Sexual Warfare: Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is an incredibly moving and engaging multimedia story from Kate Geraghty, a photojournalist with the Sydney Morning Herald. Kate has rightly won the UN Media Award for best photojournalism last night in Melbourne.
Kudos to Kate.

For a decade I have been documenting fishermen around the world as a personal project. As the ocean’s fish stocks continue to be depleted by over-fishing, I want to document those whose lives and cultures depend on fishing, and how they are dealing with the impact that it has on their local economies and way of life.

Minjerribah Fishermen is a story about a day in the life of the fishermen on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke) Island, state of Queensland, Australia.The fishermen are mostly members of the Gurenpul clan, who historically are fishermen and oysterers of the large sand island. The fishing season runs from mid-April until late August. In the past, fishermen would swim out into the waves, dragging nets out around schools of fish – a treacherous job as there are always bigger fish (such as sharks) hunting the smaller ones – as time and technology progressed, they eventually moved to rowboats and now, jet-boats in the effort to haul in the elusive catch.

Once the boats corral the fish in the nets, tractors move in a zig-zag pattern to haul in the live bounty. The usual catch is flathead, though mackerel and today’s catch, Taylor, are also harvested. The men have special permission from the government to fish the surf off of The Point, on the north-eastern tip of the island.

Those who continue to eulogize the craft of documentary photography be warned – the newly-established Centre for Documentary Practice is bent on making you eat dirt.

Based in Australia at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, the CDP has some broad and bold plans – not the least of which is to host the world’s first online journalism and documentary practice conference, October 15. The centre acts to bridge the often-chasm-like gap between those who work in the field and those who work through institutions, writing in its mission statement that it seeks to, “promote a community of practitioners within the professional and academic worlds.”
Speakers at the October 15th online conference include: Paul Fusco, Ed Kashi, Jodi Bieber, Marcus Bleasdale, Shahidul Alam, Gary Knight, Robin Hammond, Adam Ferguson, Travis Beard, Michael Coyne, Masaru Goto, Jack Picone and Megan Lewis.
The CDP has published a multi-time-zone schedule so participants can pick up a session in their part of the world. You must register to be a part of this historic conference.
Register HERE.

I am currently exploring public space and how people react towards each other while in it. My project asks, is this natural behavior, or are people modifying their behavior – do they know they’re being watched?

Having photographed the oppressive panelaks of Bratislava and Prague, I find similarities in modern Western cities. Similar to Bentham’s Panopticon, the CBD of Brisbane is replete with CCTV cameras, recording – or not recording, intending to deter crime but nevertheless infusing a sense of constant surveillance onto the pedestrians walking across their angles of view.

Intersections is where people meet, where the spaces between people dissolve and their shadows touch, and where the presence of CCTV cameras suggest constant surveillance.

“Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism.”

-Susan Sontag, On Photography

I was Here is an on-going project that explores and documents the role of the tourist photographer as the determiner of reality, the marker of existence. Each image taken by the tourist photographer is a statement of authenticity – this is my moment, this is my space, I was here.

This act of deliberate documentation by the individual is rampant in nearly all societies – even in camera-phobic Australia, where those sporting professional cameras are sometimes met with suspicion and at times, hostility, yet high-Megapixel-count smartphones, compact cameras and digital video recorders are a must-have symbol of status. Both reactions to the camera and the image attest to the belief in the power of the image to reflect reality. It’s almost like a soul-snatching device.

What I wonder is, if we didn’t take pictures to document our vacations, our leisure time, our families, our lives, would we have lived less authentically? Would our experiences be less real because there are no photographs? I have acquaintances who do not possess baby photographs or even toddler photographs of themselves and this disturbs them. How did I exist, they wonder. Was I adopted? Why was I not important enough to have been made authentic?

Fog on the Charles Bridge

I know there is no real Shangri-La, but I always harbored the thought that maybe, maybe, Prague would be the closest thing to it, should I ever venture to return to my old Bohemian haunts. Working there in the ’90s as a photojournalist was exhilarating, though sometimes frustrating, but it never failed to amaze. I landed there in February of ‘96, on a day that a bomb threat had cleared the airport, and as I stepped around the police tape and looked for a familiar face, I had a hunch that I was in for an adventure. A photographer named Vlad picked me up in his grandfather’s old Skoda 120. Along with him came Matt, an American photographer who we dropped off at the castle to photograph the long queue of mourners as they shuffled through the courtyards of Prague castle to pay respects to the recently deceased Olga Havlova, first lady and wife of dissident playright turned president, Vaclav Havel.

Prague treated me well. I worked alongside some incredibly talented photojournalists and writers for nearly eight years. We broke a lot of stories. Some stories broke our hearts. But it was all good – any obstacles were overcome with optimism and a good dose of naivete.

I stayed on until 2003. By then, the country had a new president and a new place within the European Union. For reasons of my own, I’d decided it was time to move on. It was a melancholy departure, but something I needed to do. I’m not one of those ex-pats who found they couldn’t live outside Prague (watch the mocumentary Rex-Patriates) and returned to normalize themselves into daily Bohemian life. I found a happy place in Australia. I don’t regret leaving.

So – Shangri-La. I returned to Prague for three weeks in July, with no expectations. I knew it had changed, and it wasn’t just the proliferation of Starbucks that had tilted the Bohemian kingdom on its axis. The optimism of the ’90s was long-gone, replaced by a begrudging sense of fate and a prescription to consumerism to mask the onset of middle-class ennui. Prague is over, I thought. It’s just another European city.

But try selling all that hum-bug to 20 Australian visual media students. They would have no part of it. They’ve run off and found their own adventures, their own stories, their own bit of Prague. It’s been great seeing the old city through new eyes, new approaches. And it’s been fun introducing them to old favourites, like breakfasts at the Cafe Louvre and coffees at the Slavia. It was great coaching them through their first night shoots at Prague Castle – nowhere in Australia could they confront themselves with such grand architecture – so many choices for lines and form to photograph. Simple things like the roof of the main train station staggered them with its detail. But it wasn’t all travel photography. They each dug into a story, working alongside Czech researchers, finding out first hand about the country’s recent history, from StB (secret police) files to Holocaust survivors and the resurgence of Jewish culture in Prague. They really got into it.

I’m glad I returned, and I’m glad I brought some new blood with me. Though they’ll never experience the Prague that was so famously coined by my late editor, Alan Levy, “The Left Bank of the ’90s,” they’ve experienced a new Prague, and made something of it. I’m looking forward to re-discovering the city again. Thanks guys.

Yesterday morning I received a Facebook notification from the Kansas City Star (which I’m a friend of) which carried a link to TMZ that reported that Michael Jackson had just suffered a heart-attack and died.

Being too early to even start contemplating going to work (I’m an early riser), I began to follow the story – not on Twitter, but on Facebook. It turned out to be quite a story, and not just because the “King of Pop” had died.

TMZ called the death first. Most Australian newspaper URLs continued reporting he had suffered a reported heart-attack and was rushed to hospital. But slowly, via my network on Face Book, friends from around the globe started confirming that the death had been posted on “legitimate” news sites. At that point, the Internet did a funny thing I haven’t experienced for almost eight years. It slowed down.

Eight years ago was 9/11. I was summoned back to work on the first day of a 10-day vacation (sometimes it sucks being a journalist) to organize visual coverage for the paper. After the first reports of one plane hitting a World Trade Centre tower, we found that news sites were taking longer and longer to load. Eventually, we had to choose the low-graphics version of the BBC to get anything to come up at all. That day, the world-wide web virtually came to a stand-still.

Yesterday morning, for a brief time, the ‘net suffered a deja-vu. I commented on the phenomenon on Face Book. My friends across the globe confirmed that their news sites had slowed down considerably.

Then one journalist friend in London piped up with some interesting statistics just tweeted (twitted) by Slate’s Jack Shafer. My friend wrote, “media commentator Jack Shafer of Slate tweeted last night that 15% of all tweets mentioned Michael Jackson. Swine flu and Iran never went over 5%. 7 out of the 10 trending topics on Twitter as I write are Michael Jackson. (Farrahs is #4, Iran is #5 and #9)…”

Australia’s Channel 9 extended broadcast of the Today Show by an hour to continue live coverage of the MJ story. But even they were relying on Twitter for updates. Which might account for their entertainment reporter’s erroneous reporting of American actor Jeff Goldblum’s death in New Zealand.

Happily, like most Australians, I had to get to work. Tearing myself away from the computer wasn’t difficult. I would miss my friends’ comments and anecdotes, but the news URLs were all loading faster, and I felt like we’d ridden out the storm. Driving through Brisbane, I listed to MJ’s music on virtually every radio station but classical (but I can’t be sure that someone hasn’t adapted Thriller for a string quartet). Last night the TV tabloid shows featured MJ specials. But by then I was knackered. I went to bed early.

Yesterday, a journalist friend in London wrote, “I can just picture the compositors frantically pulling the red swimsuit off tomorrow’s front pages… if there are compositors any more…” This morning, a journalist friend from Baltimore wrote, “happy to report that there are TWO Iran stories on the front of the Wash. Post. Sure, MJ is above the fold, but not as big as I expected. And even Farrah made it on the front, albeit just a little pic at the bottom with an obit teaser, but still…”

When I get to the airport I’ll see how our press plays it.

UPDATE: In the meantime, here’s Newseum’s top 10 newspaper covers for the day. Including one designed by my mate Ginger at the Vancouver Sun!

The event, incorporating a slide night entitled “Juice,” was launched by Reuters photographer, David Gray, via an iChat link from Sri Lanka (which, according to Gray, was also heating up – watch for his war images in the press this week). Gray showed his folio of images that won him the Nikon Walkley Press Photographer of the Year award (Australia’s version of a Pulitzer) for photojournalism last year.

Following Gray, 19 Queensland photojournalists took to the stage to present their latest works. The range in stories demonstrated a vast spread of photojournalistic style, aesthetic and focus. From Giulio Sagin’s feature on animal rescuers, to Jack Tran’s continuing coverage of the harrowing legacy of Agent Orange, there was something to keep every one of the 120+ audience engaged for three hours of visual storytelling.

Next up for the Pineapples are plans for a book, a workshop and more Juice nights. The PPC will be exhibiting at a national photography event next year. The new website is sponsored by Bunton.