Best-selling biographer Kitty Kelley appeared on the NPR program called “On the Media” on Sunday to defend the art of unauthorized biographies. Host Bob Garfield asked her why people she interviews (those close to Nancy Reagan, Jacqueline Onassis, and Frank Sinatra, among Kelley’s other subjects) deny afterwards that they ever talked to her. Garfield also asked, “And what happens when you present them with the smoking gun of their participation?”

Kelley answered with a long anecdote about taking photographer Stanley Tretick along on an interview with Frank Sinatra, Jr. He later denied ever having granted the interview to Kelley. “And Stanley produced a photograph,” Kelley told Garfield triumphantly.

But oh, the price of Tretick’s help! He interrupted the interview, ruined everything and changed the course of history, according to Kelley. As she explained to Garfield:

“Everything is going wonderfully well for the first 45 minutes. [Frank Jr. is] talking about what it’s like to be the son of a famous singer, a man connected to organized crime…

“And then he turned to me and he said, you know, hon, I know a lot of people. Do you know what I mean? And I said, you mean mobsters? And he said, yes. I can tell you what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. And right at that point, I thought, oh, the one great unsolved mystery of the 20th century! I thought, maybe I’ll get the Pulitzer Prize. I even thought for, you know, just a second, what’ll I wear when I get the prize?

“And just at that point, there was this clattering noise. The photographer threw down his cameras and said, well, what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa? And at that point, Frank Sinatra [Jr.] ran out of the room into the bedroom. And I tried. He said, no, I have said too much, I have said too much. The interview ended.”

Of course, Frank Jr. may know squat about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. And Tretick, who died in 1999, is no longer around to defend himself. But the moral of the story is: When a famous writer hires you to take pictures, don’t interrupt when the subject is about to solve the mystery of the century.

©AP/Matt Dunham

Splashed across the front pages of today’s British newspapers is a picture of Prince Charles and Camilla, looking panic-stricken inside their car, as it came under attack by student protesters last night. AP’s Matt Dunham, who shot the image, told The Guardian newspaper how he got the shot.

He explained that he had been in Parliament Square much of the day covering protests of proposed college tuition hikes. Later in the day he noticed a breakaway group of about 200 protesters “who were out to cause damage,” he said. He started to follow them, taking pictures as they first tried to set fire to the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, then broke some shop windows, and finally boxed in a vehicle that Dunham recognized as a royal car. He approached the car, saw the Prince of Wales and his wife inside and quickly fired off five shots with a flash through the windows, paparazzi style. Dunham then rushed back to the AP office and uploaded the images to newspapers, ahead of bystanders who shot the scene with their cell phones. (The British papers ran a tightly cropped version of the image shown here.)

© AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti

Fifteen months after he lost his foot to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, award-winning photojournalist Emilio Morenatti is again covering breaking news in a disaster zone. This time, the New York Times Lens Blog reports, he’s covering the cholera outbreak in Haiti.

After Morenatti’s foot was amputated in August 2009, he underwent extensive rehabilitation and was fitted with a prosthetic at a facility in Maryland. He began shooting for AP in March of this year, covering the World Cup and shooting events in Spain, where he lives. But Santiago Lyon, director of photography at AP, told the Times that Morenatti asked two weeks ago to be put on the Haiti story. It’s his first disaster coverage since his accident. “Emilio was very keen to get back to work,” Lyon told the Times. “It’s a very important part of his reintegration into the work he’s so good at.” Lyon told PDN, “He’s a remarkably talented photographer. It’s particularly inspiring to see him out there now, after just 15 months.”

Morenatti’s photos from Haiti are featured in a slide show on The New York Times Lens blog today.

Morenatti’s recovery has been on the minds of many in the photo community since  New York Times contract photographer Joao Silva lost the lower part of both his legs in October after he stepped on a landmine in southern Afghanistan.   He is currently being treated at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC.

Related stories:

August 12, 2009: AP Photographer Wounded in Afghanistan

October  25,2010: Joao Silva Wounded in Afghanistan

PDNPulse: Joao Silva Being Treated at Washington Army Hospital

A Mexican photographer and an Argentinian writer have won the New Journalism CEMEX-FNPI Award, one of Latin America’s most coveted journalism awards, the AP reports.

Mexican photographer Alejandro Cossio, who has documented Mexico’s drug war for the weekly magazine Zeta, won for a series of images that depicts the chilling violence of that war in and around the border town of Tijuana. (WARNING: graphic image after the jump that may disturb some readers) (more…)

Phillip Bloom, Morgan Spurlock, Vincent LaForet and Lucy Walker are among the filmmakers holding workshops and lectures during the first Vimeo Festival + Awards, being held  October 8 and 9 in New York City. The event, organized by Vimeo, the online video sharing site, will also include screenings and the announcement of the winners of the Vimeo Awards, which offers a $25,000 grant for the winner of the grand prize.

Vimeo has organized the festival around two themes: Innovation and Inspiration. “We have tried to bring together an experience that is a hybrid between a traditional film festival and a conference, which looks through the lens of online creativity,” said Jeremy Boxer, co-Director of the Vimeo Festival + Awards.

On the first day, documentary filmmaker Morgan (“Super Size Me”) Spurlock and Lucy (“Waste Land,” “Countdown to Zero”) Walker will discuss how documentary filmmaking is changing in the digital world. Phillip Bloom will conduct a workshop on HD-DSLR videomaking, and Lance Weiler is scheduled to lecture on “storytelling beyond the confines of the 16 by 9 frame.”

Two judges for the Vimeo Awards, designer Neville Brody and photographer/filmmaker Vincent Laforet, will speak on October 9. There will also be classes on videomaking, and presentations by filmmakers Ted Hope and  Brian Newman. Wired blogger Bruce Sterling’s talk will close out the event.

Tickets to the Vimeo Festival + Awards are now available online at www.vimeo.com/awards . There’s currently an early bird special on: A two-day all access ticket costs $175.

Vimeo, the video hosting site, will announce the 20
finalists in the nine categories of its first ever Festival and Awards at a special event taking place September 10 in
Amsterdam. The finalists will then be viewable online through Vimeo.

Vimeo says over 6500 videos have been submitted to the
contest. The top 20 finalists in each category will be evaluated by a panel of
judges who will then select a winner in each category. Among the judges are
designer Neville Brody (Experimental category);  documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (Documentary
category); director Roman Coppola (Music Video category) and photographer
Vincent Laforet (Narrative category). 

The grand prize winner, chosen from among the nine category winners, will receive a $25,000 grant towards a new video project.

 The winners will be announced during the two-day Vimeo
Festival, taking place in New York October 8 and 9. 

Planning to be in Amsterdam on September 10? Be sure to RSVP via Vimeo before turning up at the Bioscoop Het Ketelhuis for the party:  vimeo.com/awards/invite

Photojournalist Lee Lockwood, who gained exclusive access to regimes in Cuba, North Vietnam and other communist countries during the 1960s, died July 31 near his home in Weston, Florida, The New York Times has reported. The cause of death was complications from diabetes. He was 78.

Lockwood is best known for a week-long interview he conducted with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1965. From that interview he published Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel: An American Journalist’s Inside Look at Today’s Cuba in Text and Pictures in 1967. He also spent 28 days documenting life in North Vietnam in 1967, as the Vietnam war intensified. His story appeared on the cover of the April 7, 1967 edition of Life magazine.

Lockwood was represented for many years by the Black Star photo agency.

This month on Ask the Experts, award-winning landscape and nature photographer Robert Knight is taking your questions on  landscape photography, shooting RAW,  handling a variety of environments and conditions, workflow and image storage. 

To submit your question, view the new Ask the Experts page on PDNOnline.

A member of the San Disk Extreme Team, Knight has won many prestigious awards for his landscape and wildlife photography, including the "Wild Places" award in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and editorial awards from Nature's Best and National Geographic. His work has taken him to Antarctica with its cold, wet air, and across Africa, with intense, dry heat. A gallery of his wildlife images from all over the world can be seen on our Ask the Experts page.

You can email your questions to editor@pdnonline.com. We'll screen them, forward them to Knight,  and post his answers and comments  throughout the month.

Photo by Genevieve de Manio

Barbara Kinney and Genevieve De Manio were hired to act as Chelsea Clinton’s “official” photographers at the former first daughter’s wedding in Rhinebeck, New York,
this past weekend. Unfortunately, they can’t talk to anyone about the experience.

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Rallies were held in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia
and in several international cities this weekend to mark the one-year anniversary of the arrest by freelance
photographer and journalist Shane Bauer and his friends Sarah Shourd and Joshua
Fattal by Iranian authorities. 
They were arrested July 31, 2009 while, according to their friends and
family,  they were hiking across
Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran has accused them of illegally crossing the border into
Iran and of being spies for the U.S.

 On Friday the US State Department Issued a statement saying
that the release of the three US citizens is “long overdue and their continued
detention is unjustifiable.”

Bauer, a journalist whose writing and photography has been
published in Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation,
Christian Science Monitor,  was
based in Damascus. He met Shourd and Fattal while the three were
attending University of California at Berkeley, and they had been living and working in Syria before their backpacking trip. 

The New York Times reports that the mothers of the three prisoners spoke at a rally held Friday outside the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York to demand their children's release. The mothers were allowed a visit with the three in May but have had little contact since.