Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

Diary is a short experimental documentary by photojournalist Tim Hetherington currently making its way around the festival circuit. Tim photographs conflict, most notably in Liberia and Afghanistan. He’s currently up for an academy award for his film Restrepo. (Which you should watch. It’s great too.)

Tim describes Diary as “a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.”

The film is set in Liberia and Afghanistan.

I like taking photos, and I like chaos. But I could never be the kind of artist Tim is. I don’t like to photography conflict or disaster. It’s not that I don’t cope well in these environments – I do. But when it comes to actually snapping a photograph, I loose my capacity. I learned that in Haiti.

Anyway, Diary pushes the documentary form. Watch it. It’s great.

Usually I like days in the field. It gets me out of the basement. Today was cold. Too cold. And wet.

I’ve been struggling with the idea of scientific visual storytelling. How do you make a story ‘pop’ when it’s really just the facts? Perhaps this is the challenge of all science communication. Make it interesting, make it factual, capture imagination.

This is what I came up with. I kept it short. Fish Surgery.

It felt good to have my DSLR in my hands again. This fall has been filled with writing applications for projects I might do one day. It’s nice to just do. I’m heading to Guyana in ten days, for a month full of doing. It will be just what the doctor ordered.

A field technician wades in to retrieve the net.

The bounty. Researches must sort through nets to find Grass Pickerel, a species at risk and the subject of the study.

The tools.

Fish Surgery. Grass Pickerel are outfitted with radio tags for year round monitoring and evaluation.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post. I’m working on a project about family, class and race. More specifically, I want to take family portraits of children who were raised by nanny’s. Are you an adult who had a nanny as a child? Do you know someone who was raised by a nanny, who might like to participate? I want to hear from YOU!

Tracking people down could be tough. Please help me spread the word!

Communities of migrant workers, known as bateyes, spring up within the cane fields. They are far from the rest of civilization, and become home for those who venture across the border. Most will never return to Haiti.

stacked cane

cane cutter

long days in the field

25 years in the bateyes.

shoes

]]> http://www.earthfeed.com/vote-for-my-photo/ /feed 0 http://www.earthfeed.com/three-step-guide-to-photography/ http://www.earthfeed.com/three-step-guide-to-photography/ #comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:30:38 +0000 Earth Feed http://www.earthfeed.com/?p=485 Three step guide to photography:

01: be interesting.
02: find interesting people.
03: find interesting places.

Nothing about cameras.

via Clayton Cubitt. HT Aaron Leaf

Camera man Dave is particularly bitter sweet. I have vivid memories of lying in thick thistle for almost three hours, under blazing July heat, waiting for the Red knots to fall in line so we could fire the cannon (in order to capture and process the birds.) The space was cramped and I couldn’t move or talk or do anything at all. Except wait. I remember thinking the birds would never settle, and I would miss the shot (perhaps the most important of the film.) In this instance, patience paid off. The tide pushed the birds in line, the cannon was fired, and suddenly I had a film.

People believe National Geographic is sexy. They think making natural history content is the best gig in town. I won’t lie – I love my job – but here’s the bottom line, just between you and me; More often than not, it’s a whole lotta hurry up and wait.

I’ve just finished reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. It’s got me thinking about the nature of travel and tourism. I travel a lot (too much for someone who claims to have a green thumb.) These days it’s less as a tourist, and more for work. Still, I’m forced to admit a certain degree of voyeurism in the work that I do. There are tough ethical questions that need to be asked, and after Zambia, I can’t help but ask them every day. A Small Place is a good read, and made me reexamine some of my own assumptions on post-colonial landscapes.

From the book:

Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they would be less lonely and empty — a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of these noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your masters yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.