Global Lens Reflections on life, the universe, and everything

Picture of the Week
All things change
All things change

Pictures of the Week are ending in order to give way to more frequent posts in the main blog area. It’s been a good run, and the last couple of years of POWs will remain here online. (And those from this year have been duplicated in the main section.) The problem was simply this: as […]

Bosnian volleyball
Bosnian volleyball

If we want the images we capture to be interesting and compelling, we’ve often got to change our point of view. Especially today, with the proliferation of imaging technology in the hands of many, we are inundated with images. If we want our images to stand out from the crowd, we’ve got to do something […]

Hugo Chavez
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
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 […]

Angola classroom
Angola classroom

Two weeks ago I mentioned the premise in quantum theory that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality. This is especially true when a sweaty photographer tries to capture images of a whole room full of kids. Some of them will inevitably stare at the camera. Since documentary photojournalism strives […]

War Shadows
War Shadows

Sometimes the best images aren’t where you thought you’d find them. In 2002, just after Jonas Savimbi was killed, I went to Angola to cover the end of that country’s bloody civil war. Savimbi was one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite “freedom fighters,” and US funding and encouragement, including from private terrorist groups like the Heritage […]

Running away
Running away

Children can be a pain in the butt. They are such adorable little creatures, unless you’re tasked with photographing in a refugee camp. Don’t get me wrong, here, I’m talking about kids who are like me when I was a kid: obnoxious. (Some would suggest it’s a trait I have yet to outgrow.) Let me […]

Morales’ morning
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 […]

On the Beach
On the Beach

Sometimes when I look at an image that I captured years ago, I get a feeling that is totally unrelated to whatever you may see when you look at the image. Take this photo from the remote Indonesian island of Nias. I had gone there a while after the big tsunami to document how islanders […]

Background basics
Background basics

Backgrounds are important. I remember reading about one famous street photographer in Paris who would search for an interesting wall or street, then find a sidewalk café where he would sit all day, drinking wine, as he waited for someone to come by that would provide just the right foreground element to make the picture […]

Rescuing Ena Zizi
Rescuing Ena Zizi

Three years ago this week, the earth shook under Port au Prince, Haiti, and for many the world came to an end. I went to Haiti to cover the aftermath of the quake for the ACT Alliance, which had several members actively working in Haiti before the quake. I spent my nights there camped in […]

Walking women
Walking women

A photographer does well to think of her or his audience as jaded. Unless you are documenting something really new, most people have already seen so many images of fill-in-the-blank-with-the-project-you’re-shooting that one more image that looks like the rest they’ve seen isn’t going to noticeably budge their applause-o-meter. So one of the easiest ways to […]

Innocence threatened
Innocence threatened

It’s the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, when the church remembers the biblical narrative of infanticide by Herod the Great, who’d been appointed “King of the Jews” by Rome. Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem in order to fend off losing his power to the newborn […]

Waiting in Mursan
Waiting in Mursan

In these waning days of Advent, when our practice of waiting is stressed to the breaking point by the violent anti-logic of NRA types who think the solution to violence is more violence, I recall those I've known who wait patiently. In refugee camps and prisons around the world, in homes torn by abuse and […]

Flowers for the police
Flowers for the police

I’m currently wrapping up a month-long reporting trip with a few days in Cambodia, most of it in the boonies, but including a couple of days in Phnom Penh, in part to photograph some demonstrations on Human Rights Day last Monday. I went to two very different demonstrations that morning. The second was a protest […]

Real photographers
Real photographers

There’s a cartoon I like that shows a photographer who is poorly attired and laden with all sorts of camera gear, thus obviously a true professional, trying to get to the front of a crowd to capture the action. He says, “Excuse me, I’m a photographer,” to which the crowd of people, each equipped with […]

Boxes from below
Boxes from below

One of the things I stress in my photography workshops is that the photographer is challenged to take pictures of things we’ve all seen before, but to do it in such a way that we see it freshly, anew. Take the unloading of boxes of relief goods at a church in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, following […]

Dancers from above
Dancers from above

I don’t like taking pictures of meetings, which are almost always visually boring. One exception I make is the quadrennial gathering of United Methodists called General Conference. It’s a chance to see a lot of friends and work with Mike DuBose, a photographer colleague who actually knows what he’s doing, and so I’m constantly pestering […]

Helicopter boy
Helicopter boy

Sometimes you just keep following a subject, in case something interesting happens. On this day, I flew on a U.S. Navy Blackhawk helicopter from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel, on Haiti’s southern coast. It was a very ecumenical trip: the U.S. military transporting emergency assistance provided by German churches, which was offloaded by Canadian soldiers and turned […]

It’s just a game
It's just a game

When I posted this image on Facebook a few weeks ago, some people wanted to know if I’d gotten all wet taking it. Not really. It was late in the day and I’d wandered off without a translator or vehicle in the Doro refugee camp in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State. (These are refugees from […]

Uppity girls
Uppity girls

Here's an image from a chemistry class at St Peter's College for Women in Lahore, Pakistan. It's a school for poor girls from the countryside, sponsored by the Church of Pakistan. I thought of visiting schools like this in Pakistan when reading about Malala Yousufzai, the courageous 15-year old girl who was shot by the […]

Marked man
Marked man

This is Henri Aguilar with his one-year old daughter Genesis in the yard of their home in Chamelecon, a poor neighborhood near San Pedro Sula, Honduras. I captured this image on May 2, 2007, during a visit to prepare a story on the church's work with gangs in Cenral America. Five days later, Henri was […]

Not looking away
Not looking away

Homeless people make most of us uncomfortable. When we see them on exit ramps or city sidewalks, we change lanes, avert our gaze, suddenly remember to check for messages on our smart phones. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they remind us of our own vulnerability. Perhaps we’re afraid of the poor. So we look away. […]

Brazil boy
Brazil boy

Sometimes there are a lot of people in a scene, and trying to fit them all in gets complicated. I feel the urge to grab people and start moving them around because the light is better over here, the scene is more balanced if you stand there, etc. And then there are times when it […]