Looking at America's Great oil Spill with Bag News Notes

This session was hosted with Bag News Notes; see their website at bagnewsnotes.com/

We will be discussing an edit of eight representative newswire photos, considering each in terms of the questions below:
*Is there an iconic image of the oil spill? What does it look like?
*If we think of the BP/government agendas in terms of “we’re on top of this”how much has the visual coverage perpetuated this kind of thinking and framing?
*To what extent has the visual media been successful in communicating the impact of the crisis and the physical scale?
*How much are we not seeing in pictures, given the visual limits of covering this story ? To what extent do the photographs address the issue of the oil-addicted public?
*And finally, we want to know if anybody is willing to confess how beautiful many of the spill images actually are?

Today’s Participants
John Moore – Photographer/Getty Pictures
Erika Blumenfeld – Artist and Documentary Photographer
Kari Goodnough – Photographer/Bloomberg Photos
Loret Steinberg – Professor of Photojournalism and Documentary Photography/R.I.T. – BagNews Consultant
Nathan Stormer – Professor of Communication and Journalism/U. of Maine
Jon Levy – Founder and Director, Foto8
Paul Lowe, Course Director, MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, London College of Communications/Open-i
Sandra Roa, Editor, BagNewsSalon
Michael Shaw, Publisher – BagNews
Cara Finnegan, (Professor of Communication – U. of Illinois. Co-editor: Visual Rhetoric: a reader in communication and American culture) – Moderator