Moises Saman: Iraq's Final Resting Places

Photo  Moises Saman/NYTimes-All Rights Reserved
A compelling photo essay titled Iraq's Final Resting Places by Moises Saman appeared in The New York Time's web edition. Probably as a sort of commemoration for the so-called official end of conflict in Iraq, the photo essay documents the graves and tombs of the thousands of unknown Iraqis killed since the invasion of 2003.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry estimates that 72,124 were killed since 2003, while at the morgue, it's estimated that at least 100,000 have yet to be identified. Other estimates differ in their calculations, but some reach over 1 million Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003.

Coincidentally, an op-ed by Paul Wolfowitz also appeared in the same edition, calling for the United States to stay true to its "commitment" to Iraq. You'd think these people would disappear in the holes from whence they came, but no...they still don't accept responsibility for our country going to war on false information.

We all know that Wolfowitz was a member of the cabal who vociferously influenced the Bush administration to invade Iraq on false pretenses. We also recall that Wolfowitz was acrimoniously removed from his post at the IMF because of shenanigans involving his girlfriend's pay.

If there was true justice in this world, I'd love to see Wolfowitz at the Cemetery of Martyrs in Najaf, and explain to Muhammad Jassem's mother, aunts and sisters (in the above photograph) why he was killed....and then do the same with the 4000+ US families who lost a family member in Iraq.

Read more »

Jon Vidar: The Tiziano Project

The Tiziano Project presents the journalistic efforts and personal accounts of Iraqi citizens living in the Kurdish north, along with stories produced by their professional multimedia journalism mentors.

An extremely well-made multimedia project, it includes stories such as those on the Yazidis, nomadic mountain-dwelling Kurds, a pigeon keeper, a muezzin, a klash maker, and many more.

The mentoring team consist of Jon Vidar (one of the talented instructors at the Istanbul Foundry Photojournalism Workshop, and a freelance photographer who developed self-assigned projects spanning six continents, including work in Iraqi Kurdistan, Southeast Turkey, Rwanda, and Brazil), Victoria Fine, Grant Slater and Chris Mendez.

Read more »

Ashley Gilbertson: Bedrooms of the Fallen

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has featured The Shrine Down The Hall: Bedrooms of America's Young War Dead, a powerful photo essay in slideshow format by photographer Ashey Gilbertson (VII Network), which looks at some of the empty bedrooms of the over 5000 U.S. military personnel killed in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dexter Filkins starts his accompanying article with the words "Just kids". The ages of these military fallen range from 19 to 25...indeed, just kids.

George McGovern in 1969 speaking about Vietnam said:

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in".

Now of course, it's also women who die in combat, as indeed Karina Lau did. Her bedroom still has a stuffed teddy bear and floppy-eared rabbit on top of her floral bedspread. She was killed seven years ago when insurgents shot down her helicopter in Falluja, Iraq. She was 20 years old.

In my view, this slideshow should be mandatory viewing by every politician who supported our senseless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I just read that George W. Bush is visiting Haiti. How about visiting these bedrooms first?

Read more »

Ashley Gilbertson: Bedrooms of the Fallen

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has featured The Shrine Down The Hall: Bedrooms of America's Young War Dead, a powerful photo essay in slideshow format by photographer Ashey Gilbertson (VII Network), which looks at some of the empty bedrooms of the over 5000 U.S. military personnel killed in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dexter Filkins starts his accompanying article with the words "Just kids". The ages of these military fallen range from 19 to 25...indeed, just kids.

George McGovern in 1969 speaking about Vietnam said:

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in".

Now of course, it's also women who die in combat, as indeed Karina Lau did. Her bedroom still has a stuffed teddy bear and floppy-eared rabbit on top of her floral bedspread. She was killed seven years ago when insurgents shot down her helicopter in Falluja, Iraq. She was 20 years old.

In my view, this slideshow should be mandatory viewing by every politician who supported our senseless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I just read that George W. Bush is visiting Haiti. How about visiting these bedrooms first?

Read more »

Teru Kuwayama: How To Not Get Shot

Photo  Teru Kuwayama-All Rights Reserved
A veteran documentary photographer, Teru Kuwayama has made more than 15 trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, traveling both independently, and as an embedded reporter with US and NATO military forces, as well as Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian armed forces. In 2009 he received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor award for his work in Pakistan, and a fellowship from the South Asian Journalists Association.

He is a 2009-2010 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, a contributor to Time, Newsweek and Outside magazines, and a contract photographer for Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization that builds schools for children in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

GIZMODO has featured Teru's Ask a Pro: How to Shoot (and Not Get Shot) In a War Zone, which is certainly a must-read for every inexperienced photographer with romantic notions on war photography.

Whilst all of his suggestions are extremely valid, I liked these:

Avoid the faux-commando stuff. Learn How To Say "Hello" and "Thank You" and To Count To Ten. Don't Follow the Pack.

Read more »

WP: Female Circumcision in Kurdistan

Photo © Andrea Bruce/Washington Post
Here's a photo reportage by Andrea Bruce for The Washington Post titled Sheelan's Circumcision, which makes me cringe for two reasons.

The first reason is obvious; female genital cutting (FGC) is an abhorrent and an utterly repellent practice. The graphic photographs show us how Sheelan, a seven-year-old girl is taken by her mother to be circumcised in Kurdish Iraq, where more than 60 percent of women have undergone the traditional and controversial procedure. It is much beyond controversial...it's a horrible tradition and no efforts should be spared in trying to eradicate it. It's perhaps through photo essays like these that such efforts will increase, and young girls will be spared the indignity and pain of this procedure.

On the other hand, I'm shocked that The Washington Post editors decided not to preserve Sheelan's privacy and dignity. Here's a 7 year old whose mutilation, a terribly humiliating and painful experience, is now seen on the internet. Would the editors be so cavalier in invading the privacy of a 7 year old in New York City for instance?...or is it because Sheelan and her mother are impoverished Kurds that they ignored their basic rights??

And let me take this thought a little further...has Sheelan's mother given her consent after being explained exactly where these pictures would eventually appear? Was she given money? What did the photographer tell her to convince her? People in the Middle East have human emotions just like us...they want (and have the right) to be treated with respect and dignity like everybody else. Unfortunately, since there are no accompanying explanatory article in the newspaper's website, we are left to speculate.

I'm all for publicizing the atrocity of female genital mutilation in order to combat it, but certainly not at the expense of anyone's privacy as this photo essay does. There are ways to photograph (or edit) this event and not identify the girls' (yes, there are others!) faces.

So shame on The Washington Post's photo editors. Would they be so outrageously cavalier had Sheelan been their daughter?

For those of you who don't know: There is nothing in the Qur'an that mandates female genital cutting, and it is not practiced by the majority of Muslims. So when Sheelan's mother is reported to say: "This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember. We don't know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it", she's wrong. Her tribal elders may think so, but it still doesn't make it right.

In fact, the Grand Mufti Ali Jumaa of Egypt, signed a resolution denouncing and totally banning the practice, as it goes against the principles and teachings of Islam.

The Washington Post's Female Circumcision in Kurdistan with graphic photos by Andrea Bruce.

Read more »

The Um Kulthum Cafe (Baghdad)

Andrea Bruce/The Washington Post-All Rights Reserved
The Washington Post features a short slideshow of photographs taken in the Um Kulthum Cafe in Baghdad by Andrea Bruce. Unfortunately, the number (and choice) of photographs is insufficient to give the viewers the "feel" of an Arab cafe...the raucous atmosphere, the sense of family between the regular patrons, the sound of dominoes and backgammon, the smoky atmosphere, etc.

However, the most grievous omission made by whoever produced the slideshow is in not clarifying that Um Kulthum, the nightingale of the Arab world, was Egyptian. As it stands, the impression is left that since the Iraqi cafe is named after her, that she was an Iraqi...and that is blasphemy! Almost like saying that Elvis was Canadian...or English...or Australian...etc.

The few captions in the slideshow do not mention that Um Kulthum, the singer, was the unifying voice in the Arab world in an era of ardent nationalism. I recall that when Um Kulthum held her concerts, Cairo (and possibly the rest of Egypt, and indeed the Arab world) would come to a standstill.

Imagine how much this slideshow would improve if the producer & photographer got their facts right, had the sense of adding more pictures and a snippet or two of Um Kulthum's singing??? Too bad. A neophyte could have done much better.

Note: My thanks to Mike Morones for pointing out an accompanying article by Andrea Bruce which gives some background to the Um Kulthum Cafe slideshow, and which does mention that the singer is indeed Egyptian.

Read more »

Censoring War Photographers

Photograph © Zoriah Miller-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times features a slideshow and accompanying article on the increasing control (aka censorship) by the American military on graphic images from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both slideshow and article make reference to Zoriah Miller, the photographer who posted images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack in Iraq on his Web site. Miller was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. (For background on this, I've posted a Zoriah Miller slideshow on TTP just a week ago).

The thrust of the article is that photographers increasingly say the military allows them to embed but keeps them away from combat. Many say that they've been repeatedly thwarted by the military when they try to get to the front lines. I'm surprised at this since if we are to believe the news reports from Iraq, the so-called surge is working, and according to the Republican nominee for President, we are succeeding...so why keep away photographers from the battles? Shouldn't we enjoy seeing what our military might has caused?

The NY Times article is well worth a careful read, especially since it was co-authored by Michael Kamber, a war photographer himself (he recently published a scathing report on the Leica M8's performance) and based in Iraq.

The American military's argument is that it's protecting the sensibilities of families of the dead soldiers. Let's accept that this could be a valid argument to a certain extent, but let's also recognize that the American military's increasing censorship has more to do with preventing further erosion of public support to this unnecessary war than being "sensitive" than being attuned to the sensibilities of bereaved families. Sanitizing the horrors of war is what this is all about.

In the British newspaper The Guardian, Robert Fox penned an article titled Truth And Other Casualties of War, and refers to the Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner which graphically depicts a dead British soldier, and which was considered an outrage when it was unveiled in 1925, and he ends his article by saying this:

"It is a fitting testament to the dead of that war � as Miller's pictures are of his war in Iraq."

Read more »

Zoriah: Disembedded

Photo District News (PDN) features an article on Zoriah Miller, a freelance photographer who published pictures of dead U.S. Marines on his blog, which he claims has led him to be ejected from his U.S. military embed in Iraq. Click above to view an audio slideshow of Zoriah's photographs.

Zoriah told PDN: "They embedded a war photographer, and when I took a photo of war, they disembedded me. It's as if it's okay to take pictures of them handing lollipops to kids on the street and providing medical care, but photographing the actual war is unacceptable."

PDN's full article is HERE

Read more »

Max Becherer: The Mandaeans of Iraq

Photograph © Max Becherer-All Rights Reserved
Here's an interesting photo essay by photographer Max Becherer on the Mandaeans in Iraq. The Mandaeans are a small religious sect in Southern Iraq and Iran, who espouse an ancient belief resembling that of Gnosticism and that of the Parsis. They are also known as Christians of St. John, among other names.

The customs of Mandaeans indicate early Christian, and possibly pre-Christian, origin. Their system of astrology resembles those of ancient Babylonia and the cults of the Magi. Although some of their practices were influenced by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, they reject all three. St. John the Baptist is honored by the Mandaeans since their main ritual is frequent baptism. It seems that the Mandaeans are currently being discriminated against in Iraq, and forced to leave their homes.

Max Becherer is a freelance photojournalist, represented by Polaris Images since 2004, dedicated to covering international news and the Middle East. He is published in Time Magazine, the New York Times and a variety of other newspapers. Since working with Polaris, Becherer has covered Africa and the war in Iraq. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Photojournalism from California's San Jose State University in 2000.

Here's Max Becherer's The Mandaeans

Read more »