All posts filed under: Media-Military Relations

TED x Mid Atlantic: Active Resistance

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We are just beginning to understand the massive efforts by foreign governments to influence our elections and plant the seeds of chaos into the United States. Our reliance on digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the speed at which misinformation can spread has left us vulnerable. So what can we do? Amanda Rivkin says we must be proactive and form an active resistance against these attacks. Amanda Rivkin is a photographer and writer focused on gender, security, political and military issues in Eastern Europe and the United States.   Currently she is at work on a long-term project documenting in portraits and oral histories the victims of Chicago municipal police torture under former Commander Jon Burge. For this work, she has received a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists and support from The Invisible Institute, a non- profit journalism outfit focusing on issues of policing in Chicago.   In February 2017, she founded Trumpistan Watch, a free weekday e-mail subscription and blog media monitoring Western and …

The Sources of Russian Conduct: Russian Reading List

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RUSSIAN READING LIST by Amanda Rivkin Note: In light of the election of 2016 and the unprecedented interference in the American electoral process, it became clear that a generation that fought the global war on terror is woefully unfamiliar with what a much earlier generation of American scholars, diplomats and spies would call “the sources of Soviet conduct,” after former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow George F. Kennan’s now infamous article published in Foreign Affairs in 1947. This reading list is an attempt to plug holes, it is by no means comprehensive nor does it claim to be. It is an attempt to provide a brief selection of readings following key themes of the last century of Russian/Soviet history as it is still relevant today given the Russian leader’s training as a KGB spy and deep background in the Russian state and rise in the wake of a period of profound national humiliation of the 1990s. Usual academic caveats, any errors or oversights are mine and mine alone. BACK IN THE USSR: Ideology + Revolution: Leninist-Marxism …

Best of 2015: Chicago, Poland, Serbia and Germany

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This was a year of terrorist attacks, mass shootings a-plenty, mass exodus from the Middle East, North and East Africa and the AfPak region which does not include India but a small number from Bangladesh, rising xenophobic far right sentiment, and an uptick in hostility towards Muslims unprecedented since immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The far right so far has been kept on the back burner, but the slow slide into what I liken to the Brezhnev years of the Cold War for the Global War on Terror (GWoT) years is upon us. The American presidential elections offer little reason or occasion for hope. The state of affairs in Syria, too, offers little occasion for hope. “Assad must go” has converted into the new “red line,” as US Secretary of State John Kerry concedes Assad can stay because the US has no one else to pluck out of an abyss of alternatives. The whole world has heard of the Islamic State and the international media relishes any opportunity to put the group’s name …

Crossing Borders Picture Fund

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CROSSING BORDERS PICTURE FUND Crossing Borders Picture Fund is a print auction to raise funds towards the current refugee/migrant crisis. It is a reaction by a group of photographers to support families being uprooted from their homes in a desperate and urgent need for safety and a better life – many dying in the process of doing so. Not since the World Wars of the first half of the 20th century have we seen such an influx of people crossing international borders in a struggle to survive in order to avert death. This is a not for profit effort to engage with photography on a different level and for a good cause. All money raised will go towards the printing of the images and raising money towards an organization helping refugees/migrants on a major and impactful scale. We hope you will join us. http://www.crossingborderspicturefund.com info@crossingborderspicturefund.com Prints included in the sale from photographers Ed Kashi, Laura El Tantawy, Tanya Habjouqa, Peter Di Campo, Sara Terry, Sim Chiyin, Nichole Sobecki, Laura Boushnak and others. If you purchase …

The Year in Pictures 2011: Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan and Turkey

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The Year in Pictures 2011 The annus horribilis of 2011 is coming to a close – a year that will go down as one of dramatic upheaval and revolution alongside 1789, 1848, 1917, 1989, and now, this year. In Egypt, young revolutionaries overthrew the government of Hosni Mubarak after 31 years of subservience to a one-party state bolstered by an omnipresent muhabarata, or secret service, further bolstered by an overreaching military, after Egyptians witnessed similar events in Tunisia lead to the removal of that country’s former leader Ben Ali. Consequently, the domino theory made a surprise return as events in Egypt triggered revolts elsewhere in Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Of these, only Libya’s leader fell after rebels received aerial support from NATO war planes; Qaddafi was found hiding in a drainage canal near his hometown of Sirte (or Surt, depending on your news source and spelling) and subsequently dragged through the streets, sodomized with a knife and otherwise tormented before being shot in the head. In the Libyan conflict three photographers lost their lives, …

Interview with Dan Reimold of College Media Matters for Forthcoming Journalism Text Book

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Recently, a query from Dan Reimold of College Media Matters/University of Tampa landed in my inbox, requesting an interview for a forthcoming journalism text book he is working on now that will offer advice and experience from journalists. With his permission, I am publishing the contents of our online interview, which was conducted from July 1-5, 2011: DAN REIMOLD. What are the best pieces of advice you have received or given about capturing quality photos? AMANDA RIVKIN. Most of the best macro-level advice I have received has been from photographers-turned-editors like Santiago Lyon, the Director of Photography at The Associated Press, who has spoken to me and many, many other young photographers about the difference between taking pictures and making a picture and thinking about the frames you are taking as opposed to merely clicking away. Other photographers have undoubtedly helped along the way and too many to name, but the best advice I have found is only pertinent when it is later engrained in experience. AR. The one time I talked with photographer Chris …

From the Archive: Cordoba and “The Edge in Dissent”

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“Cordoba had the edge in dissent,” begins Pakistani writer and commentator Tariq Ali in a section devoted to the one-time intellectual capitol of Al-Andalus, the once Muslim southern half of contemporary Spain that is home to one of the most spectacular works of Islamic architecture, The Mezquita, in his larger post-September 11 work, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Much has happened in the ever-complicated relationship between mine and Ali’s country in the last week since U.S. Navy Seals raided, killed and then buried at sea Osama bin Laden, who it turns out has spent several of the past fugitive years in an elaborate compound just off Kakul Road, the drive leading to Pakistan’s elite military academy equivalent to Sandhurst in the U.K. or West Point here in the U.S. The compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was just 40 kilometers from the capital Islamabad. Not even former President and Head of the Pakistani Army Pervez Musharraf received such treatment, although he did assert he had gone jogging in the area in the past. The …

In Memoriam: Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington

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I am still at a loss for the enormous quantity of injuries to photojournalism in recent months, beginning for this generation with Emilio Morenatti of The Associated Press on August 12, 2009. An Associated Press account of the bomb “planted in the open desert terrain,” according to the American military, left Morenatti without his foot as he traveled in southern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border with AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko and a unit of the 5th Stryker Brigade. Again in southern Afghanistan, Joao Silva one of the four founding members of the famous group of South African photographers covering the end of apartheid known as “the Bang Bang club,” was hit by a mine and lost both legs, as reported October 23, 2010 by his employer The New York Times. This spring came the awful and surreal detentions of well known and intrepid New York Times conflict photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks alongside reporters Anthony Shadid and Stephen Farrell in Libya. Then obviously and most recently came the tragic deaths a whole …