Global Lens Reflections on life, the universe, and everything
Americas
A Year in Pictures – 2023
I don’t have to go far to make a photograph. This past year’s images include many captured in my own back yard, from a Red-shouldered hawk to a strolling millipede, from a Pacific tree frog to a pair of young racoons. Working at home I captured a rather tired-looking longhorn bee, a shy milkweed bug, […]
A Year in Pictures – 2021
When I got my first coronavirus vaccine shot almost a year ago, I had high hopes that 2021 would prove different than its predecessor. I started to make plans for trips abroad. And then came shot number two, and I felt ready to take on the world. Sadly, the world wasn’t as fortunate as me. […]
A year in pictures – 2020
2020 started off strangely for me, and then it only grew more weird. In January, I had surgery to swap out an old hip joint for a modern titanium one. That meant two or three months of rehab, and then I had plans to hit the road, starting with a trip to South Sudan. Beyond […]
A year in images – 2019
In her simple home in a Manila slum, 6-year old Clarisa Jugadora touches a photo of her grandparents, who were taken away by police during a assault on a poor community. Their bodies were found the next day. They were killed as part of the Philippines government’s so-called “war on drugs.” The girl believes her […]
Winnowing
Today is International Winnowing Day. Well, not really. I just made that up. But it could be, given how winnowing is such a widespread chore around the world. It is quintessential women’s work in that it’s common, difficult, and underappreciated. I just worked with a client who needed a winnowing image, and when I searched […]
2017 – A year in Pictures
A real blog is supposed to have regular installments, but the last year was so busy that all I could do was try to keep up with my day job, which is feeding images and words to demanding editors around the globe. They are fortunately a forgiving lot, otherwise they would have sent me packing […]
Nevertheless, she persisted
When Elizabeth Warren insisted on reading a old letter from Coretta Scott King on the floor of the U.S. Senate on February 7, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ordered her to shut up. In a classic example of mansplaining, McConnell commented on her silencing by saying, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” It instantly […]
2016 – A year in photos
There’s a military phrase that, despite my aversion to military terms, works well for photography. Some places I visit are clearly “target-rich environments,” in that it’s hard not to capture compelling images because the people and their surroundings are so beautiful. I’m not referring to some misplaced sense of the exotic. People aren’t interesting just […]
#TeamRefugees
At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, a unique team of ten refugees participated for the first time in international competition. Their participation clearly showed that bravery knows no borders. To honor their participation and the struggle of refugees and displaced people around the world to survive and prosper, every day during the Olympics I posted an […]
2015 – A year in photos
When Arthur “Weegee” Fellig, a New York City street photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, was asked what the secret was to his images, he responded, “f8 and be there.” In other words, you gotta show up. During this past year, that’s what I tried to do. From the streets of Pasco, Washington, to the […]
Getting comfortable
Photography can be, at its best, an intimate window into people’s lives. Yet intimacy implies proximity. The war photographer Robert Capa understood that. He said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” At a certain point, however, getting close can induce discomfort in the subject of the image, making them change what […]
2014 – A year in photos
In these waning minutes of 2014, I want to offer my thanks to those people around the world who let me share in their lives for a few moments or a few days this year. Because they were willing to tell me their stories, or let me into their homes and neighborhoods to document their […]
Chaco Women
There’s a wonderful image that appeared on social media sites recently. It features the current presidents of Argentina, Chile and Brazil compared, supposedly, with their counterparts from 35 years ago. The smiling women versus the glowering men. These contrasting images say a lot about the journey Latin Americans have traveled since Operation Condor, the United […]
Guatemala: Playful women
Decades ago, I hitchhiked across the United States, and along the way I stopped at the Grand Canyon. Yet while growing up I had seen so many pictures of it that when I first stepped out on the rim and looked down, I thought, “Oh. This looks just like the pictures.” It was cool, certainly, […]
Advent images
Advent is a time of waiting–for the incarnation, for justice, for peace. Over the centuries the church has developed a series of measures to help us develop the practice of waiting, everything from different liturgical colors to candles and wreathes to calendars with little doors to special music (though it’s an unfair fight: for every […]
Jumping Rope
When I was a kid at Lincoln Elementary School in Vancouver, Washington, I preferred the monkey bars during recess and would frequently hang there, often upside down, watching my classmates jump rope while chanting some rhythmic rhyme. In that pre-modern universe it was only girls that jumped rope, of course. Any attempt by a boy […]
In praise of literacy
Following the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, one of the first priorities of the new government was to launch a massive literacy campaign throughout the cities and countryside. Political empowerment of the poor majority demanded the ability to read and write, and volunteers from throughout the world came to help. Run […]
Guatemala genocide trial
Manuela Toj knelt in the mud at the bottom of the pit, the three skeletons before her covered with flower petals and burning candles. I knelt beside her, along with several of her neighbors, all of us gathered around the newly revealed skeletons. A Mayan priest intoned prayers for the dead while a young woman […]
Hugo Chavez
I met Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in January 2000 in the aftermath of horrible mudslides that ravaged the steep hillsides of Caracas and the country’s northern coast. I covered the response to the disaster, and spent part of my time in a steep ravine where the Catuche River flows into the center of the capital. Over […]
Colombian soldier
I’ve often said that the hardest part of photography is getting to the right place at the right time. Take a trip I made to Colombia in 2000, for example. I was interested in writing about the U’wa indigenous people. Tired of having their tribal land ravaged by foreign oil corporations, they had threatened a […]
Morales’ morning
Most of the time I interview people who are powerless: victims of oppression, refugees and street children, sex workers and migrants. I do that intentionally, as their perspective is usually given short shrift in much of the media. Too many officials and wealthy people get quoted. But every once in a while I seek out […]
Brazil: Remembering Dorothy
Antonia Silva Lima lives in a place called Hope. She came to the Amazon rainforest more than two decades ago, like hundreds of thousands of other migrants fleeing from poverty in other parts of Brazil. The settlers moved deep into the forest and cut down the trees to grow subsistence crops, only to be chased […]
Advent waiting
Advent is a time when Christians practice the discipline of waiting. For many people in the world, however, waiting is more ordinary, the stuff of every day and not just special days. Waiting shapes who they are and how they see the world. For many who wait, impatience simply isn’t an option, perhaps because it’s […]
Honduras: A death in the Aguan Valley
We found Carlos Martinez’ body lying in several inches of water in a far corner of the La Lempira palm oil cooperative that he and other peasants had seized from a wealthy landowner that they believed stole it from them. I had come to the cooperative early that Sunday morning, sitting for two hours with […]