What can we learn about the shift in how journalists accessed the battlefront in previous wars compared to the embed process in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fairly open access during the Arab Spring? And from the enduring power of the still image in the video age? How has technology dramatically changed the way news organizations get photos from the field and distribute them globally? What does the rise of local journalists reporting mean versus high cost of foreigners and low media budgets? How should we react to ISIS and its use of images? And how does this impact the role, public perception, and ethos of war photographers, agencies and media?
Moderated by Fred Ritchin, ICP Dean of School
Presented by Studio 55 | @st55nyc.
PANELISTS
Sebastian Meyer, co-founder, Metrography Agency
Carolyn Cole, photographer, Los Angeles Times
Michael Christopher Brown, photographer
Stefano Carini, Editor-in-Chief, Metrography Agency
Cynthia Young, Curator of the Robert Capa Archive at ICP
Sebastian Meyer started working as a photographer in 2004. Since then he has published photographs in TIME, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Sunday Times Magazine amongst many other international newspapers and magazines. He also shoots video and has made documentaries for National Geographic, The Guardian, TIME, Channel 4 News, and PBS. Since 2009 he has been based in Iraq where apart from doing his own reporting, he has been setting up the first Iraqi photography agency, Metrography.
instagram:@metrography_iraq
twitter: @metrography
Stefano Carini was born in Torino, Italy, in 1985. After studying photography at London College of Communication and photojournalism at DMJX in Denmark, he worked as photo editor for NOOR Images in Amsterdam and at World Press Photo. He trained as a photojournalist, covering events and social issues in Italy, UK and Egypt, but the understanding of the crisis in the media–and more importantly in the ways we depict and perceive reality–convinced him to move away from photojournalism, and search for a more personal, less commercial, way of telling stories and use photography. He now works solely on long-term, multidisciplinary projects where he tries to stretch the borders of documentary photography through tight collaborations with the subjects and the use of a multitude of different mediums. Carini's main objective is to be part of, inspire and push forward a cultural revolution in the ways and forms we produce, consume, and process images and visual documents. The world does not need more mediocre images. He lives and works in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, where he is the Editor-in-Chief of Metrography, the first Iraqi photo agency.
instagram: @metrography_iraq
twitter: @metrography
Carolyn Cole has covered national and international news for the Los Angeles Times since 1994. Her work on the civil crisis in Liberia won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Cole is a two-time winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal for war photography from the Overseas Press Club of America–for her work in Iraq and Liberia (2003) and her photographs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (2002). She has also earned four World Press Photo awards. In 2010, Cole covered the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. Cole was a finalist in the 2011 Pulitzer Prizes' news photography category for her memorable images from last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill. She spent 85 days in the gulf photographing one of the worst environmental disasters in history–day-to-day dogged visual reporting at its finest. This year marks the sixth time Cole has been a Pulitzer finalist, a record for a Times staffer.
instagram: @latimes @latimesphotos
twitter: @carolyn_cole
Michael Christopher Brown was raised in the Skagit Valley, a farming community in Washington State. Often using a camera phone as a primary recording device, his current work explores the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Sakhalin (2008), he captured the remote Russian island, while Broadway (2009) focused on New Yorkers amidst the financial crisis. He also put together a series of works from road and train trips throughout China (2009/2010) and, in 2011, documented the Libyan Revolution using a camera phone, exploring ethical distance and the iconography of warfare. A contributing photographer at publications such as National Geographic, TIME, and The New York Times Magazine, he was subject of the 2012 HBO documentary Witness: Libya. His photographs were exhibited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Instituto Cervantes (New York), The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Annenberg Space for Photography and the Brooklyn Museum. His forthcoming book, Libyan Sugar, will be published in 2015 by Twin Palms Publishers.
website: http://www.mcbphotos.com/
instagram: @michaelchristopherbrown
twitter: @mcbphotos
Fred Ritchin
Prior to joining ICP as Dean of School, Fred Ritchin was a full professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he has also co-directs the NYU/Magnum Foundation program in Photography and Human Rights with Susan Meiselas. He served as picture editor of The New York Times Magazine and of Horizon magazine, and executive editor of Camera Arts. In 1994–95, he conducted a research project for The New York Times on how to transform the print newspaper into a multimedia publication. Ritchin was also the founding director of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program at the School of ICP. Ritchin co-founded PixelPress in 1999, serving as director of an organization that has created multimedia documentary and photojournalism projects online, and collaborated with humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF, WHO, UNFPA, Crimes of War, and the Rwanda Project. Ritchin is a prolific author and curator, focusing on digital media and the rapid changes occurring in photography. He wrote the first book on the impact of digital imaging on photography, In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990, 1999, 2010), which was followed by two more books on the future of imaging in the digital era, After Photography (W. W. Norton, 2008), and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013). Ritchin has contributed articles and essays to numerous books and publications such as Aperture, Camera Arts, Mother Jones, The New York Times, TIME LightBox, and the Village Voice. His curatorial projects include Contemporary Latin American Photographers at the Burden Gallery, What Matters Now: Proposals for a New Front Page at Aperture Gallery, An Uncertain Grace: The Photographs of Sebastião Salgado at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Bodies in Question at the New York Photo Festival. In 1996, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service by The New York Times for the website "Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace," which he created with Gilles Peress. In 2012, Ritchin was given a lifetime achievement award at the Argentinean Documentary Photo Festival.
instagram: @icp
twitter: @ICPhotog
Cynthia Young is the Curator of the Robert Capa Archive at ICP. She recently curated the ICP exhibitions Capa in Color, which looked at Capa's color photography for the first time; We Went Back: Photographs from Europe, 1933-1956 by Chim, a retrospective of Chim, Capa's great friend and colleague at Magnum; and The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Capa, Chim and Taro in 2010. All three exhibitions have traveled and continue to travel throughout Europe, Mexico, and Brazil.
Photo: Zmnako Ismael / Metrography