The following video by photographers/filmmakers Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton of Four Corners Media profiles four young women who participated in the 2011 Egyptian revolution: a student, a cancer researcher, an art curator and a journalist advocate. Garen and Carleton are currently working on a longer documentary titled If, a coming-of-age story about young women and their experiences during the revolution. (If, which Garen and Carleton hope to debut this Fall, will include some scenes and characters from this video. (Garen and Carleton have also launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.com to continue filming in Egypt as their characters stories unfold.)

© The Tiziano Project

The Tiziano Project of Los Angeles, which supports online storytelling by citizen journalists in conflict, post conflict and underreported regions of the globe, has won a $200,000 Knight News Challenge grant to improve its award-winning 360 Kurdistan web site. The Tiziano Project was one of 16 winners splitting $4.7 million in grants from the Knight News Challenge, which supports new uses of web-based journalism. The Knight Foundation announced the winners on June 22.

The mission of 360 Kurdistan is to offer “a robust and complete understanding of life, culture and news in present-day Kurdistan.” Its site currently features slide shows and videos by several Iraqi journalists and Western mentors, including executive director and photographer Jon Vidar. The 360 Kurdistan team will use its Knight News Challenge grant to improve its web site using HTML5, and increase the sharing of its content on tablet and mobile devices. According to the Knight Foundation announcement, “The project will also build an interactive map to serve as a hub for projects developing similar sites in their communities and enable direct communication between these communities and their audiences.”

The full list of grant winners can be found here.

How To Impress Females (In The Bird World) from Tim Laman on Vimeo.

This multimedia piece by wildlife photojournalist Tim Laman about the highly adapted mating rituals of Birds of Paradise and Bowerbirds, both of which live in the New Guinea region, was a hit when it premiered at the recent LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA. Laman, who is also a field biologist, is currently nearing completion on a major, cross-platform project about Birds of Paradise. To see more of his work visit timlaman.com.

Christopher Anderson opened the morning program of Masters Talks today at LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA, in front of a packed crowd at the Paramount Theater downtown.

Anderson is exhibiting his latest body of work, “Son,” at the festival. The project focuses on his family as his young son grows from a baby into a toddler and his father battles illness.

During his talk Anderson called the project, which shows his wife and son, his father, and landscapes and cityscapes, “the most important work I’ve ever done,” though it deals with what he called “simple, obvious themes” of life-cycles and the relationships between fathers and sons.

Though he mostly let the work speak for itself, he presented other photographs from throughout his career as a way of telling the story of how he ended up, after living out of a suitcase for seven years, working close to home.

While shooting a group of refugees fleeing Haiti in a wooden boat, Anderson nearly lost his life as the boat sank. He was rescued by the Coast Guard. The experience was transformative, he said, because it made him wonder why, when he thought he was going to die, he chose to make pictures that “no one would ever see.” Photography is “a way of explaining the world to myself,” he said, a “vehicle to process and understand” what he was experiencing. He realized he needed to take pictures that were about more than simply reporting the facts of a situation.

Because editors “decided I would put up with a certain amount of discomfort” he was asked to photograph war and he took those assignments in places like Afghanistan and Lebanon without ever making a conscious decision to become a war photographer. By 2002 he was burned out, though, and bored with the pictures he was making.

He began carrying a Holga around and playing a sort of game where he would take just one frame of a particular subject. The work was turned into a book, Nonfiction, and it also helped him realize he was interested in making pictures that were less technically focused and more emotional and direct.

He funneled that direct approach into his study of Venezuela, Capitolio, which was published as a book and iPad app, and then into his work about his family.

Up until his son was born and he began photographing at home, photography had been a way of escaping Abilene, Texas, where he grew up, and a way of avoiding being “who I was supposed to be.” (When asked during Q&A who he was supposed to be, he said he had long since forgotten.)
–Conor Risch

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A music video for the indie rock band Wolf Parade, shot by photographer Chris Hornbecker with director Scott Coffey. “Yulia,” the story of a Russian cosmonaut lost in space and his lover’s quest to connect with him, was chosen as a winner in the Video category of the PDN Photo Annual.

Piergiorgio Casotti‘s web documentary, “Arctic Spleen,” is a journey inside the grim reality of Greenlandic youth where two percent of the young population commits suicide every year. The trailer shown here is an overview of the 14-minute film that was chosen as a winner in the Video category of the PDN Photo Annual.

Transit in Columbia, Athens. from Dionysis Kouris on Vimeo.

Dionysis Kouris‘s short documentary about North African immigrants living in the abandoned Columbia Records compound in Athens, Greece, was selected as a winner in the video category of the 2011 PDN Photo Annual. “After spending some time there, [the immigrants] try their luck at the port of Patras, in hopes of getting on board a ship to Italy,” Kouris writes. “Sometimes they manage to illegally emigrate to other cities, but very few succeed.”

A standing ovation for photographer/writer Ruth Gruber, who in her 19 books documented refugee crises and humanitarian issues, marked an emotional high point at the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Awards, held last night in New York City. Gruber, 99, won the Cornell Capa Award, named for ICP’s founder. She told the audience that Edward Steichen had told her to shoot with her heart. “I try to use these images to fight injustice and hopefully bring peace to the world,” she said.

Many of the awards underscored the ICP’s original mission as an institution devoted to supporting humanistic photography. In his opening remarks, ICP director Willis Hartshorn noted the increasing dangers facing photojournalists around the world. He expressed gratitude for the safe return of two past Infinity winners, Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, who had been captured and detained in Libya this spring, and noted the deaths in Libya in April of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros. He said their work was “a testament to their dedication to the spirit of ICP’s mission.”

In accepting the Lifetime Achievement award, Elliott Erwitt said, “The wonderful thing about being a freelance photographer is the opportunity to be in marvelous situations sequentially.” In the video that preceded his speech, he noted that Photoshop, while a powerful tool, has hurt photography’s credibility. In the video, Erwitt then donned a black wig, fake mustache and sunglasses, and adopted the persona of a pretentious art photographer who “adores Photoshop.” The art photographer’s advice to young photographers: “Photograph many famous people and print the pictures big. The bigger they are, the more artistic.”

The video, showing many of Erwitt’s amusing photos, brought laughs from the audience, but at the end of the video Erwitt said, without disguise, “I think there is sadness in many of my pictures. But humor and sadness are closely related.”

Adrees Latif,  a photographer for Reuters, won the Photojournalism award for his coverage of the floods in Pakistan. He thanked ICP for honoring images of “one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time.”

Abelardo Morrell, winner of the award for Art, showed his camera obscura images for which he is best-known, and also recent work he has done exploring the west, using a tent to create images that are cast on the ground. The Infinity Award for Publication was awarded to From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America, the catalogue of a Walker Art Center retrospective of Alec Soth’s career. Soth (“Rhymes with both,” the photographer said in the video shown before his speech, “it’s a lifelong problem”) said he became photographer because he is “a socially awkward person” who “wanted to work alone,” but over time he’s been drawn more and more into collaborations like the one he had with the Walker Art Center. “The truth is, I like it.”

Other awards given out were the Applied Photography award, given to fashion photographer Viviane Sassen; the Writing award, given to writer and curator Gerry Badger; and the ICP Trustee Award, given to the Durst family of real estate developers, who are also ICP’s landlords.

Among the photo industry people attending the Infinity Awards were photo editors Kira Pollack, Paul Moakley and Patrick Witty of Time; Michelle McNally of The New York Times and James Estrin of the Times’ Lens blog; New Yorker director of photography Whitney Johnson and her predecessor, Elisabeth Biondi; Jack van Antwerp of The Wall Street Journal; Chris Dougherty of People; David Friend, editor at Vanity Fair;  Stefano Tonchi, editor of W; Glenda Bailey, editor of Harper’s Bazaar; photographers David Burnett, Misha Erwitt, Ron Haviv, Rick Smolan, Susan Meiselas and Lynsey Addario who, having spent the last few weeks in New York accepting an Overseas Press Club award and giving interviews, was on her way home to New Delhi.


—Holly Stuart Hughes

New Jersey-based photographer/filmmaker Gail Mooney and her daughter Erin Kelly embarked on a 99-day trip covering 6 continents to document the stories of 11 people who are making a positive difference in the world. The resulting documentary, Opening Our Eyes, was shot by Mooney using a Canon 5D Mark II and the GoPro Hero Cam and is slated to be finished by the end of May/beginning of June. The trailer gives a glimpse into Mooney and Kelly’s journey and the individuals who inspired them along the way.

Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

This 20-minute film was created last year by photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, who was killed on April 20, 2011, in Misrata, Libya. Hetherington died covering the conflict between Libyan rebels and forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.

Hetherington wrote of the film: “’Diary’ is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.”

Editor and director Magali Charrier did the editing and sound design.

Related: Tim Hetherington Killed in Libya