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It's a rare treat to get the monthly envelope of tearsheets and see a magazine using your absolute favorite image from the shoot as the lead. I spent a day last month with Maxime Verhagen, whose position was described to me as "the Condoleezza Rice of the Netherlands." Despite the typical stage-managing that follows any politician being covered by the media, I felt like the photos showed a bit of the inner workings of the Dutch government. It's not often that I get these more pure photojournalistic assignments and this one was particularly enjoyable given the range of photo opportunities and the crash course I received in European perceptions of the American government from the writer (which were not dissimilar to some of the issues John Kifner touched on in the excellent first issue of Dispatches).

Edward Lovern for Stern Magazine

A story I worked on last October was just published last week in Stern, a German news magazine. I've worked on dozens of stories since then, but this one held a tragic resonance and I still think about the short time I spent with this grieving father who lost his 15 year old son to MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

I remember sitting in the noisy country restaurant as we ate fried catfish and the reporter asked questions. On the table was a large photo frame that Ed brought with him, with maybe twenty photographs of Ed's son, Jon. Jon was a normal healthy kid who liked playing basketball with the children at an orphanage nearby where Ed spent his childhood. Within a week of feeling sick, like he had caught the flu, Jon was lying in a hospital bed while doctors told Ed and his wife, "There's nothing else we can do."



On one level, this was a public health story, as it was clear that doctors had missed the diagnosis from the beginning. But the core of the story was about this family who had lost their only child. I remember Ed's eyes welling up as he traced his fingers over the photos of Jon and I listened, holding my breath as I shot a few frames.

I remember thinking that for whatever brief satisfaction there might be from telling Jon's story and letting a broader audience know about him, that moment was harshly tempered by the deep loss I saw in Ed's eyes, and felt again when I looked through these photos. It was the last image I saw that sticks with me most, of Ed walking away from us after politely shaking my hand and thanking us for our time. He carried the large photo frame securely under his arm as he walked through the dark parking lot in a light rain, as street lamps cast gleaming white reflections in the growing puddles of water.

People peer through a construction fence at a new "model hutong" constructed in advance of the Beijing Olympics

I just got back from a week in Beijing, documenting the city's preparation for the Summer Olympics. It's my third trip to China and my first time in the capital city. I came to the story with some mixed feelings about the direction of China's development. It's clear that the economic growth of the last ten years has made countless people's lives better throughout the country. Construction jobs have allowed for migrant workers to come to these urban areas and support whole families with the work they do building Beijing's skyscrapers and Olympics venues.

At the same time, I've seen firsthand the effects of unregulated environmental pollution that threaten to undercut the country's progress and that affect a large portion of the population on a regular basis. I remember one village I visited in a rural part of the Henan Province where they could no longer even come into contact with the river that ran through their village, as it would cause blisters on their skin, all due to a fertilizer company that dumped its production byproducts directly into the water.

How this all will shake out in the future is anyone's guess. It's clearly not in the best interest of many people for China to have a bad Olympics, but real human rights and environmental issues remain unaddressed and I'm often left with the feeling that China cares more about the appearance of cleaning up the environment and giving concessions to human rights than the actuality of it. With all that said, China remains an endlessly fascinating and dynamic subject that I hope to photograph for many years to come.

In prepping my images for my new Photoshelter archive, I came across images from two shoots I did with Commander Charles Swift from 2006 and 2007. Swift represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden's driver, in a case against the United States (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld). He won the case, but was forced out of the Navy because of it.

It's rare to get two opportunities to photograph someone like this and I was going over the submitted images from each shoot and found the differences interesting.

Shoot #1




Shoot #2




I was also reminded of Joe McNally's great advice to do your reshoot now, i.e. shoot the heck out of the assignment, try different things, fail occasionally and leave feeling creatively spent.

As for me, the first and the third picture seem to capture Commander Swift best as I saw him.

A few weeks ago, I got an email asking about possibly shooting a job in Australia. After a flurry of emails back and forth, I got the thumbs up and headed out there for a fun week traveling through Sydney and Melbourne and enjoying the sights. I got back in early Monday morning and have just started going through some of my photos.

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More in the archive here.

Now that the book is up on Amazon, I can proudly share a scan of it I lifted from the publisher's site. Back in October, I received a call about shooting a book cover. I soon learned it was for David Iglesias, one of the Attorney Generals fired by the Bush Administration for "performance-related issues." I couldn't help but think of another recent photo subject who unwillingly was made to stand up to the Bush Administration and suffered the consequences of doing so.

I arrived at our shooting location with a full kit of gear, knocked on Mr. Iglesias's door and was presented with our shooting location:


Taking a look around, I was reminded of Arnold Newman's great quote, "Good photography is 1% inspiration and 99% moving furniture." A rearrangement of the hotel room ensued as we cleared out a space and set up the backdrop while Mr. Iglesias was prepped by the makeup artist.

Shoots like these don't always encourage a tremendous amount of creativity (we were working from a book cover template that the publisher had sent us), but the setting presented its own set of challenges and I was glad to come away with a number of shots both the publisher and I liked.

It was a cold day in November when I arrived at the Union Temple Baptist Church for Tim Spicer's funeral. I was working with reporter Matt Cooper whose story about Tim can be read here. The family's openness and kindness in allowing me to photograph this aftermath of a senseless murder was humbling and I thought the least I could do was to work as hard as possible in bringing away something meaningful from the service.

The saddest part of the ceremony was watching Tim's son who was sitting right up in front of his father's casket. He would get up off his mother's lap and walk back and forth in the front of the church as speaker after speaker shared stories of Tim's kindness, his warmth and his bright future. It was only after I was editing the photos that I saw he was wearing a t-shirt that read "I Miss You Daddy."

after the event

Just a quick check-in from a two day shoot that brought me to NYC, Boston and now New Hampshire. Outside my hotel window my rental car is slowly being covered by a steady snowfall and a Sopranos rerun is on mute on the television. The access in New Hampshire hasn't been great, but it's hard not to be optimistic about this strange, plodding electoral process when you drive up to a middle school on a Wednesday night and see a line of people one hundred yards long waiting in the cold for a chance to see a candidate.

Clinton from afar

The disconnect between what the advance people for a presidential campaign think makes a good photo and the reality of what makes a good photo was on full display last night during a Clinton campaign stop in DC. After being escorted to the stage for 105 seconds (according to my image date stamps) of close access, we were brought to a 2nd floor spot approximately 50 yards from the stage, a position that demanded at least a 600mm lens to get any kind of close shot. After some discussion with the press person, it was clear this night was only going to get worse, so I hung back a bit as the rest of the press was escorted away and made my way downstairs.

At this point it might be more exciting to list my repertoire of stealth moves I used to get near the stage, but in reality it was lots of back tracking as I walked behind some curtains, through the kitchen that had been set up to prepare food and out into the glare of the stage lights as I found myself a few steps from Terry McAuliffe who was standing on the side of the stage.



I moved up a little bit more until I got that look from the Secret Service agent that meant going any further would result in a violent and efficient removal of myself from the area.



The sidelight worked well against the dark backdrop and I hung close as Senator Clinton wrapped up her speech and I waited for the inevitable breakdown of order that always concludes these events and would hopefully allow me to get closer.



In the end, negotiating fair access with the press people would have benefited them, as the photos of their candidate would have been better and benefited me in that I wouldn't have had to jump through so many hoops in order to get anything solid from the night.

I think there's a few factors at work here that have made these situations more difficult recently. First, you have people showing up with a point and shoot digital camera mounted on a monopod and getting self-righteous about freedom of press until they're allowed to stand with the rest of the press photographers. I'm not against free and open media access, but I am against people acting unprofessionally, casting a negative light on the whole profession and thereby making it harder for professionals to do their jobs. This in turn makes the campaign's press people wary of the photographers, lumping us all into this same unruly and combative group and results in the sort of penned-in situation that happened here.

I'm not sure there's an easy solution here without getting into some sticky issues about what constitutes legitimate press, but as the campaign season reaches a fever pitch, this feels like a situation that's going to get worse. The upside to all of this is that these restrictions will help separate the professionals whose ability to make great images in difficult situations will continue to be a valued skill.

Morning Patrol at a new resort in Runaway Bay, Jamaica

It's been one of those weeks that's left me exhausted, but thankful again for the places photography has taken me. On Wednesday, I turned a cramped hotel room into a makeshift studio to shoot the cover for a book coming out in May (more on this next Spring). Thursday had me mixing with the paparazzi while covering an event for National Geographic with Ashley Judd. On Friday morning, I flew down to Jamaica and spent the weekend shooting a job on the beautiful northern coast. I arrived back in DC late on Sunday and Monday morning I was up early getting my gear together to cover a WWII veteran's inurnment for a client.

Despite going to college in DC and living here for the last two years, I've never visited Arlington National Cemetery before. On Monday morning, the sky was a hazy blue and it felt like one of the last great Fall days before DC's rainy, cold winter. The leaves were just beginning to fall and scatter, bringing a little bit of disorder to the military-straight headstones that formed perfect rows over rolling hills of closely mowed grass.

The funeral ceremony was brief, but never felt rushed, and after the rifle salute, a lone bugler played Taps. The last note stayed in the air for just a second longer after he finished, echoing across the quiet ground.

I asked Seth Goldman to throw the bottle in the air five times before one came out right. Not only was he willing to do it, he caught every single one.

Recently, I was sent to Detroit for the day to supposedly photograph a prisoner who had been given a life sentence without parole when she was 15. The night before I left, I got a call that the writer wouldn't be accompanying me, and then another call that I wouldn't be allowed inside the prison. So my prisoner portrait turned into me standing out in the 95 degree heat on a highway median outside of Detroit photographing barbed wire fences and guards giving me dirty looks.

Right next to the prison yard was this lush strip of dense forest that almost reached the fence, and I brought out the Holga to take some pictures of this space between fence and forest.