Photographers Blog

Vienna, Austria

By Heinz Peter-Bader

A collector once said: “When you buy your first pinball machine, it is fine with your wife. When you buy your second pinball machine, she asks “Why? You have one already”. After number three and four she believes you must be crazy. But after the fifth pinball machine she proudly tells her friends that her husband is a collector.’

Guenter “Pindigi” Freinberger from Austria owns 493 pinball machines. Well, 492 actually, after my visit…

Freinberger’s pinball museum is located inside a storage depot some 80 km (50 miles) west of Vienna and nothing indicates that it contains one of the world’s biggest pinball collections. Historic machines from the 1930′s up to top modern models are all on display, in top shape and ready to play.

But for a pinball aficianado the most fascinating part is the second floor storage room. Hundreds of pinball machines are stored edgewise, with their backboxes dismounted, side by side. Some of the most precious ones are wrapped in plastic film to protect them. It feels like a journey across centuries walking through an endless maze of pinball history.

With the rise of video games, the end of the big pinball era began in the late 1990′s. If it was not for collectors like “Pindigi” Freinberger, most pinball machines would probably have disappeared for good, smashed like in The Who’s musical film “Tommy”, removed from bars and amusement halls, destroyed and forgotten.

Madrid, Spain

By Susana Vera

I remember the first time I saw Milagros Echevarria. She was in her house slippers, battling with the rubble piled up outside her home, with only a simple broom as a weapon. It was like watching David face Goliath.

The short, sturdy woman was working doggedly. She would only stop to remove rotting garbage from the debris and toss it into a nearby dumpster. “If I don’t do this every day, rats are going to eat us alive”, she told me. In the months that followed, I witnessed the same scene over and over, even when the rubbish threatening to invade her home had become the actual remains of the house itself.

GALLERY: GYPSY COMMUNITY DEMOLISHED

Milagros moved to the Spanish gypsy settlement of Puerta de Hierro in 1974, as a young girl of 12, still wearing pigtails. At the age of 13 she married her cousin Antonio Gabarri and by 14 she was pregnant with their first child, Carolina.

Chicago, Illinois

By John Gress

Most of us climb stairs.

Some of us do it for exercise, some of us do it because there is no other option.

Many of us would complain that it’s a burden to ascend three floors, but for Zac Vawter climbing to the third floor of the Willis Tower on Sunday was an accomplishment – making it to the 103rd floor was historic.

Vawter took approximately 2100 steps to climb 1353 feet with the world’s first neural-controlled Bionic leg, according to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Their Center for Bionic Medicine has worked to develop technology that allows amputees, like Vawter, to better control prosthetics with their own thoughts.

Smoking like 400 years ago…

By Michael Dalder

After eighty-four successive days without catching a fish, the old man Santiago tells his young friend Manolin that he will go “far out” into the ocean. And there, a huge marlin takes his bait but Santiago is physically unable to reel him in. Nevertheless, Santiago refuses to let him go, so this leads to a three-day struggle between the fisherman and the fish.

This famous scene of Ernest Hemingway’s novella “The Old Man and the Sea” was in my mind when I first contacted the Bavarian fisherman Thomas Amort from Lake Koenigssee.

I heard about Amort – a third generation fisherman who lives in a fishing cottage on a remote peninsula, reachable only by boat, next to St. Bartholomae – from a tourist boat captain of the Lake Königsee fleet.

By Jose Miguel Gomez

The old and decayed pier in Puerto Colombia was a place that I first visited with my father when I was just six. We walked the whole of its nearly two kilometers into the Caribbean Sea, feeling the wonderful sea breeze and a bit of fear as the waves rolled under us at the end. The strong waves vibrated the foundations of this pier that in its heyday, at the turn of the 20th Century, attracted tourists in boats which docked alongside cargo ships. It was a colonial experience when there were still street lamps casting a romantic light on the dock frequented by lovers strolling under a full moon.

The qualifying matches for the World Cup Brazil 2014 recently brought me to Barranquilla, just east of Puerto Colombia. Today, Barranquilla has its own great port for modern ships that has made the world all but forget about the monumental pier just 16 kms away. On a day when neither Colombia nor Paraguay allowed photographers into their soccer training sessions, I decided to return to Puerto Colombia to visit my childhood pier.

Thanks to Barranquilla, Puerto Colombia is no longer a seaport. A town all but forgotten, it still attracts tourists and lovers who stroll along what used to be the world’s third longest pier.

By Jim Young

The political game always seems the same to me, only the players change.

This is my third Presidential campaign and I have always been fascinated with U.S. politics. This time around it was the early impact of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, all the way to Romney’s run up to election day that intrigued me.

It all began 18 months ago when I was based in Washington D.C. and started shooting with a Hasselblad x-pan panoramic film camera while covering President Barack Obama. I had never used a rangefinder before and had to remember how to manually focus a camera.

GALLERY: POLITICS ON FILM

Shortly after I started the project, I moved to Chicago. A year and a half before election day and the campaign was already in full swing. A growing list of Republican challengers lined up for a chance to go up against the President.

By Nacho Doce

As Marcondes walked to his truck, his wife and mother said goodbye with the words, “Be careful and may God be with you.” I knew why they talked that way; the highway that he was going to take from Rondonopolis to Sorriso in the fertile state of Mato Grosso is nicknamed the “Highway of Death.”

GALLERY: BRAZIL’S TRUCKING LIFELINE

Marcondes and his father, also a truck driver, know it very well. It’s the highway famous for frequent accidents, where drivers pay little attention to the law and the narrow single lanes mean that trucks nearly touch as they pass each other in opposite directions.

This road that bisects unending plantations of cereal grain is full of potholes caused by thousands of fully loaded trucks a day, each weighing nearly 70 tons.

By Jason Reed

What a difference four years makes for someone running again for President of the United States.

Barack Obama hit the campaign trail in 2012 wearing two hats… one as the incumbent President, and one as a candidate for re-election.

Whether it’s from 35,000 feet aboard Air Force One or in a motorcade through the streets of Manhattan, Reuters White House photographer Jason Reed offers a view from behind the tinted windows of Obama’s 2012 Presidential campaign.

By Damir Sagolj

(WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT)

The bottom picture is of a dead man killed by who-knows-who and left alone in the desert. I shot this image almost ten years ago from atop a U.S. Marines tank speeding towards Baghdad.

It immediately got lost, the photo itself, amongst others illustrating what would be celebrated as the liberation of a country from a tyrant. Other images of fighting and those of U.S. soldiers doing this and that played well in the papers. Somewhere near Nassiriya, this man was left forgotten to rot under the desert sun — and on our hard drives.

Not long after, I realized that was probably my best shot from the short invasion from Kuwait to Baghdad. This was a simple but powerful picture of an unknown man killed by whomever and left alone among tank trails, surrounded by nothing but dust and the noise of war. Everyone was too busy with their personal wars at the moment, I suppose. People had to survive, to run away, while others had to win battles and justify their leader’s decisions. I had to take more pictures that seemed more important for the world of news that is always hungry for answers to those questions.

Reuters photographer Brian Snyder spent a day behind the scenes with Mitt Romney, documenting his campaign.

By Brian Snyder

Photographing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as he campaigns across the United States is often about trying to find the candidate amongst all of the supporters and entourage around him. We see him at rallies surrounded by hundreds or thousands of enthusiastic supporters, at off the record stops in an uncontrolled swirl moving around a restaurant among unsuspecting diners, in a motorcade of a dozen vehicles, and on airport tarmacs while a parade of staff, security and press load onto the campaign plane. We are always in a crowd with more photographers, U.S. Secret Service agents and campaign staff all working in small spaces.

GALLERY: A day with Mitt Romney

But stepping one layer inside that, to document a “day in the life” of the candidate and the campaign, revealed an unexpected calm.  Governor Romney spent time talking to one or two advisors, joked in a room alone with his closest aide, and watched a video feed by himself as he was introduced to take the stage at a rally. There was space.