Impromptu Portrait
I have seriously neglected this blog for months and months (years, perhaps?) but have decided to put my lazy ways behind me and start getting some photos and stories up online. To start with, here’s a portrait that just magically happened while on vacation (not a word I get to use very often) in Cairo. [...]
Some More Good News
Just found out I was selected as a winner in this year’s Magenta Flash Forward Emerging Photographers and was given an Honorable Mention in the FotoVisura Grant for Outstanding Personal Photography Project More photos and stories coming soon…
CNN Features Metrography
The CNN Photoblog has just done a lovely feature on Ali Arkady’s work on their website. Check it out.
A Soldier’s Answer to “Why Would Anyone Miss War?”
Over two weeks before Sebastian Junger’s Op-Ed in the NYTimes was published I was in the middle of a vibrant e-mail correspondence with a sergeant in the US Army I’d met in Kirkuk. He wrote to tell me–among other things–that he had read my piece on covering the conflict in Libya and it had struck a [...]
BBC Interview
When I was back in the states in May, I did an interview for my friend Marc who’s a producer in the BBC’s Washington bureau. It’s against BBC policy to allow people to embed videos off their site, so here’s the link. If you have any questions or comments about it, let me know. I’d [...]
Metrography features on TIME Magazine’s Lightbox
Check out TIME Magazine’s Lightbox piece about Metrography. I’m so proud of these photographers who worked so hard to make these amazing images. This really is the dawn of a new age of Iraqi photojournalism. Be part of it. Show your support. Spread the word!
The Dawn of Iraqi Photojournalism
Over the past week I have–and with no exaggeration–witnessed the dawn of Iraqi photojournalism. We printed the photographs from the workshop last night and will be hanging the show all day today. Photos and videos will come shortly after. And here–drum roll please–are the photo stories from the workshop. Enjoy!
Patrick arrives!
Patrick Witty, the International Picture Editor at TIME Magazine, arrived in Iraq yesterday. Here he is meeting with his students.
Iraqi Photo Workshop is Up and Running
Almost exactly a year ago Stephanie Sinclair gave me the idea of running a workshop for Metrography photographers. For those of you who don’t know, Metrography is the first Iraqi photography agency that I started with my friend and colleague, Kamaran Najm. It’s taken a year to get here, but with the generous support of [...]
Getting Shot by an RPG: My first reflection on conflict photography
Like all of my friends and colleagues, I’m mourning the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros as well as hoping for the quick recovery of Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown. I’m posting the following video to share a few of my thoughts and experiences in covering the Libyan conflict as a photographer. The [...]
A Piece of Luck and a Bag of Oranges
When our driver pulled up this morning, Rob and I had no idea that in a few hours we’d be breaking a world exclusive story about the American Jet that crashed in Libya. And we certainly didn’t expect it to come from a rumor. But, Majid, our driver was so sure that this story of [...]
War Sounds
War is not quiet. In fact, it is the opposite: loud. Very loud. Photographs, on the other hand, don’t make any noise. They don’t even move. So it is really hard (although not impossible) to translate the sounds and chaos of war into a photograph. Recently on the New York Times Lens Blog, Tyler Hicks [...]
More Time Spent on the Iranian Border
Last week I was up on the Iranian border filming another story for RT. This one was about alcohol smugglers bringing booze from Iraq into Iran. The smugglers camp sat right on the river that makes the border between the two countries and all the time while I was filming I could see Iranian border [...]
Kurdish Fishermen
Here’s an image I took while filming a report on water pollution in Iraqi Kurdistan. I was in the middle of shooting some fantastic video, but was overcome by the urge to snap this image. I ruined the video footage, but got a nice little frame. Oops.
An Old Photo I Found
This is a photo I took this past May in Mosul while I was embedded with the US troops. It shows a soldier from the Mississippi National Guard scanning the retina of a suspected terrorist in a Mosul jail. This scan, along with fingerprints, a photograph, and the suspect’s personal information will have been put [...]
A Little Bit of Press
A radio station discusses one of my photos (towards the end of the program, mind you) that’s in the Art of Photography Show in San Diego. I feel a little famous today… Check it out here.
Darul Aman
The evening before I left Kabul Hossein Fatemi, the massively talented Iranian photographer and Jason Motlagh, the prodigious TIME reporter took me to the Darul Aman Palace on the outskirts of the city. Young men ran around kicking soccer balls at the foot of the war-scarred château. The visual juxtaposition between present and past; hope and despair; [...]
A Nice Mention in the Telegraph
Just found this mention in the Telegraph after checking some stats on the ole (and now very out-of-date) website. Cool!
Photos from the Afghan Embed
Here is a pretty big (possibly unwieldy) selection of images from my embed in Afghanistan. Hope you enjoy.
Another summer show…
After my shot from Mosul was accepted into the Foto8 Summershow: I just found out that another image has been selected for the Art of Photography show in San Diego: A lovely way to start the summer!
Hawraman
The Hawraman district of Kurdistan that straddles the mountainous Iran Iraq border is one of the more remote and stunning areas in the region. The houses are still made from stone instead of the horrible ubiquitous concrete that’s spreading across Iraq like a virus. The traditional music is a warbling male a cappella solo that [...]
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