flickr — which Mr. Stuart called “a great thing” — is the fine art photographer’s role being eclipsed by the masses, or is photography simply becoming more democratic?

“The intelligence of people with cameras has risen immensely,” Mr. Powell said. “You’ll see someone taking a picture, review it, delete it and then remove themselves to a better vantage point.” The proliferation of images “means there’s going to be more work for the curators,” he predicted.

Of course, truly great — even good — pictures come across rarely. All of the photographers spoke about shooting scores of rolls without necessarily expecting even one suitable image to arise from their contact sheets.
street photo“Still Life: Houston Street”
street photo“Blue Frieze”
street photo“For J. Singer Sargent”
street photo“Passo Doble”
street photo“Putti”

"I Am A Total Devotee of Leica M Photography"

2008-02-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

"I Am A Total Devotee of Leica M Photography"
Copyright (c) 2004 Peter A. Klein
Sung to the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General"
Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan

- - - - -
Scene: A photographic gathering in a posh metropolitan hotel. The
Master Amateur is holding forth on the glories of Leica. He is dressed
in a battered old raincoat and a French beret. In his hand is a
battered M3 covered with black tape. He is surrounded by a chorus of
paunchy middle-aged men, each wearing an enormous autofocus SLR with
zoom lens. The lenses bounce on their bellies when they sing.
- - - - -

(MASTER AMATEUR)
I am a total devotee of Leica M photography.
I will not buy a digicam, I won't do videography.
I read the work of Lager with his product list canonical.
I'll never use a plastic lens with focus ultrasonical.

I look at other cameras with an attitude that's whimsical.
I do not want an SLR with viewing pentaprimsical.
The look of glass from Asia makes me squint my eyes and squirm a knee.
I'd rather get my lenses from a little town in Germany.

(CHORUS)
He'd rather get his lenses from a little town in Germany.
He'd rather get his lenses from a little town in Germany.
He'd rather get his lenses from a little town in Germa-Germa-ny.

(MASTER AMATEUR)
I will never put my camera on a tripod that is teetering.
I cannot understand the need for modern matrix metering.
Look back upon my history, it's all in my biography:
I am a total devotee of Leica M photography.

(CHORUS)
Look back upon his history, it's all in his biography:
He is a total devotee of Leica M photography.

(MASTER AMATEUR)
I love my Leica cameras with passion that's tyrannical
A rangefinder, a floating frame, and everything mechanical.
The shutter curtain's rubberized, and fashioned from the finest silk.
The lenses have a bokeh that is smooth as summer buttermilk.

My fifty f-two Summicron takes landscapes that are lyrical.
I pierce the gloomy shadows with my Summilux aspherical.
I must have Leica quality although it costs me lots o' bucks.
I bought a ninety APO, I'm saving for a Noctilux.

He bought a ninety APO, he's saving for a Noctilux.
He bought a ninety APO, he's saving for a Noctilux.
He bought a ninety APO, he's saving for a Nocti-Nocti-lux.

I develop all my Tri-X film in acid that's ascorbical.
I try to make my photos have a reference metaphorbical.
And so throughout my history, you'll find in my biography:
I am a total devotee of Leica M photography.

(CHORUS)
And so throughout his history, we find in his biography:
He is a total devotee of Leica M photography.

(MASTER AMATEUR)
I want to be like Eisenstadt and Smith and Frank and HCB.
I take my Christmas photos in a style that's documentary.
I never shoot at weathered rocks and twisted trees and gnats and logs.
There's universal pathos in my pictures of my cats and dogs.

I lurk in bars and coffeshops, and stalk the streets with Delphic glee.
To shoot unwary passers-by with Leica mounted pelvically.
But when I spy a plant that has a lovely flower's bloom upon.
I take a dazzling close-up with my dual-ranging Summicron.

(CHORUS)
He takes a dazzling close-up with his dual-ranging Summicron.
He takes a dazzling close-up with his dual-ranging Summicron.
He takes a dazzling close-up with his dual-ranging Summi-Summi-cron.

(MASTER AMATEUR)
And although I've tried the other brands they always are inferior.
They can't resolve the fuzz upon a baby's bare posterior.
That's why throughout my history, you'll find in my biography:
I am a total devotee of Leica M photography.

(CHORUS)
That's why throughout his history, you'll find in his biography:
He is a total devotee of Leica M photography.

London Paparazzi- Reaching for the stars!

2008-01-21T12:52:00.000-08:00

There's been an explosion of paparazzi since the boom in digital cameras and celebrity magazines. Is it all as cruel as it looks? Decca Aitkenhead joins the pack. Photographs by Kalpesh Lathigra

Saturday December 15, 2007
The Guardian

'Leave her alone, you dirty scum! Why don't you just leave her alone?" As two paparazzi scramble on to the pavement to catch Amy Winehouse emerging from her Mercedes van, a pair of young women bustle out of a cafe. "She's just trying to lead her life!" they scold, before pursuing the singer into the newsagent's. "You doing all right then, love?" the pair cluck. One throws an arm around Winehouse, drawing her tight, while the other steadies her mobile phone camera for the shot. "Now then, Amy," the woman exhorts. "Smile!"

Article continues
Winehouse surrenders an unseeing gaze to the lens, then turns to study the news-stand. "Look at Chantelle's tits!" she says. "I've got to have that." A cover shot of the newly pneumatic Chantelle Houghton, of Celebrity Big Brother fame, is scooped up along with the Sun, the Mirror and Heat.

At the counter Winehouse realises the shopkeeper is filming her on his mobile. "What do you think you're doing?" But her scowl sags half-heartedly, and the question must strike him as rhetorical, for as he takes her money he doesn't even bother to answer.

A decade ago, when the most photographed woman in the world lost her life in a Paris car chase, for a while it was seriously suggested that the paparazzi era was over. Newspaper editors vowed to change their ways, pledging not to use "snatched" pictures. It didn't last. Instead, the industry has multiplied beyond all control. Paparazzi agencies, which once employed one or two photographers, now have staffs of 10 or 20, and on any given night you can find up to 70 freelancers patrolling the streets of central London, supplying an ever-expanding market of tabloids and celebrity magazines. Mark Frith, editor of Heat, recalls how, back in the 90s, the daily delivery of paparazzi pictures to Smash Hits, where he then worked, would arrive in a single A4 envelope. Today he receives between 10,000 and 20,000 electronic images every day.

Members of the public send snaps of anyone they spot to the "people paparazzi" lines that all the agencies and publications now advertise. Celebrities complain of suffocating persecution. Last month, Nicole Kidman told a Sydney court she had feared for her life in a paparazzi car chase; and in the week that Princess Diana's inquest opened, Prince William and his girlfriend, Kate Middleton, complained that they were pursued home by "threatening" photographers on motorbikes. The paparazzi were widely held to blame for their split this year, and public sympathy for the couple is immense, equalled only by inexhaustible interest.

No celebrity interview today is complete without the star's bitter lament for lost privacy, the mantra of modern celebrity culture. And yet a travel company recently offered a "Glamour Star" weekend experience, for which customers pay £2,400 to be driven around Paris in a blacked-out limousine, pursued by "photographers" on motorbikes. That people will pay for an experience they are told is intolerable is one of the many mysteries of the paparazzi's world.

With a staff of 11 photographers, Splash News is one of the biggest celebrity picture agencies in London, with an office full of researchers scanning websites, tabloids and magazines for clues as to the whereabouts of stars. Sales are negotiated individually, but the market moves so fast and has grown so amorphous, they now use image recognition softare to scan every single Splash photo, and every celebrity publication, to ensure no sale escapes.

I meet Simon Hammond early one morning outside the Dorchester hotel on Park Lane, where Kidman is staying to promote her latest film. Underneath his woolly hat, Hammond has soft, youthful features; he's the chief photographer of Splash and he's 22 years old. Hammond's father was a local news man in Kent, and Hammond worked alongside him from the age of 16, before joining Splash three years ago. Father and son or brother teams are common among the paparazzi (women are rare). One thing they tend to have in common is spectacularly dishevelled cars, piled high with old newspapers and empty wrappers. "Sorry." Hammond grins as we get in. "You do sort of batter cars when you do this job."

We drive round to Claridge's hotel, where Kidman will be arriving for press interviews. More than a dozen paps are already waiting outside, and one stares at the camera Kalpesh, the Guardian's photographer, is using. "What the fuck is that?" "Er, it's called film, mate." Some of these photographers are just 18 years old, still spotty and soft-limbed, living in the suburbs with their mums.

"Heads up!" A parking attendant is about to ticket Hammond's car. He dashes off to move it, returning to the same yellow line once the warden is gone.

The photographers banter and joke with the doormen, but keep one eye on every passing limo, scanning number plates for registrations they recognise. When Tim Burton emerges from one the pack springs into action - just as another warden arrives. "Fuck it." Hammond shrugs. "I'll just take the hit. That's another one this week for the office."

Then, suddenly, the temperature seems to change, and out of a limo steps Kidman. "Nicole! Nicole! This way, Nicole!" The frenzy is electrifying, but fleeting, for within seconds she is gone, leaving Hammond poring over his camera to see what he got. It's not great. Then word comes that they've missed Johnny Depp arriving through a side entrance. Hammond spots Chelsea's chief executive, Peter Kenyon, in the hotel foyer, and laughs ruefully. "I always spot the crap ones."

"Clampers!" A photographer has spotted a clamping van, so Hammond races off to drive around the block until it leaves. By now several paps' cars have been ticketed, and the biggest earnings to be made from Kidman today look like going to Westminster City Council. The only real moment of drama is a confrontation between our photographer and one of the paps, who flies at Kalpesh, roaring, "Don't point that camera at me!" But most of them are surprisingly forthcoming. Once they get started, in fact, they don't want to stop, and anecdotes tumble out as the day wears on. They call Jude Law Celebrity Dave, because his first name is really David and because he is fond of declaring, "I am not a celebrity. I am an ac-tor." Yeah, right, they all laugh. "So I tell him," one says, "same here, mate. I'm not a pap. I am a phot-o-graph-er."

The paps refer to the stars by their first names - Kate, Amy, Kylie - as if mentioning friends, but it is a strangely alienated kind of intimacy for, unlike the consumers of their wares, they feel little curiosity about them. Affections and animosities are entirely commercial; everyone loves Kylie because she always "gives up", meaning she pauses on her doorstep and smiles, and everyone hates Sienna, because she shouts abuse and ducks. Much as traffic wardens wonder why motorists take tickets personally, the paps seem bemused that Sienna should hate them, when they are only playing their part in the publicity food chain off which she, too, feeds. Everyone - paps, editors, press agents, doormen - refers to the business as "the game"; the rules of the game, playing the game, the name of the game.

Kidman's security manager comes out to say she will stop to pose on her way out, but in return they must promise not to follow her car. The actor shimmers out looking unreal - every detail so hyper-defined it looks more like computer animation than human flesh. The aesthetic discrepancy with the swaddled and hooded paps, grey from a diet of crisps and coffee, makes them look almost subterranean. As Kidman slides into her limo, her security man steps in to block their view, but when I ask Hammond why, his glance suggests this is an amazingly stupid question. "Up-the-skirt shots."

Most of the paps now peel away to lap their daily circuit - Bond Street, the Ivy, Harrods. But Depp's limo is still here, so Hammond decides to stay to try to catch him leaving. It is beginning to drizzle; as we drive to the back door, the parking ticket flaps forlornly in the windscreen wipers.

It is a long, cold afternoon waiting for Johnny. Three of the photographers bring their dogs with them to soothe the lonely boredom, and while I'm playing with a black labrador, the office calls Hammond: Amy Winehouse has cancelled her concert in Bournemouth that night, so at six o'clock we give up on Depp and head for the singer's house.

"Wenn [a rival agency] are claiming exclusive pictures of Amy coming out of a clinic - but there's a lot of disinformation in this game." Hammond's phone rings: it's the office again. "It's on the Wenn website, is it?" You can see him processing the implications rapidly. "Outside the clinic? What kind of clinic? What does it say? So it's not exclusive then. Or it wouldn't be on the website.

"What? So she was outside her house this morning? Shit. Bollocks. Fucking hell. I just assumed she'd go straight from Brighton to Bournemouth."

He hangs up. "Well, if it's non-exclusive I'm not bothered. You're not really talking big money, maybe one and a half grand." He pauses. "I am bothered - course I am - but it's not like we've gone and missed a 30-grand set of pictures."

On a dark, rainy Camden backstreet, we find more paps waiting at Winehouse's gate. A light is on in an upstairs window, so we analyse its significance obsessively - absurdly - as if this scrap of a clue could plausibly locate someone somewhere in a city of 10 million. Giving up, I flick through one of the London freesheets in the car, only to find myself looking at a photograph of the man we've been waiting for all day - Johnny Depp, apparently shopping on Shaftesbury Avenue. "That's probably an old stock picture," Hammond says quickly. "Yeah, they just stick on a caption making something up. They've done it to my stuff loads of times."

When we spot the caption and see it was taken the previous night, he relaxes. He leans against his car. "This is boring. This is so boring." Then he laughs at himself. "Photographers - we all start out so keen, so hungry, so excited. And after a while all you'll hear is us moaning that it's boring."

Three big changes have transformed the world of the paparazzi in the past 10 years. The first, and most radical, was digitalisation. Today you need camera kit worth little more than £500, and no photographic training, to have a crack at working as a pap - which is why their average age has plummeted. It also explains why their numbers have soared. But the second change came after a 2004 BBC documentary series, Paparazzi, which followed the biggest agency in Britain, Big Pictures. "It made it look easy," one paparazzo complains indignantly. "We had a secret recipe, and they blew it. They told everyone the ingredients. It was so stupid. The makers of Coca-Cola don't tell you what they put in Coke, do they?"

The show made a household name of Big Pictures' boss, Darryn Lyons, a somewhat cartoonish ("Bloke looks like a bloody parrot") loudmouth whose inflated boasts of what pap pictures fetch led many viewers to believe all they had to do was wait outside some celebrities' houses, and they would soon be millionaires. Consequently, there are now up to 10 paparazzi stationed permanently outside choice London addresses.

"It used to be good fun," one pap says nostalgically, "a bit like hide and seek. But now there are too many muppets hanging around." The possibility of an exclusive shot has all but disappeared, and the market price of photos has plunged. A full-page picture of Kate, Keira, Kylie or Sienna - the most reliably bankable big four - sells to a celebrity magazine such as Heat for only £200, while a set of pictures of, say, Liz Hurley shopping, which could once have fetched £6,000 from a tabloid, sells for only £800. So while the stars complain that the number of paparazzi has made their lives a misery, the paparazzi complain that they are earning less than ever before. It is, as one puts it glumly, a lose-lose situation.

Frith dates another major change to an issue of Now magazine in spring 2003. "It carried pictures of three celebs not looking that great. And the cover line was something like 'ROUGH!' I remember that issue coming into the Heat office and thinking, they have finally flipped. The first rule of magazines is you never put anyone on the cover looking awful. A week later the circulation figures came in. They'd sold something like 700,000 copies, one of their highest figures ever. And it changed everything. It changed every rule."

There is no longer a reliable relationship between the earning power of a celebrity and the market value of their image. Readers prefer to see moderately famous people looking fat, or badly dressed, or poorly made up, than A-listers looking beautiful. The dynamic has thus inevitably assumed a more predatory, cruel quality. Charlotte Church, for example, has rarely been seen since before the birth of her daughter in September, and the photographers suspect this is because she doesn't want to be seen until she has lost weight.

If you are a celebrity, one of the best ways to deflate the market value of your photograph is to wear the same clothes every day. Madonna is no fool, and for years now has seldom been seen out and about in anything other than an Adidas tracksuit and dark glasses, making her image almost impossible to sell, and ensuring she is largely left alone. But once scandal attaches itself to your name, there is very little you can do - which is why, when Winehouse cancels her tour, Hammond spends the rest of the week waiting outside her door.

Time slowly begins to assume an entirely new dimension. A rotating shift of paps sit on the wall in Camden and watch YouTube on laptops, bicker over whose turn it is to buy tea, dodge traffic wardens and tell jokes. "This is us doing our job," Hammond smiles. "You've got to be pretty relaxed, otherwise you'd go mad." Staffers such as Hammond earn a basic salary, upwards of £20,000, plus 20% commission on sales, whereas freelancers pay the agencies which sell their work a 40% cut. Considering they can go days without shooting a single frame, their serenity is remarkable. I feel defeated, the only one unable to surrender to uncertainty.

When information finally comes, it is like rain after a drought. Deano, the Splash man stationed outside Winehouse's other property in Bow, has seen her van pull up. Yawning nonchalantly, Hammond announces to the others that his office is pulling him off for another job, and waits until we're well out of sight before flooring the accelerator.

We reach Bow the second Winehouse's van pulls out. The only other car in pursuit is Deano's, and Hammond is beginning to buzz. "We could be on a nice little exclusive here." The paparazzi never use the word car "chase" - rather, it is a "follow". Now, at last, we are "on a follow".

We have to run red lights to keep up, and when the road widens Deano pulls alongside us to fill both lanes. "We're just blocking idiots from getting in our way," Hammond explains. "Well," he clarifies, "actually they're not idiots. They're just people driving around London. But to us they're idiots."

When we're back on the follow, after Winehouse's first stop at a newsagent's, Hammond says, "I might ring the boys in Camden, and tell them she's out, so they'll leave. Just in case she goes home. It's not screwing them," he adds. "I'm just giving them information." He hangs up looking pleased. "Job done." Passing the office of rival agency Big Pictures, we duck and giggle. Then, suddenly, the Mercedes stops, Winehouse gets out and climbs into the front seat.

"Why's she done that? What does that mean? What's she doing?" He laughs. "Pap paranoia kicking in now. My heart's racing."

Continuing west, we speculate neurotically about our destination. When it occurs to me that this is pointless, Hammond laughs. "Yeah, I know. But it's just the game you play in your car." Entering the West End, Hammond frets that this is "pap territory" and worries we'll be spotted. "Shit!" he points at a passing car. "That was Dan, from Xposure! Thank God he hasn't seen us. You see how easy it is to lose an exclusive?" The van turns right on to Wimpole Street. "Of course! The clinic."

The same curiously courteous dance is observed each time Winehouse gets out; she pretends the photographers are not there, and they observe a polite distance of several yards. But, pulling away from the clinic, we almost lose her, because other cars are blocking us in. "Now please," Hammond pleads under his breath, "just go back to Bow." But instead, as we're nearing Oxford Circus, the passenger door opens and Winehouse slips out on to the pavement, swallowed instantly into the pedestrian tide. "Where the fuck's she going?" Hammond panics. Without even thinking, I jump out and follow her on foot.

Winehouse is startlingly tiny - just a child's body in flattened pink ballet pumps, glancing into shop windows. As we head down Regent Street, I call Hammond and whisper our coordinates. We're turning right into Maddox Street, I murmur. Now she's gone into a tanning shop. No, hang on, she's come out again - and now we're on Carnaby Street.

There seem to be camera crews all over Carnaby Street, and I'm afraid one will spot her and ruin the exclusive. Passersby turn, mouthing her name, and the soft ripple of "Amy Winehouse" follows her path like an echo. Occasionally, someone shouts, "Amy, we love you!" and twice she turns and points an enigmatic, one-finger diva salute. She has a deep seriousness that is both intent and vacant; at once oblivious to being watched, and self-conscious.

She darts into a shop. I stop and catch my breath. And then, all of a sudden, a great wave of revulsion crashes over me. I'm stalking Amy Winehouse. What am I doing? This is weird. And what if she sees me? It's so cold that I've worn a furry Russian hat. She saw me earlier in the newsagent's, so she's bound to recognise my stupid big hat. I am mortified, and desperate for Hammond to get here so that I can hide. I could stop and turn around - only by now I really like him and don't want to let him down.

And then it dawns that what I'm experiencing is precisely the same emotional spectrum every pap describes: predatory adrenaline rush, horrified shame, professional dissociation.

She ducks into a plaza and I follow helplessly. Hammond has abandoned his car and is following on foot. She goes into a boutique and I loiter outside, feeling ridiculous. Heads are turning, and I don't want people to notice I'm following her.

At last Hammond arrives, and follows her into the store. When they re-emerge, they seem to exchange a few words; a stranger could take the pair for friends. She disappears into another shop, and Hammond joins me. What did she say? He looks thrown, and slightly embarrassed. "She said, 'Where's my driver? I've lost my driver.'" So now Hammond is on the phone to Deano, who's still following the Mercedes, and Deano's trying to get the driver's attention, so he can put him on the phone to talk to Winehouse, to help her find him. But, of course, the driver is ignoring Deano, because he doesn't realise the paparazzo is trying to help. At a loss, I go into the shop, and when Winehouse turns around her pale, white face is streaked with tears.

And in that second, she becomes a real person. This isn't hide and seek, she should probably be in hospital. I don't know it now, but the following weekend Winehouse will be photographed stumbling semi-naked through the early hours in her underwear, dazed and incoherent, not playing a game but disintegrating before the photographers' eyes.

I want to tell her, I'm just doing my job. "I'm not following you, Amy!" I start to say - I'm from the Guardian, you see, and I'm following the paparazzi, and they're following you, and so now it looks like I'm following you, but actually I'm just doing my job. I open my mouth to say it - but then I stop. This is what all the paps say: I'm just doing my job.

There are three kinds of paparazzi - day, night and events. "They're a different breed," they all say of each other, and the snobbery is mutual. Day paps such as Hammond credit themselves with a degree of journalistic ingenuity and photographic finesse. "Night papping," they scoff, "is just a rugby scrum. It's not photography, it's just about getting to the front." Night paps work outside restaurants and clubs, and consider sitting outside people's houses immoral, or at least beneath them. Events paps cover the red-carpet circuit and call themselves "celebrity photojournalists". "Give me a break," the night paps say, laughing. "I mean, where's the journalism in standing in a pen behind a rope?"

To see what night papping is all about, I try a night shift with Steve Spiller, a gentlemanly soul in his mid-30s, who turned to this when the money in studio photography dried up.

His night begins with a tour of Mayfair's top restaurants - Cipriani, Scott's, Nobu - then on to the clubs at 11pm. A doorman spots us and bounds over to chat; he's one of Spiller's tippers, who will make 15% on sales from information he provides. Then a call comes in from another tipper: Jordan's name is on the guest list at Embassy nightclub. More than 20 paps are waiting outside - greyer than the day paps, and rougher when their moment comes. They spot a van they know and swoop as one, like a flock of starlings. "Katie! Katie! Over your shoulder, Katie!" Jordan - aka Katie Price - is bundled through the scrum of elbows and lenses, but through the flashgun blaze the glamour model holds her head high. "She must have inbuilt sunglasses in her eyes, that girl," a pap marvels.

To get Jordan looking right down your lens means the difference between a picture that will sell and a fruitless night. But celebrities soon learn to screen out the call of their name, so photographers must be imaginative to win their attention. Some celebrities claim paps get them to look by shouting, "You cunt!" This struck me as rather inventive but, when I mention it, the paps look genuinely shocked. "What? Cunt? No! No way. I've never heard that. They're making it up." And oddly enough, I believe them. What do they use? Comedy works best, apparently. Someone says, "I shout, 'Will you marry me?' "

But they agree that the work has got an awful lot rougher. "There's no respect," one laments. "There used to be an etiquette about getting your pictures, and it wasn't to rush at the celebs. But there are too many guys now, and people don't know. They're not photographers, they're just people with cameras."

Word of Jordan at Embassy spreads fast, so when she comes out after midnight, at least 30 paps are waiting. Motorbikes and cars roar off after her van, but Spiller has a hunch she'll be heading for Movida, just around the corner, and so for the second time that day I find myself sprinting up Regent Street after a celebrity. When the van pulls up outside Movida, Jordan's security man gets out to choreograph the mayhem. "If you stand back," he bargains, "she'll give you a picture." He looks like a wrestler, but reminds me of a nursery teacher herding toddlers.

Jordan steps out of the van with her arm around a pretty young woman. They stand before the throng. "This," Jordan announces, pulling her tight, "is my sister. And today it's her birthday - are you going to sing for her, then, or what?"

And so 30 grown men sing their hearts out, as they snap away. "Happy birthday to you," they warble, "Happy birthday to you!" As they sing I can just make out Jordan whispering into her sister's ear. "First the pout," she coaches softly. The pair tilt their heads. "Now we smile. And now," Jordan tutors her baby sister, on her 18th birthday, "now, the kiss." And in the blinding white glare of 30 flash guns, the two sisters embrace in a long, lingering kiss.

Spiller later sells the pictures to a tabloid website for just £50 each. No one expects the night to bring anything better. But they daren't go home, just in case they miss something, and so, for as long as Jordan is inside the club, everyone waits.

Through the early hours a flow of girls with ambitions to be as rich as Jordan, and with very few clothes on, come and go. Desperate to be photographed, several try flashing their underwear or breasts at the paps, and look indignant when it doesn't work. At first I read the photographers' indifference as a passive-aggressive form of misogyny - then I realise they take as a professional insult the assumption that they must enjoy snapping any old breasts.

"What is she doing?" one despairs, as yet another girl bends and flips up her skirt. "That's a member of the public! What makes a member of the public do that?" He shakes his head and looks away.

"Two words, mate," grumbles another. "Two words: no morals."

Dark contempt, pragmatism and patience seem to run through the paparazzi's veins. At the end of the week I take a freelancer for a drink. He doesn't want to give his name, because he says he gets enough grief in his job as it is. "We're just a bunch of guys trying to get the photographs," he says simply. "The people who buy the magazines and want to see these photographs, they're the fucked-up ones."

But, I say, the editors tell me they're providing a public service - a healthy psychological corrective to the dysfunction of fame - by showing the stars looking bad. He bursts out in bitter laughter. "Do you seriously think they are psychologists of any sort? Do you think they give a fuck about people's wellbeing? No. They will do what they do to sell. We're all in the same boat - every single one of us. You feel bad. Of course you do. But we're talking about people making money, and this is the game. I'm just like every other wanker in this world who is trying to make a living, and is compromised, and lives in denial, and does what has to be done to feed my children. Why should I feel more guilty?

"Of course this game's weird," he mutters into his drink. Then he looks up at me. "But you're writing about it. So how weird is that?"

I find myself thinking about the final stop Winehouse had made on her way home to Bow. A schoolboy spotted her entering a florist's. "Come here!" he shouted to his friend. "Quick! It's Amy Winehouse! Have you got your mobile on you?"

The pair glued their faces to the window. Then the second boy seemed to shake himself.

"What is so good, though?" he asked, walking away. "I mean, seriously. Yeah, that's Amy Winehouse. But what is so good?" ·

Jpeg who will own you in 100 years!

2008-01-09T11:23:00.000-08:00

To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.

DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

photonappers!

2008-01-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

Hey, Isn't That . . .
People Are Doing Double-Takes, And Taking Action, As Web Snapshots Are Nabbed for Commercial Uses

Tracey Gaughran-Perez says a photo of her pug, Truman, was taken without permission and used during an NFL broadcast on Fox. (www.sweetney.com)

Tracey Gaughran-Perez says a photo of her pug, Truman, was taken without permission and used during an NFL broadcast on Fox. (www.sweetney.com)

The family of Dallas teenager Alison Chang is suing Australia's Virgin Mobile for using her photo in an advertising campaign without obtaining permission. The photo, which the plaintiffs say was grabbed from a Flickr page, was used in the ad shown above. (Brenton Cleeland - )

The family of Dallas teenager Alison Chang, left, is suing Australia's Virgin Mobile for using the above photo in an advertising campaign without obtaining permission. The photo, which the plaintiffs say was grabbed from a Flickr page, was used in an ad that said "Dump Your Pen Friend," over Chang's picture. (Justin Ho-yee Wong - )

Discussion PolicyDiscussion Policy CLOSEComments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

Hey, Isn't That . . .
People Are Doing Double-Takes, And Taking Action, As Web Snapshots Are Nabbed for Commercial Uses

SLIDESHOW Previous Next
Tracey Gaughran-Perez says a photo of her pug, Truman, was taken without permission and used during an NFL broadcast on Fox. (www.sweetney.com)

Tracey Gaughran-Perez says a photo of her pug, Truman, was taken without permission and used during an NFL broadcast on Fox. (www.sweetney.com)

The family of Dallas teenager Alison Chang is suing Australia's Virgin Mobile for using her photo in an advertising campaign without obtaining permission. The photo, which the plaintiffs say was grabbed from a Flickr page, was used in the ad shown above. (Brenton Cleeland - )

The family of Dallas teenager Alison Chang, left, is suing Australia's Virgin Mobile for using the above photo in an advertising campaign without obtaining permission. The photo, which the plaintiffs say was grabbed from a Flickr page, was used in an ad that said "Dump Your Pen Friend," over Chang's picture. (Justin Ho-yee Wong - )

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Discussion PolicyDiscussion Policy CLOSEComments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

The pug in the corner of the Saints-Eagles football telecast on Fox looked familiar to Tracey Gaughran-Perez.

Not in the slobber-smile way that all pugs look familiar, but in the who else but me would dress their pug up in a bleeping Santa suit kind of familiar.

Gaughran-Perez logged on to http://www.sweetney.com, the personal blog where she'd uploaded a snapshot of her dog, then waited for the Fox pug -- a sort of "Merry Christmas" icon -- to appear again on TV.

Argh

cont....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/08/AR2008010804626.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR

Who's Blogging» Links to this article
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 9, 2008; Page C01

2007-12-27T11:46:00.001-08:00

"Finding and photographing human dignity within very often undignified environments is what I try to do."

Don mcCullin speaks....

2007-12-14T13:33:00.001-08:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/ram/ajtmccullin.ram

a GREAT tool...as far as tools go...

2007-12-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

Photo tool could fix bad images
By Mark Ward
Technology correspondent, BBC News website, San Diego

Stage one
This is the original image with a spoiled view...
Digital photographers could soon be able to erase unwanted elements in photos by using tools that scan for similar images in online libraries.

Research teams have developed an algorithm that uses sites like Flickr to help discover light sources, camera position and composition in a photo.

Using this data the tools then search for objects, such as landscapes or cars, that match the original.

The teams aim to create image libraries that anyone can use to edit snaps.

Stage two
Stage one: The obstruction is isolated and the algorithm searches for similar scenes

James Hays and Alexei Efros from Carnegie Mellon University have developed an algorithm to help people who want to remove bits of photographs.

The parts being removed could be unsightly lorries in the snaps of the rural idyll where they took a holiday or even an old boyfriend or girlfriend they want to rub out from a photograph.

To find suitable matching elements, the research duo's algorithm looks through a database of 2.3 million images culled from Flickr.

"We search for other scenes that share as closely as possible the same semantic scene data," said Mr Hays, who has been showing off the project at the computer graphics conference Siggraph, in San Diego.

In this sense "semantic" means composition. So a snap of a lake in the foreground, hills in a band in the middle and sunset above has, as far as the algorithm is concerned, very different "semantics" to one of a city with a river running through it.

Stage three
It compares photos online to find a matching scene

The broad-based analysis cuts out more than 99.9% of the images in the database, said Mr Hays. The algorithm then picks the closest 200 for further analysis.

Next the algorithm searches the 200 to see if they have elements, such as hillsides or even buildings, the right size and colours for the hole to be filled.

The useful parts of the 20 best scenes are then cropped, added to the image being edited so the best fit can be chosen.

Early tests of the algorithm show that only 30% of the images altered with it could be spotted, said Mr Hays.

The other approach aims to use net-based image libraries to create a clip-art of objects that, once inserted into a photograph, look convincing.

Stage four
Stage three: The finished picture where the obstruction has been removed and a better view added.

"We want to generate objects of high realism while keeping the ease of use of a clip art library," said Jean-Francois Lalonde of Carnegie Mellon University who led the research.

To generate its clip art for photographs the team has drawn on the net's Label Me library of images which has many objects, such as people, trees and cars, cut out and tagged by its users.

The challenge, said Mr Lalonde, was working out which images in the Label Me database will be useful and convincing when inserted into photographs.

The algorithm developed by Mr Lalonde and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft Research analyses scenes to find out the orientation of objects and the sources of light in a scene.

"We use the height of the people in the image to estimate the height of the camera used to take the picture," he said.

The light sources in a scene are worked out by looking at the distribution of colour shades within three broad regions, ground, vertical planes and sky, in the image.

With knowledge about the position, pitch and height of the camera and light sources the algorithm then looks for images in the clip art database that were taken from similar positions and with similar pixel heights.

The group has created an interface for the database of photo clipart so people can pick which elements they want to add to a scene.

Is Photography dead.

2007-12-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo "shoots" whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets. Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you're likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller's overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard's completely "fabricated photographs" of phantasmagoric landscapes. And the establishment's seal of approval for photography has been renewed in two current museum exhibitions. In "Depth of Field"— the first installation in the new contemporary-photography galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on display through March 23—the fare includes Thomas Struth's hyperdetailed chromogenic print of the interior of San Zaccaria in Venice and Adam Fuss's exposure of a piece of photo paper floating in water to a simultaneous splash and strobe.

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978" (up through Dec. 31) celebrates average Americans who wielded their Brownies and Instamatics to stunning effect.

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life. William Henry Fox Talbot, who produced the first photographic prints from a negative in 1839, immediately saw the mimetic new medium as an art form. Talbot wanted only to be able to "draw" more accurately than by hand. In fact, he called his first book of reproduced photographs "The Pencil of Nature." For at least a century thereafter, any photograph with a claim to being art had in its DNA at least a few chromosomes from Talbot's "The Open Door" (1844), a picture of a tree-branch broom leaning just-so-esthetically against a dark doorway. Of course, great photographers have never merely recorded visual facts indiscriminately, like a court stenographer taking down testimony. They've selected their subjects carefully and framed their views of them precisely, in order to give their pictures the look of "art." Later in the 19th century, "pictorialist" photographers used soft focus, toothy paper, sepia tones, multiple negatives and even scratching back into the image as ways of getting photographs to look more like paintings.

Soon, photography escaped the exclusive grasp of the professionals and moneyed hobbyists who could afford its cumbersome equipment, and the public began to take its own pictures. In the 1920s, small, inexpensive fast-shutter cameras like the Kodak Brownie appeared. By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, most of them quick, informal snapshots. To be sure, some masterpieces did emerge—mostly accidentally—from this Everest-size heap of images. The person who pointed his Brownie at the woman in "Unknown [photographer], 1950s" in "The Art of the American Snapshot" probably didn't anticipate that she'd cover her face with her hands just as he clicked the shutter. And he (or she) couldn't predict that the result would be a great composition—long fingers and angular elbows set against the gentle downhill sweep of a field—and a wonderful metaphor for photography's tango with the truth. What the inadvertently great snapshot shared with the work of realist artist-photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in the 1930s and '40s, and Diane Arbus and Robert Frank in the 1950s and '60s, was that the people in them were who they looked like they were—raw-boned farmers, gritty miners, harried housewives, burly bikers—really doing what they looked like they were doing.

In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head. "The big change in attitude from realist photography," says Lawrence Miller, who owns a prominent photography gallery in New York, "was when Metro Pictures [one of the hippest galleries in SoHo] showed Cindy Sherman in 1980." Sherman's fictional self-portraits—fake "film stills" with the artist posed as a negligeed blonde on a bed, or a dark-haired femme fatale in a chic apartment—weren't photography's first turn away from the straight, nonfiction reportage most people think of as great photography. But her pictures represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art. It wasn't just for reportage anymore. The Talbotian esthetic door was now fully opened for photographers to make photographs just as well as to take them. The advent of digital technology only exacerbated photography's flight into fable.

We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.Peter Plagens | NEWSWEEK