New York Times

On “nomaphobia” and digital detox: Tuning out, turning on and doing without the the devices, if only for a few days.

December 01, 2018

There’s a hotel on Bali that has passed a “digital detox” policy for its guests — while poolside, anyway. The resort has banned smartphones from outdoor public areas to enforce relaxation, and the early word is that people are loving it.

I won’t be on Bali for the next two weeks, but I will be somewhere in the tropics, untethered from my digital devices.

So … no blog, no Dispatches, and no weekly columns for TVWorthWatching.com. Imitation is the sincerest form of — well, if not relaxation exactly, something close. As writer Hannah Ellis-Petersen put it recently in the Sunday Observer, does a hotel pool exist if you don’t put it on social media?

Ayana Resort in Jimbaran, Bali —perched on a limestone cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean — is encouraging guests to simply soak in their surroundings and take pleasure in being alive and somewhere other than the concrete jungle — to stare at the wider, green world, rather than staring at a screen.

Ayana’s digital detox extends to tablets, MP3 Players and laptops, not just smartphones. It’s all part of an effort to “forcibly untether people from their addiction of checking the news, compulsively taking photos, updating social media and replying to emails even when on holiday.”

I will be taking photographs, mind, just not compulsively. And not on Bali.

All of us need to take a break from the wired world on occasion. It’s hard sometimes to grasp just how pervasive — and easy — instant communication has become, across the entire globe. A conservation-photographer acquaintance of mine just this past week sent me a Facebook message from the Southern Ocean, off the northern tip of Antarctica. Her expedition ship had no Internet connection while in Antarctica, she noted, but she had discovered — presumably by accident and not out of some need to stay in touch with the West Coast of Canada — that her Facebook Messenger app worked, albeit sporadically, and assuming her ship wasn’t about to be tossed about in a Force 9 gale while trying to navigate the Drake Passage, somewhere off Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands. The life of a research assistant in 2018 is never completely cut off from the ends of the Earth, it seems.

On Bali, Ayana’s guests are encouraged to swim, “truly relax and be in the moment” and — spoiler alert — read a book. On actual paper.

There’s even a new word to describe our need to be in touch 24/7 — “nomaphobia,” which experts are now labelling “the 21st century disease.” Surveys show that, even while travelling, one-in-five of us check our phone once an hour. More than one in 10 of us — 14%, if you must know — admit to checking our phones at least twice an hour. A 2017 Deloitte survey in the UK found that more than a third of those polled — 38%, if you must know — said they believed their were using their smartphone too much . . . and then immediately went back to looking at their phones.

After all, how were they to know the results of the survey they had just taken, if they didn’t look it up online?

Myself, I plan on reading Paul Theroux’s new book, Figures in a Landscape: People and Places, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman’s book, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War and Survival — in the original hardcover.

Back in two weeks.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2018: The experts have spoken. Now it’s the people’s turn.

October 28, 2018

It’s a known fact: People trust customer reviews more than they do critics. As one influencer posted recently on Review Trackers — not exactly an unbiased source, as any objective, professional journalist worth their salt, would point out — “So it’s between the New York Times and Yelp.”

The academia website academia.edu recently asked — somewhat rhetorically — if consumer critics write differently from professional critics, while the self-explanatory site “Coaching for Leaders” (coachingforleaders.com) named “3 Differences Between Feedback and Criticism” (the Dale Carnegie principle: ‘Don’t criticize, condemn or complain’).

All of which is a roundabout way of taking a second look at the 54th annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards, announced just last week.

I was fairly critical — and I stand by my criticism — of the judging committee’s choice for the top image this year, which favoured the safe and comfortable over last year’s daring and, some would say, controversial and inappropriate choice of a poached rhino, slaughtered for its horn, worth an estimated USD $120,000 on today’s black market. (Why ground powder from rhino horn, made of the same material — keratin — as our fingernails, should be so valuable to a primarily Asian market, and it is strictly an Asian market we’re talking about here, is a topic for a whole other debate.) One idea holds that wildlife photography awards should celebrate the beauty of nature; the other holds that, in the environmental catastrophe facing humankind and planet Earth today, the top award is better suited as a deliberate provocation, urging us to wake up and shake us out of our complacency.

Any award calling itself “the People’s Choice” wears its intention clearly and on its sleeve, though. Every year, following the WPOTY’s black-tie awards dinner at London’s Natural History Museum, the “Oscars of wildlife photography awards,” as they’ve been called, the judging committee announces 24 images shortlisted for the People’s Choice Award, which is announced the following February (voting for this year’s edition closes Dec. 13). Each visitor to the Natural History Museum’s website is allowed one vote, and one vote only. (This isn’t America’s Got Talent, where you can vote early and often, in almost as many different ways as you can think of.)

Anything open to the general public is driven by emotion, not reason.

That’s positive emotion, though. One of this year’s shortlisted finalists, of a starving polar bear, went viral around the world earlier this year. It sparked a lively and at times bitter debate about humankind’s effect on climate change in the polar regions. (Climate deniers refused to accept that the melting polar caps could have anything to do with a starving polar bear, et alone that humans might be responsible.) The image, by SeaLegacy conservation photographer Justin Hofman, is undeniably powerful, and has already proved influential, but I suspect it won’t win the people’s vote. (In his caption, titled “A Polar Bear’s Struggle,” Hofman admits his entire body was pained as he witnessed the starving bear scavenge for food at an abandoned hunter’s in the Canada’s high Arctic; the bear could barely stand under its own power, Hofman recalled.)

There’s nothing wrong, in this case, with favouring beauty over fragility. Inspiration works in wondrous, often mysterious ways. In a world beset by grim, increasingly bleak news — everything from climate change and dwindling food resources to a new mass extinction — one can’t fault people for looking for a ray of light in the darkness, wherever that light may be found.

As the Natural History Museum’s own guidelines for the Lumix People’s Choice award points out, they’re looking for a winning image that “puts nature in the frame,” something that reflects the beauty and fragility of the natural world — with the emphasis, I’m guessing, on “beauty.”

A conservation-photographer acquaintance and occasional travel companion tells me he’s doubtful of people’s choice awards as a rule, since a public vote tends to favour those finalists who have a sizeable social media following, and he has a point.

Still, as someone who pays attention to customer reviews — I’ve personally known a number of professional critics, in different fields, who are so screwed up I’m not sure I’d trust their judgment of anything, let alone something I care about — I’m always curious to see where popular tastes lie.

I’ve yet to decide which image I’ll be voting for myself, but I have narrowed my choice down to three or four candidates. I have until next month to make my final decision — and you to, too, if you choose to participate.

As with any vote, though, remember: If you don’t vote, when you had the chance, you can’t complain afterwards, if the vote didn’t go the way you want.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/wpy/community/peoples-choice/2018/index.html

Wildlife Photographer of the Year is the world's most prestigious nature photography competition (WildlifePhotographerOfTheYear.com). This year’s finalists and winners, some 100 images in all, are on display at London’s Natural History Museum from now until June 30, 2019. See nhm.ac.uk/wpy for tickets.

And now for something completely different — a feel-good story for the birds.

August 05, 2018

They’re all connected. Spiritually, if not exactly literally. A 1996 family film based on the real-life experiences of a Pickering, Ont. naturalist who taught Canada geese to follow his ultralight aircraft through the sky; a 2012 publicity stunt by Vladimir Putin to guide a flock of young Siberian cranes with his microlight aircraft on their migration route; and a bid late last year to repatriate critically endangered, captive-raised northern bald ibises back to the wild by guiding them on a three-week migration across the Alps to their wintering grounds in Tuscany using — you guessed it — an ultralight aircraft, prove one thing: Not all good ideas are created equal, and not all environmental news is bad.

Fly Away Home, directed by Never Cry Wolf and The Black Stallion’s Carroll Ballard — a card-carrying member of Francis Ford Coppola’s late 1970s’ film-making company American Zoetrope — was warmly received by critics and moviegoing audiences alike when it was released in theatres, and not just because actor-playwright Jeff Daniels and young Anna Paquin made an enchanting onscreen father-daughter couple. Reviewers at the time described Fly Away Home as an evocative, uplifting — no pun intended — film that, as one animal-rights noted, “celebration of the creative ways human beings and animals can help, assist, and love one another.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote that “Mr. Ballard (turned) a potentially treacly children’s film into an exhilarating 1990s’ fable.”

Bill Lishman, the real-life, dyslexic, colour-blind sculptor and naturalist whose experiences provided fodder for his autobiography Father Goose — later adapted by Hollywood as the fictionalized feature film Fly Away Home — died this past December, just two weeks after he was diagnosed with leukaemia.

He is said to have been the first person to have guided geese on their migration routes using an ultralight aircraft, which he first did in 1988, just three years after he told his wife and daughters that he was going to teach birds to fly with him.

Lishman’s small-scale, homespun efforts were studied and copied by other grassroots, family-run conservancies around the world, and an environmental program showed early success with the endangered Siberian crane. In 2012, looking to raise his public profile and boost his reputation as a rugged, eco-sensitive outdoorsman, Russian president Putin famously donned an all-over white suit and pair of goggles and temporarily became surrogate parent to a flock of juvenile cranes.

This isn’t “junk science,” by the way: The phenomenon, officially known as imprinting, describes the way certain species of birds attach themselves to the first living being they see after birth.

For the record, Putin did have a copilot on his famous flight in a motorized hang glider; presumably the copilot was the brains of the operation, at least where the actual flying was concerned.

Putin took the stunt seriously; when a Russian conservationist with the crane program complained to western media that it was a glorified photo op that did little to further the cranes’ cause, Putin is said to have phoned her out-of-the-blue to complain about her attitude. (Interestingly, Guardian science writer Flora Malein wrote in a Sept. 2012 opinion piece that the self-styled man-of-action can be considered to have done a good deed by bringing worldwide attention to a critically endangered species. Siberian cranes at the time were in rapid decline, their numbers estimated at no more than 2,900-3,000.)

Migration isn’t a natural instinct, according to behavioural scientists: It’s taught behaviour. Parents teach them to migrate. Because young birds imprint on the first living being they see, they’ll accept a basic disguise, even a disguise as weird as a white flight-suit and a microlight with rigid wings and a sputtering engine.

Imprinting is not common to all birds, of course. It has been observed in a surprising number of geese, cranes, ducks, and now ibises.

The northern bald ibis had been extinct in the wild in central Europe for more than 300 years, surviving only in a handful of zoos.

Thanks to the efforts of a multi-year project in Austria and Germany, a project that involves both imprinting and the judicious use of ultralights, some 100 ibises now live wild in southern Germany and Austria.

This past year’s migration flight involved (human) foster parents and some 30 (bird) subjects hand-raised at a Vienna zoo from the time they were just a few days old. The migration flight was the fifth successful flight of its kind. Granted, program founder Johannes Fritz says, the northern bald ibis is not a particularly sexy or beautiful bird — a Siberian crane it ain’t — but as program founder Johannes Fritz recently told the Guardian newspaper, they have certain charisma all their own.

Hollywood movies aren’t just about entertainment, it runs out. Fritz told the Guardian he drew inspiration for his wacky program from Fly Away Home, which he saw while studying for his PhD at a behavioural science research institute — a research institute that had just started working with captive-born bald ibis chicks at a nearby zoo.

What goes around, comes around.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/20/formerly-extinct-ibis-taught-to-migrate-by-following-light-aircraft

https://e360.yale.edu/features/after-a-400-year-absence-waldrapp-rare-ibis-returns-to-european-skies

Jane Goodall and ‘The Wild Immersion’ — a potential watershed moment for wildlife film-making.

May 26, 2018

Have you ever experienced the roar of a jaguar standing in front of you with nothing restraining him?

“The Wild Immersion” aims to make that not just possible but a virtual reality.

With the blessing of Dame Jane Goodall, French film-maker Raphaël Aupy and a small team of dedicated film professionals asked that question just last week of the assembled throngs at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, along with a challenge to, and there’s no subtle way to put this, “Trade the sunglasses for VR helmets.”

Film is one thing; the VR experience quite another. Goodall is determined to not only make younger people see and hear what’s left of our wild world, but experience it and feel it, in their bones and in their soul, as if they were there, in person.

First, the bare bones behind the project. This is the boring part. The explanation of what it is. Why it matters, why you should care — and why Goodall is injecting so much of her personal passion into the project — comes after this.

Simply put, The Wild Immersion is a virtual-reality entertainment production company whose stated aim is to produce, recreate and present immersive experiences in wild, natural surroundings, whether it’s staring up from a blade of grass at a pride of prowling lions or soaring through an African sky while flying with a flock of flamingoes, looking down on the pristine waters of a primordial lake not far from the volcanic highlands where humankind was born.

Goodall, the Bournemouth, UK-born primatologist, anthropologist, ethicist, author, behavioural scientist, mother and human being who founded the Jane Goodall Institute, has been spreading the word of conservation for half a century now, in the trail of her pioneering studies of chimpanzee behaviour at Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park in Central Africa’s “Great Lakes” region.

In 2007, when asked why, if chimpanzees are so much like us, why are they endangered, she famously replied,

“Well, in some ways, we’re not successful at all. We’re destroying our home. That’s not a bit successful.”

And then there was this admission, a few years before that,

when asked by the New York Times’ Tamar Lewin why she had exchanged her calling as a behavioural scientist to that of an environmental activist:

“I feel a desperation to make people see what we are doing to the environment, what a mess we are making of our world. At this point, the more people I reach, the more I accomplish . . . I do miss Gombe and my wonderful years in the forest. But if I were to go back to that, I wouldn’t feel I was doing what I should be doing.

“If you look into their [chimpanzees’] minds, you know you’re looking into a thinking mind. They teach us that we are not the only beings with personalities, minds capable of rational thought, altruism and a sense of humour. That leads to new respect for other animals, respect for the environment and respect for all life.”

The first three 12-minute films in the Wild Immersion film series — depicting the African savannah, underwater and polar habitats — were unveiled at Cannes, but that’s just the beginning.

Future screenings — or immersions, if you will — are planned for China, the U.S. and across Europe. There are plans, too, to introduce The Wild Immersion in schools through headset-maker Lenovo’s “VR Classroom” project, via “virtual field trips.” The Wild Immersion project is designed to raise money for nature reserves — that’s the conservation part — based on 80 minutes of VR footage captured by Aupy and his team of technicians following 120 days of filming on five continents.

In an interview with The Guardian’s Steve Rose earlier this week, Goodall, 84, explained why she refuses to give up in the face of what seems like impossible odds.

“There was one time, years ago, when [David Attenborough] was going to give up. When I talked to him, he was totally depressed and feeling hopeless. Then something happened and he dived back in.”

That something, it seems, was Jane Goodall.

“I (just) did my usual spiel,” Goodall told The Guardian. “‘We can’t give up.’”

Most ordinary people can be forgiven for thinking just that, Goodall said, but there always room for hope. That’s one reason — one reason only — why she titled her 1999 book Reason for Hope.

“Most ordinary people . . . feel, ‘What can I do to help?’ So they do nothing. My life mission is to give people hope. Because, without hope, you don’t bother. Being abusive is not going to get you anyway. You need to reach the heart. Once you’ve reached the heart, you’ve got somebody for good.”

Based on the early evidence — and just take a gander at the images below, if you doubt that — The Wild Immersion is going to touch a great many hearts, possibly more than any two-dimensional film or TV program can hope to do.

http://www.thewildimmersion.com

Watching the world change: The images that shaped and reflected our world in 2017.

February 20, 2018

Each year, the World Press Photo Awards present a unique and unsettling account of the previous year in human history.

There are so many annual photography competitions these days it’s a wonder that anyone with a camera hasn’t won something, somewhere.

There’s something particularly affecting and powerful about photojournalists recognizing their own, however. These are often images from the frontlines of war and human conflict, but there are always one or two that reflect humanity at its most aspirational and forgiving.

The nominated photographers here — I’ve selected 20 choices from the dozens of images that made the shortlist — share one thing in common, apart from a keen eye and an ability to keep their camera in focus under often trying circumstance. They are men and women who, in facing a crisis, captured a photographic record of that crisis. In so doing, they laid bare the emotion of that moment for the world’s eyes.

Many of these images are hard to take in. Some are controversial. Many are profound. They all have something to say. None of them are boring. Advances in digital photography and the Internet ensure they will never be forgotten. We live in a visual age, where exploitation and redemption are often intertwined.

These images show how photography, in the words of former Life magazine creative director and Vanity Fair editor-of-creative-development David Friend, help us to witness, to grieve, and finally to understand the unimaginable.

The World Press Photo’s prestigious “Photo of the Year” award has been whittled down to six finalists.

I’ve placed those six finalists at the top of the 20 I’ve included below, if only to show that they all share compelling qualities. The top prize traditionally awarded to the photographer whose creative expression captured an issue of journalistic importance in a way that made us think.

As Lars Boering, managing director of the World Press Photo Foundation, said in announcing the six finalists:

“The best visual journalism is not of something; it is about something. It should matter to the people to whom it speaks.”

This year’s jury was chaired by Magdalena Herrera, director-of-photography for Geo magazine.

“We were looking for challenging approaches,” Herrera told the New York Times. “But the respect of the subjects as human beings and how suffering was portrayed was most important.”

Three of the six shortlisted images were taken by freelance photographers on assignment for the Times. The remaining images were taken by photographers working for UNICEF, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.

Finalists in all categories were chosen from photographers representing 125 countries. Herrera and her fellow jurors whittled the field down to 42 nominees in eight categories, including Photo of the Year.

There has been controversy in the past over photo manipulation, with some entries being disqualified after the fact.

The World Press Photo Foundation now examines the RAW picture files of all images that make it to the final rounds of judging. As many as 20 percent of images reaching the final rounds have been disqualified over the last three years, most often for “excessive post processing” — a polite way of saying too much digital manipulation in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Boering told the New York Times that there were fewer disqualifications this year, but “fewer” was “still too many.”

“Why manipulate?” Herrera added. “If you’re an illustrator, you’re not a photographer. We’re talking about people taking out and moving things, not toning. We are (living) more than ever in a period of fake news, (so) it’s good that World Press applies these rules.”

The winners will be announced on April 12th at the 2018 World Press Photo Awards Show in Amsterdam.

The winning pictures are traditionally assembled into an exhibition that travels to 45 countries and is seen by an estimated 4 million people each year.

Here, then, are 20 selections from this year’s 40-plus nominees. Captions were collated by The Atlantic from material provided by the World Press Photo Foundation.

The first six have been shortlisted for World Press Photo of the Year. The remaining 14 are my own choices — I curated them, if you will, from the remaining 3—plus finalists, and reflect my own tastes and biases — the environment, species survival, African wildlife, spot news and international reportage. I've saved, well, not the best exactly for last, but I have saved a kick for the end.

As always, the photographer’s name and copyright information is embedded in the photo itself, using Squarespace’s “caption overlay on hover” function.

Please be warned. Many of these images are graphic, and some are disturbing. As they’re meant to be. Others — the elephant, for example — are quite beautiful.

Disturbing and beautiful. Such is the world.

SHORTLISTED FOR PHOTO OF THE YEAR

©Patrick Brown/Panos Pictures for UNICEF

PERSONAL CHOICES FROM REMAINING NOMINEES

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen