Arranging camera equipment to look like a gun is not a novel idea, but photographer Jason Siegel's art project Shoot Portraits, Not People takes this provocative idea to a new level by building all sorts of weaponry and combat materials using hand-picked pieces chosen from over 200 pounds of camera parts.
While embedded with troops in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, war photographer and writer Michael Yon captured numerous photos of the sparkling halo that can appear when a helicopter's rotors hit sand and dust. Upon finding that the particular phenomenon didn't have a name, Yon gave it one that honors two fallen soldiers: the Kopp-Etchells Effect.
Ukrainian photographer Dmitry Muravsky has been dismissed by his country's Ministry of Defense after his viral combat photos became the center of controversy regarding whether or not they were staged.
Once Syria's largest city, Aleppo has been the worst-hit city in the country since the Battle of Aleppo began in 2012 as part of the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Now a series of before-and-after photos reveals just how much the once-vibrant historical city has been marred by war.
Here's a 3-minute segment that recently aired on CBS This Morning about the soldier photographers who risked their lives on the front line to document the combat in photos and videos.
Syrian photographer Jafar Meray lives and works in a country that has been devastated by war. For a recent wedding photo shoot, Meray decided to use a war-torn neighborhood as a striking backdrop.
He calls the series "Love Reconstructs Syria."
Ansel Adams is best known for his breathtaking landscape photos, but he photographed much more than nature during his decades-long career. In 1943, already the best-known American photographer, Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, one of the relocation camps the US gathered Japanese-Americans into during World War II.
Want to see what it’s like to work as a conflict photojournalist at the front lines of a war? …
If you want to experience what it's like to shoot as a combat photographer, but don't want to actually risk getting shot at, you can look into photographing war reenactments. Lucas Ryan is a photographer who shoots reenactments, and last year he covered D-Day Conneaut, one of the world's premier D-Day reenactment events.
Here’s a 3.5-minute video by Seeker Stories that explores how photography has affected …
Giles Penfound is a photographer with an engrossing past and a story to tell. Penfound began his journey as a professional photographer over 25 years ago and spent most of his time documenting military operations from within the British Army. Documentary photographer Neale James approached Penfound to produce a short film about his life and work, and the result is the inspirational 30-minute video above. (Note: the video contains some strong language.)
NPR’s Radiolab recorded this 30-minute podcast episode titled “Sight Unseen” that explores current …
Conflict photographer Lynsey Addario has gotten quite a bit of attention lately after publishing a memoir about …
For his ongoing project "Lands in Limbo," photographer Narayan Mahon has been visiting de-facto countries that aren't recognized as countries by most of the world. Unless you're into geography and/or politics, you may never have heard of any of the places before: Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, and Transnistria.
Watches, glasses and combs... these are the kinds of everyday objects that photographer Ziyah Gafić has spent a great deal of time photographing over the past few years. They're objects that are seemingly mundane and unimportant, but in fact tell a tragic story that Gafić's work seeks to reveal and preserve.
Thom Atkinson, a U.K. photographer, spent nine months working on an incredibly detailed and interesting project, titled Soldiers’ Inventories. It consists of 13 photographs, each depicting the weapons, clothing, armor, and personal items that British soldiers have worn in battle over time.
Conflict photography is typically a dangerous, traumatizing and, at least in part, heroic profession that puts you in the line of fire with only a camera as a weapon.
But as Penn State grad and former Onward State photographer Mitchell Wilston recently demonstrated to great effect, you don't need to put yourself in harm's way to capture the kinds of gritty, black-and-white conflict photography that has become iconic through the ages.
While Russia continues to claim it has no involvement in the civil conflict in Ukraine, the selfie-strewn Instagram profile of Russian soldier Sanya Sotkin may tell a slightly different story. A story which is landing Russian President, Vladimir Putin in even more hot water than he’s already in.
Editor's Note: Although there is no direct footage of men dying, fighters on both sides lose their lives during this footage. It is not for the faint of heart.
Iconic conflict photographers are thought of as such because they do something that your standard news coverage just can't do: they show the realities of war. Statistics enumerating the number of people killed or displaced by conflict are just numbers on a page until someone captures the reality of these numbers on film... or sensor.
The video above was not shot by a conflict photographer, but it too captures that reality of war in a profound and shocking way. For an hour, you can spend time looking through the eyes of a Syrian tank column as it wreaks unimaginable havoc.
"Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening." That's the tagline of one of the most powerful, shocking ad campaign we have ever run across.
Put together by Save the Children UK, this campaign uses the popular 'second per day video' lifelogging concept to drive home an anti-war message in the most stark and unsettling way, focusing on how war affects children.
We hope you never get sick of hearing about stories that show the true power of photography to affect change, because I doubt we'll ever get sick of finding and sharing them. The most recent such story we've stumbled across is told by photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale, whose work has already helped curtail the efforts of warlords in Africa who are exploiting children in their attempt to rule Congo.
Camille Lepage, 25, is an independent French photographer living in South Sudan. She works on long term projects about topics that do not make to the mainstream media and looks at the consequences of the politics on the populations.
For over a year now, documentary photographer Camille Lepage has been photographing the struggles of South Sudan. As a new country, sovereign since 2011, South Sudan can be considered a hotbed for social, political, and religious conflicts. These conflicts are laid bare by Lepage through a strong, intuitive eye and a determination to get her shot.
Her two on-going bodies of work, You Will Forget Me and Vanishing Youth (which are on display below) contain stirring imagery that speak of the violence, and the religious and cultural dissonance that permeates this young country and its people.
It’s cold. The air is stinging my ears and my hands are numb. I pull back on my gloves and resume huddling in the conner of the courtyard. It’s December in Aleppo and the air is bitter, but the overwhelming sense of dread comes not from the cold, but from overhead. Early morning, midday, through the night; the aerial bombardment doesn’t stop. The sound of a jet buzzing overhead and those terrible trails of white streaming from the underbelly as missiles launch. Distant blasts and then closer ones. Mortar strikes as well. Silence and then an explosion.
Photojournalism can be a dangerous profession, especially for those photojournalists who are drawn to conflict photography. Once such photojournalist is Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic, who has been putting his life on the line in war zones for over 20 years.
Back in 2011, developer Dean Putney's mother dropped a photographic goldmine in his lap as he was getting ready to leave home after Thanksgiving. Out from under the coffee table, she pulled out a big black photo album that, as it turns out, contained hundreds of photos taken by his German officer Great Grandfather Walter Koessler during World War I.
Conflict photographers like Michael Kamber and Louie Palu have spent years covering the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've lost friends, been very nearly killed themselves, and come back with incredible (and sometimes hard to stomach) photos.
Both of their work is currently on display alongside many of their peers' at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and in the short video above, they share the stories behind some of their most moving imagery. (Note: the above video contains some strong imagery)
Ed Drew is an artist who's studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, pursuing a BFA in sculpture with a minor in photography. He's also a defensive heavy weapons and tactics specialist for the California Air National Guard.
When Drew was deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan this past April as a helicopter aerial gunner, he decided to bring his passion for photography with him. What resulted were the first tintype photos to be created in a combat zone since the Civil War.
"I wonder which one of us dies first?"
It was 2003, and a stray, morbid thought crossed my mind one night in a hotel in Iraq. I was in a room full of twenty and thirty-something photographers and journalists, in the Al-Hamra hotel in Baghdad. A few miles away, the grown-ups from major label news organizations had filled the Sheraton-Palestine hotel---the Al-Hamra was the low-rent downtown spill-over tent.
Are you ready for the imagery war -- the war against personal photography and capturing of video? You'd better be.
The title of this piece actually isn't entirely accurate. In some ways, this war isn't just coming, it's already begun. Forces are lining up on both sides, under the radar for most of us so far, but preparing for action. And right now, if I had to place a bet (cash, not bitcoins, please), I'd reluctantly have to predict the anti-imagery folks have the better chance of winning.
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, photographer Michael Falco is shooting a project titled "Civil War 150 Pinhole Project." His goal is to highlight the haunting beauty of civil war battlefields and to chronicle the various battle reenactments that are happening all across the country. To do so, he's using large format pinhole cameras that gives the poetic images an old fashioned look.
"Deadly sniper shot through the lens." That's the title of a photoblog entry published over on Reuters last week by staff photographer Goran Tomasevic, who's covering the deadly conflict in Syria. The photo above was accompanied by the text, "A tank fired a couple of shells onto the top of the building and rubble fell down around us."
When you mention the words "vacation photos," most people might think of trips to the mountains or to the beach. Not Toshifumi Fujimoto. The 45-year-old Japanese trucker is passionate about "war tourism" -- he actually takes on the role of a conflict photographer when on vacation. In recent days, he has been shooting on the front lines of the Syrian civil war, putting his life on the line for images that he keeps as a personal collection rather than sells for reportage purposes.
Professional photographers are often hired to capture moments in life that are memorable and emotional -- two words that aptly describe military homecomings. The number of photographers hired to shoot homecomings is reportedly growing, as more and more families are hiring professionals to document the reunions that occur when soldiers return from war.
Here's a powerful video shared by The Economist a couple of years ago that features acclaimed British photojournalist Don McCullin talking about his 50 years of photographing war, atrocities, and human suffering. (Warning: it contains disturbing images.)
Dutch historian Jo Teeuwisse is back with another fascinating then-and-now project (we featured her work once back in 2010), this time titled Ghosts of War--France. The images show old World War II photographs of soldiers blended seamlessly into photos of the same locations in modern day France.
Back in the summer of 1942, the US Army called upon a young man named Glenn W. Eve (above left) for World War II. After finding him to be 5'9'' and just 125 pounds, the military deemed him unfit for combat. Unlike Steve Rogers, there was no experimental serum available to Eve, but luckily he had a desired skill: photography. In 1944, Eve was promoted to private first class and placed in the Signal Photo Corps in order to document the happenings in the Pacific.
We've shared some pretty intense footage captured using helmet-mounted cameras in the past, but perhaps none as crazy as the video above. Shot by a US soldier in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, the video offers a point-of-view look at what it's like to face machine gun fire from the Taliban. [Editor's note: Be warned -- there's a bit of mature language.]
At first glance, New York-based photographer Richard Barnes' Civil War photos might look like they were taken from some museum or historical photographic archive. Look a little closer, however, and you'll begin to notice things that are quite peculiar. In one of them, there's a pickup truck parked in the background. In another, a man wears a T-shirt and baseball cap -- certainly not the fashion you'd expect to see in a mid-1800s photo.
The truth is, Barnes creates beautiful war photos that appear to be from over a century ago by using the Civil War-era process of wet plate photography to capture modern day Civil War battle reenactments.
Editors have always been wary of sending photographers into war zones since the practice began in the early 20th …
This may be a rare case in which a $695 class might actually save your life: Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is offering a safety course for journalists who cover war, conflict and disaster zones.