Inside the goldfish bowl. A link to an MSNBC blog post and slideshow of 2011 Pyongyang pictures, and TIME Magazine’s Pictures of the Week
I’m going to be spending a lot of time in freezing cold Pyongyang. We opened a new AP bureau in North Korea today.
Here’s the official announcement by the AP.
A selection of my 2011 Year End photos taken while covering Japan’s tsunami and nuclear crisis, Afghanistan’s opium wars, and daily life inside North Korea.
Every morning at Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel, we woke to find a new elevator carpet in rotation.
Here’s one final set of daily life photos taken in 2011 in North Korea.
Just before North Korean leader Kim Jong Il died, the skies glowed red above sacred Mount Paektu and the impenetrable sheet of ice at the heart of the mystical volcano cracked with a deafening roar, according to KCNA.
A set of photos or Jean H. Lee’s explanation on how the mythmaking machine works inside the Cult of Kim.
Check out TIME Magazine’s Most Surprising Photos of 2011 , 365 : A Year in Photos, and Two Takes
Looking back at ‘11 there’s some amazing work displayed here from friends Yuri Kozyrev, Moises Saman, Kevin Frayer, Danny Wilcox Frazier, John Moore, and many others.
When you reach April 20 in the 365 slideshow, stop and remember.
Kim Jong Il’s funeral procession passes slowly through Kim Il Sung square as the moment changes to weeping women standing along the roadside in the snow.
Like other foreign journalists, I couldn’t be in Pyongyang today to cover the funeral procession of Kim Jong Il. Instead, I made screen grabs from the TV feed for the AP wire.
This was an accidental, but pretty frame.
No-man’s land attests to Japan’s nuclear nightmare
AP has put out an extended set of photos I made inside Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone and of the displaced people who fled their contaminated hometowns. The pictures were made between April and August of this year while on assignment for National Geographic Magazine. Text essay by AP Tokyo news editor Eric Talmadge, the reporter who logged more hours in Fukushima than any other in 2011.
AP has launched the North Korea Journal, an interactive updated daily with photos, videos, essays, sounds, and tweets from inside the DPRK. Check back for the latest photos and essays.
The day that Kim Jong Il’s death was announced. A slide show in the Washington Post of my 2011 work inside North Korea.
On my first-ever trip to Pyongyang in Oct. 2000, I photographed Kim Jong Il and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Since then, I’ve made over a dozen visits inside the DPRK, including 8 trips this year.
DPRK State media reported today that Kim Jong Il died of heart failure on Dec. 17.
An interview I did with Neal Conan on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about Japan’s nuclear refugees. Live from the offices of National Geographic Magazine
Events Of The 21st Century That Shocked the World. The Truth of News Photography.
The History Channel Japan profiles photographers and the most significant news events of the past decade. The hour-long program airs Dec. 3 and Dec. 10 and features my work from Afghanistan and the Tohoku tsunami. Two Kyodo photographers discuss their coverage of SARS and the rise of China.
I spent the 1990s, and almost all of my 20s, living and photographing in Africa.
Tonight I began looking through dusty cardboard boxes filled with negatives, slides, fading contact sheets, work prints, audio and video cassettes, hard drives, cds, dvds, and quite a few unclaimed receipts. I’d not opened these boxes for more than a decade.
The photos in this slide show are examples of the hard news pictures I made while working for the Associated Press and the NYTimes around Africa. Sadly, most of my professional life in Africa was spent photographing cruelty and misery. This was not the original reason I left my home to make a life there.
I plan to begin the long process of sorting through these boxes and editing all of this material to show a more complete image of the Africa that I loved.
National Geographic has posted a selection of my AP images from inside Dai-ichi and a photographer’s journal: Scenes From Japan’s Devastated Nuclear Plant
