Eideard

A thin man rests his head on the shoulder of a burqa-clad woman, the pair collapsed together against a wall. The expression on her face can’t be seen. But her body language – right arm wrapped tightly around his neck, left hand clinging to his arm – conveys everything her expression cannot.

This is Samuel Aranda’s World Press Photo of the Year, which Mr. Aranda shot in Yemen while on assignment for The New York Times last fall.

The image, which has the mood of a Renaissance painting, was one of the first Mr. Aranda filed from Yemen, where he spent more than two months shooting for the paper. He found the pair at the entrance to a mosque that had been converted into a hospital.

“I got back to my place and I saw the photo in the screen and I was like, ‘Wow,’” Mr. Aranda said. “The woman is not just crying. It was something more. You can feel that the woman is really strong…”

Mr. Aranda, 32, was born in Spain and is based in Tunisia. When he arrived in Yemen in early October, no one knew he was there. It had taken him more than a month to safely sneak into the country.

He fell in love with the place.

Still, it was a couple of weeks before he felt comfortable walking around with a camera. While covering protests in Taiz, he and a freelance reporter for The Times came under fire from government soldiers. As the only Western photographer in Yemen at one point, Mr. Aranda was helped by friendly local wire photographers – like Mohamed al-Sayaghi of Reuters.

That made it difficult to leave, which he did just before Christmas. “I remember saying ‘bye’ to Mohamed and he was super serious, looking at me, and he was like, ‘We have a big problem,’” — “’You cannot leave the country now.’”

Koyo Kouoh, another juror, said Mr. Aranda’s photo speaks for the events that swept the region in 2011. “It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring,” Ms. Kouoh said.

It’s no surprise to see other photos from the uprisings on the list of winners, which can be seen on the World Press Photo Web site. Alex Majoli won first prize in the general news singles category for a photograph of protesters in Tahrir square reacting to a speech by the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February. Rémi Ochlik was awarded the prize for general news stories for “Battle for Libya.” And Yuri Kozyrev‘s photograph of Libyan rebels in Ras Lanuf won first prize in spot news singles.

Bravo to you all. For your skill, humanity and bravery.

Click on the photo to access Brashears’ video.

Stunning images from high in the Himalayas – showing the extent by which many glaciers have shrunk in the past 80 years or so – have gone on display at the Royal Geographical Society in central London.

Between 2007 and 2010, David Breashears retraced the steps of early photographic pioneers such as Major E O Wheeler, George Mallory and Vittorio Sella – to try to re-take their views of breathtaking glacial vistas.

The mountaineer and photographer is the founder of GlacierWorks – a non-profit organisation that uses art, science and adventure to raise public awareness about the consequences of climate change in the Himalayas.

Sad but true.

A British photographer has undertaken an epic 20-year foray into one of the world’s strangest eco-systems. Nick Garbutt, 46, from Cumbria, has made 25 trips deep into the forests of Madagascar. He has visited the island every year since 1991. Over the two decades, Nick has built up an extraordinary collection of wildlife photography, revealing the island’s unusual and colourful species up close.

Absolutely brilliant.

That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s room, on the night he was assassinated.

But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer.

On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr. Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the Original Civil Rights Photographer, whose previous claim to fame had been the trust he engendered among high-ranking civil rights leaders, including Dr. King.

“It is an amazing betrayal,” said Athan Theoharis, a historian at Marquette University who has written books about the F.B.I. “It really speaks to the degree that the F.B.I. was able to engage individuals within the civil rights movement. This man was so well trusted.”

From at least 1968 to 1970, Mr. Withers, who was black, provided photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to two F.B.I. agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program, Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, according to numerous reports summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site.

A clerical error appears to have allowed for Mr. Withers’s identity to be divulged: In most cases in the reports, references to Mr. Withers and his informer number, ME 338-R, have been blacked out. But in several locations, the F.B.I. appears to have forgotten to hide them. The F.B.I. said Monday that it was not clear what had caused the lapse in privacy and was looking into the incident.

I’m never surprised to learn about a trusted figure in American insurgent politics who may have been an agent, informer, even an agent provocateur. All part of S.O.P. for American governments, federal, state and local. Even small town Red Squads have been around for decades to keep an eye on everyone from trade union organizers to peace activists.

I hope none of you are gullible enough to think it ever stopped.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The U.S. military freed a Reuters photographer in Iraq on Wednesday, almost a year and a half after snatching him from his home in the middle of the night and placing him in military detention without charge.

The U.S. military has never said exactly why it detained Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed — who worked for Reuters as a freelance TV cameraman and photographer — and locked him away for so long, saying the evidence against him was classified.

“How can I describe my feelings? This is like being born again,” Jassam told Reuters by telephone as he was greeted emotionally by his family.

U.S. and Iraqi forces smashed in the doors of Jassam’s house in Mahmudiya town, south of Baghdad, in September 2008 and whisked him away, first to Camp Bucca, a desert prison on the Iraq-Kuwait border, then the smaller Camp Cropper detention center near Baghdad airport.

Jassam is one of several Iraqi journalists working for foreign news organizations who have been detained by the U.S. military, often for months at a time, since the 2003 U.S. invasion. None has ever been charged, triggering criticism from international journalism rights groups.

“I am very pleased his long incarceration without charge is finally over,” Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger said.

“I wish the process to release a man who had no specific accusations against him had been swifter…”

The U.S. military still has almost 6,000 detainees who must be handed to Iraqi authorities. If they face Iraqi criminal charges they will be tried, if not they will be freed.

The Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled in 2008 that there was no case against Jassam.

As ever, military justice is to justice as military music is to music.

The Environmental Photographer of the Year shares images of environmental and social issues with international audiences, enhancing our understanding of the causes, consequences and solutions to climate change.

The competition encourages images of places and people that are benefitting from a changing climate, or vulnerable ecosystems and communities that are struggling with the effects. Images may examine the relationship between economic development, environmental degradation and social inequity, celebrate innovations helping us achieve environmental improvements, examine lifestyles, cultural traditions, spiritual activities and racial prejudices or celebrate the incredible variety and beauty that exists within our natural environment. They serve to remind us what we need to protect.

Bravo!

“I try to photograph everything. Every meeting that the president does,” Pete Souza told CNN’s John King on “State of the Union.”

On leave of absence from his normal post as an assistant professor of photojournalism at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication, Souza is the chief official White House photographer for President Obama, meaning he has an all-access pass to the president’s most intimate and private moments.

“I look at my job as a visual historian,” Souza said on Sunday. “The most important thing is to create a good visual archive for history, so 50 or a hundred years from now, people can go back and look at all these pictures.”

Photography was and is an important love of my life…from my own early days.

The U.S. military in Iraq is not obliged to obey an Iraqi court order to release a freelance photographer working for Reuters news agency and will hold him into 2009, said a spokesman.

The Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled on November 30 that there was no evidence against Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, and ordered the U.S. military to release him from Camp Cropper prison near Baghdad airport, where he has been detained since September.

“Though we appreciate the decision of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq in the Jassam case, their decision does not negate the intelligence information that currently lists him as a threat to Iraq security and stability,” said Major Neal Fisher, spokesman for the U.S. military’s detainee operations in Iraq.

“He will be processed for release in a safe and orderly manner after December 31st, in the order of his individual threat level, along with all other detainees,” Fisher said in an email to Reuters…

In the ruling issued by the Iraqi court at the end of last month, Iraqi prosecutors said they had asked the U.S. military repeatedly for the evidence it had against Jassam but that U.S. forces had failed to provide any material.

Fisher said that the U.S. military was “not bound” to provide military intelligence to Iraqi courts.

Doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart to witness the process of bringing democracy to the Middle East – as managed by George W, Bush and the U.S. military?

There are over 15,000 people currently imprisoned by the United States – in Iraq. With no right to trial, no public testimony, no right to an attorney – all the crap that provoked our own uprising against British forces in 1775.

UPDATE: Jassam Mohamed finally released from US military jail.

Namir Noor-Eldeen

The U.S. military said on Friday it was still processing a request by Reuters for video footage from U.S. helicopters and other materials relating to the killing of two Iraqi staff in Baghdad a year ago.

Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in a U.S. helicopter air strike in eastern Baghdad on July 12, 2007.

Reuters wants all the materials to be able to study what happened. Access to the video, taken from helicopters involved in the attack, could also help improve Reuters’ safety policies in Iraq, the world’s most dangerous country for journalists.

Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh had gone to eastern Baghdad after hearing of a military raid on a building around dawn that day, and were with a group of men at the time. It is believed two or three of these men may have been carrying weapons, although witnesses said none were assuming a hostile posture.

Video from two U.S. Apache helicopters and photographs taken of the scene were shown to Reuters editors in Baghdad on July 25, 2007 in an off-the-record briefing.

U.S. military officers who presented the materials said Reuters had to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get copies. This request was made the same day.

Reuters has not received any formal response in nearly a year.

Reuters is still waiting. The Army is still stonewalling.

Slide Show: a photographer’s view of a city in transition.

It can’t be said often enough that we, the United States and our EU allies have treated the nation of Afghanistan as shamefully, again, as we did after the Afghan-Soviet War.

We jumped in. Pulled a smash-and-grab. Stuffed a few unfortunate locals in at the top and said, “Go ahead and govern, boys!” While we took our dollars and troops off to steal some oil down the road.