The year 2008 in photographs

At the moment I’m sitting on the couch in the living room of my parents, listen to several famous opera tracks on Last.fm and going thru the newest entries of the photo blog “The Big Picture”.

The entries of this blog are posted by Alan Taylor who is a developer for the Boston Globe’s website. Publications like Life Magazine, National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com’s Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm’s MediaStorm inspires him.

The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery, with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.

For me 2008 was an eventful year and it is amazing to see on one of my favorite photo blogs a good portion of what life has been like over the past twelve months.  You can find the multi-entry story via the following links. I’m sure you will like it as I do.

• Part 1 of 3
• Part 2 of 3
• Part 3 of 3

The voice of the voiceless

Winston Churchill once said, “Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” My understanding is that a good photography can tell the history of an entire country or a decade.

Today, I saw James Nachtwey’s speak which he did during accepting his 2007 TED prize. The TED prize is unlike any other award, because beside a prize of $100.000 each, every winner are granted a wish—a wish to change the world. James talked about his decades as war photographer and presented a slideshow of his photos, which he already published in his book Inferno. His photos telling stories like a man who had just been liberated from a Hutu death camp, which was badly scarred by machetes or a skeletal man, crawling past a dilapidated hut.

When I first looked at Inferno it was hard to believe what I was looking at. I was thinking myself how many suffer a heart or soul can take until it gets badly damaged. It’s eye opening. I’m sure that if you have the courage to look at his photos then you have the courage to say the mankind learned basically nothing from history. Be warned, the photos are very powerful!

But why is it needful to have photojournalists like James Nachtwey? I think as long we have mighty people who are thinking that an unaccomplished mission is accomplished or didn’t realized the genocide in Rwanda because they thought it was just a civil war (the sad true was that in 100 days approximately 800,000 people were killed) we need remarkable people like him. His photos catch the world’s attention and can truly drive action and change. He can be the voice of people, which lost their voice—the voice of the voiceless.