United Kingdom // Current TV

Eve Arnold, who came to be regarded as a grande dame of postwar photojournalism for her bold, revealing images of subjects as diverse as Marilyn Monroe and migratory potato pickers, died on Wednesday in London at the age of 99. Born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, Ms. Arnold had lived in Great Britain since 1961.

Her death was announced by Magnum Photos, the photography cooperative to which she had belonged for more than a half-century. She was among the first women Magnum hired to make pictures. Ms. Arnold was a leading light in what is considered to be the golden age of news photography, when magazines like “Life” and “Look” commanded attention with big, arresting pictures provided by photographers who included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White.

Acclaimed for capturing celebrities in intimate moments after winning their trust, Ms. Arnold developed a particular rapport with Marilyn Monroe, the subject of a book of Arnold photographs. Foreshadowing the celebrity portfolios of photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Ms. Arnold captured Joan Crawford squirming into a girdle, Malcolm X collecting fistfuls of dollars at a rally in Washington and James Cagney and his wife doing an impromptu dance in a barn.

But other pictures, just as memorable, were of the unfamous. Among the more than 750,000 Ms. Arnold made were pictures in a South African shantytown, a Havana brothel and a Moscow psychiatric hospital. She documented a small Long Island town, Miller Place, and the first minutes of a baby’s life. She was an official photographer on 40 movie sets.

Her many honors include the Order of the British Empire and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. She was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and named a “Master Photographer” by the International Center of Photography in New York, considered by many to be the world’s most prestigious photographic honor.

This piece includes a number of high-resolution black-and-white photographs, as well as two documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/eve-arnold-legendary-photographer-of-illuminating-images-dies-at-99/Eve Arnold, who came to be regarded as a grande dame of postwar photojournalism for... more

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Remembering Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from esophageal cancer at the age of 62, ended one of the greater intellectual careers of the last 40 years. Born in Portsmouth, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Hitchens started his career as a Trotskyite at “The New Statesman,” working along with noted authors, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, who would become his lifelong friends. In the early 1980s, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 2007, and began working for liberal magazine “The Nation,” writing some of his earliest attacks on the conservative government and American foreign policy.

A prolific author, Hitchens left behind a massive body of critical writing, with more than a dozen books and hundreds of essays targeting everyone from the British Monarchy to Bill Clinton to George Orwell to God, usually with wit and more often than not, vicious and cutting remarks. Even those who hated his politics could not help but admire his skill as a writer and ability to craft a sharp turn of phrase, and many called him a friend.

Perhaps his most famous book was “The Missionary Position,” a scathing attack on Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity church, an organization that he called a cult. Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a “fraud” and accused her of glorifying poverty to enrich herself and the Catholic church, rather than truly helping the poor. The book infuriated Roman Catholics around the world, as well as politicians and celebrities who he claimed had used the charity and her reputation to mask their own evil deeds.

A later work, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” accused the former Secretary of State of “war crimes,” and argued that Kissinger should be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” for his involvement in atrocities in Southeast Asia and Central America. As a critic of the Bush administration’s use of torture, Hitchens filmed himself being waterboarded to demonstrate the cruelty of the practice. Hitchens claimed that, “The official lie about this treatment … is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning.”

Hitchens had an enviable career arc that began with his own brand of fiery journalism at Britain’s “New Statesman” and then made its way to America, where he wrote for everyone from “The Atlantic” and “Harper’s” to “Slate and “The New York Times Book Review.” He was a legend on the speakers’ circuit, could debate just about anyone on anything and won innumerable awards.

Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, a troublemaker and was a gift, if it dare be said, from God.

This piece includes color photographs, a photo-gallery and two documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/remembering-christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from... more

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Visions: Tim Hetherington’s Theater of War

ast week, an upcoming gallery show of work by the late photographer Tim Hetherington was announced, the inaugural exhibition of The Bronx Documentary Center that was founded earlier this year. The exhibition, titled “Visions,” is a collection of never-before-seen photos by Hetherington, a British-American photographer who lived in Brooklyn. He was a longtime Vanity Fair and CNN contributor who died in April while covering the conflict in Libya, along with fellow conflict photographer and Brooklyn resident Chris Hondros.

It is amazingly ironic that the announcement of the exhibition of Tim Hetherington’s work coincided precisely with published reports that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the erratic, provocative dictator who ruled Libya for 42 years, had finally met a violent and vengeful death in the hands of the Libyan forces that drove him from power.

Hetherington was most famous for his Academy Award-nominated 2010 documentary “Restrepo,” which he filmed with Sebastian Junger in 2007. The film follows the Army platoon assigned to what was then the most dangerous posting in Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, to clear it of insurgents and gain the trust of the local populace. In the course of the film, the platoon builds a new outpost they name after Juan Sebastian Restrepo, a comrade who was killed during the early days of the 15-month assignment.

On April 20, Hetherington was trailing rebels in the besieged coastal city of Misurata in Libya, when he and Hondros were killed in an explosion from a rocket-propelled grenade. He left behind 40 rolls of undeveloped 220mm film. The negatives revealed a fascinating mix of what Tim called “the theater of war,” men strutting with their guns, as well as landscapes, graffiti, and men firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades in battle. And a vase of plastic flowers in a bullet-marked room. Seventeen of the prints will be on display in the Bronx Documentary Center show as 36- by 30-inch prints hanging from the ceiling on two large wood panels, beginning October 22nd.

This piece includes a number of high-resolution color photographs, a remarkable photo-gallery and five documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/visions-tim-hetheringtons-theater-of-war/ast week, an upcoming gallery show of work by the late photographer Tim Hetherington... more

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