death

Several thousand people attended a rally in Mexico City yesterday to denounce the killing of a Mexican photojournalist over the weekend.

Ever since junior high school, I was the kid with the camera. And many years later, I’m still the guy who shows up to every life event with camera in hand to document the lives of my friends.

I used to carry around a hulking DSLR, but the weight bothers me, and the large size feels too intrusive for the everyday. I don’t want to interrupt life by taking photos, I simply want them to remember the fractions of a second that end up representing curated slices of life.

On Sunday, Burt's Bees co-founder Burt Shavitz passed away at the age of 80. While best known as the face of his popular personal care products, Shavitz actually started his career as a professional photographer.

There's some very sad news in the world of photography today: renowned American photographer Mary Ellen Mark passed away yesterday in New York City at the age of 75.

This is the story of how I wrestled with death twice to live for photography. Before I wrote this article, I told a couple of people about it since it means so much to me. Although some didn’t understand how I could talk so openly about this topic, I decided that it’s my duty to generate awareness and help others even if it means that I’m revealing my biggest struggle in front of the world.

Wedding photographer Gordon Jack passed away yesterday after a freak accident on Friday at the wedding rehearsal of tennis superstar Andy Murray.

The latter years of the first decade of the 20th century were by no means glorious ones for The Polaroid Corporation. Filing for bankruptcy multiple times, the company ultimately decided to kill off its instant camera business in 2007, with the death of their instant film coming not long after in 2008. And while the demise of Polaroid’s instant film era is a sad one, it went out strong.

Thankfully, first-time filmmaker Grant Hamilton was there to capture the last year of Polaroid’s existence as we will almost always know it. Broken up into three acts, Time Zero: The Last Year of Polaroid Film tells the story of Polaroid’s last year through the eyes of the artists who shot the film, the dying days of instant film production and the idea and start of what was rightly deemed The Impossible Project.

Former Afghan police unit commander Naqibullah -- the man who, three months ago, walked up to AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus' vehicle and unloaded an automatic weapon in the backseat, killing the veteran photojournalist instantly -- has been convicted of murder and sentenced to death by the Kabul District Court.

Get the tissues ready, because this one is aiming right for the feels. Tucked away within a documentary on the history of Japanese cameras, this touching story of Yoko and Minoru Tanaka took us completely unawares.

We thought we were watching a mildly interesting and informative documentary... as it turns out, it was much more than that.

I ate a lot of hamburgers. We had a party.

Chances are good you've never heard the term Mingi, but if you were born to one of the tribes in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, this age-old tribal tradition might have been your death sentence. These days, however, that is far less likely, and it's due almost entirely to the work of Kara tribesman Lale Labuko and his friend and photographer John Rowe.

Right Before I Die is a tearjerker. It's a heartbreaking photo series by Andrew George that strikes at the very core of most people's deepest fear, insofar as it is a series about death, but also manages to inspire, because it is about people who are staring down the great unknown with incredible acceptance and serenity.

Leaving behind a pioneering legacy, pin-up model turned pin-up photographer, Bunny Yeager, has sadly passed away yesterday at the age of 85. Born March 13, 1929 Yeager started her career as a pin-up model herself, eventually switching sides of the camera and becoming one of the most commercially successful female photographers of our time.

Heart-breaking news came out of Bangui, Central African Republic today. It has been confirmed that 26-year-old French photojournalist Camille Lepage, who we had the honor of interviewing just six months ago, has been killed while covering the ongoing crisis there.

As photojournalists, we live the good life, getting the rare chance to make pictures for a living. While that is all fine and good, being a human first is always most important. There is no exception -- especially in the case of spot news.

When a square mile of earth swept west into Oso, Washington, leaving 36 (and rising) dead, media from local and national outlets hastily mobilized to the rural area to cover one of Washington’s most catastrophic natural disasters. In times of great sadness, tragedy and personal loss to others, a journalist’s job is to clearly, accurately and respectfully report the story to an audience, keeping dignity at the forefront. While “clearly” and “accurately” smack of journalism school requirements, “respectfully” is often passed over.

Another of the photographers who had been bravely providing coverage from the front lines of the Syrian conflict lost his life on Sunday when a Syrian air strike dropped a barrel bomb on a rebel-held area of Aleppo.

On the weekend of the 18th, 23-year-old Annie 'Kim' Pham accidentally photobombed a group of strangers in front of a Santa Ana nightclub while out with her friends. That accident cost her her life, as the strangers converged on her and beat her to the point where she had to be put on life support before ultimately succumbing to her injuries one week ago yesterday.

Sad news came out of Atlanta, GA, where a veteran Associated Press photographer suffered a fatal heart attack on the field shortly after the conclusion of the Chick-fil-A Bowl this last Tuesday.

A few days ago, we shared the tragic news Reuters freelancer Molhem Barakat, who some were claiming was as young as 17-years-old, had been killed while photographing a battle in Syria. Since then, Reuters ethics and business practices have been called into question by an outraged journalistic community that has even gone so far as to start a Change.org petition demanding that the news organization take responsibility for the young boy's murder.

A young photographer who was freelancing for news agency Reuters chronicling the ongoing clash between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria was killed Friday while covering a battle at a hospital in Aleppo.

When you hear that a stop motion video depicts the process of aging, death and reincarnation, your mind probably goes straight to digital manipulation. After all, how else do you make someone look older? Or dead for that matter?

But London-based makeup artist Emma Allen didn't use Photoshop to create her video "Ruby," she used face paint instead.

A New Zealand railroad buff killed by a train Saturday may have been misled by his camera's LCD screen into thinking the train was a safe distance away.

Some sad news has emerged from the Midwest today: The Kansas City Star is reporting that a former employee and blogger committed suicide yesterday outside a local police station. Prior to ending his own life, 60-year-old Martin Manley created his own memorial website that includes detailed information about his life, including photographs captured over the years of himself and his experiences.

Formula One car racing authority FIA instituted new rules this week banning photographers from track pits, after several spectacular injuries or near-misses this season. But photographers are saying such restrictions will do little more than reduce the quality of their work.

A photographer for an Egyptian newspaper, shot while covering political protests Monday, appears to have captured his own death on camera.

A young woman was fatally stabbed last night after photographing homeless men holding offensive signs while begging in Hollywood.

I've been living out of my car and driving all over the country to create new work. This past Sunday, I stopped near Nashville, Tennessee to see my friend and fellow photographer Marissa Bolen. While there, we collaborated to put together a photo shoot -- a shoot that involved a homemade dam, water, milk, and girls covered with flour.

If you've ever been in a bad car accident, the images Danish photographer Nicolai Howalt's Car Crash Studies may bring back bad memories. The project is a photographic study of cars that have been involved in severe (and possibly fatal) accidents.

When snapping pictures of wild animals in the great outdoors, there are some animals that photographers generally know to be careful around. These include creatures that are massive (e.g. moose, elephants), anything at the top of the food chain (e.g. lions, tigers, bears), and anything venomous (e.g. snakes). Well, you might also want to add the beaver to that mental list of yours.

It turns out beavers can be very dangerous, and even deadly. A man over in Belarus was killed recently after getting too close to a beaver he was trying to photograph.

Warning: This article contains powerful and emotional content that may be difficult to view

I knew the first minute I saw Jennifer that she was the one. Jen was beautiful and the kind of person that everyone wants in their life: she listened, and when you talked with her you felt like you were the only person who mattered. 

A few months later I finally worked up the courage to ask Jen out, telling her, "I have a crush on you." At the time Jen was living in New York and I was in Cleveland. We talked on the phone for hours and wanted to know everything about each other; after 6 months of long distance dating I moved to New York.

When doing trainspotting photography, it pays to be extra alert and aware of your surroundings. The video above, captured at the Thurston, Suffolk train station, shows how one camera-wielding trainspotter almost learned (or didn't learn) that lesson the hard way.

Less than a week removed from the train photographer tragedy in Sacramento, California, another sad story has made its way across our desks. A 23-year-old man named Nicholas Wieme died in the pursuit of a "rooftopping" photograph yesterday after he fell into a building's smokestack in Chicago.

The New York Post sparked a firestorm of controversy last week after publishing a photo of a man about to be struck by a subway train. People around the world were outraged that a photographer decided to photograph what had occurred, that he had sold (or, in the photographer's words, licensed) the photo to a newspaper, and that the paper decided to publish it with a sensationalist front page story.

Tragedy struck Sacramento, California this past weekend after a photographer and high school art teacher was killed while taking pictures of trains.

Belgian-based photographer Frieke Janssens received quite a bit of attention last year for her portrait series showing young children smoking (don't worry, they were faked), and now he's back with another unsettling photography project. This latest one is titled, "Your Last Shot," and consists of portraits of people that will one day be used on their tombstones. Each one is captioned with a name, a birth date, and a dash leading to an unknown date. The photo above is captioned, "Marcia (December 15, 1961 - )."

This past Friday wasn't a good day for photographers. On the same day that one wedding photographer saw his client drown in a freak accident during a trash the dress shoot, a man hiking in Alaska was mauled to death by a grizzly bear after getting too close to it with his camera.

If you're a wedding photographer, you might want to think twice about doing a trash the dress shoot in a moving river. A newly married Montreal-area woman drowned this past Friday during a photo shoot in the Ouareau River.

Photographer Emma Kisiel's project At Rest is both beautiful and morbid. On one hand, they show animals lying serenely inside a ring of rocks and flowers, but on the other hand, each one is of an animal that was stuck and killed by a car. What's startling is the variety of roadkill she manages to find: everything from a squirrel to an owl (when's the last time you saw an owl as roadkill?).

I love photography. I love the idea of capturing a moment in time, an event, an abstract scene or just a snippet of life that would otherwise go unrecorded, only to be forgotten over time. I have no formal training, no gallery exhibitions, no commissions and not even a particularly large following on Flickr or any other social media.

However, this does not deter me. Like the vast majority of other amateur photographers, my efforts will never be recognised, but that does not stop me from trying to improve my work, to add meaning to my pictures and to get that long awaited recognition.

Earlier this week, photographer Jeanine Thurston shared a letter that she received from a client that powerfully illustrates the value of photography. Thurston writes,