WATCHING
MediaStorm presents Rape of a Nation, Marcus Bleasdale's photos from the D.R.C.
Growing Up Online Is the Internet changing the experience of childhood? Frontline looks at the way kids are spending their time online..
READING
Pirates of Sundance: Columbia Law prof Tim Wu recommends indie filmmakers look to BitTorrent for distribution. Via Slate.com
Rabbi "live-blogs" the PBS documentary The Jewish Americans on his blog The Unorthodox Rabbi (from PBS Engage)
AJ Schnack reflects on some of the music documentaries he saw at Sundance, including Patti Smith: Dream of Life.
Freelance photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair has won the 2007 UNICEF photo of the year award for her striking portrait of a 40-year-man and his 11-year-old bride in Afghanistan.
Portrait of soon to be wed Faiz Mohammed, 40, and Ghulam Haider, 11, at her home in a rural village of Damarda in Ghor province © Stephanie Sinclair
Sinclair was featured prominently in the 2004 P.O.V. documentary, War Feels Like War, which documented the lives of reporters and photographers who circumvented military media control to get access to the real Iraq War. We interviewed Sinclair on the P.O.V. website later that year to find out more about her work.
The Film Independent's 2008 Spirit Award nominees were announced on Tuesday, and quite a few of the docs (in both the Best Documentary category and the Truer Than Fiction category) are already available on DVD. Here's your chance to check out some of the nominated films well before the winners are announced on February 23, 2008.
ON DVD
from Manufactured Landscapes
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is the subject of Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes, nominated for a Spirit Award in the Best Documentary category. Burtynsky's work is comprised of panoramic, beautiful shots of massive construction sites, factories, litter piles and other sites' industrial devastation. Salon.com says that although the film "may tell you more about how the 21st century world actually works than you really want to know... it's a heartbreaking, beautiful, awful and awesome film." Newsday recommends seeing the film in a theater because "watching it on DVD would be like listening to Mahler on a cell phone," but warns that the film "doesn't go very far beneath the surface, or ask many provocative questions." (Perhaps Manufactured Landscapes might be a good disc to bring to your friend with the 62-inch flatscreen TV's house this holiday season.)
For this week's media guide, we take a look at documentary photography. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then shouldn't powerful, affecting photographs be able to change the world?
Here's are some places to start browsing for photographs which are both moving and provocative. Some of these photos showcase situations in the news, and others shed light on tragedies around the world that receive little coverage.
California Wildfires: Photo Essays
Wally Skalij for the L.A. Times
As the wildfires rage on in California, newspapers have been full of photographs that document the destruction. For glimpses of the disaster, check out the L.A. Times' photo galleries (scroll down the page and ook for the galleries on the right side), the New York Times' slideshow and the Washington Post's photographs.
More documentary photography after the jump...
