David A. Cantor is a previous contributor to foto8. (see issues 02 and 05). He lives in Toledo, Ohio where he works on the picture desk at The ToledoBlade newspaper. In addition to his writings on the issues confronting modern photojournalism he continues to shoot his own photography. At the moment he is concentrating on compiling a series of images on AAA Baseball.

Nader Ebrahimi is a previous contributor to foto8 (see issue 01). Nader is a freelance artist living and working in the D.U.M.B.O section of Brooklyn, a painter and a photographer making books and exhibiting at galleries. The work featured this month is part of an ongoing series on the American Landscape that he eventualy would like to publish as a book or a series of books based on the landscape of America ... cars, houses, the land.

Tim Hetherington is a London-based freelance photographer. He is represented by Panos pictures. In addition he is an associate of Further Vision, where he is dedicated to reviving photojournalism into a brave new era of transmission and communication. This year he has been working on projects about Alzheimer's disease, India's digital revolution, and rehabilitation in West Africa.

Jon Levy lives in London where he works freelance shooting news and feature photostories. Most of his time these days is taken up with working on issues of foto8 which he edits and strives to establish as an alternative publishing source for modern photojournalism and photography projects. Jon is represented by ReflexNews in the United States and Continental Europe and by Panos Pictures in the UK.

Bill Swersey has worked as a photojournalist since graduating from Boston University in 1984. He was Moscow correspondent for the Gamma Liaison agency from 1991-1996 and worked extensively for the New York Times in Russia from 1991-1993.

Bill studied multimedia design and production at New York University's Interactive Telecommunication Program from 1996-1998 and has created several ground-breaking projects using IPIX immersive photography, including "Moscow Panoramas" for the New York Times on the Web and a virtual tour of the Frick Collection museum in New York City. In addition to exploring techniques for news coverage and documentary storytelling in new media, Bill is Director of Marketing for the Newsmakers Online Photo Service.
For examples of his work see also: www.swersey.com

Ilkka Uimonen lives in Brooklyn NY and is represented by Sygma News photos. Ilkka is a previous contributor to foto8 (see issue 02). He has spent a considerable time in recent months working on the Kosovo crisis from within Serbia. He has firmly established himself in the photojournalism world, covering stories from Indonesia to the Balkans for major U.S. and European publications.

May 1999
Issue 4.

Cameron Davidson At the tender and most impressionable age of 23, he shot the first of four stories for the National Geographic; his first story required aerials of a great blue heron rookery in Southern Maryland and Davidson was hooked. Since then, Davidson has shot aerials for advertising, corporate and editorial clients around the world. His career was profiled in the September/October 1996 issue of Communicatiuon Arts and his aerial work was recently featured on Nature’s Best, an American television show about outdoor photographers.

When not in the backseat of a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, Cameron can be found hacking away on his Powerbook, attempting to write the great Scottish-American eco-terrorism thriller that features a down-on-his-luck former National Geographic shooter, trying to make his way back into the world as the Police Chief of an almost extinct American Indian tribe living in the Florida Everglades.
www.camerondavidson.com

Stephen Ferry is based in New York, represented by the Liaison Agency in the U.S. and by Lookat in Europe. His work appears often in major publications such as Life, Geo, Stern, and Paris Match. Ferry has been honored with World Press Photo awards in 1992 and 1998. He has spent the past decade covering social conflict and human rights issues throughout the world, especially in Latin America.

Since 1991 he has returned every year to Potosí.

Erik Freeland is based in New York City. In 1993 following his graduation from Rochester Institute of Technology he was hired by U.S. News & World Report magazine as an intern. The internship became a contract which then became a staff position. During this time he covered stories at the White House, Congress, in Haiti, Cuba, the Oklahoma City bombing, and a wide variety of assignment work. He was at U.S. News for four years.

After leaving the magazine in April '97 to go freelance he began an affiliation with Matrix agency in New York. Currently freelancing in New York City, he was given this year an Award of Excellence from the POY competition and an Honorable Mention in the White House News Photographers' Association for coverage of the impeachment proceedings in Washington, DC, which incidentally he covered for his old employer U.S. News & World Report.

Mark Maio currently lives in Atlanta, Ga. , and works as a documentary photographer. His images are distributed by Sipa Press in New York. In 1988 he moved to Buffalo and taught at the University of Buffalo until June of 1996. During the first few months of 1989, as a way of learning about Buffalo, he began a personal photographic documentary project on the Irish First Ward on the south side of the city. The project, which continues now in its eighth year, has taken him to Kansas, where he spent time living and photographing on a family-owned farm during the wheat harvest, and down the Mississippi River towards the modern port of New Orleans, from where technology has made it more economical to transship grain.

In September of 1996 he encountered the Kinsmen Independent grain boat in Duluth, Minn., photographing the grain loading process and making the trip across the Great Lakes on its voyage to Buffalo and back. Currently, Mark is organizing his photographs, research and oral histories into a book on the grain scoopers (Against the Grain: Buffalo's Irish Grain Scoopers), for which he is looking for a publisher. An exhibition of the grain work will open at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Fla. on June 1 and runs through Sept.22. His work on a dummy book layout and digital processing has been with the expert design help of Laurie Shock.

Susan Stava currently works as a freelance photographer for the NY Daily News. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, People, Stern, Focus and other publications. She won a NYSCA grant for her work on women correction officers on Riker's Island.

Les Stone is a previous contributor to foto8 (see debut issue). He continues to work on news and feature photo stories for international magazines and distributes through Sygma in New York. His trip last autumn to Europe for Fortune magazine resulted in an eight-page picture layout in the magazine.

March 1999
Issue 3.

Alexandra Boulat lives in France, where she is represented by Sipa Press. Her work in Kosovo was accomplished during numerous visits to the region in 1998. She exhibited in Perpignan at "Visa Pour l'image" in the summer where she was awarded the highest honor for best in show. In October she returned to Kosovo and followed the plight of refugees contending with living on the run in the forests.

I would like to thank Sipa New York and Sue Brisk in particular for bringing this story to foto8 and for the support she has given in this venture.

Carol Cleere is a staff photographer at the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper in Florida. She has worked for newspapers, magazines and wire services in Minnesota, Washington, Georgia, New York and Florida during her 10-year career as a photojournalist.

Recently she has combined her passion for journalism with her love of art by developing a specialty in mixed-media illustrations. She has been featured twice in POY and was selected Georgia Photographer of the Year by the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar in 1995.

Brian Fitzgerald lives in Phoenix Arizona where he works as a photojournalist. He has made numerous trips to Russia and the former Soviet republics from 1991 before the fall of the Union. He often works for Russian language publications on these trips (including the Russian edition of Paris Match) owing to his skill with a camera and knowledge of the region and language. His project on the miners was completed over the summer months of 1998 and has not been published before.

Steve Macauley lives in Williamsburg Brooklyn where he works in film, video and photography. He currently is completing a film project with a Manhattan public access TV studio. He has freelanced for numerous news and fashion publications as well as stringing for the Associated Press at one time.
The series of images and the story written especially for foto8 are from a trip in November to Mexico where, as he says in the story, he got lost and discovered a wonderful place.

Tim Pershing is currently working freelance based in Los Angeles Calif. and Jersey City N.J. .He has worked on news assignments for AFP, and major U.S newspapers, including the Washington Post, Boston Globe,and The Independent in London. His work has been published in news magazines and others , (Time, U.S.News, Esquire).

Exhibiting as a fine artist since late '80s, he is the recipient of an NEA award for photographic mixed media work on Haiti and Bosnia.
In 1998 Pershing's photography also appeared in a book published by Rockport Press, entitled The Art of Enhanced Photography. His story on bedrooms is part of an ongoing project for which he is seeking funding for completion and an exhibition.

Brian Walski has been a newspaper photographer since 1980. He has worked as a staff photographer at the Albuquerque Journal, the Patriot-Ledger and the Boston Herald. After 12 years as a staff photographer at the Boston Herald he joined the photo staff of the Los Angeles Times in September of 1998.
Whilst in Boston he covered international stories including the Gulf War, the famine in Somalia, the funeral of Princess Diana, poverty in Calcutta and the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Indian state of Kashmir.

Walski was born in Illinois, grew up in Chicago and studied journalism at Northern Illinois University. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

January 1999
Issue 2.

Blaize lives sin Brooklyn and hails from England. His images of fashion evoke a mood of a bygone era, perhaps the '20s or '30s. His work on stories for the New York-based aRude magazine incorporates the use of large format polaroid negative film. He likes the immediacy this affords him to capture and look at the images he shoots, as well as giving him a large negative with which to work for printing.

David A.Cantor lives in Toledo, Ohio after moving there from New York two years ago. As a photographer always and editor for the Toledo Blade he is known for his vociferous championing rights for freelance photographers and for encouraging the creative independence of photojournalism.

Dave's experience with news wires as a photographer in New York and the six years he has done editing intensively for news leaves him, in his own words, habitually "thinking about where the [photography] process is headed". But wherever that analysis may go it will always be for Cantor firmly rooted in the instincts and craft he honed listening to the crackle of his scanner in pursuit of hard news.

Ron Haviv is currently working as Newsweek magazine's contract photographer in Washington D.C . He lives in New York and has contributed to the Saba agency since its founding in 1989. He has covered numerous news stories for the world's magazines and newspapers, including repeated trips to the former Yugoslavia to document the war in Croatia, Bosnia and most recently Kosovo.

Haviv is the recipient of several World Press and Picture of the Year awards as well as the Leica Medal of Excellence. His work has been exhibited at Perpignan's Visa Pour l 'image and the Newseum Gallery in New York.

Steve Lehman lives in Los Angeles. He began his photographic career proper in 1987 when his photographs of Tibet became front page news around the globe. He has since travelled extensively on assignment for the U.S. and European news magazines, covering amongst others, events in Chechnya, Rwanda and Burma.

The culmination of some10 years of work and six separate visits to Tibet, his book The Tibetans has been received as a major volume in the representation of the Tibetan struggle. With a view of himself as a interpreter for the Tibetan people and events in Tibet he brings back to the West an ethnography of their existence and, by virtue of this, proof that the struggle continues against the mighty odds of the Chinese.

Lehman has exhibited at Visa Pour l'image in Perpignan and has been honorably mentioned in international competitions a number of times.

Mike Nelson is a staff photographer for Agence France-Presse. Having lived for some time in Egypt where he worked for the wire services he currently lives in Los Angeles.

As a staff photographer in LA, Mike is responsible with one other and a team of stringers for coverage of almost all of the Western United States: film openings in Las Vegas, the Oscars and golf in Washington State mixed in with trips to Kuwait and breaking news during the past year alone. It is a wonder he finds time to pursue other projects.

His photographs of the Day of the Dead augment other projects he has shot on ceremonies and festivals. For Mike, whether it be a wedding, a birth or a death, the culture of how people mark these rites is of constant fascination.

Evan Schneider lives in Queens, New York. He is a staff photographer for the United Nations where his duties range from the daily handshakes and meeting pictures to travelling on foreign assignment to photograph the work of U.N. missions. Evan can often be found performing his photographic duties for the Secretary General on the 38th floor of the UN headquarters building.

As an art school graduate Evan developed a fascination with gas pumps when he chose them as the subject for a project. Some 10 years later and despite a dramatic shift in his photographic direction into the realm of the United Nations he still finds joy in the discovery of a new pump. Whether it be on a road trip around the U.S. or during a brief stop at a gas station, Evan says he just knows where the pumps are hiding.

The pumps have a human personality which is especially present when he finds them lonely, abandoned with paint peeling at the back of a shed or discarded in a field. The pumps are perhaps an anomaly in his otherwise journalistic photographic endeavors but they do, however, represent a document of our times in a similar way to a picture he may take of a handshake between Kofi Annan and a visiting head of state.

Bob Strong has worked in a number of photography jobs: in Delhi, India for the Associated Press, in Mexico for Reuters and more recently contributing to the Sipa Press in New York. He currently lives in New York and freelances for USA Today.

Bob combines his love of travel with a linguistic and local knowledge of places like Cuba, Mexico, Latin America and Haiti, working for his own stock and travel stories on these trips as well as news services and private corporate clients.

The photographs featured in this issue are from some of his numerous trips to Cuba over the past five years, a place to which he has travelled for events such as the Pope's visit as well as for personal photographic excursions.

ILkka Uimonen , born in Finland, resides in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Sygma newsphotos in the city. After a few years shooting New York stories for U.S. as well as Finish publications Ilkka has steadily moved towards more overseas news work. His photographs from the mountains of Afghanistan are a recent example of this.

It is the prospects of a "possible" news assignment from a magazine that will usually entice him to make the journey, but he stays ever mindful of longer-term projects and the stories that come with travel.

November 1998
Debut Issue (01)

Nader Ebrahimi arrived in New York from California to start work as a photo assistant five years ago. His art school education and his love of painting never deserted him during the years he spent assisting fashion photographers.

Despite successes as a fashion photographer himself, which included assignments from W magazine and the Los Angeles Times Nader has in recent months returned to his primary passion of art and painting. Ebrahimi's photography is an extension of this and visa versa.

Porter Gifford, is represented by Liaison International in New York and his photographs are distributed outside the U.S. by Gamma Paris. Gifford's story on heart surgery was the product of six weeks' work over this summer following multiple patients at the New York University Hospital.

His reportage on the subject of minimally invasive surgery started off as a self-motivated assignment and eventually became a Life magazine double spread in their fall 1998 special edition entitled Medical Miracles.

Gifford, based in New York, accepts corporate and news assignments through his agency whilst he continues to shoot photo-essays of his own conception. www.portergifford.com

Jon Levy lives in London, England and works freelance as a photographer and editor of this magazine. Previously a contributor to Gamma liaison and a staff photographer for Agence France-Presse in New York, he has a keen eye for news and a dee- rooted appreciation for photography and the work of photojournalists.

Andrew Lichtenstein has made numerous trips in the past five years to correctional facilities in Texas and the southern states from his home in Brooklyn, New York. As part of an ongoing long-term personal project he has compiled an extensive collection of images that deal with the penal system and the lives of prison inmates.

The story on prison tattoos featured in foto8 this month has been compiled from his recent material and is being distributed as a complete story by the Sygma New Photos agency in New York and by Sygma Paris.

Lichtenstein is currently working on diverse assignments for newspapers and magazines as well as preparing grant applications to secure financing for this pertinent and necessary reportage on the growing prison population and the resultant industry that has grown to support it in the United States.

Les Stone, a Brooklyn resident, spent six weeks in Cambodia in May 1998 on assignment to cover the general election. As is the case with many of his frequent travels, Stone manages to steal himself away to pursue self-assigned stories. His photographs of Cambodians maimed by land mines are an example of this.

Despite the recent attention given to the international ban of land mines the daily accidental detonation of dormant mines continues. In Cambodia, where the number of deployed antipersonnel mines is greater than the population, it is a sad fact of life that many will become victims. Stone has concentrated this reportage on the younger people cut down by this terrible legacy of war.

Stone, a winner of World Press Photo accolades for his coverage of Kurdish refugees in Turkey, is currently on assignment in Europe photographing a story on immigration. His photographs are distributed by Sygma News Photos.