High-res Using Data to Save: One doctor’s effort to understand more fully wartime trauma, with hopes of mitigating risks and improving the prognosis for those struck.  On the NYT.   A profile on the merits of making — and sharing widely — thorough databases on combat wounds and battlefield ailments, and the downside of keeping such data in disparate storehouses, largely out of reach. ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH Ian Bugh, an Army flight medic, treats Brett Sayre, a Marine infantry corporal, after a joint U.S.M.C.-Afghan patrol was hit by a hidden bomb.  Corporal Saye survived. Corporal Jacob C. Leicht, the 1,000 American service member to die in action in Afghanistan, was killed by the same blast. Corporal Leicht was a previous recipient of the Purple Heart, for wounds suffered in Iraq. He had fought to return to full duty, and to be assigned to an infantry unit in Afghanistan. Helmand Province. Spring 2010. By Tyler Hicks.

Using Data to Save: One doctor’s effort to understand more fully wartime trauma, with hopes of mitigating risks and improving the prognosis for those struck.  On the NYT.  

A profile on the merits of making — and sharing widely — thorough databases on combat wounds and battlefield ailments, and the downside of keeping such data in disparate storehouses, largely out of reach.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Ian Bugh, an Army flight medic, treats Brett Sayre, a Marine infantry corporal, after a joint U.S.M.C.-Afghan patrol was hit by a hidden bomb.  Corporal Saye survived. Corporal Jacob C. Leicht, the 1,000 American service member to die in action in Afghanistan, was killed by the same blast. Corporal Leicht was a previous recipient of the Purple Heart, for wounds suffered in Iraq. He had fought to return to full duty, and to be assigned to an infantry unit in Afghanistan. Helmand Province. Spring 2010. By Tyler Hicks.

Ever wonder how some photos get made? Did he levitate above a small craft in the first blast of a gale?

(No one there quite remembers, having been busy in the scramble to get the lines in and then the boat up and pointed where she needed to go.)

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Sixty-five or so miles out on the Atlantic, S by SE off the New England coast, as a squall hits. October 2008. By Tyler Hicks. In Field & Stream. Top, the opening spread. Bottom, original frame, made apparently by standing on the wet gunwale on the starboard side, up high, and leaning out. 

Chechnya, Inside, Up Close.

A photo essay about the lives of Chechen women on the website of The Boston Globe.

Photojournalist Diana Markosian spent the last year and half covering Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region. This year she started a personal project entitled “Goodbye My Chechnya” documenting the lives of young Chechen women as they come of age in the aftermath of war.  She writes, “For young women in Chechnya the most innocent acts could mean breaking the law.  A Chechen girl caught smoking is cause for arrest; while rumors of a couple engaging in pre-martial relations can result in her killing.  The few girls who dare to rebel become targets in the eyes of Chechen authorities.  After nearly two decades of vicious war and 70 years of Soviet rule, during which religious participation was banned, modern-day Chechnya is going through Islamic revival. The Chechen government is building mosques in every village, prayer rooms in public schools, and enforcing a stricter Islamic dress code for both men and women. This photo essay chronicles the lives of young Muslim girls who witnessed the horrors of two wars and are now coming of age in a republic that is rapidly redefining itself as a Muslim state.”

For more about the treatment of women by the current Chechen authorities, go here. For something about the perils of working toward change, read this.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Scenes from a wedding in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. By Diana Markosian.

High-res Nobody can tell the foreigners to stop what they’re doing, A few hired slaves are ruling the country. O Kabul! We will clean you from these black faces, Lines of committed believers are formed.                   --From “Kabul is set on fire,” by Hafiz Ikramuddin, Aug. 8, 2008. The lines above are from Poetry of the Taliban, an anthology of 200 poems, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Keuhn, that has been newly published by Hurst & Co. in the U.K.  The same volume will be published next month by Columbia University Press in New York. A fuller précis, with a few notes about an old and unsurprising controversy, can be found on the NYT’s At War blog, here.

Nobody can tell the foreigners to stop what they’re doing,

A few hired slaves are ruling the country.

O Kabul! We will clean you from these black faces,

Lines of committed believers are formed.

                  --From “Kabul is set on fire,” by Hafiz Ikramuddin, Aug. 8, 2008.

The lines above are from Poetry of the Taliban, an anthology of 200 poems, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Keuhn, that has been newly published by Hurst & Co. in the U.K.  The same volume will be published next month by Columbia University Press in New York. A fuller précis, with a few notes about an old and unsurprising controversy, can be found on the NYT’s At War blog, here.

This post begins with a photograph of Anton Hammerl, taken a few days before he was shot and killed in Libya, in the spring of 2011.  Let’s look at it for a moment. Then let your eyes roam. Now listen to the story behind the display above.

A few days after the top photo was made, by Unai Aranzadi, Anton was shot by forces fighting for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on the road near Brega. The men who wounded him left him to die. They rounded up three other journalists traveling in his group and abruptly drove away, abandoning a heavily bleeding and unarmed man to the desert. The Qaddafi government lied about his fate, repeatedly telling official and diplomatic enquirers that he was alive and in custody with his peers. Only when his colleagues were released from prison, after a season of negotiation lasting more than six weeks, did the truth break free.

Anton’s death was one of the Libyan revolution’s uncountable horrors. His remains have not been found. And as is the case with almost all stories of violence, his story does not end at the scene of the crime, or neatly. It was not simply a tale of battlefield chaos, anonymous villains and the cruel and unnecessary end of a decent man.  Its effects reverberate, and will for at least a generation.

Why? Because Anton was survived by his wife, Penny Sukhraj, and their three young children, who live in London.  He was a freelancer, not a staff photographer for a newspaper, wire service or magazine. This means that his family — which has lost him as a husband, father and breadwinner — has no institutional support.  

And this is a reason for the auction, organized by Friends of Anton and to be hosted by Christiane Amanpour, that will be held next week at Christie’s in New York. Scores of prints by many of the world’s best known photographers - Robert Capa, Platon, Joao Silva, Kate Brooks, Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario, Sebastiao Salgado, and many more - will be offered. They are scenes from abroad, scenes from here in the states, portraits, landscapes, and much more. They come from quiet glades and vicious firefights, from the desert, the forest, the cities and the sea. Among them are works by Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, who were killed in Libya, also by pro-Qaddafi fighters, a few weeks after Anton died.

Don’t rely on the small sample here. Go to the Friends of Anton site and look. Some of these photos could hold your gaze for hours, and will still seem fresh should you look back in an hour, a week or a year. The proceeds from their sale will go to Penny’s children.

The last two years have been nightmarish for the cadre of journalists who worked as Anton did. Naturally, people ask: What can I do? In my own case, frankly, I do not think Suzanne and I can afford one of these prints at the auction, and I am already blessed with crowded walls, as Suzanne and friends I work beside have over the years given me prints from the shared work, which hang in the shed where I am typing this today. A black-and-white print of the portrait by Tyler, of an Afghan National Police officer in Uruzgan Province in 2007, is looking down on me from my right, from above a shelf of munitions scraps. The image by Chris Hondros, made on the road not far from where Anton was killed, in the last weeks of Chris’s life, is tucked beside my left knee underneath my work bench, waiting to be dropped off at the frame shop in town. The other frames will have to be rearranged to make space for it.

My shed, in short, is out of wall. So we decided to do something else. Late last month the Overseas Press Club, to my and most everyone else’s surprise, gave me an award, which came with a $1,000 prize. That money was unexpected, which meant it was unbudgeted; Suzanne and I had not been counting on it for raising our own children. So Suzanne and I talked. We knew well that although the prize was awarded in my name, this was in many ways an embarrassment, because I do not work alone. I work for a bank of gifted and committed editors, and with people in conflict zones who share their stories or tips with me, or help me with rides, advice, bunk space and translations. All of them make each day, and each story, come together. Throughout it all I wander the beats side-by-side with photographers, just like Anton, who share each risk and every step. It is with them that the best work has flowed. And often when I work, our family is at risk, just like Anton’s was.

And is.

For these reasons, and others, this week Suzanne and I donated the $1,000 from the Overseas Press Club to Friends of Anton. It is a small thing, barely a drop when considered against a single-parent family’s needs. But we hope it might help, and that you will help, too. If any of you can afford the time or a few of your dimes,  please consider visiting Friends of Anton on-line. Then consider attending the auction or making an absentee or telephonic bid.

Great photography outlasts those who do it. In Anton’s case, so very sadly so. Those who carry away these prints will have that work, and will have helped good people, too.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

The photo at top is of Anton, by Unai Aranzadi. The bottom six images, clockwise from upper left, are by Tyler Hicks, Chris Hondros, Tim Hetherington, Joao Silva, David Burnett and Robert Capa. Courtesy of Friends of Anton. (In the case of the photograph by David Burnett, Tumblr’s photo-spread feature callously auto-crops it in the display above. Click on the photograph to be treated to the full frame.)