Pulitzer Prices

This year’s Pulitzer Prices have been given out in the U.S. The New York Times swept five, including the price for photojournalism. Damon Winter’s A Vision of History is, of course, about the Obama election. It’s a good series, although some of the crowd photos are not that interesting. This I kinda like:

Here’s who I’d want to be

I’ve been working on my part-time job (photo editor at Ydin magazine) and ran into Laura Junka. Her career is something I’d really want for myself: she has managed to succesfully combine academic studies in international politics, journalism and photojournalism. So at the moment she is finishing her dissertation, writing, and photographing in the Middle East. (And she is one year younger than I am. Grrrr…)

World Press Photo 2008

The jury has made its decision; the best press photo of the year is Anthony Suau’s black and white photograph about a police officer in an American home after the eviction of its inhabitants.

Without seeing the other contestants, I have to say I like this choice. The image is strong and definitely important; the current economic crisis is playing havoc with normal lives on both sides of the Atlantic.

What this image does need is a caption or a story to accompagny it. Otherwise you could end up thinking that it is about a drug bust, or an antiterroristic operation, or whatever. I don’t think that the necessity of the caption makes the image any weaker, though – but then, I have always been for the cooperation of text and image. The picture does not need to tell the whole story in itself. How could it?

Vught

I visited an old concentration camp in Vught in October. The reason for my visit was research, mostly; we were working on “war” in Photo Reportage and I wanted to know more about the Dutch experience. Of which I did not know much; Anne Frank, mostly, and some old photos from the German occupation time, but that’s it.

It was hard to get to Vught. It was raining and the place is not easily reachable by public transportation. Sort of makes sense, one does not expect to find a concentration camp in a city center. Nowadays there is a prison next to the old camp.

The old guys who took care of the camp explained many things to me, mostly in very fast Dutch which I could not follow very well. Seems the camp also had a lot of kids living in there. There was a memorial and also a wall where kids these days leave their greetings.

The place was mostly deserted. I walked around, read the exhibition materials and made some photos. Strangely Vught had no large effect on me; it was not as scary or desolate as Terezin was (I visited Terezin a few years ago when I was in Prague and got almost physically ill). Maybe it was because many of the objects were new and as such somehow fake. I understand why they had rebuilt the barrack bunk beds and the tables, but still.

There were people coming out of the prison when I left. Seemed to be women and kids, I guess they were visiting their family members. I wonder how weird it feels to sit in a prison which is basically an old concentration camp.