Writing Here:

duckrabbit
David White, photographer
Ciara Leeming
Adam Westbrook
Carl Pendle
Joseph Rodriguez
Martin-Nachtwey

What they say about duckrabbit:

'One of the hazards of publishing a well-known photojournalism blog - getting multimedia like yours, where the photos are both powerful and moving, and I end up in tears at my desk.'

Alan Taylor, Boston Big Picture)

'David White's multimedia work with duckrabbit is very exciting.'

Kate Edwards (Guardian Magazine Picture Editor)

'I am a fan of duckrabbit. I am not a fan because I agree with everything Ben has to say, but because he says it without frills and then will spend the time necessary to engage the consequent discussions. Such commitment is a priceless commodity.'

Prison Photography

'I met one of them at an academic conference in the summer. He was the sanest person there, but sure enough by damn gadnabbit ruffled more than a few fluffed up peacock feathers.'

The Photography Pages

'If you haven't seen the duckrabbit blog on multimedia you should.'

Stephen Alvarez

'duckrabbit has done another jaw-dropping job with Condition Critical, a highly commendable and important project for Medecins Sans Frontiers.'

The Travel Photographer

Photography and dirty propaganda?

Tonight I have followed Rabbit’s link to Jodi Bieber’s powerful and dignified photos of women in Afghanistan. I then went to look at the Editor of TIME, RICHARD STENGE’s, explanation of why he put the following photograph on the front cover:

‘Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait [...]

Why is poverty black and wealth white?

‘I’ve avoided the temptation to say that, in the United States, poverty is white.  It’s true, however, that there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks.  While a larger percentage of the African-American population lives in poverty, the sheer number of poor whites — 24.1 million — overwhelms the number of poor blacks — 12.1 million.  (Interestingly, [...]

In Silence

“What happened to us should not happen to anyone.”

Photographer Susan Meiselas and reporter Dumeetha Luthra traveled to India for Human Rights Watch to retrace the steps of one woman who died after giving birth to a son.

Powerful and respectful work.

UNICEF UK, Children, seen but not heard?

One of the things we feel strongly at duckrabbit is the importance of the web in giving people a voice who otherwise wouldn’t be heard. Its important if the world is ever going to move on from the belief that what keeps people alive in developing countries  is our pity and our cash.

The Universal Declaration on [...]

AUDIO SLIDESHOW: MSF in Haiti - A surgeon's perspective

Well done to Pete Masters at MSF for producing this thoughtful audio slideshow just a couple of hours after conducting the interview with the MSF surgeon Paul McMaster. It gives you a clear insight both of the need for help and just where your money is going.

Proof that giving to MSF will [...]

Faces of the uninsured - Evan Vucci, you have inspired duckrabbit

“Our original mission was to provide airborn medical relief in the developing world but since 1992 we’ve been heavily involved in providing care here in the United States.”

Stan Brock, founder Remote Area Medical

Please do check out AP photographer Evan Vucci’s stunning multimedia feature about a charity providing medical care in the USA.  This is [...]

Do unto others ...

Very roughly some 2000 years ago we nailed some bloke called Jesus to a tree.

Nothing new about that. Nailing people to trees was a rather effective form of crowd control.

Since then though a lot of people have been following this Jesus bloke. One of his oft quoted mantras was treat other people people as you would [...]

Tsunami - five years on

It’s hard to believe that Saturday will mark five years since the devastating south Asian Tsunami which claimed some 300,000 lives. To mark this anniversary – hardly one to celebrate – DFID, the department for international development, dispatched Panos photographer Abbie Trayler Smith to show how British money has helped rebuild shattered lives in Banda Aceh, [...]

(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 that in a minute) [...]

Terrorism that is personal?

The great Stan Banos first emailed me to alert me to a photo story doing the rounds about women who have been attacked with acid. The act is cowardly and the response from the authorities is usually non-existent.

A page of the photos by Emilio Morenatti is showing on Tampabay.com. I struggle a bit with the [...]

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 Sierra Leone except that it feels [...]

Oxfam and the Guardian launches interactive documentary on Bangladesh

Its brilliant that Oxfam have put so much effort into creating an online documentary about the effects of climate change on the people of Bangladesh.

On the upside Oxfam used a local media team who were on the scene when cyclone Aila hit.  Respect. There’s also a clear way of responding by sending a message  to the [...]

A Developing Story - will you help?

A Developing Story, a new website, which duckrabbit has helped get up and running, has been born:

Hopefully the title reflects our desire to create an open space on the web in which stories and images that explore the richness and complexity of an unequal world can find a home.

We will also be campaigning for the unshackling [...]

Essential reading:

Amnesty International – Human Rights In The Frame

Amnesty International is an organisation that duckrabbit fully supports. One of the best ways of achieving a more equal world is to stop human rights abuses and that’s exactly what Amnesty sets out to do.

Brilliant then to see how highly they regard photography as a tool to achieve social justice.  duckrabbit will be speaking at [...]

Found on The Click

Some of the Amercian NGO’s are creating amazing multimedia

Two of the best are The Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch.

Why are they so good?  Because they are creating seriously good journalism for all the right reasons. They want to educate and inform people about what’s really going on in the world, not just tap them up for cash.

Ed Kashi’s work in the Niger [...]

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 of a critically [...]

Charities, journalism and PR

Adam Westbrook was one of a number of bloggers who followed up on duckrabbit’s post on MSF’s new cinema advert with a much wider analysis of how charities communicate:

‘At the heart of this lies the important question of how charities choose to spread their word. The public generally are now far less trusting of spin and [...]

MSF Cinema advert … what do you think?

WW2 Advert

Every now and then duckrabbit invites people to post here who have more interesting things to say about life than we do. Today its the turn of Pete Masters, MSF Uk’s web guru, a charity that provides medical support in response to humanitarian situations.

Basically they patch people up and save lives (and do a [...]