Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
One of the most shocking events in the U.S. last year was the U.S. Capitol riots. On Wednesday 6 January 2021, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building to protest the election results.
During the riots, multiple people were assaulted and injured, many of them being journalists. One of the men who attacked the police and an AP photographer was charged with an assault and has been arrested.
In a Mother Jones piece, Ramenda Cyrus analyzes A1 coverage of last year’s George Floyd protests and contends that the media is still relying on old tropes to represent Black Americans. In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Allen and Sarah take a look at her arguments and the supporting voices of author Martin Berger and “Reading the Pictures” publisher Michael Shaw.
The attack on the US Capitol happened on 6 January, but photos, videos, and news are still surfacing. Over 400 people have been arrested so far, but at least one of the suspects was caught thanks to Instagram. The FBI used photos and videos from his girlfriend’s Instagram and identified the man with some help of facial recognition.
For over a week, people in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota have been protesting after a white police officer shot a Black man dead. And what started as a peaceful protest turned into havoc on Friday. On the sixth night of the protest, police officers reportedly targeted photojournalists and other members of the press. They forced them to lie on the ground, photographed their faces and press credentials, and some of them were reportedly even detained.
Photojournalist Andy Aitchison (46) was recently arrested after photographing protests at Napier Barracks in Folkestone, UK. He was reportedly arrested on suspicion of criminal damage for taking photos. In other words – for doing his job. He believes it’s censorship, and some serious concerns have been raised about media freedom.
On Wednesday 6 January, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building to protest the election results. In the incident, the rioters attacked journalists and destroyed equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Last week, protests and riots occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin after a police officer shot African-American man Jacob Blake. During the riots, Rode’s Camera Shop was burned to the ground. The shop was around for 109 years, but it was destroyed overnight.
On Saturday 27 June, a man opened fire in during protests in Jefferson Square Park in Louisville killing one man. The victim was now identified as Tyler Gerth, who was a 27-year-old photographer covering the protests.
Twitter, Instagram and its parent company Facebook recently removed Donald Trump’s video from its platforms. The video contained photos of protests that prompted after George Floyd’s death on 25 May. One of the photos was a subject of a copyright complaint filed by the copyright holder.
Should you blur people’s faces when covering protests o should you not? This has been a heated debate lately, and opinions are largely different. But if you’re in the “blur the faces” team and you use an iPhone, now there’s a simple way to do it. A new shortcut lets you blur faces and strip all metadata from images in just one tap.
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