The PEPCON disaster was an industrial disaster that occurred in Henderson, Nevada on May 4, 1988 at the Pacific Engineering Production Company of Nevada (PEPCON) plant. The chemical fire and subsequent explosions claimed two lives, injured 372 people, and caused an estimated US$100 million of damage. A large portion of the Las Vegas Metropolitan area – 10 miles (16 km) away – was affected and several agencies activated disaster plans.
General News
Carol Guzy on The Take
Michael Williamson on what happens in the moment of The Take
Lucien Perkins on predicting The Take
Michael Williamson on what happens in the moment of The Take
Lucien Perkins on predicting The Take
The Take - Spencer Platt
Spencer Platt
New York-based photographer's picture from bombed-out Beirut challenges pre-conceived notions of the Middle East.
February 9, 2007
The Lebanese 20-somethings in the shiny red convertible look intrigued but distraught. One holds a cloth over her nose while another snaps a picture on her cell phone of the destruction wrought by weeks of Israeli bombing in south Beirut. Behind the car, men stand atop a building-size pile of rubble. A woman in a headscarf turns away.
"It's a picture you can keep looking at," wrote Michele McNally, assistant managing editor at The New York Times, who chaired this year's jury of the World Press Photo competition. McNally said the photo, taken by Getty Images photographer Spencer Platt, "has the contradiction of real life, amidst chaos."
The annual World Press Photo contest, based in Amsterdam and judged by an international panel of photographers and editors, is considered the top prize in photojournalism. This year Platt's image beat out 78,083 images from 4,460 professional photographers in 124 countries.
"This image had been discussed a lot, and I thought maybe this was the one," Platt said in an interview this morning. "But I honestly never believed it would get photo of the year; it's the kind of thing you dream about when you're sitting on the subway." He got the call from the Netherlands yesterday, not surprisingly while he was on his way to an assignment in Brooklyn.
Platt, who is based in New York, took the winning image on August 15, 2006, the first day of the ceasefire following this summer's fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. He had been walking around all day, watching people return to their homes, salvage belongings, or just gawk at the destruction, which he described as "if the Bronx had been leveled, but the rest of Manhattan was intact."As usual when shooting for the wire, Platt says he didn't think too much about this particular photo when he first sent it off to his editors, along with 20 other images from the day. But his boss Pancho Bernasconi, Getty's director of photography for news, said, "As soon as I saw it I knew it was special."
Bernasconi called Platt "relentlessly inquisitive," and said the photographer "always wants to explain things through his photographs. This image kind of stood out to everybody, because it was such a different image from that time, such a different way to look at it."
Once buzz started to form around his picture, especially in Europe and Los Angeles, where it ran on the front page of the next day's Times, Platt says he went back and re-examined it.
"For me personally, the immediate reaction I got is that when people see it they say, this is Lebanon, this is the Middle East?" Platt recalled. "People have preconceptions of what it looks like there, and this challenges that -- it starts a discussion."
And while Platt is honored by the World Press prize, he is also humbled when he thinks how serendipitous great photos often are. He only took about five frames of this car of people, and all but this one were obscured by a man walking in front of the group. Worse, Platt was sure he'd blown the shot when an editor asked him if he didn't have "something wider." He thought he had lost the shot. Obviously, he hadn't.
"When you think of the activities that led you [to take a pictures] and how spontaneous it was, that's what I love about photography," he said. "That's what keeps me going, waiting for that moment."
(From popphoto.com)
Getty Images Podcast on Spencer Platt
The Take - Akintunde Akinleye
Akintunde Akinleye
Hell from Heaven
September 2008 (from the Canon Professional Network)
On 26 December 2006, Akintunde Akinleye was at home in Lagos when he received a phone call from a friend about an explosion on the outskirts of the city in a suburb called Abule-Egba. Thirty minutes later he arrived at the scene of a massive oil pipeline explosion, one that ended up reportedly claiming the lives of 269 people and injuring dozens more. Akintunde is used to reporting on the social, political and environmental fallout from one of the world's major oil fields, but it must have been with a heavy heart that he lifted the camera to his eye that day to begin recording the horror of what he saw.
After walking around the disaster area in Abule-Egba, Akintunde spotted a man with a bucket trying to put out the fire. The man's sawmill had been completely destroyed in the blast. With a backdrop of smoky ruins, Akintunde took about six pictures of the man. “Technically, I did nothing extraordinary. I just waited for the right moment to take the images,” he says. One of the images, the winner of the World Press Photo's Spot News prize in 2007, appeared across the world the following day.
The Take - Oded Balilty
Oded Balilty, The Associated Press
Defending the Barricade
On Feb. 1, 2006, Associated Press photographer Oded Balilty was in the West Bank settlement of Amona when a violent confrontation broke out between Jewish settlers and Israeli security forces. The troops were attempting to enforce a government order to tear down nine houses built on private Palestinian land after Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a final appeal by the settlers.
Balilty, camera ready, stood about 3 meters from the end of the barricade. Crowds lined up on a wall overlooking the holed-up settlers, while Israeli troops in riot gear advanced. "Nili, a young settler … was standing 15 meters away, biting her fingernails, when she saw them coming and ran toward the barricade," Balilty said.
Said Nili: "I felt a stranger pushing me to defend the barricade. It was God who gave me the courage."
Moments after Balilty took the photograph that won him the Pulitzer Prize, Nili was beaten by club-wielding police.
Spot News
Oded Balilty, Israel, The Associated Press
Settler struggles with Israeli security officer, Amona outpost, West Bank, 1 February
A Jewish settler resists Israeli riot police enforcing a Supreme Court order to demolish nine homes in an outpost of the Amona settlement, West Bank, on February 1. Residents joined by thousands of other protesters raised barbed wire barriers to protect the houses and clashed violently with police. Over 200 people were injured, including 80 policemen. Following hours of confrontation, the settlers were dragged away and bulldozers moved in to begin the demolition.
Spencer Platt, USA, Getty Images
Young Lebanese drive through devastated Beirut neighborhood, 15 August
Young Lebanese drive down a street in Haret Hreik, a bombed neighborhood in southern Beirut, Lebanon, on August 15. For nearly five weeks Israel had been targeting that part of the city and towns across southern Lebanon in a campaign against Hezbollah militants. As a ceasefire gradually came into force from August 14, thousands of Lebanese began to return to their homes. According to the Lebanese government, 15,000 homes and 900 commercial concerns were damaged.
Akintunde Akinleye, Nigeria, Reuters
Man at the scene of petrol pipeline explosion, Lagos, Nigeria, 26 December
A man rinses soot from his face at the scene of a petrol pipeline explosion in Lagos, Nigeria, on December 26. At least 260 people were killed after a punctured pipeline caught fire. Thieves had tapped it to fill tankers with petrol for resale, and hundreds of people had gone to the scene to scoop up leaking fuel in plastic containers. Pipeline vandalism and fuel theft are common in Nigeria, the world’s eighth largest exporter of oil, where most people live in poverty.
Assignment - Calcot
Ten p.m. the night before, my cell rings. The number is that of a producer I work with in San Francisco. He's asking if I could be in a small town south of Fresno before sunrise to shoot a cotton harvest. The best directions he could give me were GPS coordinates, six hundred miles away.
Assignment
Look and read...
Andrew Henderson
This image is of a traditional Christian Funeral for Matiah Nalla, in a leprosy colony on the outskirts of Khammam, India. An elder who lost his hands and feet as a result of leprosy, his son Nathaniel is washing him as they prepare him for burial, which is uncommon for India because the skyrocketing land prices.
Before attending Rochester Institute of Technology, Andrew Henderson was altered by the experiences he encountered during a two-month trip to South Africa and Botswana. Since 2001, he has worked on photographic essays in collaboration with organizations in Mexico, Uganda, Rwanda, and India. In 2007, he completed staff photographer internships at the Concord Monitor, The Virginian-Pilot, and National Geographic Magazine. Currently, Andrew attends Syracuse University, and will be interning at The New York Times in Summer 2008. Awards include: College Photographer of the Year, POYi, The Alexia Foundation, and PDN, among others. Publication credits include The New York Times, Newsweek, US News and World Report, The FADER, Washington Post Magazine, The Sunday (London) Times, and National Geographic Magazine. He is a member of aevum photo collective.
John Loomis
Aboard the London Eye flight, from the project “Tourists”
Carolyn Drake
Traditional Uyghur Home, Western China
Felicia Webb
“The voice constantly whirrs round in my head :
‘I’m too fat, too big, taking up too much space.”’ Natalie
Andrew Henderson
This image is of a traditional Christian Funeral for Matiah Nalla, in a leprosy colony on the outskirts of Khammam, India. An elder who lost his hands and feet as a result of leprosy, his son Nathaniel is washing him as they prepare him for burial, which is uncommon for India because the skyrocketing land prices.
Before attending Rochester Institute of Technology, Andrew Henderson was altered by the experiences he encountered during a two-month trip to South Africa and Botswana. Since 2001, he has worked on photographic essays in collaboration with organizations in Mexico, Uganda, Rwanda, and India. In 2007, he completed staff photographer internships at the Concord Monitor, The Virginian-Pilot, and National Geographic Magazine. Currently, Andrew attends Syracuse University, and will be interning at The New York Times in Summer 2008. Awards include: College Photographer of the Year, POYi, The Alexia Foundation, and PDN, among others. Publication credits include The New York Times, Newsweek, US News and World Report, The FADER, Washington Post Magazine, The Sunday (London) Times, and National Geographic Magazine. He is a member of aevum photo collective.
John Loomis
Aboard the London Eye flight, from the project “Tourists”
John Loomis began his photography career as a stringer for the local newspaper at just 15. A dozen+ years later again back in his native Florida, Loomis specializes in action, documentary, editorial, portrait, and travel work for a diverse group of magazine and advertising clients. Deeply passionate for long-term photojournalism, John is also the Editor in Chief of Blueeyes Magazine. Select editorial clients include: AARP, Architectural Digest, Audubon, ESPN the Magazine, Elle, Essence, FADER, Fast Company, Fortune, Mother Jones, New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Outside, People, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, and The London Sunday Times Magazine.
About the Photograph:
“The image of the London Eye flight at dusk struck me because of the metaphor turned physical reality of a group of tourists floating in a bubble above one of the world’s great cities. I think to a lot of people that’s how they want to travel… in a giant bubble that allows them to see everything but not get too close to experiencing something authentic or spontaneous, and even bring a bit of what is familiar to them along. What is of course a bit ridiculous about the image is that I’m in another bubble myself, photographing the other bubbles, instead of the sinking sun over the smoggy edges of the horizon.”
“The Tourists project explores how when people go on vacation the real work begins. Armed to the teeth with recording devices of every medium, the entire trip is spent in an intense effort to create an archive filled with proof that they were really there. From within their group travel package specials and double-decker tour buses, in Rome, London, Prague, New York City, or Tokyo, they tirelessly search for the right spots for their loved ones, or a willing stranger, me, to snap a picture of themselves crowned as emperor in their newly conquered territory. This is the beginning of an essay trying to understand tourism culture in America and abroad.”
Carolyn Drake
Traditional Uyghur Home, Western China
Carolyn Drake is a documentary photographer based in Istanbul. Her work has been supported through grants from the Fulbright Program, Duke University, and National Geographic and honored by UNICEF, World Press Photo and POYi. She was chosen as one of Photo District News’ 30 emerging photographers to watch in 2006 and as one of the Magenta Foundation’s emerging photographers in 2007. Her photo career began at the age of 30, when she decided to leave her multimedia job in New York’s Silicon Alley to learn about the world through personal experience. She studied history and media culture while in college at Brown University and later learned photography at ICP and Ohio University.
About the Photograph:
“The photo was taken at prayer time inside a Muslim home in Xinjiang, the autonomous Uyghur region in western China, where traditional life has been in decline for the last 100 years. In Xinjiang, many Uighurs still hold fast to rural traditions, working family farms, and traveling between vast stretches of mountain and desert to trade and mingle, but this lifestyle is quickly deteriorating under China’s vigorous modernization policies. The world’s powerful empires fold together here, influencing ethnic cultures that are among the world’s oldest. I traveled to Xinjiang at the end of a two month journey through the former Soviet Republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. It was fascinating to step over the border into China after spending so much time thinking about the region in relation to the Soviet Union.”
Felicia Webb
“The voice constantly whirrs round in my head :
‘I’m too fat, too big, taking up too much space.”’ Natalie
Felicia Webb is a documentary photographer engaged in humanistic projects on various social issues. She has worked all over the world including Africa, Asia, Latin American, USA and Europe. Her work has been published by the Sunday Times Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Le Monde , Telegraph Magazine, Independent Magazine, among others. She has worked for several charities and NGOs including Christian Aid, Save the Children, Oxfam, and others. Her projects have received many awards including World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the NPPA/Nikon Documentary Sabbatical Grant, the Visa D’Or Magazine, a Hasselblad Foundation grant and the World Press Masterclass. Her work has been exhibited in the USA, UK, Norway, Sweden, Holland and France.
About the Photograph:
For the past three and a half years, Felicia Webb has closely followed the lives of a handful of Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa sufferers. Eating disorders have become an increasingly pervasive malady in the United Kingdom and the United States, and it has been Webb’s mission to portray these conditions in a truthful, personal, and sensitive light. Her photographic essay “Nil By Mouth” couples personal testimony with compelling portraiture. Through this presentation, she aims to raise awareness about the severity and complexity of the illnesses, dispel many of its common misconceptions, and to encourage and educate sufferers, youth, and politicians to be proactive and resourceful in their encounters with eating disorders.
Markus Marcetic
View From a Mobile Clinic Window. Qalqilya, West Bank
Markus Marcetic (b.1972) is based in Stockholm, Sweden. After studying media/communications, eastern European and African studies at Uppsala University he switched to photojournalism and has worked as a photojournalist since 1998. Focusing on human rights issues Markus traveled in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe on assignment with numerous NGO’s. Markus has worked for most major Swedish magazines and newspapers and foreign publications. He has also worked as a photo editor for the largest daily in Sweden. He also often lectures on photography and photojournalism and has been awarded prizes in the Swedish Picture of The Year competition in 2004 and 2005. Markus is a member of the Swedish photo agency Moment.
About the Photograph:
“I was in the West bank on assignment for the Swedish NGO Diakonia, an organization I have been working in close cooperation with for years”. Markus has recently published a book called “Kids”. It’s a collection of photos from different stories in Europe, Africa and Asia. “Often these images summed the story I was trying to tell in a way that images of adults rarely do. Children are as much a part of conflicts and human tragedies as adults are, but rarely they get to be the center of attention in stories we read or see in newspapers and magazines. Still around half of the world’s population is made up of children and young people under the age of twenty-four.”
Samantha Reinders
Port Elizabeth, South Africa 2006
Samantha Reinders (b.1977) is a freelance photographer based in her native Cape Town, South Africa. She moved back to South Africa after completing her MA at Ohio University, and interning, in 2005, for US News & World Report magazine. She is not 100% certain when her career actually began – but thinks it was either somewhere in the hills of Appalachia, or sandwiched between two other photographers in the press pool in the Oval Office. Either way, she’s glad it did because it has, among other things, allowed her to chase penguins, fly on Air Force One, swim with sharks and meet a collection of interesting people – from business men to homeless men, and from grannies at a bake-sale to a triple murderer behind bars. In this way she thinks the profession of photojournalism is a privilege. Some of Samantha’s clients include: US News & World Report, Time, The New York Times, L’Express, Der Spiegel, Park Avenue, The Chicago Tribune, SLAM, National Geographic Books, Smithsonian, Readers Digest and The London Financial Times.
About the Photograph:
“This photograph is from a larger essay on Township Tourism in South Africa – a phenomenon with increasing popularity since the countries first democratic elections in 1994. What is today a million-dollar industry has been the center of much controversy over the years. Is it a voyeuristic, making poverty into a theme park – or does it do much to bring money, jobs and opportunities to areas that need them most? This 2006 image shows a Dutch couple that had visited New Brighton Township in Port Elizabeth in 2000. Overwhelmed by what they encountered, they spent the next few years fundraising back home and sent several ship container loads of furniture and school equipment back to the township. Here they visit one of the schools and meet some of the students."
Boris Swatrzman
Old and New Shanghai. China 2007
Boris Svartzman is a French-Argentinian freelance photographer based in Shanghai. He has lived in China for seven years, including two years studying at the university in Chengdu and Shanghai. He graduated in France with a degree in philosophy and sociology. Photography and social studies are two complementary ways for him to describe the world. His series on China’s demolition has been selected in the Paris Match Students Photojournalism Competition (2005), in Visa pour l’Image Photojournalism Festival (2006), and published in Foto 8. He is represented by Prospekt Photo Agency in Italy.
About the Photograph:
“This photograph is part of a series about the demolition of old neighborhoods in Shanghai which I considered the first chapter in the urbanisation of China. It took time to gain access and trust to photograph the living conditions of the underpaid workers.. They weren’t used to having human relations in a city where they are forced to hide from the public. They are recycling materials of the demolished traditional houses in this photograph. After talking and showing an interest in their work some of them opened their doors and invited me to dinner.”
Kathryn Cook
Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide
Kathryn Cook (b 1979) is an American photographer based in Istanbul who is represented by Agence Vu and Prospekt fotografi. Her project on Turkey examines the impact of the Armenian massacres of the early 20th century and the scars it left on the country’s national identity. Turkey still refuses to officially label it “genocide,” a word Cook uses in the title of the project. Cook has worked as an Associated Press photographer in Panama, freelanced for a variety of publications including Time and The New York Times, Stern, Newsweek and was featured in PDN’s 30 emerging photographers. Her project Memory Denied was the recipient of aftermath Project award the in 2008.
About the Photograph:
“An Armenian man from Aleppo holds the photo of his mother, who survived the journey through SE Turkey to Aleppo, Syria. His memory is of course created out of her memory, as she passed down what she saw to him. Another reason the photo isn’t in focus in this picture. This passing down of memory is also an interesting aspect to this project, as it happened so long ago that children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have a different collective memory. The diaspora and politics have also influenced it. In Turkey this is especially interesting because of the political situation with not recognizing or discussing the past. What does a memory/collective memory “denied” feel like? And for me, what does it feel like visually? That is one of the main themes I am trying to explore… among others.”
Lucia Nimcova
Instant Woman, Slovakia
For the past 10 years Lucia Nimcova (b 1977, Slovakia) has been creating books, multimedia and exhibits. Her projects expand the documentary concept and explore personal, social and cultural issues in Central European society. Lucia’s awards and grants include: International Studio & Curatorial Program, NYC., Leica Oskar Barnack Award, Germany, Fotografia Baume & Mercier Award, Italy, Asia-Europe Foundation, Singapore, World Press Photo Master Class and many others.
About the Photograph:
“I have been documenting the life of women in Central Europe since 2002. I began as a student, because I wanted to find answers to my personal questions. I needed to deal with the fact that I am a woman and through my work I was searching for what it is to be a woman in Slovak society. Eastern European societies have undergone massive transformations in the past few years. Woman are taking examples from and idealizing western ways of life. Traditions are disappearing and intergenerational conflict is inevitable. The focus of life is becoming less immediate and increasingly aspirant.”
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