Revisiting the ghosts of Aceh
By Beawiharta
I remember well the 2004 tsunami in Aceh. I stayed for more than six weeks in Banda Aceh and then flew back to Jakarta to recover. In Jakarta, I cried everywhere when nobody was around me; at the office, at home, on the street, I was always crying. The situation was embarrassing, but I couldn’t stop the tears. They were automatic.
My brain couldn’t run from the images that I took of the tsunami aftermath. The counselor told me that I must go back to Aceh to take different pictures; positive pictures. Like people building their houses or shop stalls, children going back to school or singing songs happily.
Last week, I flew back to Aceh to cover the 8.6 magnitude earthquake. When I heard confirmation that there was no resulting tsunami, I was happy because I would not be taking pictures of sadness again here, in Aceh.
Trapped with a way out
By Mariana Bazo
It would be impossible to think of rescuing miners and not to associate such thoughts to the rescue of the Chilean miners in San Jose, Copiapo, 2010. That really was a glorious rescue after a lengthy sixty-nine day underground wait.
This time in Peru, nine miners were trapped in an illegal copper and gold mine in the desert of Ica, south of Lima.
The story began to gain momentum when it was discovered the Peruvian miners were still alive. Then with the hope came the story, curiosity, national interest and comparison.
Looking into the eyes of a mass murderer
By Fabrizio Bensch
A lot has been written about Andres Behring Breivik, the 33 year-old Norwegian man who a year ago was unknown.
He lived completely withdrawn on a small farm far from Oslo, alone to work on his diabolical plan. He built bombs to explode in central Oslo, and in the following chaos drove to Utoeya island and shot as many teenagers as possible. In all, he killed 77 people that day.
Today, for the first time, I looked directly into the eyes of this man – the eyes of a mass murderer.
Back on the afternoon of July 22nd, I heard the first news about what was happening in downtown Oslo and on the island of Utoeya. Of course at that time, no one knew the full dimension of these two attacks. I took the very first flight from Berlin to Oslo, then drove straight through the night to Utoeya island. The first photographs I took were of survivors. As the number of victims on the island grew, clues emerged as to what terrible tragedy was hitting this country.
It was early the next morning when a colleague and I rented a boat to go to the island. Red Cross boats were everywhere, as were police searching for bodies in the Tyrifjorden lake. As we approached the island I looked through my telephoto lens at the white sheets on the shore. The closer we got, the more and more precise the details became. Shoes, jeans and feet. The bodies of the victims were still laying on the shore.
Olympic Dreams
By Lucy Nicholson
Sweaty burly men in photographers’ vests that haven’t been washed for days. Packed together, jostling for position. Tempers flaring in many tongues, monopods and lenses bumping against bodies – photographing Olympic athletes can be less than glamorous.
It’s an enviable front row seat to the largest sporting spectacle on earth, but there’s not much opportunity for photographers to chat to athletes, or to find many unique shooting vantage points.
So when the opportunity came to photograph Olympic athletes training in and around LA last week as part of our coverage of the build-up to the 2012 Games in London, I jumped right in, literally.
First stop found me bobbing in a pool as platform diver Haley Ishimatsu plunged 10 meters and barely made a splash next to me.
Charlie’s Angel
By Danish Siddiqui
After an excruciatingly long 15-hour journey from Mumbai, I stepped out of the car outside Adipur train station and found two children waiting to welcome me with flowers. Both were wearing bowler hats and had t-shirts depicting the silent film star Charlie Chaplin. Of course, I was yet to meet the town’s biggest Chaplin fan.
Adipur, a small town in the western Indian state of Gujarat was only famous for its salt pans until Ashok Aswani started living like Charlie Chaplin. A practitioner of indigenous medicine by profession, Aswani has been celebrating Charlie Chaplin’s birthday on April 16 with his fan club for the past 39 years. He even holds a candlelight vigil and a prayer meeting on the legend’s death anniversary on December 25.
Aswani turned a die-hard fan of Chaplin’s after watching his film The Gold Rush in a nearby cinema. The film cost him his job as a type-writer. He didn’t go to work that day and spent the entire time watching the same film over and over again.
A night to remember
By Chris Helgren
The weather was calm, the stars and crescent moon shone and the water lapped gently against the hull as three wreaths were tossed into the sea above the Titanic wreck, 100 years after she went down.
It seemed every one of the MS Balmoral’s 1300 guests, dressed against the cool night air, was crammed onto its terraced decks aft, craning for a view of the event. And at 2:20 when the wreaths went in, all was silent. As Philip Littlejohn, the Titanic historian later noted, these details mimicked what would have been happening during the disaster itself – a black night, no light bar that of the doomed liner, and when she went under, silence.
Taking it all in was Belfast writer Susie Millar, who wept at the handrails over the stern, watching as the wreaths floated into the blackness out of sight. She told me, “I thought of people in the lifeboats as Titanic sank, who didn’t know whether they would be rescued or not. It all happened (the memorial) in real time and I thought that people wouldn’t have had time to say all their goodbyes, it happened so fast. It was a night I’ll never forget”.
My day with Cocoa, the New York goat
By Allison Joyce
A few weeks ago, while I was at the Empire Hotel having a drink with friends, a latecomer arrived and laughingly said that on his way, he had passed by a goat hanging out at Lincoln Center. We were incredulous until he showed us a photo he had snapped on his phone and sure enough, there it was, a goat actually hanging out in the Lincoln Center fountain! Within days I read a story on Gawker titled “Amazing Pizza Goat Risks Overexposure,” which stated that the “pizza goat”, aka Cocoa, had dined at Serafina. I thought that this would make an incredible visual “only in New York” sort of story, so I tracked down the goat’s owner, Cyrus Fakroddin, and met them at their home last weekend in Summitt, New Jersey with the Reuters TV crew.
We followed Cyrus and Cocoa around the home they share as Cocoa wandered about, lounged in front of a warm fire, hung out with Cyrus’s pet chickens, and even jumped up onto the kitchen counter to snack on some fresh fruit. Before we headed into the city for the day, we ran an errand at the post office, and when confronted with their “no goats allowed” policy Cyrus simply told them that she was a service goat and that was that– we were in! Walking around downtown Summitt, it was clear that Cyrus and Cocoa were local celebrities; they were greeted many times by their local fans.
Bravo, Cocoa, making New Yorkers smile and laugh for a change.
Marilyn Manson… and Johnny Depp?
By Mario Anzuoni
The Golden Gods awards is a celebration of the most influential heavy metal and hard rock bands, sponsored by the industry magazine Revolver. This year, for the first time in the award’s four year history, the 2-hour show, featuring multiple headbanging performances in an extremely loud concert-like atmosphere, would be televised live on the xbox network. And if that wasn’t enough to make the night interesting, I was informed before the show that a very special guest was going to be a part of the finale this year.
The show kicked off with a performance by Motley Crue co-founder Nikki Sixx, followed by Gene Simmons of KISS receiving a special Golden God award for his career achievements. The show just got louder from there, with performances by the Hollywood-based band Black Veil Brides and Dee Snider, then Slash performing with Alice Cooper. Then came Evanescence followed by Tenacious D duo Jack Black and Kyle Gass presenting Rush drummer Neil Peart with a Lifetime Achievement award.
The crowd was pleased, but after almost two hours, the audience was both impatient and excited to see Marilyn Manson’s finale performance.
Texts from Hillary – go figure!
By Kevin Lamarque
On a secretive trip by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Tripoli, only days before the capture and killing of Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi, I photographed Clinton aboard a C-17 transport plane. She was wearing dark sunglasses while texting from a makeshift desk she was working from. Okay, nice image I thought, but we were about to land in Tripoli which was certain to yield the images that the world would really want to see. Initially yes. But that was last October.
In the past week, that image of Hillary texting on the plane has gone viral thanks to a tumblr.com blog called “Texts from Hillary” which used my image, along with a similar one from photographer Diana Walker, for a meme which according to the creators of the blog resulted in “a week that included 32 posts, 83,000 shares on Facebook, 8,400 Twitter followers, over 45K Tumblr followers, news stories around the world.”
The blog went so viral, that the creators of the tumblr blog, Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe were invited to the State Department where they met with Secretary Clinton who according to Smith found the site much to her liking. The icing on the cake was having their photo taken with Clinton as they all texted.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. Yesterday, Smith and Lambe announced on the blog
Rocking and Rolling on the Titanic Memorial Cruise
By Chris Helgren
In what resembles a Trekkie convention gone through a time portal, hundreds of passengers on the Titanic Memorial Cruise, retracing the Titanic’s voyage from Southampton 100 years later, now divide their time between promenading in the latest fashions of 100 years ago and debating the true color of Titanic’s funnels. Yellow, but what kind of yellow? Model maker Kenneth Mascarenhas and painter James Allen Flood don’t see eye to eye on the subject, and it’s suggested that fellow passenger Commodore Warwick should adjudicate the issue. After all, he saw the Titanic wreck in a submersible. However, Mascarenhas fails to take into account that the ship is now rusted through and covered with Oceanic mud, its funnels probably covered in barnacles.
Actually, there are plenty of things to do on board the MS Balmoral. I missed the “fluid retention and swollen ankles seminar” on Monday, but there’s been a parade of Titanic experts on show to fill us in on everything one would want to know (except the color of funnels). Sadly, due to the inclement weather, shuffleboard has been cancelled the last two days. As has a dance show, due to health and safety concerns. Many of my fellow passengers have been sighted hunched over, unable to promenade, green with seasickness.
The big drama yesterday was the helicopter evacuation of a BBC cameraman. Tour operator Miles Morgan said that the ship would swing back 20 nautical miles towards Ireland, within range of an Irish Coast Guard chopper. The ailing man was whisked upwards in a sling and we returned on our course, hopefully not late for our anniversary date. Captain Robert Bamberg assured everyone that would be the case if we continued at a speed of 15 knots.
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