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(VOA reporter Mukarram Khan Aatif shown in northwest Pakistan in January 2012. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for killing Aatif in a mosque in Shabqadar, some 35 kilometers from Peshawar.)

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibilty for the Tuesday killing of Pakistani reporter Mukarram Khan Aatif, who worked for the Voice of America.

Aatif was assassinated in Shabqadar, a small town located in the violence-hit Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, not far from Peshawar.

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By Ayaz Gul January 17, 2012

(Above image copyrighted by Alex Majoli)

Bill Reeves, a passionate photographer who is fortunate enough to have Magnum photographers Eli Reed and Paolo Pellegrin as his mentors, told me about a blog post that Magnum had a while back regarding advice to young photographers. It was put together by Alec Soth, who has done a series of fascinating projects such as his most popular, “Sleeping by the Missisippi” which was done on a 8×10 view camera. An interesting excerpt that Bill put together about Alec is below:

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By Eric Kim on September 26, 2011

Ron Haviv/VII
Arkan’s Tigers kill and kick Bosnian Muslim civilians during the first battle for Bosnia in 1992.

When scores of young and inexperienced photographers descended on Libya this year to cover the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government, many seasoned conflict photographers were shocked.

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By MICHAEL KAMBER

HAVANA, Cuba, 5 September 2011 — I gave a two-hour presentation on backpack journalism to reporters from Cuba, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Mexico and Venezuela at the Jose Marti International Journalism Institute (IIP) in Havana.

My presentation was part of a week long International Press Photography Workshop sponsored by the institute. During the workshop, I stressed to participants how the old model of cameraperson, sound person, producer and correspondent to acquire and to disseminate news is yielding to a leaner, more mobile methodology that delivers a more intimate, more immediate version of visual communication. We call this methodology backpack journalism. (In Latin America we call it “periodismo de mochila.”)

And the advent of this methodology, made possible by the advances in digital cameras and the Internet, is good news for those of us who practice it.

IIP Director Antonio Molto and I discussed how this shift, which has been occurring in the United States to varying degrees for some time now, is beginning to happen in Latin America and the Caribbean. The change is occurring in many parts of the world as a result of economic exigencies as much as journalistic preferences.

For practitioners like myself, the key issue is not that the shift is happening because of economics, but that it is actually happening.

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(Photos by Esther Gentile.)

By Bill Gentile
Founder/Director, Foreign Correspondence Network (FCN)

"Security forces have beaten and detained two photographers for several hours in Indian-administered Kashmir after picking them up while they covered a street protest in the capital Srinagar.

Narciso Contreras, who works for the California-based Zuma Press agency, and Showkat Shafi, a freelance photographer who has contributed to the Reuters news agency and Al Jazeera online, said they were attacked while covering protests against Indian rule in the old city on Friday."

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(Photo by Faisal Khan. Shafi, a photojournalist, was beaten and detained by security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir.)