quarta-feira, julho 30, 2008

terça-feira, julho 29, 2008

Vi a notícia da sua morte, 25 de Julho, no Publico, juntamente com um excerto da sua Last Lecture.

Já conhecia o video. Gostei de o rever. Vale a pena gastar uma hora e pouco a ver o video na totalidade. Inspirador.

"I have experienced a death bed conversion... I just bought a Machintosh!!"

Já agora, o seu discurso aos finalistas da Carnegie Mellon University.

wikipedia
Randy Pausch - Time Management

quarta-feira, julho 23, 2008

The Bang Bang Club

LIVRO: The Bang Bang Club - Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva

Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, Joao Silva;

The Wall

If only I could reach
The homestead of Death's mother
Oh, my daughter
I would make a long grass torch ...
I would destroy everything utterly utterly ...
Traditional Acholi funeral song
Thokoza township, South Africa, April 18, 1994.

"Not a picture," I muttered as I looked through my camera viewfinder at the soldier firing methodically into the hostel. I turned back towards the line of terrified, unwilling and poorly-trained soldiers taking cover alongside the wall next to me. Their eyes darted back and forth under the rims of their steel helmets. I wanted to capture that fear. The next minute, a blow struck me - massive, hammer-like - in the chest. I missed a sub-moment, a beat from my life, and then I found myself on the ground, entangled in the legs of the other photographers working beside me. Pain irradiated my left breast and spread through my torso. It went far beyond the point I imagined pain ended. "Fuck! I'm hit, I'm hit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!".

A wounded Greg Marinovich is assisted by photojournalist James Nachtwey, while Joao Silva takes pictures of Gary Bernard and an officer from the National Peacekeeping Force as they carry the fatally wounded Ken Oosterbroek in the background, 18 April 1994, Thokoza township. Photo by Juda Ngwenya/Reuters.

As automatic fire continued to erupt from along the wall, Joao and Jim desperately dragged me by my camera vest closer to the wall, seeking shelter next to the soldiers and out of their line of fire. Then an anguished voice broke through the cacophony, "Ken O is hit!" I struggled to turn my head through the tangled cameras and straps around my neck. A few yards to the right, I could see a pair of long skinny legs that were unmistakably Ken's protruding from the weeds flourishing against the concrete wall. They were motionless and at an improbable angle to each other. Jim ran over to where Gary was clutching Ken, trying to find a sign of life. The sporadic crack and rattle of high-velocity automatic gunfire reverberated through the air around the huddle of journalists and soldiers trying to flatten themselves against the wall.

Blood seeped from the gaping hole in my T-shirt. I clamped my hand over the hole to stop the bleeding. I imagined the exit wound of the bullet as a deadly, gaping hole in my back. Look for an exit wound, I said to Joao. He ignored me. "Youll be okay," he said. I reasoned that it must be bad if he didn't want to look, and as though all this was all happening in some feeble movie, I asked him to give a message to my girlfriend. "Tell Heidi I'm sorry ... that I love her," I said. "Tell her yourself," he snapped back.

Suddenly a sensation of utter calm washed over me. This was it. I had paid my dues. I had atoned for the dozens of close calls that always left someone else injured or dead, while I emerged from the scenes of mayhem unscathed, pictures in hand, having committed the crime of being the lucky voyeur.

Jim returned, crouching under the gunfire and murmured softly in my ear, "Ken's gone, but you'll be okay." Joao heard and stood up to rush over to Ken, but others were already helping him. He lifted his camera. "Ken will want to see these later," he told himself. He was annoyed that Ken's hair was in his face, ruining the picture. Joao took pictures of us both - two of his closest friends - me sprawled on the cracked concrete clutching my chest; Ken being clumsily manhandled into the back of an armoured vehicle by Gary and a soldier, his head lolling freely like that of a rag doll and his cameras dangling uselessly from his neck. Then it was my turn to be loaded into the armoured car, Jim had my shoulders and Joao my legs, but I am large, and Heidi's pampering had added more kilos. "You're too fat, man!" Joao joked. "I can walk," I protested, trying to laugh, but strangely indignant. I wanted to remind them of the weight of the cameras.

An officer with the National Peacekeeping Force assists Gary Bernard with a fatally wounded Ken Oosterbroek, 18 April 1994. Photo by Joao Silva.

After four long years of observing the violence, the bullets had finally caught up with us. The bang-bang had been good to us, until now.

Earlier that morning we had been working the back streets and alleys of Thokoza township's devastated no-man's-land that we - Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Joao and I - had become so familiar with over the years of chasing confrontations between police, soldiers, modern-day Zulu warriors and Kalashnikov-toting youngsters as apartheid came to its bloody end.

Kevin was not with us when the shooting happened. He had left Thokoza to talk to a local journalist about the Pulitzer Prize he had won for his shocking picture of a starving child being stalked by a vulture in the Sudan. He had been in two minds about leaving. Joao had advised him to stay, that despite there being a lull, things were sure to cook again. But Kevin was enjoying his new-found status as a celebrity and went anyway.
Over a steak lunch in Johannesburg, Kevin recounted his many narrow escapes. After dessert, he told the journalist that there had been a lot of bang-bang that morning in Thokoza, and that he had to return. While driving back to the township, some sixteen kilometres from Johannesburg, he heard on a news report on the radio that Ken and I had been shot, and that Ken was dead. He raced towards the local hospital we had been taken to. Kevin hardly ever wore body armour, none of us did, and Joao flatly refused to. But at the entrance to the township, before reaching the hospital, Kevin dragged his bullet-proof vest over his head. All at once, he felt fear.

The boys were no longer untouchable, and, before the bloodstains faded from the concrete beside the wall, another of us would be dead.

terça-feira, julho 22, 2008

Kevin Carter - 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."

"In Carter's case, Western newspaper readers saw a little girl. Carter, in the Sudanese village where he landed, was watching 20 people starve to death each hour. Perhaps he might have laid aside his camera to give the victims what succor he could (and thus never have encountered the girl in the bush); perhaps his photographs could have led to greater help than he could personally give. Should he have carried one girl to safety? Carter was surrounded by hundreds of starving children. When he sat by the tree and wept, it was beneath a burden of futility. But his was not a photo of futility, nor of mass starvation, nor of religious factionalism, nor of civil war. Readers saw a little girl. In part, at least, Carter died for that."

Wanting a meal

Let those who send all their spare cash to the needy cast the first stone...