Carnival. The fun holiday that Brazilians take seriously.

Carnival means a livelihood for the multi-million dollar tourist industry, and for the artisans that create parade floats and revelers’ costumes. It means 90 minutes of glory for thousands of slum dwellers parading in Rio’s Sambadrome, and five days of non-stop partying for millions of revelers, foreign and national.

And it means a lot of work for us photographers, even though it looks like so much fun.

As with many things in life, the first time covering Carnival is the best. The novelty of that first immersion in Rio’s parade of samba schools combines with the grandeur and opulence to neutralize the fatigue of working two consecutive nights with little sleep in-between.

It’s like being jet lagged in paradise.

Paradise in this case is seven blocks long and populated by innumerable figures and personalities - animal, vegetable and mineral. The side-by-side existence of the most gut-wrenching to the most frivolous samba school themes, is startling. Themes at this year’s parade ranged from the Portuguese colonization of Brazil, the origins of life and the Spanish Inquisition, to the trauma of birth and the Kama Sutra.

Even after having covered several Carnivals, we photographers still get so caught up in the expectation of the looming parade that we inevitably over-photograph the first school. Then just as we settle in to a sustainable rhythm that should carry us through both nights to a well-edited, worthy picture file, fatigue sets in and we begin to fade towards daybreak.

I still remember the last minutes of the 2003 parade. A dozen flawlessly-choreographed skeletons from the Imperatriz school danced arm-in-arm to a samba that still echoes in my head. Perfectly programmed to hit the runway as the day was dawning and my mind was waning, I was so thrilled that I ran to file half a dozen pictures just of them. A clear overfile, in retrospect.

Photographers trek from dusk to dawn up and down the long Sambadrome floor, weaving in and out of the dancers that leave us no room and make no concessions. We attempt to capture the parade’s magnificence and meaning, and avoid being mauled and mangled by the contraptions they wear. It isn’t easy.

The most recurring theme during my four Carnivals has been the Amazon rain forest, with variations on global warming and deforestation in the form of protest. Themes that are tied to current events are wonderful for us, as the interest reaches a wider audience.

This year’s recurring theme was the 100^th anniversary of the first Japanese immigration to Brazil. Interest in Japan made it easier to file more pictures than usual.

A storm was generated by the Viradouro school’s float depicting a pile of twisted bodies of Holocaust victims, meant to show how evil mankind can be. A judge banned the float by court order after Reuters published pictures of it a few days before the parade. For journalists, that kind of controversy breathes new life into an annual event, making a repetitive story interesting all over again.

This year, my fourth at the Rio parade, was by far my hardest. The fatigue set in earlier and I sensed fewer of those magic moments that make the event easy to photograph. My paradise was lost, but I was still jet lagged.

Reuters’ Carnival veteran Sergio Moraes admirably covered the parade from start to finish with all the walking involved and hours spent shooting from a ladder chained to the perimeter, without announcing with bells or whistles that this was his 20^th parade. Twenty years of jet lag.

I asked Sergio what it was like covering the world’s biggest party for the 20^th time and his answer was anything but surprising. “The hardest thing is to find a different picture.”

(more 2008 Carnival pictures here)

By Daniel Muñoz

“You guys are with me, Osama Bin Laden. Don’t worry. Nothing bad will happen.” I laughed at hearing this as a feeling of false “security” swept over me.

I was with a TV crew going on patrol of Bogota’s red light district with this wannabe Osama, whose real name is Fernando Aguirre, a 50-year-old poor man who claims to be the son of the real Bin Laden.

As we made the rounds from one brothel to another it became clear that Aguirre has gained the respect of the bouncers of these dens of prostitution here in Latin America’s third most populated capital city.

His only instructions were to stay close to him and not take photographs showing the faces of Colombia’s famously beautiful hookers, who cater to the lust of not only Colombians but also tourists from around the world.

The security guards chuckled and gave Aguirre tips. They and some uniformed police officers, who allow him to carry a fake wooden rifle, chatted with him about security in the area. This Bogota neighborhood is notorious for muggings and gangs of taxi drivers who take people for what is known as the “millionaire’s tour,” which involves being kidnapped for an hour or so and taken at gunpoint from one cash machine to another to empty out your bank account.

Aguirre patrols the neighborhood four or five times every night, until about 5am. Food venders give him something to eat when he needs it and they pour him small cups of coffee to keep him awake. At the end of each night he goes back to where he lives, a secret lair which he refuses to take us to, much like that of his outlaw “father,” wherever he might be.

After living my whole life in Colombia, a country long under the thumb of violent characters, I feel better knowing that this “terrorist” is looking out for us.

(view Daniel’s Osama slideshow here)

By Carolina Camps

“My stepfather raped me when I was a child. I remember that he always hit me hard on the head. My mom always said that I lied. Then I got engaged to be married and left home. He also hit me…I don’t know why but one day I killed him.”

This was the first story Maria de los Angeles told me in the psychiatric ward of Prison 33. She takes medicine five times a day, doesn’t know how many years she’s been in jail, or how many she has left.

She only knows that in this place she feels protected, that life outside wouldn’t treat her any better and that nobody is waiting for her release.

In December 2004, I started work on a photo essay at Prison 33 in La Plata, southeast of Buenos Aires. I chose a women’s jail because I believed it would be easier for me to get closer to the prisoners, listen to their stories and get to know them.

I was very curious to see what life was like in jail and what sort of women ended up in there.

I had a lot of prejudices when I began, but something changed. I stopped seeing and started observing, and I stopped being a free person and started to become one of them.

The bars, the prisoners, the feeling of being locked up, the punishment — I didn’t want that to show through my pictures.

The prison holds hundreds of sad stories, stories of abandonment, of mistreatment. I wanted to speak about these women just as I saw them, just as they showed themselves, just as they are.

Last year, in the second phase of my project, I worked in the maternity wards where 63 children up to four years old live together with prisoners.

The children were born in prison and have never seen daylight outside the bars. They don’t know what an animal or a car is, or what exists outside this lockup. They are children that don’t smile.

I was saddened to hear that the first word they learn is “celadora” (prison guard) and to see how their mothers used their teeth to cut food for them for the lack of a knife.

For those whose mothers are in prison for years, the arrival of a fourth birthday is the most painful day because the children must leave to live with their family outside, if they have one, or in a state home if they do not.

The vast majority jailed at Prison 33 are there pending trial; they haven’t been convicted of a crime. In Buenos Aires’ provincial prisons, about 12 percent of 780 female prisoners are pregnant or already living with their children behind bars.

The average jail term for these mothers is one year and eight months, and more than 70 percent of them are charged with robbery-related crimes or drug possession and peddling, according to a report by a provincial human rights commission.

I wanted to show with images how these women feel inside prison: the loneliness, the lesbianism as a way to feel loved, the self-flagellation and the suicide attempts, with wounds on their arms gaping like open mouths demanding attention.

I wanted to show the drugs they use to escape, their experience of motherhood, their limited lives, the lack of freedom.

I spent long hours inside the prison. It wasn’t easy getting close to them, but with patience and a lot of time I earned their trust.

That was how I could capture the feelings that circulate around the cells and hallways. It was how I could stop being an outsider and become a part of the group, documenting the daily lives and intimate moments of the inmates.

Bringing these images to light was my way of freeing them.

(Carolina’s slideshow can be viewed here , as well as the audio versions in English or Spanish)

A hundred questions raced through my mind as I sat in a taxi zigzagging through traffic towards what first reports described as a major disaster area, a rush-hour plane crash in downtown Sao Paulo.

Will my taxi be able to get close enough to the crash? Will I have to hike the citys dangerous streets with my camera gear? Will my cell phone connect to the Internet as thousands of people call their relatives? Are other photographers already at the site? What scenes of disaster and grieving will I encounter? Will my longest lens be long enough?

Amid all these thoughts, despite the screaming sirens and my urgency to arrive, my mind flashed back 15 years in time to a memory far from the present a bus ride in Bolivia. That bus ride, along an Andean mountain track that is popularly known as the worlds most dangerous road, was the last time in memory that I traveled anywhere without carrying anxiety as part of my emotional baggage.

Then, I rode in a window seat of a rusty, 45-passenger bus with my head out the window observing the breathtaking scenery. I couldnt help noticing how curious it was to watch the bus rear tire skirting the edge of the cliff and pushing stones over into the green abyss as it rounded every tight curve of the winding road, a road not always wide enough for the bus I was in.

I sensed only curiosity. No fear. No thoughts of the consequences of a simple driver error, a loose boulder falling onto the roadbed or even brake failure.

One day soon after that ride I was called out, just as I was called to this tragedy in Sao Paulo, to photograph the crash of a bus identical to the one I had traveled in. It had slipped off the edge of that same mountain road and broken into pieces as it tumbled into the rocky jungle below.

The bodies and belongings of the 45 occupants were strewn all down the cliff face. Some hung from trees. Relatives arrived at the site in despair. Rescue workers brought the remains up from the gorge in a scene that I would soon learn was all too common along that perilous route.

That was the first accident story of my news career, and traveling has never felt the same since.
After that crash I returned many times to visit that spectacular part of Bolivia, but never again in a bus too wide for the road.

A few years later I covered my first plane crash in Uruguay. Again, I lost my serenity forever. Since then I have never flown without feeling a certain anxiety about what I had seen can happen to airplanes.

Today, several bus and plane crashes later, a disaster like this one in Sao Paulo is to me another grim reminder of what can happen to a relatively few, very unfortunate travelers.

The crash site I finally arrived at in Sao Paulo was one of devastation and disbelief. It was still too early for grief, but the following days were dominated by it.

I pity the distraught relatives of the 187 unsuspecting occupants of the TAM Airbus that ended in tragedy. As I return to the job of covering more routine news, they will relive that day relentlessly for years to come.

After photographing the accident that has since been labeled as Brazils worst-ever plane crash, I expect to feel maybe a little more anxiety the next time I step into a plane.

But whenever that happens the memory I will most likely recall, for better or for worse, is that of a serene bus ride along the worlds most dangerous road.

(credits from top: Rickey Rogers - photos 1, 2, 3, 5, 6; Paulo Whitaker - photo 4)