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Notes Photo September 12, 2014

9/11: Remarkably, A Photo of the Towers From Thirteen Years Away

I wouldn't have imagined seeing a photo yesterday -- initially, a Twitter blip amidst the moments of silence, the first responders, the enormous flags in the football stadiums, the burning embers, the falling men -- that would actually cause me to look on that day anew.

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Notes Photo September 8, 2014

How the Pictures are Killing Us: The Dynamics of the Sotloff and Foley ISIS Videos

If the Foley and Sotloff videos felt like a piercing blow, if just from the bloodless screen shots, what is it that so pierced us?

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Notes Photo September 4, 2014

Compassionate Conservatism: Damon Winter’s New Photos from Gitmo for The NY Times

The new wrinkle is on how the prisoners are allowed more contact with each other as long as they demonstrate good behavior.

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Notes Photo August 20, 2014

Enabling ISIS, the VICE Videos and the Execution of AFP Videographer James Foley

Where are the ethics and the boundaries when the media engagement is so passive, even acquiescent, and the product, so indistinguishable from propaganda that the insurgents feel they can have their way with the exposure?

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Notes Photo July 1, 2014

On that ISIS/ISIL Centerfold

I imagine you’ve seen this gentleman posing here in his outdoor boudoir?

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Notes Photo June 19, 2014

ISIS Images Go Mainstream: Giving Terrorists a Hand

AP is not just validating, packaging and sanctioning this scene for the Western media news stream, its caption complements the terrorist’s narrative.

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Notes Photo June 17, 2014

Terror Imagery the Envy of Hollywood: Why a Scapegoating West Can't Get Enough of ISIS

The question is, why is Western media suddenly so obsessed with the propaganda of ISIS in Iraq, and gratuitously publishing the groups factually-ambiguous terror scenes?

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Notes Photo June 10, 2014

Las Vegas Cop Killers Jerad and Amanda Miller (Not Necessarily in That Order)

Perhaps the couple is an anomaly. Perhaps not, however. Maybe what we're seeing is the emergence of the female far-right revolutionary and domestic terrorist.

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Notes Photo June 4, 2014

Photographs of a Botched Execution Are as American as Apple Pie (GRAPHIC)

I’d like to tell you that such images are anomalous, but sadly that is not the case.

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Notes Photo

Glimpses of the Missing Nigerian Girls: Glenna Gordon's Photos of Extraordinary Ordinary Things

Notebooks, uniforms, their own clothes and finally photographs of the girls themselves. They are ordinary things that in this extraordinary context start to build up into a sad, touching image of some of the lives that have been torn away from their normal course.

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Notes Photo June 3, 2014

Conservative Backlash Gets Visual in White House's Soldier – Taliban Prisoner Swap

The deal to trade Bergdahl for five high profile Gitmo detainees threatens to dust off the visual genre of the "war on terror," a vocabulary that has been more in remission.

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Notes Photo June 2, 2014

The Santa Barbara Shooting Rampage … and How They're All Running Together

The crime scene still taped and the blood barely dry, members of the media historicize another driveway, lawn or storefront and ennoble another witness or survivor telling his or her tale.

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Notes Photo May 28, 2014

Visual Media, Misogyny and the UCSB Shooting: The Alpha Phi “Upskirt” Shot

Is the objectification of women so entrenched in our culture and media that it's inescapable, even in the visual reporting of this extraordinarily troubling story?

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Notes Photo May 14, 2014

Bring Back Our Girls … From the Digital Divide

What the girls represented was a blind spot -- active evidence that the web isn't, in fact, omniscient, and our digital experience -- as much as it feels like the essence of inclusivity -- is overwhelmingly exclusive and exclusionary.

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Notes Photo May 9, 2014

#BringBackOurGirls: The Complex Optics of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation

The controversy over the politics of representation in #BringBackOurGirls must be used to bolster the broader campaign for women’s safety, autonomy, and right to consent.

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Notes Photo February 28, 2014

Murder as Damn(ed) Good Art: Robert Hariman on Organized Crime World Press Winner

The mob knew it wasn’t enough to kill its enemies; the killings had to be displayed to the viewing public. But the photographer isn’t a lackey of the mob.

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Notes Photo December 17, 2013

She is Seeing Terror. You are Seeing Terror. We Will Continue to See Terror.

The narrow aperture is as salient as the face behind it, while the blinds on each side make a thick frame designed to obscure. The message is clear: what you see through the aperture of the camera is not the whole picture.

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Notes Photo December 10, 2013

The Politics of Nostalgia: The Mandela Fist

It's interesting how the flood of memorial portraits in the West marginalize or soft-peddle, but also get stuck on Mandela's ferocity and engagement with the tool of violence.

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