amanda rivkin, photographer

A little break from editing and post-holiday recovery affords a window on the week that just past. Census figures showed only one in fifty American states lost population over the last decade – Michigan. The day before Christmas I was in Constantine, Michigan with New York Times Chicago bureau chief Monica Davey to cover the story, “Michigan’s Decade of Tarnish Seen in Census Report”:

CONSTANTINE, Mich. — While every other state in the nation gained population over the past decade, Michigan shrank. And yet, as word seeped across frozen towns like this one on Wednesday, almost no one seemed even mildly surprised. This was, many here said with resignation, just one last, official confirmation of Michigan’s long, grim and gloomy slide.

“We used to enjoy a bit of a strut,” said Jerry Becker, a welder, recalling an era when Michigan’s automotive powerhouses ruled the world and salaries here felt lavish. “But that’s long gone. We all know by now that everybody thinks of Michigan as a bad place to live — a place that doesn’t seem to have much of a future.”

If any state is ready to be done with the 2000s, it is this one.

Where the nation witnessed economic misery near the start and end of the decade, Michigan felt a slow burn throughout. Cities like Detroit and Flint pondered ways to shrink their sizes to save themselves. States like Wyoming and North Dakota, flush with jobs, tried to recruit out-of-work Michigan residents to relocate. And places like this old corn and soybean growing village of 2,095 people — the self-proclaimed seed corn capital of the world — watched companies, like the soda pop top factory here this fall, close up shop.

More images available on my PhotoShelter archive gallery, “2010 Census Shows Depopulating Michigan for NYT”

The Year in Pictures 2010 by Amanda Rivkin available on PhotoShelter Archive.

Images from the year include:

Gitmo USA – the prison site designated for Guantanamo Bay detainees after the prison’s closure in rural Illinois that never quite opened because the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has not yet closed.
Portrait of William Fiedler, Owner of the Gallery Bookstore, Chicago – My former boss at one of the North Side’s finest used book stores.

Injured Veteran – Portrait of Michael Jernigan, injured in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004; photographed at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Baltasar Garzon – Former examining magistrate of Spain’s Criminal Court, extraordinarily controversial for execution of the practice of universal justice and far-reaching indictments of foreign leaders and terrorist organizations; photographed at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago.

Afghan Bowling Tournament (3 images) – Afghan-American bowling tournament in Annandale, Virginia.

Cuba (8 images) – The Second Age of Castro, published on ForeignPolicy.com and The New York Times “Week in Review”.

Spectacular Slovakia (13 images) – Weddings, floods, world cup, trains, planes, castles, even nuclear power plants; images from a 40 day odyssey across Slovakia for English-language newspaper The Slovak Spectator’s annual magazine-length feature travel guide publication’s 15th edition.

Azerbaijan (3 images) – Early impressions of the oil rich land include a peak inside the women’s section of the largest Shia mosque in the Old City, a meeting with satirical blogger Emin Milli on prison leave for his father’s funeral, and a visit to a polluted beach.

An Encounter with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan – And a book gets thrown at my head in Erzurum, Turkey in the country’s conservative northeast.

Hungary’s Greatest Ecological Disaster (4 images) – the aftermath and the survivors of the October 4, 2010 industrial accident caused by a rupture in a reservoir containing toxic alumina industrial waste.

On the campaign trail with Rahm Emanuel for mayor of Chicago (4 images) – running with Rahmbo as he opens a field office in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side and fields questions from attorney Burt Odelson challenging his residency and therefore eligibility to run.

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Thank you Mikko and Photojournalism Links for the mention of “The Year in Pictures” in the December 19, 2010 links.

Rahm Emanuel is running for mayor of Chicago. Since 1989, change around the world inaugurated the Daley regime in Chicago, as in Richard M. For the past 21 years, Chicago had a mayor for life – until of course Daley announced this past fall that he did not plan to seek reelection. Before Richard M. Daley, there was his father, Richard J. Daley, also known as “the old man,” who controlled the city in much the similar fashion as the son has for 21 years, until his death which ushered in an interregnum until Chicago settled for his son less than two decades later.

But the floodgates have now opened up; politicians once retired emerged, congressmen threw their hats in, the White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel resigned to come home and run, and then his tenant refused to surrender the house and threw his hat into the ring too. Then Rahm’s residency was challenged presenting a problem because Illinois state law says one must have resided in the state for the year prior to the election. A man who has taken on some of the most prominent national and international politicians and leaders is suddenly back in the parochial game of schoolyard-style Chicago politics.

The fact that Rahm did not have Chicago vehicle stickers this past year is a much discussed and much derided technicality that his objectors have leashed onto. (Everyone knows you have to buy your vehicle stickers. It is how they get you. Welcome home to Chicago, Rahm.) During an 11 hour questioning session in a Chicago Board of Elections basement conference room downtown yesterday, his objectors accused him of involvement in the destruction of the Branch Davidians compound in Waco, Texas, asked directly what he knows about bribery and blackmail and jokingly questioned if he was or ever has been a member of the communist party.

Despite the theatrics, Rahm Emanuel still has a commanding lead and is the only double digit candidate who would garner 32% of the vote if the election were held today, according to a Chicago Tribune poll released this morning. The other candidates: Gery Chico 9%, Danny Davis 9%, James Meeks 7%, Carol Moseley Braun 6%, Miguel del Vlle 3%, and Roland Burris 2%.

View on PhotoShelter Archive:

Rahm Emanuel Testifies at Residency Hearing in Chicago 12.14.2010
Rahm Emanuel Opens South Side Chicago Office for Mayor Campaign 12.10.2010
More Rahm Emanuel including: DNC 2008, Obama presidential transition and inauguration.

If there is any photojournalistic exercise in the gymnastics of Chicago politics (or any assignment for that matter), it is finding that angle, that moment, or that scoop no one else has. My biggest coup to this end on the Chicago politics beat was when The New York Times helped secure exclusive access to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich during his impeachment proceedings on January 29, 2009. But the show must go on.

Rahm Emanuel raises his right hand before testifying at his residency hearing concerning his eligibility to run for mayor of Chicago in a basement Chicago Board of Elections conference room in Chicago, Ill. on December 14, 2010.

And for some highlights from the day, courtesy of my old high school friend Eric Johnson, now a stringer for Reuters here in Chicago:

Shown photographs of his North Side home largely emptied of furniture, Emanuel identified various rooms and then jabbed at his interlocutor when asked to identify the kitchen.

“Very good Mr. Odelson. You pass U.S. history for $200,” Emanuel joked.

[...]

Outgoing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and other defenders of the famously combative political operative have said the hearing is a sham and Emanuel was serving his country in Washington, but others say the objection to Emanuel’s candidacy in the February 22 election is legitimate.

One woman attending the hearing announced loudly she had heard enough when one of Emanuel’s questioners asked how often he had visited the city in the past year.

“Boo, boo,” the woman shouted. “You are making a circus of state law. Your hearing is out of order,” she said before being escorted out.

“The nuthouse is open,” another woman commented.

Final note: All politics is local indeed. Emanuel is a 1981 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where I graduated from in 2006. During the brief chronology of the life of Rahm Emanuel that he presented on the stand today under questioning by attorney Burt Odelson, I was the only person in the room to make that “raise the roof” gesture when Emanuel said he went to Sarah Lawrence. Somewhere, probably in Bronxville, New York, Professor Jefferson Adams was smiling.

Newsletter went out today, sadly, sigh, with a mistaken subject line that ought have read “Verve Photo / Holiday Print Sale / CHICAGO!” Hopefully the fact that it accidentally went out with the last newsletter subject line will not deter folks because this has some new images from Azerbaijan and Rahm Emanuel on the campaign trail for Chicago mayor that have not been seen before:

First off, happy holidays to one and all! Some recent news, updates and events…

VERVE PHOTO

Today on Verve Photo, Geoffrey Hiller’s popular photo industry blog, one of my images from my work following the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline route last summer is featured:

From the story behind the image:

“The group of people who took me to this beach were Bakuvian urban elites, a banker, a PhD student in Germany, among others who had professional jobs that ensured that when they went to the beach it was more private, less polluted and in turn more expensive. It was a strange site, the two groups representing the two Azerbaijans. The fact that many on this particular beach swam in clothing or underclothing was something that surprised the group I had traveled there with, reminding me of something one very affluent and sharp consultant to several local oligarchs, the sort of person who can survive under any regime, told me privately: ‘We have no idea how the rest of the country lives.’”

HOLIDAY PRINT SALE

The holiday print sale I began last month continues through the holiday season. For the awesomely low price of $75 each (or $50 for student), I am offering up 17 different prints to choose from as part of this sale. Of course, if you see something you like more on either my website or archive site, drop me a note at amanda.rivkin@gmail.com.

The extraordinarily low price is a one-time holiday season offering in an effort to see my work disseminated as widely as possible and find new audiences. I’ve been overwhelmed by the reception, with the prints being given as wedding gifts, housewarming presents and of course purchased by individuals interested in displaying the work in their own homes.

To order, please send an e-mail request to amanda.rivkin@gmail.com stating which print you are interested in and where to send it to. As I am a registered PayPal merchant, you can now pay by credit card as you would with any other electronic invoice. Ordering now means it should arrive in time for Christmas. And as always, thank you for your interest and support.

TRAVEL NOTES: CHICAGO – HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS AND THE GREATEST POLITICAL SHOW (OR FARCE) ON EARTH

I am currently in Chicago through the new year and will be here as much as I can be until February 22, day of the Chicago mayoral election. As it is the first mayoral election in my hometown of any worth or significance since I was approximately five years old when the current mayor, Richard M. Daley, was elected “forever and ever,” I am learning much about multi-candidate elections in a one-party system. It’s quite the education in theatrics, chess, and bloodsports all in one.

Rahm Emanuel greets his supporters and poses for pictures at the opening of his first field office for his campaign for Chicago mayor on the South Side of Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood on December 11, 2010.

Having expected the current mayor to be mayor for life, much like his father who ruled the city for 27 years, Daley’s decision not to seek reelection for mayor after 21 years in office prompted the floodgates of Chicago politics to open. Rahm Emanuel resigned from his post as White House Chief of Staff to come home, only to find his residency is being challenged – presenting a barrier to what was supposed to be a stage-managed entrance. Others have come out of the woodwork of Chicago politics as well, including former U.S. Senator and Ambassador to New Zealand Carol Moseley Braun, Congressman Danny Davis, and others with less national name recognition. It promises to be quite the show.

If you need a shooter on this or other stories in the Chicago area and Midwest vicinity (the car/ruckus mobile travels with me), don’t hesitate. My contact information is below.

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As always, thank you very much for your ongoing interest in my work.

Sincerely,

Amanda Rivkin

Amanda Rivkin
Verve Photo: The New Breed of Documentary Photographers
December 13, 2010

Amanda Rivkin (b.1984, USA) is currently based in Brooklyn while completing a master’s degree in security studies: terrorism and sub-state violence at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. Previously based in her hometown, Chicago, where she travels frequently, her work has appeared on the front pages of Le Monde, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and Courrier Japan, The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and The London Sunday Times Magazine. She received a Young Explorers Grant from the Expeditions Council of the National Geographic Society to travel to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and eastern Turkey for a project, “Exploring the Evolving Oil Economy: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline,” in 2010. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Sarah Lawrence College.

About the Photograph:

“This photo was taken on a beach in the Bibi Heybat section of southern Baku, Azerbaijan on the 4th of July, 2010, the same day Hillary Clinton visited the oil rich nation on a tour of the region. We went in two cars from the center of Baku to the remote, polluted beach off of a major highway that goes to the Sangachal Oil Terminal, where natural gas and oil from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli and Shah Deniz offshore oil and gas fields is pumped into several pipelines: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the route of which I was ostensibly following as a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant recipient, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Sepsa pipeline to the Black Sea. The day before when traveling the other direction from the Neftcala region towards the capitol, Baku, we stumbled across a still as of then under construction villa with a harbored yacht belonging to an uncle of the first lady, a site a guard reluctantly allowed me to photograph a few snaps of and that naturally included no such visible oil facility just off shore.”

“The group of people who took me to this beach were Bakuvian urban elites, a banker, a PhD student in Germany, among others who had professional jobs that ensured that when they went to the beach it was more private, less polluted and in turn more expensive. It was a strange site, the two groups representing the two Azerbaijans. The fact that many on this particular beach swam in clothing or underclothing was something that surprised the group I had traveled there with, reminding me of something one very affluent and sharp consultant to several local oligarchs, the sort of person who can survive under any regime, told me privately: “We have no idea how the rest of the country lives.”

The K-Word
Fortnight Journal
December 12, 2010

Recently, Indian novelist and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy wrote in The New York Times op-ed page of “the subversive strength of warm, boiled eggs.” She was referencing the way her heart was won by the father of a young woman, Nilofar, in the Kashmiri village of Shopian. Nilofar was murdered earlier this year, allegedly by Indian security forces, in a disputed territory conflict with root causes extending as far back as the immediate post-Cold War period–if not as far back as the post-war Partition of India and Pakistan.

Arundhati Roy is among a select number of Indian intellectual critics of India’s ongoing policy and position on Kashmir. She has been the subject of mob retaliation orchestrated by the BJP (Hindu Nationalist Party) against her home, and there are calls for charges of treason against her. This, despite the issue of Kashmir obviously being a critical question at the core of the India-Pakistan dispute, and the ostensible reason for so much Pakistani attention to militant groups that engage India asymmetrically.

To date, Barack Obama has said the K-word only once; while campaigning for the presidency. As President, and manager of the spillover into Pakistan of the war in Afghanistan, Obama has yet to so much as mention Kashmir. This aversion is a bit like trying to bake a cake without an oven; ignoring a flashpoint of over six decades of India-Pakistan conflict will not work when one is convening both sides towards a resolution in congruent tribal areas with amorphous borders reigned over by Islamic-inspired militants. Thus is the critical ingredient to conflict analysis lacking–and the longer this neglected element sits in the sun, the more rotten it becomes.

Like several of my country’s foreign policy predicaments, however gingerly sidestepped, Kashmir is very much of our own making. In the 1980s, the U.S. funneled money, weapons and expertise to the mujahedin in Afghanistan through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). After the Soviet withdrawal, the U.S. wasted little time in ending its relationship with Pakistan, punishing it for nuclear ambitions with the Pressler Amendment in late 1990 that ended aid and assistance to the country for the next decade until September 11 laid out new geostrategic priorities for the United States.

Cut off and isolated, Pakistan cultivated rival nuclear programs and an international black market in blueprints under AQ Khan. Pakistan smuggled militants and weapons into Kashmir to challenge India repeatedly, most prominently during the Kargil War of 1999, where India and Pakistan were brought to the brink of nuclear war. Pakistan backed down when the U.S. sided with India. Rather than engage the question of Kashmir, then-President Clinton decided preserving the status quo was more important in balancing the two nuclear-armed rivals. “If the U.S. spent a small percent of the attention it pays to the Israel-Palestinian issue to Kashmir…” a familiar refrain by Nawaz Sharif went.

There has since been no challenge to the status quo on the Kashmir issue. Rather, a perpetual downward spiral unfurls as a civil society lives under curfew, threatened by a militant-infiltrated countryside that has pushed people towards the cities. Lawlessness abounds among ranks of both militants and the Indian military, the ostensible occupiers. The result is something worse than a stalemate; a nether-world, a mafia state – a place where criminal elements, drug traffickers, intelligence agents and armies can fight conventional and unconventional wars. The problem has festered even a decade after President Clinton called it “the most dangerous place on earth.”

And yet, Obama’s only effort to engage the issue has been an ill-fated proposition for Holbrooke’s pre-“AfPak” Envoy working title–Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Pakistan and India–until India objected its way out of the discussion, and then became furious about their exclusion.

Obama has another chance to engage the Kashmir issue constructively by inviting discussion in an international platform from Indian intellectuals with legitimacy on the international stage, such as Arundhati Roy, to raise conscientiousness of the issue. There is no reason not to engage a community within a country that can be far more effective in providing internal legitimacy to a presently unpopular position within high-ranking government circles for political and historic reasons. On a topic where there has been so little hope or progress made for well over a decade, any effort must be meticulous, but every effort is necessary to prevent the continuation of the world’s most dangerous game of Russian roulette. It might not end, but even de-escalation would represent a subtle reversal and perhaps provide enough room to give a generation of leaders in India, Pakistan and Kashmir the courage to come forward and see a day past curfew.

Received my copy of Illinois: Past and Present by Joanne Mattern. Quite delighted to see one of my photos literally pass into the history book, in this case for children. A photo I took of a trader on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange at the height of the financial crisis in September 2008 shot for Agence France Presse highlights the section on “Big Business” in “Chapter Four: The Industries of Illinois”.

In anticipation (read: great joy) of covering the first Chicago mayor election in my living memory (yup, Richie Daley was elected when I was approximately five years old), I am digging through my archives in 2008/2009 covering some pretty interesting times in local politics then, that quickly became national and international politics. But then there were those moments of obscurantia that occur in city life and maybe do not get much more than a passing mention in local newspapers, usually part of a much bigger story. Such was the case with the Chicago police protest of their contracts the day the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) came to Chicago for its final evaluation of the city’s 2016 Olympic bid, which went to Rio instead. Knowing rumor around town has it Daley would not have offered not to run for reelection (this is a polite word for what “elections” have consisted of over the past 20 years for mayor in this office – as it is the primaries are the only race; there is no Republican Party candidate that I am aware of), if Chicago had won the bid. So in honor of a moment in civic life that was, I present quite the wrinkle: