The arrest of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer Kristyna Wentz-Graff (©Lita Medinger)

Once again, police officers have arrested a photographer doing her job–this time in Milwaukee–only to let her go a few hours later without charges. The summary round-up of journalists at street demonstrations is a form of intimidation, and rough injustice: It’s a convenient way of putting journalists out of commission for the duration of a police action. But with cameras so ubiquitous now, it’s ultimately a losing strategy for police.

In Milwaukee, Journal Sentinel photographer Kristyna Wentz-Graff was arrested last Wednesday while photographing a peaceful Occupy demonstration. Just before she arrived on the scene, police had ordered protestors to leave the street. Police had blocked the street with their cars, and started making arrests. Wentz-Graff started taking pictures of an arrest as soon as she arrived.

According to the Journal Sentinel, “While she was taking pictures, she was grabbed by an officer, handcuffed and arrested, without warning or without being told why she was being arrested.”

Under criticism for violating the First Amendment rights of a journalist, the Milwaukee police chief held a news conference Thursday to defend his officers. He said the arresting officer thought the photographer was a protester and added that her status as a journalist “was not obvious to the officers” at the scene.

But looking at the pictures taken by others of the arrest, one has to wonder: Do Milwaukee police officers need to get their eyes checked? Wentz-Graff had her press ID badge clearly visible, as an image by Lita Medinger in the Journal Sentinel shows, and two cameras around her neck–one of them with a very large Canon telephoto lens that screamed “journalist.”(That camera and lens are hidden behind the police car in the Journal Sentinel image, but were clearly visible in this  TV video of the arrest.)

The mayor, after watching a TV video of the arrest, said to the Journal Sentinel, “It appeared very clear to me that she was a photojournalist.” He added, “I very much support her First Amendment right to be there.”

The police chief acknowledged that Wentz-Graff had “big fancy cameras,” but protestors carry cameras, too, he noted. And he added, “According to the officer at the scene, he didn’t notice her ID. He was just focusing on the task at hand. He perceived her as part of the problem he had to solve.”

Fair enough. But with his boss in the hot seat, the arresting officer has probably been advised to pay more attention to what he’s doing.

More importantly, though, Milwaukee’s police chief has pledged to try to make things right with the media. He says he’s going to meet with editors of various Milwaukee news outlets to examine police policy, and “identify those circumstances in which the perception is we are not playing fair with the press and let’s correct it.”

It’s hard not to imagine that all the pictures of the incident had a lot to do with an outcome that’s so good for the First Amendment, and for democracy. It’s not too much of a leap to argue that the whole Occupy movement has been at least partially protected by a force field of cameras. A few incidents of police brutality have resulted in more support for the movement, and widespread condemnation of the police departments involved (in New York City and Oakland, California.)

The police certainly do a tough, important job protecting us from crime, but to avoid accountability by arresting photojournalists, they’re going to have to arrest pretty much every bystander with a cell phone.

In our feature “Does Editorial Post-Production Cost Too Much?” which appears in the November issue of PDN, photographers, retouchers and photo editors weighed in. They offered their experiences about both how much photographers and retouchers charge editorial clients, but how they explain their fees to clients.

“One of our biggest challenges is that the fees vary so greatly between photos,” Wired photo editor Zana Woods told PDN.

Kathy Ryan, the director of photography at The New York Times Magazine says she’s seen photographers asking for as much as $1000 per image.

Photographer Jeff Minton, who does most retouching himself, says he charges editorial clients a flat $75-$100 per image, depending on the work they want done, which is comparable to the price he once charged for custom color prints.

Retoucher Angie Hayes says some magazines at Condé Nast simply stick to a standard per-image fee of $350 for an inside photo, and $600 for a cover. Andi Kounath, owner and retoucher at redfishblack in New York, says small magazines “never pay for retouching.”

So, what do you charge for retouching? And do you think photo editors have a reasonable expectation of the costs of producing and delivering print-ready images? Do you incorporate retouching into your photo fee, or is it a separate line item? How do you calculate what post-production costs you? Is it reasonable for photographers to mark-up the cost of retouching when they hire freelancers? Are you losing money on retouching because editors don’t have the budget to cover the costs?

Please enter your comment below or in the Facebook discussion here.

Veteran photographer Larry Price has quit his job as director of photography for the Dayton Daily News rather than carry out an order from management to fire half of the paper’s photographers, according to a recent article in the Dayton Business Journal.

“I’ve watched this happen in newspapers year after year now. I’ve had many, many friends that have been affected, many stellar journalists,” Price told the Dayton Business Journal. “These people are my group. They’re my friends. They’re my colleagues. I’ve asked so much of them in the four years I’ve been here. Every time, they’ve stepped up to the plate and delivered. It wasn’t a decision I could make in good conscience.”

The article goes on to explain how the morale and integrity of the photo department were slowly eroded by management decisions, according to Price. For instance, he was told that a photograph of a girl with tears in her eyes at a candlelight vigil was too emotional.

“The new prerogative, as it was explained to me, was to dumb down the photo report, to pull back and show crowd photographs,” Price is quoted as saying.

Price won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1981 for his coverage of the coup in Liberia for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1985 for his photographs of the wars in Angola and El Salvador for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was recruited from the Denver Post four years ago to head the photo department at the Dayton Daily News.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal dropped a bombshell last fall when it reported that the renowned civil rights photographer Ernest Withers worked secretly as an FBI informant, helping the agency “gain a front-row seat to the civil right and anti-war movements in Memphis.”

Now the newspaper says it is suing the FBI for the release of Withers’ complete FBI informant file, in an effort to learn the full extent of his activities as an informant. The questions the paper is trying to answer: When did Withers begin working as an informant? And what information and photographs did he provide to the FBI?

According to the paper, the FBI has refused a Freedom of Information Act request to release Withers’ confidential informant file. So the Commercial Appeal has sued in US District Court in Washington, DC to force the FBI to release the file.

“Holding to decades-old doctrine protecting confidential sources,” the newspaper reported on August 7, “the government argues that exposing any informant, even a dead one, would have a chilling effect when recruiting new informants needed to help battle crime and protect national security.”

Lawyers for the newspaper are arguing that the FBI “is hiding behind laws designed to protect living informants”

Withers died in 2007 at the age of 85. He photographed the civil rights movement from the Emmett Till murder trial in 1955 through the assassination Martin Luther King in 1968 and amassed one of the largest archives an on African-American society, music and culture.

The Commercial Appeal came across Withers’ informant ID number by chance in a document related to a public corruption probe from 1970s that involved the photographer. At the time, Withers was a state employee and had been accused of taking payoffs, the newspaper said.

The FBI blacked out informant ID numbers before releasing the document, but apparently overlooked one number–that belonging to Withers.

“That number, in turn, unlocked the secret of the photographer’s 1960s political spying when the newspaper located repeated references to the number in other FBI reports released…30 years ago,” the paper explained in a story last fall.

A decision on the paper’s lawsuit to compel the FBI to release Withers’ file is pending.

© AP Photo/David Guttenfelder

In June,  the Associated Press announced it had signed an agreement with North Korea’s state-run news agency to open an AP photo and text bureau in Pyongyang. The AP also noted that David Guttenfelder, AP’s Chief Asia Photographer, had already made several trips to North Korea this spring, photographing extensively in several parts of the country.

Guttenfelder’s photos of this secretive nation were published this week on The Atlantic web site and in The Independent, the UK paper. As the article in the British paper notes, “The pictures are among the most candid ever published in Western newspapers.”

In a country where the press is tightly controlled, Guttenfelder captured slices of daily life in a variety of settings: a university and a pool for its students, a library, an elementary school, a fast food restaurant, a subway station, a museum dedicated to the Korean war. Guttenfelder also photographed outside Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum, where tourists pose for photos. Some of his photos depict an eery quiet: an empty multi-lane highway leading to the Pyongyang airport, and a traffic cop standing in a Pyongyang street where there seems to be no traffic. His photos are often beautiful, capturing landscapes of color and sometimes startling clarity: as The Independent notes, the lack of industry means there’s little smog.

The three Georgian photojournalists who were arrested in their homes on July 7, 2011, and accused of spying for Russia have “confessed,” according to an AFP report.

On Monday Georgian authorities confirmed that Zurab Kurtsikidze, a European Pressphoto Agency photographer and the alleged head of a spy ring funneling images and information to Russian intelligence officials, became the final suspect to admit to spying for the Russian government. Irakli Gedenidze, photographer to President Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgian foreign ministry photographer Georgy Abdaladze have also confessed, the AFP report said.

A lawyer for Abdaladze who was present when he confessed said she believed he did so “under psychological pressure,” and Kurtsikidze’s lawyer said that although his client had confessed, he believed the prosecution did not have enough other evidence to convict his client.

The photographers could face up to 12 years in prison if they are convicted.

The arrest of the photographers has prompted protests in both Tblisi and Moscow, and several Georgian newspapers and Web sites published their front pages without photographs yesterday in a coordinated protest.

Related: Georgian Photographers Arrested on Suspicion of Espionage

Press photographer Maryam Majd has been detained in Iran’s Evin Prison, says a group of 32 Iranian photographers who have written and signed a petition demanding her release.

The petition says that, “Although the arrest of Maryam Majd has not been confirmed by the Iranian government’s official sources, the repeated illegal actions of the state-run media have caused serious concern about this young photographer’s current condition.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, Majd was preparing to leave Tehran to shoot the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament when she disappeared without notice on June 16. Majd is one of the few Iranian photographers to document female sports and has long campaigned for the government to allow Iranian women to attend soccer matches.

The petition demands “that Maryam Majd is released unconditionally from prison,” and “that [she] is able to resume work in her profession.”

The photographers also urged the Iranian Photojournalist’s Association to “act according to its responsibilities to its members” and investigate the situation, as well as “to inform photojournalists about the consequences of their work.”

According to a post on a “Free Maryam Majd” Facebook page with close to 2,000 followers, Majd’s family has been to see her at Evin Prison and reports that “her physical condition is OK,” and that “She expressed her glumness for home and her friends and family.”

The International Press Institute reports that two other Iranian female journalists, Zahra Yazdani and documentarian Mahnaz Mohammadi, were arrested shortly after Majd.

—Kayla Epstein

A press photographer was shot in the leg during a second straight night of sectarian riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland, according to reports in the British press.

Three shots were fired during the riots on Tuesday night, one of them striking the photographer in the leg. The photographer is said to be in stable condition at a hospital. His name has not been released pending notification of his family.

The loyalist group UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force), which is supposed to be observing a cease fire, is believed to be stoking the violence in the Short Strand neighborhood—a small Catholic enclave in a largely Protestant section of Belfast. On Monday rioters attacked houses and shots were fired before police dispersed the crowds. The violence resumed Tuesday night and rioters attacked police forces with “petrol bombs, bricks, golf balls, laser pens and lumps of concrete amid the worst rioting in the area for 10 years,” according to the Daily Telegraph.

Catholic and Protestant leaders have blamed the other side for provoking the violence.

At this year’s LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA, artist LaToya Ruby Frazier made her intentions as an artist and activist clear in a powerful presentation of her work that combined diaristic snippets about her relationships with her grandmother and mother with stories about the community of Braddock, PA, where she was raised. Frazier’s reading, reminiscent of a prose poem, was intensely personal, heartfelt and, at times, forceful and defiant, drawing on the history of Braddock as a once-prosperous steel town, and on its current state where poverty, joblessness and pollution-related health issues plague the largely African-American population.

Frazier’s work has previously been included in high-profile group exhibitions such as the 2009 Triennial at The New Museum and a 2010 group exhibition at PS1 MoMA, and she has had solo and two-person shows at her gallery, Higher Pictures in New York, and elsewhere. The work she has presented thus far has been comprised primarily of self-portraits and portraits of her grandmother and mother, whom Frazier taught to photograph and considers a collaborator. Yet the full breadth of her work and her ambition for it has not been widely known, she says.

“Until I spoke today, I don’t think people were aware of what the work was about, because it’s complicated,” Frazier told PDN after her Master’s Talk. “Today was a huge breakthrough to be able to come here and talk to people.” (more…)

A British newspaper photographer trying to cover a brawl in front of a courthouse was arrested and then “de-arrested” after the police brought the situation under control, according to a UK-based journalism resource Web site.

The site, called HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk, was quoting a Greater Manchester Police spokesperson who coined the term “de-arrested” after the incident.

“A photographer was arrested to prevent a breach of the peace and on suspicion of obstructing a police officer,” the spokesperson said. “Officers brought the situation under control and the photographer was de-arrested and subsequently released.”

The photographer, Sean Wilton of the Manchester Evening News, was ordered along with a fellow news photographer not to take pictures of the faces of the brawlers as police were rounding them up. Wilton said he was arrested when he “tried to speak to the officer about the situation.”

“We weren’t obstructing them at in any way shape or form – they were obstructing us,” said Steve Allen, the other Manchester Evening News photographer at the scene.

Though Wilton was de-arrested, the Manchester Evening News editor has yet to be de-irked, and has asked for an explanation from police.