livebooks blog

I’m writing this from a small hotel in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where duckrabbit and the Bangladeshi photographer Sheikh Rajibul Islam have been working on a documentary about the effects of climate change on this beautiful country.

If the scientists’ predictions are right, up to 20 million Bangladeshi’s will become environmental refugees in the next 50 years. There is no bigger long-term story than the havoc man is wreaking on nature.

It would be easy for us at duckrabbit to reduce our stories about Bangladesh to the most brutal, the most shocking. This is always a temptation for photojournalists looking for the money shot, for their World Press award, but it’s a cheap and ultimately destructive way to capture the world because it reduces people to the status of victims.

At the BBC I used to produce Costing The Earth, their flagship environmental documentary programme. We always strived to tell a balanced story, beyond emotion, because understanding is more important than shock, and debate is more powerful than bashing someone over the head with a message.

Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist and blogger, expressed this point brilliantly in a post about a controversial video advertisement by the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontieres:

“We want true stories, and we want them as gritty as the real world is. But we also want balance — and we recognize a third-world-cliché when we see it.”

There are plenty of weak multimedia pieces about the environment out there that suffer from the same clichéd black-and-white photography and lack of balance in their storytelling, but let’s not blow any more CO2 on their two-dimensional approach. Instead I want to point you to a visually stunning and deeply thoughtful piece of work by Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk.

Airsick: An Industrial Devolution is designed to persuade us that the earth is slowly drowning in CO2. Part of why it works so well is that, instead of focusing on apocalyptic images of the developing world, the piece is rooted in the familiar, in the industrialized world. I can’t watch this and not feel part of the problem. That is powerful multimedia.

(duckrabbit would like to thank the CBA for funding their recent Bangladesh trip.)

One of the best parts of my job is hanging out and talking with photographers — about photography, but also about the shifting media landscape, companies that are trying cool new things, technology that makes our life more efficient yet more complicated, and, of course, art of all kinds that inspires us.

That’s what I was doing yesterday (Sunday) in Union Square Park near our liveBooks office in San Francisco. If you don’t know Mark, check out his popular site, blog, and Facebook and Twitter streams. If you do know Mark, you’re probably not surprised that he asked to do a quick iPhone video while we were talking. I thought I should Flip video him at the same time — hope you enjoy the result as much as we did.

After that we headed to the office to talk some more and Mark made a video of me talking about RESOLVE a little more in depth. At lunch we were discussing how hard (but necessary) it is for photographers to stop focusing solely on the value of their images — today much more value is placed on education, audience engagement, and especially storytelling, as Mark explained and I asked him to rehash for the Flip.

Mark and I had not met before yesterday, so it was a pleasure to find out he is just as kind, helpful, and well-informed as his online presence suggests.

I also hung out with two innovators I’ve known for a bit longer on Saturday: David Alan Harvey, who has very exciting things in store for burn, his online photography magazine; and Phil Toledano, who I was ecstatic to hear has found a publisher for his Days With My Father project. Finally, here are few of the funner things Mark and I chatted about:

• The Photographer: A graphic novel that tells the story of photojournalist Didier Lefévre entering Afghanistan in 1986 and incorporating hundreds of his black-and-white photographs from the trip.
• Closer: Elinor Carucci’s stunning book, which was recently re-released (and happens to be sitting in my cubicle.)
• Thousand Journals: A project that sent 1,000 blank journals out into the world, asking people to add to them and then pass them along. They are tracked at this website.
• Time Code: A 2000 film directed by Mike Figgis that consists of four simultaneous movies played in a grid.
• Radio Lab – Moments: An attempt by WNYC’s brilliant science-based radio show to visually capture the idea of a “moment.“

Gene Higa is a destination wedding photographer based in San Francisco, but he’s got great tips for all kinds of photographers. In today’s Tip of the Week, Gene reminds photographers how important it is to meet new people and that helping others always pays off in the long run.

“How do you get someone’s attention and keep it?”

Photographer Chase Jarvis, a long-time proponent of iPhone photography, this week announced the launch of his iPhone application, Best Camera. The simple, elegant photo editing app also allows you to share images to Facebook and Twitter, as well as TheBestCamera.com, the app’s new community photo sharing site. A master of cross promotion, Chase has also simultaneously released a new book of his iPhone photos, The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You.

In a bizarre twist on the celebrity-photographer love-hate paradigm, PDN reports that Agence France Presse staffer Yuri Cortez and freelancer Rolando Aviles are bringing a suite against Tom Brady and his supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen for an incident where their bodyguards demanded the photographers’ memory cards and then shot at them when they refused to comply and fled in their SUV.

We were excited to see the name of Istanbul-based photojournalist Lynsey Addario on the list of the 24 new MacArthur Fellows for 2009 announced this week. Each of recipient of the “genius award” will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years.

Photographer and film director Richard Patterson released a new stop-motion music video for Iranian rock band Hypernova this week, which was created out of about 16,000 still photographs made with the Canon 1D Mark III and the new Profoto Pro-8 Air. Since releasing, along with a behind-the-scenes making-of video, it’s been viewed almost 40,000 times.