Tufts University's program for photojournalism, documentary studies, and human rights.
The New York Times Lens blog has crowdsourced an interesting project called “A Moment in Time,” which asked readers around the world to take a photograph at the same time on May 2, 2010.
It advises viewers to “make no plans for the rest of the day.” Enjoy!
The Idealist.org career fair is being held at Boston University on February 23.
Many Exposure members, past and present, have done great work while teamed up with nonprofits. If you’re searching for an internship or interested in pitching ideas for collaborations, check it out!
The VII exhibition “Questions Without Answers” is now open at the Tufts University Art Gallery, so if you’re in the area, please check it out.
This Thursday, January 28, the show’s opening will take place at 6:00 PM. More information is available on the IGL website, and you can RSVP at the Facebook event here.
Hope to see you there!
On Tuesday I went to the Martha Coakley victory rally at the Sheraton Boston. Unfortunately for Attorney General Coakley and her supporters, victory was nowhere to be found.
Alice Fordham, a freelance correspondent based in Beirut, paid a visit to Exposure on October 14 and delivered a presentation entitled “How to become a freelance journalist.”
Ms. Fordham discussed her background and the process that led her to living and reporting in the Middle East. Showcasing a fiery English wit that most of us have only ever seen in films, Ms. Fordham grabbed the attention of the room and never let go.
She also presented a rousing slideshow of the five steps to being a foreign correspondent, which is below the cut.
Some of her stories are here:
Christian Science Monitor
US transfers detainees into abusive prison system
Change party shakes Kurdish political system
The Times
Iraqi jubilance at US withdrawal
Nervous Iraqis in still-volatile Baquba
The National
Amal supporters rally in Beirut
Poets and teahouses rise again in Baghdad
Staying in a hotel in Baghdad
Camp Ashraf
The First Post
Waltz with Bashir
Now Lebanon
Iranian-Lebanese relations
Gary Knight passed along a series of articles published by David Campbell about the future of print/journalism. I’m still in the process of reading the articles, but check it out. The author makes a number of good points and carefully unpacks the difference between saving “journalism” and saving “newspapers,” pay walls, media as a product, etc:
City and regional papers in America were purchased by corporations trading on the stock market, which meant shareholders rather than readers became the primary concern of management. Balancing the books to ensure profit meant that journalism was cut, which in turn accelerated the decline in readership as people went elsewhere for news. In recent times, these corporate strategies have produced a further decline in journalism because servicing the massive debts undertaken to finance new acquisitions has required cost cutting on a grand scale.
First, there is the assumption that journalism, as routinely practiced in traditional news organisations, is a public good essential to democracy because of its history of challenging authority. To put it mildly, this is viewing things through rose-tinted lenses. It’s easy to think that each and every news organisation is run by people who see Bernstein and Woodward’s pursuit of the Watergate scandal as a template for daily reporting. But recent history suggests that much reporting promotes the interests of those in power (think about The New York Times cozy coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which subsequently prompted an apology of sorts from the paper) or recycles PR material (see Nick Davies critique of “churnalism” in the UK, and the “10 ugly truths about modern journalism.”). For sure, we need critical journalism more than ever, and there are some good existing examples, but overall it is something to create as much as it is something to protect. With survey’s showing Americans barely trust what they read or see, journalism’s belief in its inherent social value is ill-founded and needs to be re-established.
Check out the posts here (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4).
Lens has a great feature of photos from the 1979 Iranian Revolution by David Burnett.
It’s particularly interesting to see how the images from the nascent revolution back then compare to those from the widely-publicized uprisings this summer, when disputed elections brought thousands of Iranians to the streets to protest. Those protests continue to this day, but since few journalists remain in Iran to report, very little is seen by the rest of the world.
The Chinese artist Lu Lin leans back into a sectioned couch in the corner of his hangar-like studio in Song Zhuang, a traditional village turned artist community to the East of Beijing. The figure of the artist is dwarfed by the towering canvases around the open room: dramatic, mixed media works that mingle traditional Chinese painting formats with total abstraction and sweeps of bright color. It is clear from his studio that Lu does well by his art. Yet, “When people ask me what Chinese contemporary art is like,” the artist says, narrowing his eyes, “I say that China has no contemporary art.”.
