SHUTTLE LAUNCH, MARIO TAMA

I had the luxury to scout locations for a day prior to the launch and spent my time cruising up and down the waterfront in Titusville which sits about 10 miles due West of the launch pad. I finally settled on this spot and camped out behind the crowd with a 400 in the lovely Florida summer heat. At ignition, I fired the camera as the shuttle seemed to almost hover away from the pad before dashing off into the heavens. The roar from ignition didn't reach us until the shuttle was a mere speck in the sky.

c Mario Tama/Getty Images

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CENTER COURT, FRANKA BRUNS

I step up on the bench, adjust my monopod,
straighten out the 400mm lens and bite my tongue. A habit I have when I’m really concentrating on shooting. I hope I’m prepared for match point. It’s just Bob Martin and myself shooting from the overhead position of Center Court. We’re watching Venus Williams fight her way into the Wimbledon final against the young crowd pleaser and defending champion Maria Sharapova. Match point ends, Venus wins. All I can remember is pushing the shutter. I pack my belongings and head back to the press center. We got off to a late start after rain in the morning; it is now starting to drizzle again.

I really enjoy covering tennis, but after this match, I am starting feel sick. Nothing new for Wimbledon veterans who have covered the championships at the All England Lawn Tennis Club for years. But for a rookie like me, the fickle British weather and continuous running around between the air-conditioned press center and the outside courts is starting
to take its toll.

After getting a drink to soothe my throat, a fellow AP photographer walks past me, talking about a nice shot I got of Venus Williams celebrating. Since I didn’t look at my images after I finished shooting, I have no idea what he is talking about. I give him a strange look and continue on my way to our little editing room in the back. Editor Melissa Einberg then shows me a photo of Venus in mid air, her hands reaching up high and her face full of joy. “I took that?” I ask, not thinking that I had caught her airborne.

Working at Wimbledon for the Associated Press was great. The All England Lawn Tennis Club is a place, though, where discipline and obedience to the rules count more than many other places. If you don’t follow those rules on court, you will be out of there much faster then you got in. The result being: a bunch of well-behaved photographers doing their job.

c Franka Bruns
AP Photo/Franka Bruns

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EVEN COWGIRLS, BY SHERRLYN BORKGREN

I went to a rodeo in Eugene Oregon on a hot summer day
in July. I made images of young cowgirls, all 13-year-olds.



Yeee Haw! Rodeo fans glimmer on the sidelines
during a hot summer day in July.

photos by Sherrlyn Borkgren

SHARM EL-SHEIK, JEROME DELAY

Working conditions are superb, tourist resort, hotel looks like Disneyland, we have high speed wifi internet connection.
But the Egyptian police do not want us taking pictures.

I just took this one an hour ago:

AP Photo/Jerome Delay

The flowers are set outside the blown-up hotel, hidden by curtains. You can see the pix on yahoo I think.


Here is one from yesterday:

AP Photo/Jerome Delay

The two women are tourists from Turkmenistan at the site of the market bombing.

LONDON: THE PRESS BUNCH, MICHEL DE GROOT

photos and text c MICHEL DE GROOT/WPN

On Friday morning at 05.00 my cell phone rang. I jumped from my bed and ran for the phone. Katie Hunt-Morr from WPN apologized for calling me so early in the morning but wanted to know how soon I could get to London to cover the aftermath of the bombings. After a quick shower I called Katie back and asked her to repeat everything, since my brains where not really absorbing the information when she first phoned me, after only three and a half hours of sleep.

I was offered a one or two day assignment for the New York Times. I grabbed my gear plus some clothes and about half an hour later I flopped down in the train to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam to catch the next flight to London. When I arrived at 10.45 I phoned the London office of the NY Times. I discovered that they were not informed of the fact that I had been sent to London for an assignment. They had not been contacted by office in New York because of the time difference between the continents.

At the London office of the New York Times I was welcomed by Alan Cowell and a kind lady named Pam. She introduced herself as the coordinator for England-based photographers. After a cup of tea and installing my notebook computer, they hooked me up with a reporter to work on an article.

We went to the street to gather “vox pops,” voices of the people. My task was to shoot portraits for the article. After a few hours in the city we went back to the office where I edited and filed my images. Shortly after that I headed out with another reporter to do a similar story.

Around five o'clock that afternoon I was phoned by Jessie, on the NY Times photo desk in New York, who asked how things were going.

She urged me that on the next day I should not hook up with any reporter but go out alone. I was encouraged to do my own thing and just follow my photographic vision on the story. Not an easy task in a situation where the limited visual content of the story is virtually stalked by the media. I spent the next morning and early afternoon roaming the streets of central London and visiting the bombing sites. I had to be back in time at the office to edit and file my images because of the early deadline for the Sunday edition.



The “main event” appeared to be at King's Cross station where the whole press corps was circling around like vultures waiting for people who would show some emotion or were brave enough to wade through the media crowd to lay flowers at the spot.
Suddenly everyone packed together around these two men. The brothers Webb were showing a picture of their sister Laura Webb who went missing after the bombings. They wanted media attention for her loss and were hoping that their sister would show up again somehow.

A little while later a woman in her mid twenties showed up with letter sized posters of her missing friend. Some 20 to 25 photographers, tv-crews and other journalists literally jumped on her and within a second everybody was stumbling all over each other to get a glimpse of this woman. This was obvious way too much for her and she reacted very scared and emotional. She tried to run away for this crowd but everyone followed her. For minutes long the whole press bunch was moving as one big organism from one side of the place to the other, while this woman anxiously tried to get rid of them. At some point she managed to hand over the posters to another woman who accompanied her.

Finally everybody backed off and she fled. I was observing this all from a few meters distance and I for a moment I could not help feeling very uncomfortable being a journalist.



photos and text c MICHEL DE GROOT/WPN
Represented by WorldPictureNews.com New York, USA

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LONDON AFTER THE BOMBS, MICHAEL KAMBER

At least two dozen British police officers guarded the Muslim Welfare Association Mosque and another nearby mosque in the London neighborhood of Finsbury Park which has a large Muslim population. There have been threats against Britain's Muslim community following the July 7th bomb blasts.

Photo by Michael Kamber for The New York Times.
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IRAN, by RAMIN TALAIE

photos and text c Ramin Talaie

I arrived in Tehran to get a head start on this year’s presidential elections in Iran. There was not much excitement in the air as in the prior years. All seemed routine and normal five weeks before the June 17th election date. However, this being Iran, there is no such thing as routine.

Over 1,000 people exercised their constitutional rights and signed up at the Ministry of Interiors to run for the office of the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A few days later the Guardian Council, one of Iran’s unelected political bodies, reduced the field of 1,014 to 8, disqualifying the masses, and allowing the predicted top names to move forward.

Most Iranians complained that in 8 years, Khatami, a reformist cleric, brought them no real positive change. Local and foreign media favored the front-runner and former president pragmatic Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Inside Iran the reformists talked of boycotting the election as all signs pointed to Hashemi and conservatives to win.

A few days later the Iranian soccer team beat Bahrain qualifying on top of their division to advance to World Cup Soccer games in Germany in 2006. The win incited Iranians, especially the youth, to run into streets and celebrate the victory.

Women who normally are not allowed to attend games were present in large numbers with painted faces in green, white, and red along with young men who openly danced to piercing music in the middle of major avenues in Tehran. Police and members of Basij (Iran’s paramilitary group enforcing morality and Islamic laws) were simply too outnumbered to do anything.



Standing in the middle of a major avenue taking pictures with a few other photographers, we all knew this was not about the game. They just wanted to dance. The boys wanted to show the latest moves seen on MTV coming over illegal satellite, as the girls clapped and cheered them on to the rhythm of music.


Eventually people dispersed as more police and Basij took to the streets. Going home, I witnessed a group of riot police chasing hundreds of youth and beating them wildly with their batons. I didn’t dare to follow them or snap any pictures.



As things began heating up between the candidates, out of nowhere Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn, was spotted at the Nama-ze-Jumeh (the Friday prayers). Penn showed up in Iran as a journalist working for the San Francisco Chronicle.

For days people talked about Sean Penn as Iranian press chased him all over Tehran to get a glimpse of him. I finally caught up to him on his last day in Tehran when he visited the Film Museum.



However, the highlight of the crazy week in Tehran came as hundreds of brave women took to Tehran University for un-permitted demonstration asking for equal rights.



All blocks leading to Tehran University was closed off by edgy riot police. Crossing the street, a few of us formed a little group and forced our way in to reach the demonstrators. The police pushed back but most of us got through. It was clearly not a good idea for us to be there.



Everyone was tense and trying to stay near each other. A handful of men in plain clothing video tapped everyone and every woman holding signs. They were undoubtedly members of Etellaat, Iran’s secret police.

After taking a few shots, I looked up checking on my friends to see where everyone was. Men standing on the parameters of the protesters were being arrested and pushed out. Police had formed a circle around us to keep away more press and passersby away. Empty buses were brought in to block the demonstrations from the other side of the street. We were trapped!

Shooting as quickly as we could we keep talking to each other watching for the police and avoiding the Etellaat’s cameras.



I got chills running up my back as I looked around at these brave women. I felt this is what it must have felt like covering civil rights marches in the south during the 60’s. The women had strong demands. They chanted Persian poetry celebrating women’s place in society and ignored the fear tactics used by the police.

These women had taken on the Iranian government head on by asking for equal rights and demanding a change to the constitution challenging everything that is wrong in Iran especially towards women.



On the elections day, all eyes were on Hashemi. Although he took the majority of the votes that day, but he lost Tehran, the capital, to hardliner mayor Ahmadinejad.

A surprising strong showing by Ahmadinejad resulted in Iran’s first ever election runoff between him and Hashemi Rafsanji. Through the following week reformist joined forces around Hashemi Rafsanji to no avail.

At the end, all predictions were wrong. The extreme conservative, Ahmadinejad, who wanted to place a martyr from Iran-Iraq war in every square in Tehran, had won the elections.

Again nothing is normal here as we were offered a tour of Iran’s nuclear facility by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance known as Ershad. Ershad is in charge of providing visa and monitoring journalist activities in Iran. About 43 journalists, mostly foreign, jumped on the opportunity to visit the site.



We saw a nuclear reactor and power plant under construction along with heavy security. The facility is under contract by Russian and all laborers and engineers were Russians. It was fascinating to think this place will be the top hit target by Israel and America the second it goes operational.

Iran was again showing its old signs, unpredictable and exciting. I could not resist thinking what if I get stuck here!

Two days later after an adventurous two months in Iran, I was on an Austrian Air flight to Vienna.

It was an amazing feeling to have witnessed so much and having the freedom to leave it all behind.

Ramin Talaie


Tehran, Iran

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North Korea/ Pyongyang

Magnus Macedo
photos by Magnus Macedo



PART I: “Access” of Evil
From the air we could see the dry lands of North Korea with only a few irrigation fed rice fields. The highways looked empty from up there too.


Landing at Pyongyang’s International Airport was like landing fifty years ago in time. Old and semi-rusted airplanes parked next to the runway, old buses and even older cars next to the small and basic Airport building, felt ancient to me.
I was certainly the only Brazilian on that plane, and colleagues from ABC News were certainly the only Americans. The other passengers were mostly Chinese, North Koreans or Russians. It is not very often western journalists are here.

The officials were courteous but firm; and no smiles were ever exchange between them and us. I nervously tried a couple of times to have friendly eye contact with them. It never happened. Pyongyang was almost totally destroyed by the American/Allied troops in 1950’s war. Nearly 3 million Koreans were killed in those battles and most of their cities were reduced to rubble. The North Koreans accuse the US for starting this war and dividing their country in two. The resentment against the “Yankees,” as they call them, is clear.

We had three government “Minders” waiting for us. The first thing they asked us, after introducing themselves, was if we had any computers or cell phones. We knew beforehand that this kind of equipment was not allowed in North Korea, so, without hesitation, we surrendered them.

As we drove out of Pyongyang airport I saw rice fields all along the road leading to Pyongyang. Pyongyang has a population of about 2.5 million people but you didn’t have that impression when driving through town. It rather looked more like a bank holiday weekend. Even though it was mid-afternoon Tuesday there weren’t many cars or people in the streets. Mural paintings of their “great leader” Kim IL Sung and Revolution scenes were in almost every corner.

Our crew of five was divided into three cars with a government Minder in each of one of them. In our car, Mr. Li, N.K. Foreign office official, explained to me the meaning of each one of those gigantic monuments as we drove by them. He looked very proud, and sounded rather obsequious.

“Look” he said, “this is the Tower of the Juche Idea! This monument represents the principles of our society”! “And that, he said, is the Grand People’s Study House!” indicating a building that resembled a mega-pagoda, of un-human proportions, and surrounded by beautiful well-kept gardens. Ah! and that is the “Monument to Victory in the Fatherland Liberation War”, he said, another super mega monument.

When we drove by Kim IL Sung’s Square where the main Government buildings are. Mr. Li then couldn’t hide his excitement in showing us the Square. ‘Look, that’s Karl Marx! And that’s Lenin! And on the other side you can see our great leader, Kim Il Sung!


This huge square was basically empty, except in one corner where a couple of hundred school children rehearsed parade drills. The enormity of this Square is such that even with hundreds of kids it still looked empty.

God! The adoration to their supreme leader and founder of their country, Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il is almost like a religion. References to their leader are adorned with superlatives and praise by most Koreans. National TV channels show Military marches and National songs between programs. Civil awareness and duty reminders are constant broadcasted on TV. “Songs of freedom” always follow those announcements. Music is constantly played in the streets of Pyongyang as well; songs to inspire, songs of victory, revolution songs, and verses calling for unification with the South. Accordingly to Mr. Li, the practice dates back to the end of the war over 50 years ago.



“We have this to make the workers happier while they’re working” he smiled with pride. I saw “happy” workers laying new pavements almost everywhere in Pyongyang.

I often saw bands playing live music. Passers-by stopped to sing along for a bit and then carry on with their lives. I was prevented from Mr. Li from taking pictures of the scene.

Upon our arrival to the Koryo hotel, we were sent to our rooms and ordered to come downstairs in 1 hour to have dinner with Mr. Kim Gye Gwang, North Korea Vice Foreign Minister.

Mr. Gwang, a short, friendly look man in his mid-sixties appeared in the hotel foyer smiling and welcomed us to dinner. He made many toasts to our visit to his country with all sorts of rice spirits. At one point, I had a glass of beer, a glass of whisky, a glass of red wine and a glass of a rice spirit in front of me during dinner. All these being served by traditionally dressed waitresses topping off our glasses. The food was abundant and I tried tasty dishes that I couldn’t really identify as prawns, chicken, or maybe something that “tastes like chicken.”

After many toasts of welcome, Mr. Gwang wasn’t shy to tell us what he already had told the world: “Yes, we do have many nuclear weapons…we have to be prepared in case the Americans attack us”, he said. “We need to be able to defend ourselves…” “And we are on the process of making many more nuclear bombs…”

Do you have missiles? Yes we do, and they’re capable of carrying nuclear warheads too. How far? I’m not going to tell you this, obviously not, he said smiling.
“We‘re still very hopeful that the Bush administration will accept our proposal for bilateral talks. We hope commonsense will prevail,” he said. Mr. Wang also emphasized over dinner that the Koreans felt the UN left them down. “The world has let us down,” he said. He said the Americans should stop calling his country the “Axis of Evil” and “An Outpost of Tyranny”. We are utterly offended by those words, he said. Koreans are very proud of their country and would fight to the end to defend their Father Land, he said. “We dream the day of a unified Korea”, he said.

When asked about millions of his citizens of the verge of a famine, Mr. Gwang said: “Korea has problems like any other country”, not confirming not denying it.

Accordingly to WFP more than 3 million Koreans could starve if more aid is not given. At the moment N.K. gets aid from China, Russia, South Korea and even Japan and the US. But the WFP will pull out of N.K. soon for lack of funds to maintain its project there.” We will be forced to drop 3.5 million starving Koreans”, a WFP official told us in Pyongyang.

My American colleagues told Mr. Gwang that America is also a divided country, and that at least 50% of its population didn’t vote for this Government. Mr. Wang smiled and had another toast, this time with whisky. “Please be very welcomed to Korea”, he said in English.

NEXT: PART II: CENSORSHIP

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SUMMER SUNDAY AFTERNOON: MOSCOW, IVAN SHAPOVALOV

Photographer Ivan Shapovalov never lets a day go by without taking photos, especially last Sunday, with about 18 hours of daylight on a warm day in Moscow.





all photos c Ivan Shapovalov

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Isn't That a Pity, by Dick Kraus

I got annoyed by the vandalism that I was seeing occur almost daily, at a little local park where my honey and I take our daily power walks. It pissed me off enough that I dragged out my digital camera and shot some photos. Even though I've been retired from my newspaper photographer's job since 2002, I still tried to make the photos interesting. Then I sat down and wrote a little bit of prose to go with the pictures. I formatted everything in Dreamweaver and uploaded it to my personal web site. Then I called the newspaper for which I had worked for 42 years and offered it to them. It was truly a nice local piece and I thought they'd be interested. But, they weren't. Isn't it a pity. Oh, yeah. That's also the name of my piece. Maybe you will enjoy it.
Dick Kraus

ISN’T IT A PITY?
By Dick Kraus

They put up bird houses about 12 feet up on some of the tall trees that lined the asphalt walking path in this lovely passive park in central Suffolk. A few months later we spotted the shattered remains of most of them lying at the base of each host tree. Isn’t it a pity?

We couldn’t understand why anyone would want to destroy the good intentions that went into the building of these refuges for the local birds. The park itself was donated to the public by a tiny, incorporated village. I purposely avoid mentioning the name or location in order to avoid making it a magnet for more destruction. It is a lovely bit of greenery, a little more than a third of a mile square, utilizing the natural assets that existed here before it became a park. The only additions were the fencing in of the boundaries, a small parking lot, an asphalt path through the trees, and some simple wooden benches, clustered in groups of three and scattered throughout the park. It was situated in the midst of some very up-scale homes that probably sell in the high six figure range. It is open to the public from sun-up to sundown and it is the absolutely perfect place for us senior citizens to take our power walks. That is how my darling and I began to notice the vandalizing that was taking place. Isn’t it a pity?

Graffiti began appearing; first spray-painted names or initials on the asphalt path. Then the defacing graphics began to sprout on many of the wooden benches. The Village workers made an effort to scour the paint from the property. They did their best but the bleached areas on the wooden planks still bear testimony to the criminal acts performed there. And, even then, though the slate was erased, it just became a clean canvas for a new assault of graffiti. Isn’t it a pity?



The last straw occurred recently when the two of us waited for the heat of the day to dissipate and we took our walk in the cool of the evening twilight. This is the time of day that I love the most. There is a soft, ethereal quality to the fading light that artists and photographers call “magic light.” The trees really didn’t cast any shadows and the path ahead kind of faded into the dimness. But neither the dimness nor the beauty of the evening could hide the results of another onslaught of vandalism. The beautiful hosta plants that were carefully planted by park gardeners to merge with the wild growth on either side of the path were now mangled and torn; many of them uprooted and just left to wither. Trash cans were overturned and broken tree branches were littered throughout the park.

It’s a good assumption that all of this was the work of youngsters who probably reside in this upscale community. This isn’t the act of some impoverished and underprivileged kids who are venting their frustration at the inequities of life. This was obviously the actions of children who have too much of everything except a sense of responsibility.

Now, isn’t THAT a pity.

Photo and Text © Dick Kraus

SUMMER MONDAY AFTERNOON: JULY 4, MATT HEVEZI

My Fourth of July
Matt Hevezi

Five thousand festive bodies passed by me as I sat on the porch of a beach cabana just south of the pier in Oceanside, California. Some fat, some lean; some light, some dark; some on foot, some on wheels; some reserved in appearance, some bizarre. It was an absolute people watching "gold mine."

The weather was on. Beverages were on... Yadda, yadda, yadda.

So I took some pictures. I used a funky disposable to capture a vibe on a day, at a place, in time.


Outside temperature was near 80 degrees and there was a perfect on shore breeze.

The cops had draped yellow "Crime Scene" tape along the narrow strip of roadway known as "the South Strand," to mark an emergency vehicle route. I thought this would be an interesting element to the photographs in the event they ended up anywhere close to neat-o when they came back from Wal Mart.

I set my camera down on the porch without even framing up. I marked the position with a spent match. I held my drink in my right hand and advanced the frames and charged the flash button with my left.

Hordes of beach-walkers openly ignored the cops' effort to keep the roadway clear. The only emergency I observed was a 3 p.m. bust (complete with a cop copter above) of a multi-keg beer & band gig a few cabins down. The cops confiscated and then loaded the kegs in a "cop-mobile." The party was switched off until a couple hours later. The band, by sheer luck, relocated and plugged in within a stone's throw from our location.

So here is the scene. A good time was had by all. The pleasure these pictures bring me, compared to the nearly zero percent effort required to produce them ... feels good.




Maybe I will try a dual-disposable set-up next year and see what happens. Gotta go find one of those drink-holder cowboy hats with the sipper tubes on each side.

PHOTOS AND TEXT c MATT HEVEZI
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LIVE 8 by Damaso Reyes

Live 8: A Photographer’s Journal

By Damaso Reyes
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Live 8 was billed as a global event and certainly lived up to that with concerts on four different continents and hundreds of performers who came together not to ask the worldwide audience for money but to raise awareness and to encourage them to place pressure on the leaders of the G8 nations who will soon meet in the United Kingdom to adopt a concrete plan to eliminate poverty in the near future. But what if you threw a party to end poverty and nobody came?

Of course that didn’t happen in Philadelphia or London, Paris, Berlin or Tokyo. Millions of people attended and hundreds of millions more watched on television and computer screens around the world. But what was it exactly that they were watching? In Philadelphia my worst fears were confirmed when Anna Nicole Smith was assisted to the small stage in the press tent. Wisely, she was not allowed to answer questions but she simply stood in front of a background festooned with Live 8 symbols and proceeded to shake, shimmy, grab her breasts and shake her behind for about five minutes as photographers shot frame after frame, continuously firing their flashes. One photographer screamed “Anna Nicole, feed the world!” To which she responded by smiling and showing off her cleavage.



I was disgusted. So disgusted at first I refused to take any photographs. And then I remembered that my revulsion was no excuse for me to indulge a case of moral superiority: I had to take her photograph if for not other reason than to expose the hypocrisy of an event which would allow itself to be used in such a shameful way. After she left the stage I rose from my seat and faced my fellow journalists and asked: “Does anyone feel as disgusted as I do? What the hell was that?”

I am still waiting for a suitable answer.

In London a video was played of television footage taken more than twenty years ago of starving Africans which helped to inspire the original Live Aid. The video froze on the image of a young girl, near death and soon that young lady, healthy and fully grown, was produced on stage as proof that our caring can save lives and change the world. Dressed beautifully in white, she clutched a microphone as Madonna came out and sang Like a Prayer.

But she never spoke a word. At least from what we saw here in America.



These concerts were to benefit Africans but except for the Tokyo lineup African performers were largely absent from the stages. How can we help a continent when we exclude them from devising the solutions to their own problems?

As someone who has worked in Africa as a journalist, a witness to some of the worst things our global society has allowed to happen, Live 8 struck me as a sad exercise in making ourselves feel better. In one sense the day at least served as a counter to the belief that our society instills in us that we as individuals cannot make a difference. But the idea that a music show can change society or inspire eight of the most powerful men in the world to focus on the eradication of global poverty is, as much as it hurts me to say it, naïve. The first Live Aid did not address the systematic underlying issues that cause famine in Africa and Live 8 is not doing addressing the issues which take the lives of 3,000 Africans every day.

We don’t need more concerts, we need more conversations, we need more education. Most of all we need to accept responsibility for our role in causing suffering and to understand that we all need to become active in correcting it.

We need to start caring. No concert is going to really make that happen and we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing that it will.