Time to rethink the whole World Press Photo project from the ground up. If they ever get serious about catching up with where “press photography” has gone since 1955, WPP might want to scrap the entire process of Academy Awards-style categories and prizes, and become instead a serious forum for discussion of information-based, issue-oriented imagery in the new media environment. […]
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It’s not to much to ask of a western European NGO that it revitalize itself after half a century of same old same old. It’s in that spirit — hoping for signs of some tectonic shift, though not expecting any — that I accepted the invitation to attend the opening reception for World Press Photo 2012 in the Main Gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby at United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan on August 15. […] The tribulations of Kodak and Olympus impinge less directly and severely on the field of creative photography, where I concentrate my attention as a critic and journalist. Yet they too seem to signify the end of an era in which major-league companies identified so strongly with photography constituted an industry from which no one anticipated anything but ongoing strength and steady growth. […] The “citizen journalist” documentation of Lt. John Pike nonchalantly pepper-spraying seated protesters on the campus of the University of California-Davis on November 18 has gone viral not just in the west but in mainland China as well — with the blessings of the Chinese Communist Party. This raises the question of whether Pike is actually a covert operative for the CCP, deliberately overreacting to nonviolent protest in order to discredit the United States and strengthen the hands of totalitarian governments everywhere. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Lt. John Pike Goes Viral (6)
I’ve tracked the “pepper-spray copy” story here at Photocritic International because it’s as vivid and immediate an example of the potency of citizen journalism via the lens media as a commentator on lens culture like myself could want. I’ve said, from the beginning, that without Lt. John Pike’s bring-it-on turning of this situation into a police-brutality photo op in front of a crowd of amateur paparazzi, heads would not have started to roll at UC Davis and he would not have become an international symbol of uniformed thuggery. […]