From ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s acquittal to protests over Eric Garner’s chokehold death verdict and the launch of NASA’s unmanned exploration spacecraft Orion to the White House’s Christmas decorations, TIME presents the best pictures of the week.
Face to Face with Europe’s Military Cadets
Paolo Verzone's newest book saw him travel to 20 military academies from Portugal to Spain over five years to photograph cadets.
One of the most striking things, Paolo Verzone says, about photographing military cadets is that they really know how to pose. In fact, they are so good at it that sometimes, when he was taking their pictures, he wondered if they would ever stop.
“They are able to stay still for four seconds without moving,” Verzone adds. “That’s a long time, and it was pretty amazing. I actually had to light them less, it was my secret photographic weapon.”
It’s understandable, he continues, because from very early on in their careers many are trained to remain still during drills. Military personnel make even more capable subjects than models, apparently. Who knew?
This discovery came as Verzone was working on his newest book Cadets. The project stemmed from a short assignment for an Italian magazine in 2009 (for which he was sent to photograph French military personnel), and saw him travel to 20 military academies from Portugal to Spain over five years. The aim? To understand the military “soul” of European countries.
“I wanted to see these places, the [military bases] in these countries, many of which were once fighting against each other,” Verzone says.
It wasn’t always easy: Not every military academy replied to his requests. And even when they did, it took a long time for him, as a civilian, to get permission to go inside. And even then he was rarely left alone. But it was something he wouldn’t give up on.
“I wanted to see who these young people are. To go beyond the idea of the one who gets in the army and stays there for life,” he says. “Now, military academies are very different places; you can get a complete degree, and then, for many, you can get out. Times are changing.”
Paolo Verzone is a Paris-based photographer who has been published in TIME, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent, and The Guardian among others. Cadets is available now.
Richard Conway is reporter/producer for TIME LightBox.
Paul Moakley, who edited this photo essay, is TIME’s Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise.
Photojournalism Daily: Dec. 5, 2014
Today’s daily Photojournalism Links collection highlights Andrew Quilty‘s work on Pakistani refugees in Afghanistan. Some 100,000 civilians fled the Pakistani military’s offensive against insurgents in North Waziristan this past summer by seeking shelter across the border in Afghanistan. More than 3,000 families ended up at the Gulan Refugee Camp in Gurbuz District in Khost, only to find out another danger was lurking underneath their feet. It turned out the camp is located above a decades old minefield from the time muhajideen were fighting the Russians. Quilty’s compelling photographs capture these unfortunate refugees haunted by weapons of an old war.
Andrew Quilty: Finding Refuge on a Mine Field (Foreign Policy)
William Daniels: Fighting Over the Spoils of War in Central African Republic (Al Jazeera America) These photographs show how natural riches play a part in the conflict often seen purely in ethnic terms | Part of a series of posts on Central African Republic.
Best Photos of the Year 2014 (Reuters)
War’s effect on peace is examined in new Tate show (Phaidon) Tate Modern curator Shoair Mavlian talks about the new exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography.
Elena Chernyshova (Verve Photo) The World Press Photo award-winning Russian photographer writes about one of her photographs from Norilsk.
Photojournalism Links is a compilation of the most interesting photojournalism found on the web, curated by Mikko Takkunen, Associate Photo Editor at TIME. Follow him on Twitter @photojournalism.
Photographing the White House Christmas Decorations With an iPhone 6
White House photographer Brooks Kraft used his iPhone to document this year's Christmas decorations at the presidential residence
Photographer Brooks Kraft has been covering the White House since 2000, and over the years, he’s had plenty of opportunities to document the unveiling of Christmas decorations at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This year, however, he decided to mix things up a bit — and shot the event with Apple’s new iPhone 6.
“I’ve covered this event about 10 times before,” he told TIME. “It’s a very light event, obviously, and the president is not even there. So there’s no real, intrinsic news value, which is a good opportunity to try out new gear that I might use later in more news-oriented environments.”
The unveiling also offers Kraft and other journalists the rare opportunity to walk freely around the grounds of the presidential residence, “which,” he notes, “you normally don’t get to do.”
With his mind set on getting a different sort of imagery than in previous years, Kraft chose to shoot in the square format with an iPhone 6 Plus. “I thought that format would work well with the formality of the architecture in the White House, and it was a different way to look at this event — compositionally.”
The results, he feels, were good. “There are a lot of mixed lights in these rooms and there’s also [natural] light, and the new iPhones do a really good job of balancing colors right out of the camera. Kraft also likes to shoot with an iPhone because it allows him to work rapidly. “The iPhone has a lot of depth-of-field, which allows me to shoot the [picture] and move around quickly, which worked in this situation because we were sort of ushered through the rooms and didn’t have a lot of time. I wanted to photograph most of the spaces with few people in them, so the window of opportunity in which to shoot was brief.”
Kraft uses both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but in this case, he wanted to test the larger model’s new image stabilization technology, which is supposed to help in low-light situations. “Some of the rooms are quite dark, and I used the 6 Plus for that. And the larger screen also helps. There were situations when I was holding the camera above my head to try to make vertical lines more parallel on the edges of the frame, and in that case having the larger screen helped me [compose the shot].”
Kraft says the iPhone won’t replace his professional DSLR. “I look at the iPhone as another piece of equipment. But the majority of my professional work is shot on a DSLR.” Nevertheless, the iPhone can help in certain situations. “I notice that people just don’t react the same way [when you’re using an iPhone]. If you are looking to capture something candid, people are so used to seeing mobile devices that their reaction time is slower. You have a better chance of getting the shot, and that was the case at the White House.”
Brooks Kraft’s five tips for shooting with an iPhone:
- Make sure you get the best exposure you can when you’re shooting, because it’s pretty hard to correct a bad exposure on the phone. It’s worth taking the extra minute to get it right.
- Don’t use the flash. With steady hands, the iPhone is frequently capable of capturing images in low light situations, and the results often look better then with the flash. But in some cases, you don’t have a choice.
- Don’t use the zoom function because it’s not an optical zoom. It’s just blowing up the pixels you have.
- Pay attention to the image settings of the app you’re using to photograph. Some will downsize your files. I use the native camera app because I’m sure to have a clean, maximum resolution file that I can go back to.
- Think about what you do with your images once you’ve shot them. There’s a tendency when you’re using a mobile device to let your images sit there instead of organizing them, archiving them or printing them. I really think that when people look back at their visual histories, they [might find big gaps in their archives].
Brooks Kraft is a freelance photographer based in Washington D.C. and a regular contributor to TIME.
Marisa Schwartz, who edited this photo essay, is an Associate Photo Editor at TIME.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent
Go Behind TIME’s Mark Zuckerberg Cover With Photographer Ian Allen
When TIME magazine asked photographer Ian Allen to follow Mark Zuckerberg to India, not everything went as planned
When a photo shoot doesn’t go according to plan, the “only thing you can do is to rely on what you’ve done in the past,” says Ian Allen. The San Francisco-based photographer had to do just that when TIME assigned him to shoot this week’s magazine cover story, which features Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.
In early October, Zuckerberg was in India as an ambassador for Internet.org, a global partnership “dedicated to making affordable internet access available to the two thirds of the world not yet connected,” according to Facebook.
“Initially I was supposed to shoot him giving this talk in New Delhi at a conference for Facebook, and then we were going to go to Chandauli, a village in northern India, where it was going to be just him and I, and we would get around one hour to take photos as he wandered around this computer lab.”
But when local police tipped the press off to his imminent arrival, reporters and photographers swarmed the young CEO, and Allen’s hour with Zuckerberg became 45 minutes, then 30 minutes, and then just five minutes. “In this kind of situation, you have to prioritize the things you think will work best and you try to pre-light as much as you can.”
In this particular case, Allen was able to set up his gear in a small concrete room within the local school. “His people shuttle him in that little room and that’s where the cover shot was taken,” he says.
In another portrait of Zuckerberg, this time with kids, Allen also had to deal with local photographers and people who had been tipped of his presence. “Around 250 people showed up. It was a bit chaotic, but the whole time I was just hoping my images were in focus.”
They were.
Ian Allen is a San Francisco-based photographer.
Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent
When Photographers Become Self-Publishing Companies
An increasing number of photographers are bypassing traditional photo book publishers, setting up, instead, their own imprints
When Josh Lustig started photographing the wild and grubby Hackney Marshes in London on his way to and from work, he never thought it would lead him to oversee a photobook publishing venture. Yet, a year later, there he was, at the Polycopies book fair held during the Paris Photo photography trade show, presenting the releases of Tartaruga Books. As he recounted his story, Juan Valbuena, standing in the booth next to his, nodded his head. The founder of Phree, who printed Carlos Spottorno’s award-winning 2013 photo book The Pigs, Valbuena also launched his small press as a way to give his own work more visibility.
Progressively, photographers who choose to self-publish are taking it to the next level. They’re turning one-time hits into more permanent structures that release works by other artists. Many have chosen this avenue as a way to snub the major publishers who are increasingly asking their authors to bring not only a great body of work, but also a check.
“I find it insane and unacceptable that renowned publishing houses are asking photographers to come up with half, if not all, of the funds needed to produce a book. This comes across as a lack of commitment,” says Lustig. “Investing in a project shows that you believe in it.” Earlier this year, the British photographer partnered up with Max Bondi, founder of Tartaruga records to open a photobook division. “Combining forces with a similar minded record company that has a small but dedicated fan-base meant that I was able to reach another audience. And, having a partner that’s not from the photo community adds another interesting perspective,” he says.
His contemporaries, Alex Webb and Lewis Chaplin, co-founders of Fourteen Nineteen, also noticed the lack of risks established publishers take. They see their collaborative project as a way to promote work that could otherwise go unnoticed. “We are asking an audience, and the artists we work with, to take seriously images made by those in the early stages of their career,” they say. Through trial and error, their publishing endeavors, which began as a blog featuring single images from different photographers worldwide, has helped wunderkinds like Harry Mitchell, Sean Vegezzi, Susanna Zak, Will Adler, Nathanael Turner emerge. “The first volumes you make aren’t going to be the best. When making books, you learn most from failures,” they explain.
For these photographers-turned-publishers, the logic goes as follows: if they’re going to spend thousands of dollars to see their series turned into a book, they might as well pay for the freedom to do it the way they want. And, if they’re going to jump through the many hoops that come with publishing work independently, they might just as well do it twice.
“We created Riot books to produce Ilkin Huseynov’s opus Muhit. Once the system was in place, making the next title became easier, and the next easier still,” says Veronica Fieiras, an Argentinean photographer who met her Azerbaijani colleague Huseynov in Madrid. Due to their upbringing in politically tumultuous countries, the pair is focusing on work with a social justice agenda. “We’re growing quite organically. We follow our intuition and try not to lock ourselves into a certain intellectual framework. We try to stay free,” she says. Their most recent release, the seventh in only one year, Negatives Are Stored, had them craft a wooden box and hand-glue ‘carte de visite’ portraits from old Ukraine on it.
Setting up an official structure has the benefit of adding credence to what can come across as a wild gamble. When, in 2012, Valbuena decided to transform his 10 years of drifting around the Mediterranean Sea into a coherent volume entitled Noray he created Phree. Doing so allowed him to partner up with La Kursala, an initiative by the Cadiz University in Spain that is largely responsible for the recent boom in Spanish photobooks. “I was pleasantly surprised to see that if you go at it intelligently, are ready to put in the work and are passionate, it is easy to craft yourself a place within the market,” he says. Phree now boasts 13 publications.
A major challenge remains devising a distribution scheme that can turn a profit, or at the very least cover costs.
Last year, when Vasantha Yogananthan produced Piémanson under the Chose Commune label, which he founded with three associates, it cost him about $30 per copy. Traditionally, the publishing industry would have him multiply that by five in order to be profitable once middlemen have taken their shares. “We wanted the book to stay affordable, so we priced it at $50. We skipped the distributor to avoid their charges and built strong relationships with booksellers. Given the number of photobooks released yearly, they have become influential tastemakers. Even then, once you factor in their 40% commission, that leaves us with a profit of $1.25,” explains the French artist.
To finance their projects, photographers turn to other tactics: from offering higher priced limited edition that come with a print to setting up direct-purchase, print on-demand or pre-purchase options.
But, more importantly, owning your small press means that you’re allowing others to benefit from these stratagems. “When I wanted to publish Live Through This, a project I had just completed, I thought about doing a Kickstarter campaign,” says Tony Fouhse. “Upon further reflection, I decided that although crowdfunding is great, it’s also a little too selfish. You raise the funds, release your book and send it to the folks who supported you. It all seemed too much like a closed loop.” Instead, Fouhse created Straylight Press as a way to create a community of like-minded people. “I set up a website and opened for business. For me, it’s no-brainer: if you have an online store that sells photobooks, you should also help to create books by other photographers. That way you get to support the work of others.”
Today, Straylight Press, which launched two years ago, has 11 opus by seven different authors under its belt, many of which are now sold-out. “The first surprise – a good one – was that we’ve found an audience and that we actually sell books,” says Fouhse. “The other surprise – a bad one – is that we don’t always sell as many books as we’d like. If Facebook likes all turned into sales, we’d be laughing.”
Laurence Butet-Roch is a freelance writer, photo editor and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is a member of the Boreal Collective.
Read next: TIME Picks the Best Photobooks of 2014
One of Instagram’s Most Popular Users is Deleting All of His Photos
Richard Koci Hernandez plans to delete more than 1,000 images he posted on Instagram
“Out with the old; in with the new.” This is the way that one of the best-known photographers on Instagram, Richard Koci Hernandez, chose to announce that he will delete all of his images from the photo-sharing social media platform on Dec. 6.
But though the move may surprise some, it has been brewing for some time in Hernandez, and ties in with his firm desire to start fresh.
“What I really wanted to do was a lot more dramatic,” he told TIME. “I wanted to delete the originals as well and move on. I was kind of standing on this photographic cliff and my wife and friends pulled me back from that cliff.”
Nourished by the idea that photography should have a finite lifespan, Hernandez says he felt dismayed that the Internet didn’t “really respect time in the way I think it should.”
“Of course, who am I to impose rules on the Internet,” he adds. “I don’t want to sound too pretentious but I’ve always felt that my photographs shouldn’t live forever. But it seems to me that the Internet is increasingly allowing things to live forever.”
Hernandez likens his move to that of a young social media user looking to expunge his or her past. “A teenager on Facebook or Twitter is going to say and do a lot of dumb, immature things. Does he want to be remembered by these things? Probably not. In the same way, my photography and my work on Instagram is an evolution of who I am as a photographer. And on my Instagram feed, there’s some immature work there, and it’s there forever.”
Hernandez also felt his success online had prevented him from experimenting with photography. “When you have a large following, you begin to feel a particular sense of responsibility,” he says. “You begin to feel – I’ll be honest – a pressure for what you do. Sometimes I felt that maybe I couldn’t explore other avenues of photography and share them because that wasn’t what my audience wanted.”
And while he feels photography has grown in importance, with a lot more people taking it seriously, he also believes that photography has been devalued. “I think I began to take it for granted,” he says. “When there was a Henri Cartier-Bresson show in my local gallery, it was an experience. The show was only on for a certain time and then it was gone. If I wanted to hold on to that experience, I could buy a print or a poster. But the experience itself was over. Instagram doesn’t [offer] that experience. I began to take the work of other photographers for granted because I felt like it was always going to be there.”
But the Berkeley-based photographer doesn’t plan on abandoning Instagram. “I love Instagram,” he says. “It’s been the single, greatest thing to ever happen to my photographic career. I love the community; I love following other photographers; I love answering people’s questions. I’ll step away from it for a little while, but I will be back. It might be in a week or in a month. I really don’t know.”
Richard Koci Hernandez is a California-based photographer and an Assistant Professor of New Media at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Follow him on Instagram @koci.
Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent
See What Vintage Miami Was Like
Brenda Ann Kenneally's portraits of Miami's eccentric past speak of the city's economic and racial divisions
When Brenda Ann Kenneally started working as a photographer in Miami in the late 1980s, it was a very different place: there was no sign of the now famous murals in the old warehouse district of Wynwood, rents were easier on the pocket and much of the now-booming Design District was lined with semi-abandoned buildings.
It was there that she got her start photographing Florida locals on the streets and in their homes. Over a seven-year period, she produced striking, even challenging, shots that spoke of the city’s economic and racial divisions. And while the pictures, she says, may not have been her most technically proficient, they captured the “soul” of the place. Later, Kenneally moved to Bushwick, New York and began photographing on the streets there too. It would be these images that would bring her to national attention for chronicling life before societal shifts gripped parts of the New York neighborhood.
On a return trip to the Sunshine State, though, she soon discovered that pretty much the same thing was happening to her old stomping ground. The dreaded “g-word,” as she calls it, gentrification, had taken over Miami. And today, she feels her old work has become ever more relevant.
“The change is huge. I actually wound up having a photo show of my pictures from Bushwick in one of the warehouses I used to live in,” Kenneally says. “It had been turned into a gallery. The area [I lived in] is now called Midtown and there’s a PetSmart.”
Miami has been undoubtedly transformed by the presence of Art Basel, the annual art fair held in the city since 2002. Indeed, the festival’s effect on the city is often likened to the economic transformation of Bilbao, Spain spurred by the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Now, Kenneally — working with Giselle Devera, a former owner of Gallery I/D, and production assistant Sean MacDonald — has produced the installation Vintage Miami Photographs, 1939-2003. The aim? To remind locals what Miami used to be like and to let visitors see the history of the streets they walk down. To achieve this, she spent months collecting photographs of the city spanning the years 1930 to 2003 — often featuring locals in areas such as Overtown and Downtown Miami — and she will now project them onto the sides of buildings at the Grub Stake Good Works Thrift store, the Lotus House Shelter and the Downtown Art House during the four-day long festival.
“I thought it would be a statement without beating people over the head,” she says. “It’s undeniable that as these neighborhoods change some of the people don’t fit and they disappear. You know how they say ‘when you photograph someone you take a piece of their soul?’ [In a sense] these souls are sort of in my care now. My mission is to say that the life that is on any street at any time is vital.”
“It’s always good to know who walked on the ground before we got here,” Kenneally adds. “I want to document the souls [that] these neighborhoods were built upon. The history of them is really important.”
Brenda Ann Kenneally is a photographer based in New York.
Richard Conway is reporter/producer for TIME LightBox.
Paul Moakley, who edited this photo essay, is TIME’s Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise.
No, Facebook Is Not Planning to Sell Your Images
Photographers -- amateurs and professionals alike -- are concerned about a notice of Facebook's supposed privacy changes
After Facebook publicized its intentions to simplify its privacy policy starting in January, a growing number of users have opposed the changes by sharing a private note on their accounts that purports to protect their ownership of their information and photographs.
The notice, which has been circulating for more than two years, typically reads: “On this date, in response to new guidelines on Facebook, pursuant to articles l. 111, 112 and 113 of the code of intellectual property, I declare that my rights are connected to all of my personal data drawings, paintings, pictures, texts, music, etc… Posted on my profile, before this date, now and forever. My consent is necessary for commercial use of what is stated previously is required at all times.”
That message, however, is useless, argues Mickey Osterreicher, General Counsel for the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). “That message pops up from time to time, and we try to tell people that posting it doesn’t do anything,” he says. “People really don’t understand copyright, and that’s a problem.”
The latest wave of posts came within hours of Facebook emailing its users its privacy changes, with many photographers — amateurs and professionals alike — arguing that the social network could start commercializing their images.
They are wrong, says Matt Steinfeld, Facebook’s Privacy Communications Manager. “The passage in our terms of service that covers your information and your content has not changed,” he tells TIME. “We can’t sell property that we don’t have. You own the things you share on Facebook.”
By signing up to the social media site, users agree to grant Facebook “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.” This license, however, ends “when you delete your [Intellectual Property] content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”
Steinfeld argues that this license is required to allow Facebook to show that particular content on its platform. “But we can’t turn around and sell [it] without your knowledge or permission,” he adds.
“The issue is that the word ‘use’ is a vague and broad term. It could mean just about anything,” says Osterreicher. “In this case, [this license] only grants Facebook the right to use your content, so it might be hard for a third party to use your images. But it still opens the question of what Facebook plans to use that intellectual property for.”
Facebook, however, has gotten used to this perceived uncertainty, which regularly drives users to debate the social site’s commercial intentions.
“I think people are rightly interested in making sure that they have ownership and control over the things they are sharing,” Steinfeld adds. “When people see things [that allude to the fact] that it might not be the case, they are understandably worried. But, the fact of the matter is that it’s pretty clear-cut. There’s no question that people own the things they share on Facebook.”
Documenting Drug Addiction in Kabul
It took 12 visits for photographer Souvid Datta to gain the trust of drug users in Kabul, Afghanistan
Following his recent graduation from the University College of London, Souvid Datta’s first assignment was in Kabul, Afghanistan. In between his time photographing scenes of contemporary Afghan life, the 23-year-old photographer set out to work on a personal project, documenting heroin addiction in the country Afghanistan.
In Kabul, the Pul-e Sukhta bridge has become the meeting point for hundreds of drug dealers and addicts. Datta struggled, at first, to gain their trust, but, after numerous failed attempts with various fixers, Datta tried a new technique.
“I started going back alone, trying to speak to addicts above and around the bridge in Urdu,” he says. “I did this without my camera out.” It’s only after his 12th visit that he started bringing his camera out with him.
In a country ravaged by decades of war, more than one million of Afghans, rich and poor, are addicted to drugs, according to a United Nations report. “Narcotics are becoming a sad kind of equalizer in the sense that you get middle class government workers, mothers, students, and the very poor people from the streets all going down under this bridge to use drugs,” says Datta.
After meeting and documenting some of these drug users, Datta followed Afghan National Police officers and visited a treatment clinic in Kabul where people are offered therapy and given food, clothes and medication. Yet, he says, because of a lack of resources, there’s no follow-up in terms of employment opportunities and counseling. “As soon as people leave, they relapse. That’s no more obvious than in the center itself where you see people coming in for their fourth or fifth time.”
Souvid Datta is documentary photographer based in London.
Adam Glanzman is a contributor to TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter @glanzpiece
