Preston Gannaway has taken over the reigns of “Common Ground.”  Please go check it out! For more on Preston visit her site prestongannaway.com

Common Ground is a visual commentary on life in our community. Every 12 weeks a new Virginian-Pilot photographer will begin his or her series of photographs based on a topic of their choosing.

The current series, Greetings from Ocean View is a photo column aimed at exploring life in “OV,” a Norfolk neighborhood full of pride yet seemingly always teetering on the edge of change. Photojournalist Preston Gannaway hopes to tell some of the stories that make this community so unique.

Preston Gannaway

via Common Ground | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com.

Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.

via Photojournalism – Photography, Video and Visual Journalism Archives – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com.

I missed this one, check out the LA Times and their Street Scenes project.

Southern California is a vast land of neighborhoods. Drive Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, for example, and you’ll encounter industrial blocks, the garment district, Koreatown, West L.A. bungalows and the burgeoning entertainment district at the eastern end of Santa Monica. But most of us don’t spend time driving from neighborhood to neighborhood–so L.A. Times photographers have done it for us, highlighting a variety of neighborhoods, ranging from the Fairfax District to Newport Harbor.

In his wrap up of Visa pour l’Image, posted on the PDNPulse blog, Daryl Lang writes a segment he titled “Photographers vs. the world” where he is critical about a direction some photojournalism is being taken. A place where obscurity and peer recognition is deemed more important than the work connecting with a mass audience.

“I worry that he may be leading photographers down a dangerous road, toward a place where photojournalism is isolated as a specialty product, divorced from the popular media. What good is this work if nobody sees it except people who already get the message?”

Lang’s words really struck a cord in me. I think he has a valid point and criticism that not only touches the photographers in the big leagues but also those working their hearts out at small newspapers.

I hope that there continues to be a place in this world where the vision of a photojournalist can coexist with work that is appealing to a mass audience. I think both are important.

It is vision, I believe, that pushes photographers to new places and that a more artistic aesthetic can move a picture past the news of the moment. But if the audience doesn’t get it, then it fails to communicate.

I think this is a topic a lot of photojournalists should really be thinking about.

MediaStorm launched today Scott Strazzante’s Comon Ground project.

On July 2, 2002, Jean and Harlow Cagwin watched as their home — the last remnant of their 118-acre cattle farm in Lockport, Illinois — was torn down clearing the way for a new housing development. Several years later, Ed and Amanda Grabenhofer and their four children moved into the new Willow Walk subdivision, their house just yards from where the Cagwin’s home once stood.

Common Ground introduces us to the lives touched by this land, as photographer Scott Strazzante takes us on a visual journey exploring the differences and similarities of these two families while simultaneously asking us to look at what is common among us all.

Flickring Out – What will become of photojournalism in an age of bytes and amateurs? From the Columbia Journalism Review

Silas Crews has taken the initiative to create Carnival of Photojournalism. It’s sort of like a round up of posts by photojournalists who blog.  He explains it better in his post.

  Carnivals are like an online periodical to which bloggers submit past entries and an organizer collects the links to these submissions, edits, annotates if needed and publishes the resulting round-up on a blog in regular intervals.

Please check it out and if you blog consider lending your talents!

From Democracy Now! web site:

War Photographer Chris Hondros Witnesses U.S. Shooting of Iraqi Parents in Car With Six Children
We speak with Pulitzer Prize-nominated photojournalist Chris Hondros. He is best known for graphic photographs he took in the northwestern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 when U.S. troops opened fire on a family of eight approaching a checkpoint in a car. Both parents were killed while the six children in the backseat looked on.

They interview Hondros at the end of their program. An interesting, albeit brief, segment.

Opened up my New York Times today and was greeted to an article/art review about James Nachtwey’s gallery show “The Sacrifice.”

If this were a perfect world, everybody would see the photographer James Nachtwey’s astonishing shows at the United Nations and at 401 Projects in the West Village.

Sadly, as Mr. Nachtwey knows, this isn’t a perfect world, a point he brings home in the work shown here. “Inferno,” the title of a 1999 book of the photographs he shot in Kosovo, Rwanda and other hellholes, aptly describes the horror in these two exhibitions.

Check out Mark Hancock’s two part (A & B) interview with CPOY winner Matt Eich.