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Film the Police (4)

If you want to think of yourself as an informed citizen, and speak in an informed way about police practices in the United States, I think you owe it to your fellow citizens (and to yourself as well) to read the U.S. Department of Justice report “Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department,” issued on August 10, 2016. […]

Getty Images Caught Red-Handed (Again)

It would certainly behoove public-domain image archives, such as the Library of Congress, to demand collectively a forensic inquiry into the inventory of Getty Images and other such aggregators. The Carol Highsmith and Daniel Morel cases, I’ll wager, represent only the tip of Getty Images’ deceptive and illegal traffic in copyright-free images. […]

Guest Post 23: Robert Dannin on Steve McCurry

I am uncomfortable watching an interrogation that is misguided if related to some elusive standard of photojournalism. … Pressing Steve McCurry for explanations when one already knows the reasons he used Photoshop — to create a more saleable, viewable image — evades more serious issues about who controls photography, and when and how to liberate it. […]

The “Visual Storyteller” Mantra

From where I sit, the most important consequence of this scandal (aside from reminding us that photographers, like most people, will do anything that benefits them, ethics be damned) lies in the fact that the vapid phrase “visual storyteller” has suddenly become highlighted — while acquiring a darker meaning — with the revelation that Magnum photographer Steve McCurry deploys it as a both a rationale and a magic charm that, he seems to think, immunizes him from the charges of bad faith and breach of professional ethics that accrue nowadays to a photojournalist who gets caught doing the same things. […]

Photo Ed: Awaiting the Millennium, 3 (1989)

More and more, teaching artists and art teachers (these are not synonyms) work under short-term contracts of two years or less, moving continuously from job to job. Their tenuous hold on stability is further undermined by the evolution of an underclass of freelance pieceworkers: part-time teachers willing to work for next to nothing, with no protection or benefits. […]