This image: copyright Associated Press (with thanks)
Blogging about photo-journalism? It’s a tough job; but someone has got to do it. One of the toughest challenges which I have to face regularly is that of finding an image with which to illustrate a post and for which I don’t have to pay gazillions in reproduction rights.
Fair enough, snappers have to be paid & I have every sympathy for appropriate levels of remuneration, particularly for creative work. Nevertheless, the issues of copyright & intellectual property thrown up by the worldwide intraweb & its bastard child, the nefarious blogosphere, have still to be effectively addressed and I will be examining the related issues in a future post soon.
In the meantime, I leave you with my personal choice for image of the week (above). It shows members of the Iranian national football team, celebrating after going 1-0 up in their vital World Cup qualifier in Seoul last week. Alas, the South Koreans equalized in the last few minutes, denying Iran their World Cup place.
When the Iranian team emerged, it soon became clear that more than half of them, including their charismatic captain Ali Karimi, were wearing green armbands, symbolising support for Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition challenger. The high-profile game was broadcast live on television in soccer-mad Iran. However, when they emerged for the second half, the players had removed the green bands, which are not a regular part of their uniforms, amid speculation that they were ordered to do so.
I often find it difficult to find any sympathy at all for international footballers, with their inflated pay packets, over-engineered wives and/or girlfriends and their joint concommitantly ludicrous life styles. Nevertheless, when I saw these brave young men come out onto the pitch in Seoul last week, I had an uncharacteristic lump in my throat. Events in Tehran continue to move both extremely swiftly and troublingly.
I would urge anyone interested, either in the future of Iran or the future of newsgathering to monitor the #iranelection stream on Twitter. If you are interested in the future of news gathering, I will writing much, much more on that very subject, as part of a very international team, who will all be blogging on the Future of the Real Time Web at media140.com very soon – watch this space!
