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Summary:

Ed Kashi is charismatic proponent of photojournalism. In this FotoTV video he is spell-bindingly direct and passionate about his work. For him it all began as a teenager wanting to tell stories, and then going to college to learn to be a writer. In the freshman year the students had to make photographs too. And the young Kashi had never done this before. So he borrowed money from his family and rented a Ricoh. That was the beginning of a switch from words to pictures.

That’s why he calls himself a visual storyteller and why he’s been telling stories now from all over the world for over thirty years.

His motivation is a compassionate and engaged interest in social and political themes. His general approach is to choose an issue and work on it in depth. And by ‘in depth’ we’re not talking about days, weeks or months: We’re talking about five years working in the Niger Delta on oil, development and militancy, about eight years on aging in America.

His first significant project was on the protestant community in Northern Ireland.  The resulting images appearing in a small, self-published book. This led to his working in 1991 for the National Geographic Magazine. A 26-week contract covering the Kurds was followed by a project on the Jewish settlers on the West Bank.

This project, however, was brought to a sudden end by the then rapidly expanding Internet. It never occurred to Kashi, and probably to most other photojournalists at that time, that the subjects of their work would actually see and read about themselves. In this very early case it was the words accompanying the images on the Internet that caused consternation amongst the settler community. They told to get out!

Beginning in 1995 Ed realized that he wanted to look at his own culture in America. He chose an issue that will increasingly affect all western cultures, at many levels, and for the coming twenty to thirty years: Aging - a demographic shift of gigantic proportions. Many older people will remain fit and full of life. But many will be poor, depressed and lonely. We will need massive number of caregivers, not only health specialists but also simple companions and helpers. Kashi’s involvement here is almost tangible; it shines through what he says and in some of his most moving images.

Moving images, this time in the literal sense of video, is another subject on which Kashi has interesting things to say. While he uses video himself, he makes an impassioned plea for the value of still photography. “Moving images wash over you – they are passive. They don’t require much of the viewer. A still photograph requires the viewer to work, to look carefully. You need to look for detail. You need to analyse. You need to read some kind of contextual information to understand what is going on.  It demands that you think. It’s almost meditative.”

In 2009 Ed Kashi published ‘Three’, a book of trypticons. It was a dramatic departure from photojournalism. Perhaps inspired by the multiple screens common in multimedia events, the photographs in each set of three may come from entirely different places and siituation, but they share something that makes a new statement, gives a new insight.

Despite the shrinkage of printed ‘real estate’ for visual storytelling, photojournalism, according to Ed Kashi, is more alive and vibrant in all corners of the globe than ever before. He is full of encouragement for young photographers. Their work appears mostly online: “It’s just that we haven’t yet figured out a way to make a living out of this!”

Ed’s philosophy, and the message of this video is that ultimately, to make good photographs you have to tap into your creative soul, into your passions. Know what is it you want to do with your work. The camera is only a tool.

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Summary:

Today, photographer and photojournalist Harald Schmitt shares with FotoTV viewers some of his most memorable stories of his assignment work in socialist countries as a photographer for Stern Magazine.

Schmitt was accredited as a photographer in the former DDR, German Democratic Republic. It was there that he developed a great interest in socialist countries, which not only limited him to the German Democratic Republic. His assignment work for Stern Magazine soon took him to Latvia, Lithuania, the former Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. One incident in particular, which Schmitt recalls in great detail, took place in Asia, China to be exact, at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Working as a photographer proved to be very difficult in the German Democratic Republic for Schmitt, as he had to endure a long process of bureaucracy to receive a permit to be able to travel away from home to photograph a story. Schmitt soon took matters into his own hands--even though he could face serious consequences-- and explains how he just drove off to any location in Germany he desired to complete a story without giving official notice of departure, something that the authorities required of every citizen. Schmitt explains, “Otherwise it would not have been possible for me to work as a photographer without the freedom to travel, just sitting and waiting for the authorization.”

Schmitt was present the night after the infamous student demonstration that purportedly left over one thousand people dead. After capturing just a few shots of the turmoil, he sent his wife away with the film he had taken so it would not be confiscated if he were detained and searched. Soon after his wife's departure, there was a total ban of photography issued on state radio, a message than ran continuously throughout the day. The ban lasted 3-4 days and if these orders were disobeyed, anyone photographing would be immediately arrested and locked up. Needless to say, Schmitt did not disobey the order and did not dare take a photograph since soldiers, spread out every 20 or 30 meters scrutinizing everything that was going on, occupied the whole city.

Schmitt was even present during the famous speech that Mikhail Gorbachev, then head of state of the former USSR gave in 1991. It was also that infamous moment that Boris Yeltsin publicly berated Gorbachev and took over power, and Schmitt documented those moments in time. It does not happen that often that one photographer can capture so many historical moments, but he did just that. Schmitt says he is fortunate to have magazines that are willing to report the stories happening around the world for all to see. Without that aspect there would be too many injustices and moments that would go unseen.

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In the third installment of this special FotoTV series, historic journalist and photographer Horst Faas shares a little about his career working on international assignments around the world's most dangerous political hot spots, while sharing photos from some of his greatest work from exhibits.

Faas touches poignantly on the subject of political turmoil and unrest between the Vietcong and ordinary village people. Either the civilian population was either for or against the unjust or inhumane ruling, or they were forced into submission if they tried to show support for anyone else but their own government.

Teary eyed, Faas hauntingly explains that he witnessed innocent people suffer horrible and cruel deaths, having their villages burnt down while cuddling their children as they lay burnt death to dying in their arms. There was nothing anybody could do, not even Faas, a photojournalist. All he could do is document the atrocities and hope that his images would be seen around the world and that they would echo his own unimaginable horror at seeing such events taking place to normal civilians with everyday lives, from farmers to housewives, to grandparents.

Often the cities were being bombed by air to surface bombs with Napalm even before the troops marched in. Without much protection or defense it was an unthinkable terror for the villagers. Villages being destroyed, men, women and children being shot to death, whether they tried to flee or just stood their in shock--there was carnage was everywhere the could see.

He also discusses the use of Agent Orange a herbicidal warfare that was used to defoliate the trees and jungles. The effects of the use are horrifying and the results can still be seen today. As Faas explains it, "All wars are Barbaric and Vietnam, which I've seen in great detail was an exceptional barbaric war".