amanda rivkin, photographer

The New York Times page A16, June 28, 2011 includes, “In a Retrial, Blagojevich Is Found Guilty of Corruption,” by Monica Davey and Emma G. Fitzsimmons with photograph of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich by Amanda Rivkin.

Mr. Blagojevich with his wife, Patti, arriving at court on Monday.

Former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich leaving the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago on Monday after being convicted of 17 counts.

Mr. Blagojevich and his wife, Patti, leave court after the verdict. (Credits: Amanda Rivkin for The New York Times)

Jury Finds Blagojevich Guilty of Corruption
By MONICA DAVEY and EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS
Published: June 27, 2011

CHICAGO — A jury on Monday convicted Rod R. Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, of a broad pattern of corruption, including charges that he tried to personally benefit from his role in selecting a replacement for President Obama in the United States Senate.

Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat who former aides say once envisioned himself as a future presidential contender, was found guilty of most of the 20 federal counts against him: 17 counts of wire fraud, attempted extortion, soliciting bribes, conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to solicit and accept bribes.

As the verdicts were read aloud in court, one “guilty” following another, Mr. Blagojevich, who has always proclaimed his innocence, turned, his jaw clenched grimly, to look at his wife, Patti, in the front row. By then, she was already slumped back in the arms of a relative, eyes closed, wiping away tears.

The verdict appeared to be the conclusion, at last, to the spectacle of Mr. Blagojevich’s political career, which began its spiraling descent shortly after Mr. Obama was elected president in November 2008. A month after Election Day, Mr. Blagojevich, who was in his second term as governor and under state law was required to name a senator to replace Mr. Obama, was arrested, and federal agents revealed that they had secretly recorded hundreds of hours of damaging phone calls by him and his advisers.

Mr. Blagojevich, a lawyer and former state and federal lawmaker, was accused of trying to secure campaign contributions, a cabinet post or a high-paying job in exchange for his official acts as governor — whether that was picking a senator, supporting particular legislation or deciding how to spend state money. Mr. Blagojevich was acquitted on one charge of bribery, and the jury deadlocked on two counts of attempted extortion, but convictions came on the bulk of the counts and on those related to the Senate seat — the claims that had drawn international headlines.

The outcome came as a victory for federal prosecutors, whose earlier trial resulted in a deadlocked jury on most counts and led people to wonder whether Mr. Blagojevich’s behavior would ultimately be deemed crass political deal-making or a lot of wishful, blustery talk, but not rise to the level of crimes.

Issuing their verdicts on the 10th day of deliberations, jurors said the accusations related to selling the Senate seat had been the clearest and easiest to resolve, in part because of the audio recordings of Mr. Blagojevich’s telephone calls. In the end, the jurors — 11 women and 1 man, all of whom declined to provide their names to reporters — said they believed they had sent a loud signal to corrupt Illinois politicians, past and future.

“There’s a lot of bargaining that goes on behind the scenes — we do that in our everyday lives, in business and everything,” said the jury forewoman, a retired church employee from the Chicago suburbs. “But I think in the instances when it is someone representing the people, it crosses the line. And I think we sent a pretty clear message on that.”

And she had her own conclusion about the unseemly political world she had seen close-up through about six weeks of testimony: “I told my husband that if he was running for politics, he would probably have to find a new wife.”

For Democrats here, in a state government they almost entirely control, the final chapter could not come soon enough. By turns, Illinois residents had been mortified by the saga, amused by its circuslike antics and, most recently, weary of the whole thing.

Mr. Blagojevich’s impeachment, removal from office and evolution into a punch line on late-night television threatened the Democratic Party’s political hold on the state, created an outcry to overhaul lax state campaign finance and public records laws, and led to added scrutiny of some of this city’s best-known politicians, including Mr. Obama, Rahm Emanuel (the president’s former chief of staff and now Chicago’s mayor) and Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

The scandal also reaffirmed an image that Illinois has long wished to shed: Mr. Blagojevich appears likely to be the fourth governor in recent memory to be imprisoned (one for acts committed after leaving office).

Read more at The New York Times

Un bagno di petrolio
National Geographic Italia
20 giugno 2011 (June 20, 2011)

Dall’Azerbaigian alla Turchia, passando per la Georgia. L’oleodotto BTC porta verso occidente non solo il greggio. Un fotoracconto tra i popoli e i contrasti del Caucaso lungo la strada del petrolio che fu al centro della scacchiera geopolitica della regione

fotografie di Amanda Rivkin

Immersi nel petrolio
Fotografia di Amanda Rivkin

L’Azerbaigian è noto fin dai tempi di Marco Polo per le sue sorgenti di olio nero. Ha riserve per 1,2 miliardi di barili di greggio. Marianne Lavelle con le sue foto segue il percorso dell’oleodotto BTC (Baku, Tbilisi, Cehuyan) non solo un’enorme infrastruttura energetica, ma un caso geopolitico tra paesi e culture secolari. Vedi su Limes la carta del percorso del BTC. Leggi anche sul blog MappaMundi

Nella foto, Quliyev Jeyyub si rilassa con un bagno nel greggio nella rinomata casa di cura Naftalan, 360 chilometri a ovest di Baku.

La Spa petrolifera, costruita nel 1926, è uno dei diversi centri che promuovono le qualità terapeutiche del petrolio.

Gli ospiti sperano di alleviare i dolori alle articolazioni, ringiovanire la pelle e migliorare il metabolismo, con questi bagni nel caldo, denso, liquido nero.

Sono permessi però solo 10 minuti di immersioni, prima che gli assistenti li facciano uscire e avviare alle docce.

Last week on June 15, 2011, I photographed David Protess in the new offices of the Chicago Innocence Project, the non-profit he recently started, in downtown Chicago. A small image crop appeared on the front page of The New York Times on Saturday June 18, 2011 in a story entitled, “A Watchdog Professor, Now Defending Himself” by David Carr and John Schwarz. The jump page, A11 and the nytimes.com website both contained a second portrait. Here are three from the very brief shoot in the middle of last week:

(Clockwise from top left) David Protess at top left in the entry way, at top right at his new desk with a courtroom sketch of the “Ford Heights Four” above the desk, and below in the back hallway beside a fire escape at the new offices of the Chicago Innocence Project, the non-profit Protess recently started in his first post-Northwestern University venture, in downtown Chicago on June 15, 2011.

The New York Times pages A1 and A11, June 18, 2011 includes, “A Watchdog Professor Now Defending Himself,” by David Carr and John Scwartz with photograph of David Protess by Amanda Rivkin.

“I have spent three decades exposing wrongful conviction only to find myself in the cross hairs of others who are wrongfully accusing me,” David Protess said. (Credit: Amanda Rivkin for The New York Times)

A Watchdog Professor, Now Defending Himself
By DAVID CARR and JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: June 17, 2011

For the last two years, David Protess, a renowned journalist and professor who spent three decades fighting to prove the innocence of others, has been locked in a battle to do the same for himself. It hasn’t gone as well.

Mr. Protess, who taught at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, was the founder and driving force behind the Medill Innocence Project, which was instrumental in exonerating at least 12 wrongly convicted defendants and freeing them from prison, including five who were on death row in Illinois, and in prompting then-governor George Ryan to clear the rest of death row in 2003.

But during an investigation into a questionable conviction, the Cook County state’s attorney turned her attention instead on Mr. Protess and his students. Since then, questions have been raised about deceptive tactics used by the Medill students, about allegations that Mr. Protess cooperated with the defense lawyers (which would negate a journalist’s legal privilege to resist subpoenas) and, most damning, whether he altered an e-mail to cover up that cooperation.

Medill, which enjoys an international reputation, in significant part because of his work, removed him from teaching in April, and this week he resigned from Northwestern altogether. It has been a breathtaking reversal for Mr. Protess, who says he believes he is being pilloried for lapses in memory and a desire to defend his students.

“I have spent three decades exposing wrongful conviction only to find myself in the cross hairs of others who are wrongfully accusing me,” he said in an interview.

It is often said that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low, but in the matter of Mr. Protess and the wrongly convicted men he helped to free, the stakes could not have been higher.

“He is in the hall of fame of investigative journalists in the 20th century,” said Mark Feldstein, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “Using cheap student labor, he has targeted a very specific issue, and that work has reopened cases, changed laws and saved lives.”

Dennis Culloton, a lawyer who served as press secretary for Governor Ryan, said that Medill’s work led in part to the decision to essentially shut down Illinois’s death row. “I think it would have been an academic discussion if not for David’s work,” he said.

Behind that public success, however, there were gnawing tensions within Medill. Mr. Protess’s tendency to clash with authority did not end with law enforcement. He came into conflict with at least two deans of the Medill school, including the current one, John Lavine, who started in 2006 after a long career in newspapers.

Mr. Lavine is a polarizing figure at Medill: he is widely credited with stabilizing an institution that was suffering financially but he also led a successful effort to rename the school the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, a change he said reflected the school’s broader agenda but one that was widely ridiculed by alumni and journalists.

Read more at The New York Times

This is a pretty special newsletter for me concerning announcements. First, I have graduated from the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service, which ends a two-year chapter of my life first in Washington, DC and then commuting between there and New York over the past year. While it was a fascinating educational experience, I am ready to move on to new projects and pastures.

As a photographer, my work grew as well over those two years, for me most notably last summer when I was a recipient of a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant which facilitated travel photographing the social and economic life along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline which delivers Caspian crude to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan by way of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

Recently, this work was published on the National Geographic website in a photo gallery entitled, “At Five Years, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture,” with accompanying text by Marianne Lavelle.

Lastly, the biggest bit of news. As a consequence of this work and my interest in the people, culture and history of Azerbaijan, I will be returning to Baku next year and call the city as a base as a Fulbright grant recipient in photography.

I should note I have also updated my website, www.amandarivkin.com, to reflect recent and recently published work such as the “Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline” and coverage of Rahm Emanuel’s recent mayoral run in a new gallery of “Chicago Politics“.

Until July 20, I will be in Chicago and available for assignments across the city. As always, thank you for your interest and attention to my work.

Warm regards,

Amanda Rivkin

Pictures: At Five Years Old, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture
National Geographic
June 10, 2011

A New World Unveiled

Photograph by Amanda Rivkin

The landlocked Asian nation of Azerbaijan forged a powerful connection to the West five years ago with the first delivery of oil through one of the most ambitious energy projects of a generation—a $4.2 billion, 1,100-mile (1,800-kilometer) pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean coast.

When the deal was originally struck in 1994 for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, the late Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev called it “the Contract of the Century”—the first time a former Soviet state had signed a deal for its oil to reach international markets without going through Russia.

It was also hailed as a major policy success for the United States, which had engaged in years of intensive diplomacy to build an avenue for Caspian oil wealth that did not rely on Moscow. (Related: BP’s map of the pipeline route)

The BTC has the capacity to deliver 1.2 million barrels of oil per day to the Turkish port of Ceyhan from the giant offshore Azeri-Chriag-Guneshli field, and the revenue Azerbaijan earns from this single project is a major driver of the nation’s economy. In the first quarter of this year, the pipeline was delivering oil at a rate one-third below capacity, about 800,000 barrels per day.

In the BTC era, Azerbaijan is literally and figuratively a nation between East and West. More than 99 percent of its population is Muslim, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. And yet, the government of Ilham Aliyev, son of Heydar Aliyev and president since 2003, has encouraged a more secular society. In the view of some analysts, he has fostered warm relations with Western governments, despite accusations of corruption, by positioning his country as a bulwark against Islamic radicalism and, of course, as a source of oil.

A young women dressed in Western garb, above, hastily adds the required head covering before entering the Shi’a Icherishahar Djuma Masjid, or Innercity Mosque, for Friday prayers in the old city of Baku, Azerbaijan. It is one of a series of photos taken by National Geographic Young Explorer Amanda Rivkin in a summer 2010 journey to document life along the route of the pipeline.

—Marianne Lavelle, with research by Amanda Rivkin

(more images on the National Geographic website)

Last night I had the privilege and high honor to listen to highly awesome Romanian-style, Chicago-fashioned gypsy rock band Pet Peeve at the Double Door in Wicker Park, Chicago. I met lead guitarist and vocals, Lorian Toth, Friday night and Sunday night he was joined on stage by Mark Adkison on violin, guitar, and vocals; Ryan Flanagan on drums; and Elliot Esparza on bass. Like their gypsy rock of the new Western world in the new millennium predecessors, New York’s uber-famous Gogol Bordello (largely out of the Club Mehanata, formerly in Chinatown currently in the Lower East Side), they got the crowd of young’uns largely unacquainted with the gypsy tango a-goin’. Some images from Pet Peeve’s live show:

Members of the band Pet Peeve (clockwise L-R) Elliot Esparza, Ryan Flanagan, Mark Adkison, and Lorian Toth in the green room before a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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Members of the band Pet Peeve (clockwise L-R) Ryan Flanagan, Mark Adkison, and Lorian Toth in the green room before a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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Fake IDs confiscated at the entrance to the Double Door in Chicago on display on June 5, 2011.

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Equipment on the stage floor at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011 before a live set by Pet Peeve.

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Pet Peeve violin, guitar and vocalist Mark Adkison enters the stage for a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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(L-R) Pet Peeve band members Mark Adkison and Lorian Toth before a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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Lorian Toth of Pet Peeve during a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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Lorian Toth of Pet Peeve during a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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(L-R) Lorian Toth, Ryan Flanagan, and Mark Adkison of Pet Peeve during a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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Audience members dance in a circle during a live set by Pet Peeve at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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(L-R) Elliot Esparza, Ryan Flanagan, Lorian Toth and Mark Adkison of Pet Peeve during a live set at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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Audience members dance react enthusiastically after a live set by Pet Peeve at the Double Door in Chicago on June 5, 2011.

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CURRENTLY IN CHICAGO UNTIL JULY 20.