James Nachtwey grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science (1966-70). Images from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement had a powerful effect on him and were instrumental in his decision to become a photographer. He has worked aboard ships in the Merchant Marine, and while teaching himself photography, he was an apprentice news film editor and a truck driver.

In 1976 he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984. He was associated with Black Star from 1980 - 1985 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII. (Bio)

To learn more about James Nachtwey, I strongly recommend watching the documentary War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001).

About Aaron Romine:

In Aaron Romine’s recent paintings his characters have become stand-ins for something larger. Although obviously recognizable as specific people (they are all actually his friends), the work is contemplative and the scenes are a commentary on current culture. His painstaking paintings have become psychological allegories. He has looked past pure sexuality into how his subjects relate to each other, pushing their relationships to a level of intimacy. While influenced by such artists as Manet, Piazetta, Gaugin, Sargent, and Velazquez, his work has recently veered away from (strictly) historical references. (PragueBiennale.org).

First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.

Previously on Skandalon

I first found this photo over at Washington’s Blog. The post where it appears makes a (short) argument about the ban of media coverage apparently imposed by BP and US officials and the alleged suspension of the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution it represents. At the very end of the post, the author seems to put forward a legal argument supporting the publication of such pictures as the one shown above:

In addition, use of such images is also protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Specifically, reproduction is protected under the “Mai Lai/Zapruder line of cases”, since:

(1) The images are of historical significance;

(2) They show facts which cannot be conveyed effectively in any other manner, and

(3) Therefore the Constitution trumps copyright law. (more)

Now, what exactly are those “Mai Lai/Zapruder line of cases” ? It’s not a law, but a “line of cases” and it could plausibly be used to challenge the ban of some media access to the site of the catastrophe (see The New York Times: “BP and Officials Block Some Coverage of Golf Oil Spill”). More thoughts about this over at Aphelis.

“A video on YouTube gets 50% of its views in the first 6 days it is on the site, according to data from analytics firm TubeMogul. After 20 days, a YouTube video has had 75% of its total views.

That’s a really short life span for YouTube videos, and it’s probably getting shorter. In 2008, it took 14 days for a video to get 50% of its views and 44 days to get 75% of its views.

Why? In the last two years, YouTube has improved its user interface, which helps videos get seen early on. Also, the world has gotten more adept at embedding and sharing videos in real-time via Twitter and Facebook. (And there’s probably more video to choose from.)” (more)

Ephemeral culture.

“Hermes as Harpocrates, the God of mystical silence, portrayed as the mystagogue accompanying the souls on their return to the Monad. ‘Silentium deum cole - monas manet in se’; worship God through silence - the Oneness remains in itself.” (more)

“Achille Bocchi (Achilles Bocchius) (1488-1562) of Bologna was an Italian humanist writer, administrator and teacher of law at the University of Bologna. He is best known for his emblem book Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere from 1555, which “takes as its subject the whole of universal knowledge: physics, metaphysics, theology, dialectic, Love, Life and Death, packaging them under the veil of fables and myths.” (wikipedia)