The evening will begin with a drinks reception in the Clubroom followed by a sit down dinner 8.30pm served in the Forum.

The Frontline Fund (formerly the Fixers’ Fund) is an adjunct charity of the Frontline Club which offers emergency financial assistance to local producers and their families in situations of proven distress, such as inprisonment, injury, forced exile, or death.

It was initiated by Jon Lee Anderson in 2007 following the murder of Ajmal Naqshbandi in Afghanistan.

The Fund’s disbursements are intended as a first-stop expression of material solidarity by the Frontline Club and its members on behalf of some of the most invaluable, yet vulnerable, of media workers.

Without the support of local producers, foreign journalists could not operate in the field. They are the unsung heroes of the industry and too often pay the highest price, remaining in the field once the foreign journalists have left.

Join us to support this important cause. Donations to the Frontline Fund can also be made online through the following link: http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/donate/

Jon Lee Anderson leading a writing masterclass

Frontline Club trustee Jon Lee Anderson will be running a four-day journalism masterclass, Capturing the Story, at La Porte Peinte this summer. La Porte Peinte is an arts centre based in Noyers sur Serein, Burgundy.

This intensive masterclass in long-form journalism, led by The New Yorker writer, will look at how to perceive a moment and convey its truth in an honest and deliberate way, how to locate the telling detail and how to construct a story structure, how his pieces are built, discerning the details selected and the structural decisions taken to reach the final form.

It will run from 29 July to 1 August 2014. The application deadline is 31 May. Places are limited. For further information, please contact info@laportepeinte.com.

Jon Lee Anderson is an investigative journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker. He has also written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, El País, Harper’s and Time. His books include Guerrillas: Journeys In the Insurgent World, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan, and The Fall of Baghdad. Over the past year, he has reported from Ukraine, Nicaragua, Mali, Cuba and Venezuela for The New Yorker.

Your wonderful and kind messages mean so much to us, as has your friendship, council and support over so many years. There is no prize in our trade that we could ever value as much as your belief in us.

– Vaughan and Pranvera Smith

 

Thank you to Stewart Purvis, Richard Gizbert, Tina Carr, Emma Beals, Allan Little, Mani, Stuart Hughes, Richard Sambrook, Jon Snow, Marina Litvinenko, Martin Bell, Tom Fenton, Anthony Loyd, Lyse Doucet, Bill Neely, Lindsey Hilsum, Charles Glass, John G Morris, Salim Amin, Liz Palmer Gary Knight, Jon Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bowen, Matt Frei and Jean-Jacques Gonfier.

“He’s this wonderful presence [in person],” remarked Rory Carroll, who spent from 2006 t0 2012 in Caracas as The Guardian‘s chief correspondent for South America, and whose latest book Commandante profiles Chavez in depth.

Western media, Carroll said, often offered a “polarised simplistic version, like Chavez is the demon, he’s blood thirsty, some kind of semi-Stalinist character, which was ridiculous, or he’s this messianic character who is delivering the poor from hell and he’s building a shining city on a hill, which was equally as ridiculous.”

“He is amiable,” The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson agreed, “and quite a fun interlocutor.”

But Anderson and Carroll, along with Diego Moya-Ocampos, a political analyst who used to practice law in Venezuela and event host Richard Lapper, the Financial Times‘ Latin America editor from 1998 to 2008, were dismayed by the promises Chavez made to fix Venezuela.

After 14 years, inequality has reached a gothic degree in today’s Venezuela, noted Anderson; hospitals are Dickensian, Carroll said – “people are selling bandages, sheets . . . there’s no bulbs . . . you’re crunching over broken glass, there’s malandros [thugs] in the corridors, maybe with guns”; the prisons are awash with automatic weapons, and have largely been overtaken by their prisoners.

Anderson commented: “The revolution made common cause with a kind of thug culture, that I don’t know how they’re going to undo at this point . . . violence is off the charts.”

Chavez championed the masses, but Moya-Ocampos saw democracy in tatters:

“[Chavez] has systematically undermined democratic institutions. . . . What we have in the end is just one institution in place: the armed forces – the only institution in Venezuela with the capacity . . . to obtain certain outcomes. . . .

Everyone wants to believe: ‘Chavez! It’s a revolution going on in Venezuela! . . . We’re really tackling inequalities, we’re really beating poverty issues!’ . . . No. It’s not true.”

Carroll agreed: “He was an extraordinary illusionist.”

“Is the Revolution one of Chavez’s illusions?” Lapper asked.

For the most part it was, the panel seemed to agree.

Carroll and Anderson still found value in Chavez’s defiance, however – be it to America’s domination of global decisions, or to haughtiness and racism suffered by Venezuela’s lower classes.

Anderson reflected: “There’s no doubt that, whatever else you say, . . . Chavez has had an extraordinary presence on the regional stage, and that he will have meant something.”

Carroll added:

“To some extent, [the revolution] is real. . . . A lot of ordinary Venezuelans feel there’s been a revolution, feel empowered by this government, and therefore in that sense, it’s real. Because for them, it’s written on their hearts, and that has value. I could [give] lots of anecdotes about people who just feel that now they finally have dignity, and the issue of poverty is [finally] center-stage, and that they don’t need to feel apologetic for being quite dark, or not speaking great Spanish. . . . In the longterm effect, how can you quantify that? No idea. But that certainly has value.”

Watch the discussion here:

How does a photographer work with a dozen iPhones obscuring her view? This was just one of many questions debated on Thursday 13th December at the Frontline Club’s sold-out event on Magnum’s latest publication: Magnum Revolution: 65 Years of Fighting for Freedom.

Celebrated Magnum photographers Peter Marlow and Ian Berry joined New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson (who wrote the book’s essay, Blood and Hope) and Sunday Times Magazine photo editor Monica Allende for a lively discussion.

Magnum Revolution spans a vast swathe of the twentieth and present century’s seismic conflicts; it begins with the now-familiar images of the Arab Spring and ends on the black and white photos of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Both Peter Marlow and Ian Berry showcased iconic images from their own portfolios, including street photography from apartheid South Africa and the Lenin shipyard strikes in Poland, 1980.

Jon Lee Anderson said the collection was a “moveable feast of revolution”, but questioned the changing nature of the conflicts documented.

“What is a revolution? I still have an old school idea of what revolution is, which is … where you really shake things up, you alter society entirely with an ideology, you replace the old society with a new one, for better or worse.”

But, he added, recent rebellions appear to be more performance than a fundamental shift in social order:

“In some ways we see an extraordinary similarity in what the nuts and bolts of what revolution is: it is people getting out and physically confronting an armed order, that will shoot them down and kill them” he said.

“We now live in a time of … revolutionary performance. It is something a lot of us that covered the rebellion in Libya saw, we now live in a time where everything is so photographed that even youngsters who go out onto the streets have some … sensibility of what a revolution, or a revolutionary should look like.”

Monica Allende agreed that the heightened awareness of civilians to revolutionary performance has forced photojournalists to rethink their role in documenting conflict and war. There are more ways to tell a story than being on the front line of action, “waiting in Aleppo for bullets,” she said.

“You have people photographing in the moment, they are not photographers, they just happen to be there. That is the reality and photographers cannot compete with that. But it opens up new ways of thinking about documentary photography, and new aesthetics to approach. Try to think beyond, find a language that goes beyond the newspaper [traditional home for documentary photography]. There are many platforms these days for conveying conflict.”

Ian Berry agreed that photographers needed to change their approach. He said:

“Wherever you go in the world there is a guy in front of you, or 10 people in front of you holding up their phones. It is tricky. Even as a famous photographer it is not easy.”

The panelists all agreed that the practice of sending a photographer to a war zone with a blank cheque was unlikely to be resurrected.

“Nobody is going to pay me to go to Syria,” said Berry, “or indeed nobody is going to pay anybody to go to Syria. You travel the world at your own expense. Until we find a way of making the web pay, it is going to be tricky. The Sunday Times won’t be here in 10 years, so we have got to find new ways of working.”

Encompassing powerful images from the 1956 Hungarian Uprising to the recent Arab Spring, Magnum Revolution: 65 Years of Fighting for Freedom brings together hundreds of photographs from Magnum members depicting historic events. To mark the recent release, Magnum photographers Ian Berry and Peter Marlow will speak about their careers and experiences photographing war and peace with the book’s co-author, Jon Lee Anderson.

Chaired by Monica Allende, picture editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.

Ian Berry cut his teeth photographing South Africa during apartheid and in 1964 moved to London to become the first contract photographer for the Observer Magazine. He joined Magnum in 1962 and documented Russia’s invasion of Czechoslovakia; conflicts in Israel, Ireland, Vietnam and Congo and famine in Ethiopia for a wide range of publications.

Peter Marlow covered Lebanon and Northern Ireland as a news photographer in the late 1970s for the Paris-based Sygma agency. After joining Magnum in 1980, Marlow developed his photography away from war zones, by focusing first on Liverpool and later on Amiens.

Jon Lee Anderson is foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, and is the author of many books including The Fall of Baghdad.

Copies of Magnum Revolution: 65 Years of Fighting for Freedom will be on sale at a special discounted price of £30 on the night and the speakers will be available for a signing after the talk, with complimentary drinks made available courtesy of Prestel.

“A rare blend of great storytelling and pure wisdom, Little Bunch of Madmen: Elements of Global Reporting is the best thing yet written about the state of modern journalism by one of its few true living masters, and every reporter working today should go out and buy it and read it.”
— Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer, The New Yorker

Since 1965 Mort Rosenblum has covered war and peace on seven continents: civil strife, velvet revolution, climate chaos, and everything in between. As Associated Press special correspondent, he’s been shot at, locked up, lied to and shaken down. He ran AP bureaus in the Congo, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Argentina, and France. As editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, Rosenblum dispatched correspondents and decided what made news. Now, in vivid detail, he explains what he learned the hard way in this gem of a guide to global reporting.

“This is the manual I wish I’d had back in the 1960s when I was dropped into the Congolese mayhem, clueless, sleepless, and scared witless,” Rosenblum writes. “It’s also the primer I wish people backhome could have had at hand to understand what they were reading and watching.”

Rosenblum will be joining us to look back on the last forty years that form the lessons and stories of Little Bunch of Madmen.  He will be joined on stage by celebrated foreign correspondent Jon Swain, the discussion will be chaired by author and broadcaster Tom Fenton. If you are a young aspiring journalist this is an event and a book not to be missed.

This event is part of our monthly On the Media series, produced in association with the BBC College of Journalism.