Tim Burton is probably the only person who could get away with using a monster's mouth as the entrance to an art exhibition. You know him for his films Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of all film director-producers today, Burton probably has the most singular vision: one of whimsy, gothic gore and hallucinogenic fictions.
Tim Burton on the set of Corpse Bride (Derek Frey)
But Burton has been an artist his whole life. Well before Beetlejuice and Batman, he was escaping into illustrated fantasy worlds as a child in Burbank, Calif. To celebrate his career, New York's Museum of Modern Art has curated a major retrospective exhibition, opening Sunday.
The exhibition contains hundreds of creations from throughout Burton's career, including little-known short films, sketches of unrealized projects from his days at Disney and seven new pieces, created just for the show.
MOMA asked Burton to produce a trailer for the retrospective and, in collaboration with Mackinnon & Saunders, the animation and puppeteer firm that helped with Corpse Bride, he produced this little short. Learn about the making of it on MOMA's site.
Has Google joined the ranks of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt? Can Google capture what Cartier-Bresson referred to as the "decisive moment"? Does Google have the cool, objective perspective that photojournalists strive to attain? Jon Rafman might argue so. By scouring the street view offered by Google Maps, he has culled dozens of image that Google can add to its art portfolio.
In 2007, Google dispatched a fleet of cars -- each one bearing a pole with nine cameras -- with the goal of documenting the streets of the world. The images taken by these cameras have been available on Google Maps for a while, but Rafman took it upon himself to find the views worth looking at.
"This very way of recording our world," he wrote in a recent article, "this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience." Of course the Google camera is completely indifferent to what it sees -- which makes its fleeting images of burning houses or stolen kisses all the more intriguing.
Surprisingly, Rafman remarked, the Google car was met with delight as much as it was with dismay, which may be a testament to our time: we've become habituated to lost privacy and heightened surveillance -- sometimes we even welcome it. Here's NPR; what does your street view look like? Upload it to our Flickr group pool.
David Maisel is a visual artist who recently completed a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. It was there that he came across the museum's archive of X-rays, used in the process of conserving artwork. "The ghostly images of these X-rays," he writes, "seem to surpass the power of the original objects of art." And so he began to photograph them.
Maisel has photographed and scanned these X-rays to create an eerie body of work. The photos in his series, History's Shadow, explore his recurring themes of memory and excavation. According to Maisel, "They make the invisible visible, and express through photographic means the shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us." View his Web site to learn more.
There's a crazy landform in Madagascar called a tsingy, which, euphemistically translated from Malagasy, means "where one cannot walk barefoot." It's basically a treacherous forest of limestone spires that could impale anything, and cut straight through ropes and harnesses. It's one of the few places on Earth that, because of its remote location and dangerous landscape, has remained relatively unexplored. And it took National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez five days to reach it to shoot the story "Stone Forest" in November's magazine.
Alvarez, like many other National Geographic photographers, is known for photographing extreme, remote places. Much of his time is spent beneath the Earth's surface, exploring some of the most majestic cave systems on the planet. For this story, though, he spent his time above the ground. Way above the ground.
At a recent National Geographic event, Alvarez described the process of moving around this tsingy. He compared it to walking through New York City -- but instead of using the sidewalks, it's like climbing up one side of a building, then back down the other side, over and over again. "We were lucky to cover half a mile a day," Neil Shea writes in the magazine article.
This stone labyrinth, Shea describes, is a type of karst system, formed by porous limestone dissolved by water over time. "The exact processes that carved such an otherworldly stonescape," he writes, "are complex and rare." Only a few landforms like this exist in the world. And, surprisingly, this seemingly inhospitable place is home to rare plants and wildlife still being discovered -- such as the white-furred Decken's sifaka lemur. Fortunately, photographers like Alvarez can do the legwork to bring these surreal, remote landscapes to us with beautiful pictures.
To learn more, check out the article and photos on ngm.com, and view more work by Alvarez on his Web site.
For Americans, the days of extreme cultural revolution have arguably subsided. The heyday of rock has come and gone, as have new wave and punk -- even post-punk -- and grunge. So it seems like we've gotten a lot of musical subversion out of our system. But, spin to the Earth's other hemisphere, and the musical revolution has only just begun. According to photographer Matthew Niederhauser, simply listening to rock constitutes rebellion in China.
Niederhauser, a freelance photojournalist based in Beijing, first stumbled into a dive bar called D-22 in 2007. It was there that he happened upon Beijing's underground music scene, and he has been documenting it ever since. His new book, Sound Kapital, shows this burgeoning scene in photos.
As he writes, "For now, China remains in a liminal state between the socialist idealism of old and a calamitous drive for wealth spurred by free-market reforms." And the rockers are rejecting both. It may be a small scene, but it's exploding. NPR's Zoe Chace went to see one of Beijing's rock bands in Brooklyn, and the line wrapped around the door. Tune in to All Things Considered today to hear the story, and check out Niederhauser's Web site to view more of his work.
Today on All Things Considered, host Melissa Block speaks with National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen about his new book, Polar Obsession. Listen here.
How many people can say with nonchalance, "I've had good friends of mine ... eaten by grizzly bears"? Paul Nicklen can, for one. He's a National Geographic photographer who was raised in Canada's Arctic and has spent the past 20 years documenting extreme polar regions.
Nicklen blends in with the surroundings during a whiteout in East Svalbard
Nicklen had a unique childhood. He grew up in a small and remote Inuit community on Baffin Island with no radio, no TV and no telephone. His idea of fun included lying in blizzards until his body went numb, building sleds and tending pet seals. It was a secluded youth -- and to anyone else, a bit extreme. But to Nicklen, it was as idyllic as childhood gets. "I was taking care of dog teams by the time I was 5," he tells NPR's Melissa Block. "It's just a completely different world, and ... I fell in love with it."
So it makes sense that his idea of fun today includes many of the same things: extreme temperatures, exploration and animal friendships. After a brief stint at the University of Victoria to earn a biology degree, Nicklen made a prompt return to Canada's Arctic, where he began a career as a nature photojournalist. "As I got to be older, as a biologist and photojournalist," he says, "I realized that these are the tools I can now use to protect the place that I fell in love with as a kid."
It's not an easy job. "In pursuit of the photographs I've taken over the past 20 years," he writes in the book's introduction, "I've crashed my ultra light airplane, fallen through the sea ice ... and suffered frostbite... I've also become lost in blizzards and been bitten by fur seals and elephant seals, charged by a grizzly bear, sniffed through the thin fabric of a tent by a polar bear."
All in a day's work. To Nicklen, though, it's worth the risk. "How are people supposed to care about the environment when they're living in a cement jungle?" he wonders in the interview. To make them care, he goes to extremes. Nicklen is on a mission to bring these remote habitats to those of us who may never see them, to make us care about the endangered polar ecosystems and the animals that inhabit them. His photos appear in a new book, Polar Obsession, published by National Geographic.
Not to sound too Pollyanna, but according to spontaneoussmiley.com, smiles are everywhere, even on the worst of days. This site has promised to donate one dollar to Operation Smile for every user-submitted smile. Add yours to their site -- and to our Flickr group pool, while you're at it!
As recently as last month, reading material on photographer Robert Bergman was really scarce. There were a few reviews of his 1998 book, A Kind of Rapture, floating around, but that's about it. So it was hard to figure out why, after nearly 60 years as a photographer, he is just now exhibiting his work -- and not just anywhere, but at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Listen to the story here.
The opening of this exhibition last month, succinctly titled "Portraits, 1986--1995," yielded an explosion of material about Bergman. We now know that he was born in New Orleans, the son of an eye doctor; began photographing at a very young age; and has read pretty much every philosophy book under the sun -- or so it seems. But the questions still remain: Why has he been off the radar for so long, and what makes his photos special?
At first glance, Bergman might be easily labeled a street photographer. The people in his photos seem to be ordinary folks in ordinary environments doing ordinary things. And yet the more time you spend with them, the more they come to life.
For one, Bergman includes no information with his photos -- no captions, no titles, no names. These people are total strangers ... but they're presented in such an intimate manner -- tightly cropped around the face, eyes piercing through the lens -- that they somehow seem familiar. At the museum, the portraits are life-sized -- they loom and they disconcert. These are the people we pass every day on the street but never really look at. And here they are, staring at us.
It's easy to assume that these portraits, like a lot of those in street photography, represent a certain demographic -- and that there just might be an agenda behind it. But according to Bergman, "There's a housewife, there are three artists, there are two actors, an affluent owner of a bar, there's the son of a millionaire and the granddaughter of a billionaire." So much for stereotypes. His agenda, if he even has one, is simply to see people artfully.
Most of all, credit is owed to Bergman for technique. He has an unusual command of light, using only what's available -- from the hanging sun at dusk to eerie neon street lights. His personal printing process is both elaborate and time-intensive. And this particularity is precisely why we're only just now hearing about him: Bergman waited a lifetime for what he felt was the right moment to reveal his work. He waited for a book deal, waited a year for Toni Morrison to agree to write the introduction and waited 14 years for this particular exhibition to come together. A patient man, he's now "springing out of the head of Zeus like Athena," or in other words, bursting onto the scene. His work will be met with mixed reviews, but according to Bergman, "waiting pays."
His work is also on display at P.S.1, the Museum of Modern Art's Contemporary Art Center in New York City, where it will be up through January. It remains at the National Gallery through January as well. Tell us what you think. Worth the wait? Do you see familiar strangers?
Clyde Butcher and Ansel Adams have a few things in common: big cameras, a love of landscapes, and beards. (Although in a beard contest, Butcher would undoubtedly win.) He's an award-winning environmental photographer based in the Florida wetlands; he actually has a house in a preserve called "The Loose Screw Sanctuary." His black-and-white images show a surreal land of gnarly tree limbs, drooping Cyprus branches and the puffiest of clouds.
Greg Allen for NPR followed Butcher through the swamps, waist-high in water on the job. An intrepid documentarian, Butcher carries a large-format camera around the swamps on his back, like a time traveler hailing from the days of uncharted America.
Butcher is currently shooting photos for a project that will document the entire Everglades ecosystem, from the headwaters near Orlando all the way down to Florida Bay. He's working to turn that into a multi-media exhibit that will tour the country called, "The Everglades: America's Amazon." Learn more on his Web site.
National Geographic's International Photography Contest has come to a close, and winners will be announced in early December. Here's a selection of a few submissions, but you can view more on ngm.com, or check out some winners from the past.
If Louis Daguerre could see Canon's Mark II, his head would explode. Cameras have come a long way since 1839, and Smithsonian's National Museum of American History currently has a display of 22 cameras to celebrate the camera's evolution. From the earliest daguerreotypes to view cameras to early digital models, the exhibit shows off just a fraction of the holdings in the Photographic History Collection. View the photos here, but check out the Flickr site to learn more about the cameras.
Smithsonian has made great efforts to develop (pun intended) its photography collection over the past few years. It has an incredible reservoir of first-edition prints, primitive photographic ephemera, equipment and oddities. So expect more to come! And for more pre-digital history, check out this darkroom exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.
Photographer Pam Spaulding took the concept of the long-term assignment to an extreme -- spending more than 30 years photographing the McGarvey family of Anchorage, Ky.
Working for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Spaulding originally planned to photograph the young John and Judy McGarvey for a year after the birth of their first child, thinking the project about new parents would end after the newspaper published the images. But after that first year, Judy McGarvey didn't realize the project was over -- so she kept calling, and Spaulding kept going back. The project grew to span the growth of their three children, David, Morgan and Sara, as well the important moments, both joyful and frustrating, of the family over the years.
'An American Family: Three Decades with the McGarveys'
At a recent lecture at the National Geographic Society in Washington, Spaulding presented work from her new book, An American Family: Three Decades with the McGarveys. Quiet and soft-spoken, Spaulding was holding back tears as the first slide graced the screen. She wasn't the only one. Audible sniffles filled the room as Spaulding showed the audience images of a young Judy McGarvey learning to mother newborn David, of father John snuggling with a distraught Morgan, and of daughter Sara buying her high school prom dress.
The images of the McGarveys elicited such emotion because by compacting 30 years into an hour presentation, Spaulding underscored the fragility of life, the importance of family, the joy in the small moments, and how quickly it can all pass by.
"I was in no hurry, I didn't care, I didn't expect it to be published," she said when reached later by phone. "I wouldn't have kept going back if it didn't meet some need, personally and professionally. This work gave meaning to my photography, and when you have that, you can always keep going."
After the lecture, the whole McGarvey family, minus David, took the stage to answer questions from National Geographic photographer Sam Abell, who had inspired Spaulding to keep shooting the project even after her original one-year assignment was over. When he asked the family members what it was like to have a photographer shooting them constantly, one theme emerged -- because Spaulding had been around since their birth, the kids never thought it was odd that she was always there. She had simply become part of the family.
"On a personal level the McGarveys have meant so much to me," said Spaulding. "Judy is a great mother, and by observing her, I learned how to be a great mother as well. I saw that they did things just for fun, and that was a pretty foreign idea to me because all I grew up knowing how to do was work."
Adding to the emotion of the evening, Spaulding's own daughters Alicia and Lauren surprised their mother by driving from Kentucky for the lecture. It was the first time they had seen the scope of her work, and realized how close their mother was to the McGarveys.
"I was afraid that no one would be interested in a family of people who were normal," she said. "We see so many dysfunctional families, but there are a lot of successful families out there too."
Spaulding's images seem to reflect her personality -- the photographs are not flashy or sensational, she doesn't use any tricks. Instead, the moments are subtle and quiet, calm and beautiful, reflecting the classic moments of an American family. We see the kids' birthdays, from their first to their 21st. We see them in school plays, on vacation, and saying goodbye to the family dog. But mostly what we see is life unfolding, quietly, gracefully, one moment at a time.
An American Family by Pam Spaulding/National Geographic
In the early 1990s, The New York Times sent a list of questions to Sub Pop records in Seattle. The paper wanted to know more about the elusive West Coast "grunge" scene and asked for a lexicon of grunge terminology. Mocking the reporter, Megan Jasper, a Sub Pop employee (and now vice president of the label), made up a bunch of nonsense words on the spot, mostly out of boredom. (For example, according to Jasper, "swingin' on the flippity-flop" was grunge speak for "hanging out.") Her attitude was emblematic of a counterculture that simply didn't care.
The grunge scene was a medley of wayward youth, largely left to its own devices. And it was documented heavily by now-renowned photographer Michael Lavine. At the time, he fit right in, although his meticulous attention to detail and technique was slightly at odds with the reckless nature of his subjects. Regardless, Lavine was there to capture the heyday of a very distinct musical culture.
Unlike some of his musical cohorts, Lavine was able to parlay his grunge time into a long-term, successful career beyond the counterculture. His photos from the '80s and '90s grunge scene now form the content of a new book, aptly named Grunge, with an introduction by none other than Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. Shredded jeans, plaid flannel and lots of hair: This may not be conventional beauty, but Lavine's photos are still nice to look at. In some ways, the grunge look is back and more beautiful than ever: Go to any indie music venue and behold the sea of plaid. But if Kurt Cobain had seen scruffy lumberjack shirts in the windows of Macy's, he probably would have laughed.
October has come and gone, as has Halloween. Only a few more weeks of colorful fall foliage remain. But at least we can enjoy fall photos year-round! Katie Barnes and Max Bittle, New Hampshire-based photographers, submitted their seasonal snapshots to The Picture Show. You should do the same by adding your photos to our group pool on Flickr!
Oddly enough, the season "fall" may be inaccurately named. According to NPR's Robert Krulwich, leaves don't fall; they're pushed. Check out this science story: Why Leaves Really Fall Off Trees.
In the 1950's, photography was hardly considered art. If you wanted to be taken seriously as a photographer, you snapped mountains and models -- not your neighbors. It also helped to be white. But Roy DeCarava, turned all of that on its head. He died this week at the age of 89. Listen to the NPR story, or this Fresh Air interview.
DeCarava was born in Harlem in 1919 to a single Jamaican mother. He had plenty of odd jobs before he picked up a camera. He was a shoe shiner, a newspaper salesman and an ice hauler. But his natural artistic gifts eventually led him to art school, where he began as a painter. It wasn't long before the lens replaced the brush.
In 1952, DeCarava applied for the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. He was the first black photographer to receive the grant, and he used it to photograph Harlem. The photos from this period eventually became the contents of a book. The Sweet Flypaper Of Life was made in collaboration with Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. It showed Harlem as a mix of quiet ordinary moments, everyday struggles and tiny triumphs.
DeCarava continued to photograph throughout his life, most notably the New York jazz scene. He captured all the greats; the musical genre suited his improvisational style and democratic eye. But the most important thing to DeCarava was that the old woman next door deserved a photograph just as much as John Coltrane. The black man on the stoop merited a frame as much as the white supermodel.
According to Ron Carter, legendary jazz bassist, DeCarava had a sixth sense. "My impression of his photographs is that he sees the music," Carter said in an NPR interview. DeCarava saw the music in jazz performances -- but also in kids playing in the street, in a young woman staring out her window, in men on park benches. He saw the music and the beauty in black Harlem, and he showed that face to America.
More people live along the banks of the Yangtze River than in the United States. One can only imagine the environmental impact of that population. Photographer Nadav Kander took an interest in this subject, and his work was recently rewarded with the Prix Pictet. The prize is relatively new but prestigious, and the first devoted to photography and sustainability.
The Prix Pictet rewards photography that focuses on large-scale environmental issues -- photography with a large-scale communicative impact. Each year the contest is themed; "water" was the prompt last year, and this year it was "earth." Twelve finalists were recognized in July, but Kander's series, "Yangtze, The Long River," took the prize. Learn more on the Prix Pictet Web site.
"The first five minutes of any run always feels like a bad idea," said occasional NPR contributor Greg Miller over the phone. "Same thing with photographing." He was explaining the self-doubt that crept up on him during the first few weeks of his Guggenheim Fellowship, which he had chosen to spend not in a distinguished European city or dangerous developing country but in Nashville, Tenn.
It was a bold move to devote this coveted fellowship to a place so seemingly prosaic and borderline kitschy (I'm allowed to say that; it's my hometown). But it's Miller's hometown, too, and he had his work cut out for him. In the past, Miller explained, he'd been daunted by the prospect of photographing something so familiar. But after several years away from home, he decided it was time to go back and explore.
When asked what he was looking for, he said, "It's a memory, in a way." In the series Nashville, you won't see any photos of honky-tonk bars or country stars. Rather, there's a typical suburban street, a couple gone fishin', his grandmother's house after a storm. The series, which is currently on display at the Cheekwood museum's Temporary Contemporary gallery in Nashville, feels like a dreamlike, somewhat melancholy walk down memory lane.
What is it about this place, and these photos, that is distinct from the rest of Miller's work? "It's a feeling I've been depriving myself of," he said after deliberating. "It's a feeling of belonging." Like many photographers, Miller moved to the Big Apple without looking back. Now he's finally looking back and exploring the idea of "home."
Can't decide what to dress your pet as for Halloween? How about a mummy? An article in the November issue of National Geographic magazine shows that animal mummies were all the rage in ancient Egypt.
Among the many things that would be taken to the grave in ancient Egypt were pets and sacred animals. Some even had shrines of their own. That way, the deceased could be joined by their beloved in the afterlife. Over the past two centuries, archaeologists have uncovered thousands of animal mummies, and through them learned a great deal about Egyptian culture. Learn more by reading the article, and view more photos on ngm.com.
So adorable, that one is willing to accept the truth from bird photographer and naturalist Paul Bannick: that despite their massive eyes and aristocratic beaks, owls aren't actually that smart.
"Ravens and crows are probably smarter," he offers over the phone.
Regardless, Bannick, who has spent years tracking down all 19 species of owls in their various states of life, is as enamored as it gets. And apparently so is the Picture Show. Noticing, a few weeks ago, that we'd coincidentally featured projects involving owls two days in a row (here and here), we decided to dedicate a post entirely to those glorious head-whipping carnivores. It was easy because Bannick just came out with a book, The Owl and the Woodpecker, aimed at raising awareness about the iconic birds' importance as environmental indicators.
Bannick's photos highlight the humanness of these (mostly) nocturnal creatures. Ultimately, the book feels less nature document than portrait series; each birds' face and stance captivatingly distinctive.
How does one go about tracking down dozens of owls? With a full-time day job and only one year to put the book together, the key for Bannick was research and patience.
In search of the great gray owl, for example, Bannick planted himself in the snow of the boreal forest for so many hours that his limbs went numb.
"I couldn't feel my fingers. When it flew by, I had to use my whole hand to pull the shutter," he recalls.
Chasing a bird does not make for a good photo -- so anticipating its behavior in this way was necessary.
Bannick's images don't have the glossy, polished feel of some nature photography -- and that is intentional. A environmental purist, he doesn't believe in using flash (despite photographing nocturnal birds) or doing much of anything in Photoshop.
The message when you change a photo, he laments, "is that you have to improve nature" and he prefers to leave it as is.
You can see more of Bannick's work and listen to the sounds owls make, here.
National Geographic's International Photography Contest will be coming to a close a week from Saturday, and winners will be announced in early December. Here's a selection of some submissions from this past week, from an aerial interstate view to a coyote literally frozen solid. Enter your photos at ngm.com, or view some winners from the past.
I recently had the luck of finding a small community art center darkroom where I can spend Tuesday nights sealed away from the buzz of the real world. Only a darkroom can afford that sort of intimate seclusion -- where even cell phone light could be catastrophic. Things could go awry at any given step, so it requires constant attention, deliberation and patience. "Are you crazy?" my father the darkroom apostate asks, perplexed by my decision to master the darkroom as he makes strides with a digital camera.
I eschew these paternal inquiries -- vive la darkroom ! So although I was happy to discover a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art -- "In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age" -- it also struck a melancholy chord.
The exhibition is a random collection of works, from an Alfred Stieglitz carbon print, to a gelatin silver print by Robert Frank, to an Andy Warhol Polaroid. It seems to be a historical introduction to the darkroom -- to the many, many elaborate processes that have evolved over the past century or two -- for those who may never step foot in one. But also, sadly, and perhaps prematurely, it seems like a eulogy for a dying art. I, for one, don't plan on stopping my Tuesday night ritual anytime soon. And I can only hope that there are enough of us vampires out there to preserve and perpetuate the darkroom.
Johnny Cash gives the camera "the bird." John Lennon sports a New York City tank top on a high-rise rooftop. Kurt Cobain clutches his hair and weeps backstage. On the album cover of London Calling, Paul Simonon of the Clash famously raises his guitar on stage to smash it. These are the iconic photographs that have created our vision of rock 'n' roll. We know the rockers, but who took the photos?
Jim Marshall, Bob Gruen, Ian Tilton and Pennie Smith are their names, respectively. They are four of more than a hundred photographers featured in a new book: Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History 1955-Present. From a gyrating Elvis in 1955 right up to the big-haired Amy Winehouse -- from early pop rock to the British Invasion, from punk to New Wave -- the book covers not only some of the most iconic rock moments, but also the stories behind them.
The musical genre has evolved dramatically since Elvis, and so has the photographic genre. In the beginning, there were very few "rock photographers." And the few that existed had no problem getting into shows and photographing throughout the entire performance. Nowadays, a photographer is lucky to get in, and even luckier to be able to shoot during more than one song. Tilton explained in an e-mail:
When I was taking live pictures at big gigs in the '80s and early '90s, we were able to photograph the whole set. Then in the mid-90s, someone said, "You can do the first 3 songs only." ... Now the first 3 songs are useless -- the band hasn't gotten into their stride; they aren't even sweating! And that's what great live rock 'n' roll photography is all about: atmosphere and sweat and the band getting "lost in music." That's never gonna be at the beginning of a set. It's always near the end! Do you think I would have gotten those classic photos of Kurt Cobain smashing his guitar in the first 3 numbers?
Written by photographic historian Gail Buckland, the book is one of the first to tell the story of rock 'n' roll with an emphasis on those who fashioned its image. What would rock be without that photo of the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, or of Elton John doing a handstand on his piano? Photography didn't create rock, but it certainly helped create our vision of it.
The photos will be on display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York from Oct. 30 through Jan. 31.
James Nachtwey is in a league of his own. If you haven't heard of him, you've probably at least seen his work. It's been in local papers, national papers, Time and National Geographic magazine and has won numerous awards, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times). He's a war and conflict photographer, and his images can be paradoxical: They're beautiful, but often really hard to look at. Some of them appear in the October issue of National Geographic, to tell the story of Islam in Indonesia.
Of the 240 million people inhabiting the 17,000 islands, 86 percent are Muslim -- making Indonesia the most populous Muslim country in the world. And the face of Islam is as diverse as the country is populated. From violent extremists to practitioners of a more tolerant "Smiling Islam," the citizens of Indonesia are slowly adjusting to a democratization process that began about 10 years ago, after the fall of the authoritarian President Suharto.
Things are still uncertain, and the question of Islam's rapport with democracy is still on the table. Nachtwey's photos in National Geographic's October issue show the various incarnations of life in Indonesia, and the article is an approachable introduction to a culture that is both predominantly Muslim and richly complex.
View more of Nachtwey's work on his Web site, or check out this TED talk in which he accepts an award and discusses his career.
Exactly 400 years ago in 1609, one Galileo Galilei popularized a new invention: the telescope. The man had crazy gadgets to support crazy theories -- such as Copernicus' idea that the sun was at the center of the universe. He was condemned by the church for his subversive ideas, but both his telescope and ideas lived on.
Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle by Michael Benson, Abrams 2009
To celebrate the telescope's 400th anniversary, journalist/photographer Michael Benson has written a new book. Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, similar to his previous award-winning book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, is a compilation of those humbling deep-space images that never cease to amaze (me, at least). The images come from some of the largest and most powerful space-based telescopes scattered across the globe, such as the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory in the Chilean Andes.
Placed in chronological order, from within a few hundred light-years of Earth to 13 billion light-years away, the images tell the story of our universe. The coolest part of the book, though, is that Benson simultaneously tells the history of Earth. For example, next to images of Orion's Nebula is a map of the Carolingian Empire (i.e., France about 1,300 years ago). That's because it was about 1,300 years ago that light from Orion started traveling toward Earth. In other words, if a human were to look at Earth with a telescope from Orion, he would see the world of Charlemagne. It's pretty neat.
National Geographic's International Photography Contest will be coming to a close in about two weeks, on Oct. 31, and winners will be announced in early December. Here's a selection of some submissions from this past week, ranging geographically from California to India to Namibia. Enter your photos at ngm.com, or view some winners from the past.
Can you guess which one is a photo and which one is a painting?
Quartet by Ralph Goings
If you're going to do a painting that looks exactly like a photo, why even paint it? When asked this question in a written Q & A, photorealist painter and octogenarian Ralph Goings responded, "What I'm about is making paintings, and my camera is one of the tools I use. It's the artist's job to take the painting beyond the photograph."
A California native with a master of fine arts degree, Goings has been painting diners, ketchup bottles and trucks -- this blogger's beloved Americana -- for decades. "My fascination with the condiment containers," he says, "lies in the way light plays on them." His paintings are so beautiful, and so lifelike, that we wanted to see the photos that inspired them. The pictures that he dug up were, no surprise, really great. And he took them all.
Picture Show: Has anyone ever told you you're a great photographer? Did you ever consider pursuing it?
Ralph Goings: I doubt that anyone ever used the word "great," but people who come to my studio seem to enjoy looking through my files. ... I consider myself a self-taught "picture taker. " I've always been fascinated by the way photographs capture the effects of light on space and form -- the camera doesn't seem to care about "things, " but what light does to them. The camera can record effects that the naked eye can't perceive. Also, I just like the idea of capturing images. "Taking" photographs is fun. ...
Photographs are not the subject of my paintings. They are the source of visual information ... an armature to build the painting on. The painting is made of canvas and wood and organic materials (pigments, glues, solvents, etc.) and exhibits an obvious touch of a human hand. Paints are malleable materials and applied by hand.
Bureaucracy, oh bureaucracy. How easy it is to curse that amorphous force that sucks up time, binding productivity and creativity in red tape. But how do you show what it looks like?
Six years ago, photographer Jan Banning sat, stumped by this question. The self-declared anarchist had been given what seemed "the most horrible assignment of my entire life:" A magazine had asked him to illustrate decentralization of administration in Mozambique.
Then it occurred to him; "Let's go meet the people involved." Having spent his life carefully steering clear of government officers, he was surprised to find they were far more varied and interesting than he'd imagined. The one-time assignment morphed into a four-year project, involving "Bureaucratics" -- as his clever book is titled -- across the world.
There's a sheriff sitting under deer heads in Texas, an urban planner with a taste for girlie calendars in Bolivia. There's a narcotics officer in France, who helps his informers "feel at home" by filling his government office with drug paraphernalia. There's an agriculture adviser in Yemen, only her eyes peeking through her chador, keeping her a mystery behind her stark desk. (Don't be fooled, says Banning -- she runs a team of men.)
Each of the square photos is taken the same way -- straight on -- from the level of someone entering the office. Before making the portrait, Banning asked only, "Would you please look at the camera?"
Meanwhile, writer Will Tinnemans took down details about these low- to midlevel government executives' lives; background, monthly salary or -- more pertinent in Liberia -- if they'd been paid at all.
Because the pair of documentarians didn't tell anyone they were coming in advance, they sometimes encountered people snoring on their desks. Banning met people across the world whose job is to do nothing more than literally shuffle paperwork from one room to the next. But, he adds, he also met people who work hard, driven by hopes of improving their lives and their countries.
Perhaps most surprising, Banning, who is from the Netherlands, was most impressed with bureaucrats in the U.S. -- who not only seemed to take their jobs seriously, but gave their offices a "strong personal touch."
Banning's work is currently on display at The Stadthaus in Ulm, Germany.
95 percent of Libya is desert. The southwestern region, called Fezzan, is the heart of the Sahara and almost entirely inhospitable. Although ancient tribes inhabited this area, especially during more lush seasons, the harsh winds, oppressive sunlight and freezing nights make it no place for the faint of heart. In the October issue of National Geographic magazine, photographer George Steinmetz used an ultralight paraglider to show this region of the Sahara as it's never been seen before.
If you haven't already seen NPR's Emmy-nominated Project Song, you must stop whatever it is you're doing (after you read this, of course), and watch it immediately. All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen, as well as multimedia producer John Poole and our sound engineers, invite musicians into NPR's performance studio 4-A and give them a mere two days in which to produce a song. The whole thing is taped, resulting in backstage-type access to the songwriting process. As inspirational fodder, the musicians are given a choice of five photos and five words.
The newest installment of Project Song, featuring Chris Walla (of Death Cab for Cutie) and J. Robbins (of Jawbox and Burning Airlines), has finally been released. Bob showed them photos by Tom Chambers. And from a choice of five images, they selected Black Dog's Retreat. Here is a larger selection of Chambers' work -- and there's even more on his Web site.
What do you think? Do you feel inspired to pick up that old guitar?
National Geographic's International Photography Contest has been running since late August and has attracted some pretty amazing submissions from both professional and amateur photographers. It will be coming to a close on Oct. 31, 2009, and winners will be announced in early December. Here's a selection of some submissions from this past week. Enter your photos at ngm.com, or view some winners from the past.
The power of photography can be summed up by one incident in 1872. Way back in the day of Lewis and Clark, when photography was just a baby, a bunch of explorers surveyed the land around the Yellowstone River. In that bunch was a photographer named William Henry Jackson, whose photographs inspired President Ulysses S. Grant to sign a law creating Yellowstone National Park, the very first of its kind. It was a big deal, considering that not one member of Congress had ever seen Yellowstone. Since then, hundreds of parks have been created.
Today, conservation photographer Ian Shive is like a contemporary Jackson -- but with a much better camera.
His photos appear in a new book, The National Parks: Our American Landscape. "The book is a culmination of four years of image gathering across the entire country," Shive wrote in an e-mail. Shive, a National Parks magazine photographer and member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, took several trips across America, including a 7,500-mile, 20-day journey in which he hit 17 national parks.
PBS actually has a similar project, the Ken Burns PBS series The National Parks. But when it comes to photography's role in conservation, Shive writes that the "power of a single image can never be replaced ... One image has the power to tell a story, spark imagination and educate people within a few seconds ... versus sitting down and watching a 30-minute documentary."
Like Jackson, Shive's mission is to inspire the creation of new parks, as well as the protection of what we already have. His hope, he wrote, is that "the book simply inspires people to connect with the outdoors and our parks." When asked which single place, of all the photographs in his book, readers should visit, Shive offered a response that would have pleased Jackson: "Yellowstone National Park, because it has the ability to let a person step back in time and see the United States in a way that has been completely lost to development and expansion." View more photos by Shive on his Web site.
As far as photo editing goes, this was a serious challenge. National Geographic just released a new book featuring 500 pages of their best photography, which had to be whittled down to a mere nine photos for The Picture Show. That's nothing, though. The real challenge was for National Geographic editors, who had to dig through 11.5 million photos spanning the 120 years of their photographic history.
Book cover photo by Michael Nichols/National Geographic
Page after page, National Geographic Image Collection offers both iconic and never-before-seen photography, from the earliest days of glass plate autochromes to contemporary digital images from outer space. To coincide with the book's publication, an exhibition of nearly 90 images from the book will be on display at National Geographic in Washington, D.C., through April 12, 2010.
Carol Sauvion, the mastermind behind the PBS series Craft In America, says that the crafting climate in America is "stronger now than it ever was." This may seem surprising, considering the increasing number of us glued to iPhones and BlackBerrys. But this past weekend, even in a city addicted to mobile technology, D.C.'s annual "Crafty Bastards" arts and craft fair was brimming with people of all ages -- possibly more packed than ever. Perhaps it's because more and more of us, after hours in front of the computer, are suddenly recognizing the need to unplug.
The second season of Craft In America, which airs on PBS this Wednesday, illustrates Sauvion's point. The traditional spirit of crafting in America is alive and well -- and infectious. Sauvion described the satisfaction that comes with creating something from start to finish, like turning a block of wood into a working violin. The greatest thing about it, she said over the phone, is that "you can lose yourself in something. And time has no meaning. ... and in your in your own world, just working." The photos in this gallery are just a few examples of creations from this season.
Another great thing about crafting is that anyone can do it. You don't have to be a great "artist" to build a pot from clay, or sew a quilt, or hammer wrought iron. You just need a desire to work with your hands. Cliff Lee, for example, an artist featured on the program's Web site, was a brain surgeon before he discovered his love for pottery. After a sabbatical of art classes he returned to the hospital and said, "Every time I take care of patients, I look at their skulls, I think about pots -- how to make a pot like it." He's now on his second sabbatical and doesn't plan to go back.
"That's my hope," said Sauvion. "That people will see this as an alternative to other careers, that they will want to express themselves in this way, and they will be making a contribution to our national culture." Even I was inspired to find a community art center where I can now spend my Tuesday nights in a darkroom. Perhaps you'll be inspired to do the same. Here's a preview of this week's premiere, but you can watch episodes from last season online, and see more people like Lee on the Craft In America Web site. Or you can just turn off your computer.
Only a few more weeks remain in National Geographic's International Photography Contest. Photos can be submitted between now and Oct. 31, 2009, and winners will be announced in early December. Here's a selection of some submissions from this past week. Enter your photos at ngm.com, or check out these cool jigsaw puzzles they've made from submitted photos.
A photo of balls floating in air recently joined the Corcoran Gallery of Art collection. When Jehsong Baak was in his early 20s, he would have scoffed at the idea that such an establishment would ever be interested in his work. The Korean-born artist was living in New York, confused by how one was supposed to make a living with a camera. It was going so badly, in fact, that he gave up photography entirely for seven years, and took a job with an investor.
He appreciated that his boss had taken a chance on him, he recalls on the phone, but ultimately, "I was bored to death with that job, slowly rotting away at the age of 29."
The allure of that other artists' capital sucked him from his haze.
"At least I'd know I'd tried," he said of his decision to move there and dedicate himself entirely to photography, yet again.
Upon arrival, he was unable to sleep. He wandered the streets at night with his Leica M6, finding it easier to make good photos in the darkness.
"During the day, there is way too much information. We see too much. At night, with so much darkness, you can better select the details or situations that are visually pleasing," he explains.
His work over the next ten years -- which he is in the process of turning into a book -- is filled with reflections and enigmatic women's faces. Only slivers of light bubble through. Sometime his own hand or reflection enters into the frame. He had made Paris his.
The legendary Robert Delpire, who edited and published Robert Frank's The Americans, took note of Baak's work during this time. In 2006, Delpire published and edited La ou Ailleurs, a collection of Baak's work. Given that Frank is one of the photographers Baak most admires, it was yet another sign that Paris had been the right choice.
Ironically, he says he sometimes envious of his young photographer self, the one no one seemed to like. Those he knows he's far more skilled now, he misses that "youthful and furious hunger" that dissipates as one becomes more aware.
I'll admit it: I haven't done much traveling in the areas west of the Mississippi and east of California. Translation: I haven't really seen much of my own country. I'll also sheepishly admit that when I think of that vast region, I envision dry grass plains and corn. Lots of corn. This ignorance of mine is exactly what photographer Michael Forsberg is trying to turn on its head. His work is in a new book called Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild and, needless to say, it put my mental images to shame.
Unfortunately, my ignorance is probably shared by many. This often neglected, underappreciated and misunderstood "region" of our country actually comprises a great majority of our land, and in just the past 100 years has undergone a dramatic transformation as a result of human migration and industrialization. It is now one of the most endangered landscapes in North America, and easily the least protected. So Forsberg teamed up with writer/biologist Dan O'Brien, writer/geographer David Wishart and former American Poet Laureate Ted Kooser to make us care about our big backyard.
Over the course of about four years, Forsberg trekked 100,000 miles across 12 states and three provinces, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to produce the fieldwork for this project. Underwritten by The Nature Conservancy, this book shows both the splendor and the vulnerability of America's Great Plains. Corn? Ha!
National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols is one of the world's foremost wildlife photographers. But he recently said that he'd happily spend the rest of his life photographing trees. Of course, the folks over at National Geographic would almost certainly never hear of it. Nichols' newfound love developed after a serious, yearlong relationship with redwoods.
At least 1,500 years old, this 300-foot giant in California's Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park has the most complex crown ever mapped. (Michael Nichols/National Geographic)
National Geographic sent Nichols to spend an entire year in California's redwood forest. His mission was to capture the majesty of some of the tallest trees on Earth, some of which date back before Christ. And if you've ever photographed in a forest, you'll understand the challenge this presented. There's no capturing the awe one feels before these monoliths that measure, in some cases, upward of 300 feet.
In a recent lecture at National Geographic in Washington, D.C., Nichols described his frustrations. Eventually, though, he devised a way to do redwoods justice. It involved three cameras, a team of scientists, a robotic dolly, a gyroscope, an 83-photo composite and a lot of patience. (And, OK, maybe it's not the Biggest, Tallest Tree Photo Ever -- but it's the biggest one I've ever seen.) Here's how they did it:
The photograph appears as a huge foldout in the the October issue of National Geographic magazine, which hits newsstands today and is definitely worth reading. The magazine, with the help of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Save The Redwoods League, also sent explorer-in-residence Mike Fay on a transect from the southernmost redwood in Big Sur to the northernmost tree near Oregon's Chetco River. It took him and his hiking partner, Lindsey Holm, more than a year of non-stop hiking to complete the trek of more than 2,000 miles. It also took three pairs of shoes.
Redwoods have been heavily forested over the past few decades and are only just now beginning to replenish in numbers. With the enormous collection of data compiled by Fay and other conservationists, we now know more than ever about this thin stretch of ancient forest along the California coast. To learn more, check out the extensive coverage on ngm.com.
Those beautiful magazine portraits of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are usually accepted at face value. But the perfect cover photo is usually the product of much trial and error; it's one of dozens of frames (or hundreds, if we're talking digital) -- and just might even be an accident.
To see the entire contact sheet from a photo shoot is a rare and strangely intimate experience, almost like reading a photographer's diary. It's fascinating to see how the artist's eye wanders, how the mind works, how a scene evolves. This is the idea behind a new book, The Contact Sheet, published by Ammo Books, which explores the process behind some of the most iconic photographs.
It's also disconcerting to think that, because of the photographer's own editorial process, the majority of photographs go unseen. There's no telling how many works of art remain buried in dusty binders and old shoe boxes. Fortunately, this book provides a rare glimpse at a few of those contact sheets.
And there's more. An exhibition just opened at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. "A Few Frames: Photography and the Contact Sheet" explores the use of the contact sheet in art, with works by such artists as Andy Warhol and Robert Frank.
Untitled, by David Wojnarowicz, 1988, from the exhibition "A Few Frames: Photography and the Contact Sheet" (Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art)
National Geographic's International Photography Contest continues to draw thousands of photos from users around the world, and the submissions are anything but amateurish. Photos can be submitted between now and Oct. 31, 2009 and winners will be announced in early December. Here's a selection of some submissions from this past week. Enter your photos at ngm.com, or download some of the popular images as wallpaper.
It makes perfect sense that Jack Kerouac, an unofficial poet laureate of his beatnik generation and author of On The Road, would write the introduction to an unassuming -- but revolutionary -- body of photographs called The Americans.
"That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car ..."
With only 83 photographs, this Robert Frank, a Swiss immigrant and Guggenheim fellow, single-handedly altered the course of photography in 1958 when his book was published. The product of a few years on the proverbial road, The Americans was a simple documentary project about the American people. And although the subject was a familiar one, it was unlike anything that had come before it.
Alfred Eisenstaedt is known for his photograph V-J day in Times Square. That image has been in virtually every textbook, every photographic anthology, every war documentary since it was taken, or so it seems. But Eisenstaedt also has some lesser-known photographs. In fact, this collection was almost entirely forgotten until recently.
In 1952, Life magazine sent Eisenstaedt to Cuba to photograph writer Ernest Hemingway. The photographs would accompany a Hemingway novella that was to be published in the magazine before becoming a book. The story was "The Old Man and the Sea," and that issue of Life went on to sell 5.3 million copies in two days. Unfortunately for Eisenstaedt, Hemingway wasn't quite as cooperative as that famous kissing couple.
An infamously surly character, Hemingway was resistant to Eisenstaedt's camera. Only after much cajoling would the writer put on a shirt, and only with the help of his wife and a cocktail would he acquiesce to a portrait. Eisenstaedt resorted to taking stealthy candids of the writer, and for years after recalled it as his most difficult assignment. Very few photographs from the assignment ran in the magazine; some were rendered as drawings. But today, almost 60 years later, the photographs have resurfaced.
Eisenstaedt photographed the small fishing town of Cojimar, the novella's inspirational setting, as well as one old fisherman in particular -- somewhat misleading, as Hemingway insisted that his character was based on no one specifically. More photos from Eisenstaedt's arduous assignment are on life.com.
This is one of those examples of pictures being worth more than words. How can words do justice to a photojournalist who has worked in more than 75 countries and covered every presidential election since 1976, the Summer Olympics since 1984, the Vietnam War, Bob Marley, the aftermath of Katrina and, most famously, the Iranian Revolution of 1979?
In the winter of 1979, David Burnett found himself in a unique position. He was one of the few Western journalists to remain in Iran during the throes of revolution -- to witness and report live the historic overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's corrupt monarchy, and its replacement with the modern world's first Islamic republic, under the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Over the course of those 44 consecutive days that shocked the world, Burnett photographed the initial uprisings that culminated in mass demonstrations, violence and mourning. He also captured the celebrations of revolutionary Shiites upon the fall of a monarch. At the time, Burnett's photographs were featured extensively in Time magazine. And now, 30 years after the event, many of the photos can be found in one place: the new book 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World, published by National Geographic.
The photographs have an eerie resonance in light of Iran's recent demonstrations. They also have a certain eloquence that can't be translated in copy -- although Christiane Amanpour's foreward, John Kifner's introduction and Burnett's narration certainly help. View more of Burnett's work on his Web site.
In the world of visual vocations, to be featured in a Communication Arts annual is like receiving a superlative in your high school yearbook -- only better. The magazine, founded in 1959, is an industry handbook for design, illustration, advertising and photography. In addition to six regular issues per year, editors also assemble an "annual" for each category, featuring the best work selected by a small jury. It's considered one of the most prestigious competitions in the creative arts, and this year's photography category was no exception.
The winners in the 2009 photography annual are divided into subcategories such as editorial, advertising and unpublished work. From Callie Shell's Obama campaign series to a Vaseline ad to a portrait of Tim Gunn, the wide-ranging photographs cover the breadth of... well, the art of communication.
One notable difference this year was the digitization of both the content and the competition. Over 90 percent of the submissions were sent electronically. The jury also noted, some with dismay, the undeniable evolution of photography -- how many submissions leaned more toward illustration than photography after heavy post-production.
To get an idea of who's who in the photography annual, owner and editor Patrick Coyne sent us a selection of winners in various categories. For more information, check out the Communication Arts Web site.
Every year, National Geographic's International Photography Contest draws thousands of photos from users around the world. Winners will be entered into the Worldwide International Photography Contest. You can submit up to six photos in three categories -- People, Places and Nature -- between now and Oct. 31, 2009. Winners will be announced in early December. Here's a selection of some recent submissions. Enter your photos at ngm.com, or just vote for other photographs.
Two weeks ago we saw what New York Harbor would have looked like way back in Henry Hudson's day. Now fast-forward to see how time has rendered that lush landscape in steel and concrete. The Edge of New York: Waterfront Photographs, an exhibition currently at the Museum of the City of New York, shows the ever-evolving landscape of New York's urban coast, with both historical images and the work of contemporary landscape photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel.
Cook and Jenshel's project, several years in the making, is about "the confluence of recreation and commerce, development and conservation, nature and architecture," as Jenshel put it. They were granted special access to areas previously restricted along the waterfront, bringing a rarely seen part of the city to public attention. Over the course of just a few years, they've documented many parts of the waterfront evolving from post-industrial banks to recreational hot spots, although much of it remains in disrepair.
Fitting with this week's theme of married photographers, Cook and Jenshel have been collaborating since the early '90s and are two of America's pre-eminent landscape photographers. Dilapidated buildings, railroad tracks and shipping yards may not be typically associated with traditional landscape photography. But Cook and Jenshel focus on man's interaction with the natural landscape -- examining our footprints while omitting us from the frame.
Berenice Abbott, Downtown Skyport, Foot of Wall Street, 1936
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Cook works almost exclusively in black and white and Jenshel does color, but somehow the alternating rhythm works. Studying with the likes of Garry Winogrand, Jenshel was one of those first photographic rebels to decide that color had a place in fine art photography in the 1970s. Cook, on the other hand, got her start in painting and sculpture before an internship with esteemed photographer Larry Fink. Together they are two of the foremost living fine art photographers, still working in medium format film and frequently crossing over into commercial work.
Learn more about the exhibition, which will run through November 29, on the museum's Web site. And be sure to check out the photographers' site.
It's hard to imagine two people spending 20 years in the middle of nowhere and not getting sick of each other. Dereck and Beverly Joubert are Emmy Award-winning filmmakers, photographers and conservationists based in Botswana. To an outsider, one of their most impressive accomplishments is simply surviving each other. Ask them about it, though, and they don't seem at all fazed. The Jouberts have a greater cause to keep them energized. No, they don't get bored; they wouldn't live any other way.
As National Geographic explorers-in-residence, the Jouberts have devoted their conservation efforts to big cats. For their most recent project, they followed one leopard for nearly five years, from her infancy to her motherhood. Her name, Legadema, means "light from the sky" in Tswana (good luck pronouncing it). She was named after a lightning storm, during which she sought comfort by the Jouberts' truck.
Over the phone from an edit studio in South Africa, the Jouberts explained how it's possible to live so close to an animal without intervening:
"The non-intervention is purely because we want to be able to understand these animals in a way that [will help] them survive in the future. ... What we are out there to do is to hopefully show people how similar we are to animals, and how these wilderness areas are so precious."
Dereck and Beverly Joubert with a 600 mm lens.
The photographs from this most recent project have been compiled in a book called Eye of the Leopard, released yesterday. Supplemented by a corresponding film, the images are meant to provoke readers to protect the swiftly diminishing big cat populations. With the help of National Geographic, the Jouberts have also spearheaded the Big Cat Initiative, a global conservation effort.
Beverly Joubert explained that leopards are special in that, unlike lions, they are incredibly solitary creatures. Perhaps the Jouberts' photographs are resonant because they share this affinity with leopards: a comfort with solitude and a proximity to nature.
Hear the Jouberts talk about the book:
Photos by Dereck and Beverly Joubert, from Eye of the Leopard, courtesy of Rizzoli New York, 2009.
The magazine has been around for a long time. Since 1888, actually -- way back when photography was still in its infancy. As the medium continued to improve, so did photojournalism, resulting in the cachet of that little yellow rectangle. Perhaps National Geographic is feeling wistful in its old age: It has recently decided to not only dust off some treasures from its vaults but also -- for the first time -- offer a limited series of photographs and illustrations for purchase.
New York's Steven Kasher Gallery will be hosting an exhibition of the prints, titled "The World in Black and White: Vintage Prints from the National Geographic Archive." It is the first of four exhibitions coordinated by National Geographic and Steven Kasher Gallery, in an attempt to share the archival history contained in National Geographic's Image Collection -- a reservoir of over 10 million photographs, of which fewer than 2 percent have been published.
The Dome Room, Carlsbad Cavern National Monument, New Mexico, 1924. (Ray V. Davis/National Geographic Society/Steven Kasher Gallery)
Iron Hoop Cave, 2009. (Stephen Alvarez/National Geographic)
For one month beginning Thursday, 150 unique black-and-whites by more than a dozen photographers from the society's earliest days will be on display. There are photographs of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica (a conquest for the British Empire ending in the death of an entire crew). A photograph of Carlsbad Cavern National Monument in New Mexico, taken in 1924, shows the early days of cave photography continued today by National Geographic photographers like Stephen Alvarez. Photographs from all over the world illustrate a congenital dedication to exploration and discovery.
This initial exhibition is merely a preview of the National Geographic Society's vast reserves. Stay tuned for more exhibitions in the coming year.
Hear music by the photographed musicians at Take Five, NPR's weekly jazz sampler.
When the jazz label Blue Note Records was formed 70 years ago, jazz had a sound, but hardly an identifiable face. Although the music was known and beloved by its followers, it wasn't until photographers like Francis Wolff entered the scene that the faces of jazz emerged -- and become iconic. Wolff, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was the eyes of the fledgling label beginning in the late 1930s. Initially intended as studio documentation, his black-and-white photographs became Blue Note's go-to marketing materials.
Now, for its 70th anniversary, Blue Note is looking back through its notably long history with a new book, Blue Note Photography. Divided in two sections, the book compares the jazz world of Francis Wolff with that of contemporary Blue Note photographer Jimmy Katz. To get a more personal perspective on the book, NPR jazz savant Felix Contreras caught up with Katz.
FELIX CONTRERAS: Which have you been longer, a photographer or a jazz fan? JIMMY KATZ: I have been photographing since the age of 7, but I became a jazz fan in high school when Nat Hentoff, the father of one of my classmates, gave me a ticket to hear Thelonious Monk and Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers at Carnegie Hall. That concert changed the world as I knew it.
It's nice to think that those underwater scenes in Atonement were filmed on the site of a lovely English manor. Or that the fiery scene in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, in which horses and seamen are jettisoned into the Thames, was shot along the famous river. The reality, though, is a lot less romantic. Those scenes, and many more, were actually filmed in a giant tank at a place called Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom.
It's one of the largest studios in England and the place to go when in need of a watery scene. Sharon Stone, Keira Knightley and Guinness have all been there, and Phoebe Rudomino has photographed them. Taking versatility to the extreme, she has photos ranging from ethereal ballerinas in Parisian parlors to horses and chubby babies. A selection of her underwater work will be displayed at London's Movieum throughout October, in an exhibition titled "Water on the Lens."
Style spectator sports like Project Runway and online boutiques such as Etsy.com point to a new trend in fashion: democratization. Although there's still nothing like sifting through a clunky brick of Vogue, the style zeitgeist of late has been to look around for inspiration -- to be innovative and creative even if on a dime. That's the spirit of Scott Schuman's blog The Sartorialist, something of an anthropological study of street wear.
After 15 years in the fashion industry, Schuman has grown to prefer the trickle-up trendsetting of ordinary folks. Camera in tow, he wanders the streets of New York, Milan, Paris, etc., photographing strangers and dispatching daily inspiration -- from snug Italian suits to high-top sneaks and studs. Just in time for New York Fashion Week, which starts today, we caught up with Schuman about his new book. The Sartorialist, published in August, is a stout, coffee-table look book of Schuman's blog content.
But Schuman's interests surpass the sartorial. He said in a phone interview that he considers himself first a photographer, then a blogger and style connoisseur. His photographs, especially in book form, become less of a shopping list and more of a lens on self-expression. Much like his documentary predecessors August Sander and Mike Disfarmer, Schuman finds intrigue in the quotidian.
The cover image to Schuman's book, courtesy Penguin Group.
From his book we can learn a lesson about what we wear. Take a second look at that hoary-headed hobo on the street, Schuman instructs; it might actually be a creative director at Ralph Lauren. Think twice before chucking your mom's frumpy wool sweater; it could pair well with those plaid pants you thought you'd never wear -- if you're confident enough to give it a try.
Schuman is under no pretense that his blog -- or that blogs in general -- should replace fashion magazines and the styles introduced by designers. He's simply giving a voice to those who take fashion seriously outside of the magazine world. During this week's events at Bryant Park, he said, he'll give equal heed to both the runway and the surrounding scene. It should be interesting, he said, to see how the recent recession has informed the designers. Check his blog for potential updates, and to learn more about his book.
A luminous "butterfly" nebula fans out from a dying star, a turbulent cloud of gas and dust gives us a peek at the birth of a constellation, and multi-colored stars fill the frame like a tray of glowing jellybeans. All these dazzling images -- and more -- come from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope in a collection of photos released today by NASA.
Thanks to new imagers installed in May 2009 during a visit from the space shuttle Atlantis, Hubble can now see farther, clearer, and across a wider spectrum than ever before.
NASA says it's a new beginning for the 19-year-old orbiting observatory, and will extend its life into the next decade. For astronomers, it's a chance to probe deeper into space, capture never-before-seen images from the early days of the universe, and perhaps observe the birth of planets like ours.
And for ordinary folks who like to look up at the night sky and dream, it's what some astronomy enthusiasts call "space porn."
To learn more about the new and improved Hubble Space Telescope, and see more far-flung images, visit HubbleSite. Also, check out this audio slideshow of astronomers discussing their favorite Hubble photos.
Way out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, somewhere between Antarctica and Africa, wildlife photographer Stefano Unterthiner forged his way up a volcanic ridge and, when he finally reached the summit, stared out at the sea. Strangely, the sea appeared to be white and black, and spotted with orange -- it also appeared to be waddling. Unterthiner was staring at the sea of king penguins gathered on Possession Island in the Crozet archipelago -- tens of thousands of them ready for mating season. His photos appear in National Geographic's September story, "Every Bird a King."
Penguins are known as being "serially monogamist." Mating pairs remain together at least until their young are self-sufficient. Unterthiner is something of a monogamist as well: When he chooses to tell an animal's story, he stays with them for an extended period of time. A relatively new member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, he has authored five wildlife books, although this is his first appearance in National Geographic.
By Jim Wildman, producer for Morning Edition Photographs by David Gilkey, NPR staff photographer
When we show these photographs to NPR colleagues, nearly every one of them gasps. Perhaps that's because they're not images of detonated car bombs or ink-stained fingers or any of the other images we've come to expect out of Afghanistan.
Perhaps our colleagues are gasping because these images present an arresting display of neon lights, bright enough to rival Las Vegas. Or maybe this gasping comes with the realization that Afghans party too. Hard.
Whatever the reason, the most surprising thing about David Gilkey's photographs taken on a warm July evening in Kabul -- is that they introduce us to something that has become wonderfully ordinary in Afghanistan.
Each week, thousands of people attend weddings in Afghan wedding halls. Young people. Old people. Children. They dress up. They dance. (Men and women party separately.) They feast. They laugh. These celebrations last well in to the night.
During these times of bad economic news, it's easy to overlook the fact that millions of people in America still have work. NPR has launched a multimedia feature today called "The Way We Work" -- three profiles of people and their careers.
Domonique Taylor is a 29-year-old native of Washington, D.C. He's working at a Target store on the night shift, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. The hours are not ideal, but they do give him a chance to spend his days looking for more meaningful work. As someone who's just spent seven years in prison, he's anxious to get something going. His dream is to start a non-profit organization to record music written by prison inmates.
17th-century explorer Henry Hudson had a real knack for making his crew miserable. Among numerous failed attempts to find an all-water passage to Asia, Hudson somewhat accidentally explored what is now Manhattan -- exactly this time of year, 400 years ago. Little did his mutinous crew know, this lush landscape would become a global epicenter. It goes without saying that, were they to stumble upon it again today, they would find it slightly altered.
Although Hudson could never see today's Manhattan, we can now get an idea of what he saw that September of 1609 -- thanks to The Mannahatta Project, the brainchild of ecologist Eric Sanderson. His project, featured in National Geographic's September issue, shows New York like we've never seen it before: rural enough to make any Manhattanite shudder.
The project began when Sanderson came across a topographical map of the region dating to around 1782. The hills and ponds piqued his curiosity, so he matched that map with one from today to see what exactly preceded the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, etc. Artists Markley Boyer and Philip Straub re-created the old New York to contrast with Robert Clark's contemporary photographs. The result: a before and after spanning nearly half a millennium.
NPR reporter Tom Bowman and photographer David Gilkey recently returned from Afghanistan. Searching through Gilkey's unpublished photos, we came across some images that seemed to merit a dispatch.
By Tom Bowman
The Combat Search and Rescue helicopters operated by the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan transport medics who are trained to treat the injured during that "golden hour," the moments that can mean the difference between life and death.
The medics listen to the radio from their wooden hut at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan, waiting for the call. They are briefed about combat operations that day, including where they may be sent. A large map pinpoints the locations.
They share lunch, heaving pieces of chicken onto paper plates, drinking sodas, chatting and waiting.
Suddenly, a voice squawks over the intercom, and they dash from the hut to their specially designed Black Hawk helicopters on the nearby tarmac.
Within minutes they are in the air. Two pararescuemen, Staff Sgt. Mark Bedell and Senior Airman Andrew Rios, sit with their feet dangling hundreds of feet above Kandahar province. Known as PJs (pararescue jumpers), they are trained to bring back downed pilots or provide emergency treatment to soldiers and civilians caught up in fighting.
The helicopter is all business. All the seats have been taken out, and supplies are neatly stocked to one side. There is only a wide and empty metal space. Senior Master Sgt. Walter Bacio mans an M4 machine gun, while the flight engineer, Senior Airman Andrew Gibson, gazes out the window.
In a blur, we pass over mud huts, grazing sheep, and then bank a bit too close to a mountainside. A sort of super seat belt is holding me to the floor, but I'm convinced I'll roll out of the helicopter like a marble into the dust below. NPR photographer David Gilkey is somehow snapping pictures without holding on for dear life.
The pilot, Maj. Tom Roberts, and his co-pilot, Capt. Hung Nguyen, then turn in a sharp angle and drop into a compound, less than 10 miles from Kandahar Airfield. The whoosh of the helicopter blades is almost deafening. Two Americans are carrying an Afghan man, who has stepped on a mine, on a stretcher. He looks bewildered.
The man has lacerations and an injured groin. Within seconds they are hustling him onboard, the stretcher fastened to the metal floor. His head lolls back and forth as the PJs work on him. An IV needle is put into his arm. As he is stabilized, a peaceful look covers his face.
The helicopter banks again and drops into a dirt field next to an Afghan military hospital. The man is carried out and placed inside an ancient ambulance. The CSAR crew rises once more into the sky, heading back to the wooden hut, waiting for still another call.
In the late '90s a private jet transported a group of Houston public school students to Saudi Arabia to hone their photography skills. Ray Carrington III relates this fact over the phone as if it is the most normal thing in the world. That's because Carrington is not your typical teacher.
Fifteen years ago he developed an intensive photography course for the students of the Magnet School of Communication at Jack Yates High School in Houston. The former chief photographer for the Port Authority of Houston, Carrington crafted it not because he had always wanted to be a teacher but for rather the opposite reason: The idea of teaching seemed stifling to him. A friend talked him into the position, but if he was going to do it, he was going to do it his way -- pushing young photographers toward work good enough to hang in museums.
His method involves a complex subject: Third Ward, the neighborhood where the school is located. Year after year, he lets his students loose in the neighborhood, near downtown Houston, pushing them to see the traditionally black area's people and buildings with a fresh set of eyes. Whether they happen to already live there or are bused from across town, the students all discover something new.
This photo, taken by Ylonda Rodgers in 1996, is one of Carrington's favorites.
Every year, the best photos are exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. (The photos in the gallery above were all exhibited in the popular show.)
"I'm a traditionalist. If it ain't broke, don't fix it," Carrington declares, explaining why he has no plans to alter his approach; his students will spend their first year getting down the basics of aperture and shutter speed on a film camera. Only later will they experiment with digital photography.
He has been awed by the results in the past.
"There are some that really just hit my heart -- because the image is so clean and pure with light and contrast -- and sometimes it's a combination of what they write."
Carrington's students write about the people and moments they uncover in the school's backyard; a mother combing her daughter's hair; a boy offering a first kiss; boarded-up homes and fancy new condos.
The one element of the project that has changed over the years is the neighborhood itself, which is quickly becoming gentrified. Old buildings have been torn down; fancy new condos have gone up.
"My only regret is not to have taken more architectural photos," Carrington says. Some of the buildings his first students took for granted are now gone.
At some point, Carrington says, he'd like to put together a book with images from over the years -- more than a few of which were taken by students who are now professional photographers.
A photograph of a 53-year-old naked man, sitting on a child's chair, beat out 15,000 other entries from across the world in the Art of Photography competition in San Diego this weekend.
Benoit Paille, who made the unusual portrait, met the man on the street one day. Paille, who often asks elderly strangers if he can photograph them, was invited to the fellow's home. To his surprise, the man, who had recently lost his mother, chose to express his loneliness by removing his clothes and crouching on a tiny chair.
"It is a remarkable photograph in its piercing representation of an acute and specific human state," explains the show's sole judge, Charlotte Cotton, the head of the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Cotton, who sifted through thousands of photos by amateurs and professionals alike, says she was searching for photos that capture the wonder of the world -- whether through connections with strangers or kin. Another one of Cotton's favorites was Martine Fougeron's photograph of her teen sons and their friends, reclining on colorful bean bags.
"What I love about it," says Cotton, over the phone after the show, "is that she has a digital maturity, but there's also that sense of someone taking out the camera for the first time, this freshness."
She calls the fourth-place winner, "one of the best biographical stories that photography has crafted in the 2000s." See if you agree, by exploring more of Fougeron's Tete a Tete project here.
The Art of Photography exhibit, featuring the submissions, is open until Nov. 1.
Dennis Stock is a living testament to the fact that dropping out of school may not be the worst idea. Still sharp as a tack at 81 -- maybe even sharper -- he says euphemistically, "Formal education is not my cup of tea." In his youth, he probably wasn't even the tea-drinking type. Stock's idea of rejuvenation involved road trips, camp-outs, cultural immersion and long-term photo essays for Life and other publications. Nowadays, his archive is a treasure trove to the Americana-loving historian. And it's largely because he had the guts to quit school and hit the road. In the late 1960s, he was photographing the Woodstock Generation, but he was also one of its free-spirited, anarchistic exemplars.
A collection of Stock's photographs from the late '60s is now on display in his hometown, at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in New York. It's a timely exhibit, coinciding with the free-loving festival's 40th anniversary this month, and it was also a good excuse to get the renowned Magnum photographer on the phone.
In workshops and lessons, Stock teaches what he calls the "articulate image" -- that is, an image that conveys the "essence of a situation." He's certainly more comfortable explaining what makes a good photograph than, say, his infamously taciturn predecessor Henri Cartier-Bresson, who influenced nearly every photographer in the late 20th century but refused to admit it.
It seems that there's an inherent intuition to great photographers -- something that cannot be taught, and something that Stock just has. There are a few photos I've encountered in life, for example, that have really resonated -- images that, for whatever reason, I cannot get out of my mind. And one of them is Stock's Venice Beach Rock Festival, 1968.
Venice Beach Rock Festival, Calif., 1968. (Dennis Stock)
Hear Stock discuss his photo:
It was taken, as the title says, at a rock festival in California, when a girl jumped in front of Stock's camera on stage. It was a fleeting, accidental moment, and yet the photo itself is timeless. Perhaps it's because Stock was both curious about and accepting of his (counter) culture that, when it comes to articulate images, his are some of the most eloquent. If there's one lesson to be learned from Stock, it has nothing to do with composition or lighting or f-stops -- it's about being adventurous and observant and, heaven forbid, maybe even a bit rebellious.
Hear Stock discuss some of his greatest photos on Magnum's Web site: James Dean, jazz musicians, his award-winning immigrant series and, most importantly, hippies.
Harold Feinstein's career took off in 1950, when photography legend Edward Steichen purchased his work for the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. Since then, Feinstein has compiled books of 100 flowers and 100 seashells -- and now he has become something of a lepidopterist.
You guessed it: Feinstein's latest pursuit is butterflies. His new book, One Hundred Butterflies, is a simple concept that shows off the variegated wingspans. Magnified and removed from their natural environments, they appear as flying, flapping works of art -- although they are actually in the same taxonomic class as ants and wasps. In any case, it's pretty cool to see butterflies the size of your face. Visit Feinstein's Web site to see more of his work, especially the section dedicated to Coney Island. Look out for the book this November.
When we think of photography "greats," we usually rattle off names like Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon or Henri Cartier-Bresson. It often seems as if we've forgotten an entire hemisphere of photographic history. But two exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art aim to change that. "The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography" and "Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea" show off SFMOMA's extensive postwar Japanese photography collection, and also incorporate some more contemporary photography from China and Korea.
"The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography," the museum's first survey of postwar Japanese photography, includes nearly a hundred pictures from the 1960s through the 1990s. These photos document Japan's transformation in the wake of its World War II defeat. Evolving from a traditionally conservative society to a democratic, capitalistic nation took time. But over the years, Japan embraced change, which often meant embracing the West.
In 1959, for example, a group of Japanese photographers united in a group called VIVO, modeled after Magnum Photos agency -- something of an industry powerhouse in the West. Likewise, a small-press photography magazine was formed in 1968. Provoke: shiso no tame no chohatsuteki shiryo (Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought) aimed to bolster the photographic community and facilitate artistic dialogue. It also gave this exhibition its name.
Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea features photographs from 13 emerging photographers in China, as well as a selection from Korea. Here's a very small sampling of images from the exhibitions, which both open Sept. 12, and an even smaller sampling of Japanese photography -- more of a teaser introduction, if anything.
A few weeks ago, NPR's multimedia director Keith Jenkins went on All Things Considered to discuss which camera is best for you. We also asked listeners to submit summer photos to Flickr, and here are some of our favorites.
By Claire O'Neill Tune in to Weekend Edition to hear author Michael Pollan tell host Scott Simon how orchids are "the inflatable love dolls of the floral kingdom."
In 1994, John Edward Laroche was arrested for allegedly "poaching" orchids, which goes to show just how precious they are. Eight years later, Laroche was a character in Charlie Kauffman's film Adaptation, and this is what he had to say about those furtive flowers:
... what's so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. ... And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. ... In this sense they show us how to live -- how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can't let anything get in your way.
That's a pretty romantic way of thinking about a plant. Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food), on the other hand, isn't quite as charmed. His article in the September issue of National Geographic magazine, accompanied by Christian Ziegler's photography, expresses admiration -- but no such adulation.
Orchids are manipulative, self-centered, wily and sometimes downright sadistic. And yet insects and humans alike are ensnared -- perhaps for those very reasons -- by their ethereal beauty. Unlike most flowers, orchids require the help of insects and birds and pollinate. And so they have adapted, in some cases, to both look and smell like their pollinator's female counterparts. You can imagine how supremely frustrating this must be for a male insect, and how smug the orchid must feel -- that is, how it would feel if it were sentient.
We humans are by no means impervious to the orchid's charms. Pollan and Ziegler, for example, trekked around the world in an attempt to demystify some of the orchid's secrets. But while Pollan's entertaining narrative gives us pause in our orchid fever, Ziegler's photos, in this editor's humble opinion, only serve to perpetuate that flower frenzy: They are spectacular.
In the 1940s, a photographer named Gordon Parks broke into a scene that had previously been dominated by white men. He was the first black photographer to work for magazines like Life and Vogue, and the first to work for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. Born into poverty and the youngest of 15, he had a sensibility about poor living conditions. But as a renowned photographer, he also had access to some of the most famed athletes and celebrities, like Muhammad Ali and Ingrid Bergman.
This summer, it was announced that more that 4,000 prints and 20,000 negatives of Parks' work will be moved to Purchase College/State University of New York to be preserved, cataloged and made available for public view and study. The groundbreaking photographer died in 2006, and the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation acquired his work the following year. The foundation will also be sending photos by Timothy O'Sullivan, Mathew Brady and Ed Clark along with Parks' collection to be housed by Purchase.
You can see some of Parks' photos in this gallery, some from Purchase College and others from the Library of Congress, which also has a large collection of his early work. To learn more about Parks, check out this retrospective feature put together by PDN and Kodak.
El Salvador has technically been in peacetime since its civil war ended 17 years ago. But as photographer Juan Carlos says, it "has come a long way but has not moved forward." For many Salvadorans, postwar recovery has been almost as devastating as the war itself: The country is plagued with violence, drugs and a stagnant economy -- not to mention the various natural disasters that continually impede development. Carlos, currently living in El Salvador, has documented the country's postwar struggle in his series "Duro Blandito."
"Duro Blandito" (hard soft) is a type of cheese and, in popular Salvadoran speech, an oxymoron expressing the ambiguity of life. For Carlos, the phrase also conveys the difficulty of defining peace in a postwar era. The country had been defined by civil unrest for several decades, culminating in the 1980s and '90s in a civil war to overthrow a repressive government. Peace accords were finally signed in 1992, and with that came hope for the Salvadoran people.
But El Salvador is still among the 10 poorest countries in Latin America. "In various parts of the country," Carlos says, "one can still catch sight of the stillness of time." That is, those regions have remained socio-economically stagnant for the past three decades. While things are changing slowly for Salvadorans, daily life is a struggle for many. The photos in this series say more.
Juan Carlos, like many other Salvadorans, moved to the United States in the mid-1980s and settled in California. He has since returned to El Salvador to live and work. He offered to share his story with The Picture Show, hoping that it might reach those unfamiliar with El Salvador's situation. View more of his work on his Web site.
At least in Washington, D.C., today feels like the swampiest, most oppressively hot day of the year. And in the impossible attempt to beat the heat, this collection of photos somehow seems appropriate: Gigi Cifali, London-based photographer, has a series depicting abandoned swimming pools that practically scoff at the idea of cooling off.
These photos are part of an ongoing series called "Absence of Water." Cifali, originally trained as a topographer in Naples, is interested in creating a historical archive of derelict public pools in the United Kingdom. These pools, first built in the late Victorian period, reached the height of popularity in the 1930s. But an increasing number have recently fallen into decay -- either because of diminishing civic funds or general lack of interest.
These ghostly vestiges show what happens to the things we build then abandon. Times change, and apparently so do our tastes. To view more, check out Cifali's Web site.
At first glance, there's something comical about a man chasing a runaway donkey with a country's presidential ballots on its back. But actually, that man and donkey are responsible for delivering the vote to some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan for this Thursday's election -- regions only accessible by donkey that could very easily be neglected and, until now, pretty much have been.
For this year's election, Afghanistan's second democratic election, the United Nations and the Afghan Independent Election Commission have mapped out ballot deliveries by helicopter, truck and donkey to ensure rural citizens the right to vote. NPR staff photographer David Gilkey joined election officials in the trek to deliver voting materials in the Badakhshan province in northern Afghanistan.
Despite his remote location and patchy reception, we were able to get Gilkey on the phone for a few minutes to ask him about this experience. After embedding with Marines and dodging constant fire in southern Afghanistan, and after covering the presidential campaign, Gilkey seemed grateful to see this side of the election -- a more positive side. "It gives you a whole new appreciation for our right to vote," says Gilkey. "We can't even get in the car and drive a half a mile to the elementary school to vote. But these people, don't ask me how -- they don't have phones, power or water -- will walk for two days to vote."
To learn more about the Afghanistan election, and to view more of Gilkey's photographs, check out our Afghanistan hub page.
Most photographers in Venice wield small point-and-shoot cameras and attempt to capture something like a postcard city. It's the Venice of dreams rather than the sinking, struggling Venice that exists today. But National Geographic Photographer Jodi Cobb went to Venice with a different mission: to show it as it is -- beautiful, yes, but also sad and suffering. Her photos appear in the August issue: "Vanishing Venice."
Cobb has traveled the world to document places and people. She was the first woman to win the White House News Photographer of the Year award (in 1985). She was one of the first to document intimately the lives of Japanese geishas, and to photograph in China after it was reopened to the West. Compared to her other assignments, Venice, probably one of the most photographed cities in the world, must have seemed like old news.
But there's definitely a story to tell there. Venice, which indeed has a longstanding tradition of tourism, has in recent years faced an identity crisis. As acqua alta, or high tide, causes irreversible infrastructural damage, the cost of maintenance is almost unsustainable. One funding solution has been to open the flood gates to the tide of tourism. It's a mainstay for the Venetian economy, but also a curse for Venice locals. The population has diminished remarkably in the past few decades. Will there still be a Venice in 50 years? Or will it merely be a drowning museum?
Cobb's photos show us the Venice rarely seen in guidebooks. View more of her photos and read the story here. Also check out an interactive map of Venetian flood patterns.
The year is 1956. We're deep in the throes of the Cold War. And as European powers are divested of colonial possessions, the Soviet Union is shrewdly dispatching cultural envoys around the world -- dancers, musicians and artists -- to win the trust and loyalty of newly emerging nations.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is clambering in search of its own diplomatic edge. A voice of reason then emerges from the panic: Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Harlem congressman, steps up and says, "Let's send Dizzy." There's no better way to win hearts and minds than through the irrepressible forces of jazz, he proposes.
Dizzy Gillespie plays for snakes. Karachi, Pakistan, 1956. (Courtesy of the Marshall Stearns Collection, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University)
"Of course!" thought the State Department. Not only was jazz a uniquely American art form, but also a democratic one. The rules were loose, the music free-flowing -- and the musicians were ideal diplomats: All they wanted was to jam with "local cats." In turn, these jazz artists spread the image of an accepting, inquisitive and just plain cool America.
Jazz had already been popularized abroad through various circuits, namely Willis Conover
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