Wanted to alert everyone to this screening and talk by artist Lynne Sachs:
I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER is a cinematic presentation and talk exploring my decade-long artistic rather than physical immersion in war. From Vietnam to Bosnia to WWII Occupied Rome to the Middle East today, my experimental documentary films push the borders between genres, discourses, radicalized identities, psychic states and nations through the intertwining of abstract and reality based imagery. In my talk, I will introduce precise visual strategies I have discovered in working with these fraught and divisive themes. Often opting for a painterly rather than a photographic articulation of conflict, I struggle with each new project to find a precise language of images and sounds with which to discuss these volatile moments in history, exposing what I see as the limits of a conventional, documentary representation of both the past and the present. Infusions of colored “brush strokes

The following words and photographs are from Zoriah:     During my work documenting the AIDS crisis in Asia, I had the opportunity to meet some truly incredible human beings, some of whom are still alive, most though have already died in the short period of time since the completion of this project. From the groups of urban prostitutes living and working in the slums of Phnom Penh Cambodia, teaching each other safety, survival and financial planning while setting up clinics on the average aid agencies paperclip budget, to the quiet suffering of mothers who have unknowingly passed on a disease to their children via their fathers indiscretion, these stories and these faces linger in my mind.     While aid organizations give total infection rates of about one percent, caregivers, hospice staff and the people on the ground speak of certain regions reaching up to twenty five percent HIV infection rates. With a new heroin epidemic hitting urban slums and a dramatic increase in both hetero and homosexual sex tourism, the problem is expected to reach epic proportions over the next few years.        Numbers and statistics are just that, nothing more than markings on paper or words on a news program, the human side however is truly disturbing. Patients wait to die alone, coated in flies and nursed by family members. Understaffed hospitals are in such disrepair that they have been deemed biohazard and HAZMAT threats and workers refuse to even enter the premises, much less make necessary repairs and provide care to patients.     In several well known hospitals I found myself literally wading through ankle deep piles of disposed needles, catheter bags and soiled linens, as patents navigated hallways with potholes that dropped through to the floors below. The human suffering is quite unreal and the faces of teenage girls, mothers, fathers and small babies wasting away in discomfort still appear vivid in my mind.     This photo story is dedicated to my new friends who sit quietly and wait to die, those who choose not to sit quietly but fight for the lives and the health of their friends, family, and complete strangers. This photo story should also serve as an attack on the organizations, governments, corporations and pharmaceutical giants who quite simply are doing too little.

Technorati Tags: aids, cambodia, death, illness, prostitution, sex workers, zoriah

From Bill Putnam: On the surface, these two photos aren't anything special or probably newsworthy. They are photos of a sectarian massacre though. Insurgents stopped two busses carrying employees home from work at the Bayji Oil Refinery thermal plant the afternoon of March 31. They pulled nine men off -- six Shia and three Sunnis -- and shot them. All of the Shia and two Sunni died; one Sunni man lived and at last word is still in hospital. The circumstances behind this are obviously a little murky. Penetrating that murkiness is proving a little difficult for the 1st of the 187th Infantry. An official from the Iraqi Ministry of Oil arrived at the refinery the afternoon these photos were made. His drive up from Baghdad was faster than his investigation. No sooner than he arrived at the scene did he surmise it was the "work of insurgents" and concluded it. The next day 17 Shia families started an exodus out of Bayji that continues today. Staff Sgt. Jeremy Shields, 1st Lt. Dave Elliott and Alex the Terp, look at the scene April 2, 2006. A bullet casing from an AK-47 the insurgents used to execute the men. This third photo isn't related directly anyway to the massacre photos. Someone parked a car bomb on Highway 1, the country's main north-south highway which also runs through Bayji. The target was an Iraqi army Security Infrastructure Battalion convoy. The bomb wasn't the suicide version (no body parts found in the debris field) and the SIB didn't take any casualties.

Technorati Tags: iraq, iraq army, military, massacre

Tues 14th March - I was fortunate to be introduced to Betty Bigombe, the Museveni/LRA Peace Talks Mediator, yesterday. She told me that she was sad that the talks were not proving to be successful, but that she will remain in contact with the rebels as long as there is hope. I travelled from Gulu to Lira in the evening, just after nightfall. Not the wisest of moves, especially considering that now the rains have started, the vegetation is growing, which always initiates renewed rebel attacks. There have been a number of attacks in the last couple of weeks, always following the same pattern - Vehicle shot at until it stops; driver killed instantly; others robbed of shoes, clothes and possession and then shot. Driving these roads at night requires nerves of steel and a heavy foot on the accelerator.

Wed 15th March - Left Lira this morning after a flying visit to the Rachele Rehabilitation Centre, set up three years ago by Els De Temmerman, a Belgian Journalist.

From Timothy Floyd: I had the privilege of serving during the initial phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom as an orthopedic surgeon in U. S. Army's 934th Forward Surgical Team. We traveled at the front with various brigades treating, not only wounded coalition forces, but Iraqi civilians, soldiers, Republican and Special Republican Guard, as well as Fedayeen terrorists. Initially, we treated the wounded in our canvas surgical tent. As the war progressed, we made unescorted humanitarian missions to homes, villages, hospitals, and camps, including a "black mission" to treat wounded Iranian MEK soldiers. My photographs tell the story of what I saw and felt, and the uncommon empathy, courage and humanity I witnessed. My experience was much different that what is usually portrayed in the American media, but is consistent with most accounts of men and women who have been to Iraq or who are there now. The Iraqi people are just like anyone else worldwide; most of them only want a peaceful life and the freedom to work, study, play and raise a family. (More of Dr. Floyd's photographs can be found here.)

CPT. Bryan Moore attends a post-op wounded Iraqi woman.

A boy wounded near Baghdad by a grenade his brother set off.

CPT Charlotte Lee attends a wounded Iraqi Republican Guard soldier.

An Iraqi man brings a sick child to an American Army doctor near Balad

Zuma Press photographer Bill Putnam has filed new photos in his gallery from Operation Swarmer, a combined US/Iraqi military sweep in the Sunni-dominated areas north of Baghdad. Recent news stories can be found here, here and here. From Putnam: "The operation -- billed as the largest air assault since the March 2003 invasion -- lifted 1,500 Americans and Iraqi soldiers in to extremes of barren desert and lush farm lands. Whatever the terrain, they looked for weapons caches and insurgents. Sometimes, they found them. More often than not, they didn't. While this operation was a sign of the (almost glacially) slow growth of the Iraqi army, it was also a sign the insurgency is still active and will take some time to crack."

Technorati Tags: iraq, iraq army, putnam, swarmer

The following is an update on the situation in Sudan with words and photograph provided by Dan Morrison, a freelance journalist currently in the region. His Sudan reports can also be found here, here and here:

The danger and want in Darfur cannot be both an emergency and a chronic condition, and yet it now has the attributes of both. Two years after ethnic cleansing of the region's non-Arab tribes reached its height, more than two million people continue to live in camps as captive dependents of the world humanitarian community, cut off from their homes and livelihoods. Residents I interviewed at camps in South Darfur and West Darfur states were adamant that they could not and would not return to their homes in an atmosphere of continuing attacks by Arab militias. ``When they kill the Janjaweed, then we can go back,'' was a common statement. Another deterrent placed a distant second to the memory and fear of the government-backed marauders - opportunity. Widows described their pleasure at sending their children, including their daughters, to UNICEF-funded schools inside the camps. It will be a long time indeed before international community and its ``partners'' in the government of Sudan are able to replicate the range of health and educational boons that exist inside many of Darfur's displaced-person camps. It was the absence of such services that helped push the region into civil war. For those who continue to live in the countryside, outside the sometimes- protected perimeters of the camps, conditions are growing less safe and international aid more scarce. Increasing banditry, fighting between rebels and government troops, and harassment by state security services have all reduced the flow of aid to rural areas. All eyes were on January 2007, when diplomats and aid offiicals assumed a UN force would take over from the underfunded and underequipped African Union force. Sudanese diplomacy and bruised egos at the higher levels of the African Union secretariat have combined to delay that by at least six months. Peace talks in Nigeria have withstood the combined arbitrage and hectoring of the UN, AU, EU, US and UK secure in their dysfunction. Most dangerous is a projected gap in food aid that could leave 2.8 million people without food in Darfur over the coming months. ``It's big and it's frightening,'' says Carlos Veloso, the World Food Program's emergency coordinator for Darfur.

Technorati Tags: abuse, african union force, darfur, ethnic cleansing, janjaweed, morrison, genocide, sudan, world food program