Category Archives: Photojournalism

My Oaxaca– The Things They Carry

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The Spanish verb cargar sounds like the English word cargo, a load to carry from here to there. That’s cargar – to carry, to shoulder a responsibility, to burden.

In the center of Oaxaca, where small shops line the streets and pedestrians fill the sidewalks from curb to wall, almost everyone is cargando something – in their hands, atop their heads or over their backs.

Large plastic sacks stuffed with groceries for the house or fresh tortillas to sell by the kilo; backpacks bulging with schoolbooks; wooden racks of candied apples ready for sale; diaper bags, purses and newborn babies; bouquets of balloons bought for a birthday; sets of dishes wrapped in clear plastic, purchased as wedding gifts; and bulbous water jugs – garrafones — containing 20 liters (about 5 gallons) of purified water that is clean enough for drinking and heavy enough to tingle the biceps of a bodybuilder.

A full garrafón weighs 40 pounds and costs about 40 pesos, a third of the Mexico’s daily minimum wage. Forty pounds to be able to brush your teeth, make a limonada, or brew a cup of coffee.

Forty pounds. Is that too much to cargar?

My Oaxaca — Sister and Brother

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Alexis, the boy with the million-peso smile, has leukemia. His sister, Emily, lying alongside him in their two-room apartment in Oaxaca, held the key to his recovery: her genetically matching bone marrow. The transplant surgery scared her, though, because she believed it would give her cancer.

A few months after I took this picture, Emily’s love for her little brother overcame her fear. She suffered through the surgery and doctors injected her bone marrow into her brother. She was 14 and Alexis was 11.

All siblings are close to a degree, but those I’ve met in Mexico who live in one room with their mothers or sleep in the same bed for years share an unspoken intimacy that is most palpable in the silences. It is beyond affection, more of a communion borne in necessity and nurtured by dependency.

Too often, its display eludes the camera, breaking before it like a soap bubble touched by a curious finger.

My Oaxaca — La Vida de la Madre

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Mother’s Day – el Día de la Madre.

No one deserves a day of recognition more than single mothers who hold their families together through force of love, work and will. Doing so is never easy, and it is even more challenging in Oaxaca, where single women head up at least a quarter of all families.

Many are women abandoned by men who have gone north or moved on to another warm bed. Many are women who have left partners who drank too much or ruled the house with their fists. All of them have learned to be independent, both from necessity and desire, in a culture that in almost every circumstance values men more than women.

These mothers welcome me into their homes. They insist on feeding me; they invite me to graduations, baptisms and birthdays; and they bestow on me the gift I treasure the most: their trust.

They humble me with their work; they inspire me with their dedication to family; they make me laugh with their antics; and, when they are not looking, they sometimes bring me to tears.

My Oaxaca — El Caballo Rápido

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When I met Axia, she drew horses. In the bedroom she shared with her mom and two younger siblings, she had papered one wall with sketches of horses. She’d given each a name; for example, El Caballo que Vuela – the Horse that Flies.

I made some photos of Axia while she sat and drew in the light coming through the bedroom door. She asked me for a piece of paper, so I handed her my notebook. A while later, when I was on the patio talking to her mom, Axia walked out of the bedroom and handed me this drawing – El Caballo Rápido — The Fast Horse.

A few months later, I returned to the farm town where Axia lived and brought her a large sketchpad and pens I’d bought in the U.S. She filled all the pages with drawings of horses and added many of them to the gallery on the wall.

The following year, on my next visit, I was surprised to see the wall was empty; all the horses were gone. I asked Axia’s mom what happened. She said Axia’s younger sister, angry about something, had ripped up the drawings and the sketchbook as well.

Axia, whose full name is Axianeydt Ramirez Ojeda, is older now and has moved to New York. She still draws, but mostly anime characters. She seems to be done with horses.

My Oaxaca — Azul

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Azul is one of four sisters who lived in Hijos de la Luna, a children’s shelter so named because the kids’ mothers supposedly worked as prostitutes at night (under the moon – la luna). A few did, but most were just hard-working and poor. They cleaned houses, washed clothes, worked in markets, making enough to pay the rent but not enough to care for their kids.

Someone told me Azul’s mother was a prostitute, but I never met her, so I didn’t know for sure. What I knew was that Azul lived deep inside of herself. She stared at me like no else ever did or has. In the 10 or so times I photographed her, she never said more than 10 words to me. One day, when she put on a red clown’s nose, her face fell into the closest thing I’d seen to a smile on her.

After the government closed the shelter on charges of abuse, the children scattered. I heard that Azul and her sisters moved in with their mother, who afterward had a baby boy who died in infancy. Before each trip to Oaxaca, I message Azul’s older sister, asking her to ask her mother if I may visit. Sometimes I hear back, sometimes I don’t. She’s never said yes.

My Oaxaca — The Dead Dog

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Mexico is tough on dogs. They die from starvation on sidewalks. They die on highways, flattened by buses and left as a feast for the crows. The die from poison in farm towns because folks prefer dead dogs over dead chickens. They die from fights with other street dogs, clawed, bitten and infected.

This dog died in a children’s shelter. It ate something toxic, perhaps poison, maybe rotted meat. Death came slowly, performing its last rites before an audience of children. All afternoon they watched the dog lie on a slab of cement and gasp for the breath its flooded lungs could not produce.

When stillness finally came, the children stood over the corpse. A few touched its fur, moist with sweat from the exertion of dying; others, less adventurous, poked the body with their shoes.

My Oaxaca – The Procession in Teotitlán

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When I began to photograph in Oaxaca, I avoided three things: Other photographers, Americans and religious ceremonies. A couple of years ago, though, after the death of my friend, Mary Ellen Mark, a few of us who were her students and friends returned to Oaxaca, to be there during the time of her annual workshops, to photograph together and to share our memories of her.

During her workshops, Mary Ellen sent students to photograph a religious procession marking the beginning of the Catholic season of Lent in Teotitlán del Valle, a foothills village on the outskirts of Oaxaca. I never went; doing so seemed invasive. This time, though, to honor Mary Ellen and to be with my friends, I rode with them to the town at dawn, when the procession began.

I took a Leica and a wide-angle lens, hoping to be unobtrusive. As the procession meandered through the village, the sun rose, scraping the cobblestones of the streets and brushing the stucco of the buildings. I stood in a shaded doorway across from a painted wall and waited for the parishioners to come to me. When they passed, I made a half-dozen frames. This is the one I kept.

My Oaxaca – The Girl in the Uniform

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This might be the first decent image I ever made in Oaxaca. I had a new Nikon D200 that I’d gifted myself because I wanted to resurrect the photography career I’d abandoned years earlier. I was mediocre when I gave it up and not much better when I restarted, but the instant of making a photograph excited me as much at age 50 as did at age 25.

Mostly then I shot pretty pictures for a magazine near San Francisco. I enjoyed it, and they paid me, which I also enjoyed. Still, I wanted to do something more real, something more journalistic, and that meant I needed to move beyond “pretty.”

I began photographing people on the streets of Oaxaca, but I was too timid to make anything intimate or powerful. This girl was part of a group of students having their class photograph taken near the famous Santo Domingo church. I stood back from the group, hesitant, and made six frames, all of them average. Then this girl turned to look at me and I shot one more.

That was on New Year’s Eve, 2006. Six more years passed until I met Mary Ellen Mark in Oaxaca and she urged me to photograph with more passion. Ever since then I have.

My Oaxaca – The Boy and the Box

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This boy, whose name is Manual, is one of four children I met by accident one day when I went to Zaachila, a town outside of Oaxaca, to photograph a group of transvestites. It was the second day of a three-day festival. The transvestites had marched in the town’s parade the day before and partied late into the night. I arrived around mid-day and they were still sleeping in a small concrete house located at the front of a long piece of land.

I heard voices on the other side of the yard and, not wanting to surprise or scare anyone by my presence, I called out. Several children emerged to greet me. They lived with their mother and father in a tin shack at the rear of the property. I walked back with them to say hello. We all talked a while and I began making pictures.

Manual and his older brother, whose name I’ve forgotten, were playing with a pair of plastic tops, wrapping them in string and flinging them onto a large cardboard box that once held a small refrigerator. The tops spun longer on the cardboard than they did on the ground. The sheet of cardboard had a hole in the middle and Manuel crawled underneath and stuck his head through it. His brother began throwing a top toward him, trying to get it to bounce off Manual’s head. That’s when I took the picture.

My Oaxaca – Meeting Irma

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This is the first photograph I made of Irma. She stands in the afternoon sunlight in the front door of her beauty salon, which was located in the Colonia America Sur, a neighborhood with streets bearing the names of South American countries. Irma’s street was Brasil. She named the salon Michelle after her daughter, Betzi Michelle. Before opening the salon, Irma cleaned houses and worked in a laundry, living week to week on what she made. The founder of a shelter where Irma’s two children lived during the workweek helped her go to beauty school and set up the salon. The business was going to be her ticket out of working-class poverty, but it only lasted a few months, killed by too much competition and too little funding.

When Irma closed the salon, she took its furniture to her one-room apartment. Each time she moved, which was about once a year, she dragged the furniture with her – a reclining chair used to wash hair, a sink that drained into a bucket, a dressing table with a tall vertical mirror, a bright green chair made of mesh, and a pair of plastic tables. For a while, Irma did haircuts and styling out of where she lived, but eventually she gave it up entirely. Piles of clothes, food, cleaning products and toys now cover the furniture.

Our Oaxaca / Nuestra Oaxaca: An Exhibition

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OAXACA, Mexico – The late documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark had a 20-year love affair with Oaxaca, an affection she demonstrated in the many indelible images she made here of children, animals and regional rituals, but also in the passion she imparted and instilled in the hundreds of amateur and professionals who attended her biannual workshops here.

After Mary Ellen died in the spring of 2015, several of us who have become friends through knowing her and working with her in Oaxaca decided to return to Mexico together each year to honor Mary Ellen and continue the projects she had helped us shape.

Knowing of our desire to keep Mary Ellen’s Oaxaca spirit alive, the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo (where Mary Ellen had convened her workshops) invited seven of us to show our images from Oaxaca. It was a bittersweet invitation – on the one hand an honor to participate in an exhibition at Álvarez Bravo, on the other another reminder of how much each of us miss Mary Ellen, as a teacher, as an editor, as a friend.

After much planning by the staff of Álvarez Bravo (and much patience and tolerance by its director, Adriana Chávez, for our lack of understanding of the metric system and constant mangling of the Spanish language), the show opens this Friday, Jan. 20, and will feature photographs by Björn Árnason (Iceland); Ina Bernstein, Chae Kihn and Jody Watkins (New York); and Lori Barra, James Carbone and me (California).

The evening of the opening there will be a reception at 7 p.m. (I will be there and I hope my friends in Oaxaca can come.) On Feb. 25 from 6 to 8 p.m. Álvarez Bravo will graciously host an event with all seven us.

Below, in English and in Spanish, is the introductory text to the exhibit, as well as a gallery of the photos I have in the show.

Exhibition Introduction: Our Oaxaca

Mary Ellen Mark brought us together. Most of us came to Oaxaca because of her. Through her we became friends. Because of her we became better photographers. With her in mind, we come back – to pursue the work we started here, to nurture the relationships we’ve made with local mothers and fathers and children, to become the photographers she believed we could be, to honor her passion and, perhaps, to find hope and inspiration in it.

More than anything else, Mary Ellen believed in the potency of the singular image. “I like a picture to stand out individually, to work on its own,” she said. “… It’s hard. If you get a couple of good pictures a year, you’re doing very well. It’s hard to get a great picture. Really hard. The more you work at it, the more you realize how hard it is.”

As a photographer, Mary Ellen embraced relentless authenticity. As a friend, she wrapped us in generosity. As a teacher, she demanded much and encouraged even more.

Mary Ellen held her students to the same lofty standards by which she lived. Two years before her death in 2015, she told an interviewer who had asked how her photography had evolved during her 40-year career. “I’m not sure it has changed that much,” she answered. “… I’m still just trying to make powerful and truthful photographs — great photographs. Perhaps my standards are higher. I’m less satisfied with what I do. I want to go further. Reach further.”

Go further. Seek truth. Be honest. These were Mary Ellen’s qualities – as a photographer and as a person – and these are the characteristics by which she judged her work and to which she urged us to aspire.

Some of us are professional photographers, some are not. Some of us have been photographing the same families for a decade or more, some are drawn to the spontaneity of the streets. Some of us use the camera to document, some of us prefer to interpret. All of us are grateful to have known Mary Ellen, to have worked with her and to have been counted among her friends. In our work, we can only hope to emulate her, each of us in our own way.

Mary Ellen once said, “Photograph the world as it is. Nothing’s more interesting than reality.” These photographs are our reality, our Oaxaca.

***

Introdución a la Exposición: Nuestra Oaxaca

Mary Ellen Mark nos unió. Ella fue la razón por la que llegamos a Oaxaca. A través de ella, nos hicimos amigos. Debido a ella, nos convertimos en mejores fotógrafos. Pensando en ella, regresamos – para seguir las obras que empezamos aquí, para alimentar las relaciones que hemos formado con madres, padres y niños oaxaqueños, para hacernos los fotógrafos que ella creía que podríamos ser, para honrar su pasión y, quizás, encontrar esperanza e inspiración en esta.

Más que nada, Mary Ellen creía en el poder de la imagen singular. “Me gusta una imagen que resalte individualmente, que surta efecto sola,” dijo ella. “ … Es difícil. Si sacas un par de buenas fotos cada año, estas haciendo muy bien. Es difícil sacar una gran foto. Muy difícil. Cuanto más trabajas en ello, más te das cuenta de lo difícil que es.”

Como fotógrafa, Mary Ellen abrazaba la autenticidad implacable. Como amiga, nos envolvía en la generosidad. Como maestra, exigía mucho y animaba aún más.

Mary Ellen insistía en que sus alumnos se adhirieran a los mismos estándares altos en los que ella se mantenía. Dos años antes de su muerte en 2015, le dijo a un entrevistador que le había preguntado a ella como su fotografía se había desarrollado durante su carrera de 40 años: “No estoy segura de que haya cambiado mucho. … Solo sigo tratando de hacer fotos que sean potentes y verídicas – grandes fotos. Quizás mis estándares sean mas altos. Estoy menos satisfecha (ahora) con lo que hago. Quiero ir más allá. Alcanzar más allá.”

Vaya más allá. Busque la verdad. Sea honesto. Estos eran los atributos de Mary Ellen – como una fotógrafa y como un ser humano – y estas son las características por las cuales ella juzgaba su obra y a las cuales noså urgía aspirar.

Algunos de nosotros somos fotógrafos profesionales, otros no los somos. Algunos de nosotros hemos estado sacando fotos de las mismas familias por más de una década, otros estamos atraídos por la espontaneidad de las calles. Algunos de nosotros usamos la cámara para documentar, otros preferimos interpretar. Todos nosotros estamos agradecidos de haber conocido a Mary Ellen, de haber trabajado con ella y de haber estado entre sus amigos. En nuestra obra, solamente podemos esperar emular a ella, cada uno en su propia estilo.

Mary Ellen dijo una vez,” Fotografíe el mundo como es. Nada es más interesante que la realidad. Estas imágenes son nuestra realidad, nuestra Oaxaca.

The Clarity of Marc Riboud

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New York, Times Square

What do you do when you realize you haven’t become the person you once hoped to be? What can you do? What should you do?

Age complicates the answers. If you are young and unencumbered with life’s baggage, you can – and should – make the changes that will take you where you want to be. If you are older, or even simply old, your options are fewer. You have obligations, many of them, financial and emotional. You have exchanged innocence and belief for experience and doubt. The road ahead is short, the time for a mid-course correction was long ago.

What can you do? What should you do?

These questions are in my head as I step out of the Rubin Museum onto West 17th Street during a recent visit to New York. A harsh, pre-winter wind fails to penetrate the sobriety of the moment, one focused on the exhibition I had just seen – more than 100 photographs made in post-World War II Asia by the pioneering Magnum photojournalist Marc Riboud.

With a Leica loaded with black-and-white film, Riboud inserted himself into the transition points of China, Japan, India and other countries during periods of often tumultuous political and cultural change. His work is direct, honest and, at times, both intimate and grand – everything good photojournalism should be.

Of course, I’d seen Riboud’s photographs before and even studied them in college, but collected together and filling room after room in the museum, the scale and the scope of his accomplishment was impressive and inspirational.

It also – selfishly – saddened me. This is the photography I yearn for and this remains the photography that eludes me. I am working on it, but I am not focused enough. My effort is scatter-shot, diffused by lack of direction.

A friend, a photographer I love and admire, urges me to find a story and tell it. I had dinner with her in New York and over steaming bowls of chewy udon she repeated her advice. Coincidentally, the next day, at the Riboud exhibition, I come across a letter written by Henri Cartier-Bresson to a 33-year-old Riboud in 1956, when the younger man was struggling with his photography.

“You’re still having trouble, I sense, finding a story,” wrote Cartier-Bresson, who then counseled Riboud to look for the “means” of telling a story, to find the pieces and put them together one by one until the larger narrative is complete. (A larger excerpt is below.)

I have no illusions of becoming Marc Riboud. In fact, at this point of my life I have no illusions of anything. Still, I treasure clarity for it can lead to conviction.

What can I do? What should I do?

(When in New York, I walk – a lot. The photos below are snaps from a couple of Manhattan walkabouts.)

“You’re still having trouble, I sense, finding a story. I’ll quote what Max Jacobs says about literature in a letter to a friend: ‘Look for the “means,” a work of art is a gathering of means to achieve an effect. Artists are not penitents displaying their sins, they are creators working towards a goal, they have a skill and a story gets made like a suit, with cutting and patterns. Whatever of ourselves we put into it, fine, but it’s necessary to learn how it’s made: what a situation is, how to bring it along, how to resolve it.”
— Letter from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Marc Riboud, March 19, 1956.

#43

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Mission, protestor, Ayotzinapa

43 students. 43 young people kidnapped in the night. 43 sons and daughters murdered by the hands of corruption. 43 bodies discarded and burned like household trash. 43 chances for a better future lost. 43 more reasons to mourn for Mexico.

The 43 slain university students of Ayotzinapa died because on Sept. 26 they commandeered several public buses and blocked a highway, a common form or political protest in Mexico, and by doing so interfered with the wife of the mayor of Iguala, one of the most violent and corrupt cities in the Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most violent and corrupt states. She was en route to give a speech, found the road blocked and called her husband to demand he do something about it. The mayor,  José Luis Abarca, ordered the local police to attack them. The cops handed them to a criminal gang associated with the narcos who control the region. And the students disappeared.

All this happened with the same impunity on the part of the mayor, the police and the narcos that infects all of Mexico and has quite literally allowed killers of all political and illegal persuasion to get away with murder for years.

Since the beginning of what has come to be called the Mexican Drug War, launched in 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderón again the web of cartels who generate between up to $50 billion in illegal drug sales annually and control 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United State, the official death toll of the violence between the cartels, between the government and the cartels and between both of them and the innocent citizens of Mexico – like the 43 students of Ayotzinapa – has reached 60,000. That’s the official number. Unofficially, human rights observers put the estimate at 120,000.

For some perspective, consider that 58,220 Americans died in the Vietnam War, a conflict that compelled my generation to fill the streets of the U.S. capital in protest and led to vast changes in American society.

Of course, Vietnam was an American war and a draft existed that pulled those who could not dodge the conflict directly into it, but still one might imagine that a war of similar lethality occurring in a country visited annually by more than 6 million Americans would spark a modicum of outrage here at home.

Not so.

Thus far, the official U.S. response has been little more than a shrug. The Obama administration has described the fate of the 43 students and the insipid response of the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto as “worrisome.”

That may change. The street protests that began in Iguala after the fate of the students was learned have spread throughout the county and turned violent in Mexico City. Peña Nieto, who ignored the kidnapping for 33 days before speaking publicly about and then left the country for a trade conference in China, has returned to hear a growing number of cries for his resignation (fueled in part by the revelation that he and his wife, a soap-opera star, had a secret $7 million house in a wealth enclave above Mexico City).

American news media are increasingly covering the issue and Mexican-American communities in the United are organizing and marching in the hope of galvanizing more public attention. One of those marches happened Saturday in San Francisco, with 500 people walking from 24th and Mission, once of the heart of the city’s Latino community, to Powell and Market streets. More protests are planned, once in conjunction with general strike set to occur in Mexico on Nov. 20, the anniversary of the Mexican revolution, and another in 43 U.S. cities in December.

What can you do? Many things. From a little to a lot.

Write or tweet your congressional representatives. Tell them you’re outraged, that you’ve had enough, that you want the U.S. government to demand that is second-largest trade partner (U.S.-Mexico trade totaled $600 billion in 2013) clean house.

If you smoke dope or do coke (and why do you?), then stop. Nearly all the coke and much of the weed comes through Mexico. Your high supports the cartels, which in turn corrupt the government further, which engenders a state of impunity, which allows crimes of all sorts, from tax evasion to mass murder, to go unpunished.

March. Walk in the streets with the Mexicans who have come to our country, legally and illegally, in order to escape the very corruption that lead to the deaths of the 43 students. With more than 33 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States (and that’s not counting second-, third-, fourth-, etc. generations of Mexican Americans) this is as much our war at it is Mexico’s.

The Mission on the March

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Anti-gentrification protest in the Mission.

If San Francisco’s Mission District were a wild animal, it would be on the endangered species list.

The neighborhood is hunted by predatory real estate developers who toss out longtime tenants like last week’s garbage, encroached upon by relentless and City Hall-sanctioned gentrification, undernourished by new immigrants (who can no longer afford to move there), and infected with an invasive species of screen-staring clones who seem so culturally unaware that one wonders if they realize a real world exists outside of their digital lives.

Yesterday, those who prefer to keep the Mission ethnically diverse, affordable (for San Francisco) and cross-culturally vibrant gathered at 24th and York streets to march and to protest the attack on their home turf and, hopefully, ignite a broader, citywide effort to preserve working-class San Francisco’s neighborhoods in the face of increasing upscale development and what is essentially the legal deportation of anyone who cannot afford $5 coffees, $200 jeans and $4,000-a-month rents.

What is happening in the Mission saddens and enrages me. I came to San Francisco poor and damaged,  a refugee of the Sixties. San Francisco welcomed me with affordable housing in its then-fringe neighborhoods (Precita Park, Bernal and the Outer Mission), hands-on jobs that paid the rent (delivering newspapers, hotel banquet work) and an opportunity to drop back in via a low-cost city community college that itself now borders on extinction because of neglect and incompetence.

Without any of those things, I would not have been able to have the journalism career I did, to buy the houses I did, to pay the taxes I do, and to contribute, as I can, to the world around me.

Those opportunities will not exist in a San Francisco that eats its own culture, that destroys itself by driving out the very people who make it unique, that chooses development over diversity. The City — as we called San Francisco in my former newspaper — will become just a city.

The 24th Street march, as demonstrations go, was small, but the message was big. Sadly, San Francisco’s last remaining full-size newspaper,  the Chronicle, couldn’t be bothered to cover it (it did find the means to report on a skateboard contest that happened at the same time — shame, shame, shame).

However, Mission Local, the local news project of the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, was there and live-reported the event. And, much has been written about the gentrification of the The Mission and increasing use of the state Ellis Act to force evictions citywide —  by Tim Redmond, by El Tecolote and, yes, by the Chronicle.

My pictures are below. In them you see the faces and energy of The Mission — and the soul of San Francisco. Let’s not allow them be wiped out.

photocrati gallery

 

Witnesses to War

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A mobile rebel unit with a truck-mounted gun moves through rebel-held streets. Syria.

With Hamas and Israel at it again, I’m reminded that there has been conflict in the Middle East all of my life. The killing and the dying never ends. A wry joke during my newspaper days was that we could save the headline “Mideast Violence Continues” and use it as needed, which was often.

But there is nothing humorous about the cycle of bloodshed-truce-and-more-bloodshed between Israel and its Arab neighbors, nor about the now 18-month-old conflict in Syria.

Given the region’s history of continuous conflict of one form or another, it might be easy for we comfortable Americans to ignore the human suffering that is inevitable in such a world of relentless repression and aggression.

Thankfully, there are journalists who go physically where so few of us even want to venture emotionally. Below are links to recent work from photojournalists in the region.

* The Guardian published a set of images by freelancer Narciso Contreras from Aleppo, the center of the Syrian conflict.

* The Atlantic includes of Contreras’ work and that of other photographers in this extensive collection (48) of photos from Syria, published a week go. The magazine reminds us: “Syria’s horrific civil war continues. In some places, it has worsened.”

* The Guardian (again) a month published a set of photographs from Spanish freelancer Maysun vividly showing the human casualties in Syria. Warning: These are graphic images.

* The Guardian (yet again) streams photos from the new Israel-Hamas fighting. The fear or the people on both sides of the border is evident.

Periodismo Peligroso

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Three Mexican photojournalists killed

Part of protest in Mexico City against the killing of three photojournalists.

Mexico is becoming an increasingly dangerous place to be a journalist. Three photojournalists were found dead and dismembered Tuesday in the Gulf state of Veracruz, bringing to 44 the number of journalists killed in Mexico in the last six years, according to Article 19, a press freedom group.

While that number pales next to the more than 50,000 Mexicans killed in the same period during the government’s war against the narco cartels (and cross-cartel fighting), it elevates Mexico to No. 8 on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2012 Impunity Index, “which spotlights countries where journalists are slain and their killers go free.” Sadly, the year is still young.

Here’s what CPJ says about Veracruz:

… a battleground for the Zetas and Sinaloa cartels, is one of Mexico’s most dangerous states for the press, according to CPJ research. Four journalists were murdered there in 2011, and on Saturday, the body of journalist Regina Martínez Pérez was found strangled in her home in Xalapa.”

I have a long history with Mexico, including being the owner of a house I built there, but with many Mexicans clamoring for an end to the violence, the repressive PRI party on the verge of regaining the control of the presidency that it held for more than 70 years; the cartels becoming increasingly entrenched in local and national politics, and a the country’s always ethically tenuous journalistic institutions fighting — quite literally — for their lives, I fear the worst for the country in the near term.

You think I’m being overly dramatic? Read this story about the threats against Jorge Medellín, a reporter for the national newspaper Milenio. An excerpt:

Mexican journalists take the smallest hint of a threat seriously because they know that killing a reporter is so easy to get away with. The word for this is impunity–killing with no consequences. None for the killer, at least. But the consequences for the Mexican people are that journalists are afraid to report the news.

Learn more: New York Times story on the latest killings; Committee to Protect Journalists; Article 19; Coverage in El Universal, a centrist paper from Mexico City

Casualties of War (coverage)

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REme Ochlik gallery

Marie Colvin, Remi Ochlik

Marie Colvin, Remi Ochlik (credits: Sunday Times; Julien De Rosa)

The deaths today in the Syrian city of Homs of reporter Marie Colvin, an American working for the The Sunday Times of London, and freelance French photographer, Rémi Ochlik, remind us — yet once again — that a free press in the face of tyranny often carries a terrible human price.

The Committee to Project Journalists tallied 476 journalists killed worldwide in 2011, half of whom were murdered in places like Mexico, where carrying a notebook or a camera is among the country’s most perilous professions, and the other half were killed on assignment in a  place where bullets and bombs are part of daily life, perhaps caught in a crossfire, as Colvin and Ochlik were when Syrian forces shelled the city.

Let’s honor their work by sharing it, experiencing its emotion and committing ourselves, in whatever small way we can (here’s one way) to the enhancement and protection of a free press and the people who practice it.

Here is Colvin’s last video report and transcript for CNN, a moving story about the death of child from Syrian bombs. Note the passion, anger and frustration in her voice.

Here is Rémi Ochlik’s site. Above is the splash page of his portfolio. Note the dangerous geography he has been working in.

On the Job: Affordable Housing

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Katie Crecilius

Few issues incite people more than the debate over affordable housing. As a term, “affordable housing” not only sounds benign but seems undeniably just. Who, after all, would be in favor of “unaffordable housing”?

But, when such an abstract social concept morphs into physical reality, perhaps in your neighborhood, that’s when cultures clash and fears of crime, color and crashing home values cause many of Marin’s famously liberal communities to put progressive ideals on hold and start arguing the nuances of zoning laws.

In Marin, one of the country’s most affluent counties and one of its most expensive places to live, housing ain’t cheap. Even after the big burst of the real estate bubble, young couples still drop more than a million for a so-so rancher in a good Southern Marin school district and the median price for typical tract home in a Northern Marin community like Novato starts at $500,000.

Most of the teachers, cops, and restaurant workers in Marin don’t have the scratch for that kind of mortgage, so they rent – or they commute. (Marin’s drive time is one of the longest in the region because the everyday working folks can’t afford to live here.)

Marin is also very white – very, very white – which is also a matter of economics since most of the members of California’s emerging minority-majority haven’t yet accumulated the wealth to buy into Marin.

This is where the affordable housing debate comes in.

Housing advocates, who want to comply with state laws by building clusters of subsidized housing in cities around the county, say Marin needs to provide a place to live for those who school our kids, serve our meals and staff our boutiques. Plus, they say, more diversity would be a good thing.

Those on the other side argue that the market should prevail and they welcome anyone who can afford the price of entry into Marin. Providing subsidies, they argue, increases density, attracts people who commit crimes and, thus, lowers the value of nearby homes – theirs. It’s not a matter of race, they say, but one of values.

I photographed people on both sides of the issue for a story writer Nate Seltenrich did for Marin Magazine on Novato, Marin’s northernmost city and the center of the current debate. Novato is not the place most people think of when Marin comes to mind. There’s no Golden Gate Bridge, no Muir Woods and none of the hipster quotient that defines smaller southern towns like Mill Valley and Sausalito. Novato is pure suburb, a collection of developments and shopping centers linked by Highway 101 and extending out from an aging downtown that seems to be undergoing perennial revival.

I made several trips to the Novato for the story, a couple to photograph the people and locations where housing might be built, and another to shoot a community meeting about the issue. I came away from the story with mixed feelings about the matter.

On the one side, there are plenty of examples, not only in Novato but also elsewhere in Marin, of affordable housing that works, meaning it not only provides shelter for people who don’t own a Range Rover, but also fits into the community architecturally and socially.

On the other side, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like it if the city council in my leafy town decided to put 100 apartments on my block, but I also hope I’d find away around that concern and get my head in spot where I did the right thing – and I think we all know what that is.

photocrati gallery

 

Crime Scene

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Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.

A standoff between police and a man who entered a Marin County branch of the Bank of with a fake gun and a grudge turned into a spectator sport for me and my neighbors in Corte Madera – where the most exciting thing that usually happens all year is the changing of the flowers on the main drag’s median strip.

It wasn’t quite Dog Day Afternoon – the suspect, who surrendered peacefully late into the evening never made an appearance and I’ll suspect looks nothing like Al Pacino – but it was enough of a scene from to keep hundreds of suburban onlookers entertained for hours.

There were cops, SWAT teams, FBI agents, TV crews doing live stand-ups and more automatic weapons than you might find at an Arizona gun show. There was also all of us – the crowd, well-equipped citizen journalists, Tweeters and Facebookers. We photographed, we recorded, we uploaded.

One guy kept calling the news desk at the ABC affiliate in San Francisco pitching them cellphone photos, which they used. He looked at my big Nikon and said, “That’s a nice lens, but I can email my shots to the TV and you can’t.

He had me on that one.

Here are some shots from the scene.

photocrati gallery

On the Job: Photojournalist for a Day

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Dominican gubernatorial debate

I’ve been out of the newsroom for 10 years now, and even when a collision of events produces a yearning for the stain of ink and the wretch of deadline, I don’t miss newspapering. And even though I spent 22 years as a working journalist and another three dissecting the dysfunctionality of newsrooms, I’m not sure I really miss journalism either — but the jury’s still out on that one.

What I do miss, though, is covering breaking news (which is not necessarily the same as doing journalism).

Even before 24-hour cable, the infinite news hole of the Internet, and the insta-twitterness of today’s reporting, news was all about the now. It was a story told in a language dominated by Five W’s and a Big D (for deadline). It happened fast, was reported faster, written quicker still, and often forgotten in the next news cycle. If you could focus on the now and forget the later, you could thrive in the world of breaking news — as I did.

I’ve long thought that the character traits needed to do deadline news are in conflict with those that make us better human beings — impatience, aggressiveness, competitiveness, and a relentless search to find the negative in almost any situation, to name a few of the former. That’s why journalism is so complicated: On the one hand it attracts many people whose moral compass guides them toward deep, insightful stories that can right society’s wrongs, but on the other it rewards more frequently people who can feed the daily beast — now the minute-by-minute beast — with headlines designed to grab attention today without regard for the impact they may have tomorrow.

Still, I confess to occasionally missing the rush of big news events. They are, despite the blase facade adopted by the reporters and photographers who cover them, exciting. There is tension, there is conflict, there is urgency and there is a hierarchy of importance of the players involved — at the center the newsmakers, on the rim the audience, and in the middle the media.

I got to return to that space one evening in October at Dominican University in San Rafael, which was hosting the third of three debates between California gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown (who won the election three weeks later). For a few hours I was inside the ropes, shooting the crowd, the candidates and the debate. My deadline for Marin Magazine was the next morning, so I wasn’t filing as the story unfolded like most of those in the pressroom, but it was enough of a crunch to get the adrenaline pumping.

I’m not confusing the fun I had that night with the value of that type of reporting, which is mostly worthless to the average person. Inches upon inches of words and video upon video of yadda-yadda from each candidate and from reporters and pundits keeping score. Some call it horse-race journalism, and that’s apt. I’m not defending the practice; I’m just saying it’s a thrill to ride the horse now and then.

* Slideshow of my pictures.

* Marin Magazine story.

Tom Brokaw