As a discipline, Photojournalism purports to be concerned with a social justice agenda, yet often it simply perpetuates stereotypes, presenting people and issues as singularly dimensional.

Featuring Angela Blakely (Australia), Shahidul Alam (Bangladesh) and Brenda Ann Kenneally (USA), the event will be hosted from Sydney by David Lloyd of the CDP. The event is part of the Sydney Head On Photo Festival.

The 3 hour event will be held from 00:00 to 03:00 GMT.

• Sydney: 10:00am – 1:00pm
• Bangkok: 7:00am -10:00am
• Dhaka: 6:00am – 9:00am
• London: 1:00am – 4:00am
• New York 8:00pm-11:00pm (Saturday May 8 )
• Los Angeles: 5:00pm-8:00pm (Saturday May 8 )

For registration information (it’s free), visit the CDP’s online symposium page.

Introducing Pulp, the Pineapple Press Club’s first e-magazine effort.

The Pineapples are a loose and dangerous bunch of photojournalists with vague ties to Queensland, Australia (for the purpose of transparency, I am a Pineapple.). The practice of photojournalism (I’ll make Skinner mad here and lump photojournalism, documentary photography and social documentary photography in the same category), is not exclusive to those internationally celebrated practitioners from Sydney (oooh) and Melbourne (aaah), though they’d lead you to believe so. Not so long ago, in those big, smokey metropolises, the photojournalists had to start their own collectives to be seen, to be exhibited, and to be known.
Not to be outdone, the photojournalists of Queensland (the sunshine state), have banded together, loosely, to form the Pineapple Press Club. The PPC’s agenda is less about world domination (though that could be coming), and more about seeking to encourage the general public to engage with photojournalism via grass roots methods – hosted slide nights and exhibitions in community venues. And, of course, e-publishing:

To find out how you can get involved with the Pineapple Press Club, click here.
(Shameless self-promotion here, but I figure, what the heck. It’s my blog. Deal with it.)

It takes our taxi driver a few passes up and down 3 Thang 2 Street in Cholon, the Chinese district, weaving around buzzing motor scooters, until he gets his bearings and eventually turns – or rather, careens – left onto Le Dai Hanh Street, where the Phu Tho Race Track, Viet Nam’s only horse racing track, is situated. He pulls up to the fading jade-coloured gates and we step out from the cool air-conditioned interior of the Camry and into the humid, hot buzz of the street. Immediately we are approached by a vendor waiving a racing program at us. But we’re not here to bet on the ponies. Rather, it’s the punters we’ve heard about that have piqued our curiosity.
The Phu Tho track has been a fixture of Saigon gambling culture since 1930. In 1975, after the communists rolled their tanks through the gates of the South Vietnam Presidential Palace, the city was re-named Ho Chi Minh and the race track was closed down (along with other gambling establishments). In 1989, the government relaxed its moral position on gambling as it began to focus on economic development.
Nowadays the ponies, ridden by tiny teenage jockeys in rubber boots and exchangeable bibs, draw a crowd of several thousand on weekend afternoons.

Moving barely past a trot, the ponies and their riders are more of a spectacle than a sport – but try telling that to the dedicated punters who show up weekly, their emotions displayed operatically as their chosen pony wins, places or loses.

Oblivious to anything but the possibility of a big win, the punters at Phu Tho ebb and flow from track to betting window until all the ponies have run their races.

Sexual Warfare: Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is an incredibly moving and engaging multimedia story from Kate Geraghty, a photojournalist with the Sydney Morning Herald. Kate has rightly won the UN Media Award for best photojournalism last night in Melbourne.
Kudos to Kate.

For a decade I have been documenting fishermen around the world as a personal project. As the ocean’s fish stocks continue to be depleted by over-fishing, I want to document those whose lives and cultures depend on fishing, and how they are dealing with the impact that it has on their local economies and way of life.

Minjerribah Fishermen is a story about a day in the life of the fishermen on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke) Island, state of Queensland, Australia.The fishermen are mostly members of the Gurenpul clan, who historically are fishermen and oysterers of the large sand island. The fishing season runs from mid-April until late August. In the past, fishermen would swim out into the waves, dragging nets out around schools of fish – a treacherous job as there are always bigger fish (such as sharks) hunting the smaller ones – as time and technology progressed, they eventually moved to rowboats and now, jet-boats in the effort to haul in the elusive catch.

Once the boats corral the fish in the nets, tractors move in a zig-zag pattern to haul in the live bounty. The usual catch is flathead, though mackerel and today’s catch, Taylor, are also harvested. The men have special permission from the government to fish the surf off of The Point, on the north-eastern tip of the island.

Those who continue to eulogize the craft of documentary photography be warned – the newly-established Centre for Documentary Practice is bent on making you eat dirt.

Based in Australia at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, the CDP has some broad and bold plans – not the least of which is to host the world’s first online journalism and documentary practice conference, October 15. The centre acts to bridge the often-chasm-like gap between those who work in the field and those who work through institutions, writing in its mission statement that it seeks to, “promote a community of practitioners within the professional and academic worlds.”
Speakers at the October 15th online conference include: Paul Fusco, Ed Kashi, Jodi Bieber, Marcus Bleasdale, Shahidul Alam, Gary Knight, Robin Hammond, Adam Ferguson, Travis Beard, Michael Coyne, Masaru Goto, Jack Picone and Megan Lewis.
The CDP has published a multi-time-zone schedule so participants can pick up a session in their part of the world. You must register to be a part of this historic conference.
Register HERE.

I am currently exploring public space and how people react towards each other while in it. My project asks, is this natural behavior, or are people modifying their behavior – do they know they’re being watched?

Having photographed the oppressive panelaks of Bratislava and Prague, I find similarities in modern Western cities. Similar to Bentham’s Panopticon, the CBD of Brisbane is replete with CCTV cameras, recording – or not recording, intending to deter crime but nevertheless infusing a sense of constant surveillance onto the pedestrians walking across their angles of view.

Intersections is where people meet, where the spaces between people dissolve and their shadows touch, and where the presence of CCTV cameras suggest constant surveillance.