The Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival has often, over its 21 years of existence, come under criticism for its intense pessimistic focus on images of conflicts, suffering, violence, grief and hopelessness. And this year, it's likely to be the case once more as projects on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Congo and Madagascar take centre stage. However, a few photographers have been selected for their lighter, yet serious, projects. German photographer Ulla Lohmann is among them.

Her exhibition - Ash City. Fifteen Years of Ash: A Story of Survival, Hope and Persistence – takes a tragic situation and makes it into a hopeful message for the world community. Lohmann has spent the last eight years visiting, sometimes three times a year, the small city of Rabaul in Papua New Guinea. It used to be one of the most popular destination in the region, until September 1994, when the city was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Tavurvur, sending ash thousands of feet into the air, covering streets, fields and buildings, and ultimately causing more than three-fourths of the constructions in the city to collapse.

'Fifteen years later, people still live in the ruins of the past, hoping that one day Rabaul will again become the paradise it once was,' say the organisers.

'I never tell my mother what I'm working on, until I'm back,' she tells BJP. 'She would be too afraid for me.' And rightly so. Lohmann has often found herself in the middle of war zones or, in the case of Rabaul, on the slopes of an erupting volcano. 'That volcano is in constant eruption,' she says. 'And it's all sort of eruptions. Sometimes, you will be under a shower of fire balls. The thing to do is to keep staring at the fire ball until it's just a few meters away from you. Only then, you can move away. You can't just run anywhere, you have to know where the fire balls will land.'

Ulla Lohmann showing off her images at Visa pour l'Image

At other times, the 'bombs' as she calls them, will be too numerous. 'I have a video, shot in the dark, of a shower of fire bombs.' Of course, Lohmann hasn't shown the video to her mother.

Lohmann, who has already hiked the volcano more than 10 times, says that her work is more than just a record of the destruction it has brought to Rabaul. 'These people are content of what they have. They're staying in this city, despite the continuous flow of ashes, because it's their ancestors' lands. We, on the other hand, are never happy of what we have. We keep on trying to get more, buy the latest gadgets. We're very materialistic. For the people of Rabaul, a day without acidic showers or a day spent with their families is a good day.'

But beyond the quest for a more meaningful life, Lohmann's work illustrate the deep links there exists between a civilisation and its ancestral lands. 'I find this myself,' she says. 'This work has allowed me to find myself again, to realise where I come from in Germany.'

Back in Papua New Guinea, it hasn't always been easy for Lohmann to gain access to the people whose lives she wanted to document. 'It took me years to be accepted,' she says. 'But when they see you spend a lot of time with them, and coming back again and again, you gain their trust.'

For Lohmann's Mummies in Papua portfolio, which was shown at Visa's first nightly projections, the German photographer had to wait two years before being granted authorisation to see the mummies. In an isolated part of Papua, the Anga tribe used to preserve its dead, mummifying them. That tradition has been lost, until the tribe's grand-daughter's death.

'In 2001, I read in a travel guide one single sentence about this tribe. It said “They smoke their dead.” When I saw this, I had to go. It was hard to gain access. At first they refused to show me the mummies. So I came back the next day. Then, they said I could see them, but that they wouldn't tell me their stories. So I refused. The following they, they finally accepted to show the mummies and to tell me their stories.'

The lost tradition made a comeback when, a little girl, the tribe's grand-daughter died. 'I was with them when she died. We tried everything. I had a satellite phone, but couldn't get through. We had a plane that could have helped us, but the fog prevented it from landing. The tribe's leader saw these events as signs that the lost tradition had to be restored.'

The mummies were brought back to the village, and with the help of an expert, restored for preservation. Now, the tribe's leader also wants to be mummified once he dies and has already asked Lohmann to record the event.

Lohmann's images, which are unique, have already attracted interest from Geo magazine in France, which found her through Visa. 'The festival brings together talented photographers with experienced people. It's been great for me.' However, young photographers shouldn't only count on an exhibition to get the exposure they're looking for.

'They need to adapt and always diversify,' she says. Lohmann has been financing her travels using grants or following the multimedia route using video. 'It's not always easy, but if you really want it, you can succeed.'

We continue our interviews with the photographers exhibited at Visa pour l'Image, the world's largest photojournalism festival.

Image courtesy of François Le Diascorn / Raph - Eyedea

François Le Diascorn was never really attracted to the United States of America, that is until he met his wife from Oregon. He wasn't particularly interested in photography either. 'I didn't really understood why people would take photos instead of taking the time to look at the scenes they were photographing.' A visit to India changed that. 'This country gave me a taste for the visual,' he tells BJP's news editor Olivier Laurent on top of the Castillet in Perpignan.

This trip to India would change his life in many ways. Meeting his future wife on that trip, Le Diascorn was bound for the US when she couldn't say no to a producer role back in Oregon. There, he would discover breathtaking landscapes 'with forests diving into the ocean.'

But, 'Oregon isn't really representative of the US. When he receives a grant from a French organisation, he finally goes on a quest for 'weird America.' For one year, accompanied by his wife, he would travel across the US, visiting all states apart from Hawaii, Alaska and North Dakota – don't ask him why, he doesn't know. 'America is weird enough, I didn't have to look for it. The material came to me,' he says. He remembers one day in 1983 when he saw his first drive-in mortuary. 'People would stay in their cars, order a casket and then sign the paperwork before driving off,' he explains, laughing with his wife.

The following year, he was screened at the Rencontres d'Arles festival, and since then, has been going back to the US every two years. His most recent trip, in 2009, allowed him to witness President Barack Obama's inauguration, of which a photo is included in his exhibition.

The exhibition was set up following another one in Paris organised by the Maison des Etats-Unis, a travel centre set up to promote travel in the US. The curator contacted Jean-François Leroy to have the exhibition included at this year's Visa, and Le Diascorn believes Obama's election might have been key in Leroy's decision to add the French photographer to this year's roaster.

His exhibition is all in black-and-white, a style he prefers and got used to in his early days as a photographer. He is often saddened to see this style disappear. 'The only times you see projects in black-and-white is when it's a pretty dramatic story,' he says. 'Then magazines will ask for it.' His exhibition, dubbed Only in America, is also one of the rare light-hearted shows at Visa.

'There are a lot of tough subjects being shown at Visa,' he says. 'You're facing, especially during the nightly projections, an accumulation of drug-related, war-related or disease-related stories. At the end of it, you really get the blues. And I can understand why magazines publish less and less of these.'

For more about François Le Diascorn, visit his website at www.lediascorn.com.

'Photojournalism is strong as ever.' These words could have been uttered by Jean-François Leroy, Visa pour l'Image's co-founder and director, but instead they were of Dominic Nahr, who just turned 26 and is just back from a trip to Congo.

All the doom and gloom talk in the media about the end of photojournalism is not helping, Nahr tells BJP. 'What's scary is that the general public believes that photojournalism is dying or dead. But we're not. We're adapting and getting stronger,' he says. Nahr isn't an utopian. 'The market is changing,' he admits. 'The old system doesn't work. Lucky for me, I never knew the old system. But it's hard of course.'

For the past couple of years, Nahr has been working and pitching stories non-stop. A lot of his time is spent on assignments, which he believes can still be obtained in today's market with a bit of work and research. 'You have to be engaged with the editors, you have to propose and to fight for your work,' says Nahr. His recent work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is exposed at this year's Visa, is testimony of his beliefs.

'I was in Berlin for two weeks. And my first night out, which was also my last night out, a friend told me that something was going on in Congo. I got home, and did some research on the Internet at five or six in the morning.' When morning came, he had already booked his flight to Rwanda where he would go on to cross the border and enter the zone of one of the most violent countries in Africa.

He had few contacts there. 'There was a fixer I wanted but I couldn't afford him. I negotiated with him to take me across the border.' There, he received the help of another photographer, Walter Astrada, who is a contract photographer with Agence France-Presse.

The relationship between the two photographers worked, mainly because as a magazine reporter, Nahr did not compete with Astrada's wire work. 'We would get out of the car. I would go to one side, he would go to the other,' he says.

Image courtesy of Dominic Nahr / Oeil Public.

Nahr's work, which is exhibited at Visa until mid-September, was shot in October and November 2008 when General Laurent Nkunda, the Tutsi rebel leader backed by Rwanda, took control of the main roads and towns in North Kivu in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. 'Over 250,000 civilians fled the front line as the rebels advanced on the provincial capital, Goma, pushing government soldiers into further chaos, with looting, raping and killing,' say the festival organisers. 'On the other side of the front, the liberation rebels killed 150 civilians in the mainly Hutu area of Kiwanja once held by the government. In North Kivu, no one is safe, and life for civilians and many soldiers is an endless journey, walking up and down the main road in search of safe haven.'

The proximity of the war to the Rwanda's border facilitated Nahr's work this time. 'It would take only one day to get there,' he says. 'That's why it's been covered by more media this time.' Astrada was the first there, according to Nahr. 'I think he got me in, and then we got the others in and made it into a big story.'

The violence is depicted in Nahr's images. However, the most disturbing ones rarely make it out of Nahr's computer. At Visa, Nahr had a choice between having his exhibition at the Eglise des Dominicains, a majestual venue to which thousands of visitors rush to, or at another, more remote location, behind a wall with a disclaimer regarding the nature of his image. The photographer chose the former. 'I could have had a different selection behind a special wall and sign, or maybe we could have brought my work and the work of other photographers such as Astrada in the same venue, but I wanted to see people reacting to my work. And I think Leroy's selection is excellent.'

Generally, Nahr believes France is more open to images of crude violence than other countries. 'Le Monde 2 did a tight sequence of my work including the close up of a dead 17-year-old kid. It was quite impressive and in-your-face,' he explains. 'Arles also screened these images. But, in the US it's different. Maybe in Germany as well.' However, the young photographer still thinks that if he shot a full feature on the massacre with a beginning, a middle and an end, he would have tried harder to get it published, no matter in which the country.

When Nahr first started in photojournalism, he had a belief that his pictures wouldn't change the world. That was until one of his images of Somalis in Kenya made it on the front page of The New York Times. 'They used a poetic picture on the front page, and the following day it was being held in Congress in front of the Senate foreign affairs committee where [Senator John] Kerry, and others seat. In a way, I was testifying in front of these men who have the power to change things,' he says. 'You forget that The New York Times is read every day by the President.'

This year, Nahr will be back in Africa where there are more stories he wants to tell. Stories he thinks he will be able to share, despite the gloomy outlook. If you want to be published, he says, 'you have to pick your projects carefully. The love is there to drive you, but if your story won't sell, then you shouldn't do it. You have to adapt.' And this is also true for photojournalism as a whole. 'We're adapting. I don't know what the solution is – whether photographers should become publishers as well – but I'm sure somebody will come up with something. And when they do, it will be so easy and simple.'

Until then, he concludes, 'the need for good stories won't die.'

Rhubarb-Rhubarb's popular international portfolio review will go ahead in 2010 afterall, thanks to the support photographers and reviewers showed after reports of its demise.

Tough economic conditions and diminishing sponsors had forced creative director of Rhubarb-Rhubarb, Rhonda Wilson, to consider axing the review next year, in favour of a summer school for less experienced photographers. But following an outpouring of support, partnerships are now being put into place that will allow Rhubarb-Rhubarb to run an extended summer programme, including both the review and the summer school. 'Let's just say we had a lot of letters from photographers and reviewers,' Wilson told BJP.

For more details on this and Rhubarb-Rhubarb's forthcoming London event, visit our breaking news section.

At the Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival, we met up with Zalmaï, a Swiss-based photographer who left Afghanistan more than 15 years ago, and since 2001, has gone back to his native country to document the plight of Afghan refugees. We talk with him about the international community's role and what needs to be done now to "win the hearts and mind" of the Afghan people. The interview is in three parts.

Part 1/3

Part 2/3

Part 3/3

Corbis has signed up 11 new photojournalists in a bid to boost its current affairs, sports and entertainment offerings.

The image-provider announced at Visa Pour l'Image that it has signed up Tim Clayton, Elizabeth Kreutz, David Turnley, Steve Lipofsky, Sandy Haffaker, Brendan Hoffman, Noah Addis, Ricardo Ceppi, Les Stone, Amy Sussman and Trevor Snapp.

Clayton, who was born in Leeds but currently lives in Australia, has won eight World Press Photo awards, including winning first place in the competition in 1994, 2003 and 2008. He has also shot sport around the world, as have Kreutz and Lipofsky. Turnley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, while Huffaker, Hoffman and Snapp have been published by some of the world's most prestigious news media. Ceppi, meanwhile, was born in Argentina, and shoots hard news and features across South America. Work by each of the photographers can be found on Corbis' site.

Lately, Walter Astrada has been finding himself at the right place, at the right time. Or some people would say, at the wrong place and at the wrong time. He was in Kenya when violent political riots broke out. There he shot some of the most graphic images seen of this internal conflict. He was also in Congo when an under-reported conflict forced 250,000 people into exiles. And, back in February, he arrived two days before some of the most violent repression killed 100 people in Antananarivo in Madagascar.

That month, the main opponent to the government, Andry Rajoelina, proclaimed himself leader of the country. But, President Ravalomanana wasn't ready to relinquish power, responding to the proclamation by calling in the presidential guard that shot at demonstrators. Astrada was there.

'At first the situation was very calm,' he tells BJP. 'I couldn't really justify my presence there, but decided to wait until the following Saturday as there were protests planned. The protests were very orderly, as they always were. There were 2000 people, and just about 20 policemen. The idea was just to go to the palace, shout a few slogans and that would be it. But suddenly the police left, and people started running towards the presidential palace. They didn't intend to overtake it, they didn't even ran towards the fences. That's when the first shots took place.'

He continues: 'The first thing you do is find cover. Only then you start to take pictures. There were so many dead around me.' He brought back some of the only images of the deadly unrest, which he says, is his role as a photojournalist. 'I believe all this is very wrong. It shouldn't happen. It's the same in Congo and Guatemala. Being there, my responsibility is to show what happened. When I'm working, it's not just about taking pictures. I'm not a tourist. The work you do is about what you saw. There is not much room for interpretation [with these violent images]. We're just documenting the facts.'

Picture courtesy of Walter Astrada / Agence France Presse.

However, being there doesn't necessarily means that the images will make it out of the country and into the mainstream media. For example, he says, two of the most disturbing images, showing bloody bodies were barely published in the 'West'. And he has several theories why that is. 'First, it happened on a Saturday, and the Sunday papers don't publish that kind of violent stories. And, in many parts of the world, they don't even know where Madagascar is, unless people saw the animated films of the same name.'

Not everything in Astrada's work is about news. When he has time, and especially when he has the money, he works on his personal projects. Next month, he will be spending a month in India to document sexuality-based abortion, which is costing the lives of thousands of female foetuses. This will form part three of his project on violence against women. The first part was shot in Guatemala. One of the resulting images received the British Journal of Photography's International Photography Award. The second part was shot in Congo, where he also did some work for AFP.

'When it is news, AFP selects my destination. But I chose Kenya. For Congo, I was sent there because I was the only one that received a visa. In Uganda, I covered what I thought was important.' But for his personal work, Astrada selects his destination. 'He balances his press work with his personal projects depending on his financial situation. 'It's a matter of money. If I need money, then I will be working for AFP and magazines. And when I have enough money, then I will work on my personal stuff.'

Sometimes, when he is on assignment for AFP, Astrada will shoot some pictures for his personal projects. Some of these pictures were shown during one of Visa pour l'Image's nightly projections.

At the Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival, we met up with Abbas, a Magnum Photos members who produced, this year, the book In Whose Name? which takes a deep look at Islamism in a post 9/11 world. In this two-part interview, Abbas explores the rise of religion as national identity and the impact it can have in people's lives.

Part 1/2

Part 2/2

$500,000. In four years, that's the amount of money Getty Images has donated to photographers to finish various reportages. This week, Getty has donated another $70,000 to three professional photographers and two student shooters.

Image © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

US-based photographers Krisanne Johnson, Brenda Ann Kenneally and Afghan Zalmai all received $20,000, as well as collaborative editorial support from Getty Images, to pursue their documentary photography projects.

Johnson's work is dubbed I Love You Real Fast and examines the lives of young women in Swaziland, where women have a life expectancy of close to 31, due to the country’s high rate of HIV infections. 'My intent is not only to shed light on their struggle, but to present the full spectrum of their experiences and to capture deeper, truer visual references that are distinct from a sea of status quo images that define Africa to most of the world,' says Johnson.

Kenneally will use her $20,000 to continue her five-year project on Upstate Girls, a study of the issues of class and poverty in Troy, New York. Zalmai, who also won €8000 with the Visa d'Or Feature Award, will try, with this grant, to bring a new vision of Afghanistan to the Western world. 'As most of the western media focuses on what is taking place militarily, I feel strongly that the extensive human tragedy taking place in my country is being ignored by Western eyes and is going unnoticed to the rest of the world,' he says in a statement.

Student photographers Ed Ou of Canada and US-based Carl Kiilsgaard will both receive $5000. Ou, an energetic young photographer has been working on Perilous Journey, which documents the full journey that Somali refugees take as each year thousands flee from the violence in Mogadishu to the port city of Bosasso and the perilous boat journey to Yemen begins, as they seek work as laborers in the oil rich Persian Gulf.

Kiilsgaard's project, The White Family, follows a family that has lived in rural Kentucky – where, in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty that has not yet been won – for generations.

The grants were awarded by a jury that included Cheryl Newman, picture editor of Telegraph Magazine in the UK, Jean-Francois Leroy, director general of Visa Pour l’Image and Volker Lensch, department head at Stern Magazine.

With the decline of commissioned assignments, the grants are seen as one of the only ways to spend longer period of time on personal projects, the photographers admitted at the award ceremony in Perpignan, France. 'For special long-term stories you want to do, you often have to do it yourself,' says Ou. 'At the end of the day you have to put down your own money because most newspapers and magazines will just say that they don't [invest] that.'

Eugene Richards, who received $20,000 earlier this year, adds that the grant is more than just money. 'It's the pick up you need when you need it the most.'

For more information visit gettyimages.com/grants.

At the Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival, we met up with Contact Press Images photographer Alexandra Avakian, who published this year a diary on her travels in Muslim countries over the past 20 years. "Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World" is published by Focal Point.

The BJP is pleased to announce two new prizes and an extended deadline for its International Photography Award.

Photographers now have until 01 October to enter the prize, which is already attracting entries from all over the world. Photographers can enter two categories – the best body of work, and the best single image – both of which are judged by a panel of photographic experts.

First prize for the best body of work is now a £5000 voucher for professional photographic retailer Robert White. Robert White’s extensive range of kit includes everything from Nikon and Canon DSLRs to Rodenstock large format cameras, and photographers are free to spend the money however they choose. This voucher replaces the previous first prize for the body of work, a Leaf camera. Blurb.com has also come on board with an extra prize for photographers in the single image prize – a photobook with a selection of the best single-image entries. First prize for the single image category is the professional-standard compact, the Sigma DP2.

Photographers in both categories will also see their winning images printed by Spectrum Photographic, one of Europe’s leading labs. These prints will be exhibited at The AOP’s leading London gallery, then handed over to the winners.

BJP has been running the International Photography Award for five years, and previous winners include World Press Photo winner Walter Astrada, Mexican Joop Swart Masterclass attendee Carla Verea and advertising and editorial photographer Frank Herfort. Previous judges include Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins and publisher Dewi Lewis.

Last week, we had the opportunity to hear from student photographers Ed Ou and Carl Kiilsgaard, after it was announced that they had both won $5000 each from Getty Images as part of the Getty Grants for Editorial Photography.

One question they were asked was what kind of equipment did they take on their various projects - Ou was back from a trip to Semey in Kazakhstan where the Soviets tested more than 400 nuclear weapons during the Cold War, while Killsgaard documented the life of a 'White Family,' as his project is called, for several weeks.

Their answer was pretty simple - one camera, one lens. Another photographer, Maximiliano Braun added: "At the end of the day, the lighter your kit is, the more energy you have."

And you, how many camera bodies and lenses do you take on a documentary project?

***We've updated this blog with pictures from inside the store. Find them here***

Leica is expected to open its first official store in London. The store will be open to the public from Thursday 10 September at 10am. Some photos before the official opening.

The good folk of Derbyshire can take it easy. The rest of us can expect a tap on the shoulder at any moment, because according to our special report into the use of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police forces around the country are using its extraordinary powers to stop and search members of the public on a regular basis. So regular, in fact, that the Metropolitan Police conducted 108,012 searches in London from May 2007 to April 2008, while the Derbyshire force made none.

As many of you have already learnt, photographers seem particularly suspicious to police. S44 has been used on a regular basis to stop them taking pictures in public places, and although the powers are supposed to be used for counterterrorism purposes, many photographers believe they are being misused. Police forces must apply for use of the controversial powers, and once granted they last for 28 days, after which they can apply for renewal. Police must also indicate the specific areas to which the special powers will be applied. But those areas are not made available to the public, meaning photographers don’t know where to avoid shooting in public if they want to avoid questioning.

We decided to try and find out, using the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the locations where S44 powers have been granted. First we tried the Home Office. It said no, refusing to reveal the locations on grounds of national security. So we filed 46 additional FoI requests to all chief constables in England and Wales, asking them to disclose whether they have asked for stop-and-search powers under section 44. Nine
of them answered, five more partially answered, and the results can be seen in BJP’s special news report investigation in this week’s issue. But 29 refused, again citing national security, and three – Cleveland, Dyfed-Powys and Kent – failed to answer at all, which is in clear breach of the Freedom of Information Act.

Two more, the Met and the City of London Police, were not required to answer, but they confirmed that they had requested the powers to cover the whole of Greater London, and that these powers had been granted every 28 days for the past eight years.

While the chief constables’ answers or lack thereof don’t constitute groundbreaking information for UK-based photographers, they show the lack of transparency in a country that prides itself on its freedoms. As we have seen since events of 9/11, and particularly over the past two years, photographers are increasingly viewed with deep suspicion by police forces, and arguably by the wider public at large.

We frequently receive calls from photographers – both amateurs and professionals – recounting their latest run-in with the law. In most cases, the incident is the result of an abuse of power from over-zealous officers. The publicity behind these incidents has pushed the Home Office to release a newly-worded circular advising police officers against using the Terrorism Act to prevent people from taking pictures.

But the fact remains that photographers are still being stopped from taking pictures of ‘strategic’ places around the country. But, in a classic Catch-22 situation, the Home Office and most chief constables believe photographers have no right to know where these places are, yet they expect them to know the law.

Why can’t we know where this piece of legislation is in place? According to 29 chief constables we contacted, terrorists could use such information to plan attacks. However, not all constabularies share this assessment. Nine police forces have released information about their use of Section 44, finding that public awareness was paramount.

BJP will continue to fight for photographers’ rights, and it has already filed further FoI requests. Meanwhile, you can help our campaign by uploading a protest photo to www.not-a-crime.com.

Read our full report here.
Find out if Section 44 is being used in your county here.

Today's Leica press conference will also be a live webcast available to all online. Tune it at 2pm London time, right her to view the webcast, or follow us on Twitter for behind the scenes information about the launch of the M9 and X1 cameras, as well as the opening of the London Leica store...

Live Webcast on 9/9/2009 - The next Generation of Leica Cameras from leica camera on Vimeo.

Time and time again, Leica has made history with its superior quality cameras and lenses. And, each time, the innovations and developments made throughout the company's history have always been - and will always be - committed to one single aim: Uncompromising quality dedicated solely to the creation of a perfect image.

Please join us as Leica begins a new chapter in photography and tune in to the live webcast on September 9th to witness the unveiling of the next generation of Leica Cameras. www.leica-camera.com

The Leica store in London will open on Thursday 10 September at 10am. The address is:
In the meantime, here are some photos from inside the shop.

More images after the jump.

The interview is in French, but you will find below a English transcript.

BJP Can you start by talking about your pictures and your project?

M.D. This project came after another one in Guatemala, when I covered another conflict, in the 80s - the genocide of the Mayas by the army. I followed the work of legists and anthropologists who were looking for clandestine cemeteries. At then end of that project, I was wondering why Guatemala was involved in another war, which is the title of this exhibition, after having underwent 36 years of war.

That’s why I wanted to work on that global theme, about the multiple violences the Guatemalan People are experiencing. The “maras” phenomenon is the main theme of my project. This is not a project exclusively about “maras”, this phenomenon is one aspect hiding among many. I wanted to go deeper because you have to know that before becoming murderers, these kids were victim of this accumulation of violence.
I wanted to show all the different violences they could have been victims of – poverty, no public health care, no education, familial context, sexual abuses. Their families are usually disintegrated, because of war or because their parents left to immigrate illegally to the US.

These young people had no values, no references and the only way for them to exist in a society that had always denied them, is to use the only language they know – violence.

BJP How did you have access to the gangs? Was it difficult? How long of a process was it?

M.D. This is a really long process, which is really dangerous. Today no one is safe. I first spent five months with them in prison. I wanted to understand the situation, to try not to stigmatize them since they are stigmatized enough in their country and abroad.

We just pay attention to their tattoos and I wanted to go further. I wanted to go beyond that false and reductive image we have to reassure ourselves. By talking with them, I created a link with them, little by little they accepted to testify, we trusted each other and they allowed me to take pictures.
There is no testimony in this exhibition but my work is made of them. That’s how I understood that whereas the Guatemalan government and mass media want us to believe, they are a consequence of the situation and not the reason why Guatemala is in this difficult situation. After the peace agreements of 1996, the government did not answer to any of the population’s demands.

These young people grew up in shantytowns. There are about 250 or 300 of them in Guatemala. These shantytowns are the result of the war; to escape the massacre made by the army, thousands and thousands of people – mainly mayas - left and settled in wastelands in Guatemala, living under plastic and cardboards for years. The state did not help them, they had no access to education. They grew up in these conditions hating this society that forgot and rejected them. Society always denied their existence.
In the end, the only way to feel like they are human beings is to integrate a “maras” when they turn eight or ten. For once in their lives, the others are afraid and drop their head when they cross their paths. They’ve known but one language in their life – that of violence.

They know they’re going to die maybe at 12, and they prefer to die standing up rather than dying on their knees, humiliated like their ancestors.

BJP Many images can be really hard to look at in this exhibition. How do you work in these situations? How do you work that close to death?

M.D. It’s always delicate to show harsh images, it is a real problem as a photographer to be able to show violence and death while still respecting the intimacy of the people you photograph. It is a real “cas de conscience”.
I want to show the violence, not suggest it. But I don’t want to fall into the morbid, I don’t know if I made it but I tried.

BJP Afterward, is it difficult to publish this kind of pictures? Are magazines willing to publish violent or bloody pictures?

M.D. I don’t think that is what bother them, magazines are used to superficiality. They do a quick review of everything. When they send journalists, they send them for two, three or four days to cover a situation they don’t know anything about and as a consequence, they bring back clichés. Whereas when you work on a project for a longer period of time, you go further, you understand more and more of what is going on. In that case, they are disconcerted because it is different from what they thought or imagined.
You may not realize it but the longer you work on a project the hardest it get to publish it.

BJP Do you think that some countries are more willing to publish this kind of project?

M.D. I don’t really know about the North American press. Anyway, concerning this project, this is a result of two years of investigations, and I am still working on it, I am going back there at the end of October. About the French press, I did not want my project to be published by my agency (Agence VU) for these two years because it was not coherent enough for me. This exhibition is the result of five periods of three months in Guatemala. I did not want my pictures to be used as clichés, I was waiting for my project to be coherent enough for it to be published.

Actually, in one or to weeks, VSD, a French magazine is going to publish it. But it is always the same, it is going to be a portfolio, and I thank the director or photography who fought for its publication but there is not going to be any text or analysis, the text is made of large captions, there is no testimonies and at the end it tends to be cliché as well. But unfortunately, we cannot decide and it is really hard to control the publication of our work, but still it enables us to go back there to work.

BJP Back to your project and its title - The Other War - as opposed to the armed conflict. Do you think that this kind of internal conflict is overshadowed by what is happening on a global stage, by the war against terror or news such as Michael Jackson’s death?

M.D. One simple example, this reportage was supposed to be published this week, during Visa pour l’Image and it was postponed because of Ted Kennedy’s death, celebrities’ news is obviously more attractive than this kind of projects. What can we do? How can we struggle? We have no control over this.

BJP Do you think Visa pour l’image is still important for photojournalism in general?

M.D. Of course, not only is it a great promotional tool for us, but it is also the opportunity of showing many pictures that are usually not published. As photojournalists, indeed, we are interested in telling stories and to see these stories to be published. Unfortunately, the unique way to do this is at these festivals such as Visa pour l’Image. Because the press is getting more and more careful and is paying less and less. And at the end, some really good photographic reportages have never been published. It’s dramatic, everyone agrees and acknowledges it but nowadays, most of the magazines have contracts with press agencies. We have less and less space to publish our work.

BJP The president of VII Photo Agency said that photojournalists should work with firms and NGOs to get funding. Do you agree?

M.D. Nowadays, to be able to work on a long time on a project, as far as I am concerned and I am not talking about my colleagues, the money I earn from my work doesn’t enable me to go back in the field. We have to find some new ways to find funds. NGOs can be a possibility. For this project, a local NGO helped me financially and allowed me to pay for my plane tickets. It is already a lot.

When I start working on a project I always try to figure out why and for whom I doing this? Well, if the press is not publishing your work anymore, how can you inform? I am interested in giving something back to the people who offered me their images. I’m trying to be useful to the country.
We are currently working on a huge project, to make a book made of pictures and testimonies and a pedagogical booklet to give to all Guatemalan schools. The goal is to try to get them to think about the whole situation. When a young person integrates a gang at the age of eight or ten, he has no idea of what he is doing. As I was saying before, these young people have no patriarchal reference. Even the government is not a good example for these people, since it is corrupt.
The only role models young people have are the gang leaders at the corner of the streets. They have got power, money, women, and these are the only things they see. Once you integrate a gang you cannot go back, you will end up in prison or in a cemetery.

We have to do something for these young people now.

Poster for Mois de la Photo, image @ Kutlug Ataman.

Montreal's 2009 Mois de la Photo opens later this evening at the Canadian Center for Architecture. The eleventh Mois de la Photo is curated by Gaelle Morel and features work by 24 artists, spread over 11 venues across the city.

This year, Morel has chosen the theme The Spaces of the Image, investigating the ways in which artists working with photography choose to exhibit their work. Canadian photographer Robert Burley has created a trompe d'oeil on the front of the CCA, for example, while Emmanuelle Leonard is exhibiting a series of photographs of people at work, the dimensions of which represent the number of Canadians employed in that sector. International photographers showing work at the festival include Alfredo Jaar and Yang Zhenzhong, and Kutlug Ataman is exhibiting a video piece.

'Due to the range of possibilities - the technical diversity of film and digital cameras, formats, printing procedures, and the many alternatives offered in terms of museography and occupation of space - photographers are increasingly called upon to become aware of their relationship with the exhibition,' writes Morel. 'Production methods and viewing modalities, as integral parts of projects, exert a direct influence on the aesthetic of images.'

More stories and interviews from the festival to come, so keep posted on the blog.

Eugene Richards, arguably one of the best living documentary photographers, can seem odd the first time you meet him. He is quiet and appears shy, and to his own admission, doesn’t really know how to deal with agencies and photographers at festivals such as Visa pour l’Image.

‘You have to sell your work at these festivals, but I’m uncomfortable doing that,’ he tells BJP. ‘Photographers also do this to me. They show me their work, ask me for my opinion and advice, but I can’t. If I could, I would, but no one believes me when I say that.’

The photographer, who left Magnum Photos twice and VII Photo before signing with Getty Images, was in Perpignan this year presenting a very intimate project. War is Personal is a series of 15 photographic essays in which Richards introduces us to Americans whose lives have been deeply and irrevocably impacted by the ongoing war in Iraq - a former combat medic who struggled with addiction upon returning home, a father who has just learned that his son was killed in action, a mother who spends every waking hour caring for her grievously brain-injured son, a young soldier who refused redeployment and fled to Canada, a young paraplegic shot in the spine four days after arriving in-country.

The idea behind War is Personal came after much deliberations, says Richards. ‘I was critical of the war, and I wanted to do something about it. I thought of going to Iraq, but I didn't want to be embedded, to follow the army. I wanted to be free to choose what to cover and where to go.’

‘War is very personal,’ he adds. ‘My son asked me what would he do if he were drafted. It's a family decision. It can cause a huge clash in a family like it did with mine. My own father told me I would go to Vietnam if I were drafted. I wouldn’t have had a choice.’

Richards’ project began four years ago. He started researching and looking online for families that had been disrupted by the war in Iraq. ‘I didn't want to have to choose who to follow,’ he says. ‘I didn't want to know more about them. I didn't want to make a determination of where they were, what idea of the war they had. Tomas was the first. I called him up, and he accepted to receive me.’

Richards spent a few days with the former soldier at his home in Kansas City. Tomas needs two hours every morning to get out of bed and get ready. When Richards saw the photos, he was reticent to use them. Calling Tomas, he said: ‘You know how bad you look? He just said: “so?” It happens, it's true.’

‘For most photographers, access, getting invited in is fundamental,’ says Richards. ‘It's very delicate, especially with a family in grief. With every story you're dealing with there is a line. And you can't cross it. They tell you a story, and you have to let them do it.’

Richards is still working on War is Personal. He has received a $20,000 Getty Grant for Editorial Photography this year, which will go to complete the work. The hope is that, once the book is released, it will bring more attention to the masses of injured soldiers coming back from the war.

‘The biggest problem is indifference,’ says Richards. And with the war in Afghanistan picking up steam, ‘thousands of people are going to come back injured. Now, we can keep alive a lot of people that would have died in other wars.’

Sometimes, indifference can take another form. Every once in a while, he will be asked if by taking a critical look at the consequences of war, he is not promoting an anti-American view. ‘America is where I want to live. Am I against the government? Yes. I’ve seen some people heckle grieving families saying that they shouldn’t protest the war because their sons volunteered and knew the risks. Why would you say that to someone?’

Indifference also comes from the magazines. ‘I can't sell this [story],’ he tells BJP. ‘I tried but only The Nation magazine ran it, as a very small one-page story. Magazines feel there is nothing new there. They're looking for what's redemptive in this story.’

However, the response from the public has been amazing, he adds. ‘We need to get the material out, and get the dialogue going. More sacrifice need to be made on the part of the media. But, you have to understand them, why would they print this when they can get bigger sales from celebrities’ images.’

What about publishing it online? ‘You have to be willing to give it away,’ he says. ‘The only danger I see is the fact that some people could use it to transmit their own political views. You have to find a way to get it out in its virgin form.’

For more on Richards’ work, visit www.eugenerichards.com.

Michael Flomen, Blue Flyer II at Le Mois de La Photo. Photo © Carlos and Jason Sanchez.

Gaelle Morel is a French curator and art historian based in Toronto, and the first non-Canadian curator of Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal. She opted to investigate ‘The Spaces of the Image’, the ways in which image are presented in exhibition. 'While the processes that go into the making of the artwork are generally subjected to painstaking study, the technical side of images and the situations they are used are often ignored - they are likely to be deemed too prosaic,' she writes in her essay in the festival catalogue. 'These installation processes must be seen, however, as one of the essential keys to reading many photographic, video, and media arts projects presented in recent years.' Diane Smyth caught up with her at the opening of Le Mois de la Photo.

DS: What's the concept behind the festival?

GM: When you go to a photo show, often what you see is black-and-white, framed pictures on the wall. That’s great but it’s just a convention, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are many artists who have thought about it and worked in a very different way, and I thought it was good timing to throw a spotlight on some of them. We tried to show work that hasn’t been shown in Canada before, although for example Pierre Tremblay showed his work [a stop-motion image of his daughter] in the Nuits Blanches in Toronto. If it was good, I wanted to show it.

DS: Three of the artists are showing work that goes outside the museum or gallery, could you explain how they fit into the concept?

GM: When you’re dealing with sceneography and trying to open doors, you very quickly go outdoors. This is is a festival so it has to be very open. It has to be coherent and demanding, but it also has to be open to the public. It can be hard for people to say "Let's go to an exhibition" so I wanted to find ways to bring work out.

Robert Burley's image is of a giant Polaroid, opened up to show the positive and negative image, and it's on the side of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He's using a very new technology developed in advertising, in which images are bonded directly to surfaces without damaging them. It was a great opportunity to try something new, using new technology. Anne Ramsden has created a series of posters, using images from Flickr, that supposedly advertise The Museum of the Everyday, an imaginary museum. These posters have been put all over Montreal, so you don't know when you'll come across them or even that they're an art work. And Le Mois de la Photo always uses a couple of billboards, so Michael Flomen was able to utilise them.

We also have lots of exhibitions where people have to touch or blow the images, or have turn in the space to understand them. It means that they’re really part of the show and I hope it means they feel committed, and feel part of the work. Because really without an audience, there is no work. That doesn't mean we have to dumb down, all the work has to be good, but we have to make sure we're sharing something with the public.

DS: A few of the exhibitions consider photojournalism and how it's disseminated - Alfredo Jaar is showing a video piece about Kevin Carter's shot of a Sudanese famine victim, for example, while Pascal Convert has made a wax sculpture based on Hocine Zaourar's shot of a weeping Palestinian woman. Are you commenting on photojournalism?

GM: Photojournalism is the main way for photographs to be distributed, so it’s the way people usually see it. The artists who use photojournalism are concerned with how the photograph was taken, when and how, and what the discourses on it were. They're asking "Are we ok with photojournalism" but also "Are we ok with it if photojournalism disappears?" because photojournalism is facing challenges now. New technologies mean that photojournalists will probably have to imagine new ways of working, so it’s a good time to consider what it is and what it might become.

DS: Did you consider using work which uses new technology to distribute images in new ways?

GM: I was open to everything but if you work online it's difficult to show works to the public, plus we have regular exhibition venues here. But it would be wonderful to do more with that in future. It would be fantastic to experiment and create new kinds of venues - there’s a whole path in front of us, we don’t even know what we’re capable of with these new devices.

Chuck Samuels, director general of Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal (holding microphone) with photographer Robert Burley (speaking), in front of Burley's installation at the opening of the festival. Image © Diane Smyth.

The cost of living in Montreal used to be so cheap that artists need only get one show and a couple of commissions a year to survive, says Chuck Samuels, director general of Le Mois de la Photo.

These enviable economic conditions lead to a distinctive art scene in the city, he told Diane Smyth at the festival opening, in which artists step back from the market to consider what art is and what it does. 'Many artists are doing work here that has little regard for the market, that reflects and self-references. That's a real force, and that idea of thinking about art and how it works feeds into Le Mois de la Photo. We are interested in themes that question how photography works or doesn't work rather than a subject such as, for example, 'sports'. That's unlikely to be a theme we would do.'

The first Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal took place in 1989 and was set up by a local artist-run centre, Vox. At that time, said Samuels, the organisers felt photography was under-represented in contemporary art galleries, so they drew on Houston Fotofest and Le Mois de la Photo in Paris to both defend and celebrate photographic art. Since then photography has become a well-established strand in contemporary art but the festival has remained, evolving over time into the guest-curated, strongly themed event it is today.

'It was such a huge success [over the 1990s] that the organisers decided to dispense with the general exhibitions and have one very coherent central theme, organised by a guest curator and supported by a colloquium and publication,' said Samuels. 'They introduced that in 2003, with a festival arranged around the theme of 'NOW. Images of Present Time'. It included work by Paul Seawright and Alison Jackson and looked at contemporary issues, issues usually covered by photojournalists. I came on board in 2002.'

The board of directors does a call for submissions from curators, and this year selected a non-Canadian for the first time since it imposed the single-theme concept, French-born Gaelle Morel. The curators are expected to bring a strong central concept and an idea of the photographers they would like to include, but once accepted, have a year to research exactly which exhibitions they would like to include. Photographers are also invited to submit proposals, and this year's theme, 'The Spaces of the Image' attracted over 400 submissions from all over the world and Morel has included artists from as far away as Chile and the Congo, so check Le Mois de la Photo or BJP websites for more information on the next call for submissions. Or, failing that, move to Montreal and get involved in an exceptional artistic scene.

'Artists and the people who frequent cultural events in Montreal really feel that the events belong to them and they belong to the events,' says Samuels. 'There are a lot of artist-run events and galleries, it's unlike elsewhere.'

Yesterday was the official opening of the Lomography store in London. The launch party was a HUGE success. Try to fit in 100 people in a small Newburgh Street-based store and you can imagine how crazy the evening was. The mood was excellent, the atmosphere was electric like you would imagine any Lomography party to be, and the lights... Well, the lights fell down from the ceiling half-way through the night.

This morning, the Lomography staff was busy cleaning up while electricians were there to repair the lights. But the store is now ready to welcome customers, and here are a few shots of the store that will become a must for many - Adam Scott, the director of Lomography UK, is even inviting people to have lunch in the downstairs area of the store. It's that cosy!

Entrance to Alfredo Jaar's The Sound of Silence video booth.

Alfredo Jaar was born in Chile, and now lives and works in New York. His work considers the divide between the developed and developing worlds, calling into question the visual strategies used by the West to portray other countries. At Le Mois de la Photo he is presenting a video projection booth called The Sound of Silence, which relates the story of Kevin Carter's image of an infant Sudanese famine victim, who is dwarfed by a large and menacing vulture. Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for the image in 1994, but committed suicide just a few months afterwards. DS Diane Smyth, AJ Alfredo Jaar.

DS How does this piece fit into the rest of your work?

AJ It is right at the heart of what I do. I have been working for 30 years on the politics of images and issues of representation and so I think this piece is really at the root of my concerns for a long time. This work seem to have captured the audience’s imagination – this is its 10th presentation. It hasn’t stopped touring around the world, it is going to the Moscow Biennale next week and then to Japan in November, here it is in French and we’ve also done it in Italian.

DS What do you hope to do with this work?

AJ I am an architect, I never trained in art, I consider myself an architect making art, I use the methodology of the architect – I give myself a programme for each work that I make. One of the fundamental points about this work is communication. I want to make people think about these representations, so it’s very important for me to create work that has different levels, differents points of entry. All my work has many layers – some people will enter the work at a basic level, others will enter at a deeper level, but hopefully they will all be able to connect with the work.

I’m practically on an impossible mission, but I think it’s very important to try to get people to question images. We’ve been taught how to read and write but no one has ever taught us how to look at images. We don’t understand the language of images, we think they’re innocent and that we can read them easily, but no, we don’t. We are bombarded by images and these images are not innocent. They are out there in the world, and most of them exist to sell us something, whether it’s products or ideas. Their messages influences our vision of the world, they are our vision of the world. We are surrounded by a landscape of images we don’t know how to read. This work is a theatre built for a single image, and a model of thinking about an image, and that might suggest that all images should be thought about.

DS Why did you choose to work with this particular image?

AJ It was published in 1993 and when I saw it, I was shocked. It is maybe the most extraordinary image ever created in terms of articulating the widening gap between different worlds – between the so-called developed world and the so-called developing world. Kevin’s image captures so many things, including the criminal indifference of the developed world. That is why it provoked so many reactions when it was published, because it really goes to the essence of what’s happening with the imbalance that exists in the world.

DS Why do you produce this kind of work?

AJ I’ve been travelling pretty much nonstop since I was a kid, I’ve seen probably more than 100 countries. I have seen a lot of the world and it is clear to me that the world you and I live in is almost a work of fiction compared to the rest of the world. We are here dressed up, wearing shoes, we have access to food and entertainment and technology, it all seems so normal but this is not normal in the world at large. There have been extremely interesting developments in the world of technology such as the internet, but still 50% of the world population doesn’t have access to a telephone. When you’re aware of those gaps, of those dire imbalances, you have to do something about it. As an artist I am in the fortunate position of being given space to think about this, to think about society, and for me that is an incredible privilege, and it comes with a responsibility to think about the world. It is part of what I have to do, there’s no other way to say it.

Circle of Confusion by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, on show at Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are showing one piece in Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal - a large, fragmented image of Beirut that viewers are invited to scatter - but the gallery in which it's being shown, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, has taken the opportunity to show a much larger collection of their work. I am here even if you don't see me includes a video documentary about a stolen, censored film, a half-eroded video from Joreige's disappeared uncle, photographs of decomposing posters of martyrs and war heroes taken around the Lebanon, and seemingly-straightup shots of weaponry, as well as other pieces. Their work explores the use of imagery in the Lebanon, and the ways in which images both illuminate and contribute to the country's complex political situation.

'We became interested in photography and video during the war because of the use of images by different media,' Joreige explains to BJP. 'We were trying to think about our own relation to images - whether we can believe in them, and whether we can grab something of our own presence.'

That's why The Circle of Confusion, the image shown at Le Mois de la Photo, divides Beirut into 3000 moveable pieces. Viewers can move the pieces around or remove them altogether, destroying, rebuilding and falsifying the city and illustrating how poorly and partially documented it is. That's also why the duo photograph posters of dead heroes, whose individual features have worn away over time, and why Le Film Perdu shows clips from the Lebanese media and local photographers as well as the short takes ironically rescued from their stolen footage by the censors. 'We’re not a country without images, we’re a country that produces a lot of images,' says Hadjithomas. 'We had a lot of television channels during and after the war but what these images were showing was politically telling.

'You cannot make images or film without thinking about the other images that have been produced, especially in a country like the Lebanon,' she adds. 'We have in mind the photojournalism and the propagandistic images used in the war, as well as the images used by other powers, be they political or economic.'

For Hadjithomas and Joreige, form is inseparable from content, and both are equally important in generating meaning in their work. Rather than a vessel to carry content, form is part of an integrated strategy, which considers images and their uses and abuses. 'We don’t work on images because we're interested in images, we're interested in the context,' says Hadjithomas. 'That’s what pushes us to question. We have a lot of questions and we want to share them with others.

'I'm not suspicious of photojournalism necessarily, but I want to stem the flow of images and regain some power over them. In that sense, our work is political, because we take our context into consideration. When you’re aware of the context in which you produce your images you must be political.'

Brennan Linsley, an Associated Press photographer, has gone 12 times to the high-security detention facility in Guantanamo Bay where the Bush administration said some of the most dangerous terrorists are held indefinitely. At a time when the Obama administration has committed itself to closing down the facility, we talked to Linsley about his work there. How he gained access to the base? What could he photograph once there? And what impact the prison has had on the US both at home and abroad?

Brennan Linsley in front of his exhibition at the 2009 Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival.

BJP: How did you get access to the prison? And what are you allowed to see once there?
Brennan Linsley: You constantly have to lobby to go to Guantanamo Bay. There is a lot of red tape. Whenever I get the green-light from the public affairs office at Guantanamo, AP sends me. The US military is the only limiting factor in these assignments. But, there is a new unit every few months. So you often have to start over the negotiations. But I've seen that the more you go, the easier it is to get in.

They have an itinerary prepared for the press. It's usually broken down in 15-minute parts. You have to work a lot to get out of this itinerary. Most of what they have for you has nothing to do with the detainees. They will show you the beach, the lighthouse. The time you have inside the “wire” in the detention facility, as they called it, is very limited. They try to move you along the whole time.

Now, I send a wish list every time. I tell them that I don't want to go to the clinic or the lighthouse. I tell them to skip this or that. “Just put me in a corner and I'll be fine.” Sometimes the public affairs people will help you. A couple of times, they took me inside the central guard tower at 4am and allowed me to photograph the morning prayer.

Every photo you see is a victory. It's amazing how simple some of the photographs look.

When you get the photograph of a detainee, it's the result of hours of pushing. You're not allowed to communicate with the detainees. There are 15 pages of ground rules. You try to humanise these guys, but it's difficult with these restrictions.

My first trip was at the instigation of the government. They saw that we kept on using the same and unique pictures we had of Guantanamo Bay, when it was first opened. They were saying: “these are out of date, wait until you see how it looks like now.”

My goal is to come back from each trip with a couple of shots that will allow me to paint more of a picture of this place. Some trips, I came back with nothing at all. Some journalists and photographers get frustrated when they don't get what they wanted. They spend a lot of time and money on this, and when you come away with very little, it is frustrating. And it doesn't serve the government's purposes. They should allow selected interviews of detainees. In terms of public relations, it would go a long way.

BJP: Talking about the detainees, is it difficult to frame a story if you can't get access to them?
Brennan Linsley: One of the problems you face is that you don't know who you are photographing. Are they, as Bush and Cheney say, the worst of the worst? Some are high-ranking terrorists, some are Talibans or foot-soldiers, but others are truly innocent. We know that a certain number of detainees were captured on bounties paid by the government. They used to drop leaflets in the tribal areas saying that $5000 would be awarded per terrorist caught. A lot of innocent people were rounded up as a result. In the fog of war, a lot of stuff happens.

So when you're working there and make eye-contact with a detainee, you never really know who it is you looking at.

Something that should be looked at in the indoctrination process at Guatanamo. What is the effect of confinement on the detainees. There is now a new military commander that has a pretty sophisticated view of what needs to be done to win the hearts and minds, and how counter-productive the stringent rules have been to achieve this goal.

This war is very political. The Talibans are also fighting for the hearts and minds of the population. I was very surprised about how successful the republicans were at turning this into political football. They shaped the message by saying that only the worst of terrorists were there. And they have used that perception against Obama.

Obama's view is that Guantanamo Bay is not only a human rights aberration, but also a strategic blunder that hurts America. It has become a symbol of US oppression. It's killing US troops and so it's strategic to get rid of it. But the Republicans are so good at setting the narrative. I remain hopeful, if anyone can close Guantanamo, Obama can. But it is going to need on ongoing dialogue with the public. It has to be a campaign, so that Cheney cannot say that it is endangering America. It has to be more than a couple of speeches.

BJP:: How is the base? Can you gain access to other areas?
Brennan Linsley:: It's surreal. It's Cuba, but it's not. Ten to 15,000 people live there. They have McDonald's, Starbucks, the Navy version of Wal-Mart. They have everything.

There are two ways to cover this story. You can go on the standard media tour, or you can be commissioned for the pre-trial hearings. For the latter, you get to go into the base – Camp Justice. The bubble is tighter there. You are in a eight-people tent. You can't photography anything outside, not even a little bit of razor wire. You can only photograph the lawyers and the tent.

In late May, in Camp Iguana, there was a Chinese detainee, one of the guys that no one would take. He heard that there were journalists coming that day, and so wrote down on a pad the words “Let there be justice” and “We need to freedom.” The public affairs people didn't know what hit them. You can't communicate with the detainees, but there was nothing in the rules that dealt with detainees showing placards. Our work was held in limbo for 24 hours, while the Obama administration was informed and that they wouldn't be taken by surprise by the images' release.

Not all photographs make it out of the base. 'The operational security people go through all the photographs, videos and sounds recorded by journalists and photographers and they delete anything that they perceived breaks the ground rules. It's agonizing. The best pictures from Guantanamo Bay are all gone. It's hard to humanise someone when you can't even show their face.'

BJP: Has it been difficult to operate in the current economic climate, with people saying that photojournalism is dead?
Brennan Linsley: There's less money in photojournalism, that's a fact. It's hard for people to make a living. In terms of impact on the public, this hasn't changed. If you asked people if they remember a photograph from the last 12 months, the answer would be yes.

A lot of photojournalists are dying financially. It becomes an art that is only sustainable if you have a life outside of photojournalism. More and more you need to self-fund the process. You need to be able to work for nine months, set aside a few thousand dollars and then you can spend that money on a project for three months. But the challenge is to find a venue to show this work. Photojournalism suffers from that lack of venue, which is paradoxical in a world where we have 800 television channels, thousands of magazines and the online world.

The industry is suffering, but the impact of photography hasn't changed. It's a powerful medium. A powerful photograph makes people think, it makes them want to know more. And I don't see anything that would change that.

The Golden Age of photography has been over for a long time. It died somewhere between the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Before, magazines such as Time would send three photographers unilaterally without restrictions. They were able to send their pictures whenever they wanted. Now, we have three deadlines a day. It's annoying sometimes, because you want to be able to disappear into a story.

BJP: In projects such as this one [exhibited at this year's Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival] do you retain control of your images?
Brennan Linsley: Absolutely not. AP is the owner. AP has a resale division where they resell the pictures. Photographers don't see much of that money. But, at the same time, it contributes to the health of the company, which allows us to go on such projects.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who won a respite last week in the repayment of her $24m loan with Art Capital Group, is far from being out of trouble, according to Steve Kuncewicz, intellectual property and media lawyer at law firm Ralli.

He says that Leibovitz, who as part of her new deal is rebuying her copyright, could be have to pay a higher premium to do so: 'The loan Leibovitz entered was on the basis she also put up all of the photographs she would take in the future. This was an extremely good deal for Art Capital and would see her giving up her only source of continuing revenue. She is now buying back her copyright, but at what cost? Art Capital could conceivably charge her a premium in exchange for altering the terms of her loan.'

Kuncewicz adds: 'If Annie Leibovitz had been unable to get an extension on the deadline to repay her loan, she would have lost everything. Losing her properties would be bad enough, but if she lost her portfolio copyright, she’d lose the right to make any income from the huge amount of images she’s taken over the years. Copyright in most photographs, under US and UK law, is owned by the photographer and usually lasts for the life of the photographer plus 70 years. Few photographers have had images become as iconic as Leibovitz and very few will be able to make as much from licensing them out to third parties.

'The credit crunch has led many artists to use their work as collateral to raise funds as they become aware of how valuable copyright can be. It allows the creator of a photograph to control how the image is used, reproduced and sold. Art Capital obviously sees the value in this and has built its business from making money for its clients and itself by taking copyright as a form of security.

'If you are going to use your intellectual property as security for a loan, think about the terms very carefully. If you default, a lender could end up literally owning your creativity, as Annie Leibovitz so nearly found out. Seeing her iconic images licensed out for use on tee-shirts or on other merchandise would not have been a pretty picture.'

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Robert Burley's Photographic Proof at Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal.

Robert Burley's contribution to Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal is a dramatic, larger-than-life depiction of a freshly-opened Polaroid, plastered on the outside of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The material used to bond the image to the bricks is brand-new, made possible by digital technology, but both the 'Polaroid' frame and the subject Burley depicts pay tribute to an earlier photographic process - analogue. For Burley's image shows the controlled explosion of the Kodak-Pathe plant in Chalon-sur-Saone, France, near where Nicephore Niepce first discovered photography. It's part of a four-year project on the death of film photography called The Disappearance of Darkness, in which Burley photographs the destruction of photographic film and paper plants.

'I’m based in Toronto and in 2005 I discovered that Kodak Canada was going to close the plant nearby,' says Burley. 'I had access through people I knew, so I was able to go and document the plant before it closed down in 2006. It was fascinating because although I’ve been involved with photography since high school, I didn’t really have a thorough understanding of how photographic materials are made. Companies were often proprietorially secretive about their processes, so it was amazing to be able to see how it was done first-hand and have access to engineers who could explain more.

'This photograph [taken in France] was shot in December 2007. Kodak, a name that used to be synonymous with photography, did a number of scheduled implosions of film plants around the world because they really couldn’t be adapted to any other use, and also I think as a symbol of the company's development from one technology to another. It was really a big event - I joined a crowd of people, many of whom had worked there for many years, to see the end of traditional photography. This plant used to run seven days a week, 24 hours a day, producing football fields of paper. But digital technology is faster, cheaper, more flexible, so film is kind of over.'

Burley believes digital technology augurs death of traditional photography, partly because analogue films and papers rely on economies of scale to be made and - more fundamentally - because digital image-making doesn't command the same evidential status as analogue. 'I've called this installation Photographic Proof because what’s disappearing, alongside the photographic materials, is our faith in images,' he says. 'Of course it was always possible to manipulate film, but it was like sculpting with stone compared with sculpting with clay – it was very difficult and only possible with special tools. Digital technology changes all that.

He wants to explore those changes, and the new possibilities opened up by digital imaging, he says, rather than simply trying to reject it. 'I am a traditional photographer, I’ve worked with film and photographic paper my whole life but this piece is really about my confrontation with new technology,' he says. 'It's about trying to make sense of two technologies that really define photography today – the first the traditional films and paper, the other digital media. Digital imaging really redefines not just what I make in terms of the pictures but what you see as a viewer. There really isn't much of a relationship between films and papers and digital imaging, it's not a case of a simple evolution from one to the other, and that changes both our relationship to images, and how we look at the world through images.'

It’s been a year since the global financial crash and the demise of investment bank Lehman Brothers. This week, Reuters has released a new multimedia online documentary - Times of Crisis - featuring an in-depth timeline of the past year, showing the effects the crisis has had across the globe. Reuters used over 1000 entries drawn from its range of news coverage and financial data.

It’s not the first high-profile multimedia project Reuters has promoted. Last year, it released the film Bearing Witness: Five Years of Reporting War in Iraq, which brought together news photography, video testimonies and graphics to provide an insight into the daily obstacles faced by reporters and photographers on the ground in Iraq.

Girl in a Golden Dress, Georgia, 2009 © Vanessa Winship. From the series Georgia for a Song

Vanessa Winship won the Godfrey Argent prize for black-and-white photography in the 2008 National Portrait Gallery Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize but this year she's in the running for the main award.

Winship is one of four photographers shortlisted for the £12,000 prize, which is announced on 03 November. Also in the running are British photographer Paul Floyd Blake, Israeli-born Michal Chelbin and Serb-born, Canadian-based Mirjana Vrbaski. The first prize winner picks up £12,000, second prize £3000, third prize £2000 and fourth prize £1000. The Godfrey Argent Award-winner receives £2500, and this year this award will be given to the best photographer under 25.

Winship took her shot on one of many recent trips to Georgia, where she is trying to build a contemporary photographic portrait of the region. 'I found this particular young girl in the capital, Tbilisi, at one of the Palaces of Marriage,' she says. 'She was there as a guest at one of the many weddings that took place on that summer's day. I particularly liked the delicacy of her features and the way she held herself in what looked like a new and best outfit.'

Diane Smyth, deputy editor, was one of the judges of this year's NPG Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, alongside Sandy Nairne, director of the NPG; Terence Pepper, the NPG's curator of photographs; Sian Bonnell, artist and curator; Fergus Greer, photographer; and Stephen Snoddy, director of the New Walsall Art Gallery. The exhibition goes on show at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 05 November to 14 February 2010, after which it goes on tour around the UK.

Sonalle Photography: Ethnic Minorities Coming Out is on show at Rich Mix, London until 04 Oct6ober, before travelling to venues around London over the next year. For more info see richmix.org.uk or sonalle.com

For a long time coming to terms with being gay has been haunted by the notion of ‘coming out’. Like a confession, the prospect of spilling the beans is painless for some but for others it’s stressful, even traumatic, as Sonalle’s new exhibition reflects, Alex Christofides writes.

The most recent in a series of exhibitions called ‘Ethnic Minorities Coming Out’, confronts issues surrounding homosexuality and surfaces personal experiences of ‘coming out’ in ethnic minorities. It offers an intimate, heartfelt and subtle insight into lives affected by narrow mindedness and stigma.

Sonalle in her own words tries to ‘deliver an insight into detail we may not always perceive, or that we sometimes try to ignore’. She documents a range of subjects from various backgrounds at different stages of the coming out process; some have already come out, some are in the process, while others are thinking about it.

It is a sensitive topic and Sonalle handles with care: if subjects felt uncomfortable at any point she concealed their identity. Photographing an expressive part of the body instead. She uses appealing natural light throughout, capturing details effectively, and text alongside each image also helps explain each individual story.

It’s a well-executed show. It is ambiguous in places though, which evokes a sense of mystery and hidden identity at the cost of narrative strength.

Sonnalle has been on the road for almost a decade, but she’s now returned to London assisting Magnum photographer, Mr. Chris Steele-Perkins. She aims to continue with her own work, using issue-based assignments to raise the public consciousness.

Along with the Paris, New York and Milan shows, the London Fashion Week is an integral part of fashion’s calendar. And for the past three years, the event has been sponsored by Canon.

This year, Canon secured BJP a space in the photographers’ pit for one day, and so we decided to make the most of it. While our full report on our experience there will be published in early October, here are a few tidbits on the show and Canon’s involvement.

During London Fashion Week, Canon hosts a Canon Professional Services photographer’s area and lounge for all accredited photographers. ‘The area can be used for editing and wiring images, storing kit and taking a well earned coffee break,’ says Canon.

Canon also provides technical staff to answer queries, carries out kit repairs and cleans and arranges kit loans. In fact, Canon bring more than 500 spare parts and can replace, on-the-spot, hot shoes, LCD screens, rear lens mounts, contacts and focusing screens. It also has more than 30 bodies and 60 lenses, which photographers can loan for the day.

Frankie Jim and his team are on site all day long – two hours before the show starts, and one hour after it’s over. They also make available a series of Canon large format printers, so that photographers can see ‘the details and depth of their images.’ Canon also runs a competition there for the best creative shot.

Follow us on Twitter for the latest on London Fashion Week.

The London Art Book Fair takes place from 25-27 September at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, with 80 art and photography book publishers offering up to 40% off their wares. Thames and Hudson, Steidl, Photoworks, Phaidon and Trolley Books are all there as well as companies such as Tate Publishing, Frieze and Studio Voltaire. Talks and booksignings are also taking place throughout the weekend - Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are in the study studio from 12.30-1.15pm on Sunday while Robin Maddock, Iain Sinclair and Hannah Watson (managing editor of Trolley Books) are in the same place on the same day from 2.30pm-3.15pm.

On 09 September, one picture made the front pages of many news websites after a South Carolina Republican shouted "You Lie!" at President Barack Obama in the House of Representatives. The picture, shown below, was shot by Getty Images' photographer Chip Somodevilla. BJP asked him how he got that photo.

'The exclamation "You lie!" rang out inside the House Chamber at just the moment when President Barack Obama had finished saying that health care reform would not benefit illegal immigrants,' Somodevilla tells BJP. 'The rant continued and it was loud enough in the semi-quiet chamber that I could tell what general direction it was coming from and Rep. Joe Wilson made it easy for me to spot him in a seated crowd. He dropped his cupped hands from around his mouth and began to wag his finger and shout at the president. "That’s not true!" he continued. Without a thought, I lifted my camera, framed him up, auto-focused and fired a burst of shots all at the same time. The images I made before and after the one that has been most published are out of focus. It was pure luck.'

He continues: 'When I made the photo I was standing in what is called the Writers Gallery, a tiered row of desks and stools that runs the width of the chamber above and behind where the president stands when addressing Congress. So naturally, my primary responsibility that night was not the president but to look for the reaction to the speech by important members of Congress.'

As with most news photos, Somodevilla didn’t realize the importance of what he had at first. 'The reaction in the chamber was palpable. A collective gasp followed by very aggressive murmuring. I chimped the photo on the back of the camera, saw I had one in focus and quickly quizzed other photographers and reporters about who it was that had shouted and what exactly he had said. Congressional Quarterly staff photographer Scott Farrell asked some of the CQ reporters and gave me Rep. Wilson’s name and I wrote it on a sheet of paper and photographed it. This conveyed the information to Chief Photographer Win McNamee who was in the next room where he was live editing my images (I was tethered into his laptop via Ethernet cable). That was it. It was on the wire before the president finished his speech.'

But how was Somodevilla able to quickly find Wilson in a room filled with more than 550 politicians. 'He just happened to be sitting in my field of view at that moment,' he says. 'Had he decided to lose his composure five minutes before or after the time when he did then I would have missed it. Experience played a hand as well. In the last four years I’ve photographed three State of the Union speeches and four other joint sessions of Congress, including addresses by prime ministers Gordon Brown and Nouri Al-Maliki. The House chamber is a very big room but the more time you spend there the smaller it seems.'

Afghan photographer Fardin Waezi being photographed in front of his work in Paris at the second PhotoQuai biennale.

British Journal of Photography is at the launch of PhotoQuai, the two-month festival of photography at the musee du quai Branly.

The highlight of the festival is the PhotoQuai itself, which collects together 50 photographers from all over the non-Western world (including New Zealand and South Africa) and exhibits large prints of their work outside, by the river Seine. The exhibition was curated by Iranian gallerist Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, who selected works from a much larger long list of photographers put together by an international team with contacts on the ground. This ensures that the exhibition features some real surprises as well as those photographers and photographs already well known on the international scene. The only stipulation is that the photographers must not have exhibited in the UK before.

Ghabaian Etehadieh told BJP: 'We tried to find interesting art photography, it didn't matter which country it came from,' and highlights include Hiromi Tsuchida's images of Japanese streets and parks, Ilan Godfrey's South African series Living with Crime, and Mexican photographer Jeronimo Arteaga's shots of the San Luis Potosi desert region. The image above shows Afghan photographer Fardin Waezi with his work, a project celebrating the rebirth of amateur photography in Kabul. Waezi, who learned photography in his father's studio and studied under Reza Deghati, teaches at the Aina Photo School as well as shooting photojournalism for the Aina Photo Agency, the United Nations in Afghanistan and the international wires.

The biennale includes two other shows too; an exhibition of Iranian photography inside the musee du quai Branly, and a series of images taken from the museum's extensive photography archive, on show next to indigenous art at the Louvre. Space has also been made for last year's Artistic Creation Project winners, who were given the support to create new work - Mexican photographer Lourdes Grobet, Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji and Chinese photographer Wu Qi. The winners of the 2009 award, Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew and Taiwanese photographer Wayne Liu showed their work-in-progress.

The award demonstrates the museum's ongoing commitment to photography - it also exhibits, commissions and acquires contemporary photography. 'Contemporary photography was an obvious place for us to focus some of our grants and funds,' said director of the musee du quai Branly Stephane Martin. 'We have a good curator, we wanted to focus on contemporary art, it's not too expensive and its accesible. Plus we have a large archive [of photography and other artifacts]. If you don't add to your archive it becomes something dead, although still very precious.'

In total, the museum has an annual budget of €60m, of which it spends €2m per year on acquisitions alone. This year it also spent €1m on PhotoQuai.

The Iranian Revolution, image © Kaveh Golestan, on show at the exhibition 165 years of Iranian photography at the musee du quai Branly, Paris.

The musee du quai Branly has put Iranian photography under the spotlight in one of its PhotoQuai exhibitions, with a show celebrating 165 years of work. The exhibition is curated by Bahman Sarbakhshian and Bahman Jalali, under the creative directorship of Iranian gallerist and this year's PhotoQuai curator Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, and it gives a brief outline of early photography in the country before turning its attention to photography during and after the 1979 revolution.

'We wanted to show that Iranians have a long tradition of photography, and that it's a different history to that of, for example, France,' Ghabaian Etehadieh told BJP. Photography in Iran really blossomed in the 1920-1960s then almost stopped, until the revolution - it was an important part of the revolution and beyond. Now is another big time for Iranian photographers, because they now have access to the internet, and can see images from elsewhere. The level of photography now is higher.'

The exhibition includes early shots of eroticised 'Persian femmes' by Antoine Sevnegin as well as striking shots of the chaos of the revolution, shot by photojournalists such as Bahman Jalagi and Kaveh Golestan, as well as contemporary work by photographers such as Sadegh Tirafken, Vahid Salerni and Arash Kamooshi. Tirafken's images mix composite headshots with traditional carpets to suggest the multitudes which comprise Iranian society, while Salerni provides a refreshing take on an often-photographed country by showing shots of football matches. Kamooshi, meanwhile, shows a funny, poignant and, finally, sinister scenario - the police confiscation of a set of domestic satellite images. 'One of the questions we ask in the exhibition is whether there is a school of Iranian photography,' said Ghabaian Etehadieh. 'I think maybe there isn't yet - but there will be later.'

The exhibition is on show until 22 November, which means it's also up when Paris Photo comes to town (19-22 November), with the same Iranian theme. Other institutions picking up the baton include Monnaie de Paris, with an exhibition of 30 years of documentary photography from the revolution to the present day (06 November – 20 December) and HSBC France, which has a short exhibition entitled Chroniques Iraniennes (Iranian stories,16-27 November). Paris Photo itself, meanwhile, will include an exhibition of Iranian and Arab photography curated by Catherine David including images by up-and-coming photographers presented by two Tehran galleries - Mohammed Ghazali and Sadegh Tirafkan (presented by Assart Art) and Bahman Jalali, Katayoun Karami and Gohar Dashti (presented by Silk Road - Ghabaian Etehadieh's gallery).

And there are rich pickings outside Paris too. Iran Unbowed, at The Churchill Hyatt Regency London, 10-24 October, will show work by established artists such as Abbas Kiarostami and Farideh Lashai as well as Hossein Cheraghchi and Rasool Soltani, who are previously unexibited outside of Iran. Photojournalist David Burnett’s images of the Iranian revolution, meanwhile, were recently exhibited at Visa Pour l’Image and have been published as a book by National Geographic.

Henri Cartier-Bresson's shot of two Mexican women makes an unusual match with a piece of sculpture from Haiti, part of the PhotoQuai biennale of world photography. Image copyright musee du quai Branly, photograph Antoine Schneck.

PhotoQuai, the musee du quai Branly’s festival of world photography, includes an usual exhibition in the Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre. Portrait croises pairs a selection of 40 images from the musee du quai Branly’s extensive archive with indigenous sculptures and artworks from around the world.

The connections between the images and objects were left deliberately vague by the curator behind the installations, Yves Le Fur, director of the heritage and collections department at the muse du quai Branly at the Louvre. ‘I didn’t want the images to be used as illustration,’ he explains. ‘They have a discrete presence. So I kept the correspondences deliberately unsystematic, leaving it to the viewer to unravel.’

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1934 shot of two women in Mexico, for example, is paired with a piece of sculpture from Haiti, one of the Louvre’s many pieces of art from the area. The correspondence, in this case, is between the women’s poses, their upturned, bleak expressions, and the shape and form of the sculpture. It’s a novel, unexpected approach which, as Le Fur says, becomes almost like a game for the viewer. ‘Often there is no logical link between the two, so the viewers see the picture and the object and have to question it for themselves.’

Le Fur selected the images for the exhibition with Christine Barthe, curator for photography at the musee du quai Branly since 2004. They deliberately picked out portraits, says Barthe, in the belief they would appeal to the general public to relate. ‘The general public isn’t well informed about photography or indigenous art and we wanted them to feel free to come,’ she says. ‘Plus the Louvre now presents indigenous art pieces as masterpieces in their own right, so we needed very strong images to match up to that.’

The museum’s collection of images dates back to the 1820s, and includes shots by Claude Levi-Strauss and Pierre Verger as well as Cartier-Bresson and numerous anonymous photographers. It was originally held by the Natural History Museum then, as attitudes towards colonialism and non-Western cultures shifted, moved to the Musee de l’Homme. This ethnographic institution decided to make the collection available as documents to scholars, and added images to it throughout the 1930s and 40s. The collection then declined a little, before being moved to the musee du quai Branly in 1996. The musee du quai Branly is now actively adding to the collection, acquiring existing images from artists and commissioning three or four new works per year.

Image © Gavin Watson.

Outside rigs powered by old generators, sound systems hanging from trees, a sea of gurning faces glowing under the strobes. In an open field people gather at night in the summer of love to escape the world and…rave. Brothers Gavin and Neville Watson were there, at the peak of the 1989 acid house wave, and they’ve documented the spirit of a generation in Raving '89.

The book is a celebration of the unbound freedom and anarchy of the rave movement, in all its glory. ‘Suddenly these kids who didn’t consider them political were creating this revolution,’ writes Neville. ‘It was more punk than punk ever was.’

Gavin shoots the rebellion, going deep into the crowded dance floor where wide-eyed faces beam into the camera. Friends and strangers alike come together to dance underneath the disco lights and camo nets, and the images show clichés of the 1980s and more – acid wash denim, shoulder pads, bright colours and, of course, big hair.

But style was secondary to this movement, and it’s the smashing of conventions that really comes across. Dynamic and shot at awkward angles, the images capture the intensity and raw energy of the time. Eyes bulging, bodies hunched and fists clenched, the crowd is an army ready to rave in an apocalyptic scene.

In between the pages of gritty black-and-white shots, Gavin and Neville add their comments and anecdotes, adding a poignant depth to the euphoric party scenes. The book pays homage to a time liberated by music and independent thought, a defining moment for a generation.

Published by DJhistory which has also printed Disco Files, art critic Vince Aletti’s history of the 1970s dance phenomenon.
Alex Christofides

Raving '89
£19.95 RRP
ISBN 978-0-9561896-1-5

Image © Beso Uznadze, winner of the portfolio category in the British Journal of Photography’s 2008 International Photography Award.

The deadline to enter BJP’s International Photography Award has been extended to 05 October.

Entries to the award avalanched last week following the announcement of a new sponsor, so BJP has pushed the deadline in response. Robert White is now the sponsor of the portfolio category of the prize, and is offering photographers the chance to win a £5000 voucher. The retailer sells a wide range of professional kit, including the Fujifilm medium format film camera GF670, known in Europe as the Voigtlander Bessa III. The winner could also take a Leica M9 camera, a Canon EOS 5D Mark II or 7D digital SLR, or a Nikon D3x.

The single image category prize remains the Sigma DP2 compact camera, and 30 photographers in this category will also be included in a book produced by Blurb.com.

Both winners’ work will be printed at Spectrum Photographic, one of Europe’s leading fine art labs, and exhibited in a London gallery. The IPA is run by the British Journal of Photography, the oldest photography magazine in the world.

Getty Images and Flickr have united to pay tribute to the passion of photography. Getty Images’ gallery has opened its doors to host an exhibition of photographs licensed through the picture agency’s Flickr collection.

With over 800,000 user accounts, Flickr is one of the largest photo sharing networks bringing together communities of photographers from around the globe. In this exhibition Getty Images wants ‘to show the diversity and range of quality photography on offer at Flickr, showing a range of subjects from family to fantasy’ Tom Hind of Getty Images told Alex Christofides.

Although this is in part directed to commercial clients and aimed to maximise marketing potential, the exhibition also offers photographers a platform to exhibit their work. ‘It’s good for building contacts and you don’t know where the work could lead’ says photographer and contributor Daniel Lee.

The exhibition will continue at Getty Images Gallery, London.

This amateur 3D-movie shows an "editor" hiring a "photographer" for a one-day shoot. Of course, the editor refuses to pay travel expenses, wants to grab all copyrights to the pictures, and will only pay £50 for the whole shoot. We found this hilarious, but a bit of warning, there is quite a bit of fool language (which is to be expected in that kind of situation)...

Let's revue the facts:
1/ AmTrack (the US main train operator) announces a photography contest
2/ Photographer Kerzic takes photographs for AmTrack's photography contest
3/ Amtrack police arrest Kersiz for taking photographs

Here is an hilarious report from Stephen Colbert (at The Colbert Report) about a photographer who was arrested as he was taking photos of trains.

Professional photographer Chase Jarvis has teamed up with Ubermind to try and push the boundaries of camera phone technology. Jarvis has launched Best Camera, a new iPhone application that is supposed to allow users of the iPhone or iPod Touch to shoot, creatively edit using a range of filters, and share their pictures quickly and easily.

Once an image has been selected and edited, Best Camera allows the user to publish on Facebook, Twitter, E-mail and the Best Camera online gallery. The concept of the application came from Jarvis who tried to discover the shortcomings of other iPhone photography applications, he says.