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from Photographers Blog:
Flashback to the Bali blasts of 2002
By Beawiharta
A ceremony to remember the victims of a bomb blast that struck a busy street on a Saturday night in 2002, killing 202 people.
Today's ceremony carried me back to 10 years ago, where shops were burned and damaged. The bomb had left a big hole in Legian Street. That Sunday morning in 2002 was bright, with good weather and a blue sky as I entered Kuta beach's Hard Rock Hotel. It was a different atmosphere; the situation wasn't relaxing on the resort island. It was on high alert with security personnel covering the streets. Police, local security people called “pecalang” always asked for ID. If someone didn't have ID, they couldn't enter the hotel area or walk the streets.
I arrived at the bomb blast site shortly after landing from Jakarta but the destroyed area was already closed off by police. Security was very tight and no one could enter the bomb blast area so I went to the hospital, to try to get access to the victims. The hospital was not a comfortable place to be, especially after the violence of the night before. There were many burned bodies lying on the floor covered with white fabric, and the smell was bad. It’s already been 10 years since that day but some of the visuals of the 2002 Bali bombing are still in my mind.
Firstly, I took pictures of an injured woman lying on a hospital bed as her injured friend tried to comfort her. Just one click and go; it was a difficult time to photograph not because of security or limited access to the recovery room. I was already there, standing next to her bed, it was because I didn't want to take that picture. For a moment I didn't do anything, I couldn't do anything. The visual wasn't great, as the injuries weren't too visible but how two women communicated by touching each other in the difficult situation; that touched me.
from The Observatory:
Titanic proportions
You can’t sink a good story.
The past few months have produced countless articles, columns, photo galleries, videos, and sundry media clips about the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic striking an iceberg and foundering in the frigid North Atlantic in the early hours of April 15, 1912.
The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach reported that the president of the Titanic Historical Society found himself “besieged with interview requests” as he tried to survive the centennial. Wrote Achenbach:
from Photographers Blog:
A night to remember
By Chris Helgren
The weather was calm, the stars and crescent moon shone and the water lapped gently against the hull as three wreaths were tossed into the sea above the Titanic wreck, 100 years after she went down.
It seemed every one of the MS Balmoral’s 1300 guests, dressed against the cool night air, was crammed onto its terraced decks aft, craning for a view of the event. And at 2:20 when the wreaths went in, all was silent. As Philip Littlejohn, the Titanic historian later noted, these details mimicked what would have been happening during the disaster itself – a black night, no light bar that of the doomed liner, and when she went under, silence.
from Photographers Blog:
Rocking and Rolling on the Titanic Memorial Cruise
By Chris Helgren
In what resembles a Trekkie convention gone through a time portal, hundreds of passengers on the Titanic Memorial Cruise, retracing the Titanic's voyage from Southampton 100 years later, now divide their time between promenading in the latest fashions of 100 years ago and debating the true color of Titanic’s funnels. Yellow, but what kind of yellow? Model maker Kenneth Mascarenhas and painter James Allen Flood don’t see eye to eye on the subject, and it’s suggested that fellow passenger Commodore Warwick should adjudicate the issue. After all, he saw the Titanic wreck in a submersible. However, Mascarenhas fails to take into account that the ship is now rusted through and covered with Oceanic mud, its funnels probably covered in barnacles.
Actually, there are plenty of things to do on board the MS Balmoral. I missed the “fluid retention and swollen ankles seminar” on Monday, but there’s been a parade of Titanic experts on show to fill us in on everything one would want to know (except the color of funnels). Sadly, due to the inclement weather, shuffleboard has been cancelled the last two days. As has a dance show, due to health and safety concerns. Many of my fellow passengers have been sighted hunched over, unable to promenade, green with seasickness.
from Photographers Blog:
“As a person I am not extra interesting” – Klimt
By Herwig Prammer
When you walk through central Vienna now you get the impression there are almost no other cultural events this year besides Gustav Klimt's 150th birthday anniversary. Posters, postcards, sketch books, scarves, curtains, neck ties and gloves, umbrellas, cups and glasses, bottles and plates, boxes and containers on every corner are covered with his paintings. Copies of "The Kiss" even beautify toilet seats!
Originally I wanted to look at how Vienna pays tribute to this important Austrian "Wiener Jugendstil" (parallel to "Art Nouveau" in France) artist. But the growth of tacky commercialization of Klimt's art has begun to taken center stage.
from Photographers Blog:
Empty spaces
By Carlos Barria
A year ago I went to Japan to cover the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the country's northern coast.
At the time I was shocked by the scale of the destruction and felt I needed to show the magnitude of the disaster. I tried to fill my pictures with as many elements as possible. I even took a series of panoramic-format photographs, for a wider view.
from Photographers Blog:
The place that adults fear
By Toru Hanai
March 11 is here again in Japan.
A year after the tsunami devastated Higashi Matsushima city in Miyagi, seven-year-old Wakana Kumagai visited the grave of her father Kazuyuki with her mother Yoshiko, brother Koki, and her grandparents.
I first met Wakana last April, just weeks after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and huge tsunami devastated Japan’s northeast Pacific coast. The school year begins in April here in Japan, and Wakana was carrying her new, shiny red school backpack as she visited her father at a temporary graveyard that housed those who died from the tsunami. She gracefully bowed to her dad, showing off her new bag and her dress she wore for the first grader’s ceremony as if she were at a ball, and told him that she just attended her school for the first time. Her graceful bow struck my heart.
from Photographers Blog:
One year from that day
By Toru Hanai
It will soon be one year from that day - March 11, 2011.
Greetings among friends who meet after a long absence begins with, "Where and what were you doing on March 11?"
On March 11, 2011, I was photographing Prime Minister Naoto Kan during a committee session at the Parliament building in Tokyo.
from Photographers Blog:
38 days and 10 years in Afghanistan
By Erik de Castro
As I write this blog, I am on the 38th day of my current assignment to Afghanistan as an embedded journalist with U.S. military forces. I have been assigned here several times since 2001 to cover the war that is still going on 10 years after the al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil. Mullah Omar, popularly known as the one-eyed Taliban, was the first member of the Taliban I met back in 2001. He held press conferences almost daily at the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan a few weeks before U.S. forces and its allies attacked Afghanistan to remove the Taliban government.
Ten years and several trips back to Afghanistan later, I still haven't seen a lot of Taliban fighters. My present assignment is the time I’ve experienced the most encounters between the combined U.S. and Afghan forces and the Taliban.
from Photographers Blog:
Learning to smile again
By Toru Hanai
Six months after Japan's massive earthquake and tsunami, I went back to visit six-year-old Wakana Kumagai who lost her father in the disasters in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi prefecture.
I photographed Wakana when she visited her father's temporary grave at a mass burial site in Higashi-Matsushima on April 21, after attending an entrance ceremony at her elementary school. I was struck by how positive and optimistic Wakana behaved.
