
Using Drones to Shoot War Zones
Photographer and director Joey L has been using camera drones to capture aerial photos and videos in conflict zones. Here's a 21-minute talk he recently gave on his work at Hardwired NYC.
Photographer and director Joey L has been using camera drones to capture aerial photos and videos in conflict zones. Here's a 21-minute talk he recently gave on his work at Hardwired NYC.
Giles Duley, one of the world's leading documentary and humanitarian photographers, is working on a new project titled Legacy of War. Learn what he thinks it means to tell a story in this inspiring 7-minute interview as part of Ilford Photo's new "Ilford Inspires" video series.
Joey L. has released a follow-up documentary to his 2015 film ”Guerrilla Fighters of Kurdistan”, again finding himself embedded with Kurdish guerrilla organisations on the frontlines against ISIS. The new documentary is titled ”Born From Urgency”, and is available online for free.
Taken in September of 1942, this captivating collection of black and white photographs show the New York Times in production during the height of World War II.
The late US Army combat photographer Spc. Hilda Clayton is being hailed as a hero this week after the Army released photos Clayton captured of the blast that killed her in Afghanistan. The photos were published with the approval of both Clayton's family and her Army unit.
Due to costs and scarcity, the vast majority of photos captured during World War II were shot on black-and-white film. Some images were captured in color, however, and those rare shots reveal what scenes from the Second World War looked like to people in them.
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.