Writing Here:

duckrabbit
David White
Ciara Leeming
John Macpherson
Peter
Sara Trula
Carl Pendle
Joni Karanka
Mike Lusmore
Madeleine Corcoran

The Vision and the Voice

A few days back I exchanged emails with the photographer Stephen Alvarez, who for the last fifteen years has shot for National Geographic. He suggested we take the conversation onto our blogs.

If you’re not aware of his work than I would say it is characterized by being both hard won and sublime:

(c) [...]

(click on photo, the video player will load, then click again to play)

It’s one of those moments you don’t forget.

This term I’ve been a guest lecturer at Birmingham City University. I sat twenty students down in front of one of the four videos we’ve been producing for MSF (more of [...]

Thanks Mondo (Multimedia Muse), your words are a real encouragement

The credit is shared with the masters we worked with at MSF. Jake, Robin, Julie, Martin, Pete, Bruno, Mitch, Pascale and many others.

Just another set of limb chopped Africans by a famous photographer

The headline on the BBC website reads:

In Pictures: Rebuilding Wrecked Lives After Sierra Leone’s civil war

Sounds interesting?

Then I flicked to the set and found another story to the one sold to me in the headline.

There’s nothing technically wrong with Nick Danzinger’s black and white pictures of people from [...]

'Kenya hasn't seen a drop of rain for several years.'

If you have no knowledge about East Africa you might actually believe a statement like the one written above presumably by the photographer Stephano de Luigi on the VII website.

I’m wracking my brains to imagine how he (or someone else) could have got it so wrong, and how no-one else has spotted it? [...]

An interesting point of view about the NGOization of African imagery fed to America

has been posted by Paul Melcher on the Black Star Rising blog. You can read the full post here. duckrabbit doesn’t entirely agree with him. I think its actually a bit of a cliche that NGO’s only show pictures of despair coming out of Africa. Actually I think a lot of what they show is [...]

Parched in India

A photographer whose work I’ve come to admire greatly is Sanjit Das. He and I briefly worked together on a job for the NGO Action Aid in Delhi last summer, and since then I’ve been watching his output with interest – and not a little envy. He is a serious talent.

Anyway, the other [...]

Miss HIV, Botswana

MISS HIV STIGMA FREE 2007 BOTSWANA..TSHEBETSO THOBOLO comes on stage at the MISS HIV pageant to great applause. (c) David White

Stories about HIV and AIDS in Africa are often presented as either one of polar opposites. There are the news outlets who tend to publish negative stories, sometimes with a picture [...]

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Time to turn the camera around on Africa

Think of Africa and you envision wild animals, conflicts, starving kids and suffering. On a whole, this continent hasn’t had the best of times in the past few hundred years. Whilst for some it might be a fact of life, for others it’s a rite of passage in an industry that thrives on misery and [...]

Is this an own goal?

Having just seen the winner of The Press Photographer’s Year, I completely understand now why Kenyan photographers get totally pissed off so many of the photography jobs go to visitors to their country (NGO or otherwise).

The argument being that outsiders are better equipped to deliver (yeah right).

The winners photo was taken in Kenya. [...]

Multimedia -Sexual Warfare, Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo

When duckrabbit lived in Ethiopia the radio programmes that I managed regularly told stories of women and children who had been the victims of sexual violence. The stories were horrific. To say that that the problem is endemic is to put it mildly. Sexual violence against women and children is rampant the [...]

How to do it

Ok…after looking at mediocre photography day in day out for what seems ages, I was sent an email by Marco Vernaschi. He’s had a lot of exposure recently, and rightly so. His work is of a rare quality. He is technically totally in control, aesthetically he’s bang on and the stories he covers are epic. [...]

MSF Condition Critical “Now is not the time to sleep. It is the time to speak out, to express ourselves. Me I speak out through my painting”

I have to admit when MSF launched its Condition Critical website, a multimedia insight into life in Congo, it felt like it could be a real turning point in the way that NGO’s expressed their work. Unfortunately the opening fanfare was followed by silence, and I suspect a lot of people lost interest.

Not [...]

Zimbabwe’s orhans – BBC Audio Slideshow

There’s a quiet and thoughtful audio slideshow running on the BBC about the harsh reality of life for many of Zimabawe’s children. Take a moment out of your day to watch it and to reflect how ‘man hands on misery to man.’

The suffering in this world is only matched by the mass indifference towards [...]

Have you heard the light?

Photographer Oliver Edwards has. He’s just signed up for duckrabbit’s first Trinity Session.

The Trinity Sessions are for photographers and journalists who want to get their head round multimedia storytelling and in particular recording audio for slideshows.

Oliver has a degree in documentary photography from Newport University. The moving photos here are from a job [...]