Barbara Davidson’s “Frozen Land, Forgotten People”

Even if you only have five spare minutes today, I urge you to spend them watching Barbara Davidson’s heart-wringing audio slideshow Frozen Land, Forgotten People.

It’s the story of the residents of huge chunk of Arizona which was declared a “no development zone” by Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner Robert L Bennett back in 1966. The ban made it illegal for the residents to do anything to improve their living conditions – and stayed in place for 40 years.

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Reporting from Afghanistan – with an iPhone

The Associated Press has this excellent photo slideshow of images taken by David Guttenfelder while accompanying soldiers on military activities in Afghanistan between 2001 and today.

The images have all been shot with a standard iPhone and an (un-named by AP) fake Polaroid effect app. There are dozens of these on the App Store today, and most of them do a pretty good job of applying the faux Polaroid effect. But they look their best when brought together in a themed gallery as powerful as this one.

Talking of Polaroid: remember The Impossible Project to revive manufacturing of Polaroid film? Turns out it wasn’t quite as impossible as we all thought…

Editor’s Note: the AP may not be revealing the Polaroid app they’re using, but here at PhotoCine News we’re not shy about sharing our methods. We like ShakeIt from ShakeIt Photo. Well known professional photographers like Mark Leet are making ShakeIt part of the their camera bag as well.

How graphic is too graphic?

Arielle Emmett has written a sombre and thought-provoking piece for the American Journalism Review, discussing the role and impact of graphic photojournalism in the wake of the recent Haitian earthquake.

With natural disaster and war comes violent and bloody death; in some cases on such a scale that it’s hard to take in.

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Beware the coming of the Daily Digital Beast

Colin Mulvany, multimedia producer at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, writes a sobering and thought-provoking article outlining his vision of photojournalism in the age of the internet.

His view is simple: photojournalists can cling to their still cameras and remain “purists” – or they can embrace audio and video devices, adding them to what he calls their “storytelling toolboxes”. He’s pretty sure he knows which of the two strategies is going to be most successful in the coming years.

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