The photographs, taken between 2008 and 2013, paint two portraits of Afghanistan. On one side, the stark reality for the millions of Afghan refugees who have returned to their country since 2002, only to find they cannot go back to their homes. On the other, Zalmaï takes us away from the monumental humanitarian crisis exasperated by war to reveal signs of a new and positive life force permeating the country, and to spotlight the hopes and dreams of the Afghan people.

At a time when the world is turning away from Afghanistan, this work goes beyond the headlines to reveal the ongoing struggle in the country. Zalmaï will be joining us in conversation with editor-in-charge of Reuters Wider Image, Alexia Singh, to present this deeply personal and humanistic body of work of Afghan refugees, by an Afghan refugee.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

From Afghanistan to Iraq, Darfur to Libya, Lynsey Addario has spent the past decade and a half capturing life on the frontline.

It was after the September 11 attacks, when the world changed, that Addario made the decision to embark on a career in photojournalism. It is a path that in subsequent years would see her travel around the world, from crisis to conflict, documenting the human cost of war. In her new book, It’s What I Do, she details the journey.

Lynsey Addario will be joining us in conversation with editor-in-charge of Reuters Wider Image, Alexia Singh, to share her story of how a relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theatre of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.

Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist whose work appears regularly in The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine. She has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur and the Congo, and has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Genius Grant and the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting.

Photo: Lynsey Addario. Maternal Mortality in Afghanistan. Badakshan Province, November 2009.

On Tuesday 11 November, John G Morris, former picture editor for Life magazine, joined guests at the Frontline Club to share his photographs and experiences in Normandy towards the end World War II. Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images and editor of Morris‘s book Quelque Part En France, joined his good friend to give insight into the process of collecting the photographs from 1944 and creating the book, which will hopefully be published in English soon.

Pledge introduced “John Morris, not the picture editor, not the historian . . . but John Morris the photographer”.

John G Morris (left) and Robert Pledge (right) discuss Morris’s experiences and photography in Normandy.

He described Morris as “. . . undoubtably one of the most knowledgeable people in the field. . . . We didn’t know until about a couple of years ago that John not only could speak about photography but he had been a photographer himself for a very short period of time.”

The compelling photographs chosen from the book, illustrated French citizens, troops and the effects of World War II in Normandy. Servicemen were forbidden to disclose where in France they were writing from, hence the title Quelque Part En France, or Somewhere in France.

The 168 photographs that Morris took, were “images that are so very different to those of war photographers . . . who were more concerned about the action”, said Pledge. “John saw things and registered things that most photographers did not.”

The pictures show “little everyday scenes in the French countryside and small towns”. And in his capturing of them he was “a very fine, subtle observer of war in a dramatic environment”, said Pledge.

Robert Pledge shows Quelque part en France to guests.

Despite having his photographs displayed and commended around the world, Morris can not become accustomed to being called a photographer.

He said, “When you have the privilege of working with the greatest photographers of the 20th century . . . you don’t call yourself a photographer. . . . I still don’t think I’m a photographer.”

Morris worked with photographer Robert Capa in France:

“From Capa I learnt to look for the human message. . . . Photographers have to also pay attention to words,” said Morris.

Morris affirmed that his photographs did not influence his editing, and shared why he did not continue taking photographs after that trip:

“My job was being a picture editor,” he said. “My job was either to assist photographers or boss them around, not to compete with them. . . . It was just a camera I happened to borrow, . . . it was obvious I was a tight shooter.” But, he admitted, “The pictures are better than I thought they were.”

An audience member asked about censorship in the media during World War II. Morris said, “Censorship mostly, quite frankly, . . . occurred at the level of shooting. Photographers knew what not to shoot.”

Morris said that his book is a “testament to French people, it’s a love letter to France in a sense. I am very proud of that.”

He said, “Here were the French people subjected to terrible attack . . . and despite that, we were welcomed as liberators. . . . I share the dismay of my generation . . . with the present state, the state of world affairs. I’m a peacemaker from way back.”

“The images of yours have a tremendous impact today,” Pledge said to Morris, adding to the audience, “John never believed this could happen. He never took his images seriously as photographs, he took them as notes. . . . He was not trying to produce photographs.”

“History can be observed on various levels and one of them is just the common level of human reactions to ordinary situations,” Morris said.

You can watch and listen again here:

In 1944, John G. Morris was a young picture editor working in London for Life magazine, overseeing the photographic reportage of World War II. Normally confined to the picture desk, in June of that year he went to France to coordinate the coverage of the D-Day landings – of which the work of his friend Robert Capa became so famed.

Morris’s 14 rolls of black-and-white film from the four weeks he spent in north-western France were never intended for publication. The negatives and contact sheets remained in his personal archive until a long-time friend from Contact Press Images, Robert Pledge, rediscovered them and curated their exhibition at Visa pour l’image in 2013.

These images, now published in Quelque part en France: l’été 1944 de John G. Morris (Somewhere in France: John G. Morris and the Summer of 1944), provide a personal perspective of the Allied troops advancing toward German strongholds.

Morris, now 97, will be joining us in conversation with Robert Pledge, the co-founder of the international independent picture agency Contact Press Images, to present his images and discuss his world of photographic reportage.

“I was photographing the margins of the war but they kind of held up a picture of what war is really like.” — John G. Morris

When Anastasia Taylor-Lind arrived in central Kiev on 1 February 2014, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) was under siege, surrounded by police loyal to the government. Rising tensions culminated in the worst day of violence on 20 February and the following day President Yanokovych fled Ukraine. In all, three months of protests resulted in 112 confirmed dead, and many more missing.

Taylor-Lind’s portraits have been uniformly shot against the black backdrop of her improvised studio, removing them from the context of the barricades just a few feet away. The ‘fighters’ are identified by their homemade body armour, and the ‘mourners’ by the bunches of flowers they have brought to pay their respects to the dead. Captured with an air of stillness and reflection, these photographs show the individuals involved in, and impacted by, the unrest.

Taylor-Lind will be joined in conversation by Olivier Laurent, the editor of TIME’s LightBox.

Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square will be published in its entirety by GOST Books in July 2014. Join Taylor-Lind for the official launch and signing on the book at the club on Thursday 24 July, from 6:30PM. For more details, see here.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Olivier Laurent will be delivering a day-long workshop looking at engaging with social media for photographers at the Frontline Club on Saturday 16 August 2014, 10:00AM – 5:00PM. For more details, see here.

All images © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

Following months of unrest, Ukraine has a new leader. Known as the Chocolate King, Petro Poroshenko is tasked with restoring law and order, and steering the country away from conflict.

As fighting in the east continues, we will be looking at the challenges that lie ahead for Poroshenko and asking how he will unite the country.

Central to the battle in Ukraine has been the use of disinformation and propaganda in an information war. With a panel of journalist who have been covering the crisis, we will look at how the facts have been distorted and to what end.

Chaired by Bridget Kendall, diplomatic correspondent, BBC News.

The panel:

Katya Gorchinskaya is deputy editor of the Kyiv Post, a position she has held since 2008. She belongs to a group of journalists who investigate documents found in Mezhyhirya (YanukovychLeaks).

Dmitry Linnik is the head of the London bureau for Voice of Russia. He began his career in 1973 working for the English-language service of Radio Moscow, he went on to work for BBC World Service, initially in Moscow and then in London before moving to Voice of Russia.

Yevhen Fedchenko is director of the Mohyla School of Journalism and head of their PhD programme in mass communication. He is one of the founders of stopfake.org, a watchdog of Russian disinformation regarding Ukraine.

Victor Balagadde is the editor of Kommersant UK, a position he has held since 2009. He has also written for New Style, a Russian language magazine published in London and the Ukrainian Kharkovsky Courier.

Photograph: Getty Images

With support from:

The theorist Susan Sontag wrote:

“For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”

While our perception and understanding of the 20th century is intrinsically linked to the images of its conflicts, photography’s ever-increasing ubiquity has perhaps desensitise us. If photography was meant to show us our true natures and in so doing shock us into action, then it has failed.

Throughout history, we have sought ways to illustrate our wars. However, the notion of an ‘artist’ who could produce work in real-time for publication was incongruent. Before the telegraph, news from the front line could take days or even weeks to make it home. Likewise the concept of daily newspapers or periodicals only emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The vast majority of illustrations were not produced by artists on the front line but by craftsman in the studio, rendering drawings based on oral accounts or testimonies from those who had fought.

From Goya’s The Disasters of War: Enterrar y callar (Bury them and keep quiet) and Lo mismo (The same).

During the Crimean War (1853–56), the burgeoning newspaper industry coincided with technological advances, marking the first occurrence of what we would call conflict reportage. With the invention of the telegraph, correspondents were able to transmit reports from the field to editors back home almost instantaneously.

One of the first ‘artists’ commissioned to document the effects of war was Roger Fenton. He chose photography over illustration but, to avoid offending Victorian sensibilities, refrained from documenting dead bodies. If the first correspondents and photographers demonstrated restraint with this new medium, the emergence of the war photographer during the American Civil War would make it the most documented conflict of the 19th century. The role of the camera in capturing conflict would only expand in the 20th century.

Roger Fenton’s photographic van and ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ in Crimea.

The practicalities of photomechanical reproduction meant that newspapers continued to commission illustrators throughout the 19th century, but artists’ drawings were increasingly based on photographs taken in the immediacy of battle. The inspiration for war artists had shifted from oral histories to photographic templates.

When The War Illustrated was first published at the start of World War I by William Berry, owner of The Daily Telegraph, its focus on illustration over photography saw its circulation peak at over one million. And US generals during World War I and II preferred to enlist artists over photographers in covering frontline conflicts, believing illustrations better expressed the ‘experiences’ of war. The Navy Combat Art Programme even trained artists and illustrators along with regular troops.

However, by the 1930s the popularity of new photographic reportage periodicals, such as Life magazine, began to claim photography as the best way to document conflict. Vietnam became the first ‘photojournalists’ war’ where the true power of the media, let loose without regulation or censorship, saw it fought on televisions and in newspapers, but it also made governments weary of the power of the photographic image.

From the First Gulf War through to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the embargo on images of dead soldiers and the embedding of photojournalists increasingly stunted photography’s ability to function as a tool of truth and to convey the image of conflict objectively. Its objectivity and immediacy, the very attributes that had made it so appealing to editors and audiences alike, were increasingly used by the authorities to sanitise and censor.

Added to this the increasing proliferation and beautification of the war image – the paradigm shift from ‘dead body’ shock to aesthetic object – made Sontag’s assertion that “a photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show” ever more distorted. Perhaps this demonstrated the limitations of photography in a world dominated by photographs.

There is no question that, at its most visceral, artistic depictions of war have the ability to comment on the human condition at its most vulnerable and nihilistic. Goya’s The Disasters of War prints still resonate – not just as a record of the terror inflicted during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain – but as universal indictment of the horrors of conflict. And yet Goya, unlike 20th century war photographers, never witnessed first-hand the horror he so accurately articulated.

However, just as the US generals viewed the suitability of illustration to capture the experience of war, perhaps Goya’s prints, although not intended as an objective account of what happened, made sense out of the madness of war.

In a time when images of death are everywhere and the demand for up-to-date news coverage can be satisfied by anyone with a phone, perhaps the whisper of the illustrated image really is louder than the shout.

Our upcoming event, In the Picture: Illustration in Times of War, with George Butler will be held on Wednesday 16 April 2014, at 7:00pm. Find out more and book online here.

Photography dominates the news in print and online. It is an immediate, vivid and mostly objective medium for portraying current events. In comparison, illustration is seen as more subjective and tends to be confined to softer, more abstract stories.

But is there still room for illustration in hard-news stories?

We are flooded with images taken by cameras and phones which often struggle to have the impact that they did 50 years ago. In a society that has become so desensitised to photographs of war, can illustration be used to better encapsulate a situation and connect with the viewer?

In 2013 George Butler‘s drawings from war-damaged Syrian towns were used in The Guardian, The Times and on the BBC World News. He will be joining us to present his work and talk about how he produces it. 

He will be joined by Malik Meer, features editor for The Guardian and editor of the G2 supplement, to discuss the appeal of his illustrations.

Discussing the legacy of Johannesburg’s gold mining. Francis Hodgson and Jason Larkin.

Larkin was last at the Frontline Club in 2011 to present a project he had worked on with Jack Shenker – Cairo Divided. His new project shows the same measured, thoughtful and thought-provoking approach – a series of beautiful, square-format images, which present a subject but do not force one conclusion.

Hodgson, photography critic for the Financial Times and professor of photography at the University of Brighton, played devil’s advocate in challenging Larkin‘s approach to his work:

“You make pictures in a very beautiful, very poised, rather slow, very steady way, which is about allowing the land to have its own say. That doesn’t sit all that easily, apparently, with a history of exploitation, a history of protest, a history of get-rich-quick. There’s a kind of shift . . . between the way you’ve chosen to express yourself and what you’ve chosen to express.”

Larkin replied:

“There are multiple stories going on with all of this. . . . The mine dumps are huge – there are 400,000 people living on them. I don’t want to get too lost on one person’s story, one person’s narrative within these pictures . . . and I don’t want to show too much of how I personally feel about it. I’m laying out the facts.”

And as such Larkin presents the images of a legacy – and encourages us to question how we will engage with that legacy today and in the future.

https://twitter.com/MMP_Photography/status/433687274879205376

As well as addressing how a photographer communicates ideas and reaches audiences, Larkin and Hodgson touched on the current culture of rapid consumption and disposal of images – the “digital soup” in which work can be lost.

Asked about his influences, Larkin mentioned Simon Norfolk‘s work in Afghanistan as being able to convey more than standard, gritty reportage in a very beautiful way.

“You don’t have to show pain and crying and all the other stuff that happens within my industry to get a message across.”

Hodgson added:

“In other cultures than photography, people know roughly the level at which the audience situates itself. . . . Photographers feel they have to reinvent the wheel and it’s nice to have a photographer who understands that the audience have a certain level of culture and that all the normal tools of cultural activity – of quotation, of reference, of allusion – are possible in photography.”

Went to the @frontlineclub to see @mrjasonlarkin talk about his photo/journalism project on mining in Johannesburg. Honest and inspiring.

— Kana (@KanahayaAlam) February 13, 2014

An exhibition of the work will be held at Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP, 20 February – 20 March 2014.

You can listen to or watch the full discussion below:

Johannesburg is a city built on gold. It was founded in 1886 when settlers and immigrants began mining the largest reef of precious metal ever discovered. What had been a small farming community rapidly transformed into a mining mecca and within 50 years, over 300,000 people were working in mines across the city. The mining may have come to an end, but its environmental and social impact is still visible.

Jason Larkin lived in Johannesburg for two years, photographing a landscape of vast tailing dams – mountains of dumped toxic waste.

In his new book, Tales From The City Of Gold, Larkin combines his observations of the ordinary and extraordinary nature of life alongside the dumps. Its focus on the coexistence of the past and the present provides a unique perspective on the actions of previous generations and reveals their impact on today’s society and environment. Through this project, Larkin has worked on multiple formats for the final output, reaching different audiences both in Africa & Europe.

In a talk chaired by Francis Hodgson, they will discuss the challenges of communicating ideas and reaching audiences, as well as the various methods of output and distribution available to photographers today.

Hodgson is the professor in the Culture of Photography at the University of Brighton, photography critic of the Financial Times and a former head of the photographs department at Sotheby’s.

An exhibition of the work will be held at Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP, 20 February – 20 March 2014.

All images © Jason Larkin, courtesy Flowers, London.