The photography community descends in droves on New York City this week. The First Annual New York Photo Festival will sprawl across DUMBO, in Brooklyn. The International Center of Photography hosts its 24th Annual Infinity Awards. Photo gallery openings are scheduled by the score, from the “Humankind” exhibition at Hasted-Hunt, dedicated to the work of photojournalists from the VII photo agency, to the Saul Leiter show at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Contemporary art and photography auctions are being held as well. Please, come to New York and join us. And make it snappy.

COPYRIGHT FIGHT GOES ON. The National Press Photographers’ Association and the Advertising Photographers of America are helping to spearhead opposition to the House and Senate “Orphan Works Bills” which, because of their radical recasting of copyright protection provisions, have the potential to seriously undermine the rights of photographers, artists, illustrators, and other visual creators. This week’s Photo District News Newswire has a comprehensive look at the ongoing battle royal.

ESQUIRE OVERSIGHT. Photographic eminence Helen Marcus, past president of both the American Society of Media Photographers and the W. Eugene Smith Fund, wrote an important letter that The New York Times published this week, in which she pointed out that in many of the articles about MoMA’s new show on classic Esquire covers of the 1960s - conceived and designed by master art director George Lois – few of the reviews seem to mention the photographer who created the cover photographs: Carl Fischer.

Says Marcus, “It is akin to publishing pictures of the Sistine Chapel and mentioning the pope who paid for them but not the painter.”

Ah, Michelangelo? Who he?

DISPATCHES. Finally...check out the new magazine-manifesto, Dispatches, created by Gary Knight, Giorgio Baravalle, and friends. The first issue has offerings from the likes of Antonin Kratochvil, Paul Theroux, John Kifner, Muzamil Jaleel, Samantha Power, and the illustrious, over-the-edge British illustrator Gerald Scarfe. Way impressive.

Newsmagazines seem to be withering, like curled-up husks. Picture magazines have been replaced by tabloid-types, all gossip-pocked. (Even overseas, formerly vital titles like Paris Match are on a Bruni binge, ruled by the steady flow of fashion shows, galas and bashes, and celebrity snaps.) And now that staple of the professional portrait photographer – Polaroid film – is packing it in. By year’s end, the once-magical formerly “instant” medium (pre-cursor to digital’s perpetually “instant” medium) will have gone the way of the Packard.

New York magazine this week parades out an impressive cordon of mourners: artist-photographer Chuck Close, photographer-filmmaker Timothy-Greenfield Sanders, filmmaker-provocateur John Waters. Says Sylvia Wolf, curator of the new Whitney show, “Polaroids: Mapplethorpe”: “There’s a sexiness and titillation to the instant process." Adds Waters, “Now what the hell am I supposed to do? Digital isn’t instant gratification, and those cameras don’t make that sexy sound.”

But what good is a stodgy old Polaroid when photographer and subject can pre-view pictures right there on a digital camera back?

Woe is Po.

Or, as Poe might have put it, “Quoth the dodo, ‘Nevermore.’”

PAKISTAN. Reports coming out of the Pentagon suggest that at least part of the reason we can’t find Osama bin Laden has been due to internal squabbling in the U.S. military. This week AP’s Robert Burns reported that even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been trying to persuade the Air Force to free up more of its camera-equipped Predator drones to swoop and snoop over possible al-Qaeda hideouts in Pakistan, the Air Force has been resistant. On Monday Gates groused that getting the Air Force to dispatch additional unmanned Predators has been “like pulling teeth . . . My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield.”

According to Burns, the fleet of pilot-less surveillance aircraft has “grown 25-fold since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to a total of 5000. Gates has been trying for months to get the Air Force to send more [but the request has been stalled, says Gates] ‘because people were stuck in old ways of doing businesss.’”

IRAN. And just when you thought the Bush administration was ducking into lame-duck hibernation, there are real indications that we are creeping toward a military confrontation with Iran. Yesterday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen turned up the war-rhetoric volume when he bluntly stated that the Pentagon is planning for “potential military courses of action” against the regime in Tehran. Iran, he said, “is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. . . . The military option must be kept on the table.”

Sound familiar, kids?

Thank our lucky stars that only Congress has the Consitutional authority to declare war. Last I checked...

Virginia Heffernan’s essay in this weekend's The New York Times Magazine explores the new aesthetics of digital photography as practiced and perfected on the photo-sharing Web site, Flickr. Some of the top amateur digital-photo auteurs, says Heffernan, “have mounted a case against verite rawness, in favor of posing, cropping and special effects. . . . Just as certain ne’er-do-well writers have found themselves in blogging, and failed filmmakers have taken to online video, these seemingly out-of-step artists have both invented and mastered the Flickr photograph. Other photographers have added still more levels of processing – including otherworldly contrasts achieved with high-dynamic-range photography – to the quintessential Flickr image, and it’s becoming only more eye-popping and stylized.”

Yet again, the message is: In this PhotoShop world, woe is photojournalism.

Apologies for my silence. While the Pope has been in America, meeting with some of the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks, I have been in the Pope’s homeland (in Germany and also in the Czech Republic), dwelling on the atrocities of the Second World War while visiting sites like Dresden, Potsdam, and Berlin.

Apropos of religion and September 11, my son recently pointed out a Buddhist perspective on the attacks and the U.S. military response, written by David Loy, a Japan-based academic: “On the Nonduality of Good and Evil.”

If the beginning seems a bit familiar, it is based on an email message that Loy sent out in the days after the attacks, an email that hit a public nerve and was immediately forwarded around the world, virally. While some of the observations are geopolitically naive, even dangerously so, there are certainly larger truths to be gained from Loy’s thesis: that civilization must find a way to break the escalating cycle of violence triggered by Islamist fundamentalism and by the West’s long-term designs on (and military response to protect) Middle East oil supplies.

This week I visited the about-to-be-inaugurated Newseum – the museum dedicated to chronicling the History of the News. The impressive, airy facility with its vaulting atrium has been relocated from Arlington, Virginia, to Washington D.C.’s Mall. Most germane (for the readers of this Web site) was the 9/11 Gallery, which features a wall of newspaper front pages from 9/12; a transfixing documentary that chronicles news coverage on September 11 (with memorable testimony from Thomas Franklin, who took the famous Ground Zero flag-raising photograph); and a display of the damaged camera gear of Bill Biggart, one of the two working photographers who perished in the attacks.

Most arresting, for me, was the main artifact in the room - a portion of the mangled communications spire from the apex of the Trade Center, still affixed to the top of the tower itself. (The dedication page of Watching the World Change honors the memory of eight working journalists who died that morning - two photographers on the street and six TV engineers, monintoring that very communications spire, ensconced in the lofty reaches of the WTC: Bill Biggart, Gerard Coppola, Donald J. DiFranco, Steven Jacobson, Robert Edward Pattison, Glen Pettit, Isaias Rivera, and William Steckman. The book is dedicated to my parents and to photographer Harry Benson, with whom I spent two days down around Ground Zero the week of September 11.)

The real reason for my visit was that last Thursday the Newseum hosted a solemn ceremony during which the remains of four Vietnam-era photojournalists lost in Laos, in 1971, were finally laid to rest, interred in a crypt at the foot of the Journalists Memorial, an enormous, three-story wall of carved glass bearing the names of working press members killed while covering the news, from 1837 to now.

The most poignant moment of the day came when my friend Russell Burrows, son of Life photographer Larry Burrows, spoke to the assembled. I’ve rarely been prouder of our profession than I was when I heard Russell remark, as reported on the Web site of Photo District News:

"They chose to be there," said Russell Burrows. "It was the highest manifestation, I think, of their profession." Speaking of the memorial, Burrows said, "I'd like to regard this as kind of a family chapel."

The photojournalists’ remains had been discovered on a hillside in Laos in the mid-90s, thanks to the efforts of photographer Horst Faas (picture editor for the Associated Press in Saigon during the conflict) and Richard Pyle (the AP’s Saigon bureau chief). In 1999 I assigned Pyle to write about the search for the remains for Vanity Fair, which published his gripping story. His tale, which I described in a VF.COM posting this week, eventually served as the basis for the book, Lost Over Laos, co-authored by Pyle and Faas.

MEANWHILE...

CORDON RED. The New York Daily News discloses that a new proposal for beefing up security around the World Trade Center area would close or restrict "at least 24 blocks on eight major streets" and create what the paper calls an anti-terror Ring of Steel at the site.

THREE NEW BLOGS. I recommend James Danziger’s new photo-centric blog, “The Year in Pictures.” His recent post on Andrew Bush’s California Car Window series is a flashback to that 90s, devil-may-care buzz at the Cusp of Armageddon, that flush-with-Clintonian Good Times Meets Hollow, Alienated Edge. I remember first encountering Bush’s work in French PHOTO, back in the day.

Photography and picture editor Geoffrey Hiller emailed me (about a weak link on the site) and, in passing, mentioned his own documentary photography blog, which is quite an eyeful: Verve Photo.

And the Blurberati Blog (which bills itself as "Passionate about all things book: design, content, sharing, life...") praises a piece by yours truly on the Smithsonian Institution's new photography initiative: Click.

COMIC RELIEF… Finally, Your Faithful Blogger has posted a satirical ditty (about 3 a.m. White House Phone Calls) at VanityFair.com.

This e-mail comes from Oswego, New York. The writer, Kevin Caraccioli, refers to a blog post on this Web site about Roko Camaj, the World Trade Center window washer pictured below…

“I admire your work. I recently came across your book, Watching the
World Change: The Stories behind the Images of 9/11.

“For the better part of 5 years, I have been attempting to make contact with the family of Roko Camaj, the window washer at the WTC who lost his life on 9/11. Admittedly, my efforts have been minimal out of an abundance of caution and sensitivity (I can not imagine myself in the same situation that they find themselves in). I have produced a short tribute film with Roko and the WTC as the central themes…”

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CAMAJ FAMILY

“…In circa 1978, my family and I took a trip into NYC and the WTC. It was Easter season (we typically traveled to Greenwich, Conn. to spend the holiday with relatives). Our visit to the WTC was recorded with a 8mm home movie recorder. We were amused by the window washer, on the outside of Windows on the World, looking in at us. It was one of those special memories that always sticks with you.

“After the events of 9/11, I was reading some of the profiles of the victims that regularly appeared in the weekly news periodicals. One profile struck me hard. It told the story of the window washer, Roko Camaj, and was accompanied by a photograph of him taken in recent years. I immediately searched our families home movie collection, queued up the tape with our visit to WTC and saw the now-chilling images of Roko Camaj, some 23 years earlier.

“I am a lawyer by profession, but have always dabbled in artistic projects. I decided to put together a video tribute to the WTC and Roko Camaj, who provided me and my family with a memory of a life time that day. I searched for the perfect music to accompany my video and found it in a piece by pianist Billy Childs entitled, ‘Hand Picked Rose of a Fading Dream.’

“This week, I had a chance to meet Billy Childs and present him with my piece. He has given me permission to use his music with my video and present this tribute to the Camaj family. I would very much like to do so and ask for your assistance in making that connection.

“Please let me know if this is something you can help me with. I would be most grateful for any guidance you can provide me. I am happy to send you a copy of the piece, its about 4 minutes long.

“I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest opportunity.”

Sincerely,
Kevin Caraccioli

DEAR KEVIN: At your service! I’ve lost touch with the Camaj family but will surely be in touch with them soonest...

The advance buzz for Errol Morris’s new Abu Ghraib documentary, Standard Operating Procedure – set for release in late April - is already deafening. For a glimpse of the movie trailer, CLICK HERE.

But for those looking for powerful, distilled high-octane Morris, right this instant, please check out the revelatory piece by Morris and Philip Gourevitch in the March 24 issue of The New Yorker. The article, “Exposure,” timed to fan the flames for Morris’s film (and adapted from the forthcoming book, Standard Operating Procedure) centers on the story Sabrina Harman, the American reservist who took some of the most memorably incendiary images at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Harman, who joined the reserves with hopes of some day becoming a police department forensic photographer, shot hundreds of images of systematic atrocities at Abu Ghraib. She claims the photos were her way of chronicling the horrors she witnessed – evidence which she then hoped to pass along to the press upon her return to the States. “I was trying to expose what was being allowed,” she is quoted as saying, “what the military was allowing.”

Write Gourevitch and Morris, “In other words, she wanted to expose a policy; and by assuming the role of a documentarian she had found a way to ride out her time at Abu Ghraib without having to regard herself as an instrument of that policy. But it was not merely her choice to be a witness to the dirty work on Tier 1A [the so-called Hard Site at Abu Ghraib, where detainees were routinely tortured]: it was her role. As a woman, she was not expected to wrestle prisoners into stress positions or otherwise overpower them but, rather, just by her presence, to amplify their sense of powerlessness. She was there as an instrument of humiliation.”

Harman, through photographs and letters home, was able to isolate the actions of her fellow soldiers and somehow deflect or absolve herself of her own complicity. “Harman,” they write, “seemed to conceive of memory as an external storage device. By downloading her impressions to a document, she could clear them from her mind and transform reality into an artifact. After all, she said, that was how she experienced the things she did and saw done on prisoners on Tier 1A: ‘It seems like stuff like this only happened on TV…. It’s just something that you watch and that is not real.’ ”

Harman was famously photographed in the Al Hillah morgue, leaning over the corpse of an Iraqi detainee while giving a “thumbs-up” sign. As Morris and Gourevitch point out, “There are at least twenty photos from [the village of] Al Hillah in which she is in the identical pose, same smile, same thumbs-up….[This is the posture] she usually [assumed] when a camera was pointed at her. [Said Harman,] ‘I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hillah.” Harman also photographed the shot of the lone hooded figure, mock electrodes attached to his fingers, as he was made to stand on a crate. The picture, a facsimile of which Harman later tattooed onto her arm, has become perhaps the iconic image of the ill-fated war in Iraq. (For a discussion of this photo, see pages 303-307 and 401-402 of Watching the World Change.)

In their New Yorker story, Gourevitch and Morris note that the photograph “achieves its power from the fact that it…creates…an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability – in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness…. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera?

“Had there been cameras at Calvary,” the authors ask, “would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?”

ALSO WORTH READING THIS WEEK:

ERROL MORRIS UNVEILED… I’m impressed with the new book, Non-Fiction, out next week from photographer Nubar Alexanian, in which he documents his friend Morris on the set and off.

PREDATOR PIX… According to Mark Hosenball and his colleagues at Newsweek (March 31, 2008) “The United States has stepped up its use of pilotless [and oftimes camera-equipped] planes to strike at Qaeda targets along Pakistan’s rugged border area…. Since January, missiles reportedly fired from CIA-operated Predator drones have hit at least three suspected hideouts of Islamic militants.” (See pages 106 and 175 of Watching the World Change for Hosenball’s 9/11-related assessments.)

POLLS ON A 9/11 PLOT... In today’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof reminds us that a recent poll from Ohio University “found that 36 percent of Americans believed that federal officials assisted in the attacks on the twin towers or knowingly let them happen so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East.” More than a third of the country still clings to this myth, promulgated by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, five and six years after the attacks.

THE NEW PAPARAZZI… For all the criticism The Atlantic Monthly received this month for running a cover story on Britney Spears and the 21st century ascension of the new paparazzi, the magazine succeeds with its April Issue article “Shooting Britney,” which makes great reading for anyone interested in the state of play in the celebrity-ambush business. Photographer Francois Navarre (nicknamed Dano), owner of the X17 paparazzi agency, reveals how he hires posses of immigrant teens, provides them with digital cameras, and has them stalk stars for between $800 and $3,000 a week – in return for granting his agency all the rights to their snaps. “X17 also pays weekly stipends,” writes David Samuels, “to a dozen dedicated tipsters and occasional fees to 500 or 600 parking-lot attendants, club kids, and shop girls in and around L.A.”

How’s this for inside-baseball? According to Samuels, “Paparazzi prefer to work in a triangle, with the celebrity at the center and the shooter on three sides. That way, when they turn away from one camera, they are facing another, and when they turn away again, they are facing a third shooter. As Dano retreated from [Britney Spears, as she tried to attack the pack with an umbrella], two flanking X17 photographers took stills while Dano shot video…. Stills and videos of the incident sold for nearly $400,000.”

(For a withering satire of the paparazzi pack mentality, view this video, courtesy of MySpace TV.)

The Smithsonian Institution has just launched an online exhibition and interactive photo project-database-"Webinar," curated by scholar Marvin Heiferman, called "Click! Photography Changes Everything." Yours truly has a piece up on the Website (adapted from Watching the World Change) about the importance of Wolfgang Staehle's photographic sequence taken on the morning of September 11. Please take a look. The site will grow each week as the Smithsonian adds more offerings.

PHOTO BY WOLFGANG STAEHLE

Also... On the VF DAILY Blog this week, at VanityFair.com, I discuss the new book L'Irak N'Exist Plus by Regis Le Sommier, the New York correspondent for Paris Match, who has reported extensively on 9/11, its aftermath, and the war in Iraq.

AUSCHWITZ ALBUM

I heartily recommend Alec Wilkinson’s mesmerizing essay in this week’s New Yorker, “Picturing Auschwitz," on the power of a recently discovered photo album which, for the first time, shows the quotidian lives of Nazis who operated the killing machine at the Auschwitz death camp. Like the watershed Lodz Ghetto Album (showing "ghetto photographer" Henryk Ross’s previously unseen pictures of privileged Jews who were spared execution by agreeing to collaborate with their Nazi-aligned superiors), the Auschwitz photo trove constitutes the only known visual evidence of the perpetrators’ everyday existence.

Had the Auschwitz photographs not been taken, stowed away, retrieved, and explained by archivists, these details would have surely been lost forever. And we would have had less direct knowledge of the banality of evil.

The New Yorker provides an expanded album of images on its Web site, including the above group shot of Auschwitz officers singing at a retreat in 1944, with Dr. Josef Mengele plainly visible in the front row, third from right, facing the accordianist. (Mengele, who conducted hideous mock-scientific experiments on twins and others, was called the camp’s Angel of Death because he would often stand at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s boxcar receiving ramp and decide which arriving prisoners would live and which would go immediately to the crematoria.)

PENTAGON TAPES

The Pentagon this week admitted that it had unearthed at least 50 videotapes of post-9/11 interrogations of prisoners at its facilities across the globe. While these are not the infamous C.I.A. torture tapes, destroyed by the agency against the advice of Justice Department lawyers, they do raise the intriguing notion that even more incriminating footage may be unearthed in the near future.

In my December 15 blog post, “Watergate vs. Waterboard,” I noted:

“My guess is that we haven’t seen the end of the torture tapes. Somewhere, in some safety deposit box or closet or attic, or deep in the recesses of a rogue hard drive, someone – an underling, a supervisor, or an agent (whether proud of his actions, enraged by the actions of a colleague, or hoping to cover his ass) - made a dupe that he’s been squirreling away for three or four years, a copy of which will inevitably find its way into Congressional hands (or wind its way up onto YouTube), making dupes of everyone involved.

“Patience, patience. In this age when data is forever-stored and passed along, like traces of DNA in a genome, it wouldn't surprise me if somehow someone somewhere will unload that damning cache. “

MISCELLANY...Renowned sports columnist George Vecsey, in today’s New York Times, writes about a snapshot of Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens and a fan – 24-year-old Kevin Williams, who had worked for Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center.

...And, finally, on a wholly unrelated and lighter note, please check out my blog post at VanityFair.com - about the Eliot Spitzer mess: "A Governor's Glossary."