livebooks blog

• The long-awaited new LIFE.com has finally launched this week. A collaboration between LIFE and Getty Images, the new website features millions of images from the LIFE and Getty archives and more than 3,000 images are added to the site every day. You can download, share or print any of the images for free for personal, “non-commercial” use. We can’t deny this is an amazing (well-designed) resource, but like Vincent Laforet, we wonder how this will affect editorial licensing in the long run.

• This April is the inaugural Month of Photography Los Angeles, produced by the people behind the Lucie Awards in New York. The festival consists of exhibitions and lectures around the city, including a Douglas Kirkland exhibition at the new Annenberg Space for Photography and one by glamor duo Markus Klinko and Indrani at the Pacific Design Center.

• These days pretty much anything seems “greenable” so it’s not surprising that Aurora Photos is launching a “Green Collection” that “focuses on creative photography illustrating contemporary environmental themes and issues.” We like the journalistic approach of its “Nature and Environment Feature Stories,” which has slide shows that cover environmental issues from all over the world.

• The New York Times broke the sad news on Monday of Helen Levitt’s death. The photographer, famous for her poetic imagery of New York City streets, passed away in her sleep at her Manhattan home at the age of 95.

The image that started it all. Alan's first photo that got picked up by BAGnewsNotes and started his ongoing discussion with commenters on the blog. ©Alan Chin

One of the most important features of the blog format is this ability to have a comment thread, this feedback with the readers. As a photographer I’d never had that before. When you publish something, you know people write letters to the editor and maybe weeks or months later you might get a few letters. But that’s very rare and remote. Now it can be instantaneous. We forget very easily what the average person who’s not a journalist, when they pick up a paper or they go online, how they approach the imagery. This is what Michael’s site is all about to begin with, but it’s especially important with the original photojournalism work we’re doing.

It’s been educational for me that this is what “normal” people think about when they look at pictures, which is not the way we as professionals look at pictures. We’re really jaded. And we have a huge opportunity educate our audience; they can be really surprised. If I put up a little diary entry, for example, of how I work in Iraq, or being on the campaign trail, readers are amazed. For photojournalists, we think, of course, you have to get a fixer, you have to get a flak jacket, we don’t think twice. But the average person, they’re not thinking about that at all. They only see the results of our labor, they never really understand how we go about doing it. And when you give even the most basic of explanations, then that whole conversation starts. We have found specifically on this blog a tension and dynamic between photo people and political junkies, because it is a political blog. It’s telling how people who are really politically savvy can be very naive photographically, and vice-versa.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t read the comments on my images. Photographers are like children in that sense. We crave praise and hate criticism. And we’re insecure about ourselves. I mean, if some total stranger says, wonderful picture, you feel good, even though you have no idea who this person is and why they say that. And also if some other stranger says it’s terrible, you feel bad, even though they might be blind for all you know. So I read all the comments on BAGnewsNotes, and I will on RESOLVE too!

But most of the comments on BAGnewsNotes are more of a political nature, using the photographs to inform the debate. At least I don’t have to worry too much about my “photographic” pride, especially at something like the DNC, which we’ve all seen so many times. How do you take pictures at a convention that aren’t boring? I think I spent most of my time just trying to make good pictures. I read the comments, but that doesn’t change what you do the next day because you know you just have to go out there and try to make interesting pictures.

Images of homeless teens by Jay Fram (left) and Martin Schoeller for Do1Thing.org. ©Jay Fram/Do1Thing and ©Martin Schoeller/Do1Thing

Miki Johnson: How did Do1Thing start?

Najlah Hicks: Back in May, 2008, after 25 years out of school, I went back for my master’s degree in multimedia. Do1Thing is actually my master’s thesis at Parson’s. I was planning to create a long-term documentary on what happens to kids who never get adopted.

Pim and I had co-founded the Heart Gallery of New Jersey, where professional photographers take pictures of children in foster care, in hopes that people will be drawn to the pictures and seek out these children and adopt them. We shot about 350 kids in 2005, and in 2007 and 2008 we shot another 100 of what the state calls the “hardest to adopt.” They have lived in foster care the longest, they have multiple siblings, or they are older kids. We were wildly successful. Over 150 of those kids have now been adopted. Today a third of all inquiries for foster care adoption in New Jersey come through the Heart Gallery of New Jersey website.

Then, our last project that we shot, we were seeing that a lot of the kids were older, 15, 16, or 17, who were about to age out of foster care. And there are 25,000 kids nationwide aging out every year, and about 40% end up homeless. That’s where Do1Thing started. That initial idea to document homelessness turned into: We can’t just document it, we have to do something. How about if we do just one thing? And that’s how Do1Thing was born. We launched Do1Thing on February 14, 2009, but it wasn’t just a one-time thing. We are currently working to get official non-profit status, create a traveling gallery, continue to raise awareness, and find funding. So while the fury of our launch is over, that was just the beginning.

Our larger goal is to put together this multimedia, multidisciplinary group that will tackle the big nagging issues that are affecting teens and children. They’ll go in there and come back in a very short time with a comprehensive focus — that’s exactly what we did with this first project. We targeted teen homelessness and within eight weeks we put up a massive amount of quality content documenting teen homelessness around the country. We feel like, there are all these social dilemmas that people just don’t know about, until someone brings them to the forefront.

Another good thing about Do1Thing is that we recognize that we can’t solve the problem alone. We’re not smart enough. We don’t know enough about it. We don’t make the legislation. But what we can do is raise awareness. I hope we change the face of what a lot of people think homelessness is. It’s not fifty-year-old drunks on the side of the street. Today more people are homeless than any other time in history, even the Great Depression. And 1.3 million of them are children.

The results of this first project varied by location. A lot of it depends on how much the local non-profits were working to get the word out. Some worked feverishly — they understand the value of being able to use Do1Thing as a vehicle to spotlight the issues they’re working on. Others are leery because they don’t know us. But the first project was a great success. Our website is now averaging six to eight thousand hits a day. A lot of national homeless associations are linking to us, and asking us to link to them.

MJ: What are you and the Do1Thing volunteers doing on a daily basis now?

NH: We’re editing –- we recieved over 125 gigs of JPGs in 48 hours, which is tens of thousands of images. We have six or seven editors who are editing every day, and we’re adding new content to the site every day. We want to get the word out there, so we’re considering festivals and traveling galleries. Anything that works. We also want to print images for each one of the non-profits that we partner with so that they can have this work on their lobby walls.

Of course identifying sources for funding is a constant process. We would love to be able, five years down the road, to fund independent projects for photographers. Five photographers to work on AIDS; five photographers to work on cancer; five to work on water-borne diseases. To produce great work that will create significant social change, that’s our long-term goal.

Non-profits need this kind of powerful visual content, if they’re going to succeed. For organizations like the Covenant House, 80 percent of their funding comes from direct mail marketing and 80 percent of their donors are over 65 years old. Before Do1Thing, the Covenant House knew very little about social media. They didn’t Twitter. They had a small Facebook crowd. In the 48 hours after the Do1Thing launch, the Covenant House’s YouTube channel was the most-watched non-profit YouTube channel in the world. But they didn’t know about any of that before working with us. They had no concept of blogging, Twittering, Digg, del.icio.us, and all the social networking sites. I think non-profits need to start utilizing those tools and exploring their potential for fundraising.

Do1Thing is not yet a non-profit. We’re applying for non-profit status, and we’re partnering with non-profits, like the Heart Gallery. Right now we’re a project of the Heart Gallery. But it will become its own non-profit, hopefully in the coming months. And then we imagine Do1Thing becoming a kind of consulting agency for non-profits. Again, we’ll shine a light on a cause we believe in. Then we partner with non-profits and take over the multimedia from them. Like with Covenant House, in a very short period of time we can put together a comprehensive multimedia presentation on any social dilemma.

Luz Maria Marin holds the head of her husband Angel Toala one day before he died of stomach cancer in his home in Shushufindi. ©Lou Dematteis

Click below for segments from a recent audio conversation between Lou Dematteis and Michael Costuros, the founder of liveBooks. Lou speaks candidly about the tangible social change produced by the project and how his involvement with the cause continues to nourish his own passion and creativity.

Part 1: How did Amazon organizers initially use your images? “I found out that photographs I had taken that I had passed on for use in Ecuador had been used as part of an education and organizing campaign.”

Part 2: How did the book Crude Reflections come about? “In 2007 we received a Distribution Grant from the Open Society Institute, and that allowed us to print a set of photos and display them back in the Amazon, so the people living this and experiencing this had a chance to see their photos. They were literally in tears.”

Part 3: What effect has the book had in South American communities? “The book is bilingual…we didn’t just want to produce a book we were going to show in the United States. We wanted to make it useful and available to people in Ecuador and Latin America.”

Part 4: How has this project enriched your life? “I’ve developed an incredible bond with many people there. They are very thankful that I’ve helped give a voice to their community. That is tremendously fulfilling to me.”