WASHINGTON (AP) — Jacquelyn Martin is a staff photojournalist with The Associated Press based in Washington. She covers politics at the White House and Congress and has traveled the world as a pool photographer covering every secretary of state since Hillary Clinton. She is also known for her self-driven enterprise feature packages for which she photographs, writes and records video. She was the last press photographer to photograph Nelson Mandela before he died.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Jacquelyn Martin is a staff photojournalist with The Associated Press based in Washington. She covers politics at the White House and Congress and has traveled the world as a pool photographer covering every secretary of state since Hillary Clinton. She is also known for her self-driven enterprise feature packages for which she photographs, writes and records video. She was the last press photographer to photograph Nelson Mandela before he died.
Jacquelyn Martin is a staff photojournalist with The Associated Press based in Washington. She covers politics at the White House and Congress and has traveled the world as a pool photographer covering every secretary of state since Hillary Clinton. She is also known for her self-driven enterprise feature packages for which she photographs, writes and records video. She was the last press photographer to photograph Nelson Mandela before he died.
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This feature is part of a series highlighting Associated Press journalists for Women’s History Month. An earlier installment featured one of our photographers working in Ghana and her work focusing on the lives of women in her country.
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Based in Washington for the AP, I cover a lot of high-stakes politics. I’m used to working in scrums, walking the fine line between being assertive while also using finesse to ensure access. Too aggressive and no one wants to work with you. Too soft and you’ll get run over. When I started in 2006, female photojournalists in Washington were greatly outnumbered by men. While trailblazing colleagues like AP’s Susan Walsh pushed boundaries long before I arrived, and more women have joined us in the years since, there were many years where I was the only female face in the photo scrums. It taught me a lot about walking that line, which was useful this past October.
On Oct. 11, 2023, I boarded a U.S. Air Force plane to fly with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on his last-minute trip to Israel and the Middle East in an attempt to stop all-out war from spreading across the region in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas against Israel. I was assigned as the photo pooler and tasked with providing pictures to U.S. news outlets and the global wires with pictures of these frantic diplomatic efforts.
With one day’s notice and no idea of how long we might be away, I packed lightly and prepped what captions I could, knowing everything could change at a moment’s notice. Although I’ve covered the State Department, traveling as the photo pooler many times, under several administrations, I knew this story was urgent and that gave me a renewed sense of purpose.
The Middle East can be a tough place to photograph under the best of circumstances. Access can be difficult, the press and officials can be intense, and you must be quite assertive. It’s also less common to see female photojournalists there. Sometimes people not knowing what to make of you works in your favor. Add in volatile international politics, a brewing war and sky-high tensions, and that made it even more challenging. The assignment took on a greater sense of urgency, knowing that people’s lives would be affected by the meetings I was covering. The adrenaline made it hard to sleep, but that was a good thing because it turned out we wouldn’t be sleeping much. I knew my colleagues in the region were out in the field and in danger. Still, I had to do my best to document this one part of the larger story.
Right away I could sense the chaos, and thus an opportunity, to make more behind-the-scenes imagery than is usually possible. Being prepared and working the chaos to your advantage can lead to more storytelling moments. These photo sprays are often highly orchestrated. This time there was so much up in the air that I was able to quickly calculate where to position myself, slip in, do my job, and come away with more of a variety of scenes than normal. It helped that I’ve worked with the State Department team before; in fact, I was with them as the pooler for a trip to the Middle East just months before. You must show that you can do the work, that you won’t get in the way. It helps to show them that if they work with you and trust your instincts, that images of their guy will go around the world.
I need to travel lightly on State Department trips. I wear all the gear on my body, even on the planes. There’s no time to pack and unpack a camera bag. Traveling compactly comes in handy when you must push through a wall of Qatari official photographers or slip into photo opportunities quickly last minute because you had to sprint up from the back of a very long motorcade.
I’m not a photographer who covers war and conflict. I cover mainly politics. There was one overnight moment when we were being held outside in the middle of Israel’s Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv where alarms went off. Rockets were incoming and the press pool had to seek shelter underground. I felt the booms from the Iron Dome detonation. I hadn’t experienced that previously, and it shook me. As a mother, I will admit to sending messages to my son to say I loved him, just in case. It seems sort of silly looking back, as we were in a safe place and so many people in the region were suffering much worse at that same moment. But it was scary and really brought home the seriousness of what had happened and how the situation could spiral.
A bursary focusing on the theme of sporting endeavour and designed to help talented young photographers has been launched in honour of the memory of the award-winning Guardian and Observer photographer Eamonn McCabe.
The bursary, established by The Royal Photographic Society (RPS), The Guardian and Observer and McCabe’s family will give £3,000 to a photographer aged 25 or under to produce a project.
The RPS described McCabe, who died in 2022, as “one of the outstanding photographers of his generation”. He had produced “a swathe of memorable images that defined their era”, it said.
McCabe started his career as a sports photographer, worked as an educator and broadcaster and was the Guardian’s picture editor for 13 years.
He won picture editor of the year six times and sports photographer of the year four times. He also won news photographer of the year in 1985 for his images of the Heysel stadium disaster in Brussels. In the 2000s he pivoted to portraiture, photographing key figures from Tony Blair to Iris Murdoch and Lou Reed to Desmond Tutu. Many of his images are displayed in the National Portrait Gallery.
The bursary recognises McCabe’s commitment to supporting other photographers, including those just setting out on their careers, said his wife Rebecca Smithers, a former Guardian journalist who is supporting the award along with Ben and Mabel McCabe.
“Eamonn was always generous with advice and practical help to up-and-coming young photographers whether on assembling a portfolio, choosing the right course or trying to secure work experience,” Smithers said. “He knew from personal experience how tough it was for people starting out who did not have any contacts in the business.”
Tom Jenkins, an award-winning Guardian sports photographer and videographer, said the mentoring he received from McCabe had been invaluable.
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“The photographic world owes Eamonn McCabe a huge debt. He was an inspiration to a whole generation in this country and abroad,” he said. “Countless young photographers like me were given a first break and encouraged into the profession by him. Not only has he left a legacy of incredible images but he has also generously ensured that photographers following on behind him are set up to succeed.”
Those wishing to apply for the bursary can do so online before the start of August, the RPS said. The theme can be “interpreted as widely as the applicant wishes” but their work should be new and suitable for publication, it said. The chosen project will be published by the Guardian and brought to a wider audience. The winner is expected to be announced before the end of September, with the project given 12 months for completion.
“Eamonn was incredibly encouraging of aspiring photographers and this bursary will continue that by producing new and exciting photography into the future,” a spokesperson for the RPS said.
Angela Rossi was born and raised in Chicago and moved to Danville in 2017 with her family and has chosen Danville as her home ever since. She says, “Danville is the most supportive, uplifting community I have ever encountered.” Angela has lived all over the country and has never encountered people like the people of Danville. “There is nothing like the people in this town.”
Angela is a mother of two children who are 11 and 6 years old who attend Schlarman Academy in Danville. Her partner, Chris, has three children, and they live together and raise their blended family with love. Her goal as parent is to join her children on their growth journey and help lead them toward their best selves. She approaches parenting kind of like an entrepreneur approaches business. She asks, “How can I encourage them to grow and be with them in the thick of it as they engage with the world around?”
She loves her career, but she says parenting is the number one priority in her life. “It is an honor to get to raise them.”
In 2015, Angela started exploring photography as a hobby. Before that, she was in the beauty industry, as a massage therapy and aesthetics instructor and as a small business owner offering custom makeup, facials, massage, etc. When her brother passed away in 2002, they scrambled to find photos of him and realized they didn’t capture enough of his legacy. She realized then that photography is documenting a very important life journey.
Having children of her own and photographing them made her love and appreciate photography even more. That grew into a passion to help business owners, families and individuals capture their stories and precious moments. Angela says, “Telling a story through visual media is invaluable.”
Angela is best known in the area for her photography business, Rossi Studios. Angela loves being a business owner, and we are so glad she has chosen Danville to capture the beauty of the area and the meaningful experiences that we have in this city. She is not small-minded with her business plans, and the roots she has put down continue to grow.
Ultimately, she loves serving small businesses, organizations, schools, and families. She hopes to provide employment for other creatives as her business grows – not just in photography, but in videography, print, and visual media services.
She doesn’t want to leave businesses empty-handed. Angela says, “I don’t want to just give them images and walk away without teaching them how to utilize them. So, I am growing into providing print and digital assets they can use online or in person at the same time.”
Digitals are wonderful, but she wants her clients to have something in their hands that they can hold and cherish or marketing assets in their arsenal that they can put to use.
Angela says, “I am not serving anyone well if I do not complete the project. I am a photographer, but I see myself as someone who is in the service industry. I am here to serve my clients. My gift is to help and serve others. My tool is my camera.”
Six years after his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans returned to the city recently with his unfiltered, unedited and altogether untouched images.
“The Point Is Matter”, the 55-year-old German-born artist’s second show at David Zwirner Hong Kong, consists of more than 80 works, ranging from images taken in the mid-1990s to others captured recently in Hong Kong and in Shenzhen, southern China.
In addition a video installation, Four Videos of Build from Here, dominates one of the gallery rooms, accompanied by electronic music from Tillmans’ upcoming second album, Build From Here, to be released on April 26.
The visuals are mesmerising; one clip zooms in on the inner workings of an industrial offset printer from various angles, while another frames the moonrise above a dark sea as the artist’s silhouette moves against the shimmering reflection. In another scene, the moon glides across the screen.
Tillmans, who became the first photographer and non-British artist to be awarded the UK’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2000, says he is obsessed with astronomy and the vastness of space. The video captured the real-time movement of the moon seen through a telescope.
He first looked through a telescope when he was 12, he says.
“In my teens, I tried all sorts of mediums of expression, like painting, making music, drawing and even making clothes, only to buy a camera at 20.” He discovered the manifold possibilities of photography and it became “the source” of all his art, he says.
“[Some images] can be a painterly discourse, some can be documentary,” he says, referring to his famous records of the liberating hedonism of 1980s and 1990s nightclubs and youth subculture. Some may be pure studies in colour, nature, or abstraction.
“It is all based on the study of reality,” he adds. At the same time, he has always been interested in how lenses can show reality differently to how the naked eye sees it.
When he was a teenager, he was already using photocopiers to distort photos taken with borrowed cameras, or found images. In his 2023 series “Sirius Through a Defocused Telescope”, six inkjet prints depict the brightest star in the night sky with rainbows shining around it.
They were captured using a set-up that slightly refracted the light beam from the star, Tillmans explains. “There is no coloration here, no digital manipulation. It’s a recording of natural light.”
“I want there to be a certain sense of trust in my pictures as evidence,” he says, and jokes that he is probably the only photographer who doesn’t know how to use Photoshop.
While he did start using digital cameras in 2009, his way of image making has changed little, he says. “My photography is, in a way, always easy. From when I started 30 years ago, I’d always wanted to make the pictures look simple.”
But there is nothing random about his images. They reflect his understanding of the world and his recognition that information lies beyond the materiality and surfaces of things, he says. The point of “The Point is Matter” is to see beyond the seemingly casual display of pinned or taped prints on the walls.
“What runs through this exhibition is a deep interest in the matter of things.
“In today’s world, we are constantly living in the future as well as in the past. We’re projecting; we’re editing; we’re looking at pictures of things. But the actual things – this shirt, this branch, this leaf, this roadside, this ocean surface – these are the material realities of our life that I look at with great curiosity,” he says.
HKG Airport Interior (2023) is an apt example of this inquisitive lens. Fixating on the glitch on a screen at the Hong Kong International Airport, it brings attention to a technical mistake that most would otherwise overlook; but to Tillmans, it was a fleeting moment of authenticity to be preserved.
His ability to turn the mundane into compelling images is on show in Ulaanbaatar Still Life (2023) and Window Left Open (2023), still lifes of plants and windows in a study of light and shadow.
“I think a lot and I read constantly, newspapers and all sorts of publications. But I also really like to just rest my eyes on things and take in what life gives me at present. Life is infinitely interesting.”
“Wolfgang Tillmans: The Point is Matter”, David Zwirner, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Tues-Sat, 11am-7pm. Until May 11.
RICHLAND — A state representative, two city councilors, a city administrator and a photojournalist walk into a burning building. And no, this isn’t a joke.
One at a time, followed closely by a firefighter from their local department and surrounded by a crew of training ground operators, they hook up to air tanks, crawl to a burning couch, aim the hose and spray.
