amanda rivkin, photographer

The left is Al Jazeera live in Tahrir Square on Sunday January 30, 2011. The same moments as captured on the right by Egyptian state television where Cairo as a sea of calm.

“Any government that treats its people as the property of the state cannot be tolerated.”
- Adam Michnik at the New York Public Library in conversation, “Revolution: A User’s Manual” April 29, 2006

As demonstrations in both Tunisia, which successfully toppled the regime of Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali, and the ongoing siege on the streets of Egyptian cities where the government of (likely) outgoing dictator (sorry, Joe Biden) Hosni Mubarak have shown, small acts of civil disobedience together can make a big noise. From the archive, small acts of civil disobedience.

Desmond Lane, 11, with his father, Darick Lane, 38, opponents of the death penalty, during a prayer vigil near the entrance to the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va. hours before the 9 p.m. execution of John Allen Muhammad, the so-called “Washington sniper” responsible for gunning down 10 and wounding three in the D.C.-area in 2002, on November 10, 2009. Gov. Tim Kaine refused to grant a stay of clemency and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the request for a stay of execution despite religious objections due to Muhammad’s mental health.

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Signs in a cornfield on rural Illinois Route 71 protest the closure of the Arcelor Mittal plant in nearby Hennepin, Illinois on July 20, 2009. The plant, owned by the largest steel company in the world, Mittal, previously employed 280 hourly workers and an unknown salaried employees.

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Denetta Reddick, 38, hands out a flyer to a passing trucker as Richard Erwin, 37, looks on as part of the informational picket outside the main gate of the Arcelor Mittal plant in Hennepin, Illinois on July 20, 2009, which closed after several rounds of layoffs in between March 1-20, 2009. The plant, owned by the largest steel company in the world, Mittal, previously employed 280 hourly workers and an unknown salaried employees; an informational picket set up at both the main and west gates to the plant has claimed one major success, the refusal of a company to strip the plant and send the machinery offshore. Both Erwin and Reddick worked at the plant for 7.5 months.

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In Chicago, even police take to the streets at opportune moments, like this protest outside the legendary Fifth Floor, the mayor’s suite, during the International Olympic Committee’s visit to the city for a final tour of an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Olympics. Knowledgeable insiders attributed the bid’s loss to Rio as a considerable factor in Mayor Daley’s decision not to run for reelection this year for the first time in 21 years.

Chicago police officers protest the absence of a working contract for two years, wrapping around Chicago’s city hall with signs that read “Daley doesn’t protect your neighborhood” and “end monarchy,” on April 2, 2009 as the International Olympic Committee arrived for its final assessment of the city’s bid for the 2016 summer games.

Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who left the position to run for mayor of Chicago following Richard M. Daley’s surprise announcement not to run for reelection after 21 years, and Mayor Daley’s brother, William Daley, Barack Obama’s newly appointed Chief of Staff at the Inauguration luncheon in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2009.

Kitsch
January 12, 2010

“…Amanda shoots droll diversions in Central Europe and the Caucuses.”

Michael Shaw is “the publisher of the popular progressive blog, BAGnewsNotes. BNN is the only blog dedicated 100% to visual politics and the analysis of news images, and also features original, politically-oriented images from America’s pre-eminent photojournalists.” Included on his list of the “top 10 visual politics/photojournalism blogs” for Blogs.com is Verve Photo and a link to recent work featured on the site by Amanda Rivkin.

Also included on the list is The New York Times Lens blog, where I co-created and contributed a series of 13 interviews with young photographers last year for the “Turning Point” series that asked about an image that served as a source of inspiration and an image by each photographer that represented a turning point in their early careers. In addition to being featured in this series on the Lens blog, “Turning Point: Images That Inspire,” my work was also highlighted in “Must See: Images on the Web” and “Showcase: New President, Old Problems (2009 – The Year in Pictures)”. Additional blogs listed in Shaw’s top ten include No Caption Needed, which featured an analysis of a New York Times page A1 photograph of Rod Blagojevich on his final day in office, “R-e-s-p-e-c-t, Find Out What It Means to Me,” on February 2, 2009, and Prison Photography, which highlighted work photographing the Romathan Gypsy Theater in eastern Slovakia this past June in a post, “The Roma People: Matt Luton building upon a legacy of wandering photographers”.

My good friend Eirini Vourloumis has work featured on The New York Times Lens blog today, “Adding Islam to a Latino Identity,” that includes 19 slides of Latino Muslim life in the New York suburbs. From her interview with Lens editor and New York Times staff photographer Jim Estrin:

Q. What got you started documenting Muslim life in America?
A.My interest in Islam began after the attacks of Sept. 11, as I was interested in how the event affected the daily lives of Muslims in New York. Personally, I was interested in exploring Islam because my mother’s family is Muslim, from Indonesia. Being raised in Athens and baptized Greek Orthodox, I was never exposed to the religion. I desired to learn more about my mother’s culture, using photography as my guide.

Q. Is it different being Muslim in America than in other countries?
A. The main difference is that in America, Muslim society does not have a homogeneous ethnic identity. There are communities of different cultures and backgrounds that embrace Islam. This creates an layered Islamic society where all voices of Islam are represented. In Indonesia, most Muslims live in the same moderate religious lifestyle within the same cultural framework.

It is challenging to live in the U.S as a Muslim. There is a heightened sense of Islamophobia, which can be aggravated by the general portrayal of Muslims in the media. Negative images of Islam — drawn from associations with fundamentalism and terrorism — have begun to marginalize Islamic communities, accentuating the prejudice that many Muslims face in their daily lives. This is why I believe it is important to document Islamic communities in the U.S., to simply show everyday life without focusing on politics or race.

Below, a few of my favorite frames from this series:

(NOTE: An updated bibliography and account, “How to Write A Graduate Thesis on Military-Media Relations in the USA! in 120 Days” posted April 14, 2011.)

Over the next five months, I will dedicate no small part of my time to the task of studying the relationship of the U.S. military and the American media during a time of war. I will examine three case studies of multi-year involvement in foreign conflict from the Second World War and Vietnam era to the present, post-September 11 conflicts. My work will first be collected towards my thesis in the Security Studies program at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. I hope to also see the work evolve into a magazine article. I will amend this list periodically as my bibliography expands. I also hope to collect numerous interviews with current practitioners, editors, communications managers, and military public affairs officers relevant to the study of the relationship between the military and the media as possible between then and now.

Historical Rise of the Modern War Correspondent

Goldstein, Robert Justin (1989). Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth Century Europe. St. Martin’s Press; New York.

Russell, William Howard (2009). The Crimean War: As Seen By Those Who Reported It. Louisiana State University Press; Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Spencer, Graham. The Media and Peace: From Vietnam to ‘The War on Terror.’ Palgrave Macmillan.

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Media Theory of Conflict Coverage

Carruthers, Susan (2000). The Media at War: Communication and Conflict in the Twentieth Century. St. Martin’s Press; New York.

Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Anchor Books; New York.

Hunt, W. Ben (1997). Getting to War: Predicting International Conflict with Mass Media Indicators. University of Michigan Press; Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Knightley, Philip (2004). The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from the Crimea to Iraq. The Johns Hopkins University Press; Baltimore.

Strobel, William. “The CNN Effect,” American Journalism Review. May 1996..

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Government and Military Theory of Propaganda, Later Public Relations

Bernays, Edward (2004). Propaganda. Ig Publishing; New York.

Biddle, Stephen (2004). Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton University Press; Princeton, New Jersey.

Deutsch, Karl Wolfgang (1963). The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. Free Press of Glencoe; London.

Deutsch, Karl Wolfgang (1974). Politics and Government: How People Decide Their Fate. Houghton Mifflin; Boston.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1957). The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edelman, Murray (1971). Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence. Academic Press; New York.

Edelman, Murray (2001). The Politics of Misinformation. Cambridge University Press; New York.

Kilcullen, David (2010). Counterinsurgency. Oxford University Press; New York.

Lang, Anthony [Ed.] (2003). Just Intervention. Georgetown University Press; Washington, D.C.

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Media-Military Relations

Aukofer, Frank (1995). “America’s Team, The Odd Couple: A Report on the Relationship Between the Military and the Media,” Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University; Nashville, Tennessee.

Braestrup, Peter (1985). Battle Lines: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Military and the Media (background paper). Priority Press Publications; New York.
According to Robert Justin Goldstein, author of Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth Century Europe, Battle Lines, the report of the task force of the Twentieth Century Fund “consisted of former military and Government officials, scholars and journalists, and heard presentations from military officials, journalists, and others… The creation of the task force was prompted by the exclusion of news organizations from covering the early stages of the United States invasion of Grenada in October 1983… From before World War II until the Grenada invasion, setting information policy had been considered a civilian decision, rather than a military one, according to the report.” (p. 337)

Der Derian, James (2001). Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. Westview Press; Boulder, Colorado.

Gowing, Nik (1994). “Real Time Television Coverage of Armed Conflicts and Diplomatic Crises: Does it Pressure or Distort Foreign Policy Decisions,” Spring; Working Paper #1994-1. Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University; Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Osgood, Kenneth and Frank, Andrew [Eds.] (2010). Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century. University Press of Florida.

Smith, Jeffrey Alan (1999). War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power. Oxford University Press; New York.

Uko, Ndaeyo (2004). Romancing the Gun: The Press as a Promoter of Military Rule. Africa World Press, Inc.; Trenton, New Jersey and Asmara, Eritrea.

Young, Peter (1997). The Media and the Military: From Crimea to Desert Strike. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Human Rights Culture and Evolution

Moyn, Samuel (2010). The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nash, Kate (2009). The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and the UK. Cambridge University Press; Cambridge and New York.

Stacy, Helen (2009). Human Rights for the 21st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture. Stanford University Press; Stanford, California.

Wilson, Richard [Ed.] (1997). Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. Pluto Press; London and Chicago.

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Case Study One: World War Two

Braverman, Jordan (1995). To Hasten the Homecoming: How Americans Fought World War II Through the Media. Madison Books; Lanham, Maryland.

Hynes, Samuel; Matthews, Anne; Caldwell Sorel, Nancy and Spiller, Roger J. (1995). Reporting World War II Part Two: American Journalism 1944-1946. Library of America; New York.

Laurence, William (1946). Selected articles, The New York Times.
Pulitzer-Prize winning science correspondent for The New York Times and official journalist of The Manhattan Project who witnessed dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

Liebling, A.J. (2008). A.J. Liebling: World War II Writings. Library of America.

Matthews, Anne; Caldwell Sorel, Nancy and Spiller, Roger J. (1995). Reporting World War II Volume One: American Journalism 1938-1944. Library of America; New York.

Maudlin, Bill (1983). Bill Maudlin’s Army: Bill Maudlin’s World War II Cartoons. Presidio Press.

The New York Times archives.

Pyle, Ernie (2001). Brave Men. Bison Books.

Pyle, Ernie (2004). Here is Your War: Story of G.I. Joe. Bison Books.

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Case Study Two: Vietnam

Bates, Milton J.; Lichty, Lawrence; Miles, Paul; Spector, Richard and Young, Marilyn (2000). Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975. Library of America; New York.

Bernstein, Carl and Woodward, Bob (1974). All the President’s Men. Simon and Schuster; New York.

Ellsberg, Daniel (2003). Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Penguin Books; New York.

Halberstam, David (1993). The Best and the Brightest. Ballantine Books; New York.

Hallin, Daniel (1986). The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam. Oxford University Press; New York.
Credited as the first revisionist history of the media’s role in the public discourse in the United States concerning the Vietnam War.

Hammond, William (1988). Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968. Center of Military History, United States Army; Washington, D.C.

Hammond, William (1996). Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968-1973. Center of Military History, United States Army; Washington, D.C.

Hammond, William (1999). Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War. University of Kansas Press.
Senior historian with the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History; depicts Pentagon struggle against the press and what Hammond believes to be a press coup.

Herr, Michael (2009). Dispatches. Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf; New York.

Kennedy, William V. (1993). The Military and the Media: Why the Press Cannot Be Trusted to Cover a War.

The New York Times archives.

The New York Times and The Wasington Post (1971). Pentagon Papers.

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Case Study Three: Post-September 11th Conflicts

Ali, Tariq (2008). The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. Scribner; New York.

Bumiller, Elizabeth with photographs by Addario, Lynsey, “In Camouflage or Veil, a Fragile Bond,” The New York Times. May 29, 2010.

Cockburn, Patrick (2008). Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq. Scribnher; New York.

Coll, Steve (2004). Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Press; New York.

Coll, Steve (2008). The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. Penguin Books; New York.

Conroy, Thomas and Hanson, Jarice (2008). Constructing America’s War Culture: Iraq, Media and Images at Home. Lexington Books; Lanham, Maryland.

Hastings, Michael. “The Runaway General,” Rolling Stone. June 22, 2010.
The article that resulted in President Obama’s firing of General Stanley McChrystal on the grounds of insubordination.

Hersh, Seymour (2005). Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Harper Perennial; New York.

Hoyt, Mike and Palattella, John (2007). Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It. Melville House Publishing; Hoboken, New Jersey.

Kamber, Michael (advance proof from author, 2010). Uncensored: A Photojournalists’ Oral History of the Iraq War.

Livingston, Steven (1997). “Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention,” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The New York Times archives.

Packer, George (2006). The Assasins’ Gate: America in Iraq. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; New York.

Ricks, Thomas (2006). Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Penguin Press; New York.

Rid, Thomas (2008). War and Media Operations: The U.S. Military and the Press from Vietnam to Iraq. Routledge.

Risen, James (2007). State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration. Free Press; New York.

Rosen, Nir (2008). The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter’s Journey into Occupied Iraq. Potomac Books, Inc.

Rosen, Nir (2010). Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World. Nation Books; New York.

Rubin, Elizabeth with photographs by Addario, Lynsey. “Battle Company Is Out There,” The New York Times Magazine. February 24, 2008.

Scahill, Jeremy (2007). Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Nation Books; New York.

Sweeney, Michael (2006). The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce. Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University Press; Evanston, Illinois.
Journalistic establishment response to the new codes of press conduct in a time of war as outlined in the course of the early coverage of the Iraq War.

Sylvester, Judith and Huffman, Suzanne (2004). Reporting from the Front: The Media and the Military. Rowman and Littlefield; Lanham, Maryland.

Van Baarda, Th. A. and Verwelj, D.E.M. [Eds.] (2009). The Moral Dimension of Asymmetrical Warfare: Counter-terrorism, Democratic Values and Military Ethics. Martinus Nijhoff; Leiden and Boston.

Wilkinson, Paul (2006). Terrorism Versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response. Routledge; London and New York.

Woodward, Bob (2003). Bush at War. Simon and Schuster; New York.

Woodward, Bob (2004). Plan of Attack. Simon and Schuster; New York.

Woodward, Bob (2010). Obama’s Wars. Simon and Schuster; New York.

Wright, Lawrence (2006). The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Vintage Books; New York.

After viewing “Bureaucratics” by Jan Banning at the HERE Arts Center in the West Village New York last night, I was determined to comb the archives for images of that ubiquitous figure on assignments – the bureaucrat – who only occasionally makes the cut of a final edit for publication or submitted for such. As Mr. Banning has gone to the trouble of forming clusters around nations and functions, my attempt to do the same with this selection of five from the archives.

First, from my own country taken from assignments for The New York Times and the non-profit investigative website ProPublica in Iowa, the Illinois statehouse, and the stagnating Indiana town of Elkhart.

Marriage license and vital records clerk Rebecca Badtram, Scott County Recorder’s Office in Davenport, Iowa on April 27, 2009, the first day same sex weddings are legal across Iowa.

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Assistant to beleaguered Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, Mary Stewart cleaning out her workspace adjacent to Blagojevich’s during the conclusion of his impeachment trial at the state capitol in Springfield, Illinois on January 29, 2009.

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Elkhart, Indiana Mayor Dick Moore on April 8, 2009.

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CONCLUSIONS: In America, bureaucrats’ functions range from managing city budgets to delivering coffee to the governor and packing up his desk when he is ousted on corruption charges. They also issue marriage and death certificates. To each, his or her own respective desk, office and accoutrement. Mary Stewart has the American Flag and Elkhart Mayor Dick Moore has a portrait of the first family with the White House seal behind it.

In the Turkic world, from Turkey and Azerbaijan functionaries of a religious and the intersection of business and government make an appearance in the archives.

From Azerbaijan, I have this image in a Baku highrise along the Neftciler Prospekt (Oil Workers’ Boulevard) of Shahmar Movsumov, the Executive Director of the State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan which is responsible for managing the foreign financial assets of the state’s oil wealth and operates independently of the the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), on July 20, 2010. A portrait of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev hangs over Movsumov’s desk.

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And in Turkey, the mosque attendant at the Lala Pasha Mosque in the conservative northeastern city of Erzurum on the first night of Ramadan, August 11, 2010.

Last night, I attended an awesome photography exhibit by Jan Banning, curated by Jamie Wellford, at HERE Arts Center 145 Sixth Avenue (Entrance on Dominick Street) in New York. The photographer, whose work has previously been displayed in the Moving Walls exhibit and on The New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog, was unfortunately not present. A conversation with Wellford afterward offered some interesting insights into his working methods (he tried to get them just as they are settling in), audience reaction (boredom), and how the photographer would react to knowing that (he would love that). It’s a pretty awesome show, that when accompanied with such data as the monthly salary of the bureaucrats photographed and an explanation of their wide-ranging responsibilities leaves much unspoken about the possibility of corruption. As one friend said, “When this man in Texas makes $5,600/month and a woman in India makes $12/month, you start to appreciate who can survive on that income.” Indeed, we are reminded of the bureaucrats primary function: legitimation. Here are some of my favorite prints that appeared in the show taken from the pdf catalogue of the book Bureaucratics, available on the photographer’s website:

The work has also inspired a forthcoming “From the Archive” where I will comb the archive for bureaucrats I have photographed in the past in their native habitat: the office.

WordPress e-mailed me the following info at the start of the new year. Thought it might be a good way to kick off the new year, with reflection on the one that most recently just passed.

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010:

1. Holiday Print Sale: THANK YOU to Everyone Who Has Ordered Prints So Far

2. The Best in WikiLeaks Cablegate Coverage from News Sites Around the World

3. About

4. From the Archive: Muslims Wearing Things

5. Traveling to Azerbaijan: The New Visa Regime