08 March 2009

8 tips for speakers from a TED photographer

Via boingboing: James Duncan Davidson was one of our shooters at TED2009 (along with Asa Mathat -- an amazing team). As a photographer and conferencegoer, Duncan has watched a lifetime's worth of speakers, the good and the bad, the pro and the amateur, the calm and the completely freaked out. His takeaway: "There are things that speakers do that feel good to them, but which are not actually great for the audience." He offers 8 pieces of presentation advice -- meaning presentation of yourself, not of your PowerPoint slides -- in this roundup: Dear Speakers. From the essay:

Please deliver your speech to the crowd, not the screen. Your slides aren’t the recipient of your presentation. Your audience is. Face them. Address them.

Please take off your name tag. This is self-explanatory enough.

Read all 8 tips >>

See more of Duncan and Asa's work in the TED2009 photo galleries >>

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10 February 2009

How I caught the mosquito

We had two great editorial photographers at TED2009 in Long Beach -- the brilliant Asa Mathat and James Duncan Davidson. As luck would have it, Duncan was the shooter who happened to be in the right place to catch Bill Gates' now-famous mosquito release. Read how Duncan got the shot. In the enlargement above, it's clear that, yes, they were real.

Photo (enlargement): James Duncan Davidson

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10 October 2008

YouTube takeover: James Nachtwey's video playlist

From the TED Prize blog:

Today, James Nachtwey is the guest editor of the YouTube homepage. Along with the video of his photographs of XDR-TB and a special message from James to YouTube users, James has "selected compelling examples from other YouTube users that exhibit the power of film to relate a story and spread the word. These YouTube users -- by turning their cameras on subjects like the conflict in Africa, the human rights violations in Myanmar, and the HIV crisis in rural America -- are following Nachtwey’s lead and, ultimately, are changing the world through the force of their efforts and film-making expertise."

To find 3 quick ways to end TB, visit XDRTB.org.

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05 October 2008

Trouble hitting SIGN on XDRTB.org?

We've heard from some users (and thank you, those who wrote in!) that the SIGN button on the XDRTB.org home page is not working. If you clicked on SIGN and nothing happened, you can try turning off your pop-up blocker, or use this direct link:

SIGN >>

to sign the petition and tell world leaders to take action on TB and XDR-TB. You'll first see a small window where you can choose your country, and then you'll be taken to a petition that will reach your country's leaders directly.

This petition really does make a difference -- on Friday, the first day of the XDRTB.org campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama issued formal statements on what they'd do about TB if they were elected President of the United States.

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05 October 2008

See the XDRTB.org photographs in LA today and this week

All around Los Angeles this week, Phantom Galleries LA has arranged screenings of James Nachtwey's photographs of the XDR-TB epidemic. Here's the full schedule, starting with two showings today, October 5, in downtown LA and in Long Beach:

Sunday, October 5, 2008:

Elevate Film Festival
Nokia Theater at LA Live Downtown Los Angeles
2pm-8pm

University by the Sea, Long Beach
Projection and information booth inside the Lafayette Building Kitchen.
Free class

Thursday, October 9, 2008:

Downtown Art Walk
Projection on wall at 6th and Main Street
7-10 pm
(With an info booth at Phantom Galleries LA at the PE Lofts, 610 Main St., showing the photography of Alexandra Breckenridge and Shalon Goss curated by Edgar Varela Fine Arts.)

Friday, October 10, 2008:

Pasadena Art Night
Projection in window at 82 North Fair Oaks.
7pm-11pm
(With an info booth at the Phantom Galleries LA exhibit Dave Lovejoy: “Circular Logic” at the Majestical Roof Gallery, 88 North Fair Oaks, Suite 102, Pasadena.)

Saturday, October 11, 2008:

NELA Art Walk
Screening at Future Studio, 5558 N Figueroa St., Highland Park
7pm-9pm

Look here for more last-minute additional screenings >>

Follow this wish on Twitter >>

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04 October 2008

James Nachtwey's wish and video in Portuguese

Marconi Pereira, who blogs in Portuguese at BLOG OM -- Orientação Mediúnica, has captioned James Nachtwey's TEDTalk in Portuguese. This TEDTalk includes the full XDR-TB slideshow, as well as inspiring excerpts from James' original TED Prize acceptance speech, where he talks about what drives him to make change through photography. Many, many thanks, Marconi!

To watch James Nachtwey's TEDTalk subtitled in Portuguese, use YouTube's new "CC" feature, at the bottom right-hand corner of the video player window -- it's circled in red in the image at left).

Follow the TED Prize on Twitter >>

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03 October 2008

Use my photographs to stop the worldwide XDR-TB epidemic: James Nachtwey on TED.com

Photojournalist James Nachtwey sees his TED Prize wish come true, as we share his powerful photographs of XDR-TB, a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis that's touching off a global medical crisis. Learn 3 quick ways to help at XDRTB.org. (Duration: 5:52.)

See James Nachtwey's powerful photographs on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 300+ TEDTalks -- including more talks about Media That Matters.

Watch James Nachtwey make his TED Prize wish: "I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age."

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25 August 2008

Prototype: Scope, a camera for kids

Inspired by James Nachtwey's TED Prize wish, designer Bas Groenendaal shares this prototype camera with TED. The Scope camera has a fresh look and a singular purpose, he says:

to be used as a therapeutic instrument for underprivileged children, e.g. children living in (former) warzones. Children can take photographs and self-portraits in order to rediscover their environment and identity, and share their point of view with others.

With its open-steering-wheel design (you click the shutter by squeezing the sides), Scope invites a new perspective on picture-taking, removing the distance between the photographer and her subject. As Groenendaal writes,

I wanted to emphasize the importance of looking and framing. In my design there is no screen ... It places the photographer in the spotlight: while looking through the camera, the world looks at you. You cannot hide behind the camera.

Groenendaal took the Scope prototype to an asylum-seekers center in the Netherlands, where the kids quickly figured it out: "A funny observation was that the children used Scope to frame their own heads: hold the camera really close to their face and -- while talking -- look at everybody around them. The children seemed very conscious of themselves, their position, what they were seeing." It's an illustration of the power of photography to frame a very personal story. When Groenendaal watched James Nachtwey's TED Prize wish, he felt a deep resonance:

I was triggered in particular by the question posed as part of the wish: "What are creative ways to make the biggest impact in a way that others could use in future?" I believe that photography from within, made by the people/children themselves, can make a powerful impact on not only the outside world, but also on the people themselves.

Visit Bas Groenendaal's website >>

Having trouble leaving a comment? (We're working on it...) Email it to us: blog at ted dot com

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29 July 2007

Ed Burtynsky's beautifully monstrous "Manufactured landscapes"

If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary "Manufactured landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.

"Manufactured landscapes" is based on the work of photographer -- and 2005 TED Prize winner (watch his speech) -- Ed Burtynsky, whose camera has captured stunning images of man-transformed landscapes around the world.

Burtynsky is not much interested in micro: his focus is on vastness, on the scale of the environmental scars and transformations brought forth by industry, energy production and transportation. The documentary (trailer) is a hybrid: it's a meditation that makes very little use of words, leaving it to images and situational sounds and noises to tell the story, and at the same time a convincing illustration of the monstrosity of today's global trade. Although Baichwal shows images from Canada, California and Bangladesh -- and makes generous use of Burtynsky's TEDPrize speech -- the movie's main character is China, the "manufacture to the world": there, Burtynsky, followed by Baichwal's cameras, has shot factories, huge container ports, quarries, the Three Gorges Dam, electronics graveyards, the rapid urbanization of Shanghai. (Another great movie, recently, has shown some of this within a fictional frame: Gianni Amelio's "The Missing Star").

Burtynsky's work (see his books) can be unsettling. He extracts beautiful, sometimes poetic images from outrageous alterations and destructions of the environment. He calls himself an artist -- not a reporter -- and refrains from judging what he photographs or from politicizing it, wanting, as he said at TED, to "make people think harder about our planet's future" without suggesting them a direction. As the film goes I find myself thinking of painters: Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dalì because, respectively, Burtynsky's photos of a computer components dump, the stacks of containers in the port of Tianjin, and the lunar shipbreaking beach of Chittagong (Bangladesh) oddly remind of their artworks.

The photographer has a rationale for aestheticizing this devastation: that's a way to gain access. Most of what Burtynsky photographs is on private land: "My work is mostly negotiation, with some photography thrown in", he said half-jokingly at the premiere in San Francisco. There is a scene in the movie where he is shown with his assistants and an interpreter trying to talk Chinese officials into opening the gates to a neverending coal yard, and the key sentence is "we will make it beautiful". Asked how he convinced factory managers to gather all their thousands of employees on a street for the picture that makes the poster of the movie (see image), Burtynsky explained that what Westerners see as a robotization of workers, the Chinese proudly consider an organizational and industrial achievement.

This discrepancy echoes throughout the documentary. It powerfully reminds us that "stuff" doesn't just happen, that it comes from somewhere, although we tend to forget or ignore it (thought of the impact of the extraction industry lately?) And it illustrates how, as we transform nature, we redefine who we are and our relationship to the planet.

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13 July 2007

E.O. Wilson on PBS: Why should we care if the woodpecker goes?

The last "Bill Moyers Journal", the weekly report on PBS, featured a long interview (video - transcript) by Moyers with biologist and TED Prize 2007 winner EO Wilson. The focus was very much on Wilson's career -- "No one in our time has added more to our understanding of Earth's ecology than Ed Wilson" is how Moyers described him -- but Moyers took the opportunity to also ask questions about the Encyclopedia of Life. The EOL is Wilson's TED Prize wish (video - summary - text): It's a vast project aimed at documenting all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth, and those yet to be discovered ("We're maybe today about 1/10 through the discovery of species", says Wilson). Efforts towards an EOL have been underway since January 2006, but Wilson's TED2007 speech has significantly accelerated the process, with the McArthur Foundation leading a US$ 50 million funding commitment, leading scientific institutions including Harvard University and the Smithsonian teaming up, and agency Avenue A/Razorfish creating a first design concept for the Encyclopedia and a video to explain the ambitious vision behind the initiative, using photography by Frans Lanting (watch his TED 2005 speech) and others.

Moyers is a great interviewer. At a certain point, he asks Wilson: why should we care if the woodpecker goes? I mean, we've lost---how many species have we lost?

Wilson: How many species going extinct or becoming very rare do you think it takes before you see something happening? We now know from experiments and theory that the more species you take out of an ecosystem like a pond, a patch of forest, a little bit of marine shallow environments, the more you take out the less stable it becomes. If you have a tsunami or a severe drought or a fire, it is less likely that that ecosystem, that body of species in that particular environment, is going to come back all the way. So it becomes less stable with fewer species. And then we also know it becomes less productive. In other words, it's not able to produce as many kilograms of new matter from photosynthesis and passage through the ecosystem. It's less productive. It sure is less interesting, though, isn't it? And more than that: we lose the services of these species.

Moyers: The services of these species.

Wilson: Yes, services of these species to us. Like pollination and water purification.

Moyers: That we get free from nature.

Wilson: Yeah. Here's an easy way to remember it.

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