The Image - A Covenant of Uncompromising Trust

Over the past two days a couple of stories have erupted on an old, but problematic issue that will never go away yet now more than ever is fanned into full fire by global digital winds: image theft.

Thousands of words have been written on the subject and I'm tired of repeating any of them. My complaint, my concern, here lies in the breaking of what I believe is the "Photograph's Covenant" the image creates an uncompromising trust with the viewer. It says what you see is real, the truth.

Simple theft has reparation. I can asked to be credited, I can ask for the abuser to stop using the image, I can sue their arse off. Breaking the Covenant destroys something I can never repair.

One could extend the Covenant to documentary film and journalistic reporting, both audio and writing, as well. It's simple—the viewer's trust is in the reality of photograph's content. It's an unspoken trust of truth. As photographer Ami Vitale said in a recent NYTimes Lens interview The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls, regarding an egregious disregard of the covenant:

We are responsible as photographers and journalists when we make promises to do justice to their stories and honor them in the way that they have honored us by sharing their stories." 

Like the loss of trust in all relationships, once compromised there is forever lingering doubt. But what saddens and frustrates me more is the increasing disinterest in the trust. No one thinks about it and no one seems to care (except the original creators.) And once decapitated it is gone. As in this example when I recently attended a film documentary about photographer Vivian Maier with friend/photographer Joni Kabana, in Joni's words:

"Another example that some might not realize constitutes theft: last weekend I went to see the Vivian Maier documentary and I saw someone photographing her images, up close, that were on the promotional poster. When I went over and pleasantly reminded her that she was infringing on copyright material, she got nasty and said to leave her alone. She continued to photograph the images so that they looked like she took them. I continued by saying she could not post or use them anywhere, as the rights to the image belong to the photographer."

Sharing images and content from so many sources, from around the world, has inspired and enabled a wonderfully powerful change that I celebrate. Like all changes there are cost, some appropriate, some too high. Loss of the Covenant is too high because we pay that price with our trust.


Above Photo: A screen shot taken from Chris Brown's Twitter account May 1, 2014, depicting the Twitter campaign for #BringBackOurGirls that went viral regarding the hundreds of Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. The images, created by photographer Ami Vitale in 2000 in Guinea-Bissau, has absolutely no relationship to the school girl kidnappings.

To see Ami Vitale's original story with the images used as she intended Guinea-Bissau: Rediscovering the Soul of a Forgotten Land
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"he had this great book that he wanted to write"

A day of struggles with writing, knowing you have a story eating away at you from the inside, a global tale, and Steinbeck and the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath:

"One of the amazing things about the book is that Steinbeck knew that he had an epic that he was going to write. He spent months researching it. He spent much of the mid and late '30s with migrant workers. He wrote a long series of six articles for the San Francisco News, and he knew that he had the raw material of an American epic. He was really almost kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. 

And he was plagued by the pressure of it as he's writing it. In his journals, you can tell that he is really weighted by the idea of how to get this right. And he wrote about it: I've done my darnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags. I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived, not the way books are written. He wanted the book to become a part of the culture immediately and it did. I mean, if you think about the idea that a major industry was burning this book and you - you know, you move forward to 2014, that's quite astonishing. Can you imagine a novel that would move a major industry to burn it? That speaks to how much of a nerve Steinbeck was hitting in." - Steve Almond

The lingering echoing words, "kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. "

Is What We Carry Is What We Are?

In a few months my ten-year with my current passport will end and I am forced by decree to obtain a new one, whether I like "it" or not. That raises an irritating issue: the newish U.S. over-the-top nationalistic passport that will be forced upon me. "What’s in the Australian passport? There are wombats, dingoes, koalas, emus, and kangaroos, but they don’t say a word." that's the final line from the Slate.com article on one of my pet peeves THE RIDICULOUS U.S. PASSPORT. Like the author I'm proud to be American and very patriotic in a Thoreauvian way, but cling to my old subtle-paged passport with its few blank remaining pages as a symbol of democracy with discretion, intelligence and compassion - like the majority of the tiny percentage of Americans who actually have a passport and use it. On the other hand, perhaps the new one is more accurate, the passport of paranoia and posturing - and all things I travel to get away from.

And by the way... what ever happened to all those yellow, orange and red alert colors the Bush Administration came up with to remind us of how paranoid we should be traveling beyond our front steps?



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Some Days I Need To Be A Photographer

Everything was going fine - cuppa tea made, bike race from Europe watched, cat fed, emails being answered, even worked on the taxes (even though it's April that's way early for me - I'm chronically late to the IRS... but then again they are chronically late with providing all the education and social services I think my money should support), and then I bumped into a trio of stories that I felt compelled to post to my facebook page - after the third posting it hit me: today I miss being a photographer.

Each of the three photo stories had a common theme - they were stories being told through photographs. Different yet the same. Posted here for those not on facebook (I completely understand.) Each about the "need" tearing at my soul today.

First was - 

Photography in the Docket, as Evidence

By James Estrin

Then came - 

How A Female Photographer Sees Her Afghanistan

by Farzana Wahidy

Finally, 
Photographs: The Battle We Didn't Choose | My Wife's Fight With Breast Cancer
By Angelo Merendino


It wasn't like this when I was younger. I shot a lot, but the need was different. Now it's bloodstream stuff. It's a need flowing through me, begging me to not be satisfied not being me. It's the me trying to take control of the eyes and tell a story. After all these years, it still bewilders me that I can't identify this mood in the beginning - it's the one that starts as a hint, slips into attention disorder about all other things, then gnaws at my bones as if I am being consumed from within. Some days I need to tell a story. Some days I need to be a photographer.

Travelers Never Come Home

Portland, OR -
The photograph that graces the header to this blog is called "Earthrise" by astronaut William Anders during NASA's Apollo 8 mission. That mission was the first to orbit the moon. My late camera-colleague Galen Rowell spoke my sentiments best, "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken."

In my satchel-like wallet I carry a folded copy of "Earthrise", I have always thought of it as a picture of  "home." It has become my most influential photograph ever taken. It travels in there aside my U.S.Passport, a folded copy of the 20 things to remember from All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, and the quote, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." from the speech at the Rio Summit by 13 year old Severne Susuki. Collectively these are my home.

I have spent much of the past 12 months on the road from, Indo-malaysia to East and Central Africa, and more recently in India and Sri Lanka. Some of the time I spent alone, some together with my Great Ape Diaries film partner Skye and most recently guiding a collection of tourists. All surrendered different thoughts on this thing I do, travel, observe, reflect.

Reflecting on recent wandering I am certain it is impossible for travel to occur in groups - only tourism. Groups reinforce living in the past. A constant comparison to what was. Someone said to me to travel "they need to step out of their comfort zone" - agreed, but they cannot while always reinforcing their comfort zone with one another. Stepping out of one's comfort zone one does alone. Or at best with a kindred spirit. Three in a space capsule may be the limit of oneness.

The latter, guiding tourists, is something I am self-limited in doing. It has it's teaching moments, or should I say reminder moments. A reminder that touring is not traveling, despite the desire of the tourist to travel. They never come fully prepared to travel, fully committed to accept never returning. Traveling is what the crew of Apollo 8 did on that first circumnavigation of earth's moon in late December 1968. They left their earthly limits. They accepted on some level the opportunity of never coming home.

When I first started traveling I was still living at my parent's home. As my father backed out of the driveway the first time to take me to the airport my mother stood and wept. She later told me it was because she was afraid I would never come home, to that home I never returned. I accepted the opportunity of never coming home, she knew that. She had seen me run away as a child and knew I had insatiable gypsy-feet. Home was where they took me, were they stood.

True traveling assumes a new tomorrow without a comparison to today, or even more critically, all one's yesterdays. That is where the road forks between travelers and tourists...

"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."

Traveling in turn trusts everywhere is home. But therein lies the danger. Home becomes everywhere, every place, and everybody and thing your neighbor. Eventually there is no "there" only here. A war in Congo is here, in me, it's faces my neighbors. There is no international news, only neighborhood affairs. I step into the kitchen and turn the tap and see refugees filling plastic yellow jugs, a family of women and their children bathing at a broken corner hydrant in Kolkata, a rancher in South Dakota looking desperately skyward for rain, and an elephant raiding a community well in Namibia. We share the same roof.

In the past couple years I have turned to Al Jazeera news when in Portland, my only way of seeing the comings and going of my neighborhood. I am at once homesick and lost. The heartache is daily. I think, it's my home, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." Then I'm reminded, they are only tourists, they think when it's all over they will go home.

Travelers never come home, they close their eyes and see the Earthrise.

Time To Perambulate

No I haven't fallen off the edge of the world - although those ancient mariners may not have been too far off - the world has assumed a few straight edges it seems. And not for the better. Worlds need roundness - nature has few straight-edges; they tend to be inflexible. Back to point, my world has been consumed with a new project - Great Ape Diaries - which does and doesn't fit here. It certainly is full of perambulations - just not here.

Like most things in life I plunge in 100% or flop about on the edge like a fish on the shore. I'm at a point in life where flopping doesn't suit me physically or, most importantly, mentally. Meaning is the water in which this fish needs to swim.

I'm coming back here because Great Ape Diaries has thrust me back into the world - traveling and thinking - and all those impressions don't fit quietly into a GAD box. They are most at home perambulating on a blank slate of no pre-intentions.

On Our Better Nature...

"Sherwin Nuland, the clinical professor of surgery at Yale who wrote How We Die, writes in The Art of Aging, "Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do otherwise."