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God damn it. Some bastard has just been round the back of my house and half inched a beautiful and incredibly heavy B20 engine for my ancient Volvo Amazon, and thieved my beloved welder.

I don’t know why I’m telling you.. other than to ask you to keep your eye out down the pub. Down the bloody scrapyard more like. Oh, and I suppose it’s a good opportunity to post a pic of the car the engine was for, and which the welder has welded (sob). This car is my sanity when all the world goes to shit. Oh, her name’s Lola by the way. If you see her, give her a wave.

To keep this post on a photographic bent I used some off camera flash. So there.

Thanks. I feel better now. A bit.

Ey up. Photo editor job for the frankly great MSF.

Could this be for you? You’ve got to like Brussels though, and they make you fart.

===============================================================================================================================

PHOTO EDITOR

Background and objectives:
The PHOTO EDITOR position aims to contribute to MSF’s communication and information activities through photography.

Together with the Photo Production Advisor, he/she works on selecting photos, helping with photo production and diffusion, and advising on lay-out. He/She also assists with the management of photo archives.

The position is half-time and is based in Brussels.

The PHOTO EDITOR works within the MSF OCB Audiovisual Unit and reports to the Communications and Audiovisual Coordinator. He/She works in very close collaboration with the Photo Production Advisor. He/She will work as a team with the Video Producer and Editor, as well as with the various Communications Officers of the Combo team.

Main responsibilities
• Select and prepare pictures for internal and external publications
• Supports the Photo Production Advisor on photo production and diffusion
• Advise on matters of layout and design
• Assist with the management of photo archives

Tasks
• Select pictures for internal and external publications, including slideshows and photo-films
• Prepare selected photos and upload them on the international media database
• Follow up with the Communications Officers of the Combo team on the accompanying info for pictures (dates, captions, keywords, authors, etc.)
• Supports the Photo Production Advisor on photo production and diffusion
• Produce photography in the office or for MSF in Belgium
• Develop and maintain a photo database of key MSF spokespeople in the field and HQ
• Occasionally, may produce photo reports in MSF field projects
• Advise on matters of lay-out and design both for print and online publications produced by the Combo team
• Maintain a network of quality designers motivated to work for MSF
• Assist with the management of the MSF OCB photo archive
• Be the reference photo person in the absence of the Photo Production Advisor

Together with the Photo Production Advisor:
• Promote the work of the audiovisual unit internally
• Provide support to and advise field communication staff and other MSF field staff with regards to photography
• Promote MSF photo guidelines – including usage rules and photo ethics – among MSF teams
• Support with the acquisition, maintenance and use of MSF OCB photo equipment

Qualifications
• Previous professional experience in photography or at a picture desk of a major publication
• A strong sense of initiative as well as team play
• A good judgement of ethical aspects of photography
• A strong motivation for working with a humanitarian organisation
• Experience in lay-out and design
• Fluency in English and French
• Basic knowledge of Dutch is a plus

Conditions
- Based part time in Brussels
- Post to be filled at once.

CV + application letter to be sent before 14/02/2012 to Thalia Maes,
Communication Department, Rue Dupré 94, 1090 Brussels.
E-mail : thalia.maes@brussels.msf.org

Well well well. It’s about that time. Amongst the myriad of things to do, Funky Friday must not be forgotten.

Enjoy.

If you only read one thing about photography this week, next week, or for the rest of the year, read this post.

‘Even if your photographic diet only consisted of, let’s say, James Nachtwey photographs, I am relatively certain – relatively, not absolutely – that this photograph will move you. It might even shock you. Needless to say, that is not why this is a good photograph. This is not why you might want to use it as an example of what photographs can do. For the shock, all you’d need is something by Nachtwey. But for something that strikes your innermost self, this photograph is an amazing example. It is a photograph that, to (mis-)use Francis Bacon’s words, speaks directly to the nervous system.‘

Blimey.

Imagine if you could get a job that would really, definitely, demonstrably make a difference. One that tallies with your desires to make the world a better place. One that would also probably allow you to work on those delicious projects that you struggle like hell to fund. A job that makes you feel better about yourself, and a job on which you will probably pay no tax. A job that you are very likely to get. Are you dreaming? Have I gone mad? Was that pork flying past the double hung sash?

How about this for a coincidence….there are at least 8,750 photographers in the UK looking for work. There is also a desperate need for at least 8,750 foster families in the UK. Incredible. I only made up one of those stats….there is probably many more photographers looking for work.

I’ve heard that fostering is bloody hard work mind, but since when have you been scared of hard work? Wimp.

Just a wee thought.

The answer to this question is very likely YES.

“Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for further interrogation. This is unacceptable,” said MSF General Director Christopher Stokes.

I’m not the only one who has been struck by the one sided reporting of the Libyan revolution.  It seems the media were largely only capable of presenting one point of view applied to the spring revolutions. What happened in Tunisia was narratively speaking interchangeable with what happened in Libya.

This makes for an easy story and easily read photographs.

Good guys fight badass dictator (who we’ve kissed ass to over the years) and good guys win Hollywood style. Afterwards we can all sleep safely in our beds. In the meantime the more kick-ass action the better.

But now according to the BBC those good guys are accusing both human rights organisations and MSF of being Gadaffi’s fifth column

The head of Misrata’s military council, Ibrahim Beitelmal, denies involvement in any abuses and says his accusers have a hidden agenda.

“I think that the people working under the guise of human rights organisations or doctors without borders are Gaddafi’s fifth column. There may have been a few cases of former rebels taking revenge but that doesn’t mean that the orders have come from my office to torture prisoners.”

Was the Libyan war reported, photographically speaking, as one continuous emotional and intellectual embed (in bed) with the rebels? One that audiences are preconditioned not only to accept, but actually to celebrate, from news print, to internet, TV reels and gallery spaces.

Yesterday I got this shocking email from MSF (printed below). Read it and ask yourself  how are we now to read the photography of Misrata (a place synonymous in the photographic community with the deaths of the photographers/filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros)?

There is a thin line between propaganda, bang bang chasing pictures and journalism.

It seems now we were fed a lot of the first two and very little of last.

Should any of us really be surprised by this?  That it’s almost impossible to jump on a plane, visit a country you’ve never been to before, where you don’t speak the language,  that is immersed in full on tribal civil war, embed with one side, and then tell a story that is anything else but flawed?

Anyone else feel cheated?

Huffington Post Says

‘Here’s a foolproof way to sell a book of photographs: reconceptualize the best ones in the world. That’s what photographer Tim Mantoani has done with his new book “Behind Photographs,” a compilation of famous photographers holding their famous works‘

My review is here.

I’ve been teaching photography in various ways for over 20 years, and embraced the digital revolution for all the reasons we all have, but also because of the ways it enabled me to show a novice photographer a technique in ‘real time’ and see the result on the lcd screen. Learning is quicker and more fun this way. But one thing that I’ve tried to encourage people not to do when learning, and which digital makes easy to do, is delete in the field.

I’ve tried to encourage a process of editing in the computer, and looking at the work as a whole, and seeing how the images that you might like have been arrived at, by studying the progression of images as you shot ‘through’ the subject over a period of time.

Yes just like the contact sheets we used to make in the good old film days (and some people still do).

I think there’s a lot to be learned from doing this, not just technical lessons, but aesthetic too. But I’ve come to realize that there’s another aspect to this thats really important. Its that for many inexperienced photographers it’s actually quite difficult to determine what actually constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ image and that too often its the technical qualities that are the defining ones, overriding any other less tangible considerations.

I was teaching photography for a community association adult group over a recent winter, all beginners, mostly using basic digital compacts. Simple class structure – an ‘assignment’ to undertake in the intervening week, and a group review of the class images from the tasks for the first hour of each successive session.

One woman class member Susan was struggling to find the particular images she wanted to show us on her laptop, and as she flicked through several others she said “not sharp, not sharp, not sharp, sorry these are ones I meant to delete“.

“Whoa!” says I. And she stopped and backed up as I requested, through numerous images, until we came to a few pictures I’d spotted as she’d flicked through.  One was simply beautiful (although the original was in colour, but with a horrible colour cast).

Village Hall, Strathconon. © Susan McLennan

I asked what she thought of it. “Not sharp, didn’t work“, she replied. And again said “I meant to delete these“. I asked the class what they thought and the same comment was made by several of them about the image not being sharp..

And so I told them what I thought. That this was a wonderfully evocative image of a highland village hall, the timber lining, the tall windows, and the pictures on the wall of the local laird (estate owner) and his wife at their wedding, the stag heads, all of it just shouting ‘village hall’ and giving it a real sense of place, but with that wee bit of additional magic -  the children. Moving around as they played during the long exposure, they had recorded as a slightly ethereal presence, wispy and transparent, almost ghostlike. And I explained how for me this evoked the presence of past children, and future children, and because they were virtually unidentifiable they were ‘any child’, and that this was a timeless image which should be celebrated and enjoyed and certainly not deleted.

The class were well up for the discussion that followed and enjoyed having their preconceptions about what constituted ‘good’ work challenged.  And many of them found the concept of ‘emotional content’ a revelation, and the realization that it is a quality totally independent of the technical aspects of an image, to be a very liberating thing.

We all have to start the learning curve of photography somewhere, and it’s been a continuing source of delight to me that with some guidance (and even without) the vast majority of people have something to say ‘visually’, and can often take a really really good image to illustrate it. Truth is that taking ‘good’ images is very easy, but the difficulty is that they are invariably surrounded by a mass of work of lesser value.   How does one discern the good from bad? If you’re a novice photographer how can you tell the difference? I often wonder how many real gems never see the the light of day because they are simply deleted?

In one subsequent class an even more emotive moment occurred. The class task was to photograph something you like or something you dislike. One woman class member showed an image of a leg, clearly badly smashed up and surrounded by a metal cage, obviously in a hospital context with a nurse’s hand visible at the bottom of the frame holding the leg. She explained this was an image she hated because it was her partner’s leg, taken after they’d decided to move 500 miles to Scotland and she’d relocated and got a job whilst her partner worked out his notice in the south. However he’d had a serious accident and was now in hospital down south for at least 6 months, until his leg healed. And this meant the new life they’d planned together was on hold because of the accident, he was down there, she was up here, hundreds of miles away “and this photo – well I hate it, I just hate it because of what it signifies, the separation and his absence” she said with an emotional crack to her voice.

After a moment I asked the class what they thought, and there was a subdued range of nods of agreement, and sympathetic murmurs. This image and its meaning had obviously struck them all as being a little ‘heavier’ and more emotional than they’d expected. So I asked a question:

“What attitude do you think that nurse’s hand displays?“.

Silence. So I asked again for everyone to look at the hand and tell me what it looked like. Still silence.  I gave some guidance, and suggested that what they had responded to so emotionally was the verbal description of the image’s meaning to the author, NOT to the image’s actual content.  And then asked them did they think it looked like a caring hand or an aggressive hand in the photo. After a few moment one of the bolder folks (bearing in mind this is only week 2 of our course) said “er….um….well…..caring I think“.  I pressed on “why caring?“.  And then several of them started to look, to see, and to think, and answers flowed, such as “it’s hard to say, it’s just well the way it looks” and  “it’s the way it’s touching the leg, sort of delicately” and so on.

I added “yes, we all recognize aggressive actions, stances, bodily shapes, and equally we recognize passive, caring, tender attitudes and actions, whether we are aware of this or not. For me this hand sums up ‘care’, and ‘tenderness’ and ‘healing’, and I’d suggest that rather than hate this image you should perhaps love this image because what it demonstrates is that in your absence someone else is looking after the person you love with a great degree of care, and dare I say it, tenderness”.

There was a silence then a little tearful sniff, and “Oh my, you’re right, I’d not realized. I didn’t see. Oh my…I’d , I’m…..I’m…I see now. Phew. Ohhh!” . The hugely absorbing discussion that followed took us in a wide arc through a range of topics, about emotional content, visual literacy, cognitive dissonance and much more and left the class somewhat drained, but much much wiser.

I think its vital that you share your work with people you know. Discussing why it was made, and what it makes you feel like, is a hugely valuable thing to do. It’s an even more valuable thing to do with people you don’t know, because they’re less likely to care about offending you by saying they don’t like a particular image.

Every image has a story. Telling that story, about how you felt that day, why you pointed the camera in a particular direction, what it felt like for you then and what it feels like for you now, all help to articulate the worth of your work, and can make you think carefully about the content.

But what others will see in your images might sometimes surprise you.

You can learn a lot by sharing.

Wondering whether or not to press that delete button?  Might be better to wait.

On the road again…safe travels.

Somebody wrote:

‘OK, Kodak’s dead…..and why is it, with the exception of a handful of shooters, none of the photographers who excelled in my generation are working, and why is it that no one really cares? I can think of 40 names, even more from the 80′s who were young at that time…. I am doing far better work that I ever was when I was getting MONTH long gigs from LIFE and I can’t sniff a good job? Seriously folks, something is way out of whack in all of this…’

Someone replied:

There are broadly two types of photographer – one says ‘everyones a photographer’ with a sneer, the other says ‘everyones a photographer’ with a tone of excitement and wonder. Or maybe there’s a third, someone who says ‘everyones a photographer’ with utter bewilderment, because I have a hard time keeping up with it these days.

But more people taking more pictures is not, and can never be a bad thing IMO. Bearing in mind photography is one of the most democratic art forms ever invented – thanks largely to Kodak funnily enough – the difference in underlying attitude is quite telling, in that it measures the photographers ideas about their audience, and their assumption as to where they are in ‘the pecking order of things’. Most of us have seen the massive trend in photography towards universality and democratization – from the iPhone, to Flickr, to people in the Middle East chucking samizdat videos and pictures around.

But there has been another trend, largely ignored – and that is the increasing tendency of photographers to cleave towards the (largely self proclaimed) ‘elite’ – political, economic, cultural.

Of course the argument would be that they’re simply following their rational economic self interest, in the light of tanking ‘old skool’ revenue streams. But its funny how it also uncannily enforces the dog-whistle tone of vanity and desperation that has always sat just under the surface of the business.

As the mass money dries up, there is a trend to aspire to be closer to the Versailles salon of the Sun King. From riding on the back of a Pentagon war machine subsidy, picking up grants from uber-hedge fund mega-predators or corporate lobby foundation fronts, becoming the in-house photographer for ’1 Percent Monthly’ magazine, to simply engaging in a seemingly endless ponzi scheme-esque money-go-round: I grant you, you bursary him, he awards her, she judging panels him, he workshops them…and round we go again.

Until it ends up on the wall of a disused church, viewed by a hermetically sealed bubble of like-minded peers, in a southern French city where the unemployment rate is 30 percent.

Or maybe they don’t do any of that, but simply pine for a Golden Era when the non-digital barriers to entry meant they were Ozymandias, King of Kings. And of course the prevailing photographic view was euphemistically called ‘Western’, but was in fact, mostly American, British, maybe a bit o ‘French. The rest of the World was their cultural playground.

It was great while it lasted I suppose. It will never, EVER come back.

The crashing irony is everybody is talking about Kodachrome like it was fine wine, when the reality was, it WASN’T. It was Spam, and manufactured by the giga-ton to be consumed like Spam by people who would genuinely value their family snaps a damn sight more than some here-today-birdcage-liner-tomorrow feature in some glossy mag.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is a rant against particular photographers, many of whom are astonishingly talented genuine artists, and like many, I think its a crying shame they can’t pursue their vision with the limited degree of independence they once had.

It’s the trend thats entirely retrograde IMO, and I just think they’re on the wrong end of the curve. Its a move away from the mass audience we were supposed to engage with. It’s why for example, the two most photographed wars in history have left the majority audience virtually totally ignorant, and arguably voting for economic and political policies that will cast them into an abyss.

Thats only one of many epic failures on our part, and I don’t blame the audience at all for viewing what we pursue with a fair degree of contempt. They’re tired of being patronised, so they’ve seized the tools and made their own media. The quicker we get out of the way, the better.

There is a very small number of photographers who ‘get it’, and who are engaging with grassroots audiences as peers and fellow collaborators (instead of the Old Skool ‘Attention Peasants! I bring you truth! Now shut the fuck up and take it’ model) using the very same tools available to the audience – digital capture, social media. I think its a hopeful sign and wish them every success.

As for the rest? As I’m now working on a picture desk and training people, I’m now largely part of the audience now more than I was, and find myself tending towards thinking as they do (in my case the audience is in SE Asia).

I really don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the Washington Consensus salon-monkey media anymore. The world is just moving past them.