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October 10, 2005

What A Difference A JPG Makes

There's a rainbow before me.

So Stewart asks me if I know beFrank, the blog of course. And I think for a moment and realize he's not talking about Barney Frank or Joe Frank. I say no. But now I do know and I'm glad of it. I have discovered photoblogs.

When I was a kid, Pops bought the whole Time Life series on photojournalism and cinematography. If he hadn't sent me into the closet so often with his bulk film loader, I might have had enough interest in the subject to have become a fearless photog. Alas, I fell for the charm of a different kind of technology, but I did learn how to properly pronounce Henri Cartier-Bresson. So I've always had an attraction to the power of the lens.

In Boston 12 years ago, there was an exhibit at the Central Library that reminded me, once again, of the power of the photograph. Much of that which caught my attention was war photography. There was so much of it, and each shot was so vivid, that it gave me the idea of a cable war channel. If we had a cable war channel with photojournalists covering every hot spot on the planet, it would leaven our understanding of conflict. It would add a dimension to our understanding of our civilization. Instead, the axciom of war being the thing that teaches Americans geography is laden with guilt because we only follow our own wars. We forget how many people die in the world for no good reason, or for good reasons other than our own. There is no such thing as a senseless death. Human brutality is laden with human meaning, it's just that we don't pay much attention and are all to often illiterate of it. That's why it's so easy in the United States to sustain protests of outrage over war. We are not so consistently moral and pacifist as we are mortified by violence - like children wandering into the wrong bathroom would be seeing the raw sex of their peers not knowing it is the focus of human behavior. We need to know how much death goes around, and that's why Michael Yon is something of an inspiration to me.

I imagine that Yon would be an inspiration to the photobloggers as well. They are subsumed into the action of the moment. Behind the lens they become fearless. It is their instrument. These are the kinds of people we need to be behind. If citizen journalism is to be and the blogger base will eventually provide cover and support, there has got to be more than just writing in the mix. Check out and support photobloggers.

Posted by mbowen at October 10, 2005 08:19 AM

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Posted by: Gregg Jackson at October 20, 2005 04:52 PM