Photos from Central African Republic

By a young French photojournalist recently killed there. See here.
P.s. They may not all have been taken in CAR, but I think most of them were.

Pictures of tornado damage

Here [hat tip: C. Bertram at CT].
Be sure to scroll down to #23, which is a striking image of storm clouds.

A famous photograph

Remember the picture of a long line of people waiting to try to get onto a helicopter departing from a rooftop as Saigon "fell" in 1975? The Hong Kong-based Dutch photographer who took the picture, Hugh Van Es, recently died. As this BBC piece notes, the photo is sometimes mistakenly thought to depict the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. (In fact, it was another building, not the embassy.)

Photo of the day

Two baboons sitting on rocks in a South African park. Here.

The Enderlin affair

The Weekly Standard is not one of my usual browsing stops, but this piece by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet about the long-running journalistic and legal controversy in France surrounding an iconic image from the second intifida is worth a glance if you're interested in journalism, France, and/or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Caution: she has a definite point of view, and without having read anything else on this case I'm not in a position to endorse what she says.

Photojournalism and democracy

The current Perspectives on Politics (June 2008, pp.372-73) has a review of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007).

The reviewer, Michael J. Shapiro, praises various aspects of the book and notes that its argument is that "photojournalism participates effectively in the constitution of liberal democracy." Shapiro says that the authors discuss something they call "visual democracy," but unfortunately he does not explain very clearly exactly how the authors contend that photojournalism and democracy are connected.

Instead, Shapiro finds fault with the authors' alleged lack of theoretical sophistication, complaining that they refer to the "obviousness" of photographic images -- something that, according to Shapiro, a careful reading of Roland Barthes and Jacques Rancière should have led them to avoid. He grumbles that there are virtually no "theoretically guided analyses of photographic images" and moans that the authors' "impoverished notion of ideology" will disappoint "those who reside in a post-Lacan, post-Althusser, post-Zizek intellectual world."

With all due respect to Professor Shapiro, I would have preferred to hear more about exactly what the authors are arguing and a little bit less about their insufficient appropriation of the alleged insights of post-structuralist theory.

It so happens that the editor of Perspectives on Politics, James Johnson -- who, I should note, does not edit the book review section of the journal -- has a blog called (Notes on) Politics, Theory and Photography. The link is here.