A panel of freelance journalists and photographers joined an audience at the Frontline Club on Thursday 28 January 2016 to discuss the story behind a new exhibition of freelance war photography. Osie Greenway, Anne Alling, Benjamin Hiller and Jeffry Ruigendijk introduced photography and footage from their time in the Middle East – particularly Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – and explained that the exhibition’s purpose was to bring to light to the complexities that surround freelance journalism, which are rarely recognised by those who ultimately view the content produced. 

The @WZFreelance team discussing their project & exhibition @frontlineclub https://t.co/ZkVVWndicu #Support #WZF16 pic.twitter.com/T1T0874Eft

— Metro Imaging (@metroimaging) January 28, 2016

“We think there needs to be more light shone on [freelancing], to understand where the news comes from and how the news is reported. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes when you see a picture,” explained photojournalist Osie Greenway.

The panel commented that the War Zone Freelance Exhibition was also created in order to draw attention to the vital – and sometimes highly dangerous – work of fixers and local journalists. 

“They are often forgotten in the long run,” said photojournalist and writer Benjamin Hiller. “We leave, they stay behind, and often they have to take up the consequences of that.” Without them, he said, the work of western journalists would be near impossible. “We are intertwined; we are dependent on each other,” he said.

Dutch photojournalist Jeffry Ruigendijk agreed, saying that local journalists frequently don’t receive recognition for their contributions – even when the western media picks up their stories or photographs. “You see a byline with a name from an Arab country, but apart from that you never hear these guys. You never hear them speak on the radio; they never appear on talk shows. They’re ghosts with a name and a beautiful photo.”

Ruigendijk also commented that the exhibition aimed to provoke a discussion about the inconsistent payment of freelance journalists. “Usually [editors] want the photo or video last week, but you get your invoice paid in a couple of months. At the moment I’m waiting on two invoices: one which is a year and a month old, and a second which is nearly a year old.”

If the exhibition could provoke a discussion of “what is ethical and not ethical” in this context, Ruigendijk said, then it would “help freelancing in general.”

Anne Alling, a Danish writer and reporter, said the exhibition was a “developing project” with the purpose of exposing the unique work of freelancers. She added that the exhibition reflected some emerging trends in freelance work, such as the use of crowdfunding and social media to maximise support for the project. She hoped the exhibition would “give an insight into what it takes to be a freelancer, and provoke some kind of debate about freelance journalism.”

Such an interesting evening @frontlineclub on warzone freelancing. Be back tomorrow for the follow-up on #warzonefreelancingexhibition

— Sarah Mbengue (@sarah_mbengue) January 28, 2016

Ultimately, Greenway said, freelance journalism is not a new profession: “it’s an ancient craft, we’re not trailblazing.” Instead, he said, “our goal is to bring it back into the light, to make people see what it takes to take a photo.”

The panel will return to the Frontline Club this evening – Friday 29 January – for a discussion on the future of freelance journalism.

Contact warzonefreelance@gmail.com for more information on the exhibition, and visit the Frontline Freelance Register website for more information on freelance conflict reporting and its risks.

Looking at Time, Brandon Lavoie

A panel of experienced filmmakers will come together to discuss their creative methods for short documentary production – focusing on cinematography, editing, and visual storytelling for capturing the essence of big stories in short format. Taking into account the development of online distribution platforms and Op-Docs, we will explore how new technologies and distribution methods are connected to creative practice.

Addressing the editorial challenges involved in short filmmaking and screening segments of stylistically varied and innovative projects, this discussion will be geared towards both filmmakers and short film enthusiasts.

Panelists:

Jenny Horwell (moderator) joined DocHouse as producer in 2012, organising weekly screenings of documentaries in London cinemas. In 2015 the organisation opened Bertha DocHouse, the documentary cinema based at the Curzon Bloomsbury. As well as her work at DocHouse, Jenny has programmed the documentary shorts for four editions of the London Short Film Festival, since 2013, selecting work from open submissions. Before all that, she spent several years working at film festivals and events, and produced promos, trailers and videos at Matter Productions.

Liam Saint-Pierre

Born in Blackburn, England, Liam’s background was in stills photography and as a documentary camera operator, where he worked with the likes of Shane Meadows at Warp Films.
With a desire to tell stories, Liam’s path naturally led to directing,where his skills as a versatile filmmaker allowed him to create beautiful and intimate imagery across a variety of mediums. His cinematic style mixed with a tender realism and subtle humour translates into different genres, with story telling always at the heart. Initially this was in documentaries, but a focus on narrative has been translated into music videos, short films and commercial work. His films have been selected to screen at numerous international film festivals, including Raindance, LSFF, Sheffield Docfest, DOC NYC and many more.

Chloe White

 Chloe is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and photographer based in London. Her short films have screened worldwide at festivals as well as on the Guardian, BBC3, London Live, and BBC Radio 4. Chloe is interested in character-led documentaries and has made films on a diverse range of topics (lobster fisherwomen, female genital mutilation, self-marriage, launderettes, an atomic bomb survivor and elder transgender women) but has a special interest in female-related subjects.
Chloe also runs a production company called Whalebone Films, specialising in films for NGOs (Save the Children, WaterAid, Oxfam) and arts organisations (National Theatre, Barbican). Through this work Chloe has travelled around the world filming in over 25 countries.

Marc Silver

Marc works worldwide as a filmmaker and director of photography. His first feature length film ‘Who is Dayani Cristal?’ premiered at the Sundance Festival 2013 where it won Cinematography Award: World Cinema Documentary and the Amnesty International Best Documentary award 2014. His second film ’3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets’ about the murder of Jordan Davis premiered at the Sundance Festival 2015 winning U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Social Impact. It was shortlisted for an Academy Award and broadcast on HBO.

Marc’s rich portfolio includes documentaries, concert visuals, art installations and branding. He has created content for the BBC, Channel 4, Universal Music, The Guardian, The New York Times, Amnesty International, UNHCR and collaborated with artists such as Gael Garcia Bernal, Nitin Sawhney, Michael Nyman, Jamie Cullum, Ben Okri, Matthew Herbert and Cirque Du Soleil.

Marc is currently working on a new film about ayahuasca, neuroscience and global drug policy. He is Creative Director of The Filmmaker Fund.

Gemma Atkinson

Gemma Atkinson is an award-winning producer and director, with ten years experience of making documentaries through her production company Fat Rat Films. Her films have been screened at major festivals internationally (AFI Silverdocs, LSFF, Doc/Fest) broadcast on BBC, C4, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and the New York Times. She is in production on her first feature documentary What We Leave Behind, an intense character study of a grieving undertaker, scheduled for release in Autumn 2016. She directs and produces documentaries around the world for various NGO’s including Amnesty International, Oxfam and The Elders.She is a co-founder and director of the hugely successful screening and networking event Doc Heads, playing to packed screenings for over 6 years.

View a sample of the work in the exhibition below:

By Alan Selby

The advent of new media has seen an increasing pressure placed upon journalists to become multidisciplinary, but often to the detriment of each medium. During an evening moderated by David Campany, reader in photography at Westminster University, writer A. A. Gill and photographer Tom Craig mounted an impassioned defence of collaborations between photographers and writers. The duo were speaking in the lead up to a new exhibition of their work, a collection of 20 of Craig’s unseen photographs accompanied by text from Gill, which is opening at the Flaere Gallery in March.

The audience were guided through an eclectic series of images from Gill and Craig’s travels, which have taken them from the blistering heat of Chad to the freezing depths of the Arctic. As their presentation began, Craig explained that his dissatisfaction with the news media was a driving force behind their collaboration:

“I was becoming disillusioned with the imagery that I was seeing appearing in the news and feature print media. The reason for that was I felt increasingly individual photographers were going to places with very specific agendas. They had a photograph in mind before they even got there… I think it’s a dangerous place to be in, because it represents a place where it’s very difficult to be impartial.”

Discussing the unique marriage of text and imagery that the pair have produced, Craig added:

“I believe that the power of the image and the written word are great on their own, but they’re a lot greater when they’re combined… I’m at an advantage, I can tell the quieter story because I know there are other things that will be said about it.”

Craig provided the foil to Gill’s inimitable sense of humour throughout the evening and, despite claiming that Craig’s interests amounted to taking photographs of people taking photographs, and of the backs of people’s heads, Gill praised his approach:

“What you want is a photographer who’s aware of himself, and aware of changing the dynamic he is in. Tom does that, he’s very sensitive.”

In response to questions from the floor, the pair discussed how they first met on assignment in Chad, and how they approach the assignments that they undertake. As the proceedings reached their conclusion, Gill offered up his own evaluation of their work together:

“What we do gets rarer and rarer, because a lot of journalists now are expected to take their own pictures. A lot of us are expected to have phones that can take print ready pictures. Then there’s everything that’s happening on the internet: everybody is a photographer, and everybody is a journalist. What you have is this babel of karaoke news. I feel like we’re a Farrier and a Thatcher, we’re doing two jobs that are from the last century, but that’s what we do, and we do it well. When we do it well I don’t think there’s anything else that can touch it.”

Watch the event here:

Travelling together on assignments across four continents, photographer Tom Craig and writer A. A. Gill have worked alongside each other on stories from Albanian capitalism to Madagascan Baobabs over the past eight years.

In a new exhibition opening in March, Flaere Gallery have brought together 20 unseen photographs by Tom Craig with accompanying text by A. A. Gill. The pair will speak at the Frontline Club about their close collaboration and the explorations they have embarked upon together.

As journalists are increasingly expected to multi-task and provide the text, photography, video and tweets for their stories, Gill and Craig will mount a defence of their increasingly rare form of partnership and the insights and enrichment two sides on each story can bring.

The event will be moderated by reader in photography at Westminster University David Campany.

“The one thing words and pictures have in common is that their craft is all in the editing. Out of the streaming confusion of information and images, we have to sift and select the things that make a cogent, coherent, engaging plot… What is happening just outside the picture are the words. And when we get it right, the image and the writing, when they come together, they make something that is greater than their binary parts. They’re not illustrations or captions, but a tandem, complimentary work, without repetition or duplication.” A. A. Gill 

The exhibition will run from 5-10 March at The Gallery in Cork Street in association with Quintessentially and sponsored by Boucheron. The production of the artworks in the exhibit is sponsored by Spectrum Photographic.

Created in 1989 by a small group of young British men and women FNTV was a pioneering international news agency for freelance video journalists that was 20 years ahead of its time. The agency closed in 2003, by which time half of its camera-people had been killed while filming around the world. The dramatic story of the agency is told by David Loyn of the BBC in his book, recently published in paperback, Frontline: Reporting from the World’s Deadliest Places.

Frontline’s cameramen and women were the first to pick up small format, consumer, cameras. Their successes included securing the first western media interview with Bin Laden, the first film of the stinger missiles that altered the course of the 1980’s war in Afghanistan, key footage of the Romanian revolution, the only uncontrolled footage of the ground conflict in the first Gulf War and footage of the Kosovo conflict that led to British and NATO involvement. 

It is free to attend but please register in advance by clicking the "book" link above. Complimentary drinks will be provided courtesy of Chivas Regal.

This exhibition has been made possilbe through a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund with which the Frontline Club Charitable Trust is currently digitising and cataloguing 1,000 hours of FNTV footage. 

Created in 1989 by a small group of young British men and women FNTV was a pioneering international news agency for freelance video journalists that was 20 years ahead of its time. The agency closed in 2003, by which time half of its camera-people had been killed while filming around the world. The dramatic story of the agency is told by David Loyn of the BBC in his book, recently published in paperback, Frontline: Reporting from the World’s Deadliest Places.

Frontline’s cameramen and women were the first to pick up small format, consumer, cameras. Their successes included securing the first western media interview with Bin Laden, the first film of the stinger missiles that altered the course of the 1980’s war in Afghanistan, key footage of the Romanian revolution, the only uncontrolled footage of the ground conflict in the first Gulf War and footage of the Kosovo conflict that led to British and NATO involvement. 

It is free to attend but please register in advance by clicking the "book" link above. Complimentary drinks will be provided courtesy of Chivas Regal.

This exhibition has been made possilbe through a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund with which the Frontline Club Charitable Trust is currently digitising and cataloguing 1,000 hours of FNTV footage. 

All Frontline members have been invited to a reception and exhibition opening to mark the 10-year observance of Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security.

With gender-based violence as its theme, the exhibition will feature photographs by VII photographers Marcus Bleasdale and Ron Haviv alongside Lynsey Addario and James Nachtwey.

The opening will take place on Wednesday 20 October, 2010 7pm-9pm at The Atrium, Old Building London School of Economics & Political Science Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.

To RSVP please email: RSVP@congowomen.org

Photo credit: Lynsey Addario/VII Network