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• How much Photoshopping is too much? Judges of a Danish photo contest seemed to think that they have the answer. Last month, Danish photojournalist Klavs Bo Christensen was disqualified from the Danish equivalent of Pictures of the Year contest because the photographs that he submitted “went too far” in digital manipulation. The incident, not surprisingly, sparked a lot of discussions in Denmark and eventually among the English-speaking blogosphere. According to NPPA, Jens Tønnesen, the webmaster for the Danish Union of Press Photographers, decided to explain the story to people outside of Demark, and did an English translation of an article he posted on the Pressefotografforbundet website, where you can see the three images in question placed side by side with their RAW files. Check out interesting comments about this story at PDN Pulse and The Online Photographer.

• Robert Adams, who is known for his landscape photography of the American West, has won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and received a $60,000 prize at an official ceremony in San Francisco on April 15, 2009. The Foundations’s citation describes Adams as “one of the most important and influential photographers of the last forty years.” An exhibition of Adam’s work will open at the Hasselblad Center, Göteborg Art Museum in November, 2009. Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and William Eggleston are some of the previous award winners.

• Paul Melcher, named one of the “50 most influential individuals in American photography” by American Photo, explained in a post on the Black Star Rising blog why the Chris Usher v. Corbis case is important to all photographers. While Usher won the case, he was only compensated for “a lousy $7 per image” for the 12,640 images that Corbis has permanently misplaced. Melcher argues, with great reasoning, that what this ruling means is that agencies or publishers will no longer have to worry about losing photographers images because “it will be cheaper for them to trash them than to return them to you.”

When I started photographing 30 years ago, all the photojournalists in the world, we all had almost the same tools: one Nikon camera. When you went to cover African or Asian countries, they had the same camera. The writers and journalists had only a pen and a notebook. Everyone had the same things. But in the last 30 years, we went through an information revolution. We in the west are the first ones who have access to these new tools. We are the ones getting the best laptops, cameras, and video cameras. In the meantime, considering how expensive it is not only to buy this equipment but to be trained on it, we are leaving the whole other part of the world — non-western countries — behind.

Their journalists and artists and poets don’t even have money to buy a pen and a notebook while we have access to the top technological materials. So how can they connect to us, or their own nation, if they don’t have tools? So I thought, each country needs just a few hundred people to be trained and to get those tools. If we can help them, train them, and give them access to tools, we have connected the whole humanity of the world together again.

My other observation was that one of our main tasks is to say that democracy is the best way of having a government. We are trying to spread democracy. The only way to achieve that is to let the people themselves make democracy. You cannot force people to be democratic. And the best tool for democracy is freedom of speech, which needs free media. If there is no free media, there is no democracy.

With those three observations in my head, and running from one conflict to another, I started thinking, “What will be the 21st century’s new organization that could bring all these elements together and effectively help solve those problems?”

I had started training local photographers when I was going on assignments, in ’86 in the Philippines, and then the former Soviet Union. Then I went to Bangladesh to help Shahidul [Alam] start his own school, and I was the first teacher in that school. Afterwards I went to Beijing for three years to teach in the university and train professional photographers. This was how I began to realize the answer to my question: Create an independent media and culture center in each country, where a couple hundred local journalists and talented young people would be trained to have access to new technology. We would train local people, not as a school, but as a job training center. The idea was to start media projects immediately, like independent magazines, children’s magazines, women’s magazines, a radio station for women. Then in the meantime you have people who are trained launching their projects.

When I wrote all those ideas down, I was looking for one country that would be the pilot country, which I would use as a laboratory for the whole thing. It was 2000 and the obvious place for me was Afghanistan. First, because it was the darkest place of humanity: the Taliban were there, Russians had been there, there was civil war, and Al Qaeda fighting them. Plus, the world had totally forgotten them for 10 years. So I thought Afghanistan would be best place for a pilot project. And this was the whole start of AINA.

The official launch was in July 2001 in the north part of Afghanistan, in a rebel region, when the whole country was under Taliban. Then suddenly 9/11 happened. Everything changed. The Taliban fled and we entered Kabul and started a center there immediately. We were the first NGO that started a project there after the fall of the Taliban.

In Afghanistan during the pilot project, I realized that the people who would have an especially big impact would be the women journalist. During the conflict, my hatred of the war made me think that if women could take more control of the media and government, we could grow toward a more peaceful world in a century or two. So this was how we started saying, let’s start having much more women in the training, especially in Afghanistan.

That’s how we launched Voice of Afghan Women, which is a radio station. By doing this, I realized how important this tool is, and how it reaches millions of Afghan women in their remote homes. They cannot read. They cannot even go out. They cannot have access to magazines or books, but radio can be brought to them in their homes. So we launched this women’s station and started distributing small transistor radios to remote places, 5,000 of them. Now from just one radio, information is going to the whole village.

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?

©Dietmar Busse

Q: What do you see as your greatest success from your eight years of personal work?

Dietmar Busse: The most important thing that came out of that time was that I found my own language as a photographer. There was so much I had to learn about who I am as an artist and as a human being. For example, I don’t like to be in a crowded place with a lot of people I don’t know — and I like it even less if I have to take pictures there. It makes me completely nervous and I just want to leave. On the other hand, I really enjoy being with just one person in the room and taking their picture. I learned how to create the right atmosphere for my shoots, and consequently my work has become much more focused.

MJ: What has your experience been now that you are moving back into fashion and commercial photography?

DB: In many ways it’s much easier now. Getting some distance has helped a lot. I think I am much humbler now, and I appreciate every opportunity to do my work.

The most difficult thing has been to get access to the “right” people. So much of this business is social networking, and it’s a real challenge to rebuild a support system. But once I sit down with an art director or editor, I feel really comfortable. I think my work has a definite point of view, and people either like it or they don’t — it’s pretty straightforward. I am almost a bit embarrassed to say it, but I absolutely love showing my work now, and I am sure clients notice that.

MJ: Do you have advice for young photographers who are in a similar situation to you when you started out?

DB: I think it is very important to know what you want. Be honest with yourself. Why do you want to be a photographer? Why do you take pictures? Are you interested in the money, the models, self-expression?

At least for me it took quite some time to figure this out in my head, and later to build a body of work that corresponded to that. But I believe it was totally worth it. As we know, so much of our culture is about being richer, more beautiful, more famous, and all of that. People are divided into winners and losers. It’s important not buy into that. I think building a strong sense of self helps you to be immune to that and will hopefully lead you to create something unique and photographs that are meaningful to you.