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Michael Probst has been working as a photographer and editor in Germany for over 40 years. He’s covered everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Olympics and soccer World Cups, but one of his favorite things to do is make feature photos, the off-the-news assignments that tell their own story. Here’s what he had to say about creating this extraordinary feature image.

WHY THIS PHOTO

I like to shoot features in nature. There aren’t many things that are nicer than watching the sun rise in the outskirts of Frankfurt with all sorts of animals that you don’t find later in the day.

When the rape fields — plants of the mustard family whose seeds yield an oil used in cooking (canola) and for industrial uses — near the city started to blossom, I drove around to find locations with good looking fields of the yellowing flowers. They are found every year in different places.

When I found two or three fields that could be nice, I returned the next day with my drone. Once it was in the air, I saw that the fields were still too green. I tried again a few days later and the fields were the brilliant yellow I was looking for.

HOW I MADE THIS PHOTO

I tried various altitudes with my drone between 30 meters (33 yards) and 120 meters (130 yards). The drone was up for about 25 minutes waiting for a red car to come by.

Whether things that you photograph using a drone will work, you only find out once you are up in the air. A lot of my efforts fail.

WHY THIS PHOTO WORKS

For me, green and yellow always work for some reason, and the red car adds a different color. But I actually don’t think too much about why a picture works or doesn’t. I like it or I don’t. I try to discover things where it’s worth taking a picture.

I don’t often photograph people because in Frankfurt we don’t often have assignments with important people, and shooting interesting people on the street is not allowed without asking. That makes it sometimes quite complicated because most people don’t want to be photographed in Germany — they don’t trust the media anymore.

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For more extraordinary AP photography, click here.

Call it beginner’s luck.

On a trip to the Oregon coast in late April, amateur photographer Michael Sanchez took his new camera out to Hug Point State Park to snap pictures of waterfalls.

Sanchez, a 41-year-old middle-school band director from Vancouver, Wash., recently picked up photography and, by his account, is by no means a bird-watcher. But his trip turned into an impromptu photo shoot that made him the envy of birders.

“I got all the shots that I needed and when I was finishing up, I looked behind me and, still before the sun’s fully up, I see this little bird with black feathers. I said, ‘Oh, well, what a cute little bird, why don’t I practice shooting that bird?” Sanchez, 41, told NPR on Thursday. “When I got home, I started to process the pictures from my trip and I saw that it wasn’t a little black bird — it was actually a beautifully colored blue and a chestnut bird.”

It wasn’t until he posted his pictures to Facebook that he learned his bird sighting was extremely rare: a blue rock-thrush, far from its native breeding habitat in parts of Europe, Africa and Asia.

His April 21 sighting is the first time the bird has been seen in the U.S, bird experts said. It’s also the first blue rock-thrush sighting in North America since 1997, according to the American Birding Association, when the species was spotted in British Columbia. The prior sighting had been rejected by the ABA over debate about how the bird had arrived in the area; however, the Oregon sighting may prompt the association to reevaluate its 1997 record.

Brodie Cass Talbott, an educator with the Bird Alliance of Oregon, was stunned by the finding after his team verified the sighting. He said the male bird is the Southeast Asian philippensis subspecies — the only one of five with a reddish-brown belly.

“It was just a real shock,” he said. “This is potentially the rarest bird that’s ever been seen in Oregon.”

Oregon isn’t usually a stopping ground for vagrants, a term for birds that travel well beyond their normal breeding or wintering locations, he said — especially those traveling from Asia like this one.

Alaska likely would’ve been the quickest destination for this particular bird, which his team believes migrated from just north of Japan.

“They’re usually going to come across the Bering Sea, from Russia to Alaska and then make their way south,” he said. “So, that’s a really, really broad ocean that this bird would need to cross.”

Among birders and ornithologists, the unusual sighting has invited theories about this bird’s origins.

Talbott doubted that the bird made it all the way across the Pacific Ocean on its own two wings.

“What seems more likely is — especially since it is in the heart of migration season for this species in Asia — that this bird may have gotten blown off course during migration,” he said.

A storm could have whisked the bird toward the ocean, or it could have hopped a ride on a cargo ship, or maybe a combination of the two, he conjectured.

Just a few days later, another blue rock-thrush sighting occurred further down the Pacific coast, deepening the intrigue. About 500 miles away from the Oregon site, the same subspecies was photographed by researchers on Southeast Farallon Island off the coast of San Francisco.

It’s unclear whether this is the same bird or a second bird, the ABA said, adding that “both scenarios seem about equally likely.”

“Both possibilities are so rare that it’s really hard to know,” Talbott said.

He speculated that it was the same bird, blown south by a recent wind recorded in the region, while trying to get back home.

As for hobbyist photographer Sanchez, the buzz around his early work has inspired him to expand his focus.

“I have more of an interest in photographing birds now,” he said. “I don’t imagine I’ll ever get something like that again. But, you know, it does help me to notice birds a little bit more.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The ability to capture the essence of humanity in a single frame is what draws many to street photography. However, the genre often finds itself trapped in repetitive patterns and clichés, hindering photographers from expressing their unique perspectives. 

Coming to you from Justin Mott, this passionate video candidly discusses the current state of street photography and challenges viewers to break free from the mold. Mott, a seasoned photojournalist, expresses his concern over the lack of genuine emotion and storytelling in many contemporary street photographs. He critiques the overreliance on predictable formulas, such as high-contrast black and white images with isolated subjects, often shot through puddles or reflections for added effect. While acknowledging the mastery of legendary photographers who employed similar techniques, Mott emphasizes the importance of infusing images with soul and character, something he finds lacking in many modern interpretations.

Mott argues that blindly following these established formulas, without understanding the underlying emotions and stories they conveyed, leads to a generation of “soulless photographers” producing derivative work. He encourages viewers to move beyond mere technical proficiency and explore themes that hold personal significance. Instead of replicating the styles of others, Mott urges photographers to discover their own voices and express their unique perspectives through their work. He advocates for experimentation with different approaches, whether it be shooting in color, utilizing wide angle lenses, or incorporating a series of images with a clear purpose and narrative.

The core of Mott’s message is a call to action for street photographers to break free from the constraints of clichés and infuse their work with authenticity and meaning. He challenges viewers to dig deeper, explore their own motivations, and find their own visual language to tell compelling stories through their photographs. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Mott.
 

In 1970, aged 35, Jack Lueders-Booth left a well-paid management job at an insurance company in his native Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue his interest in photography. “Until then, I was a serious hobbyist,” he tells me over the phone from the city where he still lives, “but my interest had deepened to the point where it was more and more difficult to do my day job. I needed something more stimulating. Photography was my real vocation.”

Soon afterwards he landed a job as an administrator for the fledgling photography department at Harvard University, where later he also enrolled as a student. For his master’s thesis, he submitted a proposal that would alter the course of his life. “I told them I wanted to teach photography in places of confinement such as prisons and mental hospitals,” he elaborates, “I thought it would be beneficial for the inmates in all sorts of ways, not least because they could share their experience with their families through the images they made.”

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In 1977, he began teaching photography in Massachusetts Correctional Institution Framingham, a women’s prison that had been founded in 1872 to house those convicted of the crime of “begetting” – giving birth out of wedlock. Over the ensuing decades, under various liberal governors, MCI Framingham became known for its progressive initiatives: allowing prisoners to wear their own clothes, employing female guards and, for a short period from the mid-1970s, allowing a small intake of male prisoners who mixed freely with the female inmates.

Over the seven years that he taught photography there, Lueders-Booth transformed an unoccupied wing of the prison, building dark rooms in unused 19th-century cells and installing sinks and enlargers. There, he taught his eager charges how to make photograms (camera-less images), construct cardboard pinhole cameras and make formally accomplished portraits of their fellow prisoners. His reputation as a gifted and trusted teacher was such that he was allowed to roam freely with his 35mm Leica, taking “tens of thousands” of black-and-white photographs of the inmates. “In all sorts of ways, it was a different, more liberal time,” he says wistfully.

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The 32 images that comprise his new photo-book, Women Prisoner Polaroids, have been culled from about 200 colour portraits he also made there in 1980, when he became the recipient of the first of two generous Polaroid fellowships that included a donation of 12 state-of-the-art 4×5-inch view cameras and an unlimited supply of Polacolour film.

The results are striking in their relaxed intimacy and ordinary domesticity. As Lueders-Booth points out, the cells often “look more like college dorms or apartments”. Barred windows have been artfully concealed by curtains or decorative blinds, steel doors covered by wood-veneer panelling and the interiors often feature bookshelves, armchairs and chests of drawers topped with family snapshots, ornaments and even hi-fi record decks and speakers. Only the drab, peeling painted brickwork of the corridors and communal rooms fracture the illusion of home.

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Over the years he worked there, Lueders-Booth came to know and respect the incarcerated women, many of whom, he says, brought “an incredible openness and curiosity” to the portrait sessions. “A successful portrait is an exchange of trust that requires both parties to be totally present and engaged,” he says. “When I came to choose the images for the book, it was not just about how formally good they were, but that they somehow told a story about the person and the place.” His role, he says, “was to be a truthful witness” and, as such, he often detected “a sadness that many of the women carried, even though they would bring a brave face to the camera”.

The book also includes a short selection of anonymous oral testimonies Lueders-Booth tape-recorded during his time at Framingham. One expectant mother explains how her baby will be taken into foster care soon after she gives birth: “I cannot see myself, after five days, giving my new baby up to anyone. They’ve got their nerve. But I’m not supposed to have any feelings about this.” Another inmate speaks frankly and without remorse about the moment when she fatally stabbed an abusive man with a pocketknife. “I told the judge, ‘If I have to do it again, I’ll do it again…’ I know I’m in jail, but, no sir, no sir. I do not feel sorry for defending my body ’cause I’m a woman and I have had it. I have had it.”

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These visceral and defiant first-hand accounts evince an anger that is in stark contrast to the stillness and calm of the portraits, I suggest. “Yes,” he says. “But what you have to understand is that, for many of the women, this may have been the first and only time they have had a chance to express their anger at the injustice of their lives.”

The book concludes with a long freeform poem written by an inmate, Tina Williams, in 1980, when she had served nine years in Framingham for “turning tricks.” Titled I Love My Sisters, Sisters Love Thy Selves, it articulates a hard-earned wisdom that, ironically, was only achieved through a time of deep reflection in the relatively calm confines of Framingham prison. There, she and women like her were free from brutally controlling male partners or parasitic pimps, and what she memorably calls “the knife of life’s coldness”.

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Williams was one of a few women with whom Lueders-Booth formed a lasting friendship. “She died just a few weeks ago,” he says quietly, before describing her poem as “a cautionary tale that speaks of the damaged lives that many of these women had”. In his time there, he encountered several prisoners who, having served their time and been released, would end up back inside a few months later. “They came back looking battered and drained,” he says. “I realised that, for them, prison was a better life. A place where there were no pimps, no coercion, no violence.”

These humble Polaroid portraits speak of another America that seems impossibly distant, while the anonymous faces that stare back at us across the decades seem both present in the moment and out of reach. “A photograph is made in one-twetenty-fifth of a second,” says Lueders-Booth. “It cannot come close to representing the totality of a life, but, through a kind of rapt attentiveness, it can reflect a moment very deeply. Maybe that is enough.”

A Russian soldier raises a Soviet flag over Berlin’s Reichstag in Yevgeny Khaldei’s well-known 1945 photograph of wartime triumph.

But in the original image, the officer standing below can clearly be seen wearing a watch on both wrists. Khaldei’s shot, first printed in a Moscow magazine, was quickly withdrawn and the extra watch, which might actually have been a military compass, was removed for safety’s sake. Looting was not a good look and was punishable by death.

This little-known work of deliberate visual distortion is shown in a new exhibition, The Camera Never Lies, which opens later this month and tackles the public’s dwindling faith in photographs. Tristan Lund, who co-curated the new show, said: “It’s rare to see both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ prints together. The Khaldei photograph that went out later had one watch scratched out because the editors knew this tiny detail might have incriminated not just the officer but the whole Soviet army.

“In the second image, the sky is much darker and dramatic as well. It has been massively manipulated for effect.”

The exhibition, which features more than 100 images from world-renowned photographers including Don McCullin, Stuart Franklin, Robert Capa and Dorothea Lange, will demonstrate that a picture, however well intended, can never be the whole story. Although few images on display involve deliberate distortions, the interpretations of several have spawned controversies and rival accounts.

The show, at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, features shots of the assassination of President Kennedy, the Chinese “tank man” protester in Tiananmen Square, and the chilling image of a figure jumping from New York’s burning World Trade Center in 2001. Running from 18 May until 20 October as part of the six-month series What is Truth?, it looks at how altered context, sometimes coupled with technical manipulation, has defined events in modern history.

The role of photographs as a reliable, trustworthy source is increasingly under threat, with editing technology now readily and cheaply available. In March, family shots put out by the Princess of Wales were found to have been edited, and the Observer revealed that other candid royal photos had been quietly altered before.

Lund said that he and his collaborator, Harriet Logan, still value the “inherent truth” of the work they display, although he believes it poses a key question for our age: “The exhibition asks what truths we can really expect to extract from a photograph. Is the succinct and objective sharing of facts the thing we remember most from a single image, or is it the emotion triggered by the composition and creativity of the photographer that tells a thousand words?”

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Visitors will be able to compare three of the four images of Tiananmen Square that went into news archives. Franklin’s 1989 shot “The Tank Man” depicts a moment when the Chinese government cracked down on a lengthy Beijing democracy demonstration, killing hundreds on 4 June. The unknown protester who stood in front of a line of tanks was photographed from different angles by cameras inside the same building, documenting a scene that has been heavily censored in China but in the west has become an emblem of oppression.

“Younger people may not know where the picture came from and, if they do recognise it, they will probably have a composite of all the photographs in their mind,” said Lund. “One image zooms in on the protester while another is a little further out and includes the distraction of a street lamp. Franklin’s has more of the street and the tanks.

“We wanted to remove each from its news context to slow down the way people could look at them. We are displaying it with the Kate Adie BBC report from Tiananmen and with a work we’ve commissioned from a contemporary Chinese artist whose father was in the square. Some of his friends didn’t survive. She does not want her name known because she wants to continue to visit her family in China.”

“Beijing continues to deny that it happened,” added Logan, a former news photographer. “But for the public the image is often a proof, a kind of verbatim truth, that allows us to relax about what we are being told about uncomfortable events. Many of the images in the exhibition, like the one known as “Napalm Girl”, from Vietnam, have become part of history.”

This upsetting image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who was photographed as a young naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, now visually represents a 20-year war, Lund said. The same has happened with Capa’s 1936 photograph “The Falling Soldier” from the Spanish civil war. The story behind this shot is disputed, due to the lack of background detail given by Capa at the time and the loss of the negatives. Some suggest it was staged. Research later established the location and revealed that on that day the frontline was some distance away.

“Capa was only 21 when he took the [shot] and he will have sent back an unprocessed roll of film which may not have been correctly captioned. That happened,” said Logan. “I worked back in the analogue days, and picture editors cropped photographs later and made decisions that defined an image. So when Capa got home he will have been confronted with a whole lot of truths attributed to his image.”

Seventy-nine years later, another Magnum photographer, Max Pinckers, stood on the same hill with a colleague and made the artwork Controversy, now also in the show. Using a high-resolution camera they recorded the landscape, now empty except for olive trees.