journalismstudyblr

Latest Posts by journalismstudyblr

Photographs I took at a Free Palestine rally on May 14, 2021 in Columbus, Ohio. 📸

Highly recommend this book of collected essays written by Arab women journalists! ✨

A protester burns a flag during a demonstration against police violence and racial inequality, Portland, Oregon, Caitlin Ochs, 2020

But when you and I step into the voting booth, we can proudly say: “I am an American, and this vote I am casting is the exercise of my highest privilege and my most solemn duty to my country.”

- Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 4, 1940

Pursuing photojournalism and photography was the best decision I’ve ever made. 

Travelling in Europe with my journal and Polaroid 📸📖

Shooting video for my digital video production class ✨

Ansel Adams, February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984.

I finally got my first digital camera!! 

Some important life lessons I have learned as a college reporter, news editor, and now managing editor.

Can also be applied to academia and other leadership positions!

Kashmir, 1998

[Photo: Steve McCurry, Magnum Photos]

Anne Morrissy Merick (1933-2017) was a pioneer in the field of journalism, especially in advancing women’s rights and opportunities in the field. In 1964, she managed to persuade the Pentagon to reverse an order that would have barred female reporters from accompanying troops on the front lines of the Vietnam War.

She attended Cornell University, and was the first female sports editor at the university. She was well-known for her efforts to fight against sexism in reporting, and published a book on her experiences in 2002.

Just cancel it if there are no women.

Overheard at The Washington Post  (via washingtonpost)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, July 5, 1896

…while others declare that the photography of color is one of the impossibilities and can never be accomplished.

WEST GERMANY. West Berlin. August 11, 1988. A message is seen painted on the wall at Potsdamer Platz: “Berlin will be wall-free.” A little more than a year later, on November 9, 1989, the wall finally came down.

Photograph: Andreas Schoelzel/AP

Treat Your S(h)elf

Travels with Myself and Another: five journeys from Hell by Martha Gellhorn

The door [of their accommodation for the night] opened onto the street and the smell thereof. The mosquitoes were competing with the flies and losing… I lay on the boards, a foot off the floor, and said in the darkness, ‘I wish to die.’

- Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another: five journeys from Hell

This fantastic quote perfectly embodies Martha Gellhorn’s feelings when Hemingway to whom she just married had brought her to the front lines of the Sino-Japanese War for her honeymoon.

Travels with Myself and Another describes her globe-spanning adventures, both accompanied and alone. At heart it’s a collection of “the best of the worst journeys,” originally published in 1978 and spanning a swath of history from the WWII Greatest Generation to the 1970’s counterculture revolution. In the complexity of her observations ‘she prefigures the works of people like Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban and the renaissance of first-person adventure writing. For Martha Gellhorn had a full life that very few of us can only ever dream of let alone emulate.

“Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt,” writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford in the foreword of the book.

As a hard bitten war correspondent, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. Gellhorn witnessed the invasion of Normandy as a stowaway after getting kicked off the press boat and wrote over a dozen fiction and non-fiction books in her 60-year career. A feminist at her core, Martha, M as UC (unwilling companion, AKA Hemingway) calls her, sets off on each “horror journey” as she’s dubbed them, without a great deal of pre-planning, other than the bare minimum required by her destination. The era of traveling by your bootstraps, hopping flights when you need them, hoping to stumble upon a hotel with available rooms each night, etc. is simply unheard of today.

Indeed Gellhorn was enraptured. She went to toe to toe with Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together. Gellhorn and Hemingway had been married a few months before and this trip to the front lines of the Sino-Japanese War was in effect their honeymoon  Their compared experiences of the trip create much of the humour, as he is happy to drink, smoke, and chat with locals, while she is trying to get material for her article and remember important details, as well as deal with guides and officials that barely speak English. With razor-sharp humour and exceptional insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the Sino-Japanese War.

“We are supposed to learn by experience;” Gellhorn reflects on her repeated travels in her introduction, “fat lot of good that does if you only remember the experience too late.” We start out in WWII China with Ernest Hemingway as her unwilling “another,” and end with her babysitting her helpless driver in East Africa. Her laugh-out-loud descriptions of lunches with everyone from Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang in war-torn China to Mrs. Mandelstam in the oppressive Soviet communist regime provide an entertaining romp through history with someone who has been there. Her casual mentions of the countries in Africa and realistic dialect of the natives of the Caribbean made me pick up an atlas. Her character as a true free spirit who hires her own boats against the advice of locals shines through in her tight and un-politically correct prose. “I remember West Africa the way one remembers pain, as an incident but never the precise sensations.”

While I’m sure there are readers who would find it difficult to turn off their 2018 PC filters and would find her recounting of her 1962 trip to West Africa offensive, at it’s core it is a compelling historical and sociological exploration into the changing nature of how we travel and interact with people, and is definitely worth reading. People can skip it if they feel offended but the rest of the book is a treasure of insight, history, and world travel.

When M and UC (Hemingway) go to China during World War II, it never feels like there is a great threat on their lives. When M goes to the French islands of the Caribbean, I learned a great deal about how the Vichy government affected their lives, but I was never fearful of M’s survival. These adventures, and M’s quite frequent poor decision making – when the pilot of the boat tells you he won’t wait for you to scale a dormant volcano because he can’t dock safely, you should probably heed his warning and not be surprised when you get up in the morning and he’s gone – just a thought. But all these adventures are learning experiences for M and for us, her readers, 40 years after the original publication, 70 years after the adventure.

Still I found myself admiring Gellhorn’s quick and direct writing style, impressed by the amount of description she is able to capture in just a few words. I loved reading her stories that contained the honest appraisals of her thoughts and impressions of this most extraordinary woman.

Along with Freya Stark and Beryl Markham and I would have Martha Gellhorn as one of my travel muses. Her books are never far from reach. I would often take a book of hers with me when I went traveling and simply say “Oh Martha”. Travels with Myself and Another opened my eyes to the depth of knowledge in women’s lives and stories. And the best of Gellhorn doesn’t typically discuss how her gender has anything to do with her ability to travel and I really love her for that. Reading her I always got a real sense of, “If M can do it, so can I!” not because of my gender but because of my insatiable curiosity and need to travel and explore.

On this International Women’s Day, I am paying tribute to Martha Gellhorn, a fearless war reporter whose sagacious dispatches from conflicts spanning the Spanish Civil War to the Vietnam War paved the way for future generations of female journalists.

It was the marriage of travel and foreign cultures and curiosity and photography. It was Photojournalism.

Lynsey Addario (via camerabum)