Media Studies 2AB Photojournalism: Topic

Eddie Adams, the photographer who took the shocking photograph of a prisoner being executed on the street, talks about why he took it and the unexpected consequenses.

Source : Youtube uploaded 29 June 2008

Photographs do more than document history — they make it.

At TED University, Jonathan Klein of Getty Images shows some of the most iconic, and talks about what happens when a generation sees an image so powerful it can't look away — or back. Running time 6min

Philip Blenkinsop is an award winning Australian photo journalist who has been based in Asia since 1989.

"The wonderfully chaotic world of Philip Blenkinsop"

Noor agency - Philip was one of the founding members

In the video interviewbelow, he discusses his work as a photo journalist.

From the UNHCR site, British photojournalist and UNHCR Nansen Refugee award winner Alixandra Farrina describes the scenes she faces every day as she documents the effects of flooding on the people of Pakistan. Alixandra and Philip Blenkinsop are both founders of Noor agency.

The Nansen prize: Documenting the Displaced - Salima's story

Photographer Nic Ut.    

In one of the most iconic photographs of the Vietnam War, a group of children with Napalm burns flee along a road. A lot has been said about the cropping of the image (see above).

This is another view of the scene. The footage was shot by ITN at the time the photograph was being taken. The filmographer of this footage would have been just out of the frame of Nic's photo and to the side of the road. Click on the photo below to go to the footage.

This is what David Burnett, one of the news photographers there at the time has to say "the guy on the right changing film is a Vietnamese photographer, probably military, and is definately not me. I was, for the record, still about 100 feet back of Nick when this shot was made, struggling not with an M3 or M4 (easy to load) but with a Leica III ... screwmount and no flip up back door to align the film, ergo... tough to load. I wouldnt read too much into the psychology of the crop. For years, cropping was standard practice, going back to the days when cameras were themselves kind of imprecise, so if you shot wide, you had plenty of space to crop down to the elemental bits of the picture. In this case, there was very little discussion about the picture at the time it came out of the dark room other than... "You did good work today, Nick Ut " from Horst Faas (I was at AP souping my film for the NY TImes that day) ... and im sure in looking at the picture, whomever was the editor, either Horst or Carl Robinson, they just did what photo editors had always done: crop the "unnecessary" bits out, and leave the key elements of the picture in tact. Then it went off to be wired at the PTT office.. and the rest, is.. more or less, photographic history. I wrote a blog piece last year on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Trang Bang bombing, and the rather amazing dinner in Toronto that took place to mark it (http://werejustsayin.blogspot.... At the dinner was Nick Ut (who has remained like an uncle to Kim Phuc these forty years), Chris Wain - the ITN correspondent who poured water over her burns, and later helped to get her moved to a proper burn unit for care in Saigon (and which surely saved her life), Perry Kretz - the former STERN photographer who managed to get her a passport, and flown to Germany for treatment of her scar tissue, in her teen years; a 91 year old French Canadian nurse who had cared for her at the burn unit in Saigon, and perhaps most amazing of all, the Canadian customs officer who, when Kim and her newlywed husband were returning to Cuba from their Moscow honeymoon, helped them 'defect' and eventually resettle in Toronto. There is no doubt that little girl, terribly burned during the napalm attack, wouldn't be alive today if not for that photograph. At the time no one knew who "the girl in the picture" was.... and in finding out who she was, in putting a name on that face, she was given a second chance at life."