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• RESOLVE contributor Michael Shaw is hosting his next BAGnewsSalon over at BAGnewsNotes this Sunday, May 3. Michael hosts these online, real-time image analysis sessions frequently and the discussion is always lively. The topic this time is Obama: The First 100 Days; guest participants include Alan Chin (another RESOLVE contributor), Nina Berman, David Burnett, Brian Ulrich, Mario Tama, and PDN news editor Daryl Lang, plus a bunch of historians and professors.

• In keeping with the Obama theme, the “I Do Solemnly Swear: Photographs of the 2009 Presidential Inauguration” exhibition is currently on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. David Hume Kennerly, the Ford White House photographer, and Robert McNeely, President Clinton’s official photographer, were commissioned to lead a team of more than 24 photographers in capturing the inauguration. It opened April 29, the 100th day of the Obama administration, and will run through July 12.

• The New York Times has a fantastic slideshow of pictures buried in the recently found “Mexican Suitcase,” three filmsy cardboard boxes of negatives of photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War by photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour. Capa left the boxes of negatives in his Paris darkroom before he fled to America in 1939. It was believed that the negatives traveled from Paris to Marseille and eventually to Mexico City, where they resided for more than half a century before they were turned over to the International Center of Photography in NYC last year.

• Since the high-def video camera RedONE was launched last year, photographers everywhere have been curious to see how it would eventually make the still cameras obsolete. Then Greg Williams, uses one to shoot his June Esquire cover of Megan Fox and needless to say, people like APhotoEditor have things to say about it. You can also watch a sneak peek of Greg’s behind-the-scenes video.

Afganistan seen through a woman's burka, by Aina-trained photojournalist Farzana Wahidy.

As a photojournalist I have observed an important thing, that most coverage of world events — especially in places like Afghanistan –- is done by white men between 30 and 40 year old. All those male journalists do interviews with Afghan men but have no access to the lives of the other 50% of the Afghan population. What about Afghan women’s stories? Who can tell them? Even if you have one or two women journalists there, the minute they have their own male interpreter and bodyguards, they cannot go inside the houses. They may be able to go inside some open-minded families’ houses, but they are are only talking to a tiny percentage of Afghan women. So who is the best to cover Afghan women? The Afghan women themselves.

This was how we started the Aina video project for Afghan women, asking them to make documentaries. The first ever documentary like this was called Afghanistan Unveiled. We trained seven Afghan women to hold a  camera for the first time, and nine months later their film was shown on PBS, the National Geographic channel, more than 20 international channels, at festivals…everywhere. In 2005 it was nominated for an Emmy award as one of four best foreign documentaries. It was because the story was totally different from what we’d heard before. The women knew where to go and who to talk to and how to express themselves. We also had one of Aina’s former student, Farzana Wahidy, who got the National Geographic All Roads honor. She was the first Afghan female photojournalist to receive this award.

In these ways we continued to develop the idea that Aina was founded on. Then one day the UN came to us saying, Reza, what would be the best tool to send out messages to the maximum number of people in the villages and cities? Obviously, as a visual person, I came up with this idea, which was used before in many countries a long time ago, of the mobile cinema project. We have mobile units going from village to village, school to school, with big screens and nice projectors. And Aina students make films that are informative and educational. It connected the population immediately and the whole cycle became local.

We also created a children’s magazine designed to provide both children and their families with important  information. It’s not an entertainment magazine; it’s about understanding each other and the whole world, which is especially important in this part of the world. so little-by-little this children’s magazine and women’s radio have become our main projects.

I think that the 21st century needs a new humanitarian organization, and for me this is Aina. I call it a “third-generation” humanitarian organization. It’s not giving people bread; it’s helping them to make their own bread. The big difference between all the existing NGOs and what we are doing is that we want to train local people, help them to become independent completely, to take their countries in their own hands — and then we leave.

So today, after almost nine years in existence, here are some very brief figures: Aina has trained 1,000 Afghans, three to four hundred of whom are women. The first Afghan independent media, called Kabul Weekly, is still going on, and it’s highly respected. We launched an Afghan women’s radio station; we launched a kids’ magazine; we have this production unit making films. And we created the first Afghan photo agency, AINA Photo Agency. It’s an independent photo agency, whose shareholders are the photographers that we trained. They are the owners of their own agency. Kabul Weekly is 100-percent independent media that seldom needs outside help.

By creating a national messaging system, we’ve created all the tools now to replace these psychologists we would need to help people in war-torn countries heal. But the biggest result will be long term. When you start educating women and girls, you are educating the next generation of mothers to educate their children. And we not only trained 1,000 people who then found fantastic jobs, we also created jobs.That’s why Aina, as the first of this kind of organization in the world, has such a positive outcome. That’s why in 2009, with the help of the National Geographic Mission Program and for which they named me a fellow of the National Geographic society, I’m going to launch an international organization to bring the most important aspects of Aina to other countries.

• In the latest update on Iranian-American photojournalist Roxana Saberi, after being charged with espionage two weeks ago, she was subsequently convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. Her parents, Reza and Akiko Saberi, who are staying in Tehran to press for her release and Roxana has announced a hunger strike in protest. In the meantime, students at Northwestern University, where Roxana received her graduate degree in journalism, are rallying in her support. According to ABC News, Roxana’s parents have hired new lawyers for her appeal, which could be decided within a week.

• Congratulations to Damon Winter of the New York Times and Patrick Farrell of the Miami Herald, the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for photography. Damon’s coverage of the Obama presidential campaign garnered the award in the Feature Photography category, and Patrick’s photo story of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike in Haiti earned him the award in the Breaking New category.

• Showing that they aren’t resting on their Pulitzer laurels, the New York Times posted a nice multimedia slide show featuring Tyler Hicks’ photographs of American soldiers in Afghanistan.

• Photojojo alerted us to World Pinhole Camera Day on Sunday (April 26) and also to the extravagant pinhole cameras for free download from Corbis. They come as a pdf that you cut out and assemble yourself — warning, these are the most complicated instructions we’ve seen in a while, but they look cool! All the designs are created by Fwis, a small design firm based in New York.

Covenant House headquarters in Manhattan during a candlelight vigil for homeless teens. ©Nina Berman/Do1Thing.org

Miki Johnson: Tell me how you’re working with other non-profit organizations.

Najlah Hicks: We’re working with two major non-profits. The first and the biggest is the Covenant House International. Covenant House is the largest provider of services to homeless teens. Our second partner is StandUp For Kids, which is an all-volunteer group that helps teenagers on the ground. We believe that in order to produce good work, we have to partner with a non-profit that is on the ground every day and has a long history of working with this population.

Again, we’re not experts on homelessness. For us, it’s very important to figure out who the expert on homelessness is and then partner with them. Working with those organizations gave us access to kids that we would never have access to otherwise. We ended up partnering with over a dozen non-profits. But the biggest is Covenant House, and we drove all donations to them.

All of the photographers or editors we work with, even Pim Van Hemmen and I, the co-founders, we’re all volunteers. We raised –- we’re still calculating what’s coming in –- but we know so far about $30,000 in cash donations, and tens of thousands of items were donated nationwide. And we didn’t charge Covenant House a penny.

Our idea for long-term is to pick a cause each year. It could be AIDS, it could be cancer, it could be famine, but always something that affects youth and children. Then we find who’s doing the best work in the non-profit world and we partner with them.

MJ: I was blown away to see the big names on your list. Why were photographers and editors so eager to collaborate with you?

NH: A lot of people thought we would have to give them a hard sell. I didn’t have to give them any sell at all. We asked somebody and boom, they’re already on top of it. That’s how we ended up with 32 Pulitzer Prize winners and 75 editors, photographers, and designers.

Leandra Hollaway and Michael Cunningham check out their new room at a friend of a friend's. ©Judy DeHaas/Do1Thing

We started off with photographers we had worked with at the Heart Gallery. Nina Berman, Mark Peterson, Ron Haviv, many of the VII photographers, Martin Schoeller, Bob Sacha. Those guys knew first-hand the power of what they’re doing. The kids that they photographed at the gallery are getting adopted. So when I told them, look, this is what we want to do, it was an immediate yes. Then they contacted their friends, who contact their friends, who contacted their friends. It took literally less than two weeks to get a phenomenal team to come together and do it all for free. If you were to quantify what this would cost, it would be a million-dollar project.

And now these photographers want to go back. They want to do more. They want to follow these kids. Want to know if they can stay long-term. This photographer Mark Peterson was shooting for three months, documenting this one teenager, and will continue to document her. He’s looking to do a two- or three-year project on her. Again, all for free.

I think what happens is, when you get to the point when you’re in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, you realize you’ve covered everything that you can cover: famine, wars, floods, fires. You get to the point where you ask, When I leave this life, what do I want to be able to say about my work? Yes, I documented history. That’s great. But how much greater is it to be able to say that I changed the history of a life?