Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 47th on their 2011-2012 Press Freedom Index, down 27 places from the previous year, tied with Argentina and Romania.

“In the space of two months in the United States, more than 25 [journalists] were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police who were quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behaviour, public nuisance or even lack of accreditation,” Reporters Without Borders wrote in their report. The US “owed its fall” to arrests and harassment related to coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the non-profit reporters’ rights group said.

The drop saw the US ranked just above Latvia, and Trinidad and Tobago, which fell 20 places due to a scandal involving the government spying on journalists.

In a statement released along with the index today, Reporters Without Borders noted that “Many media [around the world] paid dearly for their coverage of democratic aspirations or opposition movements…. Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011.”

In North African and Middle East, the Arab uprisings greatly affected the rankings of several nations. In Tunisia and Libya rose in the index as censorious regimes were deposed. Egypt, however, fell 39 places in the index due in part to “The hounding of foreign journalists for three days at the start of February, the interrogations, arrests and convictions of journalists and bloggers by military courts, and the searches without warrants,” the report said.

Syria and Yemen were already lowly ranked, so their crackdowns on demonstrations and journalists only caused them to sink a bit lower. Iran fell in the rankings to 175. China, “which has more journalists, bloggers and cyber-dissidents in prison than any other country,” the report notes, also ranked near the bottom of the index at 174.

Eritrea was the worst nation in the ranking for a fifth straight year, and its Horn of Africa neighbors Somalia and Sudan also received low rankings as part of an East African region where journalists are regularly subjected to violence, censorship and lengthy prison sentences served in awful conditions.

The Press Freedom Index is calculated using a scoring system based on a questionnaire distributed to partner organizations, a network of 150 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.

For the full report and more on the creation of the index, see the full Reporters Without Borders release.

Related: New York Times Photographer Blocked by NYPD
Photogs Arrested in Raid on Occupy Protest at Zuccotti Park

Andrew Hetherington, Andy Anderson, Chris Buck, Mark Zibert, George Simhoni and Derek Shapton are among the more than 40 photographers who have contributed to the silent print auction to be held February 5 to raise money for Heather Morton, the freelance art buyer and popular blogger. In the fall, Morton began two years of chemotherapy for fibromatosis, an aggressive, non-malignant sarcoma.

The event will take place at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, Morton’s home town, on February 5 at 7pm. Photographers Naomi Harris, Daniel Ehrenworth and Brett Gundlock will be showing images from recent projects, and there will also be a raffle for dozens of prizes. Sponsors include Pikto, Agency Access, Westside Studio, Katarina Marinic and others (a full list of sponsors, a look at some of the images for sale and more information can be found on Morton’s blog, where friends and colleagues have been helping with postings).

Tickets are $10, and available via PayPal on Morton’s site to anyone who wants to attend (or just support this effort from afar).

©Peter Rad--From an anniversary campaign for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featured in PDN's Who's Shooting What column.

In the latest installment of PDN’s Who’s Shooting What column, we feature Nigel Parry’s work for the MSNBC “Lean Forward” print campaign,  Peter Lindbergh’s work with actress Gwyneth Paltrow for the Coach spring/summer 2012 campaign, a nude by Emily Shur for an advocacy campaign, plus a lot of other assignment work by photographers from all over the country (not just LA and New York). We also name the ad agencies and creatives behind the assignments for Bally, AOL, VW, Frito-Lay, Cocoa Metro and other clients.

Another special feature of the latest Who’s Shooting What column is our first-ever WSW Quiz, where readers can test their skill at separating advertising fact from fiction.

If you would like to see your advertising work featured in future installments of Who’s Shooting What, follow the submission instructions here for consideration. Please note that WSW is primarily for advertising assignment work. Editorial work is rarely included.

Now, for the fine print: you have to be a PDN subscriber to access the WSW column, which is behind our pay wall. Subscription information is available here.

This video by NPR was honored in the video category of the 2011 PDN Photo Annual. NPR Music’s Project Song challenges musicians to write and record a song in
just two days, then records the results. David Gilkey, John Poole, Bob Boilen and Neil Tevault produced the video.

Moby and collaborator Kelli Scarr finished writing their song so quickly, they wound up recording three different versions of “Gone to Sleep.”
The 2012 PDN Photo Annual is now accepting entries in 12 categories, including video, web sites, photo books, advertising, photojournalism and more.  To learn about prizes, the panel of judges, rules, deadlines (avoid the late fee and enter soon!) or to upload your entries, visit www.pdnphotoannual.com.

Vimeo just announced a new design of its video-sharing service. The main feature of the redesign is a new video player that Vimeo says is twice as large as the previous set-up, making it easier to display video content.

Vimeo says the redesign also gives users the ability to play videos from their personal homepage, improves the overall navigation, and adds more privacy options on your account.

Many of the new features are outlined in the video below. Also, after the jump is a press release about Vimeo’s revamp.

Read the rest of this entry »

An apparent administrative slip-up has stirred an uprising at music and celebrity photo agency Retna, with photographers complaining that the agency is failing to report sales, pay royalties, or respond to calls and e-mails from frustrated contributors. Retna’s CEO acknowledges the problems, but blames them on his predecessors, and has told contributors he is correcting them.

Photographers started comparing notes last week after an agency employee sent notification about the agency’s change of address in New York City. Instead of copying photographers in the blind carbon copy (BCC) field of the e-mail, the agency employee distributed the names and e-mail addresses of dozens of photographers so all could see who had received the e-mail.

Read the full story on PDNOnline.com.

©Annie Leibovitz--From "Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage." Something on TV got Elvis Presley all shook up. Leibovitz took this photo in a storage room at Graceland.

New work by Annie Leibovitz goes on exhibit today at the American Art Museum in Washington, DC., and it’s only distantly related to the celebrity portraiture she’s so famous for:  Leibovitz has turned her camera on the personal effects and ephemera of celebrities from bygone eras, especially notable women.

The exhibition, called “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage,” includes 60 personal images she shot from 2009 through 2011 while traveling around the US and elsewhere. Among the images are landscapes, but the images of things left behind by famous people are the draw.

Those images include a photograph of Louisa May Alcott’s dolls; a close-up of a something-of-hearts playing card signed by Annie Oakley, with a bullet hole that the famous markswoman put through one of the hearts; an Emily Dickinson dress; and Georgia O’Keefe’s pastels. Famous men are also represented: Leibovitz includes a photograph of TV set that Elvis Presley shot through with a large-caliber bullet sometime in the 1970s.

Leibovitz is a celebrity herself because of her commercial portraits of so many icons of pop culture.  But she has published and exhibited several personal projects in the past, notably images of her parents and her partner, the late Susan Sontag, and compiled much of it in her book “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005.”

© Lauren Greenfield, from "The Queen of Versailles"

The Sundance Film Festival, the 11-day festival of independent films, kicks off today in Park City, Utah, with a roster that includes documentaries by two photographers-turned-filmmakers.

“The Queen of Versailles,” a documentary by Lauren Greenfield, which will debut on the opening night of the Festival, has already been touted as a must-see at the Festival. In the film, Greenfield, whose 2006 documentary “Thin” also premiered at Sundance, documented a time-share developer and his wife as they attempt to build the biggest house in America, and then struggle in the economic downturn. The subject of the film, David A. Siegel, has already brought legal action—not about the movie, but about the wording of the press release for the film, which claimed his timeshare business had “collapsed.”

Also debuting at Sundance, though not included in the competition for festival prizes, is “About Face: The Supermodels, Then and Now,” by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Greenfield-Sanders expanded a piece he shot for Vanity Fair, shooting video interviews with former supermodels Jerry Hall, Carmen Dell’Orefice, Christy Turlington, Paulina Porizkova, Beverly Johnson and others, who discuss the issue of age in the beauty industry.

The trailer shows that all the former models still look pretty damned good. Yet Rossellini, for one, laughs that she’s no longer invited to A list parties; her daughter is.

Related story
Lauren Greenfield Sued for Defamation by Documentary Subject

Was the photographer blind, inattentive, or just following the, ah, brief?

Somewhere, a photographer has been scolded–or worse–for a catalogue image that embarrassed his or her client.

The image in question, for La Redoute, a French clothing company, shows happy kids frolicking on the beach in bathing suits–with a naked man emerging from the water in the background. The company removed the image from its Web site and apologized publicly after some shocked customers complained.

A BBC report about that apology notes that the error was “compounded by the fact that La Redoute provided a magnifying glass so that people could examine the beachwear close-up.”

This piece of news made the viral rounds a couple of weeks ago, so perhaps you’ve already heard about it. But we wanted to point out the silver lining: There are lessons to be learned from the unfortunate mistakes of others. In this case, they include:

–When location scouting for a kids’ catalogue shoot, avoid nude beaches.
–If someone on set says, “There’s a nude guy in the background, but we can fix that in post,” don’t just say, “Yeah, yeah” and forget about it.
–Have someone review your images for nude guys (and other glitches you’ve tuned out) before you send them to the client.

The magnifying glass raises pesky questions, though. Was the nude man really an error, we wonder? Or was he planted intentionally in a perverse kind of “Find Elmo” game–that came complete with a magnifying glass–in order to generate publicity for the company?

So that brings us to Lesson #4: If a client asks you to plant a nude guy in a catalogue image, go ahead and oblige them. Just ask them to leave your name out of it, so when they send their public apology to the BBC, it doesn’t look like you screwed up.