UNHOLY EXODUS, DAVID BLUMENFELD

photos and text ©David Blumenfeld

11:30PM: Yitzhak Cohen, 43, (right) listens as the soldiers agree to give him until 5:30 the following afternoon to pack up their possessions and leave Gush Katif.

8:00AM: As Yehonadav, 9 (right), sleeps in his bedroom, Malka(middle) weeps as she tries to comfort Sraya, 15 their final morning in Gush Katif.

5:11PM: Bnayaoo Cohen wears "Tephilin" (Black prayer phylactories) has he prays on top of his roof before being evacuated from his home. "I couldn't put on my tephilin this morning to pray, but now I must."

5:31PM: Yitzhak Cohen (center) tears his shirt as he says the Prayer for the Dead before leaving his home in Gush Katif after 22 years. Soldiers from his son's Golani Unit who came to help the family pack, weep.

5:50PM: With his arm around his brother Bnayaoo, 19 (2nd to left), and Sraya, 15 (middle) walk toward the gate of Neve Dekalim. His shirt, a split star of David, symbolizes the great rift in Israeli society regarding the disengagment from Gaza.



Unholy Exodus: The Cohen Family Bid Farewell to Gush Katif

It is 5:11PM on August 17, 2005 and 19 year-old Bnayaoo Cohen is praying for a miracle. As he recites Minha, the afternoon prayers, on top of his red-roofed home in Neve Dekalim he tearfully watches as his neighbors and friends leave their homes. In less then an hour, he too will be forced to leave the place where he was born and grew up and where his family has lived for the past 22 years – Gush Katif.

I arrived in Gush Katif 10 days earlier, along with hundreds, if not thousands of other journalists, in order to document the historic evacuation of Jews from Gaza.

Overwhelmed by the drama of this event, I decided the best way to cover it was by concentrating on one particular family. After all, this was a human story. Whether one is right wing or left wing - agrees or disagree with “the settlements,” these were real people and families that were being forced to leave their homes. Yitzhak Cohen and his family graciously agreed to allow me to document the last 24 hours of their life in Gush Katif. From the moment the soldiers arrived to deliver their eviction notice, to driving their car out of the gates of Neve Dekalim for the last time, this was one of the most emotional stories I have ever covered.

As a photojournalist, it was frustrating at times – while tires where burning outside, I sat with the family drinking coffee, waiting for those telling moments. However, when these intimate moments did arrive for me to photograph, I felt I was capturing the real story here.

I remember driving through Neve Dekalim 6 months ago with a writer from Newsweek. Looking at the homes, synagogues, shops and buildings we said to each other, is this disengagement really possible? We could not envision it. Yet now it was actually happening.

The days leading up to the “Disengagement” was a mix of dance and song, tears and prayer - as the youth, many of whom snuck in illegally, set up tent cities in the various settlements. One journalist I know nicknamed the event “Gush-stock,” a play on “Woodstock” as this will surely be a time marked in the hearts and minds of the Israeli psyche for many years to come. Whether it too is the end of an era is yet to be seen.

c David Blumenfeld
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DUBAI, JACK ADAMS

photo by Jack Adams

Dubai: One big construction site. From the beach we see 27 high rises being topped off. They work night and day, non-stop. They want it all, and they want it NOW ....Everything is being done in the highest quality, even at that breakneck speed. Some of the most beautiful Architecture and Hotel Interiors I have ever seen in the world.

c Jack Adams, lead interior architect, KEO international
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GAZA: DAVID SILVERMAN

Photos by David Silverman/Getty Images

A water-cannon forces back right-wing settlers as Israeli riot police try to take over the synagogue roof where hundreds of extremists had barricaded themselves August 18, 2005 at the Gaza settler community of Kfar Darom.

Now that the dust has settled ...


Actually it hasn't. It's just beginning to rise.

The dust from hundreds of homes being bulldozed into the ground.

The dust kicked up by the speed of the disengagement, which I must say has amazed everyone I have spoken to.

The dust from the tent encampments set up by settlers unhappy with the resettlement offers made to them by the Israeli government.

So let's see what next week brings.

MORAG, GAZA STRIP - AUGUST 22: Israeli soldiers take photos as heavy machinery tears down the very same settlers' homes they until last week strove to defend in the evacuated settlement



PE'AT SADEH, GAZA STRIP - AUGUST 21: Israeli bulldozers are seen tearing down a settler's home through the window of a neighboring house facing imminent demolition where the residents have painted the word "peace" on the wall August 21, 2005 in Pe'at Sadeh settlement in the Gaza Strip.




KFAR DAROM, GAZA STRIP - AUGUST 18: Israeli riot police are covered in paint and foam as they break onto the synagogue roof where hundreds of extremists had barricaded themselves during the evacuation August 18, 2005 in the veteran Gaza Strip Jewish community of Kfar Darom.

NETIVOT, ISRAEL Jewish settler bride Rivka Netanel is greeted by friends and family as she arrives for her traditional religious wedding to Bezalel Weinstein in the Faith City settler encampment August 24, 2005 in the southern Israeli town of Netivot. The bride was evacuated from her Gaza Strip settlement home of Atzmona last week and the groom hails from the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh. The majority of the uprooted Atzmona settler community established the Faith City encampment in an uncompleted industrial complex where they live in tents until the Israeli government agrees to their demand to be resettled together in a new community.

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NIGER, MICHAEL KAMBER

text and photos by Michael Kamber


This was a tough story to work on.
There were kids dying every day, women were crowding thronging the MSF clinics each morning, skeletal children with skins falling in folds.

For several months MSF (Doctors Without Borders) had been sending me emails
warning that the food shortages in Niger were becoming critical.

There was little interest in the west.

Stories about looming shortages are hard to sell,
Stories about starving babies write and sell themselves.

When the babies started dying, the press showed up en masse and something got done. I wonder what the threshold is to get the wheels turning--how many sacrificial kids does it take.

Is five hundred
enough, one thousand, ten thousand?

In Niger, in “normal years” one child in four dies before his fifth birthday. Clearly the threshold is pretty high.

We just had the G8 conference. Billions in aid was pledged to Africa.
We shall see what it brings.

c Michael Kamber

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text and photos c Michael Kamber

Digging up Truth in Guatemala. VICTOR BLUE

ESTRELLA POLAR: WAR CRIMES EXHUMED, James Victor Blue
Photos by Victor James Blue/ WPN

We stop along the trail behind the pack mules that will be carrying out skeletons. When Moncho, a social anthropologist, adjusts his headphones, I ask him what he’s listening to. "Cannibal Corpse." Perfect.

I am traveling with a team from the Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation way the hell up in Ixil Maya territory. We are going to the tiny community of Estrella Polar to exhume the mass grave of a massacre committed by the Guatemalan Army there 20 years ago in which 96 people were killed. It was a textbook example of the genocide that took place in Guatemala during the 36-year civil war, but because of the continued fear and impunity in Guatemala, the Foundation had been unable to exhume this site, one of the most important and well documented, since the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. Finally a couple months ago permission was granted and even though it was the rainy season, a bad time to undertake a massive exhumation, the decision was made to press on.

I met up with the team after a 6 hour bus ride to Nebaj, the capital of the Ixil Mayan people in highland Quiche Guatemala. It consisted of five forensic anthropologists, two archaeologists, and three social anthropologists. They spent an hour or so in the office of the local authorities, signing the official papers legally enabling them to carry out their work. From there we went straight to a series of sketchy bars and cantinas, where I was introduced to the almost unquenchable thirst of the forensic anthropologists. I suspect it comes from uncovering the dirty state secrets of the genocide that took place here.

The next day we left for the exhumation, a 4-hour drive on winding dirt roads through the verdant green highlands, eventually descending into the lower and more jungle like coffee growing zone. Both pickups successfully crossed the rain-swollen river, after carrying a ton of equipment across a swinging hammock bridge.

We drove for another 30 minutes taking in the scenery, when the driver of a big truck stopped us on the road to tell us our friends ahead had been in an accident. We drove on, and found all the occupants standing on the road, looking down at the lost pickup, which had gone over a ravine. Alvaro, better known as “Tio” or uncle, had been driving when the road under the wheels crumbled away. The trucked flipped one and a half times, hit a tree and came to rest about a hundred fifty feet down. Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt, although everyone was well shaken. It took a couple hours to get the truck out with a backhoe. We cranked it up and drove it to the town of Chel, all the while billowing white smoke.

By early evening we made it to the camp, about a 15-minutes hike from the exhumation site. We had just put our tents up when a mean thunderstorm hit, and we began the nightly game of keeping the water out of our stuff.

The village of Estrella Polar sits at the foot of a mountain string. It is an immensely poor village, the sight of a land invasion years ago; the current residents are not the survivors of the victims. In fact, they oppose the exhumation, adding to the tension at the site.

Thursday we descended to Estrella with a large group of relatives of victims of the massacre who had come from different parts of Guatemala where they had been displaced by the war.

Next to a concrete monument that marked the edge of the grave they performed a Mayan ceremony to ask for guidance and blessings for the work to be performed, and for the souls of their loved ones beneath. They burned candles and pine needles, and chanted prayers.

The social anthropologists as well as representatives of the civil society groups that had requested the exhumation gave a talk about the exhumation process, what to expect, etc. We would end up wishing someone would have told us a little better what to expect ourselves.



On Friday the actual dig began.

On March 22, back in 1982, only days after Efrain Rios Montt had taken power in a coup and initiated his scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign, soldiers arrived in the early morning at Estrella Polar. They forced all the men from the village into the small Catholic church. There they locked them inside and tossed in grenades, then finished off the survivors with bullets to the head. Now, 23 years later, the men who had come to look for their lost fathers and brothers threw themselves into the dig. When one showed even a hint of tiring, another came along behind him, took over and swung one of the pickaxes used to break up the dark earth. It was only an hour or so until they encountered the first bone.

The digging continued for the next couple days as the anthropologists and the family members worked to define the edges of the grave and locate the cluster of remains. All the while, the social anthropologists conducted interviews of the survivors and family members, looking for clues that would help identify the remains they would uncover.



By Sunday I had put down my cameras for most of the day and dropped myself into the hole to help unload buckets and buckets of earth. Once the level of the remains was determined we worked to widen the space, so they could work around the bones.

Alan, the head of the anthropology lab at the Foundation, was concerned we would not find the main group of remains, but as the work went on, it became clear that they were right under us.

The Ixil women descended each day with lunch for us and two police officers dispatched from a nearby town to provide security for the dig and the anthropologists, not a hollow gesture considering the number of death threats the Foundation receives each year for their delicate work.

At night we returned to the camp, which we shared with ECAP, an NGO that provides psychological accompaniment to the families during the exhumation process.

All went fine until late Monday. The grave had been widened, and the anthropologists had begun to work in earnest, preparing to exhume the first of the 17 bodies they had found. The remainder of the 96 lay beneath them.



The work had progressed well all day, when storm clouds began to gather. As we had rigged up a huge tarp to cover the site, no one was particularly worried when the first of the rain began to fall. The rain became fiercer, and started to run in gullies down the hill from the village. A flash flood ensued, and the grave was filled with water in minutes.

Inside of 10 minutes, the whole site was a lake, with the 17 exposed skeletons reburied under water and mud. Everyone was in shock, heartbroken. It was bad enough that in a couple of minutes, the Foundation had suddenly lost everything they had worked for the in last week, including one of their pickups. Even worse was having to turn to the family members and explain to them that the exhumation could not continue, that it would have to be suspended until the dry season at least.

All had waited for over 20 years for this moment. To bury their loved ones, to light candles for them, to visit them in their local cemetery. But even more important, to have them, to end the doubt, to reclaim them from their assassins and try and release all the years of pain and fear through the ritual of their burial. Only to have it all washed away in a few minutes. Quietly they helped cover the grave back over, to wait for another day.

c James Victor Blue

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WPN

GAZA, BY DAVID SILVERMAN

Disengagement – Part II

photos: David Silverman/Getty Images


One week later: I have seen the fall of Gush Katif, and the beginning of the end of 38 years of Israeli occupation.

It was meant to take six weeks to evacuate all the Israelis out of the twenty-one Gaza Strip settlements, but in just five days, the strongholds of Neve Dekalim and Kfar Darom, along with a dozen others, are now no more than collections of empty houses and deserted streets waiting to be bulldozed into the pages of history.

Despite the magnitude of the events of recent days, what comes back to me again and again are the varied emotions that I have felt while covering the evacuations.

I felt extreme anger at the extremist settlers who walked out of their home in Kerem Atzmona, hands held up in surrender, like the famous picture of a young Jewish boy in a second world war Nazi ghetto.

I was moved to tears by the faith and resolve of a Jewish family sitting on their living-room floor reciting prayers for the dead – for their home and settlement – as weeping Israeli soldiers waited with patience and understanding to escort them to a waiting bus.

And yet, if I had to choose one image, I would pick the general view of the Israeli police attack against the hundreds of militant settlers holed up inside and barricaded on the roof of the Kfar Darom synagogue.

c David Silverman
Staff Photographer
Getty Images

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Getty Images

HIDE AND SEEK: JENNIFER ANISTON

by Robert Scott Button
photos by Robert Scott Button

Superstar Jennifer Aniston broke her silence last week about her breakup with Brad Pitt in her tell-all story in Vanity Fair magazine. A few days after the magazine hit the stands she was due to finish shooting “The Breakup” in Chicago.

Game on! We (paparazzi)knew where she would be for over a week. I hatched a simple plan: fly to Chicago and get a photo. Jennifer’s bodyguard and professional driver also had a plan, not to let the paparazzi get the shot.

After four days the score was team Aniston 4, photographer 0.

The cops had the sound stage locked down, the hotel had a very private garage, and anywhere she went the star had what I like to call “service entrance” access, AKA the back door and was blocked by her large bodyguard. So why were they going to such great lengths to keep the pack (I counted six teams made up of two photogs and one reporter) from getting a photo? There had to be a good reason.

I did what I call a “soft follow” of Aniston’s SUV from the sound stage to a small restaurant in Chicago. I kept four to five cars back from the SUV and just observed who got out of the car. Bingo! Jennifer Aniston and a mystery woman exiting the SUV, going to dinner. The mystery woman would later be identified as Brad Pitt’s mother, and confirmed by Pitt’s publicist. Team Aniston 7, Photographer $$


c Robert Scott Button

the photo was exclusive, so it can not be published by FOTOGBLOG for 30 days


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STAR MAGAZINE

GAZA, BY DAVID SILVERMAN

Israeli Settlers Voluntarily Evacuate West Bank Homes.
David Silverman/ Getty Images

DISENGAGEMENT 2005
by David Silverman

Covering the Israeli withdrawal of its settlers and forces from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank is telling a story of determination.

Of Jewish settlers, with blind faith in a greater Israel they believe was given to the biblical Abraham by God for eternity, determined to stay in their homes, remain within their settlement communities and continue farming their land.

Of the Israeli army and police doing their utmost to fulfill an order … to evacuate 8,000 settlers from their homes … an order they were never trained to do, until now.

Of the hundreds of families who chose to evacuate ahead of the August 15, 2005 disengagement have accepted their fate and are making new lives for themselves with the help and understanding of a government that sent them to the occupied territories in the first place.

In the next week, the whole world will see how this unfolds: Will Jewish soldiers really force Jewish settlers from their homes? Will a popular movement against the withdrawal put a halt to the process? Will the evacuation take place with the help and coordination of the Palestinian Authority and its forces? Or will it become a tempting target for the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants?

Right-wing Israelis Block Roads In Protest Against Gaza Withdrawal .
David Silverman/Getty Images

I doubted the evacuation would take place when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon first announced his plan in December 2003. I remember thinking back then it would be just another idea on the bombed-out road to Israeli-Palestinian peace that would join the chronology other grand ideas.

How things have changed. Three events that I have photographed in recent months show me the determination of the parties to this story:

The sadness in the faces of one of the first families to leave a settlement under the disengagement plan, the effort the army and the police are making to ensure the evacuation will go ahead as peacefully and successfully as possible and finally the pain and the faith of the settlers who hope never to abandon the Gaza Strip.


Israeli Settlers Protest Graves Relocation. David Silverman/Getty Images

c David Silverman
Staff Photographer
Getty Images


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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

This is a picture of me. It is not altered in Photoshop.
I am a female art student.
I'm pretty hot as a guy, but I'm an asshole.
c Hope Bowers

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journo action figure

Limited Edition 1/6 scale
Journalist action figure

is out of stock.

Product Description:
-Blue jeans and checkered denim shirt
-Middle Easter style scarf
-Body armor vest with TV markings
-Helmet with TV markings
-Journalist utility vest with working pouches
-Camcorder unit with 3x video tapes
-Camera set including 3 different interchangeable lens
-Rugged laptop with extendable antenna and illuminated keyboard, includes 2 stickers for screen
-Handheld Phone/GPS
-Usable equipment pouch with belt
-Zipper back pack
-White tennis shoes
-ID card in holder
-Sunglasses
-Pen
-Watch
-Extra set of hands

SHUTTLE LAUNCH, WIN McNAMEE

photo by Win McNamee/ Getty Images

This was the first time I photographed a shuttle launch. To say the undertaking was a bit confusing at first would be an understatement. When you're in that situation the best thing to do is to seek advice from people who have done it successfully many times before. This picture was made with a sound activated remote trigger produced by Scott Andrews, from Nikon.

We purchased several remote kits because they are often the best source of pictures from shuttle launches. Scott is a genius at this stuff and a terrifically generous fellow with his knowledge - enough good things can't be said about him - and his pictures are amazing. Without Scott, and his advice, we would have been lost.

The camera was an old Canon 1D with an old beat up 20-35mm lens. The basic exposure was 1/1000th of a second at f10, at 200 ASA.

Red Huber from the Orlando Sentinel was also particularly helpful in offering advice for remote locations and he too is a true professional at this kind of photography - making most of us look like rank amateurs. Without his advice the launch would have been much more confusing from a practical standpoint. Last but by no means least, Ken Thornsley - the Director of Photography for the Kennedy Space Center was also an invaluable help. His years of experience, collective wisdom and his helpful nature are some of the best things going at NASA.

All of the things you might hear about witnessing a shuttle launch are true. It's an amazing sight. Once the shuttle has departed, and the initial rush is over, you just wanna do it all over again.

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FOTOG JOKE:

How many photographers does it take to screw in a lightblub?

50. 1 to screw it in, and 49 others to say, "I could do that."

Chip Oglesby

DOSVEDONYA, SUCKKA!

MOSCOW - Russia's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it will not renew permission for ABC-TV to operate in the country after the network broadcast an interview with a notorious Chechen warlord.

In a statement, the ministry said ABC would be considered "undesirable" by all Russian state agencies because of an interview with Shamil Basayev, which was broadcast last week on "Nightline."

making monkeys out of the russians in red square?