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Notes Photo July 4, 2013

Alexandria Sunset: A Metaphor

What's so fascinating about this Egyptian sunset that's gone viral over the past few days is how much the heavy-handed construction of reality mirrors the radical re-engineering that has just taken place in Egypt.

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Notes Photo July 3, 2013

Bolivian Prez Plane Caught in Snowden S-Storm. (Or: Hiding in the Millenium Falcon!)

In a crisis unlike any other — the Snowden drama playing out in secret and on the world stage -- President Evo Morales of Bolivia finally took off for home this morning in his Dassault Falcon after thirteen unscheduled hours on the ground in Vienna. So much for...

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Notes Photo July 2, 2013

Egypt vs. Morsi: What Pics are Trending, and Why

Surface-to-air muscle flexing meets "e-tagging." Photos of citizen demonstrators flashing laser pointers at Egyptian military helicopters.

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Notes Photo July 1, 2013

Obama in South Africa: Political and Media Disconnect

If anything, we need to understand these protest images in S. Africa more in terms of current and similar photos from Brazil and Turkey. The public, in other words, is more sensitive these days to when they're being patronized.

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Notes Photo June 24, 2013

The Further Invisible Adventures of Edward Snowden

But it's Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas who point out in the Washington Post that the lurid aspects of Snowden's invisible adventures actually detract from the importance of his disclosures, that covering his personal ordeal "has even neutralized journalistic resources that could’ve been devoted to the larger NSA stories...

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Notes Photo June 8, 2013

Turkey in a Whirl

On the surface, I see citizens honoring cultural tradition in the face of a government attempting to impose its will and ideological agenda.

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Notes Photo June 6, 2013

The Gorgeous TIME Ai WeiWei China Cover

Doesn't this artful expression represent, more than anything, how much the U.S. relationship with China is crying out for real craft and imagination?

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Notes Photo June 4, 2013

Why I Like Guy Martin's Gezi Park Photos

The pictures are notable for what they're not. Not sensational. Not glorifying the violence. Could the photo world be approach a tipping point in terms of sensation, aesthetics and the combination?

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Notes Photo June 2, 2013

Uprising Pictures from Turkey: Going All In with the Gas

Tear gas has become an increasingly visible staple of domestic control. From the pictures distributed by newswire and social media though, these Turkish gassings seem to rise to a new level.

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Notes Photo May 13, 2013

James Whitlow Delano – First Dispatch: Return to the Rainforest

Over the months ahead, I want to make some sense about how a long-term project on the needless destruction of the equatorial rainforest came to be an obsession and how I have attempted to visually portray this form of daylight robbery.

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Notes Photo May 12, 2013

Closing Act: The Bangladesh Miracle

Whereas we all want to believe that the images of the previous eighteen days really matter, I'm afraid that the American media consumer is so tied to the warp speed of the news cycle that those hopes might already be gone with the wind.

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Notes Photo May 8, 2013

Dying for Brands: Among the Deep Affronts of the Bangladesh Factory Collapse (GRAPHIC)

What is particularly tragic is how photos of name Western brands pulled from the Bangladesh factory collapse relate to the image below.

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Notes Photo May 1, 2013

Syria Serves Up Rebel "Terrorists" to Western Journalists. Q is: How to Shoot Them?

I wonder if it what we had on the NYT front page last Thursday was a standoff between heavy-handed state propaganda and high-level photojournalism.

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Notes Photo April 26, 2013

Colorful Bangladesh

What's ironic is how the Bangladeshi's employed the very fabrics they use to produce those West European and American brands to try and rescue survivors.

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Notes Photo April 13, 2013

Korea Pics of the Week: Paper Tiger vs. Bloody Tiger

There aren't two other photos from the extensive collection this week that better represent the extreme ends of the N. Korea threat spectrum.

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Notes Photo April 11, 2013

Femen Storms Putin, but is “Femenism” really “Feminism”?

Unfortunately, Femen’s “new aesthetics” look strikingly similar to the optics of patriarchy.

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Notes Photo April 7, 2013

Women Who Expect One Thing and Get Another

Lately, I've been thinking about themes and patterns in the river of photos flowing through the news web.

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Notes Photo April 4, 2013

Jew in a Box

So when the base of the box in which the person sits says “Are there still Jews in Germany?', maybe an automatic response would be to addend a "why" to the start of the sentence.

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