Felicia Webb visits FiftyCrows

Felicia Webb, of London UK visited FiftyCrows while working on her new photo essay on "Fat Times in the USA", for which she won the 2004 NPPA-Nikon Documentary Sabbatical. The sabbatical has allowed her to expand on her ongoing investigation into eating disorders. Felica has been a Finalist of the FiftyCrows International Fund for Documentary Photography, once in 2002 for her poignant essay on eating disorders and last year for her essay on the oil fields in Azerbaijan.

We enjoyed a nice cool orange water under the holly tree and discussed contacts for her to meet with in both the Bay area as well as in New York. We love to connect the dots, especially when it helps such amazing photographers like Felicia.

FiftyCrows' Lillian Sizemore reviews Bill Owens' new book

Bill Owens signs his new book, "Leisure", the companion to the iconic American classic, "Suburbia"...Check out Lillian Sizemore's book review and interview with Bill, in Ei8ht magazine, published out of the UK. Bill's books are available online for sale at Photo Eye - FiftyCrows' favorite online boookstore (tell Rick the owner we said Hi), or in San Francisco's best photography bookstore Foto-Grafix (tell Jun the owner we said Hi!)

US Publications and the photos of US casualties

US Publications and photos of Iraqi casualties

Bill Moyers and PBS

by John Nichols Sun May 15, 3:40 PM ET

Bill Moyers is not taking attacks by Bush Administration allies on public broadcasting in general and his journalism in particular sitting down.

"I should put my detractors on notice," declared the veteran journalist who stepped down in January as the host of PBS's NOW With Bill Moyers, who recently turned 70. "They might compel me out of the rocking chair and into the anchor chair."

Moyers closed the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis on Sunday with his first public response to the revelation that White House allies on the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have secretly been holding PBS in general -- and his show in particular -- to a partisan litmus test.

"I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. And that's what (CPB chair) Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing."

Recalling former President Richard Nixon's failed attempt to cut the funding for public broadcasting in the early 1970s, Moyers said, "I always knew that Nixon would be back -- again and again. I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

That was a pointed reference to Tomlinson, a Republican Party stalwart, who contracted with an outside consultant to monitor Moyers's weekly news program for signs of what Tomlinson and his allies perceived to be liberal bias. Moyers ridiculed the initiative first by reading off a long list of conservatives who had appeared on NOW, then by reading a letter from conservative US Rep. Ron Paul (news, bio, voting record) (R-Texas) praising the show, and finally by noting that Tomlinson had paid a former Bush White House aide $10,000 to do the monitoring.

"He spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests and stories were, ten thousand dollars!" Moyers exclaimed. "Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week you can pick up a copy of TV guide on the news stand. A subscription is even cheaper and I would have sent your coupon that can save you up to 62 percent! Or for that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show! You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam -- your favorite -- mine too! (We had some things in common.) Or you could go online where the listings are posted. Hell, Ken, you could have called me collect and I would have told you who we were having on the show!"

Moyers said he wasn't buying Tomlinson's claim that the results of the monitoring were not being released to protect PBS's image. "Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that stuff every day," said the man who came to Washington as a press aide to former President Lyndon Johnson and was present when the Public Broadcasting Act was written in the 1960s.

Moyers revealed to the crowd of 2,000 media reform activists that he had written Tomlinson on Friday, suggesting that the pair appear on a PBS program to discuss the controversy. He also revealed that he had tried three times to meet with the full CPB board but had been refused. Expressing his sense that the board had "crossed the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out," Moyers said, "I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can't."

The man who has won thirty Emmy Awards for his hosting of various PBS programs was blunt about his critics. "They've been after me for years now and I am sure they will be stomping on my grave after I'm dead," he said. As the laughter from the crowd of 2,300 media reform activists quieted, however, he added, "I should remind them that one of our boys made it out 2,000 years ago."

Moyers was even blunter about why he thought Tomlinson and other allies of the Administration were so determined to knock his groundbreaking news program off the air and to replace it with more conservative fare such as a weekly roundtable discussion featuring Wall Street Journal editorial page staffers, joking that "I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it." Speaking of the investigative reporting NOW did on everything from the war in Iraq to offshore tax havens and ownership of the media, Moyers said, "Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn't the party line."

"The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets," he explained. "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

The broadcasting giant was greeted with cheers when he declared that "the quality of our media and the quality of our democracy are intertwined." But the loudest applause of the day came in response to his invitation to the crowd to join him in the fight to "take public broadcasting back from threats, from interference."

"It is," Moyers said, "a worthy goal."

Moyers has endorsed a call by Free Press, Common Cause, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and Media Access Project for town hall meetings nationwide that would allow Americans to speak directly to PBS station managers and policymakers.

That call came in the context of a broader appeal for media reforms and a fight against manipulation of the news not just by this administration but by all of the forces that would use the media to lull Americans into civic unconsciousness.

"Hear me," Moyers said, "An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight -- ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too."


Copyright © 2005 The Nation

FiftyCrows Media's Chernobyl Legacy Film accepted into Mountain Film Festival

FiftyCrows Media has been working with Magnum Photographer Paul Fusco on a short film based on his amazing images documenting the lasting effects on the people and environment of the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear facility in Ukraine in 1986. The film will have its premiere at the prestigous Mountain Film Festival in Telluraide, CO this month.

The film will also air on LinkTV in the coming month. LinkTV reaches 21 million households in the US through DirectTV (channel 375) and DishNet (channel 9410). We'll be posting airing times as soon as we know ourselves.

We're also planning to enter the film into many more film festivals around the world... all of which takes money. Sooo, if you coan help us out with a small donation it goes a long way towards getting this important essay into the world. Just click here to donate.

Huge Nuclear Disaster in UK - NO US MEDIA REPORT IT

As reported by Paul Brown, an environmental reporter fopr the Guardian Unlimited UK, on May 9th a leak of highly radioactive nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, enough to half fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, has forced the closure of Sellafield's Thorp reprocessing plant.

The highly dangerous mixture, containing about 20 tonnes of uranium and plutonium fuel, has leaked through a fractured pipe into a huge stainless steel chamber which is so radioactive that it is impossible to enter.

Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes will take months and may require special robots to be built and sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the £2.1bn plant.

The leak is not a danger to the public but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer since income from the Thorp plant, calculated to be more than £1m a day, is supposed to pay for the cleanup of redundant nuclear facilities.

The closure could hardly have come at a worse time for the nuclear industry. [When does a nuclear accident ever come at a good time.. my god!] Britain is struggling to meet its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20% of 1990 levels by 2010, despite a substantial programme of wind farm construction, while generating capacity will also be hit by the rundown of some of Britain's coal-fired power stations.

A problem at the plant was first noticed on April 19 when operators could not account for all the spent fuel that had been dissolved in nitric acid. It was supposed to be travelling through the plant to be measured and separated into uranium, plutonium and waste products in a series of centrifuges. Remote cameras scanning the interior of the plant found the leak.

Although most of the material is uranium, the fuel contains about 200kg (440lb) of plutonium, enough to make 20 nuclear weapons, and must be recovered and accounted for to conform to international safeguards aimed at preventing nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands. The liquid will have to be siphoned off and stored until the works can be repaired, but a method of doing this has yet to be devised.

Call For Entries: Magnum's Inge Morath Award

Magnum Photos announces the third $5000 Inge Morath Prize to be awarded to a woman photographer under 30 years of age. The prize is designed to assist in the completion of a long-term documentary project.

Inge Morath was an Austrian-born photographer who was associated with Magnum for almost 50 years. She died in January, 2002. As Morath devoted much of her enthusiasm to encouraging women photographers, her colleagues give this award as a tribute to her efforts.

* Send a project description (maximum one page)
* Between 40 and 80 slides in a carousel or on a CD.
* A c.v. (maximum, three pages) including photographer's name, telephone number, e-mail address, plus shipping and mailing address with return envelope.

Send support material to:

Magnum Photos Inge Morath Award
c/o Magnum Photos
151 West 25th Street
NY NY 10001
USA

Deadline: June 1, 2005
Award Announcement: July 15, 2005

FiftyCrows' Lillian Sizemore invited as Guest Editor of Ojodepez

Frank Kalero, who is the publisher of OjodePez magazine from Spain, has chosen FiftyCrows' Lillian Sizemore as the guest Photo Editor for Issue #5 which is due out in October 2005. Frank is coming to San Francisco this summer and they will work together for two weeks preparing the issue. The entire publication, all 200+ pages, will be dedicated to the photo essays of past winners of the FiftyCrows International Fudn for Documetary Photography.

Lots more to come on this as things develop a bit further...

Photography Matters!!

Here's an amazing quote taken from a Q&A session with the wonderful journalist Christiana Amanpour...

QUESTIONER: Lionel Beehner. I'm a staff writer with the Council. I'm wondering about the correlation between coverage and aid. And I believe there is a correlation. After the tsunami, which was widely covered--which is maybe, you could say, more black and white in the sense of it was clear what the response should have been--but there was a lot of aid, there was an outpouring of aid. I guess--do you think that the issue in Sudan, even if they open it up and there was cameras on all the time, that it's such a--it's a much more complex issue. I mean it's not--or do you--

AMANPOUR: No, it's a direct correlation. Cameras equals aid. And I think all the aid organizations will say so.

Photographs as an investment?

Something to think about:

Now, I never believe that one should start collecting photography, or any art for that matter, purely as an investment. Nonetheless, when this sort of information comes out it is worth noting...

An original print of the classic photograph by Robert Doisneau of a couple kissing outside Paris city hall taken more than 50 years ago was sold at auction Monday for a record 155,000 euros ($200,000 dollars).

Francoise Bornet, the woman captured in the romantic 1950 "Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville" — Kiss at City Hall — sold her print of the photo at the Dassault auction house in central Paris as part of a large photography sale.

It was bought by an unidentified Swiss national, who paid more than 10 times the initial estimated value of between 15,000 and 20,000 euros for the print bearing Doisneau's signature and stamp.

After more than 40 years in silence, Bornet surfaced and met Doisneau, showing him the original print he had sent her just a few days after the shoot. Bornet, 75, who decided to part with her print in order to fund a documentary production company, said the sale price was unbelievable.

"This photo belongs to the century. The presence during the sale of the 'lover at city hall' added to the chemistry and magic," said auctioneer, Herve Poulain, highlighting the emergence of a market in art photography which did not exist 15 years ago.

Stephanie Sinclair update

Stephanie Sinclair, another of the 2005 Winners, is back in Kabul and working on her winning essay, expanding it to include portraits of the husbands with their young brides, (which she will shoot with her new Hasselblad camera) and an extended follow-up on the self immolation story.

We admire her courage and vision and look forward to seeing the continuation of this incredibly important story.

Stay safe Stephanie.

Rena Effendi

Rena Effendi, who you will remember, was one of the 2004 FiftyCrows
winners from Baku, Azerbaijan, was one of the 12 photographers selected to
be a participant 12th Joop Swart Masterclass, which will be held in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands from 5 to 10 November 2005. The committee
consisted of David Burnett (USA), photographer Contact PressImages, Yuri
Kozyrev (Russia), photographer Time Magazine, Maria Mann(USA), director
Global Current Events at Corbis, Stephen Mayes (UK),director Art + Commerce
Anthology and Marion Schut-Koelemij (the Netherlands), former director
Transworld Features.

Congrats Rena!!