In response to the sheer horror felt by most ordinary people who have seen the images there has been a studious attempt by the Pentagon and, on its behalf, by most sections of the media to downplay the video’s importance and call into question the idea that an informed opinion can be made on the basis of its content. Viewers have rightly responded with revulsion to the words and deeds of the helicopter crews in the video but have been told that they should not be surprised by what they see: this is war, this is how it looks and these kinds of incidents – though regrettable – are simply mistakes that everybody in the military does their very best to prevent. Also, according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, what we see in the video lacks context. He is right in that regard but background and perspective do not serve him well.

July 2007 was the height of what became known as “The Surge” in Iraq. The U.S. military escalation was sold to the American people as a necessary effort to create a secure environment in which “political reconciliation” could take place among the Iraqi leadership and socio-political factions. This troop increase, we were told, would be accompanied by the implementation of counterinsurgency best practices as laid down by the new, much vaunted U.S. Military Counterinsurgency Manual. This had earlier been rolled out, to great media attention, with talking points such as “lessons learned,” “population-centric,” “secure the population,” and “population friendly.” Billed as a radical departure from the previous Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, it was designed to direct a public emphasis away from a “kinetic” approach to the war.

The reality was somewhat different. “The Surge” was a calculated effort to keep an increasingly disillusioned and American casualty-averse public in the U.S. engaged in what they saw as an unwinnable war. Best counterinsurgency practices were a smokescreen for a ramping up of violence – particularly in Baghdad – to unprecedented levels. This included a 500% increase in the use of air strikes by the U.S. Air Force alone. As we see in the video, eliminating possible threats from a distance was preferable to risking American lives on the ground. Why send a company of infantry to explore an ambiguity when it can be eliminated by a missile strike or a few bursts of cannon fire? According to the Department of Defence’s statistics, June and July of 2007 were the high tide of violence in its part of the war in Iraq. In this accommodating environment I cannot help wondering just how many similar incidents occurred during this period.

Another slice of context that would serve us well would be to know the identity of the whistleblower – the insider (for he/she surely was inside) who sent the material to Wikileaks. What motivated him or her? From reviewing documents released by the Pentagon after Wikileaks posted the video, it seems that the 39-minute file may be the same one put together by the helicopter unit in the immediate aftermath of the incident and handed, on a CD, to the officers charged with conducting the internal investigation. This raises more questions: is this from one helicopter or both? Were both helicopters recording the mission? If so, what else would we see if both recordings were being played side by side?

The video we see begins only one minute before the group of men in the courtyard become the focus of the helicopter crew’s attention. Critically, it omits what they claim was a request for assistance by troops in the area who were being fired on. Where is that footage and why was it not included in the edit? And why didn’t the investigators request the full record of that morning’s flight?

There have been claims that the leaked video segments do not adequately depict the situation on the ground that day. If that were the case, the additional footage would, presumably, clear up any false impressions. Judging by a combination of what we hear of the ground unit’s radio traffic and the overall demeanour of the Iraqi men we see strolling nonchalantly in the courtyard, it is difficult to imagine any sort of significant action taking place close by. The argument that the actions were justified because small arms fire could be heard in the vicinity does not stand up. The sound of small arms fire does not necessarily equal a gun battle in progress. There are armed men in the courtyard – one carrying some sort of Kalashnikov (AK47) variant and the other with a machine gun, either an RPK or a PKM – and both are relaxed. It does not look like they are ready to use the weapons or are moving toward positions where they would likely use them. If they are aware of the helicopters overhead they do not seem to regard the aircraft as a threat even though they are openly carrying weapons.

The pilots – and many people who have viewed the video since its release – assume the men to be “insurgents” but remember that besides occurring at the height of “The Surge,” these events took place during a raging civil war in which residential districts and, all too often, mosques were the targets of bombers and gunmen. Many districts set up armed neighbourhood watch groups to protect themselves against attack by erecting checkpoints to control access, and most mosques in the city had some form of guard force. There is a possibility – given the proximity of the mosque – that the armed men could have belonged to either of these groups. Even then, it is not these men who trigger the request by the Americans for permission to open fire; it is what we now know to be Namir’s cameras, one carried by himself, the other by Saeed. These “weapons” become the centre of attention.

Once he is given the go-ahead, we hear the pilot’s excitement rise considerably and the aircraft begins to move in for the kill. Suddenly the “weapon” loses its previously ambiguous status and becomes a rocket propelled grenade launcher (RPG), even though it looks nothing like one and is not in any way being handled like one. With an increasingly urgent tone in his voice, the pilot says that the man on the corner is about to open fire, but now takes the time to traverse back to the other side of the corner instead of taking immediate action to prevent the man on the corner from firing. He clearly has more interest in eradicating the group than eliminating what he has identified as the threat to other U.S. troops because, as he later says, he “didn’t want all those fuckers to run away and scatter.”

The men in the courtyard are cut down by repeated bursts of cannon fire from the helicopters and then, when the dust clears, we witness the spectacle of a wounded survivor locked in the cross hairs of the gun camera. We hear the radio voices taunting and goading as they express their hope that he will reach for a weapon that exists only in their own minds.

If what we have just seen leaves any room for doubt as to the impropriety of the helicopter crew’s actions, it is soon dispelled. Having twice said that they can see no weapons, the crews repeatedly insist that they be granted permission to kill the wounded man and the three courageous Iraqis who have come to give him assistance. When the killing is sanctioned it is on the understanding that a wounded man and others who are carrying out a humanitarian act will be put to death.

We learn later that there are children in the car. Although nothing suggests that the helicopter crews knew this at the time, there is certainly enough evidence of their heartlessness to suspect that it would not have prevented them from committing the crime. By their own words, to these Americans an Iraqi father is such a subspecies that he brings his children to a battle.

Later in the video one of the helicopter crews fires a second missile into a building just as rescuers are entering it to help the victims of the first missile attack. Shortly afterwards a third missile is launched into the same building.

By the end of the day the military authorities in Baghdad knew that two of the men who had been killed were Reuters employees, and said that the military had opened an investigation. The documents made available by the Pentagon in response to the Wikileaks release are supposedly what resulted. They do not amount to an investigation. Instead, they show a superficial internal inquiry carried out by officers of the same command who seem highly sympathetic to those they are supposed to investigate, and are clearly indisposed to doing what is necessary: thoroughly exploring the incident to establish the truth. They simply provided the helicopter crews with an opportunity for self-exoneration.

Looking at this report – which, astonishingly, places the blame for the incident on the Reuters staff – it is little wonder that members of the American military have come to understand that the unlawful killing of an innocent Iraqi or Afghan carries little danger of scrutiny or punishment. The clear signal that this sends out is that actions such as we have seen in this video are deemed acceptable conduct and can be carried out within a cocoon of impunity.

Judging from what I have seen since the video entered the public domain, the editorial boards of the newspapers in the United States and Great Britain have remained shamefully silent. Where we would expect a muscular and well-argued demand for an official investigation conducted by competent, qualified investigators, we have heard nothing. The only organisations to express such an opinion have been press groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, leaving the impression that the only reason to be troubled by these killings is that journalists are among the dead. It is almost certain that it is the only reason we now know what happened that day.

The full 39min 14sec video:

Yesterday, about a week after AK Kimoto left us, I was standing in the rain on a busy Tokyo street corner waiting to cross and one of those thoughts popped into my head that I would have immediately shared with him. We would have laughed or ripped it apart, though I frankly I have already forgot what it was I wanted to share. I stood there kind of dumb struck thinking that there was no one else with whom I could share this insight. There is this new hole now in life. It will never quite be filled but it will always have AK’s stamp on it. I know I am not alone in discovering this new hole. We will all have to re-route around ourselves, carrying on and yet can look upon this void with affection knowing he has forever marked our lives. Be well on the other side, AK. You will visit me often whenever I have such a thought I want to share with you.

The last communiqué I got from AK was just over a week before I wrote this. These were his final sage-like words to me:

I don’t care about being recognized, and I don’t care if I go through life with no fame to show for my efforts. What bothers me is if people don’t take my latest work seriously. Not for my sake, but for the sake of the people who allowed me to photograph their lives. When was the last time you saw a 4 year old sucking down heroin? Is it not a tragedy? If I can’t do anything to bring attention to their plight, and if nobody cares, then what am I doing with my time and in fact, my life? It was never about awards or anything like that. I thought it was about being out in the world, witnessing things that others don’t see, and sharing these stories with a larger audience. I always said that I do what I do because I only have 2 hands.

James Whitlow Delano

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Dear our A.K.,

Your voice still resonates in my mind. I remember the exact tone of your voice. Three years after we met again, you became like my older brother. You kept telling me to “focus!” and “hey, I am worried about you” both in my life and in my photography. You were always the one who reminded me what is important in life and in work as a photographer. You were only 3 years older than I am, but a very mature and open minded person who I always respected and aspired to be like. The personality you had was like a warm, comfortable ocean where I always could dive without any worries. You always welcomed me whenever I wanted to share my experiences. Also you always guided me when I was on the wrong path by always finding the way for me, a childish little brother. In photography, you were the one who really believed in my work even if I was not confident about it. You pushed me a lot to go forward. You always gave me the criticism which guided me in the right direction not only for the quality of pictures but the important attitude as a photographer as well. I believe it reflected your great personality.

When you called me from Afghanistan last year, you were waiting for all the logistics to be prepared for your project. I was worried since I knew you were going get really deep into the mountains of Badakhshan for the opium story you wanted to follow. I had never seen pictures that deep inside a place. I remembered when we were talking about access. If access is more difficult, there tends to be more important a story to be told. After a month, you suddenly called me and showed your face on Skype with really slow connection. Your face was tired but I saw from your face that you did an important story. I asked you how you were going to present this story. Then you told me that you wanted to go to an N.G.O. or to the U.N. to show your story first and, while you were still there, ask them for support for those people whom you had just met in this remote area where no organization was working yet.

A.K., you talked a lot about the kids you met as well who smoked opium to resist the pangs of hunger. You really wanted to care for them, and the pictures you showed me were stunning, really touching and really strong. Some time later, when I visited your home in Bangkok you told me that now some organizations had started working in the area where the people you had photographed lived. I cannot forget the little happy smile you showed me. You said they were not doing much yet, but at least they had started. I really respected your attitude and what you told me really motivated me. Still, you never stop talking about the people you photographed. You were still trying to bring more attention to them. You were truly a photographer who cared deeply about the people in the photographs and a person who never talked about recognition. You were always caring about others, and not much about yourself. I felt your nature was to dedicate yourself to others.

I am writing this in Colombia where I just have finished working on a new project. While I was shooting a story a month ago, we talked about 10 minutes by phone. You were worried, as you always did, when I was shooting stories. Each time I talked, I felt the warm attitude from you. As I am an only child, I always wanted to have a brother, an older brother. You made me feel like I had a real older brother. I was happy to have a brother now in my life and this would last long time until we became 60 or 70 years old, or even older. I was looking forward to how we would become when we were in our 40s and 50s. It was going to be such a beautiful friendship and we would have more and more things to share in our lives.

When I heard the news from several of our friends, that was the day I had just finished everything I had to do here in Colombia this time round. It was just unreal to me since we had just talked 2 weeks ago on the phone when I had returned to Bogota, the capital. I wanted to show you the pictures I had just taken after you come back from Australia where you had a slideshow at Fotofreo. I was also really happy when we talked about how your important work, the people you care about in your photographs, were beginning to get more and more exposure. I know I have to accept one day that you are really gone but still cannot believe it, because your pictures are here and telling me the story as if you were talking to me directly. It is such a strong and important story you have done.

As it was announced that your ceremony will be held today by your parents and sister, I went to a church in Bogota at the same moment. It is nighttime here and not a good time to be walking around outside. I know you are not a Christian but a church is the only place I could be calm and pray for you since I don’t know where there is a Buddhist temple here. All the churches were closed, so I prayed outside of a church and remembered all the things I shared with you. I saw a dangerous-looking man who approached me but when he saw me praying and thinking about you. He didn’t do any harm to me. Instead, he just remained calm.

AK, I learnt so much from you. You cared a lot about your friends. You are such a beloved person. All people who knew you, loved you. I have never seen another person like you who was so loved and deeply respected by so many people. We all love you, AK. and we all know you will always be here with us. As a little brother, I promise you that I will focus on what I need to do in my life, so that you don’t have to be worried about me and can have rest peacefully. As a fellow photographer, I keep trying to tell the stories of people with the power of photography in the way you believed we should.




Kosuke Okahara, Bogota, Colombia. Heading to your home, Japan.

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Opium Addiction in Badakshan

In the remote North-Eastern province of Badakhshan in Afghanistan, opium and heroin addiction are ravaging isolated mountain communities, and the staggering numbers are only getting worse. In some places, it is said that 70% of the population use drugs in some form, from hashish, to raw opium and refined heroin powder. It is not uncommon to find three generations of a family smoking together behind closed doors.

Traditionally, Opium was used as a cure-all, the magic medicine that could work wonders on anything from back pains to headaches to the nagging cough that every one has during the brutally cold winter months. The residents of Ishkashem, on the Tajikistan border say that it was never a problem before. Now, the situation is changing. In Ishkashem, it is said that at least 50% of the population has a serious drug addiction problem. Other remote villages further down the inaccessible Wakhan Valley are said to have an unbelievable 70-80% addiction rate. Children are born into addiction every day, and thus, the cycle is perpetuated.

A.K. Kimoto

Images to Stop TB is part of the Stop TB Partnership, a movement that aims to halt the spread of TB around the world through social and government initiatives.

Unlike HIV/AIDS Tuberculosis is curable but it gets much less attention perhaps because it is less prevalent in the west and is a disease most commonly connected to the poor.

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Every second someone in the world is infected with Tuberculosis and although the disease is completely curable, 2 million people die from it every year. The current vaccine, created over 80 years ago, is ineffective and does little to stem the spread of the disease. The course of treatment can be long, painful and difficult to access for many in the developing world. New drug resistant strains of the disease are spreading across the planet and represent a real public health threat to us all.

TB is a disease that has been largely ignored in the Western world. It was believed to be on the road to extinction, but has made a gruesome comeback, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable, impoverished communities. TB is deadly, it is spreading, and it will not go away without a massive, coordinated, well-financed international effort.

From homes to health clinics to hospitals, TB is far reaching, affecting both the individual patient and their families and communities. These photographs from Mumbai, India represent how the disease infiltrates and affects urban communities. Because of its massive population, India represents nearly 33 percent of the world TB incidence; the disease is one of the leading causes of death in the country, killing a thousand people every day. India presents logistical and cultural challenges to dealing with TB, but they are challenges that must be overcome in order to have any hope at all of easing the pain and suffering that the disease brings.

http://www.davidrochkind.com/

“The continuing human tragedy of Congo is not a statistic. It is a continuing human tragedy…” remarks John Le Carré in the foreword to this book. His words contain the indignation of a man who despairs at the state of humanity that allows the history of Congo to unfold unchallenged as the West looks on. “We must never turn away our gaze,” he implores. With this collection of photographs, made over more than five years, Marcus Bleasdale directs us to look.

It is an emotionally demanding task to read the introductory words and turn to the images that follow. Unimaginable. Horrific. Brutal. Do these words convey my reaction to the images and the book as whole? Or do they better serve to describe my – and our – collective failure to do something about the scenes the photographs show? Bleasdale and Le Carré point out there are moments of sanity and hope provided, on the one hand, by organisations such as MSF and Human Rights Watch who strive to make a difference, and on the other hand most importantly, by the people of Congo themselves who maintain through all their experiences a “secret gaiety of spirit and a love of life”. In Bleasdale’s first book on Congo, One Hundred Years of Darkness, 2002, I had the impression of a man who was travelling to discover a land and explore a history handed down to him in the stories he had been told. In The Rape of a Nation I see that this same man no longer travels Congo to explore and answer his own questions, he photographs it to lay bare the discovery of our complicity in the evil he has found and pose questions to us.

The layout of the book plays to this intention with its unrelenting depiction of exploitation, the gold and diamond miners; of grief, at one of many funerals for a child; and of displacement, most poignantly realised in a chillingly pretty view of the flower gardens of Aveba where we are told women were rounded up and raped by the military in 2006. Le Carré’s and Bleasdale’s are not the only voices that echo throughout this humble tome. Interspersed amongst the pages are testimonies of the Congolese. Printed on delicate tabs of paper that punctuate the harshness of the black and white photography are the words of Henri, Olive, Régine, Tanzira, Madame Lisi, and Innocent to name a few. Fathers, mothers, children, their words are short but their stories are almost too huge to take on board. These words bring us back from any imaginary space we may have wandered off to while merely looking at the photographs. Through their stories we learn that “the enemies attacked our village”, “the Mayi-Mayi kept us a slaves”,
“I don’t even know how I learned to kill”…

Together Bleasdale’s photography and these recounted stories are so powerful in their symbiosis that this book seems able to actually shout “Read me”. It would be too easy to rationalise this book with simplistic analysis of the photography that seems at times to embody a World Press Photo style of image making– the low-slung Kalashnikov; a half-cut head in the frame’s foreground – but aesthetic deconstruction does little justice to the work or myself. This collection of images and words, ink on paper, is in so many ways a powerful statement on the unrivalled effectiveness of photojournalism. Powerful photography collides with insightful words to construct an enduring narrative that exists both in the present as an act of witnessing and in the future as a valuable document.

As Le Carré says: “To observe pain only through the prism of the boardroom and the computer screen is to sever the vital artery between compassion and action”. Thanks to Bleasdale and his publisher’s gentle, but unflinching, approach to making books it is presented here with force and purpose.

-Jon Levy

Click here for the original post on Foto8.

what: “Dispatches from the Real World” at Tucson Festival of Books
who: Gary Knight and Mort Rosenblum
when: 13 March 2010 at 4pm
where: University of Arizona, ILC 150

During a recent panel discussion in London on “the new ecology of photojournalism,” Ed Kashi remarked that despite all the gloom and doom we should realize that this is now a potential golden age for photojournalism. He didn’t underestimate the problems but he urged people to think about the prospects for new forms of visual journalism across multiple platforms to diverse communities.

I think Ed is spot on with his reasoned optimism, but to appreciate where this might lead us, we have to drive a stake through the heart of a prehistoric argument that has dominated the last few weeks of the year.

‘Parasites, thieves, and promiscuous behaviour’

Rupert Murdoch and his trusty lieutenants (Les Hinton of Dow Jones, James Harding of The Times and Robert Thompson of The Wall Street Journal have launched a vicious rhetorical war against the free circulation of content on the internet, singling out Google and others for making aggregation and distribution possible.

This is part of a News Corporation effort to garner allies for their strategy to charge for news content. Plans to put their papers behind pay walls have been much trailed by Murdoch executives. The time it is taking to implement these proposals, combined with their unwillingness to follow through on their threats to block their content from Google’s view, demonstrates the purpose of these manoeuvres is to try and reshape the public debate, get as many other legacy media companies as possible to join them in similar strategies, and wring some business concessions from the successful new media companies in the process.

Murdoch’s protestations – which have been effectively countered by Eric Schmidt – have given some comfort to those in the photographic world who hope that the sight of a pay wall going up might mean the return a benevolent editorial paymaster. It’s time to put that dream to bed once and for all and face up to the challenges and potentials of the new era.

The problem with pay walls

What Murdoch and others are missing is the new ecology of the web and how that has changed things for good, in both senses. For those who want critical journalism in all its forms, the debate on pay walls is at best anachronistic and at worst counter-productive. We can see this in three different ways:

(i) Little money:
Building on the points in my first post of this series, we need to appreciate that even the most successful pay wall strategy will never fund investigative journalism. Pay walls are a form of subscription. But subscriptions have only ever generated about 20% of a newspaper company’s revenue. This means the most successful pay wall will never compensate for the collapse in advertising revenue.

Nonetheless, the idea that people paying for content is the holy grail of lost revenue is increasingly promoted by media organisations who are now more willing than ever to explore this option. It has become an almost theological commitment that users should pay. But this overlooks one very significant historical point – consumers have not previously paid for content. As Paul Graham argued, we have paid for the mode of distribution rather than the information being distributed.

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

This has been the case with newspapers too. Rupert Murdoch, now demanding customers stump up for his articles, had no qualms about selling at a loss by reducing the price of The Times to 10 pence a copy (or giving it away as a free item in bulk) during the British newspaper price wars of the 1990s. Having never priced his products in terms of the cost of content, now is an odd time for him to start.

It is possible that for highly specialized content consumers will be willing to pay something for access (see the conclusion to this debate). While recent surveys offer contradictory data on how much or how often people will pay, even the highest of these numbers offers no hope as a general solution to the economic crisis of distributing journalism (while the lowest condemns it as a flawed strategy). Corporate media debts are too vast to be eased by revenue from premium content, so we should not cling to the false hope that new money will fund the documentary stories that have long been under-resourced.

(ii) Who they block:
The second problem with the supposed pay wall solution emerges when we have a more nuanced understanding of web traffic to news sites. Companies like to make a big deal about the number of “unique users” visiting their URLs, and this summation of global clicks is an important indicator of reach.

But most visitors come quickly for something specific and leave equally as quickly. They aren’t reading “the paper” on-line, but searching for a specific piece of information, consuming it, and moving on. Indeed, although some surveys have reported higher numbers, the average time spent on a US news site in November 2009 ranged from just four minutes up to a high of 23 minutes.

If a news organization wants to extract commercial value from its online users, it needs to find a way to first attract large numbers and keep a proportion of these visitors on site for longer so that over time they become loyal. This means the target audience for such an economic strategy is much smaller. To illustrate this, consider the following metrics from the Daily Mail in the UK:

• 28.7 million unique users/month globally
• 8.9 million unique users/month from the UK
• Of the UK users 611,588 came to the web site every day
• Half of those UK daily users (c. 300,000) stayed for 20 minutes

So while the headline-grabbing number of 28 million unique users suggests a vast community of potential value around the Daily Mail, in fact their loyal on-line users number just 300,000, which is just 7% of their daily print readership. (The Times editor recently confirmed a similar pattern on his site by contrasting 20 million uniques with the 500,000 who had developed a ‘genuine digital habit’.

If one were thinking about a pay wall to control access to content on a paper with these user numbers, where would it be built? Around all content so that each and every visitor had to pay to pass? Around content viewed a certain number of times so the daily visitors were forced to open their wallets? Or directed at those who stayed on site the longest?

Two recent posts by Steve Yelvington and Damon Kiesow brilliantly illustrated the counterproductive nature of this dilemma from their experience with local American papers.

As this graph from Kiesow’s Nahsua Telegraph in New Hampshire makes clear, if your advertising depends on reach, you don’t want to cut off the huge number of uniques on the left, some of whom might be transformed into loyal users if they have open access. And the number of daily/loyal visitors on the right is too small to build a viable subscription model on.

All this shows a general pay wall for news content will slash the number of visitors and fail to generate even modest revenue for investigative journalism. This is not the counter-theological proposition that “all information should be free” (a view Jay Rosen recently found to be often proclaimed but little referenced by those in favour of pay walls. It is recognition of the harsh economic realities of the web’s ecology for news that too many traditional companies are failing to appreciate.

Some, though, are realizing that this disparity between the millions of casual users and the thousands of loyal readers points the way to a new strategy. A Fairfax executive in Australia recently remarked that transactions rather than advertising or content were the best on-line revenue streams. Crucially, transactions require news organisations to build a community around their brand and product, and then take a percentage of the transactions (hotel bookings, financial advice etc.) those community members conduct through the associations, links and relationships provided. Building a community based on the smaller, loyal audience is something a Daily Mirror executive outlined, while Slate has been shifting from the pursuit of a mass audience (7 million uniques) to a smaller, more engaged audience (target 500,000) because “one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader.”

(iii) How they limit public good:
Proponents of pay walls say consumers must contribute to the cost of journalism because it is a public good. We should debate the assumption that journalism per se is automatically a public good given “the media’s” patchy record for accountability in recent times. But even if we rather rashly accept that the majority of the fourth estate is critical of conventional wisdom and questioning of those in power, pay wall advocates have this argument upside down.

The public good of journalism in the age of the Internet comes from the vastly expanded possibilities of circulation and distribution. Clay Shirkey has argued this recently (see video here) by calling attention to how a 2002 Boston Globe investigation of child abuse by Catholic priests in the city travelled globally from its Massachusetts origins to the global community of Catholics, mobilising social groups along the way, and ending with the Church having to take action internationally (such as in the recent Irish government report on abuses in the Dublin Archdiocese).

Shirkey’s argument is that it was the forwarding of the original article, rather than just its publication, which enabled people to mobilise and force authorities to act. Circulation was what gave the story value as a public good. So while Murdoch and others see public re-use as a crime against civilization, both Shirkey (and Jay Rosen in his interview with Shirkey here, starting at 9:30) demonstrate that in the new ecology of the web this forwarding (or “super-distribution”) of information and its public re-use is the condition of possibility for the very democratic ethos and public virtue media proprietors say they are desperate to defend. If information gets forwarded to journalists to cross-check and challenge their stories it can make them better, and the journalists’ stories get forwarded to people who are the most relevant thereby enabling social action. For Shirkey, this is the public good of publishing on the web. Murdoch might regard it as ‘promiscuous’, but pay walls would prevent the expansive sharing that is at the base of this public good.

Towards the new futures of photojournalism

Here is my point for photographers – forget all the fuss around the Murdoch-inspired debate about paying for content that has dominated the last few weeks of this year. Perhaps News Corporation will make pay walls work for some of its titles, but they won’t be the economic saviour of any media company. Nobody should pin their career hopes on them enabling a rosy future that will replicate a lost and largely mythic past. A new subscription-funded editorial paymaster looking for photographers to assign is not going to emerge, and holding out for media conglomerates to deliver this will only stymie creative development.

However, Murdoch is not really trying to create a new revenue stream (let alone one for documentary work). He is trying to change the terms of the public debate on the web in order to “call time on free distribution.” But that is an even more impossible task, because free distribution is both the intrinsic architecture and great virtue of the web. Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the web, was recently asked why he put the web into the public domain as a free facility rather than a private enterprise. “Because otherwise it would not have worked,” he said. (Just watch the first two minutes of this video interview with Berners-Lee to appreciate this core value).

The successful visual journalist in the new media economy is therefore going to be someone who embraces the logic of the web’s ecology, using the ease of publication, distribution and circulation to construct and connect with a community of interest around their projects and their practice. Like the media players beginning to understand that developing and engaging a loyal community is more valuable than chasing a mass audience (while being open so those passers-by can become associates), photographers need to do the same. If people now understand they are publishers as well as producers this puts them in a new and potentially powerful position.

It won’t be easy (but when was photojournalism or documentary photography easy?), but the successful visual journalist will be someone who uses social media (in combination with the more traditional tools of books, exhibitions and portfolios) to activate partnerships with other interested parties to fund their stories, host their stories, circulate their stories, and engage with their stories. The social value of this is obvious, and this social value will be the basis for drawing economic value so the work can continue.

A good number of people (like Ed Kashi) are working this way now. Jonathan Worth has been pursuing a fascinating project based on his portraits of Cory Doctorow, and VII is promoting discussions around these themes. In the last couple of weeks we have seen new digital magazine formats unveiled, and if developed these will be exciting platforms for visual work. What all these moves have in common is an embrace of the virtues of digital technology in an open web. Google has been one of the icons of the last decade, and while as a company it is far from perfect, its success marks the path for the future so long as we understand what is novel about the web.

Passion for Pictures: Talk by Matthew Butson, VP Hulton Archive, Getty Images

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What new ways are there to raise awareness of ongoing conflict like the war in DRC? As an example, John Prendergast explains the multi-platform project that he worked on for CBS’ 60 Minutes.

Filmed on 13 October at VII Gallery, Brooklyn
Video and editing by TJ Kirkpatrick

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For more information:
internationalrelations.house.gov
artworksprojects.org
enoughproject.org
viiphoto.com

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Is the fact that people can access the media and stories on multiple platforms a positive thing? Are people able to filter and find the important stories?

Ron Haviv also addresses why it’s important to continue photographing genocide and conflict to answer critics who say that it’s all been documented before.

Filmed on 13 October at VII Gallery, Brooklyn
Video and editing by TJ Kirkpatrick

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For more information:
internationalrelations.house.gov
artworksprojects.org
enoughproject.org
viiphoto.com

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To what degree does the mainstream media show victimisation of certain subjects over and over again? Noelle LuSane, the Staff Director of the House Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, discusses the impact that stills and video footage from around the world have on lawmakers and the constituents who call them to action.

Filmed on 13 October at VII Gallery, Brooklyn
Video and editing by TJ Kirkpatrick

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For more information:
internationalrelations.house.gov
artworksprojects.org
enoughproject.org
viiphoto.com