Babel @ Bedlam

The Evangelizers Have Taken Over The Asylum. #newsrw - A Few Thoughts FWIW

2012-02-05T12:41:00.002-08:00

"The Dinosaurs are still roaming the planet, but now they can see the meteorite approaching" (with apologies to @brian_condon - scroll down for link to relevant Audioboo...)

It is always a bitter-sweet moment, isn’t it? The one when you realise that everyone else has finally got wind of your great big secret and no matter how loud you shout: “I told you so!” - they are just not listening.

Of course they are not; they are all too busy, playing with the wow new toy you kept telling them that they needed, way, way back in the day, back when they were all too busy, still scoffing.

Understandable. You used to be part of a pretty small, but immeasurably cool, gang who were in on something which was going to be really, really big; just maybe not quite yet. There is the camaraderie, the complicity; let’s face it, there is the darned smugness. Just you guys wait! You are going to see how right we were! You are going to have to eat your Twitter-dissing, social media scorning words.

Actually, there has been no time for apologies. Everyone is far too busy, checking in on foursquare, replying to their DMs, uploading their latest pics to Flickr. Those of us who were well in the vanguard will just have to sigh and be content with the knowledge that we did indeed predict the revolution and that everyone else is still playing catch-up, more or less.

There were hundreds of nodding heads and complicit smiles at the News Rewired conference in London on Friday when New York Times Social Media Editor Liz Heron underlined the fact that all of us brave and hardy evangelizers were finally in huge demand, from the very colleagues who had once jeered our Twitter addiction.

I glimpsed a lot of very old, or should I perhaps say, “experienced”, evangelists in the room. I was able to catch up with several friends and contacts whom I met at my own, very first social media conference in May 2009, back when I was the one staying up until the wee hours of the night before, stuffing the goodie bags.

They included the legendary Christian Payne (@Documentally – many happy returns!) Jon Gripton, then of Sky, now at the Beeb, and Laura Oliver, back then still a stalwart of journalism.co.uk, organisers of News Rewired, and since then, cleverly snapped up by a canny Guardian.

I also caught up with the beguiling but terrifyingly bright Brian Condon, broadband campaigner and co-founder of #C4CC. Brian’s lively Audioboo which captures the #newsrw energy and insight can be found here.

This conference had all the right ingredients: ideal venue at MSN HQ in SW1; great programme, top speakers, an extremely lively back channel, good sarnies and covetable stuff in the delegates’ bag – (Note to event organisers: can’t do a decent baggie? Just don’t bother?!)

It was a relief to be discussing the real challenges created by the new open media (personally, I find “social” to be a limiting term?) although there is still far too little candid discussion of real-life business models, ROI or the scary drain on resources which the monitoring & filtering of our new media cacophony inevitably occasions.

Liz Heron’s assertion that the NYT has a whole team of busy-bee editors “hand-selecting tweets” stretched my credibility. Can the NYT really afford such a luxury? Can any media organisation? There was an awful lot of cooing about what great stuff my old stomping ground, the Guardian, and the BBC are doing, social-media wise, with only a few voices on the back channel pointing out that the Scott Trust and the license fee mean neither organisation really needs to worry about the bottom line.

We did have a stimulating session on paid-for-content models which provided my personal highlight contribution of the day from François Nel. Not only did he quote Claude Lévi Strauss on reciprocity, he also showed super cute pics of his twin nephews.

It seems a tad churlish to highlight specific prezos from an overall excellent day but, in no particular order, I would like to thank the following for stimulating my aged brain: @sifter; @darrenwaters; @dougiegyro; @khaddon; @currybet; @kevglobal; @mikegoldsmith; @natelanxon; @fieldproducer; @rondiorio and @tomstandage.

Great to catch up with i.a. @GabrielleNYC @andrewgrill, to meet IRL (congrats on you know what btw!) @Sarah_Booker & to meet among some rather smart ladies: @HelenRoxburgh of @economiamag, @caroline beavon & @SallyGriffith.

There was excellent live-blogging and tweeting from the inimitable @adders and his partner-in-crime, @egrommet. The hosts, including @joelmgunter, @rmcathy @SarahMarshall3 @KTKing @peteclifton and supremo @johncthompson all made it look like a swan gliding effortlessly through the choppy waters of our noisy new media environment. As we say #Twitter: kudos.

The Evangelizers Have Taken Over The Asylum. #newsrw - A Few Thoughts FWIW

2012-02-05T12:41:00.001-08:00

"The Dinosaurs are still roaming the planet, but now they can see the meteorite approaching" (with apologies to @brian_condon - scroll down for link to relevant Audioboo...)

It is always a bitter-sweet moment, isn’t it? The one when you realise that everyone else has finally got wind of your great big secret and no matter how loud you shout: “I told you so!” - they are just not listening.

Of course they are not; they are all too busy, playing with the wow new toy you kept telling them that they needed, way, way back in the day, back when they were all too busy, still scoffing.

Understandable. You used to be part of a pretty small, but immeasurably cool, gang who were in on something which was going to be really, really big; just maybe not quite yet. There is the camaraderie, the complicity; let’s face it, there is the darned smugness. Just you guys wait! You are going to see how right we were! You are going to have to eat your Twitter-dissing, social media scorning words.

Actually, there has been no time for apologies. Everyone is far too busy, checking in on foursquare, replying to their DMs, uploading their latest pics to Flickr. Those of us who were well in the vanguard will just have to sigh and be content with the knowledge that we did indeed predict the revolution and that everyone else is still playing catch-up, more or less.

There were hundreds of nodding heads and complicit smiles at the News Rewired conference in London on Friday when New York Times Social Media Editor Liz Heron underlined the fact that all of us brave and hardy evangelizers were finally in huge demand, from the very colleagues who had once jeered our Twitter addiction.

I glimpsed a lot of very old, or should I perhaps say, “experienced”, evangelists in the room. I was able to catch up with several friends and contacts whom I met at my own, very first social media conference in May 2009, back when I was the one staying up until the wee hours of the night before, stuffing the goodie bags.

They included the legendary Christian Payne (@Documentally – many happy returns!) Jon Gripton, then of Sky, now at the Beeb, and Laura Oliver, back then still a stalwart of journalism.co.uk, organisers of News Rewired, and since then, cleverly snapped up by a canny Guardian.

I also caught up with the beguiling but terrifyingly bright Brian Condon, broadband campaigner and co-founder of #C4CC. Brian’s lively Audioboo which captures the #newsrw energy and insight can be found here.

This conference had all the right ingredients: ideal venue at MSN HQ in SW1; great programme, top speakers, an extremely lively back channel, good sarnies and covetable stuff in the delegates’ bag – (Note to event organisers: can’t do a decent baggie? Just don’t bother?!)

It was a relief to be discussing the real challenges created by the new open media (personally, I find “social” to be a limiting term?) although there is still far too little candid discussion of real-life business models, ROI or the scary drain on resources which the monitoring & filtering of our new media cacophony inevitably occasions.

Liz Heron’s assertion that the NYT has a whole team of busy-bee editors “hand-selecting tweets” stretched my credibility. Can the NYT really afford such a luxury? Can any media organisation? There was an awful lot of cooing about what great stuff my old stomping ground, the Guardian, and the BBC are doing, social-media wise, with only a few voices on the back channel pointing out that the Scott Trust and the license fee mean neither organisation really needs to worry about the bottom line.

We did have a stimulating session on paid-for-content models which provided my personal highlight contribution of the day from François Nel. Not only did he quote Claude Lévi Strauss on reciprocity, he also showed super cute pics of his twin nephews.

It seems a tad churlish to highlight specific prezos from an overall excellent day but, in no particular order, I would like to thank the following for stimulating my aged brain: @sifter; @darrenwaters; @dougiegyro; @khaddon; @currybett; @kevglobal; @mikegoldsmith; @natelanxon; @fieldproducer; @rondiorio and @tomstandage.

Great to catch up with i.a. @GabrielleNYC @andrewgrill, to meet IRL (congrats on you know what btw!) @Sarah_Booker & to meet among some rather smart ladies: @HelenRoxburgh of @economiamag, @caroline beavon & @SallyGriffith.

There was excellent live-blogging and tweeting from the inimitable @adders and his partner-in-crime, @egrommet. The hosts, including @joelmgunter, @rmcathy @SarahMarshall3 @KTKing @peteclifton and supremo @johncthompson all made it look like a swan gliding effortlessly through the choppy waters of our noisy new media environment. As we say #Twitter: kudos.

Give The Hockney Hordes A Miss In Favour of John Keane's Powerful Political Paintings

2012-01-24T07:13:00.000-08:00

"Figure at an Inquiry No 2" 2010
Image (c) - John Keane, Flowers Galleries, London

Are you going to the Hockney? Well, of course you are. It’s the blockbuster of the moment and jolly good fun it is too. Most of the critics seemed to love it and I have to admit that I loved it too.

The majority of the pictures on show are of one of my own favourite parts of the world: the Yorkshire Wolds, just inland from Bridlington where Hockney lives these days, in what used to be called the East Riding. It is a subtly beguiling, still virtually undiscovered, stunning swathe of proper English countryside. I urge you to go.

I am not so sure I urge you to go to the Royal Academy however. Spectacular as the humongous landscapes and ingenious i-Pad drawings are, it is almost impossible to get a proper look at them, given the number of people the Academy seems determined to squish into the show. In many cases, you are simply not able to get far enough away from the bigger pictures to appreciate them. Besides, advance tickets are already reportedly sold out until March.

I do, however, urge you to go to another show, just around the corner from the RA, in Cork Street. Flowers Gallery is staging the first solo show for three years of paintings by John Keane (b.1954), the sometimes controversial and always thought-provoking British artist who first came to international attention with his appointment as the Imperial War Museum’s official artist during the Gulf War.

I have already written on this forum about Keane’s arresting 2006 series entitled “Guantanamerica”. The new exhibition, “Scratching the Surface, Joining the Dots” which runs until February 11th, seems to me to mark a stylistic development for the always experimental Keane but it retains his markedly political themes.

Many of the new paintings refer to recent events in the Middle East, with a particularly striking series of images of Tony Blair’s appearance in front of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War (see above). I was particularly struck by a rather smaller canvas, depicting just the former prime minister’s hands. Next time you see Tony on telly, just keep an eye on them. Those very mobile hands speak volumes.

The images of Tony being interrogated also strike a theme which is topical and current, as we continue – and will carry on for many months to come - watching the great and the good of Fleet Street and its putative environs giving their own evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press.

But Keane has always been a particularly prescient artist. More than a dozen years ago, his 1999 series entitled: “Making a Killing” featured ever so slightly grotesque portraits of Rupert Murdoch, Diana, Princess of Wales and Charles Saatchi.

The title of the series was always a bit too bald for me but it did not detract in any way from the power of the images, many of them abstracted from extremely familiar television shots, such as the doe-eyed Diana of the infamous “three-in-the-marriage” Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.

Keane’s latest works are more powerful still, with the commentary all the more potent for its subtlety. I had to stare at one canvas for ages before I realised why the scene looked so disturbingly familiar. Finally, it hit me: it was a still from the “Rules of Engagement” video of a 2007 US helicopter attack in Baghdad which killed 12 people, including two Reuters staffers. The video was, of course, controversially released to the world by Wikileaks in 2010.

Keane’s two images from the video, which remains at the centre of the global debate on censorship, freedom of expression and the internet are entitled “Hindsight”. Whatever your own stance on the latter debate, I sincerely hope you can find the time to view this important and stimulating exhibition.

On the Media - Wikileaks & Journalism: “The Julian Show” rolls on.... (& on)

2011-01-12T03:01:00.001-08:00

Good afternoon, good evening and good night!

Once upon a time, I, too, had my own little perch in the daily news conference at the Guardian. I would squat inelegantly in the corner of a windowsill, overlooking the Farringdon Road, nervously awaiting my own 90 seconds of impatient attention, while some of the biggest beasts of Fleet Street – Roger Alton, Alan Rusbridger – bestrode the pokey editor’s office.

So it was difficult not to feel a rush of nostalgia when the paper’s deputy editor Ian Katz lifted the lid on some of the excitement engendered by the Guardian’s recent entanglement with Wikileaks. Katz was on the panel at the Frontline Club’s first On the Media event of 2011, entitled “Wikileaks – holding up a mirror to journalism”. The event was covered, live, in admirable detail, by the erudite Brian Condon.

It was an often heated discussion, with the Guardian accused at one stage of: “playing Julian Assange and essentially betraying him”. Read the much cited Vanity Fair piece here.

But precisely there, with Julian Assange, lies the rub. Katz himself admitted that Julian: “is a colourful character” and just what, exactly, was the Guardian supposed to do, when their collaborator himself became the story?

For David Aaronovitch, also on the panel, Assange is “a phenomenon of the modern era”. He is itinerant, arrogant, aloof, cool. “Throw in a Swedish sex story […] he was never not going to be interesting”. Indeed.

And here, for me, is where “The Julian Show” has now, sadly, obscured so many of the very significant implications of the Wikileaks phenomenon: for free speech, for accountability and transparency and for best possible journalistic practice. “The Julian Show” is the very model of the indolent, personality-based, sleb-led journalism that so many newspapers and on-line media outlets now prefer to practice.

After all, “The Julian Show” has got simply everything. The enigmatic, persecuted protagonist, the thorny, likely trumped-up, law suit, the photogenic range of international locations. Why, it’s even got the obligatory stately home and a plucky yet truculent heiress to boot now. Someone, somewhere, must be polishing off the screenplay as I write.

Here are some of my own casting suggestions – for Julian, Jason Isaacs (who plays Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter - above); Kelsey Grammer for Vaughan Smith; Andrew Lincoln for Ian Katz; for Bianca, either Salma Hayek or Monica Belluci would do.

And isn’t it so much easier to dissect the individual rather than examine the issue? Discuss, say, Kate Middleton’s incipient anorexia; not the likely expense of her nuptials in the current climate, or the sheer anachronism of her fiancé’s elevated status in a 21st century democracy. The examples are endless.

Whatever your perspective: Wikileaks presents a watershed for journalism. It has heralded a sea change which was addressed, albeit briefly, during the Frontline event. Gavin MacFadyean, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, raised the worrying spectre of the sheer scale of the tsunami of information unleashed by ever-accelerating technology.

How, with mainstream media reduced to increasingly impoverished resources, can these data dumps be effectively mediated and republished coherently? How can we be sure that the stories which need to be published get the appropriate space and attention they deserve? How do you choose between the old-fashioned “splash” and the almost afterthought “basement”, when both contain vital, new information?

As Katz explained, the sheer volume of material processed by the Guardian – who were apparently able to second between 30 and 40 reporters to deal with the Wikileaks data tsunami – often meant that stories which, at a different juncture, would have brazenly commanded the front page, only merited a few down-page paragraphs. How disturbing is that?

Personally, I loved Aaronovitch’s idea of an “analyst caste” – experts who understand how to read this data and process information in vast quantities. But he acknowledged that it is costly to develop these skills and suggested it might just put an end to investigative journalism as we know it.

Certainly, without the ever mysterious resources of the Scott Trust or perhaps an impecunious army of hungry interns, data dump journalism presents huge challenges to the main stream media and is likely to continue to do so.

According to McFadyean, there are still millions of documents to see the light of day, including significant material from whistleblowers in China. It seems the weird fog of Wikileaks will not be clearing any time soon.

Meantime, the Julian Show rolls on. Tune in for the next cliff-hanger on February 7th, when Julian returns to court in London for his extradition hearing. I have heard a rumour that he has been allowed to stay the Frontline Club. Well, Julian, I can highly recommend it.

Attack of the 800 foot Amazons - Can Prime Time Podophilia really flog Footware?

2010-10-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

A statuesque Afro-haired model, in a shimmering, low cut, fuschia pink jump suit, straddles an enormous phallus, legs akimbo. With a complicit, sly smile, she rises elegantly to her full height, towering, head and shoulders above the high rise building on a shimmeringly familiar city skyline. Cut to a titian-haired temptress, supine in a diaphanous gown, gazing up, directly into the camera as she seductively raises one knee and the gown slowly starts to fall open.

Do I have your attention yet? Just click here for a glimpse of the clip I describe above – although perhaps you should be warned? It won’t actually take you straight to a wicked website, devoted to the singular charms of gigantic women and their puny male prey – although there are plenty of those out there – as ever, I’ve researched this post thoroughly, on your behalf, of course.

It is not a slice of slick macrophiliac porn. It is, in fact, the latest television advert for good old Clarks shoes – founded 1825 by brothers James and Cyrus Clark, in the tiny town of Street in Somerset, southwest England. And, it seems, still going strong.

The clip was directed by Scott Lyon for agency AMV BBDO and was first aired in the UK at the end of September. Obviously, it grabbed my attention as the super-size models are seen stalking around the Central business district of my native Hong Kong and I am thrilled to wallow in nostalgic recognition any time the ad airs.

Yet, once I had successfully identified every street and every skyscraper, the ad began to trouble me. Why would such a staid old shoe company be so overtly referencing such a controversial artistic trope to push its new Autumn/Winter range of boots and shoes? It is not, of course, the first time that Clarks have pushed the envelope with its advertising. Remember the jaunty “Act your shoe size, not your age” campaigns, orchestrated by iconic agency St Luke’s in the late 1990s?

Neither is it the first appearance of giant women in an advertising campaign. Lee Jeans and Burger King are just two companies who have recently used huge women or tiny little men to push their products. Right now, on London Underground, the lengthy, fish-netted legs of the stars of musical Chicago are wrapped around a selection of city landmarks such as London Bridge.

The forbidding figure of the Amazon or Giantess recurs in Greek, Roman and Norse mythology and has been around in both fine and popular art and literature for centuries. In one classic children’s book, even Lewis Carroll had poor Alice temporarily take on enormous proportions, while the giantess in popular culture may well have reached her apotheosis in 1958’s schlock-horror classic “Attack of the 50 foot woman”.

Super-sized females remain a potent theme in much contemporary art. Among my personal favourites is the German-born British artist Julia Fullerton-Batten, most notably in her sensitive and thought-provoking “Teenage Stories” series. Check out “Milk Bottle”, “Chewing Gum” “Airport” and “Red Dress in City".

Nevertheless, any internet search on this subject throws up an extraordinary number of borderline pornographic sites for enthusiasts. Macrophilia is, of course, a paraphilia; one closely related to podophilia or foot fetishism. All of which lends the Clarks advert an even edgier undertone, making me wonder quite what kind of message the company – or rather, the agency – is trying to convey?

Perhaps I had better rush out and buy myself a pair of those black suede boots, last seen striding across Queen’s Road Central, behind the Star Ferry and stepping onto Hong Kong’s old colonial City Hall? (Model name: Loch Erin £120.00 online).
I’ll let you know how I get on...

Sushi, Shiraz and Tsunamis - (A Personal Take on) The James Cameron Memorial Lecture 2010

2010-09-23T05:06:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered what happens to old journalists? Do they simply put down their pens, slip silently away from the still active herd and head off quietly in the general direction of the elephants’ graveyard? Don't be daft. Of course they don’t.

Journalists never retire. They may well retreat to the country cottage but, rest assured, there is always the odd op-ed piece to write, the odd talk to give, the odd colleagues’ lunch or an apposite lecture to attend.

There were certainly plenty of very distinguished journalists gathered at City University in London on the evening of 22nd September for the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture – not least the two prize winners, Africa specialist Michela Wrong and pioneering film maker Michael Cockerell (who made an amusing and remarkably self-effacing speech about Cameron, the doyen of foreign correspondents, himself).

The lower rows of the lecture theatre were filled to bursting with the balding pates and silver locks of scores of Britain’s finest scribes and broadcasters. The upper tiers were equally full: of bright-eyed, shiny City journalism students, live-blogging on nifty net-books, filming the proceedings, tweeting apace.

But where were the in-betweenies? All the senior, if not quite yet venerable, experienced, maybe middle aged journalists who must form the bulwark of this country’s most respected print and broadcast organisations? Surely they can’t all have been “let go” or – perish the thought – moved into financial PR? They were certainly conspicuous by their absence.

I was hoping for some sort of explanation from our orator for the evening, Leonard Downie of the Washington Post but alas, his lecture - entitled “The New News” - threw up rather more questions than answers.

Careers in journalism simply don’t come any more glittering than Downie’s – and yet last night in London, he appeared to have nothing fresh or insightful to say about our “new journalistic era”. Instead, we had plenty of tired, old clichés, including that evocative but hoary chestnut of the “tsunami of economic, technological and social change [washing] over the news media”.

In Downie’s view, unsurprisingly, nasty, thieving aggregators like the Huffington Post are “parasites”; the blogosphere and social networks are “chaotic”. He also railed rather predictably against the cynical appeal of “news presented as entertainment and entertainment presented as news”.

For the rest, we were treated to an exhaustive enumeration of various new hyper-local news sites across America and a list of equally novel, not-for-profit, investigative news organisations – many of which were apparently staffed by professional journalists who have been made redundant. It sounded for all the world like the one-size-fits-all speech that Downie, in his newish role as Professor at the Walter Kronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, must be giving on a regular basis. You can download a copy of the lecture from the City website here.

I really do wish I could take heart from Downie’s enthusiastic endorsement of nascent Stateside not-for-profit journalism initiatives, such as ProPublica and the new national Investigative News Network. He also espouses an apparently steadfast conviction that scores of wealthy philanthropists are just waiting in the wings for an opportunity to invest in some mythical new, non-celebrity, transparent and accountable news service.

Yet somehow I just can’t see some rich Brit forking out to found a 21st century successor to the Scott Trust while persistent hostility towards the BBC licence fee exposes widespread reluctance among the British viewing public to underwrite credible and verifiable journalism.

In her rather shorter acceptance speech, Michela Wrong spoke movingly about former colleagues who are now no longer able to make a reasonable living from journalism. Well, I was moved and I am one of them. She suggested that, although protracted, this turbulent "period of adjustment" would eventually end. After the lecture, as London's journalistic élite queued for the sushi and the Shiraz, the consensus was that Wrong had said more in her five minutes than Downie had managed in fifty.

The Importance of Being Earnest - Why Journalists Need to Have the Courage of their Convictions

2010-05-13T07:16:00.000-07:00

The Nightmare on Downing Street last week – albeit relatively short-lived – sadly succeeded in pushing a far more serious crisis much further down the news agenda. As I write, oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating miles and miles of highly sensitive natural habitats and threatening the livelihoods of millions of fishermen and other human inhabitants of the US Gulf Coast states, all the way from Texas to Florida.

Given the absence to date of any real concrete developments, this environmental catastrophe is currently struggling to hold international attention. Attempts by British oil giant BP have so far proved to be woefully unsuccessful in plugging the leak which followed the 20th April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig which claimed the lives of 11 BP workers.

I have been following the saga with more than my usual news junkie’s interest. It is not that I am a diehard environmentalist, although, of course, nobody likes to hear about dead dolphins. I have actually been charting the fortunes and the reputation of BP since I spent several months working on their corporate communications - a few years ago now.

There, I’ve said it. So much for all my juvenile ambitions of “shining a light into the world’s darkest corners”. It is true. My little freelance copy-writing agency once accepted a series of commissions from a local media agency whose key, actually sole, client was BP. The work was straightforward, the remuneration was nicely above market rates and, most importantly, my byline was not on any of it.

So, I spent a fair few months conducting phoners with BP operatives in places as far-flung as Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Mozambique. I interviewed many of the senior bods, including current chief exec Tony Hayward and COO Doug Suttles. Both, I must add, were cooperative, informative and utterly charming.

I also learned a lot – about how exactly you go about extracting tar from pesky tar sands, about how best to go about resettling entire villages, particularly if the elders are objecting; about how best to protect your precious pipeline from Islamic terrorists.

Yet finally, I had to jack it all in. Now I would love to be able to say that it was my conscience which made me relinquish this role – as the tiniest of cogs in the gargantuan BP PR machine. Sadly, the truth is more prosaic: I fell out with the intermediaries, the media agency, who were slack, disorganised and very tardy payers to boot.

Yet, I was relieved to give up polishing copy which I knew in my heart was 90 per cent promotional guff. I have no doubt that BP takes the welfare of its staff and other key CSR issues as seriously as the next global corporate behemoth. I just didn’t want to have a hand in crafting, editing or disseminating anything that smacked, even ever so slightly, of propaganda.

I don’t mean to come across as unnecessarily noble. In fact, I am pretty much with Dr Johnson in the “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” camp. But for me, at least, there are limits, as I discovered during my short stint with BP.

Times is tough for journalists, particularly of the old school. Print and broadcast media are both broad-based pyramids and for every editor of the Economist, there are myriad lesser hacks, running around trying to make an honest buck – however, wherever and whenever we can.

So why have I been so surprised to see that so many of my former colleagues have jumped the wall into the PR and corporate communications world? At a drinks party a few years ago, I was struck dumb, as scores of my former Financial Times comrades handed over business cards, proclaiming their elevation to head of media relations - or some such - at one swanky bank after the other.

Yet maybe these were the smart guys? The ones who got to 35 and realised they had a mortgage and school fees to pay. So they wisely stopped mooning round the newsroom, stuck on NUJ wages, waiting in vain to be appointed editor. Instead they bravely took the plunge, surrended to the blandishments and accepted the twinkly shilling of the selfsame evil corporations they had spent the previous decade attempting to unnerve?

In one of those twists of serendipity, the BP head of media currently popping up all over the place to apologise for the Deepwater Horizon fiasco is none other than former FT editor, Andrew Gowers, who, I recall, sat at the far end of my second floor office in Bracken House, many many moons ago now.

I don’t envy Andrew or, indeed, any of my other mates who now spend long hours, burnishing brand reputations, sorting out corporate cock-ups and spinning finely crafted yarns to their erstwhile journo chums, who are, sadly, more credulous and indolent these days.

I’m just ever so slightly thankful that I have been able to dust down my languages and do a bit of translating. After all, the psycho spaniels’ vets bills (not to mention all of my other, if rather less terrifying, expenses) have got to be paid somehow…

Location? Stimulation? Libation? How Do You Mix the Perfect SocMed Conference Cocktail?

2010-02-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

Stars of #LikeMinds 2010 Exeter - photo by kind permission of Benjamin Ellis

Take one utterly brilliant idea, add a few pertinent panels and a couple of cracking keynotes, stir in a few select sponsors, re-tweet relevant hashtag furiously… Et Voilà! You’ll have yourself a real time, world wide trending topic before you can say Social Media Conference. Or will you?

Once upon a time, way, way back in 2008 or 2009, there was still very much a Field of Dreams “If you build it, they will come” feel to the Social Media IRL scene. But now that we’ve all been to more tweet-ups and Twestivals than you can shake a USB stick at, I suspect that the punters are becoming rather more discerning about which gigs they choose to spend the corporate on-line comms budget on. Ergo, organisers are going to have to up their game and that, imho, is going to mean sweating the small stuff.

I write as someone who, not all that long ago, flew halfway around the world, to spend four days in an Antipodean basement, stuffing goodie bags and live-blogging - when I wasn’t abusing interns or doing my own little bit to iron out the inevitable last minute glitches which plague just about every big production.

This week, I had the pleasure of putting away my all areas pass to be an everyday attendee at the really rather fabulous Likeminds 2010. Pundits far more qualified than myself will be analysing what it all means in the cold light of day but I did want to jot down just a couple of my own conclusions about what makes these events rock – or indeed - not.

So, if you want to organise a gig like this:

DO – start as you mean to go on: After pretty painless reg. and warmest of welcomes from Like Minds co-founder Scott Gould, Jonathan Akwue gave the energetic and energising opening keynote, fabulously illustrated and super funny. Jon set the bar high but the standard never faltered. These gigs are always good-humoured but this audience spent a good deal of time roaring with laughter and, crucially, with the speakers, not at them, so…

DON’T - (please please please) put the live Twitter stream on da big screen? I do know opinions differ wildly on this one. Yet, as Jon illustrated eloquently (with a slide of people queuing outside banks) new tech doesn’t always make everything better. Yes, it is vital to monitor the back channel, (as we swiftly discovered at Media140 in Sydney) but we have all now been to gigs where the Twitterwall has simply taken over, sometimes - sadly - because it was actually more interesting than anything happening on the podium beneath. If you want to read the stream, do it on your gadget. You can read an excellent post on just this topic by Alan Patrick of Broadstuff here.

DO - pick the proper venue. Not location per se. Get the programme right and you could probably hold a SocMed gig in a hangar at Heathrow and sell out. The charming city of Exeter is not the most obvious place to hold an event such as Like Minds but the bill of fare at the banquet tempted more than enough people to travel – in some cases – thousands of miles. I am talking about creature comforts.

The days when we were all newbies, happy to pay hundreds of dollars, euros or pounds to sit in airless cellars, swill unacceptable, non-fairtrade, coffee, gnaw on dry sarnies and queue endlessly for the loos, while muttering darkly about band width and the insufficiency of sockets are well and truly over. And, oh yes, did I mention the wi-fi already? (Which worked perfectly in Exeter, I was assured by my non-Luddite mates...)

DON’T – worry too much about giving out goodie bags? If the gig is good, goodies become irrelevant. With good content and smooth organisation, nobody is going to go away, feeling short-changed just because they haven’t got a logo-covered bag-for-life, containing a ball pen, a note pad and a miniature can of some new energy drink (which will all probably be left behind in the bar at the after-party). On the sometimes thorny subject of sponsors, I felt it was well-balanced #likeminds, with co-founder Drew Ellis discreetly announcing individual underwriters at the start of each session.

I could, of course, go on but I suspect you’ve got the general drift by now. Instead I'd like to wrap up with huge thanks to Drew, Scott, all the other stars of the stage and the whole Like Minds team, especially the army of very efficient interns, (none of whom looked in the least bit abused to me).

And finally, a few personal highlights – (many of a surprisingly sartorial nature…)

The irrepressible @ajpape in his magnificent robe (Tunisian Jalabiya) which later inspired both @markofrespect & @lesanto to compete. (Made a welcome change from that old leather jacket, Glenn?) Thanks to perky paparazzo @paul_clarke for letting me use this pic.

The short but moving LikeMinded Endeavour slots including a timely reminder about Twestival from the world’s best-dressed live-blogger, @arengrimshaw.

The now traditional “creative” shirt competition, with a strong showing from @stevebridger, @markofrespect (what again?) & @davebriggs. Won by a whisker of his rather Johnny Depp-esque goatee by chauffeur to the star that is @chrisbrogan, the Tall Man with Glasses - @stuartwitts.

The jeans’n’tie combo sported by Olivier Blanchard which provoked such a heated Twitter debate with “I’m so nervous about attending” @carolinemytton robustly against yet @cosmond resolutely pro..

The now also traditional “Oh my goodness, I completely forgot about the live stream” expletives from the stage. Aforementioned, and, it must be said, charmingly apologetic @cosmond among the guilty on Friday...

Err, that’s it. Same time next year everyone?

The Cautionary Tale of the Professor, his Blog Post & the Blatant Plagiarism

2010-02-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

Any journalist with more than a few years’ experience has a sad saga of plagiarism to tell. Not even the most august publications are immune from the practice, as we saw only yesterday with the resignation of New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe amid allegations he lifted material straight from a piece written two weeks earlier by a Wall Street Journal reporter.

This kind of blatant theft – plagiarism comes from the Latin verb: to kidnap - makes for a good headline and there was no surprise that prestigious Spanish newspaper El Mundo chose to splash the story of the NYT investigation on the Media section of its website. El Mundo used Spanish news agency EFE copy and ran it without comment.

Good then, to see El Mundo alerting its readers to this shameless breach of protocol by the venerable Gray Lady. What a shame it failed to take this perfect opportunity to admit to an equally brash example of plagiarism on its own website earlier this week.

On Tuesday 16th February – Ramón Salaverría wrote a blog post which - loosely translated - was entitled “Plagiarism & What to do about it”. He explained that his Monday post - concerning the future of EFE - was lifted shortly after he published it – and practically verbatim – by the website of major Spanish daily El Mundo.

The story which follows is a cautionary tale about the swift rise of uncredited appropriation of original material in our global digital age. As the loud slamming of stable doors at the NYT shows, policing this piracy is practically impossible. It also highlights the frustrating impotence of individual originators in the face of powerful media organisations.

Ramón Salaverría is Professor of Journalism at Spain’s prestigious University of Navarre and is the academic behind the influential e-periodistas-weblog. He tweets at @rsalaverria.

Justifiably peeved, Ramón sent a tweet about the plagiarism - which, unsurprisingly, was swiftly retweeted around the Spanish-speaking Twitterverse. Less than an hour after the tweet – 140 characters which exposed the casual appropriation of a considered blog post by a respected journalist and commentator - the piece on the El Mundo website was markedly modified – in a patent attempt to differentiate it from Ramón’s original post.

However, it still contained no acknowledgement of the original source, nor any nod to the original author of the piece. The time of posting of El Mundo’s re-jigged version had also been mysteriously modified – to predate the original, expository tweet. Ramón tweeted about this back-tracking by the El Mundo website. He also noted that El Mundo was also flagging the NYT-WSJ plagiarism piece.

There is a silver lining to the black cloud of this story. Ramón’s story prompted an avalanche of indignant tweets, all expressing solidarity. On Wednesday afternoon, he finally received an apologetic telephone call from an El Mundo representative. Was this apology prompted by the Twitter backlash? Impossible to be sure but difficult to discount completely.

As I write, Ramón’s story has appeared elsewhere in the Spanish media; a couple of headlines reading: Salaverría accuses El Mundo of plagiarism. The use of that particular verb is, as he says himself, a question of nuance.

Salaverría is a journalism professional and the author of several key publications about online journalism and the future of news on the Internet. With this frank and expert eye on the media landscape, he recognises that he is not the first to have his intellectual property whisked away in this manner – nor will he be the last.

But as he expounds in his original blog post: we all know that the media are in full-blown crisis; the future is far from clear. Professor Salaverría firmly believes that this future depends upon the media – whether print or on-line - remaining a credible and trustworthy resource for their readers.

He echoes several other commentators’ pleas for a return to the criteria of excellence and – slightly scarily – refers his readers to a post he wrote six years ago – the substance of which remains: “pressing ‘delete’ does not necessarily mean rectification”.

Art London: Saatchi’s Latest Squint at the Zeitgeist

2010-02-07T06:48:00.000-08:00

Jitish Kallat (b.1974) "Public Notice 2" (2007) - this image copyright: Saatchi Gallery

It is 25 years since bashful advertising maven Charles Saatchi opened his first gallery in a disused paint factory in north London. Saatchi has since courted controversy and divided the critics with his potent, some might say, baleful, patronage. However, signs are emerging that the art market Melmotte may finally be mellowing. The gallery is now in its third incarnation and some distinctly philanthropic elements are appearing, alongside the taciturn collector’s once rather more commercial objectives.

In 2003, the Saatchi Gallery left leafy St Johns Wood, migrating south to London’s former County Hall. However, the sojourn on the South Bank was ill-starred to say the least, overshadowed by rows over tenancy and an acrimonious war of words with the YBAs Saatchi had once championed and their nominal gang leader, Damien Hirst.

I personally never felt many of those period icons, such as Damien’s Shark, Gavin Turk’s Sid Vicious and Ron Mueck’s Angel seemed entirely at ease, among the wood panelled corridors and chambers of the palatial former GLC building. The Japanese landlords eventually won their legal case; Saatchi was evicted – it may well have been for the best.

The Saatchi Gallery reopened in October 2008 in the rather more elegant, grander setting of the former Duke of York’s Headquarters, upstream from Westminster, off the King’s Road in Chelsea. The shiny new floors have now finally settled down, the white walls no longer reek of fresh paint and a decent café is now also open.

The latest, and third major, show seems to have Saatchi continuing to monitor the geo-political and economic shifts which have marked the 21st century. The first exhibition showcased new art from China, the second, young Middle Eastern artists and now we have “The Empire strikes back: Indian Art Today” (29 Jan.-7 May 2010).

Aside from the dubious, gimmicky titles: “The Revolution Continues” for China; “Unveiled” for the Middle East, the shows have been critically well-received while art-loving natives and tourists alike now have another airy place of pilgrimage, with a growing reputation for thoughtful shows. Admission is also free.

The curators of the current show take advantage of the venue’s extraordinary spaces. To date, Gallery One has been used for a single or pair of powerful installations and is here given over to "Public Notice 2" (2007) by Jitish Kallat (above). There is an awful lot of Kallat, current darling of the sub-Continental art scene, on show here. Yet I had to admit every piece had earned its place. Unsurprisingly, practically every work on show here references socio-economic themes: poverty; violence; the gap between rich and poor.

Kallat’s monumental sculpture of the boy book seller “Eruda” (2008) is stunningly displayed here. Yet I found “Death of Distance” (2007) far more moving. The work comprises another huge sculpture, of a one rupee coin and five lenticular prints which juxtapose two found texts – one of a girl who commits suicide for want of one rupee for school lunch and the other on the launch of one-rupee-per-minute phone rates. Do take the time to read both stories. Kallat talks more about his work here.

Subodh Gupta (b.1964) "Spill" (2007) - this image copyright: Saatchi Gallery

At the 2005 Venice Biennale, I found Subodh Gupta’s installations of cooking pots and utensils both insubstantial and banal. In this setting, really rather more intimate than the always chilly and gloomy Arsenale, I found more to admire in the clever distortions of scale and in the still life oil paintings of the same steel cans and pans.

Another artist benefitting from intelligent installation was Pakistani artist Huma Mulji. Her taxidermied animal sculptures are not easy on the eye but the discomfiture they provoke is balanced by a marked humour.

Huma Mulji (b.1970) "Her Suburban Dream" (2009) - this image copyright: Saatchi Gallery

On show in the gallery’s Project Room is an on-going work by American artist Emily Prince (b.1981), entitled “American Servicemen And Women Who Have Died In Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including The Wounded, Nor The Iraqis Nor The Afghans). This highly topical contemporary comment-cum-tribute is overwhelming in scope. I will be revisiting this piece, and examining new works of war art by Prince’s contemporaries in a future post.

Last but far from least, Chelsea boasts another pull with the recent unveiling of Richard Wilson’s “20:50” – a site-specific installation of used sump oil and steel, first shown in the original Boundary Road gallery in 1987. This truly extraordinary experience now occupies an entire gallery, built specifically for the piece. The artist (b.1953) will discuss his work with critic Ossian Ward at the gallery on Thursday 25th February.

Art Sydney – How to be a Venerable, yet Very Hip Art Institution – The Art Gallery of New South Wales

2009-11-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

This image: copyright The Luo Brothers

We have all got them, haven’t we? A rather specific, rather personal, list of our own favourite, arty hang outs. They are, more often than not, the key venues we visited, usually as pimply adolescents, clutching our cheap reproductions of Matisse and Monet, insanely happy to wander through hallowed halls, finally contemplating the images that had inspired us – still blissfully ignorant that the rest of life, sadly, did not consist of empty afternoons, devoted to the casual contemplation of art.

In a fairly long list, mine would include the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, acknowledged ugly sister of the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh, but an institution where key elements of the European avant-garde were forged, and a place where I personally did much of my own art education, over the course of several lunchtimes, during my first posting as a foreign correspondent.

There is also Peggy Guggenheim’s still somehow slightly louche villa on the Grand Canal in Venice, the light, bright Picasso Museum in Antibes in the South of France and the warren of basements and mezzanines which constitute Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.

It would also very much include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, an eclectic and extraordinary collection of significance, housed in a fabulous late 19th century neo-Classical building in the heart of Sydney’s airy, green heart, The Domain.

I first visited AGNSW on a flying trip to Sydney in 1999. It has been a rather long ten years and Oz is a very long way away; but I resolved that my recent trip Down Under would include another visit – if only to check that my initial impressions of a superior institution had been well-founded.

Before we – myself & my friend Elana (of whom, more later...) even entered the Gallery, we were treated to the latest of the Kaldor Public Art Projects: an installation by Japanese-born, Berlin-based, artist Tatzu Nishi, who has ingeniously recreated the immediate environment surrounding the equestrian sculptures outside the museum - in a thought-provoking and utterly chilling way. I would urge Sydneysiders not to miss this extraordinary installation and anyone passing through to try and catch it (it runs until February 2010).

The AGNSW also boasts a vital Asian Art collection. Funerary ceramics such as Tang horses are cleverly, and not at all patronisingly, displayed alongside works by provocative contemporary Chinese artists, such as the Luo Brothers (see image at the top of this post).

The AGNSW exhibition space itself is aptly fit for purpose. Every piece was immaculately installed and sensibly labelled - elements so often ignored, even by leading global galleries. As a whingeing Pom, I particularly enjoyed all the home-grown stuff and I have now concluded that Australian Art is rather like Swiss Wine: the locals are well aware of how good it is; ergo, they like to keep it all to themselves.

The Australian artistic tradition exhibited at AGNSW is vibrant and inclusive. There is plenty of heritage work by artists who are perhaps better known further afield such as Sydney Nolan (1917-1992) but more contemporary artists are also well-represented, such as Russell Drysdale, Lloyd Rees, Jeffrey Smart, John Olsen, Fred Williams, John Brack, Rosalie Gascoigne and everyone's favourite, Brett Whiteley. There is also an important collection of Aboriginal and Torres Straits art, from bark paintings to new media installations.

As a brief aside, the Australian contribution to the Venice Biennale this year also impressed, particularly Felicity Fenner's small, but perfectly formed, group show at the Ludoteca, a former convent between the Giardini and the Arsenale. The medieval building lent itself perfectly to the installations by emerging artists, Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Yonetani, and Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro.

Given my exuberant enthusiasm for the Gallery, I was thrilled when I returned home to Blighty to discover that AGNSW also had a Twitter feed @ArtGalleryofNSW run by the lovely Molly and Sheona. The Gallery also runs regular Art After Hours sessions, with live music and ArtBeat workshops and events, especially for Gallery Kids. They have tours in Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese and sign language tours for the deaf. The Gallery also has a Flickr group and a YouTube channel – sure signs of a venerable institution that knows just how to make the most of Social Media.

It was through Social Media that I first came across the perfect companion for my NGNSW trip. I was in Sydney helping out with a conference about the Future of Journalism in the Social Media Age, run by Media140 and generously hosted by the ABC.

Elana Bowman is a feisty South African born lady, whose family emigrated to Australia in the 1990s. Fellow bookworm Elana and I first met on-line, via virtual reading circle, Shelfari.com, back in the mists of time, around five years ago, when Twitter itself was still a gleam in the eyes of its founders: @ev and @biz.

Since then, she and I have become Facebook friends and follow each other on Twitter. I learned about her heartbreaking decision to close her beloved book shop, her subsequent job hunt and followed a few of her romantic ups and downs. She, in turn, was a great cyber support when my dear old Dad succumbed to dementia over the course of 2007/8. I had no doubt that when we finally met IRL, in the bowels of ABC’s Ultimo Centre, it would be just like a reunion with a long lost and trusted friend.

And so it was. Our afternoon in the gallery, followed by a stroll through China Town's night markets, a welcome libation in a backpacker pub and the post-Media140 valedictory drinks at the CBD Hotel, was truly one of the highlights of my Australian interlude. So thank you, city of Sydney for the Art Gallery of New South Wales and thank you, Social Media, for my dear friend, Elana.

Cowgirls in Corsets: Why the Picture Desk loves the Catwalk Shows:

2009-09-28T03:36:00.000-07:00

So farewell then, London Fashion Week. The weekend papers made the very most of the last few gobbets of gossip –
i.a: "Doyenne Anna Wintour ignores wannabe Alexa Chung horror";
"Spell-binding Emma “Hermione” Watson all grown up now”

Meanwhile, the front pages featured the last set of opportunistic images before the entire circus packed its natty bondage ankle boots into their custom-made Louis Vuitton trunks and hot-footed it (Business Class, natch) to Milan.

Breaking news so far from the Italian shows?
“Armani explores the future with a “plastic fantastic” theme”
“Raunchy cowgirls in denim corsets at Dolce & Gabbana”
“Sex sells at Emilio Pucci”

Sex sells? Well, hold the front page. No doubt about it: fashion certainly sells. Picture editors have long been grateful for the bi-annual race around the globe, covering the collections. Unsurprisingly, heel heights, hem lines and super models make for a more appealing front page than the usual parade of grumpy, grubby suited politicos, sombre flag-draped coffins or sundry other sobering trappings of the War on Terror or the global economic crisis.

Much as the advent of colour television transformed the sport of snooker, fashion coverage in so-called serious newspapers started in earnest in the early 1990s, when the first full colour imaging technology began to transform the Front Page. We bid a thankful farewell to tiresome inky fingers but (imho) we also (pace The Independent) lost the bold statement of the impossibly eloquent monochrome news photograph.

Now fashion coverage is considered de rigueur for the most earnest of organs. During my years at the Guardian, the Women’s Page stalwarts would not have considered the catwalks a subject worthy of serious coverage. I do remember one brave Features Desk intern suggesting a fashion-related feature in conference one morning - to audible sniggers. To her credit, she stuck to her guns and, unlike fashion-phobics such as myself, is now still fully and lucratively employed. Only last week, I noted her byline above a piece explaining how to wear the Breton trends, elbow cages, sequins and snakeskin details which apparently “emerged” in London last week.

Now, fashion coverage appears to be a Guardian staple with this breathless round-up pretty much par for the course. If you can’t get enough from the paper or website, you can even follow Milan Fashion Week live as Observer fashionista Helen Seamons tweets live from the Front Row (hashtag #MFW)

Alongside such London Fashion Week scoops as the surprise arrival of Victoria Beckham, I was heartened to see some serious debate triggered by the audacious decision of Canadian designer Mark Fast to use size 12 and size 14 catwalk models. The heart, however, did sink to read that this brave move had prompted Fast’s stylist to resign.

I did find myself last week - albeit briefly - finding rather more respect than I have had to date for Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer, Linda ($10,000 a day) Evangelista et al. I spent an excruciating two hours having my own photograph taken for a rare appearance as the subject and not the writer of a newspaper article. The photographer John Lawrence was charming, professional and exceptionally patient - as I gurned and grimaced in a bid to convince him that the dogs were far more photogenic than their reluctant owner. Everyone who has seen the piece seems to agree..

Before I sign off, I wanted to thank all this blog's readers - you know who you are! - for their extraordinary patience while this forum became precariously over-weighted with posts about social media and the real time web. I have now transferred these to the new Media140 team blog here. This forum will now return to its main, niche but nice, photo-journalism and fine art theme. To that end, I will also be confining my more personal postings - those cheery themes of elder abuse, assisted suicide, musings on mourning et al to a new forum at: ahappierending.blogspot.com. I do hope you will check it out some time.

Killer Robots and Archbishops against the Internet: welcome to the Silly Season

2009-08-04T05:33:00.000-07:00

Many countries have a corresponding term for “silly season” & several reference cucumbers or gherkins: Komkommertijd in Dutch, Norwegian Agurktid, Polish Sezon ogórkowy, Hungarian Uborkaszezon and German Sauregurkenzeit.

Welcome to the Silly Season which started, by my own, highly unscientific, reckoning on Sunday, when the Times ran a huge, and apparently serious, piece about scientists fearing the rise of killer robots. Too much time is apparently being spent developing artificial intelligence without enough thought to the concomitant implications of robot – and by inference, human – safety.

Not to be outdone by the bovver boys of Wapping, the Sunday Telegraph came up with its own shock horror scoop: “Catholic Archbishop slams assisted suicide, decries divorce and says Social Networks are shallow”.

Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere, (which, as we all know, never eats, sleeps or takes a holiday – even in August -) was quick to respond to the relevant sections of what was a fairly wide-ranging interview with the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols. It is not the first time the Liverpudlian primate’s pronouncements have made the news. He raised several eyebrows at the time of his ordination in May by praising the “courage” of the Irish clergy and religious who had confessed to child abuse. But, as he told the Telegraph’s Jonathan Wynne-Jones somewhat ruefully, he has now come to expect that his every word will be relentlessly examined.

As a cradle Catholic, but one long since formally accepted into the rather less rigid Church of England (far superior architecture and music, rather more practical pointers on the niceties of Christian behaviour) I have to confess that I have long standing reservations about any edicts emanating from Rome or, indeed sweeping statements on almost any subject from clergy, religious or laity of a Papist persuasion.

I can date this aversion fairly precisely, to one morning in the bees-waxed parlour of my convent boarding school, where I sat, waiting to return home for my mother’s funeral. The youngish nun, appointed to sit with me until my aunt arrived, attempted to engage my taciturn 12-year old, just bereaved self, in a philosophical discussion about the reasons for my mother’s premature death, after a long struggle with breast cancer. Her conclusion? “Indeed, myself, or my brother, or more than likely, both of us, must have done something unspeakably wicked for God to take our Mummy away…”

I was not the only reader gobsmacked by the archbishop’s interview. Simon Jenkins, respected editor of successful Christian online community Ship of Fools, said: “I found his comments were disappointing – not based on research, but were his own thoughts on something that seems to me as if he is not involved in, and is speaking from a position of relative ignorance….It is all quite predictable what was said – the Catholic church probably protested when the telephone was invented and the telescope...”

Across the Atlantic, Jere Hester, the cerebral founder of the City University of New York’s NYCity News Service, suggested that the power of social networking to bring people together over common interests, nurture personal relationships and renew old friendships is still being weighed against its potential to isolate those who live online or its use as an instrument of harassment.

Closer to home, on the award-winning Telegraph.co.uk, the paper’s Communities Editor Shane Richmond posited convincingly, in a characteristically candid post, that Nichols was mistaking social problems for technological ones.

My own thoughts on the pros – and cons – of online communities can be found in this post from earlier this year, in which I argue that the former far outweigh the latter.

Finally, I note that Archbishop Nichols spoke to the Telegraph from the southern French Marian shrine of Lourdes, visited by more than six million invalids and their carers every year and by me, on a school trip in the early 1970s, in the hope of a cancer-curing miracle, to be wrought by prayer and ritual immersion in the ice-cold spring where, in 1858, Our Lady appeared to Saint Bernadette. Sadly neither the prayers, nor the humiliating, semi-naked dunking were of any use to my Mother, who died nonetheless, within the year. But then again, Our Lady did heed my selfish post script and within days of my youthful pilgrimage, she cured that pesky veruca.

Can Spam ever be amusing? A few thoughts on the Habitat Twitter fall-out

2009-07-10T01:25:00.000-07:00

The one and only time I ever found Spam even mildly amusing was a few years ago when I watched a gaggle of American teens queuing up in a Broadway theatre foyer to hand over $15 for a “Spamalot commemorative” tin of the processed pink stuff. It was never ever funny, encased in palid batter fritters served up every Thursday night at boarding school while 21st century non-edible spam is now a non-hilarious, utter menace for anyone with a broadband connection.

Spam – of the cyber variety – increasingly permeates our lives – either directly, into our own in-boxes or sneakily, weaving itself through all our favourite websites or social media networks - as the cheap Viagra peddlers and increasingly, brands big enough to know better, try and jump onto what they see as the free marketing band wagon.

I wasn’t surprised when a “Las Vegas Poker” scam started to spam the Twitter stream from the May 20th #Media140 event in London I helped out with. The sheer volume of live bloggers and tweeters took the hashtag straight to the top of the trends. However, I was not the only one shocked to see UK furniture chain Habitat using top hashtags, including #iPhone & #Mousavi - at a time when protestors were using Twitter to get real time, uncensored news out of Tehran.

In what has now become a text book example of how brands should not use Twitter, the store eventually apologised, initially blaming “an intern” and deleted the offensive tweets – and yet, the fall out continues.

Two weeks ago, the arrival of a flyer about the upcoming Habitat sale prompted me to get myself taken off their database. Sentimental as it sounds, it was a sad decision – I once had a huge, if nostalgic, affection for the brand. My late husband, Peter Griffin, was a key player in the grooviest early days of Habitat in the 1970s, working alongside Terence Conran and eventually taking the brand across the Channel to Holland, where he was working when he and I first met.

Several phone calls later, I found myself connected to the press office line, assured by more than one human voice that this was the correct channel for database queries. Several days later, I still had not managed to speak to a human in the press office. A series of messages left on the voice mail were still unanswered and I resorted, as exhorted by the voice mail message, to e-mail.

Almost by return, I received a response for which the adjective “intemperate” would be mild. It also contained the following “apology” which offers no concrete explanation as to how the spam fiasco happened in the first place.

"The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are sorry for the offence that was caused. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again...".

On Twitter itself, the @HabitatUK feed has not been updated since June 24th, when the final tweet contained the link to this expiatory post on SocialMediaToday. Meanwhile the ever enterprising Daren Forsyth has launched a Twitter campaign to locate, and then forgive, the putative #Habitatintern. Good luck with that one Daren! Please keep us posted on how Habitat are now “determined to do better for the Twitter community.”

Behemoths of Media Buying set to bestride the New Media Landscape (but there is good News for Geeks..)

2009-07-02T05:34:00.000-07:00

(If you need a caption for this image, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog)

Hands up if you remember the 1980s? You know, when eyeliner was everywhere, greed was good and mobile phones bigger than bricks were the de rigeur symbols of status.

Back then, I was still a starry eyed young journalist, on my first foreign postings, trying valiantly to shine a little light onto some of the world’s worthier stories. Unsurprisingly, I was utterly unmoved by the entreaties of one particular suitor, who thought the way to my heart would be to whisk me off to lunch at the Ivy – in his Porsche natch - where his lavish corporate expense account allowed him to entertain clients and contacts several times a week.

Actually, it wasn’t the Porsche, the brick-sized mobile or even the bow tie that put me off. Reader: he was a media buyer – the very thought of consorting with a non-creative ad exec sent shivers down my spine. Back then, media buying was not considered an entirely respectable occupation for a gentleman.

But that was then and things have certainly changed in our brave new media world. Humble journalists are obliged to twist their copy to suit complex new click metrics while the media buying behemoths continue to consolidate the power now afforded them by the transparency and accountability of the world wide intraweb.

You may have heard, if only vaguely, of companies called Aegis, Omnicom, Havas, Zenith and WPP, but you probably have little idea of how powerful they have become, given that jointly they control more than 50 per cent of the global advertising market.

This was the frankly chilling scenario eloquently explained by Professor Joseph Turow this week at the Oxford Internet Institute at an event jointly organised by the inestimable Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Professor Turow suggested that the rise of the buyers, leaving the usually lauded creative element of the advertising industry behind, has been under-reported and is – as a consequence – misunderstood.

That newspapers, news journalism and news values per se are undergoing a fundamental change is not news but Turow painted a vivid picture of a media future in which the key players were no longer the once mighty publishing platforms. Those (to some extent, already) in charge will be the media buying agencies, the advertisers, the media rating companies, some third party ad networks and of course, the technology developers.

But what about the journalists, you ask? Well, those who haven’t already crossed the PR Rubicon or been replaced by a far, far cheaper, Anglophone typist on the ground in Bangalore, may be lucky enough to find work with an altruistic foundation, generously funding issue-based journalism along the lines of ProPublica.

There may also still be some work available for hacks prepared to specialise – as advertisers will continue to be willing to fund niche supplements serving distinct interests. Oh and guess what? There is also going to be an awful lot more “refining” of what purports to be straight news to allow for (yet more) product placement.

Prof. Turow, a genial (coincidentally, also bow-tied) Brooklynite, is the author of the cerebral but highly accessible "Niche Envy" and is considered to be the expert on media fragmentation. He also foresaw a future of merged regional news cooperatives and a diverse raft of new organisational forms and alliances between traditional prestige content providers. In principle, this sounds like a reasonable solution, although I have had personal experience of dozens of newspapers attempting to work “together” from my stint as editor of Guardian Europe in the early 1990s and at times, I have to admit, it was not a particularly pretty sight.

So far then, so bleak for all my keen journalism students. I keep telling them to go into something rather less precarious, like investment banking perhaps? No, better still, make that financial PR. And what of the smooth Porsche-driving, bow tied beau, I hear you ask? Reader, I married him.

What Flavour is your Muffin? A few thoughts on Harnessing the Power of Twitter

2009-06-24T04:06:00.001-07:00

Twitter is a narcotic. Not life-threatening perhaps, but as addictive and as potentially potent as any other class-A habit. I had my first suspicions when I started – relatively recently – to prefer following the tweet stream to actually watching sports events, from the rugby to Formula One. These were confirmed yesterday when I was one of a dozen or two delegates at a London conference on Twitter raising their hands to confess that they were unabashed and enthusiastic Twitter aficionados.

Harnessing the Power of Twitter – organised by Internet World – was clearly aimed at newbies; by far the largest group of elevated hands were from the “using Twitter but don’t get it or need convincing” subset. It’s no secret that I am far from being a Twitter virgin but if I had been one, I’m confident that I would have come away from the sunny Albert Embankment educated, edified and enthused.

The fragrant Vikki Chowney of Six Degrees kicked off with a lucid explanation of micro-blogging as tweets wishing her a very happy birthday popped up on the huge screen adjacent, carrying the live feed of the #hpt09 twitter stream. I particularly liked her identification of Twitter users as narcissists, inactives, marketers, SEO obsessives and Facebook converts. Vikki illuminated Twitter’s efficacy in humanising corporations and gave a great exposition of how NOT to use Twitter highlighting the recent, and IMHO utterly contemptible, spamming of key trending topics by @HabitatUK. The retailer compounded this huge fail by deleting many of the offending tweets but some can still be seen in this piece from BrandRepublic reporting the belated apology. (Congrats Vikki - power of twitter!)

Then Vicky “Good Morning Twitterville” Harres Akers - the human voice of @PRNewswire - gave us a trans-Atlantic perspective of how Twitter enables apparently monolithic conglomerates to give humble consumers a peek behind the curtains. She also stressed the importance of converting all these virtual relationships into real life ones whenever possible.

Glue London’s Jonny Spindler gave an intriguing presentation into the thinking behind the very clever Social Media campaign to transform good old Woolworths from just another High Street casualty into a hip and happening digital brand. I spotted their virtual Easter egg thread but I hadn’t twigged that @team_woolies was behind the irresistible #myfirstsingle meme.

Personally, I was relieved to hear the key themes of “transparency”, “authenticity” and “value” reiterated. The power of the personal also resonated through the next presentation from Future Media veteran and Twitter evangelist Daren Forsyth.

If I had been a newbie, I would have found Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead’s guide to jargon invaluable. As it was, I discovered some handy Twitter tools of which I was unaware. Nick’s insight into the growing real i.e. monetary value of the Retweet was fascinating, particularly given that most of the delegates were clearly there both playing catch up and trying to work out the KPIs and ROI of Twitter – if anyone ever manages to work out the precise formula for the latter, they will clearly make millions!

No 10 comms head honcho Ian Green was next: extolling the superiority of the @DowningStreet twitter stream vs. the dull old news feed of officially verified @whitehouse (now tweeting in Farsi, I noted today). I hasten to add that Ian was amusing, informative and self-deprecating, stressing the importance of identity and of consistency of voice. Ian is the only member of the PM’s comms team to add any personal imput to the stream; his forlorn tweet about being stuck in a DC basement with only a muffin for sustenance inspired the title of this post.

Alas, that was all I was able to attend. Pity! Well-organised get-together; spectacular venue overlooking the sunny Thames and delicious lunch and cake. All the latter often in short supply at these bashes so kudos where due to James Drake-Brockman and the rest of the IW crew.

Finally, for everyone who has complained that all this useless social media guff is polluting a perfectly serviceable photojournalism blog, you will be pleased to hear that I will shortly be moving it all to a brand new URL at the Media140 blog where I am going to be part of an international team posting about the future of the real time Web.

Babel@Bedlam Image of the Week: Always problematic but this week? Well worth it

2009-06-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

This image: copyright Associated Press (with thanks)

Blogging about photo-journalism? It’s a tough job; but someone has got to do it. One of the toughest challenges which I have to face regularly is that of finding an image with which to illustrate a post and for which I don’t have to pay gazillions in reproduction rights.

Fair enough, snappers have to be paid & I have every sympathy for appropriate levels of remuneration, particularly for creative work. Nevertheless, the issues of copyright & intellectual property thrown up by the worldwide intraweb & its bastard child, the nefarious blogosphere, have still to be effectively addressed and I will be examining the related issues in a future post soon.

In the meantime, I leave you with my personal choice for image of the week (above). It shows members of the Iranian national football team, celebrating after going 1-0 up in their vital World Cup qualifier in Seoul last week. Alas, the South Koreans equalized in the last few minutes, denying Iran their World Cup place.

When the Iranian team emerged, it soon became clear that more than half of them, including their charismatic captain Ali Karimi, were wearing green armbands, symbolising support for Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition challenger. The high-profile game was broadcast live on television in soccer-mad Iran. However, when they emerged for the second half, the players had removed the green bands, which are not a regular part of their uniforms, amid speculation that they were ordered to do so.

I often find it difficult to find any sympathy at all for international footballers, with their inflated pay packets, over-engineered wives and/or girlfriends and their joint concommitantly ludicrous life styles. Nevertheless, when I saw these brave young men come out onto the pitch in Seoul last week, I had an uncharacteristic lump in my throat. Events in Tehran continue to move both extremely swiftly and troublingly.

I would urge anyone interested, either in the future of Iran or the future of newsgathering to monitor the #iranelection stream on Twitter. If you are interested in the future of news gathering, I will writing much, much more on that very subject, as part of a very international team, who will all be blogging on the Future of the Real Time Web at media140.com very soon – watch this space!

D-DAY 65 - Canadian Tanks reach Juno Beach by Lt. Fred Jackson RNVR

2009-06-05T02:39:00.000-07:00

Members of the LST & Landing Craft Association gathered recently to celebrate the life of their shipmate Fred Jackson ISO, QFSM, CPM

Anniversaries are like buses at the moment. Tiananmen Square plus 20 and this weekend's 65th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings - both of which have caused very different but predictable amounts of furore (viz: my previous post). I am no royalist but I believe it is important that Prince Charles is now going to the Normandy commemorations. It is a key anniversary - mainly because the numbers of veterans are dwindling and this may be the last year that many of them, all now in their 80s and 90s, are well enough to cross the Channel.

Sadly, it is six months too late for my own Father to join them. He died, after a few rather less than dignified months of dementia, in December 2008. We celebrated his life last month with 14 of his LCT and LSA shipmates, who included National Standard Bearer Anne Cutter and her husband Harry, Parade Marshall. They solemnly placed the huge banner on the altar in church, behind the casket containing his ashes upon which his white fireman's helmet was placed. When they retrieved it and marched out to the Sharlston Male Voice Choir singing the Navy Hymn (For those in peril on the sea) there was not a dry eye in church.

There has already been reams of D-Day material in the MSM; one of the most moving and thoughtful pieces was by James Delingpole in the Telegraph. James interviewed surviving members of 47 Royal Marine Commando and visited the scene of their most heroic battle at Port-en-Bessin. Read it here.

I will now hand over to Dad himself, who wrote about his own D-Day experiences in an uncompleted memoir. The BBC also has some wonderful audio clips of veterans while the British Legion is also doing its usual sterling job.

Dad returned from Normandy the week after D-Day, celebrating his 21st birthday, not as I did with champagne and canapes under a Palladian collonade, but on the choppy waters of the Channel, not knowing whether he would ever set foot on British shores again. I think you get a wonderful feel for his optimistic, courageous and ever curious outlook on life from these - completely unedited by me - few lines.

Holding Juno - German counter-attacks

"At about this time, we changed over our old Mark III Landing Craft for a newer Mark IV type with far better accomodation - causing a near mutiny from the other crews. We were then allocated a detachment of Canadians and nine large tanks each with a huge 105mm gun. Our job on the approach to Juno was to open fire at 10,000 yards, run on to the beach, offload via the bow ramp, prior to kedging off (pulling yourself off the beach by use of the storm anchor) and heading for another load.

"We started doing many familiarisation exercises on the beaches at Boscombe, Bournemouth and Slapton beaches which were similar to the ones we would land on in France. Around this time, Slapton beach saw a shoot-up with German E Boats and almost a thousand men - all US personnel - were lost. Between March and April, we had a quickie refit and check at the Lady Bee boatyard in Southwick, where they normally built luxury yachts. We managed to persuade them to build us a lovely day cabin in our troop space - quite unofficially of course!

"Returning to Southampton and yet more exercises, we had a pep talk from Lord Louis Mountbatten himself on the 1st of June, telling us what to expect and how to react - a bit like Horatio at Trafalgar. On the 4th of June, we received orders to stand by to sail but a serious gale had blown up and the operation had to be delayed by 24 hours. June 6th would be D-Day. We sailed on the night of the 5th. The 100 miles across to France took us 12 hours. En route we received a message to the effect that we would be required for the second wave on D+1. We made our way to Juno beach but were not required to fire on the way in. There was still a huge amount of activity on the beach, but our lads already appeared to have the upper hand.

"We looked for an opening on the beach and the skipper slowly brought her in. When I felt the craft grounding, I took a sounding and found only three foot of water, so I gave the order for the first tank to move off. We successfully disembarked all nine tanks and they rumbled across to join the others on the beach. There was some air action going on at the time and many of our men on the ground opening up at a lone Spitfire which came across the scene. Fortunately, they appeared to miss him however and he made good his escape on this occasion to fight another day.

"We then started taking in the stern kedge anchor which was a little tricky as we were semi-impaled on a beach defence but managed it successfully, finally got turned around and headed back towards UK and our loading base in Gosport. A couple of miles offshore, we came across a sister ship with wires around her propellors. We took them in tow for a couple of hours and they eventually managed to clear them. Some 12 hours later we were on G4 Loading Hard in Gosport and after a few welcome drinks whilst loading, we were soon ramp up, heading back to Arromanches. Luckily, the local, the Lord Nelson, was just off the Hard. In the many days that followed, we did some 50 trips with men, transport, tanks and later, agricultural machinery for the farmers in Rouen."

Find out more about the British Legion's D-DAY 65 campaign & how they are using it to help current servicemen in the theatres of Iraq & Afghanistan here.

#8964 Another Brick in the Great Chinese Fire Wall – Some Sober Thoughts ahead of the Tiananmen Anniversary

2009-06-03T00:54:00.000-07:00

Match the correct caption to this photo (but don’t win £100,000):

A) Daily Telegraph publishes photo of the latest garden ornament bought on expenses by leading Labour MP (note iconic portrait of Party Leader in background).
B) French tourists inspect the unusual & ingenious exchange gift presented by President Obama to President Sarkozy ahead of their commemoration of D-Day (note iconic portrait of Party Leader in the background).
C) The makeshift “Goddess of Democracy” statue surrounded by student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in May 1989.

Do you even remember the wonky, jolie-laide, but somehow potent figure which, for a few weeks at least, came to symbolize the aspirations of many younger Chinese for more transparency, democracy, for less corruption and repression. Oddly enough, it is an image you don’t see very much any more. I wonder why.

It was rather more difficult to suppress the equally identifiable image of “Tank Man” – the one which sits permanently at the top of this blog for – I hope – obvious reasons. Perhaps because the tank man was photographed by half a dozen Western photographers and won several awards, most notably the overall World Press Photo in 1989 - awarded to the shot taken by Charlie Cole of Newsweek.

I wasn’t at Tiananmen but I was as near as I could get – around 1200 miles to the South, huddled in Statue Square with hundreds and hundreds of like-minded optimists, milling between three bizarre monuments to Hong Kong’s colonial past: the Cenotaph War Memorial, the Mandarin Hotel & the Hong Kong Club. Frankly, there was not much we could practically do, but we felt we had to do something and so we came together, collectively symbolising solidarity with our peers in Beijing.

I was born in Hong Kong and I doubt if I will ever be able to do justice to what it was really like, growing up in such a politically anachronistic and avowedly capitalist society, hanging on gingerly to the underbelly of the mighty and hostile Chinese dragon. Perhaps my feelings for what was then the Peking regime were crystallised during the 1967-68 pro-Communist riots in the colony, during which we went to school in armoured cars and several of my father’s peers in the Fire Brigade and the Police Force lost their lives to random bombs and in violent street skirmishes.

On Monday night, I duly attended an event devoted to Tiananmen + 20 at London’s Frontline Club which champions independent journalism. The influential panel included Shiao Jiang, one of the organisers of the protests, who was subsequently imprisoned & eventually fled to the West after years of harassment. Shiao Jiang wore a simple black tee-shirt bearing the Tank Man image.

I hope to post later at greater length on the compelling, if frustratingly truncated, panel discussion. Founding Editor of the authoritative Chinadialogue, Isabel Hilton, provided several insightful contributions to the discussion which was expertly moderated by Sky News Foreign Editor Tim Marshall. Telegraph.co.uk's Kate Day did an excellent job live-tweeting from the event.

Inevitably, the debate came round to the potential of technology, the Web, the burgeoning Chinese blogosphere and enthusiastic uptake of Social Media. BBC World Service China Editor Shirong Chen suggested that communication technology was certainly pushing the boundaries of transparency within China, but the Party should never be underestimated and “could so easily put the lid back on”.

Nevertheless, I skipped out of the Club later, feeling that my few days standing in Statue Square 20 years ago might not have been totally in vain and that the amazing world-wide intraweb and the inexorable rise of on-line communities might - eventually - effect some real change in 21st century China.

Yet Shirong Chen was extraordinarily prophetic; when I logged on the very next morning, I discovered that China had blocked a range of social networks, including Flickr.com, Twitter, Hotmail accounts and even the new Microsoft Bing. The censors had already been at work according to the BBC’s Beijing-based James Reynolds.

One of the very first Chinese characters you learn to write – after your numbers of course: 一; 二; 三 - is 中 as in 中国

This image: copyright Reuters

The word for China: the Middle Kingdom. An empire which boasts several millenia of advanced and civilised culture and history, an empire which now has well over a billion of hard-working and deeply aspirational consumers; an empire which - perhaps understandably - sees itself as the kingdom at the centre of the world. Perhaps it is naive of me to think that Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the ilk, could even start to chip away at the surprisingly agile monolith which is the Chinese Communist Party - but I don't intend to give up hope - not quite yet.

And finally - More unscientifically selected Ponderings and Postings on #Media140

2009-05-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

#Media140 Keynote Speaker Pat Kane wants everyone to know that Hue & Cry are still very active. Check them out here!

Apologies for delay - but seriously, there was so very much stuff to sift through and I am taking this job - with my semi-official, ill-fitting, Media140 crew tee shirt on - very seriously indeed. Perversely, as I burned the midnight oil, reading everyone's post #media140 thoughts, I realised that my plight was insanely symptomatic of our new(ish) digital media landscape: information overload. It's many years now, since I sat "copy-tasting" downtable at Reuters (how anachronistic does this vocabulary sound already?) and even then, I never had to cope with this volume of material.

Personally, I have no solutions yet - but it did make me wonder how I might go about teaching my students how best to filter? In my experience, it is both highly subjective & somehow extremely instinctive. Can news sense ever be taught? Answers on a postcard please!

As promised yesterday, a selection of utterly unscientifically selected posts and pull-togethers. I don't need to teach you guys how to use a search engine - although during the course of all my rather unscientific if very enthusiastic research, I did come across a couple of (hithertofore unknown to this benighted Luddite and) rather cool tools: http://twithority.com/ and the slick http://tweetmeme.com/ from Media140's very own @nickhalstead! The Google News Feed was also pretty impressive.

One salient point of feedback from Wednesday's event at Iris Digital was the calibre of the panellists and moderators and at least two of them found time to post their own thoughts. For Journalism.co.uk, Laura Oliver did a series of thoughtful pieces; I particularly liked her piece on Pat Kane & newspaper pay walls. Read it here.

Kevin Anderson also gave a great presentation and then wrote more than one perceptive pull-together for TechGuardian.

Another nice piece which spoke to me was "The 13 most important conclusions on Twitter" on thenextwomen.com. Hartelijk gefeliciteerd, Simone! There was another interesting overview here from editorsweblog.com (although getting BBC Pesto's name wrong as P-R-eston irritated. One thing I always tell the kids: the slightest typo or most trivial factual error will inevitably and always undermine your authority).

At the Broadsight blog, Broadstuff, @freecloud fleshed out his notes from the day with his usual accurate analysis. This is also worth reading for the series of apposite comments it attracted.

Another keen analysis of the frontline journalism panel came from the cerebral Daniel Bennet for the Frontline. When you get a moment, check out all the amazing Frontline bloggers; there is bound to be one for you! They also include one from @fieldreports whose extraordinary presentation at Media140 drew possibly the longest applause and apres-show kudos.

We were extremely lucky to have so many experts live-blogging and tweeting, among them @adders who also took some of the best shots of the day, including my personal favourite of @joannageary and @Documentally. Naturally, I am still too much of a Luddite to be able to upload and display it here, despite Adam graciously giving me his permission but you can check it out, along with the rest of the Flickr group here.

Another live-blogger who did a great job was the Telegraph's @kate_day. Kate first wowed me with her minute-by-minute coverage of the London Marathon - perfect for those of us who would have been there if only our ageing knees had allowed. The link to her post-event think piece entitled "Truth vs Speed" was re-tweeted again and again. It includes an audio clip of my heroine of the day Gerry Jackson of SW Radio Africa and a great pic of the day's acknowledged most entertaining agent provocateur @billt.

Please keep constructive post-event criticism coming, either to me @deejackson or to Media140 guru @dailytwitter.

Cockroaches, Conversations and Axe-wielding Nutters – A totally unscientific but (mainly) affectionate look back at Media140

2009-05-22T04:37:00.000-07:00

G

Hot New Trend #Media140: the fuschia pink sweater look...
TwitPic courtesy of @RadioKate
(Check out her amazing project @BBC_SOS )

When Media140 founder and mastermind, Ande Gregson, said, and I quote, “Crack on!” when I suggested that, as an albeit lowly member of the Media140 crew, I did a blog post on feedback-cum-review of the day, I was practically ecstatic. Finally: a chance to dust down all those once-learned, never forgotten tools of the trade I was first taught by the legendary George Short, in a stuffy room full of – I kid you not – manual typewriters behind Reuters HQ at 85, Fleet Street.

So, initially enthusiastic, I set about aggregating, cogitating and filtering - as the links to #media140-labelled posts started to proliferate on Twitter. It wasn’t long before I realised that there was simply far too much stuff here for my super-annuated brain; and that was before I’d even had time to peruse all the energetic and, in the main excellent, live tweeting and blogging which went on all afternoon from the Media140 crew: @paulagoes; @badgergravling; @benjamindyer; @dan_martin; @sizemore; @ana_brasil; @vikkichowney; @brian_condon; @sheamus; @kate_day; @iainaitch; @blogtillyoudrop & @bash.

Added to which, most of the posts were by Social Media denizens who are all, frankly, far more qualified to get to the nub of the issues raised at the event than I am or ever could be. Truth be told, it is translating and copy-editing which now pay my mortgage, although I do try and keep up with the times, as I regularly find myself advising student mates who – despite all my advice to the contrary – still seem determined to pursue a career in journalism.

I do, however, know when I’m beaten so I thought I would restrict myself to sharing some of my own highlights, along with some of the more critical feedback that came my way on Wednesday, when I was wearing that distinctly unflattering Media140 crew tee-shirt. I have also appended a list of published #media140 posts which struck particular chords with me – purely personal whim. I hasten to add that no money has – as yet – changed hands.

There was more than a mutter about the distinct paucity of women on the podium. Indeed, even Bill Thompson referred to himself and his fellows on the first panel as the “Five Old White Guys”. Having been at fairly close quarters as Ande worked to put the event together, I know that this was not for want of trying and, in the end, the women who did speak: Laura Oliver & Joanne Jacobs moderating; Suw Charman-Anderson & Joanna Geary on panels did a fine job. The audience was also at least 50:50, if not more so, female. My gut feeling is that Media140 stuck pretty much to the guns of its sub-title: “The Future of Real Time News” and that, although I have plenty of great Twitter girlfriends, many of them are, if not quite full-blown “Mommy Bloggers” then they often, rather like myself, have a very particular, and not necessarily hard news-oriented, niche to plough.

The emphasis on breaking news and news gathering was also the reason that not more time was devoted to examining the role of PR – pace Dan Martin and others. I know this is definitely a topic to which Media140 hopes to return in the future.

As an ex-foreign correspondent, my own highlight panel was Frontline Journalism with instructive expositions by all: @suw on findingada.com, Mark Jones explaining how the Thomson-Reuters behemoth has come to innovative terms with Twitter; @kevglobal’s fascinating US campaign tours; the charming and personable Moeed Ahmad, when he finally came through loud and clear and Guy Degen’s compulsive footage from Tbilisi – crazy dateline, slightly crazy guy. The impact of his presentation can be seen in this tweet from one of the many unsung heroes of the day – thanks George!

RT @iboy: @fieldreports Watching the folks #media140 watch you was fun. Facial expressions said: "Holy shit, this guy is really doing it!"

So many other people, including the above cited Dan, have written eloquently about the Local Media panel. I was impressed when I signed up for @simongrice’s BeLocal.com yesterday and was receiving DMs about my local weather, news and carefully selected trivia within minutes. It makes an excellent case for the much-talked about micro-micro.

On the technical side, there were unfortunately a few annoying glitches, such as with the mikes. The ever-perceptive Andy Piper came up with a valid grumble. Andy wasn’t there on Wednesday but hoping to follow the discussion and asking questions via Twitter. Sadly, overall, he was disappointed at the lack of response to external questions, lack of response to the back channel and to the video stream. He pointed out that SOMESSO Corporate Social Media Conference on May 15th had a “front channel” alongside the presenters, to which they duly responded. In a series of constructive DMs, Andy explained: “For a “140” event, I was amazed that Media140 didn’t have the same set-up”. All valid points and I know that the other Ande is keen for all feedback. DM him @dailytwitter

My highlights of the day, in no particular order:

- Audible gasp from shocked but enthralled audience as @billt “banged heads together” during first panel.
- Watching Guy’s material from Georgia and remembering why I became a journo in the first place….
- Getting my badge signed by teenage crush Pat Kane
- @Documentally introducing the courageous Gerry Jackson from http://www.swradioafrica.com/
- The suggestion that we just call Moeed on the phone when we were having trouble with the connection, shouted out by well known wag @freecloud
- Working with @klbarber, @petrajohansson and all of @dailytwitter’s other slaves
- Baths full of beer & impossible to eat ciabatta burgers…er that’s it.

Look forward to seeing all and more at the next...

How my afternoon idling on Twitter taught me a bit about earthquakes & space walks & a lot about the increasingly skewed perspective of BBC news

2009-05-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

"BBC Eurovision host Graham Norton was nowhere near the protest and is totally unharmed” (Irish on-line forum)

I’ve been very busy lately but I couldn’t really tell you what it is I have achieved. I suppose I’ve been mostly busy with life minutiae – you know the sort of stuff: sick spaniels, laundry, being the executor of my late Father’s estate and the rest of all that bereavement baggage (separate post coming eventually – I know, bet you just can’t wait…) last minute commissions just a little too lucrative to turn down, laundry, lovelorn girlfriends, scrubbing the house as it goes on the market and, you’ve guessed it, yet more laundry.

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a minute this month to fulfil my regular commitment to a U.S. database, who pay me very nicely to read and abstract foreign language arts magazines for their website. It’s my favourtie gig. Interesting, informative, stimulating and, as a bonus, the (UK) Cambridge-based editors with whom I work – if only virtually – are a lovely, professional bunch.

So, on Saturday afternoon, I sat down with the express intention of completing a few records. And then I got distracted. Yes, hands up, by Twitter, but I hadn’t been terribly attentive or active for ages and wanted to ensure I knew what was going on in the Twitterverse, ahead of Media140 in London on 20th May with which event I’ve been lucky enough to be just a little bit involved.

These are just a couple of the things I did, courtesy of Twitter and Twitter pals IRL and otherwise, on Saturday afternoon alone. I heard within minutes about the Texas earthquake from the must-follow @JimMacmillan. Not a big one at 3.3 apparently but unusual for Texas. I also discovered the #earthquake Tweet stream which is bizarrely compelling. I was able to follow the latest on the Twitter #fixreplies saga via @JamesRivers and read a top think piece on the emergence of Social Network Revolt from @mashable.

I learned about the great #UnderAPound #Under2Bucks initiative started by @DarenBBC which is just the kind of TwitterLove project/meme which particularly appeals to me. Thanks to @Carole29, I was alerted to a link which let you watch the space walk live. I am no geek but a live space walk! How far is that from 1969, when my parents made us sit down in front of a tiny monochrome TV to see Neil Armstrong take his small/big step.

Courtesy of @tristamsparks I found out all about the #freejeanfer #escandologt campaign. If you haven't heard about it, I recommend you do so. I’d been trying all week not to get bogged down with daft #eurovision tweets but then saw this one from my friend IRL @Danoosha, "#Eurovision: gayest event in European calendar in Europe's most homophobic country. I predict a riot" http://tinyurl.com/qdqkgb

I’m not gay – although many of my close friends are and I suppose I have kept a vague watching brief on HIV/Aids related issues since my late brother, Rory, died in 1995. I didn’t even know that activists, including Peter Tatchell, a brave bloke whatever you think of his motives, were planning to stage a protest ahead of the Eurovision Song Contest. Russia decriminalised homosexuality in 1993 but the gay rights situation remains dire. Moscow’s influential mayor Yuri Luzhkov has described homosexuality as satanic. Then I found @PeterTatchell’s Tweet Stream which included such perfect succinct tweets as the following: “Arrested. Shortest march I've ever been on” and the last tweet at 12.26 on 16th May: “Free from police station but am deeply worried about Slavic Pride organiser Nikolai Alekseev. Haven't heard anything since his arrest”

As I continued trying to do a bit of remunerated work, I drifted back to Twitter and became more and more anxious about the lack of news about the Moscow arrests. Searching #Eurovision merely unearthed Euro-Tweeps’ preparations for camp parties with a few blatant attempts to secure votes for particular countries. Then I started to check MSM, starting with the BBC who were running huge coverage of the event itself. Much anticipation of whether Graham Norton could adequately fill the shoes of his countryman Sir Terry Wogan but on the protest and the arrests? Nothing whatsoever.

On Google, pratically nothing but the wire services’ anodyne round-ups of which the English-language Russia Today turned out to be both the most neutral and the most comprehensive. On Twitter, I found a previously undiscovered country of (mostly) sober and serious LGB voices, tweeting either as individuals or from collective platforms. Via one of these, I found a link to UKGayNews which had by far the most up-to-date news.

The story is still moving with one detainee, US activist Andy Thayer completely off the radar for several hours. I’m still struggling to find anything breaking but have definitely given up on the BBC. This morning, Radio 4 news at 9.00 am ran a soundbite with the Norwegian violinist who won Eurovision, admitting that he really couldn’t sing but the bulletin mentioned nothing about the arrests. “Openly gay” host Graham Norton reportedly said something along the lines of: “heavy handed policing spoiled (sic) a grand Eurovision”. I’m still trying to work out whether this line on an Irish on-line forum was serious or supposed to be funny: “BBC Eurovision host Graham Norton was nowhere near the protest and is totally unharmed”.

Looking forward to debating this and many other key issues: #whithertwitter, the changing face of news gathering and the citizen journalist at Media140 on Wednesday 20th May. Hope to see you there.

Stop press: this tweet from PeterTatchell "Glad everyone was freed eventually, though Nicholas & others face police charges. On my way home to London now.... I need a holiday" (c.1115 hours Monday)-

Guantanamo Tribunals & Torture Photos: why my own Honeymoon with Obama is over

2009-05-15T04:06:00.000-07:00

This image (from the 2006 series “Guantanamerica”)
Copyright 2006 John Keane/Flowers East

Barack Obama’s controversial decision to restart the Guantanamo Bay tribunals has been hailed as the official "End of the Honeymoon". It certainly marks the beginning of my own irritation with the increasingly pragmatic President. Just when I thought it was safe to publish a new post on his decision to hold back thousands of images of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, he throws in yet another extraordinary reversal of a campaign promise, infuriating the left-liberal blogosphere and rendering much of my own carefully crafted musings on the torture photos decision rather old hat.

The story is still moving quickly. Just as the White House is spluttering over what or was not promised on Guantanamo, more shocking pictures of American torturing prisoners have emerged, despite all the administration's efforts to suppress them. The latest images to emerge via an Australian television channel are thought to be from a batch of the original 2006 Abu Ghraib shots which were not publicised at the time.

My last post on Obama’s approach to the thornier elements of the Bush legacy was in early March, when I explained the significance of his promise to release previously banned images of America’s war dead and other footage from both theatres of war. At the time, the decision was, rightly, hailed as a victory for a long-fought battle for freedom of information and seen as welcome proof that Obama’s re-iterated campaign promises for greater transparency would be honoured. The main reason given this week for holding back the torture images is the need to prevent any further international anti-American feeling, suggesting that now finally in office, the Obama administration may be finding national security issues more complex than they appeared to be when viewed from the rather simpler perspective of a hopeful candidate.

However, this week’s back-tracking, both on the torture photos and on Guantanamo seems to signal a decidedly more sober presidential approach, interpreted by some U.S. commentators as a victory of statesmanship and pragmatism over the instinct and spontaneity which has previously characterised the new President’s approach and which so many of the electorate clearly found so attractive. Nevertheless, the speed of both reversals has shocked observers on both sides of the political divide. The president originally ordered Guantanamo to be shut by early 2010 in a bid to restore America’s human rights image. But the closure of the Cuban-based detention camp was always going to be fraught as Newsweek’s Dan Ephron pointed out perceptively as long as six months ago.

The image above is by John Keane (b.1954) one of my favourite and most thoughtful artists. He is often called the ‘journalists’ artist’. He was the Official Artist during the First Gulf War and has since consistently turned his intelligence and extraordinary technical approach to issues of conflict and media all over the world. My personal favourites are his 2006 Angola series, in conjunction with Christian Aid and his 1999 series ‘Making a Killing’ featuring Rupert Murdoch and Diana, Princess of Wales.

Small Country: Significant Trauma - Why the Queen’s Day Parade attack is sure to scar the Dutch psyche

2009-05-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

This image from the series "Reigning Queens" © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, NY and DACS

Why the shock of the Queen's Day attack on Queen Beatrix has shaken her subjects to the core

The key challenge for every foreign correspondent is to report accurately from wherever the dateline, without falling into the facile trap of resorting to national stereotype. The Netherlands, with its familiar and easily caricatured iconography of windmills, tulips, clogs and cheese, is a relatively small northern European country, (population 16.5 million) whose heady days of maritime empire are centuries ago and whose guttural language erects yet another barrier for any outsider attempting any meaningful analysis of the contemporary Dutch nation. It is moreover, a society which has been radically altered over the last four decades by unfettered immigration, much of it from Islamic countries.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to underestimate the shock and horror reverberating throughout the Netherlands at yesterday’s – ultimately suicidal – attack on Queen Beatrix and her family, as they travelled in an open-top bus through the central Dutch town of Apeldoorn, home of the main Oranje royal palace, Het Loo. Without exception, today’s headlines in the Dutch papers all signal the end of dreams, the shattering of illusions, disbelief, disgust and discomfort. “Zwart fantoom blaast alle dromen weg” (A black phantom blasts every dream away); “Nationale illusie gesneuveld in Apeldoorn” (A national illusion slain in Apeldoorn); Beatrix: “Heel diep geschokt”.

The country’s leading commentators seem to be taking an unusually long time to gather their thoughts but the on-line message boards have been buzzing with indignant theories and demotic and instinctual apportioning of blame. “The American plague of crazed individual narcissism has arrived!” was one comment in daily de Volkskrant. Another complained about the insensitivity of the media, quick to broadcast footage of the attack on main news programmes, without a prior warning as to its highly disturbing content.

I arrived in Amsterdam in 1985 on my first foreign posting. I was nervous and anxious that my Dutch experience would be as wretched as my gap year, teaching English in a small town in Bavaria. On my first trip to the office, I got hopelessly lost along the city’s central horseshoe of canals and stumbled upon the floating flower market on the Singel. It was April. All I could see was what looked like a protracted rainbow of brightly coloured, perfectly formed tulips. I was hooked.

I lived in the Netherlands, on and off, for almost a decade. I even managed to master – albeit with a still frightful foreign accent – their curiously classical, yet simultaneously colloquial – language. Slowly, I discovered a people startlingly close to their British cousins across the Channel, or the big puddle, as it is affectionately referred to in Dutch. I admired my Dutch friends’ refreshing directness and candour, their dry sense of humour, their robust family ties and their intellectual curiosity and often surprisingly whacky creativity. And, despite my clumsy attempts to mangle their fiendish tongue, I was universally welcomed. The centuries-old alliance between the Low Countries and Britain developed into fervent Anglophilia during the Second World War when the government, eventually led by Gerbrandy was evacuated to London as the Germans invaded their previously neutral neighbours in May 1940.

The Dutch resistance was partially run from London and agents on the ground were heavily indebted to the BBC for communications. British troops’ role in the May 1945 liberation set the seal on an affection which continues, unshaken by any trivialities of EU politics. To this day, German sailors on the Ijsselmeer fly the blue, starred EU ensign, rather than their national colours and most Dutch people, even though they speak perfect German, will use their fluent, accent-free English when replying to German visitors.

I personally believe the Occupation is a vital key to understanding the apparently self-contained Dutch character. The survival instincts, courage and compassion fostered during those five years seem to have lent the Dutch an almost arrogant confidence in their ability to deal with almost any conceivable affront. If my generation has only limited understanding of what our parents and grandparents went through during the Second World War, how much harder do we have to imagine what it must have been like to live, with the Occupiers living next door, with the fight for survival and the temptations, in a time of privation, of collaboration? As a translator, I have had the privilege to work on more than one self-penned tome of memoirs and the extent of the local heroism and courage in all of them is humbling.

The Netherlands is known more for the visual arts than for the literary ones but the Occupation inspired several important lightly fictionalised autobiographical works, among them De Aanslag (The Assault) by Harry Mulisch and my personal favourites, Stripes in the Sky and Drowning by Gerard Durlacher. The Occupation is moreover the subject of the most famous Dutch book of all time, one which has become one of the best-loved books in world literature, Het Achterhuis or Anne Frank’s Diary. The Occupation continues to reverberate artistically, in works such as Paul Verhoeven’s surprising 2006 return to credible film with Zwartboek (Black Book).

The other key factor in understanding the implications of the Queen’s Day attack is the immense affection in which the Royal Family, and particularly Beatrix, herself is held. The family remains remarkably accessible to the Dutch population. Who could possibly imagine the entire British Royal Family taking to a charabanc for a parade on a holiday? A holiday which is anticipated and enjoyed as a true Volksfest – a proper people’s party, with free beer, spontaneous jumble sales and obligatory naff Orange accessories, cheerfully and willingly donned by all.

Of course, there have been regular mutterings about the Dutch royals, since Queen Wilhelmina decided she might feel safer in London, leaving her loyal subjects to deal with the invading Germans. Beatrix herself courted unpopularity in 1966 by marrying a German, Claus van Amsberg (1926-2002). More recent tittle tattle has concerned the putative activities of Argentinian-born Crown Princess Máxima’s father during the Videla dictatorship and the suitability of alleged gangster’s moll, Mabel Wisse Smit, now the wife of Prince Friso.

An excellent English-language portal into Dutch news is the website of the venerable daily NRC Handelsblad which also has clear links to the equally professional English language offerings of Germany's Spiegel-Online and Denmark’s Politiken.

George Orwell would be blogging. Why irrational nostalgia poses a real threat to the future of print journalism

2009-04-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

This image copyright Hergé/Moulinsart SA

World’s most famous Belgian?
Tintin, the intrepid boy reporter and his trusty sidekick Snowy

Is there another profession whose practitioners suffer from quite as much maudlin nostalgia as journalism? I think not. You don’t often hear doctors talking about the good old days of trepanning and leeches and I have never met a farmer – and yes I know quite a few, living as we do in rural isolation – who would willingly swap his Sanderson for a horse drawn plough or the sharpest scythe.

Yet gather together hacks of a certain age and before too long, the conversation comes around to the long lost days of hot type, the whiff of the ink, the clatter of the typewriter keys and the reliability or otherwise of telephone lines across five continents. At a recent Frontline Club discussion on the future for local newspapers, I was flabbergasted to hear three members of a distinguished and experienced panel, plus a few contributors from the floor, recounting endless tales of how things used to be done and how noble (read: how much better) it all was back then.

There was much hand wringing at the current crisis but precious little initiative or lateral thinking on the thorny subject of how the local papers will have to regroup to survive. One panellist sorrowfully evoked Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi presumably in the sense that you “don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”.

Unsurprisingly, I shared many of the fears expressed, notably that the current slash-and-burn happening across the country at so many regional titles will inevitably lead to a dumbing down of coverage and erosion of quality and to a worrying lack of transparency on key community matters such as the arcane proceedings of the local council or the police. Nevertheless, there was no valid discussion as to how the big media groups might go about replacing the (once obscenely) lucrative advertising revenues which have inevitably migrated to the nefarious world-wide intraweb.

I, too, am guilty as charged: my very first job was actually, physically, on Fleet Street in the elegant Lutyens-designed headquarters of Reuters at number 85, next door to Wren’s equally elegant St Bride’s, still the “Journalists’ Church”. I, too, can bore for Britain with tales of long nights at El Vino’s, long days at the City Golf Club and the odd international scoop. Earlier this month, I sat, enthralled, alongside 120 other self-confessed hacks, listening to the distinguished poet and writer James Fenton wax lyrical about his days as a bona fide war correspondent, hitching one of the last choppers out of Saigon. Those were indeed the days and should be celebrated as such.

I was struck by the absurdity of this longing for a long gone era when recently recounting just such a tale, albeit at their request, to a bunch of student friends, all of whom remain puzzlingly keen to forge their own career in journalism. “So finally, after four hours of failed attempts, we finally got a phone line through to Moscow, I had to run all the way down the newsroom in my high heels and short skirt, to make sure the copytakers were ready.”

More than one hand shot up. “What’s a copytaker, Dee?” Now these are Oxbridge undergraduates, not conspicuously lacking in intelligence but I could see the concept perplexed them. They simply could not conceive of a room full of head-setted typists, fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to take dictation. Of course not. They all write their own pithy reviews of dire student drama productions on their I-Phones and just press send.

When you think about it, hankering for the good old days of journalism is plain bonkers. Why would anyone swap their Netbook and Wi-fi for a super-annuated Tandy dependent on a reliable three-pin plug and a telephone line? No chance. Technology is awesome and should be gratefully embraced. Click here to read an enthusiastic paean on the topic from the entertaining and always perceptive Shane Richmond of the Telegraph.

I hope to return to post on some practical approaches for the brave new world of print. The advertising model is not actually broken – as was tiresomely reiterated during the Frontline discussion – but it does need some serious modification. Counting solely on traffic has already failed to successfully monetize newspapers' online offerings. The existing CPC/CPA model currently in widespread use really needs to move to a tenancy-based sell. There are, however, several other problems which may prove more intractable, from simple inertia, to the huge range of widely diverse individual newspaper cultures. At 'Out with a Bang' Rick Waghorn writes intelligently about these and related conundrums. Another mine of knowledge and consistently lucid source is the editors’ blog at Journalism.co.uk. For a truly comprehensive view, I can really recommend the percipient and spookily timely “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” by LSE Polis Director, Charlie Beckett whose blog is also required reading.

Print is not yet dead. It is not even moribund as I was reminded by two publications which recently hit my desk. The first is the immaculate, highly readable and beautifully produced UK version of Wired, edited by a former Guardian colleague David Rowan. I am still dipping in and out of the April Launch Issue. The second is IssueOne magazine, a rather more exotic but equally beautiful beast to which I hope to return in another post.

Signed: Elizabeth R To Our Trusty & Well-Beloved Fred Jackson Esquire, Greeting!

2009-03-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

My Dad - 12/06/23-18/12/08 - Requiescat

The rumours are, I am afraid, all true. I was once an avid collector of autographs. Long, long before these our days of celebrity culture, I was an over-keen, gangly pre-teen, hanging around the stage door, never without my leather-backed notebook and lucky ball-point pen. I can still see the first three pages with their hurried yet clearly legible marks: Cliff Richard; Frankie Vaughan; Gilbert O’Sullivan!!!

The notebook is long gone, of course. Into some trunk, into some attic, gnawed on by rodents or consumed on some bonfire. I still have a few prized signatures, however; many of them just visible in the corners of the paintings & lithographs I started to collect when autographs per se started to pall. I’ve even got the Queen. Her bold Elizabeth R, in a rather beautiful frame, hangs on the wall above the sink (signed Philippe Starck) in our downstairs WC.

I didn’t actually wangle an invite to Buckingham Palace and whip out a scrap of paper and a fountain pen at a likely juncture. I didn’t need to. Her Majesty made her mark upon the royal warrant conferring the Imperial Service Order upon my father – making him Fred Jackson, ISO, QFSM, CPM. Every time I wash my hands, I now have a mental picture of the Queen, perched at a huge desk in Sandringham or Balmoral, spectacles on, looking as serious as Helen Mirren in that movie, working her way through a ream of parchment warrants, scratching out Elizabeth R again & again & again.

The ISO was established in 1902 by Edward VII. It is a limited order, awarded to a select group of civil servants “for long and meritorious service of the British Empire”. It was seriously limited in 1993, when it was quietly dropped in favour of the Imperial Service Medal; stands to reason – we haven’t really got an Empire any more.

Dad himself was quietly but hugely proud, not just of his ISO, but of his many awards. Myself, I was proudest when I went, in my Sunday best, to Government House to see Sir David Trench present Dad with The Governor of Hong Kong Lanyard – awarded for outstanding gallantry during the 1967 Communist uprising and riots. Self-effacing, modest & often surprisingly shy, the most he would ever say was: “not that bad for a boy from Askern, is it?”

A few years ago, Dad started to write his own memoirs. Alas, they stop abruptly in 1968 – when my mother, Tina, was first diagnosed with breast cancer. He has a charming, candid and quietly comic voice and I hope to do something with them at some stage. For now, I am afraid, the following will have to temporarily suffice:

Fred was born in 1923 in a tiny hamlet on the edge of the South Yorkshire coalfield. My grandfather, Cecil, was still a dairyman then but the pit at Askern would soon dominate the local economy. My grandmother, Violet, née Spink, went on to have another 10 children: Sidney; Charles, William Arthur; Anne Cecilia; Eric; Cecil; Stuart; Violet; Michael and Norma – the latter and her brother Eric both died as infants of pneumonia. At time of writing, both of Dad’s sisters and his brothers Bill and Michael survive him.

My grandfather went on to tend to the pit ponies and Dad’s bi-annual trip underground to bring them out for their brief respite in the fresh air convinced him that a miner’s life was not for him. Despite fierce paternal opposition, he escaped the pit by joining the Navy and swiftly, despite a truncated formal education, became a commissioned officer.

In 1944, he found himself accompanying the Canadian tanks across to Juno Beach on D-Day & celebrated his 21st birthday, not as I did, with champagne and canapés under an elegant 18th century colonnade, but on a battered landing craft, negotiating the choppy Channel waters on his way back to England. My mother clearly fell for this wind-burnished chap in uniform and they were married in October 1946.

Dad then joined the Fire Brigade in Doncaster and in 1956, he and my mother left for an initial three year contract in Hong Kong, a move rather braver than any gap year student with a mobile phone and laptop might now be able to fully comprehend.

My parents both loved the colonial lifestyle and tropical weather and my father endeared himself to his men by learning to speak fluent Cantonese (albeit retaining his distinctive Yorkshire accent). Dad was an exemplary officer and was decorated several times for gallantry. He was instrumental in preparing HKFS for the eventual localisation of senior ranks ahead of the 1997 handover and, by the time he retired in 1985, he was the Deputy Director of the Brigade.

Alas, in 1975, we lost my mother, Tina, to breast cancer and were doubly devastated less than 20 years later when my brother Rory became an early and ludicrously young victim of HIV/Aids. Dad himself enjoyed nearly 20 years of healthy retirement back home in Yorkshire until 2006, when on-going heart and vascular problems prompted his cardiologist to give him a pacemaker. This operation coincided with a diagnosis of a fairly rare condition: Dementia with Lewy Bodies, which, although not yet fully understood, seems to combine the worst elements of both Parkinsons and Alzheimers.

Difficult as it is to watch someone you love & who was once so very vital, thus cruelly diminished, I found it comforting that Dad’s vivid hallucinations – a key symptom of DLB – usually took him back to Hong Kong or to his Navy days and that very often he clearly saw my late brother, Rory, sitting amiably at the foot of his bed.

Otherwise, Dad’s final months were not as dignified as I, or anyone who loved him, would have wished and I intend to write elsewhere about the terrible circumstances of his demise – when the time is appropriate. Certainly not until after we hold our service of Thanksgiving for & Celebration of his life on Friday 8th May, at St Joseph’s Church in Pontefract, where my parents were married, after which his ashes will be interred in my mother’s grave, alongside Rory’s.

Dad wanted any donations in his memory to go to the Fire Fighters Charity or to the Mission to Seafarers. You can find out more, both about the charities and about Fred on our justgiving.com page.

Can one photograph really change the world? Yes it can! Or can it? Obama, Secretary Gates and the sorry saga of the flag-draped caskets

2009-03-04T10:11:00.000-08:00

This image copyright USAF

I admit: it is impressive. Obama and his team continue to pull stunt after stunt in such an artfully casual way, we barely notice how brazenly we are being manipulated. This week alone, we have had glam, yet reassuringly mumsy, Michelle on the cover of Vogue and now, the shocking juxtaposition of the vital, groomed & grinning Obama with the bowed, dishevelled & grumpy Gordon - (eight out of 10 Washingtonians reportedly identified the British PM thus: ‘Is he like maybe a news anchor for one of the cable TV channels?’)

We wait to see whether the potent currency of Candidate Obama can be converted into presidential success, yet there are signs that the new administration is chipping away at some problematic vestiges of the Bush era. It started with a vow to close Guantanamo Bay. There is also welcome news on the environment with the granting, to 14 states, of waivers from the Federal Clean Air Act, allowing them to impose even stiffer standards on emissions.

Last week, Defence Secretary Robert Gates (whose appointment raised influential eyebrows) announced that media images of the flag-draped coffins of America’s war dead will now be allowed – with the express permission of the families of the fallen. This decision is a dramatic reversal of the blanket ban imposed in 1991 by then President George H.W. Bush and the scrapping of the ban has sharply divided the miliblogosphere.

It is, however, a victory for a Freedom of Information campaign, led by veteran CNN correspondent Ralph Begleiter. Begleiter, now professor of Journalism in Delaware, home state of Dover Air Base, where the caskets are repatriated, sued the Pentagon in 2005, in a bid to release images of regular honour guard ceremonies which continue to be documented by military photographers.

"I never considered the release of images a political issue," Begleiter has said, "But, seeing the cost of war can have strong political consequences. Hiding these images from the public....hinders policymakers and historians of the future from making informed judgments about public opinion and war.”

The defence establishment has had a vexed relationship with the media since William Russell first got to the Crimea in the 1850s. Since then, myriad weighty tomes & conflicting theses have been produced on the influence of war reporting and of specific photographic images. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that the dissemination of so many gruesome scenes from Vietnam was instrumental in the shift of U.S. public opinion against the war.

In the pre-digital era, every conflict threw up its own iconic image. We can all instantly conjure those seared on our memories, such as the one below taken by Nick Ut in 1972.

This image copyright 1972: Associated Press/(Nick) Ut Cong Huynh

Since Vietnam, technological watersheds and the increasing speed of global media networks have made it far more difficult to single out the sole and specific iconic image; yet somehow, one or two always seem to insinuate themselves into the public consciousness. The images from Abu Ghraib prison, featuring Lynndie England and her U.S. army colleagues, which encapsulate a key Iraq War narrative so eloquently, seem set to become the first such photographs to be taken by amateurs rather than by professionals.

In Britain, the MOD exerts equally strict access limits on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq but is less draconian on the use of photographs of the fallen or, indeed, of their Union flag-draped coffins. They are, however, rigid on issues of copyright & I struggled to find images to safely & legally reproduce. British services photographers continue to document both conflicts; many thoughtful and accomplished images can be seen here:

So, in Britain we have no real restrictions on showing images to illustrate the human cost of these wars, yet why do they now appear so infrequently in our newspapers – both quality and tabloid? I live close to a huge Royal Air Force base and the Hercules transport planes bearing the remains of services victims fly overhead on a depressingly regular basis.

This image: Crown copyright/Sgt Ian Houlding

Yet the next day, when I scour the papers for any mention of these tragic shipments, I am usually disappointed. The fate of these men & women is now usually consigned to a downpage paragraph or two, accompanied by a blurred profile picture of an absurdly youthful face, smiling broadly into the camera. Then again, this slight dignity is rather more than that afforded to the many thousands of Iraqi and Afghan victims who have died since Britain and the U.S. went so boldly and unthinkingly into their respective countries.

I am rarely at one with the Mail’s columnist & pundit Peter Hitchens but I was easily persuaded by his cogent arguments in a recent piece linking the most recent military deaths in Afghanistan to the sadly premature death of six-year-old Ivan, the disabled son of David and Samantha Cameron.

At last count, the Pentagon says that 4,253 U.S. service members have died as a result of the war in Iraq since March 2003 while another 584 have been killed in Afghanistan

According to the Ministry of Defence, 149 British service personnel have been killed on active service in Afghanistan while the toll since 2003 in Iraq is 176 fatalities.

Online Communities? "They are all just Victims, in Search of a Common Enemy..." Discuss:

2009-02-03T09:36:00.000-08:00

A wise old blogger, of the ‘never apologize, never explain’ school, advised me never to blog about NOT blogging. Makes sense. Get to the point. Never apologise for cyber-absence, no matter how protracted. So, I’m back, though I have popped up elsewhere in the blogosphere - anonymously. When the crisis in question is no longer sub judice, I hope to put my own name to the posts.

Not necessarily here. The same wise blogger advised me that blogs should retain distinct voices, focussed on a specific range of subjects. This very blog is usually restricted in scope (ie: research for my tome-in-progress on photo-journalism). One friend described it well: “Very nice, but very niche”.

Fred Jackson ISO, QFSM, CPM 12/06/23-18/12/08 - Requiescat -

I do try to keep to photography/news/arts themes & not hijack the blog for subjective rants & meanderings. Neither am I particularly qualified to analyse citizen journalism, UGC, social media & all other elements of the 21st century worldwide intra-web. I leave that to the professionals, many of whom you will find on my blogroll.

Yet for several weeks now, I have wanted to write about “online communities”. I heard – well, overheard – the statement in this post title over lunch. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping? But the tables were so close! We were in an Italian trattoria, much frequented by the editorial & management teams of a global media organisation.

On the rare occasions that my picture byline now appears, it is so out-of-date, that I am utterly unrecognisable & the two Fleet Street Grandes Dames who sat next to us, although I'd met them both before, did not acknowledge myself or my table mate, beyond a friendly smile when the over-sized pepper mill arrived.

One was a writer, of the superior Polly Filla variety, musing on an apposite subject for her next piece. The mental health of readers who left online comments in response to her column was suggested by her interlocutor, a senior editor, with wide management experience. She delivered the assertion above with conviction & audible venom. She went on to complain about the hundreds & thousands of pounds “wasted” by the newspaper on the ever so dull & time-consuming chore of moderating said comments.

As I choked on my tiramisu, I was reminded of two former colleagues, both political pundits but from diametrically opposed corners of the ideological spectrum, both of whom have struggled with the uncomfortable accountability which the new mania for reader interaction has foisted upon them both. An analysis of this feedback frenzy was provided in the Times recently by the perceptive Sathnam Sangera. Read more here.

Unsurprisingly, my friends reacted distinctly to this new relationship with their readers. The first was both sanguine & fully cognisant that the volume of comments, temperate or otherwise, was key to keeping him safe in his lofty position, both on the Op-Ed pages & the editorial board. The other was bug-eyed & apoplectic in his fear & loathing of the “green ink brigade”. What might surprise you is which reaction came from the Leftie and which from the old reactionary....

I have no pat answers to the vexed question of online communities. It is early days and the communities in question are still in their infancy; we may not yet have the perspective to judge their merits or otherwise. In a recent blog post, my friend (not IRL, but one of my many talented Twitter friends – go figure…) Benjamin Dyer points out that online communities are fundamentally flawed, because they are driven by emotional human beings. Read his thought-provoking post about building an online community here.

When another Twitter acquaintance, Neil Perkin, was asked to present on how online communities work, he actually crowdsourced opinion which he was then able to feature in his talk. Read more about Neil’s intriguing project here.

From a purely personal perspective – that is: of someone working freelance from home, alone but for the much-appreciated company but non-existent conversation of three psycho spaniels – I feel extremely grateful for the often unexpected but always stimulating interaction with my own online communities – such as they are.

I have finally been able to abandon an uncomfortable fortnightly evening of warm Pinot Grigio and bitching, masquerading as a book club and I am now able, via Shelfari.com, to discuss my own favourite books with intelligent readers around the world, who share not merely my postcode but my literary predilections

When I switch on my computer every morning, I remain enchanted (just about) to be able, via Facebook, to IM my teenage goddaughter who has just got back from school in Hong Kong or to see the very latest photographs my talented stepson Daniel Griffin has uploaded to Flickr.com from his current trip to India & Nepal.

Via Twitter, I am in touch with scores of other freelance translators around the world - all of whom are never less than generous with their tips, suggestions and even the occasional heads-up on a potential work opportunity.

Over the last 30 months, as I've struggled to find my way through the terrifying parallel universe that is the planet of geriatric care, I have been more grateful than ever for the opportunity to moan, whinge and even scream in cyber-space. And guess what? Amazingly – you usually get heard.

Late one November night in 2006, possibly, after a glass of wine or two, I started to blog – more or less anonymously & very much elsewhere. I wrote about my much loved Father’s sudden & utterly unexpected descent into a rare, and not yet fully understood, form of dementia, about our frustrations at the tyrannies of the “pathways” & “protocols” of the health & social care systems, about our shock & distress when we discovered that so many of those with a duty of care to my father were actually exploiting and abusing his frailty, his confusion, his generosity and his trust.

Within minutes of pressing post, I had received a score of responses: from social care professionals, from more than one medic, from daughters who had been through a similar experience. Yet the majority came from casual readers, those who had taken a few minutes to read my posts and who felt moved enough to respond. If that is not a "community" - I'm not quite sure what is.

To Blog or not to Blog? Of Damaged Doctors & Procrastinating Princes or: Is Celebrity Casting bringing the Wrong Sort of Audience to the Theatre?

2008-12-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

This image: copyright - Tristram Kenton

I have finally decided to grasp the cyber quill and scratch out a few lines about the latest dramas surrounding the RSC Hamlet at the Novello in London, mainly because several friends have asked me to and I also know many who have tickets which they have now heard will not guarantee them a performance by David “Time Lord” Tennant. I don't want to rehash the critical dingdong – if you’re interested, check out Mark Espiner’s expert knit-together from Thursday’s Grauniad.

The story so far: as an occasional reviewer, I sometimes get early dibs on hot tickets and, when the chance for six seats to see dishy Dave do the Dane popped up in the summer, I knew more than five young ladies who would gnaw my arm off for a ticket. (When not translating, copy-editing or blogging, I spend many a happy hour on the Thames towpath, trying to teach Oxford students from my old college a little about rowing - and, I hope, about life in general).

Thanks to the instant, and often über-candid, magic of Facebook, I am, sometimes blushingly, privy to all their crushes & crises & I knew there would be a scramble for the seats. I took the tickets, confirmed the first five girls to respond & booked us in for Monday, 8th December, after their hectic, inebriated term end, a few days into the London run, on the night preceding press night. By October, these very tickets were going for up to 4x face value on E-Bay.

Even I was looking forward to our night Up West: a civilised pre-theatre supper next door at One Aldwych, followed by a couple of hours at Elsinore. But when they arrived in the mezzanine restaurant, their little faces were long & lachrymose. They had already been to the theatre (taking photos to upload onto Facebook, natch) only to see the billboard announcing that, at tonight’s performance the role of Hamlet would be played by Edward Bennet. They were inconsolable. One even rang her Mum to see whether she could be picked up from an early train home.

In the end, all of us trooped into the Novello (much excitement at seeing Nigella ‘Domestic Goddess’ Lawson two rows in front) and sat down for the Tennant-less tragedy. Fast forward to the inevitable standing ovation. Young Ed did good. He was word perfect and even I jumped to my feet. I have since been troubled by Charles Spencer’s suggestion in the Torygraph that Bennet looks like a cross between Bertie Wooster and Prince Andrew but, on the night, the 29-year old stepped into some rather large hose & wore them with aplomb.

The rest of the cast was superb, most notably Patrick Stewart as a troublingly sexy Claudius and as Old Hamlet’s Ghost - almost as madly possessed as was his amazing CFT Macbeth last year. Penny Downie makes a very elegant Gertrude.

I would counsel anyone with tickets to see Bennet, rather than Tennant, NOT to return them. It is as good a Hamlet as I have ever seen: better than 2004’s Old Vic/Trevor Nunn/Ben Wishaw and up there with Peter Hall’s 1994/95 version with Stephen Dillane, Gina Bellman & Michael Pennington. (Dillane’s planned reprisal of the role, with Sam Mendes at the Old Vic, has reportedly been postponed.) Obviously, we look forward to Jude Law’s “visceral” interpretation at the Donmar/Garrick with Michael Grandage next year (tickets already up to £99 each on a well known internet auction site…)

But soft, gentle reader, what comes now? Why! ‘Tis the traditional Shakespearian theatre goer’s rant… My young friends were unanimous in their admiration of Bennet but were unable to convincingly mask their disappointment at Dr Who’s detention in the Tardis sick bay. Would they have accompanied me to Hamlet had dishy Dave not been centre stage? Alas, I think perhaps not.

In fact, the entire theatre was full of people who were patently only there to see Dr Who in the flesh. That was certainly the case with two young women directly behind us who puzzled out loud about the “weirdness” of the language & the complexities of the plot throughout the first half. They did however prick up their ears at: “To be, or not to be..” loudly furnishing us with the next sentence before young Ed up on the stage could even pause for breath and/or dramatic effect.

To cast a Sleb or not to cast a Sleb? Perhaps that is the real question? I’d like to think that my five girlfriends – super-clever, articulate, curious Oxford students all - would have accompanied me to Hamlet even if DT hadn’t been top of the bill? Yet deep down I know, that no matter how politely they applauded the understudy & warmly kissed me goodbye (I did, after all, pay for dinner..) they were there more for the Doctor than for the Bard.

Personally, I don’t feel any particular need for a “Sleb-on-Stage”. I’ve been enthralled by almost anything theatrical since my dear old Da took me to the Lee Theatre in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, aeons ago, to see the Temptations in concert. I will never forget how my six-year-old heart fluttered, as the curtain rose slowly to the insistent three beat of the bass guitar and five immaculate black guys in white suits started singing: I got sunshine…on a cloudy day -

My last amazing theatre experience was Michael Morpurgo’s Warhorse at the National where the true celebrities were life size horse marionettes and the expert, yet hidden, puppeteers manipulating them. Beg, borrow or steal a ticket!

World Aids Day - What's the Point?

2008-12-01T04:44:00.000-08:00

If this morning’s radio news is anything to go by, the BBC is more or less ignoring World Aids Day today. Perhaps it really is not that easy a news call? The 20th anniversary of a United Nations initiative to maintain awareness of a killer global virus vs. the Damian Green row, Mumbai aftermath, British tourists in Bangkok et al.

I was, however, quietly pleased to see various TV types, including the X-Factor finalists and judges, all sporting red lapel ribbons over the weekend. It is easy to knock these annual commemorations, perhaps particularly when they are sponsored by the UN. Yet this is not National Sausage Week or Take your Dog to Work Day.

It concerns a disease which affects 33 million people worldwide – the vast majority of whom do not have access to the anti-retroviral drugs which can both prolong & enhance their lives.

Twenty years on from the first World Aids Day, I was hoping that some entrenched attitudes and prejudices might have evolved. Alas, no. All these years of raising social awareness and of technological developments in the treatment of HIV/AIDS have singularly failed to change most generally held social perceptions of the disease.

When I mentioned to a friend that Starsky actor Paul Michael Glaser was presenting a BBC Radio 2 documentary about Aids in America, the response was: “I didn’t realise Starsky was gay!” He’s not – Glaser’s first wife, Elizabeth contracted HIV in 1981 through a blood transfusion while giving birth to the couple’s first child, Ariel. Ariel died in 1988; her mother in 1994, after founding the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation. Glaser himself has since worked tirelessly for the cause.

When my brother, Rory, was first diagnosed in the early 1980s, it wasn’t even called HIV. At the time, the virus was considered fatal, and so it turned out to be for so many young gay men in the U.S.A. and Europe. Now, the WHO classification is merely chronic, which is the same category as a condition such as diabetes. Then, the fear & loathing was compounded with ignorance & homophobic prejudice. I found that out for myself, as once good (and now former) friends started to shun social occasions, including my own wedding, if they suspected that my brother would be present.

Now, with life-long treatment and the regular use of medicine, HIV positive patients can enjoy a long and normal life. Nevertheless, limited access to the appropriate medication and continued high rates of transmission mean that the virus remains just as deadly for the millions already infected in much of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

Sadly, Rory didn’t manage to hang on quite long enough. He died in London’s Middlesex Hospital on May 16th 1994, aged 29-1/2, mere months before early UK drug trials started to show a faint glimmer of hope. I think about my brother constantly, perhaps more often than usual of late, as our elderly father slips into dementia and closer to his own end. So I don’t really need to sport a red ribbon in Rory’s memory today; I will however be wearing one proudly: for my brother, for all his mates who are gone and for everyone living with HIV, in the hope of continued advances, both in diagnosis, treatment and prevention – but perhaps more importantly – in prejudice.

Dallas, TX, 22nd Nov 1963: Jackie's Pink Pill Box, JFK & Obama in 2008

2008-11-22T05:26:00.000-08:00

The 22nd November marks 45 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963. The news of the fatal shooting was one of the first, almost instant, global headlines of the post-WWII era. To date, it remains one of the most shocking events to be broadcast internationally, immediately - or as near as damned. Was it perhaps the very first instance of every listener or viewer remembering exactly where they were & what they were doing, when they heard the news?

For reasons which, I hope, are obvious, I don’t personally share any of those memories. I do, however, remember accepting a singular reporting assignment to Dallas in the late 1980s, when I was but a youngish columnist on the FT & the capital markets I was then covering were in rather more robust health than they are today.

One of the “highlights” of the trip, laid on for us lowly hacks by the Association of International Bond Dealers was a bus trip to Dealey Plaza and the grassy knoll, the reported location of most of the eye and ear witnesses to the three shots that felled JFK at 12.30 pm CST. At the time, I remember thinking, with an involuntary shiver, that there was no irony whatsoever detectable in the chirpy commentary with which our tour guide welcomed us to our bathetic vantage point over the scene of a 20-year old, 20th century tragedy.

Every element of the image above is somehow seared into the collective consciousness: from Jackie’s pill box hat & bangs, to her husband’s dipped head and raised elbows. Another key factor? The shocking scenes from Dallas were some of the earliest colour images to reach such a huge, global audience.

Choosing a specific JFK/Dallas image was surprisingly difficult; there are even more than you might imagine. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of them feature on the most arcane blogs, some of which are devoted solely to the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination.

The events of 22nd November 1963 in Dallas signalled so many watersheds: not least in Cold War politics and in American society, but in scores of other fields, from international communications to photo-journalism. In 2008, it may be almost impossible for those of us who watched horrified, in real time, as the Twin Towers imploded on 9/11, to understand the shocking power that these last pictures of JFK commanded.

I know that many of us were also watching live only days ago, when Barack Obama won the 2008 US Presidential Election with an uncannily familiar combination of youth, energy, charm & charisma, and of course, perfectly modulated rhetoric.

Perfect dentition and a winning smile are clearly not the only features Obama shares with JFK. The president-elect has already been targetted by the white supremacist fringe. The putative plot was scuppered just days before the election.

Leibovitz, Capa & Flickr.com. The vexed Question of Celebrity Photographer vs. Photographer Celebrity

2008-11-17T10:00:00.001-08:00

This image: copyright Daniel Griffin.
To see more of Dan's extraordinary work, click here:

If my mantelpiece is anything to go by, London galleries are not feeling the dread crunch quite yet. Every day brings a fresh crop of heavy envelopes, full of lavishly designed private view & Christmas party invitations, complimentary 2009 diaries plus the inevitable hyperbolic letter: about important new work from established artists and “thought provoking” pieces from major new talents.

The Vernissage itself is certainly not what it used to be. Even if I were still a famished art student, I am not sure I would be rushing off to Cork Street or to Hoxton on the now well-established First Thursdays for a beaker full of tannic Shiraz or tepid Viognier and a fistful of impossible-to-identify canapés.

I am, however, off to the National Portrait Gallery for the private view of Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005. If you don’t know who Leibovitz is, I’m not entirely sure why you are reading this blog. There is even a school of thought which holds Anna-Lou (b.1949) responsible for the creation of celebrity culture. She certainly does not need any more hype from me - although I am interested to take a look at some of her more personal projects, including the last pictures of her partner Susan Sontag (1933-2004).

I’m actually more enthusiastic about catching up with the Barbican’s latest tripartite show, a Robert Capa (1913-1954) retrospective and a reappraisal of the life and work of his partner Gerda Taro (1910-1937). Taro was the subject of a fascinating presentation at the Frontline Club given recently by the show’s curator, Irme Schaber. You can also read Sean O’Hagan’s measured review here:

This image: copyright Daniel Griffin.
To see more of Dan's extraordinary work, click here:

Fortunately, we have the perspective of history with which to judge Capa and Taro. Evaluating the work of contemporary, living & working, photojournalists has become increasingly fraught in our camera phone/citizen journalist/Flickr.com age.

So many questions. Which begat which? The Celebrity or the Celebrity Photographer? If the Photographer becomes a “Celebrity”, what happens to their work? What is the precise distinction between the work of Annie Leibovitz & self styled “Australian paparazzo & media personality” Darren Lyons? Perhaps, after I have been to the NPG show, I may be just that little bit clearer. Watch this space.

In the meantime, take another look at the work of a talented young photojournalist who is not yet a celebrity but who is well on the way to becoming rather celebrated by the cognoscenti.

Why I never want to forget to remember

2008-11-10T02:27:00.000-08:00

This image: copyright Ian Britton

I seem to have been more than usually lachrymose of late. What with the Obama speech, Saturday night’s Festival of Remembrance and the Last Post at 11.02 am on Sunday morning. Even two minutes of total silence can get me started, it seems.

Yet I don’t really think I have anything to be ashamed of. There were plenty of cyber-confessions of Obama tears last week from the most unlikely members of the Bloggerati and the fast-emerging Twitterocracy.

As for Remembrance Sunday? As a student, I used to sneer at poppy wearers, declaring myself a pacifist. Thankfully, I’m a little more circumspect these days and I was actually rather touched to see how many of my young undergraduate Facebook mates replaced their profile pictures for poppies over the weekend.

When I first started this blog, I had a small column where I would record the latest British fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq. From my desk, I frequently see C-17s flying over to RAF Lyneham or Brize Norton. More often than not, they are carrying a Union Flag draped coffin. One of my stepsons is in Kandahar so I keep a pretty close eye on the news from those datelines.

I deleted the fatalities column a couple of months ago. It just became too depressing. For the same reason, I’ve pretty much stopped looking at the memorial websites. You can read about Yubraj Rai of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, shot south of Musa Qaleh on November 4th here:

I do, however, keep the small item about Turner-prize winner Steve McQueen and his “Queen and Country” project. McQueen currently has a feature film out, entitled Hunger about Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikers which has, predictably, been fairly controversial.

However, I don’t think there can be that much dissent about the integrity and purpose of “Queen and Country” for which project McQueen worked with more than 100 bereaved families of servicemen and women killed in Iraq. I was thrilled to see a comprehensive article by Sarah Crompton about "Queen and Country" and the Royal Mail’s continued refusal to issue the stamps in the Telegraph on Saturday 8th November. Click here to read her earlier appraisal of the work.

I would urge anyone who has an opportunity to see this project itself to go. It is difficult to describe well but it is an astonishingly powerful work. It’s on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh from 3rd December to 15th February 2009. To sign the ArtFund’s petition to persuade Royal Mail to issue the stamps click here:

I’ve always found it rather fitting that our November period of remembrance coincides with the gathering mists and denuded trees of approaching winter. It is certainly always a particularly poignant season for me. My husband Peter Griffin (b.1950) died on Friday, 7th November, 1997, at the very end of an absolutely glorious Indian summer and an incredibly brave two year fight with kidney cancer. It was a gloomy afternoon, less than a week after the clocks went back, that time of year when everything suddenly seems to get very dark indeed.

Top Gear - Is addiction grounds for divorce? Jeremy Clarkson, the complexities of bad taste jokes & the etiquette of eavesdropping

2008-11-08T11:24:00.000-08:00

This image copyright BBC

First: an apology. This post is late, more than 24 hours late & it's entirely my own fault. I seriously underestimated quite how long I would actually spend trawling through the intermittently coherent posts on one particular webpage, URL something along the lines of: http:// forum.jeremyclarkson.co.uk/discussions/html...you'll find it, if you really want to. Just imagine if all the chuckling sycophants gathered in the Top Gear TV hangar suddenly decided to "contribute to the on-line debate". No, it's not an edifying read but it is somehow morbidly fascinating - as I found out for myself.

Apology out the way, here comes the confession: I don’t like Jeremy Clarkson. There, I've said it & it's quite a relief. I don't mean it in a nasty way. I’ve actually met Über-bloke a few times, professionally & socially, and he is almost perfectly personable, (but in that: “I can’t really believe she’s still married to him - but I do sort of understand why she did it in the first place?” way...)

Yet I used to be a big fan. I looked forward to his Sunday Times column, in which he distinguished himself from the rest of the contrarian rabble (Liddle, Gill et al) with his “edgy” yet perceptive humour. One JC suggestion which still makes me smile was his proposal, a few years back, to modify overhead lockers on airplanes, all the better to accommodate bawling infants.

Sadly, I fell seriously out of love with JC & his Top Gear sidekicks a couple of years ago. Did it perhaps have something to do with those long dark Sundays? When my other half sat in front of the 42” plasma, giggling and guffawing, like a school boy in the lingerie department, while I sat, at the other end of our converted barn, on the uncomfier sofa, draped in malodorous hounds, watching repeats of Midsommer Murders & Morse?

Then, I just presumed that the whole Top Gear conundrum was just another case of Mars vs Venus. Ergo: no point posting about my Sunday evening bloke time envy?

Yet, earlier this week, when the “JC, lorry drivers, tasteless joke” meme began to flitter through the blogosphere, I was heartened to note that more than a few male commentators whom I really respect had never bought into the whole Überbloke/TG thang.

Still, I resisted. Then, earlier this week, I ended up in an east London eaterie, within spitting distance of two very Grande Dames de Fleet Street. Over the Dover sole, GD1 (editor lady) asked GD2 (columnist lady) which thorny subject she was thinking about tackling in her weekend column. “Top Gear, of course. I'm sticking up for Clarkson,” announced the latter confidently, adding she felt that JC now performed a vital role as a “societal safety valve”.

OK mea maxima culpa - I was indeed, eavesdropping but, it led me, initially, to a responsible conclusion: best leave JC/TG to GD2 - with her thundering, highly rated, op-ed page, weekly column in a national newspaper. Elegantly written & rationally argued as ever, you can read her pro-TG thoughts here:

Personally, I’m still not entirely sure where I stand on JC/TG et al. Yet I do remember that in September 2006, I was in a hospital room in Yorkshire, with Fred, my father, an 86-year old D-Day veteran, who was then fighting for his life. At exactly the same time, JC acolyte & TG regular, Richard "the Hamster" Hammond (b.1969) nearly died in a 288 mph crash, a stunt filmed for & eventually shown on Top Gear.

Then at the end of last week, I entered a well-known high street store (which will remain unidentified but which recently posted a 30% drop in last half profits) and practically walked into into a gargantuan, intractable wall of Top Gear merchandise, from the Stig Remote Control Go-Kart (£15) Top Gear Stunt Carts (£15.00) Stig Bubble Bath; Stig Key Ring etc., etc. Petrol head present paradise and much of it aimed at kids of all ages. So don't forget to tune in to JC, Hamster, James May & all the usual Top Gear fun & malarkey on Sunday night now, will you?!

Just call me Cassandra: Ross, Brand, Assisted Suicide & how Auntie finally lost the plot...

2008-10-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

This image: copyright: BBC

Regular readers are now invited to call me Cassandra. In every post over the last six to eight weeks, I have suggested that editors – picture & otherwise – would be digging out (& paying good money for) all those slightly frothier stories to leaven the now heavy old daily bread of market meltdown, R-R-recession, clocks going back, climate change & the ‘null point’ mambo which is Westminster.

Yet there has been a decidedly surreal twist to the headlines of late. Metropolitan snow in October? Nat Goldsmith fingers ex-mate Osborne for hanging with dodgy oligarch? Peter Mandelson in ermine? But in wildest dreams, could anyone seriously have conjured up the “storm in a teacup” fiasco that is the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand "Mucky Messages" saga?

To date, I have remained neutral on "Manuelgate", leaving the sticky involvement of divisive opinion to titans of media analysis, such as Gordon Brown & David Cameron.

Not that I cannot see the Vaudevillian attractions of the story: its two classic villains - lisping dandies, Wossy & Bwand; token good guy, Mark Thompson – (who should actually wear that metaphorical dog collar full time;) innocent victim, Andrew Sachs, a much-loved national treasure, familiar from a thousand reassuring voice-overs, not to mention his role in the ultimate classic comedy series. Add to this cocktail, Sachs' childhood escape from Nazi Germany. It’s a very potent formula – even before you throw in granddaughter, Georgina – (AKA Voluptua of the Satanic Sluts, now, of course, represented by PR "guru” Max Clifford). Some how, I keep expecting BBC Biz Ed. R.Peston to pop up somewhere in this headline story.

Until recently, the only winners in the entire row were Associated Newspapers, whose Mail on Sunday organ kicked up all the fuss, splashing with the story on October 26th, more than a week after the original broadcast was aired (with only two formal complaints to the BBC).

But last Wednesday, I finally allowed myself to get angry. “Manuelgate” led every single BBC News bulletin for more than 48 hours - & was also prominently flagged by many other headline media outlet programmes. On the very same day, Debbie Purdy, 45, (below) an MS sufferer from Bradford, failed in the most recent chapter of her bid to get the High Court to clarify the law on assisted suicide. Debbie remains compos mentis but is now mainly confined to a wheelchair. Not at all unreasonably, she wants clarification on whether or not her husband, Omar Puente, would be prosecuted, were he to accompany her to a Swiss euthanasia clinic.

By any reasonable criteria, Debbie Purdy’s story would have led every news bulletin that day. Our ageing population, increasingly sophisticated palliative medicine and general anxiety about facing the vexed question of how we might all eventually shuffle off this mortal coil should be far more generally discussed & debated. Instead, editors chose to focus on the Ross/Brand/BBC saga. At the same time, a human catastrophe of extraordinary proportions is unfolding in Congo. But how many papers will that sell?

Poppies, Heroes & the Kindness of Strangers

2008-10-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

This image: copyright PA

It’s that time of year again: when no ambitious – sorry, self-respecting – news reader or other talking head would dare to be seen without a poppy proudly displayed on their lapel. Fitting then, that quite a few newspapers today ran with the equally obligatory pictures of the ecstatic return from Helmand Province of 2 Para to their anxious loved ones, back in Colchester.

In almost any other context, these happy family snaps, radiating relief, joy and love, might verge on the banal. Yet in the current climate of doom, gloom, the R-word, encroaching winter and myriad other reasons not to be cheerful, it is not difficult to sympathise with picture editors everywhere, scratching their heads about appropriate images with which to run.

Fifteen soldiers who were members of 2 Para or attached to the unit did not make it back home. The average age of the fallen was 24 years old. They included Private Daniel Gamble, a rifleman and Pashto speaker, who died, aged 22, in a suicide bombing attack on June 8th, the 100th British soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. Pictures like the one below, showing the repatriation of 19-year old Private Charles Murray, killed in the same attack, just don’t seem to make the front page quite that often. A memorial service to remember 2 Para’s fallen heroes will be held on Thursday, October 30th at St Peter’s church in Colchester.

Comrades carry Pte Murray’s coffin. This image: copyright Daily Mail

On Sunday, Defence Secretary John Hutton told BBC1's Politics Show that Afghanistan was the front line in the fight against international terror, adding it was "impossible to tell" how long troops would be deployed there, but conceded that it could well be "decades".

Click on the following link to go to a comprehensive Roll of Honour of British Troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 compiled by the team at www.britains-smallwars.com.
http://www.britains-smallwars.com/Terror/afghancasualties.html

The troops – fallen, wounded and still serving – took centre stage on Sunday 26th October, when I joined 20,000 other runners to raise funds for charity at the Great South Run in Portsmouth. Help for Heroes (set up only last year by Bryn and Emma Parry to help servicemen wounded in Afghanistan & Iraq) had managed to assemble a veritable army of charity runners, including a bunch of young men in full yomping gear and three teams of eight who pushed a Land Rover around the entire 10-mile course in the teeming rain and wind. Just a quick glimpse of them was all the incentive I personally needed not to give up...

To be honest, I was extremely nervous, not just about running but about touting for sponsorship in the current climate. Despite being woefully ill-prepared, I actually managed to finish in around 1.44, and, thanks to the generosity of friends (both IRL and many of my just as good mates from Twitter) and the magical powers of Justgiving.com, I've raised a significant amount for the Cancer Campaign at the Royal Marsden where Nick, my brother-in-law, was treated earlier this year; his lymphoma is now, thankfully and thanks to the Marsden, in remission.

Anyone doing anything at all for charity would be mad not to set up a fund-raising page at Justgiving. When I ran the London Marathon in 2001, I spent weeks trying to get people to make good their pledges. This time, within hours of sending my link by e-mail, I had already far exceeded my original £500 target. At time of writing, I’m already up to £1500 and the donations are still coming in!

Next time, I’d like to raise funds for Help for Heroes too but I reckon the X-factor gang's take on Mariah Carey will probably bring in a fair few quid. I’d give the link here - if I didn’t feel that the enterprise smacks a little too much of Simon Cowell’s particular, high-waisted, brand of cynicism. Nevertheless, I hope they raise millions for an excellent cause & additionally, some awareness of what British troops are facing in these remote and alien theatres of war. For now, I’ll stick to proudly wearing my own poppy.

Examining the Image #22 – Palin & her Fey Doppelgänger – Harbinger of Doom?

2008-10-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Republican VP candidate Alaska governor Sarah Palin watches Tina Fey’s now notorious SNL impersonation alongside executive producer Lorne Michaels
This image copyright Dana Edelson/NBC

I’ve been wanting to take a look at the photo-journalistic phenomenon that is Sarah Palin since John McCain announced his shock decision to appoint her as his running mate. However, I didn’t want to choose one of the cheesy beauty pageant or scary moose-hunting shots which, compulsively, morbidly fascinating as they are, simply do not stand up to much scrutiny or analysis.

Then I saw this surreal shot of Palin watching Tina Fey doing Palin, albeit at one remove, split by a screen, but with all the heavy symmetrical resonances of the identical red jacket, curiously dated lapel brooch, serious-yet-come-hither specs & quasi-permanent Cherie Blair rictus.

The Cholmondeley Ladies Anon. 1600-1610.
Image copyright Tate Gallery

This type of close figurative symmetry, as seen in the famous 17th portrait of the Cholmondeley Twins above, has a long and complex tradition in the history of art while the theme of the lookalike or Doppelgänger is traditionally associated with issues of identity and duality.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): The Two Fridas 1939
This image: Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Trust

The word Doppelgänger is also often used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself peripherally, in a position where there is no chance that it could be a reflection – one of the visual tricks which help to give much of René Magritte’s precise Surrealist paintings their peculiar attraction.

René Magritte (1898-1967) La Reproduction Interdite 1937. Copyright ADAGP Paris/DACS London 2006/V&A

In many cultures, a Doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own Doppelgänger is often an omen of death. They are also frequently regarded as harbingers of bad luck.
While the jury is still out on the wisdom or otherwise of Palin’s decision to play along with the Saturday Night Live crew, there can be few politicians who did not ultimately rue similarly irreverent depictions or imitations.
Cartoonist Steve Bell’s decision to have John Major’s underpants on the outside of his trousers springs immediately to mind while Liberal leader David Steel reportedly blamed his squeaky pocket-sized Spitting Image puppet, cuddling up on David Owen’s shoulder, for the downturn in his career.

Reading the Runes: Damien Hirst, the new Saatchi Gallery & what Market Turmoil means for the Art Market

2008-10-07T11:29:00.001-07:00

Yue Minjun: this image copyright Arario Gallery; all rights reserved

Not that long ago, my personal party trick to engineer sudden & stunned silence at any boring West London dinner was to announce that: “Harry Potter was derivative, simplistic, poorly written, sub-C.S. Lewis drivel”. Believe me - for many months, nay – years, even, it was completely & utterly effective.

More recently, a good way of poking the hornets’ nest, particularly at any inter-generational gathering, has been to mention the name of the particular black beast that is Damien Hirst. Please! Don’t get me wrong. Personally, I think Hirst is extremely, extraordinarily, preter-naturally, clever, a more than worthy Warhol de nos jours.

My other half, on the other hand, thinks the boy Damien is just brilliant and I now fear he might possibly kill to have even one of the most mundane spotty paintings on the wall in our downstairs loo. Together, we debated the myriad merits of the Boy Hirst, as we meandered around ArtLondon last Saturday, held this last weekend in the august confines of Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital in Chelsea (London, England).

We actually queued with sundry other "art lovers" to get in at 10.55am; yet, if we hadn’t had free tickets (courtesy of a gallery from which we long ago bought a small print) would we even have bothered? All of these newish London “art fairs” have suffered in all sorts of ways lately, particularly since the initial sheen of most of the YBAs has inevitably dulled & the credit crunch has meant that £30, including catalogue, for two adults to wander round a chilly marquee, looking at poorly hung pictures, seems rather less attractive than a hearty meal at the local Italian.

Roman Black Gallery were showing one or two of Damien’s Skulls & Butterflies, but, alas, they were beyond our budget. Perhaps they were hoping to ride the tidal bore of the recent, and now notorious, Sotheby’s 15th September £111m Hirst sale which, with 20-20 hindsight, it appears, managed to pip global financial meltdown?

What may or may not be happening in the art market is well worth a look, given that ‘art’ is now – (with a CNN-estimated annual $4 billion turnover) the biggest legal global economy which is still fundamentally unregulated......

An indication of art market resilience emerged last weekend at Sotheby’s recent Hong Kong auction, the biggest art sale since the credit crisis started. Unsurprisingly, sales were far less robust than expected, with most buyers opting for cheaper artists and earlier works; many lots by top Chinese names even failed to sell.

A 1990-1991 untitled oil scene of Tiananmen Square by Yue Minjun (see above) fetched HK$6.6m - yet two works by Zhang Xiaogang and key lots by Zeng Fanzhi all went unsold. Conversely, on Saturday, Indonesian artist I Nyoman Masriadi's ‘Sorry Hero, Saya Lupa’ - featuring Superman and Batman - fetched HK$4.8m, eight times its pre-sale estimate - a record for Southeast Asian art.

Charles Saatchi has, to date, managed to remain well ahead of the art market game. It will be interesting to see whether his newest exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the latest incarnation of the eponymous Gallery, moved from St Johns Wood, to Lambeth, and now to Chelsea SW3, catches the Zeitgeist.

The following link takes you to Waldemar Januszczak’s interesting perspective on the new gallery & the state of contemporary Chinese art -

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4867527.ece

Shouting Men in Shirtsleeves - How best to Illustrate Market News?

2008-09-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

This image copyright AP

I have it on excellent authority that senior picture editors all over Fleet Street were whooping into their tall skinny lattes last Monday when the news broke that Lehman Brothers had finally collapsed, with thousands of job losses expected around the globe. Finally, they thought, some decent pictures we can use.

“Shots of sweaty men in shirtsleeves, shouting loudly down 'phones don’t tell the readers anything, but the same guys? Walking out of those shiny front doors, lugging the contents of their desks in boxes – nobody needs a caption to work out what that all means”.

And sure enough, last week’s papers carried all the obligatory shots of redundant bankers, trooping out of their erstwhile offices, brows furrowed, chattels aloft. It is a wonder no snappers were injured as they pushed their long lenses forward in an attempt to document this sad, shuffling exodus. Even I felt some momentary sympathy, hence my decision not to reproduce any more schadenfreude shots here.

Frankfurt Stock Exchange: Bull & Bear - copyright Thomas Richter

Adequately illustrating financial news stories has historically been an infrequent, but perennial, problem. Until relatively recently, money and market matters had the good grace to restrict themselves to the inside pages, with only the occasional High Street sales hiccup or Christmas Club collapse muscling their way into the mainstream headlines. To date, this has allowed picture desks to get away with myriad indulgences, not least the over-zealous use of images of attractive women which have little, if any, relation to the story at hand. “M&S reporting tomorrow? Run a snap of one of those models from the ads. No, not Twiggy. Use the sultry one with the curly hair. Her, or that Myleene Klass.”

Yet even before the market turmoil of recent weeks, financial news has been hitting the front page far more regularly of late – fueled by a combination of credit crunch anxieties, continuing globalization and the demands of increasingly sophisticated investors. The latter are no longer confined to canny middle class pensioners and part time stock market players; they now include the man on the Clapham omnibus who wants to know, among other things, exactly how much the price of his Victorian terraced cottage has been affected by remote and distant events, events which are still beyond his control but are now no longer beyond his ken.

Cartoon: copyright blueherald.com

If, as seems likely, the markets are to remain centre stage, perhaps it is time for imaginative picture desks to think beyond the box when it comes to illuminating financial news? It is hard to think of a single photograph that has managed to explain or convey as much as the cartoons which have flowed thick and fast from the pens of some of our best commentators, most notably Matt in the Telegraph, Nick Newman of the Sunday Times and Robert Thompson in the Spectator & elsewhere. Yet, I suppose, why bother to commission an incisive cartoon or any other perceptive illustration - when you can pretty much always find a decent shot of that Myleene Klass?

Art on Telly - Triumph or Travesty?

2008-09-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

The image above shows the simple lines of the Uffington White Horse, scoured out centuries ago alongside the ancient Ridgeway and above the evocatively named Dragon Hill on the Oxfordshire-Wiltshire border. Not only can I actually see the old nag from our barn (well, I can if I go to the top of the garden and clamber up the young horse chestnut tree) but this White Horse, in its eponymous Vale, was one of the many works of Land Art featured in the last of Waldemar Januszczak’s three-part Channel 4 Sculpture Diaries.

I wasn’t totally sold by the first episode in the series which looked at sculptures of women, from the Venus of Willendorf to Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper – Pregnant and so didn’t bother to catch the middle show (apparently on power). However, I am a bit of a Land Art nut, so I did tune in last Sunday.

A few critics have reportedly moaned about Waldemar’s over-jaunty delivery but perhaps they should have been listening harder to what he was saying? The Sunday Times regular is one of our most lucid writers on contemporary art. Most recently, his perceptive take on the Tate Bacon retrospective avoided so much of the hysteria written elsewhere and actually drew fresh conclusions about Bacon’s work, which I personally fear has suffered from the “Athena syndrome” of rampant reproduction.
You can read his review here:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4731865.ece
The programme itself was a witty and insightful travelogue which illuminated several iconic pieces of the cosmic earthworks movement which started in the States, more or less in tandem with Conceptual Art in the 1960s and 1970s. I was very envious when Waldemar walked out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, onto the vestiges of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) – a work he described as “an atrophied slurp”. I was intrigued to find out more about Smithson’s wife, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) while his visit to James Turrell’s extraordinary Roden Crater has got me saving up for the inevitable trip to Flagstaff, AZ.

My enjoyment also got me to thinking about whether or not “Art with a capital A” actually works on television? Certainly, you need conviction and the passion for communication, first evidenced by the equally jaunty Matthew Collings, bouncing Boswell of the YBAs, and most recently exhibited by the dapper Count Francesco da Mosto. It certainly also helps to know what you are talking about, viz: Sir Kenneth Clark or Brian Sewell. For my money, the best telly art critic of our own age is Tim Marlow, regularly to be seen on Channel 5 - (or is that just “five” these days?)

Channel 4 continues the arty Sunday night theme this week with “The Mona Lisa Curse”, a documentary examining one of my own regular rants: art & money. It is also presented by a true art world leviathan, Robert Hughes, who only this week dubbed Damien Hirst’s work ‘absurd’ and ‘tacky’. Unmissable.

Arty Party of the Year - & I was invited….

2008-09-13T04:27:00.000-07:00

Model for Gehry Pavilion at Serpentine Gallery 2008
This image copyright Gehry Associates

Yes, it’s true. The unfeasibly heavy red envelope fell through the door a few weeks ago. To be honest, I was half-expecting it. Even though the powers that be at the Serpentine Gallery scraped our names off the proper patrons’ wall a couple of years ago, why would they even dream of taking us off the mailing list? Some people are prepared to pay good money for that kind of data.

So we were invited. By Dasha herself, no less. That’s Daria Zhukova to you, Founder, the Garage, Center (sic) for Contemporary Culture, Moscow. She has pleasure in inviting us to The Summer Party on Tuesday 9 September 2008 7pm-midnight. Her generous co-hosts included: Lord Palumbo, Tim Jeffries, Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Funny that, the invitation didn’t actually mention whether or not Dasha’s bloke was going to be meeting and greeting by her side. You might have heard of him, fellow Russian, not short of a rouble or two either, name of Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea FC and a recent graduate to the hallowed circles of very serious art collectors. Abramovich was eventually revealed as the mystery buyer who snapped up Francis Bacon’s 1976 Triptych and Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping for an eyewatering, record-breaking total of £60 million in New York in May this year.

In the Times Magazine today, James Collard has penned an elegantly written but frustratingly, less than illuminating interview with the oligarch’s 27-year-old girlfriend, designer and now art mogul. It’s an engaging read although there are few revelations, most notably about Abramovich’s recent conversion to contemporary art. But, as Collard points out, he wouldn’t be the first very rich man to move on from buying yachts and houses to acquiring art. The article is illustrated by a characteristically sleek portrait by Jude Edginton. You can read the piece itself by clicking here:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4703250.ece

Well, I can’t say I wasn’t tempted at the prospect of an evening gazing upon Frank Gehry’s small but perfectly formed urban promenade itself (see above). The fractured glass and timber amphitheatre has turned out to be one of the most successful in the recent series of temporary pavilions. It remains in situ outside the Gallery in Kensington Gardens until October 19th.

But then I read the small print. Tickets, restricted to two applications per invitation, were priced at £400 – each. That was £200 per individual ticket with a “suggested” charity donation of £200 per ticket – the donation going straight to help fund Dasha’s Moscow-based Garage Center. Now I like to think of myself as a reasonably philanthropic individual but somehow, I just couldn’t see myself donating £400, ostensibly to further the latest enthusiasm of another post-Soviet heiress. Besides the weather forecast for west London last Tuesday was really pretty dismal.

Fox Talbot, Lacock Abbey & Maggie Taylor - Curiouser & Curiouser

2008-08-11T02:30:00.000-07:00

The Herald (2006) This image: copyright Maggie Taylor 2008

In a bid to be right up to the minute, I had hoped to post about Jude Edginton’s magnificent portraits of British Olympic and Paralympic athletes which are on show in a multi-media exhibition on the South Bank outside Tate Modern for the next few weeks. Alas, the images don’t seem to be freely available quite yet. However, as soon as I can get hold of a few, I hope to discuss them. Sponsored by Adidas and by British Olympic Campaign, London 2012, the series highlights several key points about the funding and execution of major photography projects in the 21st century.

On a rainy afternoon last week, I finally made the pilgrimage to Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire where, in 1835, photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) produced the earliest known surviving photographic negative using a camera – a small drawing of the latticed window of the Abbey’s south gallery.

This image copyright/courtesy of National Museum of Photography/Science & Society Picture Library

The Abbey itself was founded in 1232 by the intriguing Countess Ela of Salisbury, as a Nunnery for Augustinian Canonesses. As far as I could work out, it functioned as a kind of refined commune for the posh daughters of gentry, who favoured education and industry over the option of being married off to a philandering or otherwise absent crusader knight. Eventually dissolved by Henry VIII’s commissioners, it was sold in 1539 to Sir William Sharrington, in whose family it remained until his descendant Matilda Talbot donated the Abbey, lands and village to the National Trust in 1946. The Abbey was used as a school for evacuee children during the Second World War and, as I wandered around the medieval Cloister, Chaplaincy and Warming Room, I saw immediately why the producers of the Harry Potter cinema franchise had elected to use these elegant stone arches to stand in for Hogwarts’ hallowed halls.

The small museum dedicated to Fox Talbot and his pioneering work at Lacock is housed in a medieval barn in the Abbey grounds. It does a workman-like job, using various items of Talbot's equipment, objects he photographed and some publications and personal items on loan from the main Collection, which has now moved to the British Library. Perhaps because the Collection - over 4,000 photographs by Talbot and his circle and more than 10,000 letters and other correspondence between Talbot, his family and friends – is now housed in London, the Lacock Museum itself feels sadly like something of an after thought with low ceilings and confusing labelling. I was personally most taken by the few vitrines set up to show the breadth of polymath Fox Talbot’s scholarship in so many other fields, including: mathematics, chemistry, classics, philosophy, botany, Assyriology and archaeology.

The upper barn galleries are used for temporary photographic exhibitions. At the moment & until 14 December 2008, American artist Maggie Taylor is presenting her own take on that perennial artists’ totem: Alice in Wonderland. Taylor works by scanning original 19th-century photographs, line drawings and book illustrations, combining them with her own landscape photographs. These are then layered using digital techniques such as Photoshop, sometimes as many as 60 times, to create a surreal image which is intended to erase the boundary between photography and illustration.
I admit it is an interesting approach and some of the images are quite beguiling but I often wish we could just leave Tenniel alone – If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Time for Tea? Tum-ti-tum-ti-tum....

ArtLondon #5 Asia House/Afghanistan

2008-07-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

This image - copyright Seamus Murphy
The late, great Philip Jones Griffiths (1936-2008) called Seamus Murphy “a poet with a camera” – yes, of course, a clichéd epithet - but, like any cliché worth its salt, it contains more than a kernel of truth. If you want to see some excellent examples of Murphy’s visual verse, you have until September 13th to wend your way to Asia House, an extraordinary and relatively new venue, still practically hidden on London's super-posh New Cavendish Street, nestled between all the plastic surgeons, orthodontists and top-of-the-range shrinks plying their various trades in W1.

Murphy’s exhibition of images from his latest project: A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan remain on show in the main Asia House Gallery. Check out:

http://www.asiahouse.org/net/MainGallery.aspx

Afghanistan and continued British involvement in this fascinating, strange and remote country remain an enigma to me. In a bid to better understand why we are still involved there, and to what end, I went last week to an Asia House event where my erstwhile & esteemed colleague, “Vitamin Murders” writer James Fergusson, was talking about his latest book: A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan. I left elucidated but nevertheless depressed to have my own instincts confirmed: that military intervention – let alone that of a former imperial power – had no chance whatever to effect any possible good for the future of the Afghan people – the same people so nobly portrayed in Seamus Murphy’s photographs. If you can’t make the show, do check out the book at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Afghanistan-Darkness-Visible-Seamus-Murphy/dp/0863566200

James Fergusson’s considered and beautifully written analysis can be perused further at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Million-Bullets-Real-Story-Afghanistan/dp/0593059026/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217340023&sr=1-1

ArtLondon #4: Puppies win Prizes? Jeff Koons & the RA's Wollaston Prize

2008-07-24T03:54:00.000-07:00

Jeff Koons 'Puppy' outside Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain

Art prizes seem designed to create controversy. What would the Turner be without the annual kerfuffle about the calibre of the nominees and the eccentricity of the eventual selection? Martin Creed, one of my own heroes & Turner winner in 2001, springs immediately to mind. This year the Royal Academy’s prestigious £25,000 Charles Wollaston award went to American artist Jeff Koons (b.1955). In the Spectator magazine, critic Andrew Lambirth has registered his own protest – suggesting that Koons’ piece, the high chromium stainless steel ‘Cracked Egg (Blue) 1994-2006’ was far from being the most distinguished work in the Summer Exhibition. I find myself increasingly irritated with the flashier, "life-style" Spectator, but the lucid writing of contributors such as Lambirth keeps me from cancelling my subscription. (My other Spectator must-reads include: Simon Hoggart, Charles Moore, James Delingpole, Marcus Berkmann, Charles Spencer, Matthew Parris and Robin Oakley).

On the RA award, I fully agree with Andrew Lambirth that Koons’ cheeky sculpture - brashly displayed in the middle of the magnificent octagonal central hall - cannot by any criterion be called the most distinguished piece in the exhibition – & I do wonder what Lambirth’s own choice would be? However, I can’t help but cherish a quiet personal fondness for Koons’ triumphantly kitsch celebration of the banal – a skewed but utterly hilarious, tongue in cheek aesthetic, exemplified by pieces such as 1988’s ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles.

I don’t seem to be the only one reluctantly seduced by Koons’ humour and vision. His sculpture Hanging Heart (also 1994-2006) set a new record for a living artist at auction when it reached $23.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York in November 2007. His 12m high topiary terrier ‘Puppy’ has become very much a city symbol in Bilbao, as loved and as lauded as Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim Museum outside which the giant floral West Highland Terrier sits obediently to attention.

Back to the Summer Exhibition, I was relieved and heartened to see that the work of a handful of much younger photographers and painters whom I’ve had the luck to spot already had made it through the tortuous submission and selection process. They include Ed Kevill-Davies and Eleanor Lindsay-Fynn and I will be writing about them in their own post soon.

ArtLondon #3 - RA Summer Exhibition & the Genius of David Mach

2008-07-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

David Mach: Chairman Mao, 2004. Collage. Image Courtesy - The Red Mansion Foundation

There are still four weeks left in which to experience another annual highlight of the London art carousel: the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – “the largest open contemporary art exhibition in the world, drawing together new work by both established and unknown artists. Now in its 240th year, the exhibition includes 1,200 works, the majority of which are for sale”.

Another confession: I haven’t even bothered to go to the Summer Exhibition for the last year or two – I've been content instead to watch the hang on some worthy cable arts programme and pick up on any controversy via the popular prints. However, I found myself in Piccadilly recently with an hour to kill and I decided to give the RA one more chance, making a note to spare myself the mental and visual anguish invariably provoked by the over-busy hang of generally poor amateur efforts which yearly fight for attention on the walls of the Weston rooms.

The RA blurb insists that highlights of the show include a memorial gallery dedicated to the late Ron Kitaj (1932-2007) but after passing attentively through it, I was no less perplexed by his huge reputation. Gallery VIII, curated by recently elected Academician, "our" Tracey Emin, also failed to move me; it was, however, full of sniggering schoolboys – perhaps attracted by the “over-18s only – shocking works on display” warning.

The perceptive and always readable Andrew Lambirth has complained in the Spectator Magazine about the award of the RA’s prestigious Wollaston Prize to American Kaiser of Kitsch, Jeff Koons. I will add my own guinea’s worth of comment on the subject in a later post.

For me, the stand-out works of the show were the huge-scale collages, constructed from thousands of identical postcards, by David Mach (b.1956) currently RA Professor of Sculpture – & in particular, the haunting, veiled image ‘Visitor’ and its gallery partner ‘Golden Delicious II’.

I dream of one day owning one of these incisive and accomplished comments on 21st century society but I was sadly unable to persuade Mach himself, a genial leather-jacketed Scot, to let me have one at a discount when we met him at his 2006 solo exhibition at Jill George Gallery in Soho. Click on this link to marvel at the images then on show: http://www.jillgeorgegallery.co.uk/artists/mach/mach_exhibition2006.htm

My particular favourite is the one of Bart Simpson – a two metre square collage of Tao-Te-Ching cards which so faithfully reproduces almost everyone’s favourite prodigal cartoon son. Photo-collage began as a tool for Mach to describe and layout his large scale installations and public sculptures but they have now emphatically transcended this preliminary phase to become fully-realised works of art in themselves.

ArtLondon #2 - Prince's New Clothes at the Serpentine Gallery

2008-07-16T02:16:00.001-07:00

This image - Untitled (cowboy) 1989 - copyright Richard Prince

London’s green & verdant Hyde Park - what better place to be on a balmy June evening? The rather chic crowd, milling outside the Serpentine Gallery is brazen testament to director Julia Peyton-Jones drive, energy and extraordinary networking prowess. The annual temporary pavilion is now a cultural landmark and talking point by any measure, while the Serpentine Summer Party is now a Society and Season landmark – considered - in certain circles - as right up there, alongside Ascot, Wimbledon and Henley Royal Regatta. And yet, and yet..…I can’t help wondering whether somehow the art itself is getting increasingly sidelined, as the Gallery itself and its profile goes from strength to strength?

I was so depressed by the last Serpentine exhibition – a collection of dismal and utterly distinction free abstract paintings by Viennese feminist artist Maria Lassnig (b.1919) that I was unable to even contemplate writing about it. It seems that the latest show has also split the critics. “Continuation” is hailed as the first major British public exhibition of the work of American appropriation master Richard Prince (b.1949). The show was chosen and curated by Prince himself, who has somehow squeezed London in, neatly between last year’s “Spiritual America” retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York and another solo show, entitled “Four Blue Cowboys” which opened (in the same week as "Continuation") at Gagosian’s newish Rome headquarters.

My heart sank as I entered the gallery’s sunny white rooms on “Special Private View” night, to read that the show was: “presented by the Serpentine Gallery in collaboration with Louis Vuitton”. Prince is one of the latest artists to design a line of new handbags for the luxury brand. The work itself, both older and more familiar pieces - such as the cannibalized Marlboro Man above: “Untitled (cowboy)" (1989) - and the newer “Nurse” series, left me personally rather cold but the show has been reviewed rather more comprehensively by, among others, Joanna Pitman in the Times – you can read her intelligent and measured conclusions by following this link.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4199805.ece
In the Sunday Times, her colleague Waldemar Januszczak took a rather more benign view:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4213533.ece
Elsewhere, in the Guardian, writer and broadcaster "Bidisha" vented some moral outrage in a blog post which attracted so many controversial comments that the thread was finally closed down by the free speech monitors of Farringdon Road.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/06/girls_cars_and_body_parts_rich.html

The Richard Prince retrospective continues until 7th September. In the meantime, I do look forward to the opening next week of the latest Pavilion, the first built work in this country by pioneering American architect Frank Gehry, working for the first time in collaboration with his son, Sam. When last glimpsed, half finished outside the Prince show, it looked utterly intriguing. Watch this space for a considered opinion on the finished construction.

ArtLondon #1 - Plensa's Monument to Fallen Journalists

2008-07-09T04:28:00.000-07:00

(Breathing 2003-2006: Copyright Channel4) In London recently, I caught for the first time a glimpse of Jaume Plensa's new art work which glows above the BBC in Portland Place, as a memorial to journalists & crew who have died upholding freedom of speech. Entitled 'Breathing', the site specific, glass and steel sculpture which was unveiled in June is engraved with a meditation upon silence, life & death. Veteran hack Robert Fox has written movingly about the dedication service for the memorial, which he suggests is highly timely - given that, despite every advance in technology, news gathering around the world continues to be a highly dangerous business. You can read the full article here: http://www.thefrontlineclub.com/club_articles.php?id=412

"Breathing" is certainly both elegant and thought-provoking. To date, I had not taken Catalan artist Plensa (b.1955) terribly seriously, dismissing him as a Turrell wannabe and his huge outdoor installations such as Gateshead's "Blake" (1996) the laser beam outside the Baltic and Chicago's mirrored "Crown Fountain" (2004) as rather gimmicky. This new work has made me think again and I look forward to finding out more about the artist's latest public sculpture for this country. A model of the landmark, entitled "Dream", was first seen in May. Commissioned by St.Helens Council as part of The Big Art Project, an ambitious public art initiative from Channel 4, supported by Arts Council England & The ArtFund, the 20 metre high sculpture will sit on top of the former Sutton Manor Colliery, overlooking the M62 main east-west arterial motorway which effectively bisects England.

For the unveiling of "Breathing", the BBC also commissioned a new poem from former war reporter and foreign correspondent James Fenton (b.1949). It is elegiac and apposite. You can read the text here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/06_june/16/breathing_3.shtml

For a slightly more accessible but equally beautiful memorial to fallen journalists, I can highly recommend the simple side altar at St Bride's Church in Fleet Street upon which tributes to those reporters, cameramen, photographers and fixers who have all paid the ultimate price still appear with depressing frequency.

It's a Lacroix, Darling - Rencontres d'Arles

2008-07-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Photography Festivals are a bit like blogs: now ubiquitous, of wildly varying quality, often highly political, if sometimes irrelevant and currently springing up all over the globe. However, one of the oldest and justly popular is the annual Rencontres d'Arles in the southern French city which this year celebrates its 39th edition, with an official launch tomorrow July 8th at various venues across Arles until mid-September. If I manage to make it across the Channel, perhaps I might manage to understand a little more about fashion photography and where it fits into the canon of 21st century imagery?

This year's guest curator is one of Arles' favourite sons - the fashion historian and couturier Christian Lacroix (b.1951 or 1956 - some confusion between the designer's own website and every other source...). Among his guest exhibitors are many of the usual suspects: Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi and Brit star of the moment, Tim Walker; the latter has his own retrospective at the Design Museum in London until 28 September. On show in Arles for the first time outside the U.S. is a series from 1995 by doyen Richard Avedon (1923-2004). Entitled "In Memory of the Late Mr and Mrs Comfort: a Fable" - the images feature a series of increasingly macabre tableaux of model Nadja Auermann, engaged in an extremely intimate relationship with a skeleton - albeit one which is often fully-clothed - in itself, a puzzling image which continues to disturb long after one has turned the page or moved on.

Cintra Wilson, the "Critical Shopper" recently lambasted Lacroix's latest design confections in the New York Times, calling them "regressive" and suggesting that the designer was "boxing the dusk in the twilight of life" and concluding that he had reached "inevitable self-parody".

Yet only last week, Suzy Menkes in the IHT lauded Lacroix's very latest Paris collection. At a chic birthday lunch in the Netherlands last week, my table companion correctly identified my Wedgewood blue brocade coat as a Lacroix; I didn't trouble him with the detail that it was only from the relatively affordable Bazar diffusion line and that it was at least a decade old....

If you feel like a trip to Provence to consider Lacroix's curatorial eye, check out: http://www.rencontres-arles.com/ARL/C.aspx?VP3=Renderer_VPage&ID=ARLP144

Corpses & Cornflakes

2008-05-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

Another day, more harrowing pictures from China & indeed, from Burma, where the regime can try & prevent overseas aid from coming in but is having markedly less success at preventing photographic evidence of the extent of cyclone death and devastation getting out.
Last week, David Viggers, Reuters UK Chief Photographer, wrote the blog post below:
http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2008/05/15/why-i-became-a-news-photographer/

The post was accompanied by a series of powerful images of the Chinese earthquake. The impact was immediate: a series of comments, initially branding the photographs offensive, and even berating the author for "boasting of his brilliance" - when people needed hands-on help. Fortunately, a raft of subsequent comments praised the images and vindicated Viggers.

Yet the cyber-storm highlighted a perennial problem - who decides which images are acceptable, why and how do they make these decisions? How can we both be sure & ensure that vital images such as those currently coming out of Burma and China are both published and circulated?

Questions of propriety and prurience have become decidedly blurred in the multi-media 21st century of the ubiquitous image. Things have become far less clear cut since 1991, when Ken Jarecke's gruesome carbonized bust of an incinerated Iraqi combatant polarised picture editors across the globe. The image managed to escape the US military censor but was immediately pulled when it hit the AP wire Stateside. Nevertheless, several papers, among them the Observer in London chose to run with the shot.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4528745.stm

The move succeeded in sparking a major debate: should editors protect their readers from the sight of such horrors, particularly when they might expect to be enjoying a leisurely weekend breakfast? Or was the image itself simply too important to spike, or to hide downpage on the foreign pages inside?

In Jarecke's case, the image, though indubitably upsetting, ultimately proved its intrinsic worth by demolishing, once and for all, Washington's line that the Gulf War to date had been 'clean bloodless and surgical' with an absolute minimum of Iraqi casualties.

For more, equally important, images from China, follow the link below:
http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/articleslideshow?articleId=USSP23973420080515&channelName=topNews#a=15

Cyclone Pieta - Burma #3

2008-05-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

(This image: copyright MYM/IPS)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42348

Courtesy of Frontline Blogger, a link to some extraordinary pictures being emailed out of Burma (see posts passim). What I think I find most moving is the brightly coloured baby-gro - the sort of thing middle-aged women like me rush out to buy for expectant friends. Not to mention the reverent caress, lifeless head still carefully cradled; the look of anguish just discernible on the furrowed brow. It is a pose instantly recognizable from scores of religious imagery over the centuries. Perhaps here even more poignant as it is not "Madonna & Child" but "Father & Son".

Juergen Teller vs Josef Koudelka

2008-05-12T01:44:00.000-07:00

A senior U.S. editor recently asked me what I thought of the Sunday Times Magazine, a publication she herself had worked on, in its glory days of reportage and striking photo-journalism. I was not very complimentary and complained that it, too, had been rather dumbed down of late. Since I made this pronouncement, I have reluctantly backed down, as week after week the ST mag has published one worthwhile, well produced story after another. This week brought us a welcome spread on Magnum's Josef Koudelka (b.1938) and his famous Prague Photographer shots (see above). The interview itself proved less than illuminating; nevertheless, it did provide an opportunity to review Koudelka's extraordinary images of the Russian tanks on the streets of Prague, on the eve of publication of a new book: Invasion Prague 68 (Thames & Hudson). Immediately preceding this spread was an article about fashion turned fine art photographer Juergen Teller, alongside some of his more arresting images: Lily Cole naked, Bjork in an Icelandic geyser and several of the photographer himself, naked, with & without actress Charlotte Rampling. It made for a thought-provoking juxtaposition.

Burma #2

2008-05-12T01:35:00.000-07:00

As predicted here in my last post, the situation in Burma continues to deteriorate hourly. The attitude of the military junta would be almost farcical - if so many millions of lives were not at risk.

The latest UN reports has between 1.2 million and 1.9 million people struggling to survive after the cyclone. The U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated the number of deaths at between 63,290 to 101,682, with 220,000 people still missing.

Cyclone in Burma-Myanmar - 22,000 reported dead. Far more fatalities to come.

2008-05-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

Sitting at my desk over the weekend, headlines about the Burma cyclone popped up regularly in the Top Stories box in the corner of my screen. First estimates were of around 400 fatalities. I knew this was, sadly, going to be way off the mark. I grew up in the Far East and storms of this magnitude always leave a devastating trail of death & destruction.

With my foreign correspondent's hat on, I also wondered how the information was actually getting out of the notoriously xenophobic & isolationist regime. Slowly, the terrible scale of the disaster has leaked - and continues to leak out - not just via the authorities or the NGOs or accredited envoys, but via the Internet & mobile phones - technological advances unknown in Burma until relatively recently.
Without both the latter, it is unlikely that the world beyond the Burmese border would have learned so much so quickly about the scale and passion of the Buddhist Monks' protests in September 2007 (see image above).
At a debate hosted by London's Frontline Club on World Press Freedom Day (2nd May) last week, several speakers, including Nazenin Ansari of London-based Iranian newspaper Kayhan and Palestinian writer Iqbal Tamimi of the Exiled Journalists Network, eloquently lauded the new freedoms and frontiers afforded by the New Media. Regime change effected by text message and photo uploads? Stranger things have happened.
For a guide to the Burma/Myanmar debate, follow this BBC link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7013943.stm

War Art: Official & Non-Official

2008-04-29T03:38:00.000-07:00

Apologies for starting with a classic critical truism: the history of photojournalism is inextricably linked to the narrative of war - from Robert Capa and George Rodger to Philip Jones Griffiths, Nick Ut and beyond. (The juxtaposition of the latter's 1972 Vietnam napalm kids and his snatched sobbing Paris Hilton shot, precisely 35 years later, tells a story all of its own...).

The concept of the official war artist first became enshrined during the Great War but the depiction of warfare has concerned both artists and patrons for centuries. This weblog plans to consider war photographers and artists - both official and unofficial - on a regular basis.

The experience of warfare leaves no one unaffected and many official war artists have produced work markedly at odds with what the authorities who appointed them might have anticipated. John Keane (b.1954) hit the headlines in 1991 when he was appointed official British war artist during the Gulf War. His work is concerned with conflict - military, political and social - in Britain and around the world. The image above is from his 2006 series Guantanamerica.

Queen & Country (see the panel right) is the title of a similarly powerful and thought-provoking work by Turner Prize Winner and official war artist Steve McQueen (b.1969). Working closely with 137 families of servicemen and women who lost their lives in Iraq, McQueen has created a cabinet containing a series of facsimile postage sheets, each dedicated to a deceased soldier. The project is currently on show at London's Festival Hall (until 1st June) where visitors are being asked to sign The Art Fund's online petition, asking the Royal Mail to issue the stamps as a fitting tribute to the fallen and to fulfill the artist's original vision.

http://www.artfund.org/queenandcountry/Queen_and_Country.html

Examining the Image: Nixon in China

2008-04-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the U.S.A., died 14 years ago today in 1994, at the age of 81. This image shows Nixon and his wife, Pat, sharing a joke with Chinese Premier Zhou EnLai, during the historic 1972 visit which initiated a gradual thaw in Sino-American relations. This is not the place to go into details about what came to be known as "Ping Pong Diplomacy" but to make a point of just how time and history can blunt the shock of the original appearance of any image. For most Americans, steeped in the paranoia of the Cold War, the news that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had secretly visited China in 1971 was scandalous enough. To see the President of the United States sharing jokes with the "enemy", shaking Mao by the hand and toasting the Peking regime at banquets, shook many Americans to the core. The ground-breaking trip passed into legend, not least because it became the subject of a minimalist, critically well-regarded opera by American composer John Adams, with libretto by Alice Goodman. Nixon's record was overshadowed by the Watergate scandal and the threat of impeachment in 1972-1973. It all ended ignominiously with his resignation - the first by a president in office - in 1974. Nixon was pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford but the spectre of Watergate still obscures many of his diplomatic achievements, not least his role in negotiating a ceasefire with North Vietnam, his moves towards detente with the Soviet Union and key role in the limitation of strategic arms and, of course, his historic visit to China.

Martin Parr - Jester or Genius?

2008-04-20T07:13:00.001-07:00

British photographer Martin Parr (b.1952) has always polarised the critical establishment. Personally, I am a fan (and not just because this image - from the 1995-1999 Common Sense series looks just like my best friend Cara). Eventually, after much toing and froing and significant and vociferous protest, Parr was admitted to the pantheon of full Magnum membership in 1994. His sly, wry documentary - spying on his countrymen at play, dissecting the phenomenon that is mass market tourism - is feted on the Continent and in the US, yet slightly sniffed at back home. Robert Sandall captures the paradox well in the following piece which appeared in the Sunday Times on 20th April 2008.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3751217.ece

Eldorado #2: Chaos at YFZ Hearings - A Few Statistics

2008-04-18T01:33:00.000-07:00

San Angelo Barbara Walther district judge was forced to suspend proceedings amid scenes of chaos at the custody hearings of the children seized from the Yearning for Zion polygamist ranch.

Lawyers acting for the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are arguing that the case violates their religious freedoms.

The FLDS, a breakaway branch of the Mormon faith, led by self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs, currently in jail on charges of complicity to rape, claims 10,000 members

The fate of 416 children is being considered in San Angelo.

At least one minor is reported to be pregnant and four girls under 16 already have children.

More than 350 lawyers are involved.

The relatively restrained BBC story follows below -

For rather more detail and analysis, I have found the Salt Lake Tribune, the market-leading publication in the mainstream Mormon capital of Utah, to be invaluable.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7353304.stm

http://www.sltrib.com/polygamy/ci_8969119

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695271299,00.html

Teenagers in Victorian Fancy Dress? Or Fortunate Escapees from Abuse in Eldorado?

2008-04-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

Religious news of most types usually comes relatively down-page on this side of the Pond. Consequently, it was only last weekend that peopled images of the extraordinary developments at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas found their way to our front pages, notably in the foreign coverage of the broadsheet Sundays. More than 500 women and children have now been removed from the ranch, set up by polygamist Mormon sect leader, 52-year-old Warren Jeffs.

What really struck me about these particular images was the nature of the demure clothes, or rather costumes, worn by the women and, in particular, their extremely elaborate and doubtless, time-consuming hair styles. There seems to be every possible variant of the Victorian chignon, French pleat, braid and bun on show, suggesting that personal appearance and grooming remained extremely important for these females - presumably in the stiff competition to attract the attention of the relatively few men in their midst?

I found the initial image above extremely disturbing and distressing. These young, practically pre-pubescent, women look as if they have wandered out of a Victorian novel, or an early Laura Ashley catalogue. There is more than a hint of Grant Wood's seminal 1930 painting 'American Gothic' while the girls themselves seem to have slipped somehow out of a Thomas Eakins portrait. Presumably, these demurely clad and elaborately coiffed Henry James' heroines are now among the 400 children who have been taken into state custody for their own safety?

Marathon News (and Just Because I love it...)

2008-04-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I ran the London Marathon. Not particularly fast - it has to be said. (I blame the loo queues plus my Dad ringing on the mobile every 20 minutes to check my progress...) I'm intrigued to find out how the six Maasai warriors, running today to raise money to install a well in their home village, got on. They were all rather optimistic, given the likely absence of lions from the streets of London and the high comfort factor of their shoes, made out of re-cycled car tyres. Charity Greenforce certainly raised its profile with a series of fabulous photo ops such as this one & some fantastic PR, including news that M&S had donated underpants to the chaps, who usually go commando and that they had swiftly become addicted to the English cuppa with as many sugars as the proverbial plumber. To donate, follow this link:

http://www.maasaimarathon.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=c_pages.showPage&pageID=1&CFID=40376&CFTOKEN=22634994

Images of Afghanistan: Seamus Murphy & Steve McCurry

2008-04-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

Steve McCurry (b.1950) is an American photographer, perhaps best known for the portrait of a young Afghani refugee girl which appeared on the cover of National Geographic Magazine in June 1985. This 2002 image shows Sharbat Gula, now in full burka, carrying her own image from 17 years earlier, after the photographer finally succeeded in tracking down his original subject.

Seamus Murphy is a younger Irish photographer, who has a rather different approach to McCurry's. His new book 'Darkness Visible' is the extraordinary product of a dozen years of travel to Afghanistan, during which he achieved a remarkable level of intimacy with his subjects, ably conveying something of the patent resilience of its peoples. I wasn't able to find a truly representative single image of Murphy's Afghanistan work but I do urge you to click on the link below and to take - at the very least - a look at the last half dozen images in the series.

http://www.poy.org/62/wua/murphy_36.php

Olympic Flame Progress...

2008-04-09T06:53:00.000-07:00

I note from Facebook this morning that Nikhil, my 17-year old godson in Hong Kong, has joined a group entitled: "Attempt to extinguish Olympic Torch in Hong Kong". Not for the first time, I struggle with my conscience as regards what my younger FB friends are posting in relation to my long and close friendships with their parents... However, it does make one wonder whether like-minded kids around the world may actually manage to stop the Torch in its tracks (& it makes one proud that one's friends have raised such intelligent and aware kids...) The image is of the San Francisco protestors, scaling the Golden Gate Bridge. Could there be a better global billboard to get a message across?

Another one to ponder

2008-04-07T04:09:00.001-07:00

This classic of the genre was used in today's Telegraph to illustrate the extraordinary poll finding that Margaret Thatcher at her peak would sweep to power in a general election held today. An incidental finding also spells rather bad news for Dave: almost two thirds of Tory voters said they would prefer Lady Thatcher to the current party leader. The image itself shows the "Iron Lady" in the tower of a British Challenger tank in the then West Germany. More than 20 years on from what was clearly a piece of highly orchestrated PR (don't mention the Cold War) the jury is still out as to whether this "Grace Kelly awry" shot actually boosted Mrs Thatcher's re-election chances or whether it ranks with William Hague's baseball cap and Neil Kinnock's beach stroll as one of the worst PR gaffes since the spin doctors first muscled their way into Westminster.

Untimely death of Dith Pran

2008-04-06T03:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not usually a big fan of Jon Swain but I was very moved by this tribute to his friend and colleague Dith Pran, who died last week of pancreatic cancer, aged only 65. According to Swain, it was Pran who coined the phrase "the Killing Fields" - the eventual title of the well-regarded 1984 Roland Joffe film which brought the Cambodian atrocities to a deservedly wider public. Read Swain's Sunday Times piece below:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3688459.ece

Or is it just me?

2008-04-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

So - what's going on? Zimbabwe on the utter brink; Tibet: more shootings & protests against the stately progress of the Olympic Flame - via 10, Downing Street no less. What else have we got? Putin & Nato; Credit Crunch; Irish Economic Miracle tainted by corruption; Pregnant Man; Canadian seal culls; Darfur; Basra escalates.... Yet what is the image in most of the Brit papers today? Why obviously super-model, Naomi Campbell - as incensed as we all might be at the loss of a designer suitcase - being driven away from Heathrow Terminal 5 by a friendly police officer - presumably not the one at whom she allegedly spat?

Inquest News -

2008-04-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

So - 89 days and £10 million later - is it far-fetched to hope that the late Diana, Princess of Wales, can now rest in peace? Just a thought - would you perhaps prefer to continue seeing now familiar images of Diana on the front pages? Or are you now happier to feast your eyes on the likes of equally troubled young women who appear to have stumbled into the vacuum left by Diana's untimely death? Viz - Britney, Lindsay, Paris, Posh, Cheryl, Kerry et al? Discuss:

Philip Jones Griffiths (1936-2008)

2008-03-24T03:24:00.000-07:00

The Vietnam War was a crucial watershed for photo-journalism. Among the distinctive breed of courageous photographers who brought the scale of the war's atrocities and devastation to the public consciousness was Welsh-born Philip Jones Griffiths, who has died of cancer at the age of 72. His 1971 book Vietnam Inc. set a high bar for the myriad volumes which would follow. Jones Griffiths became a regular contributor to the Observer, McCalls, the Sunday Times and New York Times magazines. He was a key member of Magnum where he served as president from 1980 to 1985. Martin Wollacott. veteran foreign correspondent of the Guardian, contributes a perceptive insight to the obituary attached.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/photography/story/0,,2267726,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews#article_continue

Is this the first still television image you really remember?

2008-03-23T13:07:00.000-07:00

Listening to the lugubrious & wryly hilarious Stuart Maconie on (shock horror/apologies...) BBC Radio 2 yesterday afternoon, I was vividly reminded of the shots of the US Space Shuttle Challenger exploding (imploding?) not long after lift-off more than 20 years ago. These images have stayed with me to this day. It was probably the first time I - then a rookie foreign correspondent - had watched a disaster of this magnitude unfold in real time.
Yet somehow - it is the still image which remains. Discuss......

Magnum in Motion

2008-03-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

Simply the best - http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/

Addendum to Images of Iraq

2008-03-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

Reuters - where I personally spent (perhaps quite not enough) of my formative years - have now caught up excellently with the programme -
Many thanks to the indefatigable Jemima Kiss for alerting us all to www.reuters.com/iraq

Broomfield's Battle for Haditha & Images of Iraq

2008-03-18T04:44:00.000-07:00

Last night, watched the TV premiere of Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha, a dramatisation of the events surrounding a still unexplained revenge massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005. Thought-provoking, if flawed in places, it remains a valuable addition to the growing body of work now slowly emerging, which attempts to put the invasion of Iraq and its woeful aftermath into some kind of context. Images from Iraq (such as the notorious torture shots from Abu Ghraib prison - which I considered using for this post but found myself unable to do so) have formed a powerful part of the case both for and against the War itself. With passing time & enhanced perspective other artists, film makers & photographers will hopefully be able to emulate Broomfield's laudable attempts to make sense of the 21st century's defining conflict.

George Rodger & Bergen Belsen 1945

2008-03-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

George Rodger

2008-03-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

Babel@Bedlam examines iconic images in the best photo-journalistic tradition. What is it precisely that singles one particular image out from a single contact sheet or reel? Are we even able to analyse what it is that constitues the power or singularity of any individual image? Who are the photographers responsible for this extraordinary body of work?
Thanks to the excellent Frontline Club Blog, I was alerted to a wonderful piece by his widow, Jinx, about one of the first heroes of photo-journalism George Rodger (1908-1995). A founder member of Magnum, British-born George Rodger's images from Belsen materially helped to clarify post-war attitudes towards the extent and significance of Holocaust atrocities. Read, digest, reflect and give thanks for his courageous and unflinching vision...
http://www.fromthefrontline.co.uk/blogs/index.php?blog=5&title=jinx_remembers_george&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

New York PS

2008-03-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

At the Guggenheim...
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/cai.html

Cai Guo-Quiang fills the snail shell with perhaps the most extraordinary installation ever.
Anyone visiting NYC between now & May 28th should definitely take a detour to 5th & E 89th...

An excellent review of the show and perceptive comments by Time's Richard Lacayo who blogs on art and architecture

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1720099,00.html

New York New York

2008-03-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has an extraordinarily diverse collection of masterpieces in every medium. On a recent visit, I headed straight for the photography in the Edward Steichen Galleries on the 3rd Floor; these show a rotating exhibit of MoMA gems from pioneers, such as Muybridge and Stieglitz, to the usual suspects such as Diane Arbus & Jeff Wall. I was very taken with several trademark street portraits by Harry Callahan (1912-1999), the first photographer to represent the U.S.A. at the Venice Biennale in 1977. Check out - http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/collection_galleries/photography.html

Edward Steichen himself (1879-1973) is the subject of a major, if partial, retrospective at the superb Kunsthaus in Zurich http://www.kunsthaus.ch/. Curated by William Ewing and Todd Brandow & entitled 'In High Fashion', the exhibit remains on show until the end of March & will subsequently travel to Madrid and Wolfsburg in Germany before reaching New York's ICP in January 2009 www.icp.org/.

A pivotal figure in the 20th century reappraisal of fashion photography, Steichen had already made his name as a painter and art photographer on both sides of the Atlantic when, in 1923, he became chief photographer for Condé Nast's influential Vogue & Vanity Fair magazines. His influence, both as a curator at MoMA and as the de facto creator of the prototype of the "super model" cannot be underestimated. My own highlights of the Zurich show included early portraits of British icons such as Winston Churchill & Noel Coward.

Yes - but is it Art? Is it even a Press Photo?

2008-03-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

This is the image which won the latest annual Swiss Press Photo Prize. It is currently on show with 1800 other photographs, all of which were considered for the award at the Forum der Schweizer Geschichte in Schwyz (until 17 May 08). As many of you will recognize, it is the work of American artist Spencer Tunick (b.1967) who seems to have no difficulty in persuading hundreds of art lovers to strip naked for his installation-cum-performance-cum-living sculpture pieces. This image takes on an additional layer of significance when the viewer realises that the series was commissioned by Greenpeace. The stated aim of the artist and his patrons was to draw attention to the vulnerability of the melting glacier. I wasn't able to catch the entire exhibition on a recent short trip to Switzerland but I would be keen to examine the calibre of the other works which were in competition with Tunick's work for the Swiss Press Photo accolade.

the magic of translation...

2008-02-23T03:29:00.000-08:00

ON THE FRONTLINE...

2008-02-23T02:44:00.000-08:00

So - here I am in sunny W2 taking my first steps along the wonderful weblog highway, ably assisted by the experts of the Frontline Club. The crack team consists of Harry alongside Minal and David. Team leader is Graham