Sources and Methods #12: Louie Palu

 
palu_headshot.jpg
 

Suzanne Schroder's blog

Suzanne Schroder on Twitter

Louie Palu 101:

Louie's website

Louie on Twitter

"Four Burning Questions for Louie Palu, photojournalist"
 
"Louie Palu Talks Global Conflict"
 
"Louie Palu: The Art of War"
 
"Dangerous exposure: Photojournalist Louie Palu on working in conflict zones"
 
"“Photographs Are There To Empower You”: Louie Palu Talks Mexico, The Drug War And Photography"

"Kandahar Journals"

"Portrait of an Artist: Louie Palu"

"Prison Photography: Louie Palu"

Show Notes:

2:45 - British photographer Don McCullin inspired me to become a photographer, saw his work and photographs, and immediately connected with it.

4:55 - Freelancing was exhilarating at the start, taking a photograph and then seeing it in paper’s the next day, but I knew quickly I wanted to work on long term projects.

5:32 - First major project were the mines in Northern Quebec and Ontario.

6:20 - I don’t usually get commissioned to do work, I do my own projects and then try to publish them. Eventually got hired at the Globe and Mail.

7:02 - Why do I cover war? I used to say because it was important, and of course it is. But really, there’s nothing personal in that answer, and it didn’t satisfy me. What I realized was that it all connected to my parents, to my roots. My dad's friend was thrown in a POW camp during WWII serving in the Italian Army, and he used to have to fight for food, literally competing with dogs. And that story really stuck with me, as I grew up with these stories, and it really has informed my work.

9:34 - The first conflict I covered was in Kandahar. I was a Canadian, and I heard we were about to start a combat mission there, and I wanted to document it, to start one of my long term projects. It wasn’t just a historical / patriotic thing, it was ‘what’s happening with this country, and our country.’

11:02 - My photography in Afghanistan wasn’t about Italian, or Canadian, or even Afghan, but it was about a human experience.

14:03 - Kandahar has astonishing history, so much to document.

17:01 - I wanted to avoid being a photographer who followed the shooting, or ‘bang bang’ as photographers call it. Did lots of researcher, and really tried to figure out how I could physically get where things were happening, and fill in the holes in the embedding system.

27:00 - Absurdity and war certainly go hand and hand.

31:49 - How to prepare for heading out in Kandahar? Basic respect and researching about everybody in that place as much as possible, and learning about the small things. Everyone wants to learn about the big things, but it’s really the small things.

33:10 - The Taliban don’t want to destroy Afghanistan, they want it to cohere. Afghanistan has always been a weak state but a strong nation.

35:03 - I think it’s important to see war from all sides. Only until you reach inside yourself and understand your own humanity is inhumanity revealed. Until you understand that, you’ll never get it.

52:02 - War is never straight forward, many people think that. It’s a lot of shades of grey. I think the important thing is training - and a lot of journalists went to Afghanistan but they were inexperienced, and this showed. Neutral and objective reporting wasn’t always there. It’s about looking at everybody as an individual.

54:25 - Palu’s Garmsir Marine Portraits. And his Concept Newspaper.

56:15 - I’ve covered the Mexican Drug War, and nobody wants to believe how violent that place is. 100,000 dead since 2006 - it’s like a little Syria with a functioning economy.

1:10:20 - One of my favorite photographs from Guantanamo doesn’t have to do with the detainees - I really started thinking about the environment of this place, and took a picture of a chair. It’s just a chair. But you don’t need to see any more to understand that something probably not that great happened there, and I thought it was really powerful.

1:17:13 - The big next project: Kandahar Journals, from 2009 and 2010 when I was in Kandahar. And I’ve been working on a story to go underneath all the stories and writing and photographs from my time there. It’s also about Kandahar being this forgotten front in the war as well. Working on a book as well. I’m also working on publishing parts of my archive and make it more accessible to the public.

Sources and Methods #11: Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple 101:

Molly’s website

"15 rules for creative success in the Internet age" - BoingBoing

 

Show Notes:

3:50 - I’d describe my work mainly as anti-authoritarianism.

5:02 - When I was an 11 year old, I would draw pictures of the cool kids so they wouldn’t beat me up - using art to curry favor, it’s the oldest artist trade.

7:02 - I’ve always drawn the world in front of me, and people always respond to that.

9:10 - Drawings can be as accurate as photos, and in some ways they can be more transparent than photos. Photos have a pretense of truth even though we all know they can be manipulated and photos lie. There’s this idea that if there’s something in a photo, it tells the truth. With drawings, the creator’s subjectivity is front and center.

9:44 - Molly’s writing on Occupy Wall Street on CNN

13:23 - I always say that artists are the most spoiled people on earth - we get to mash together all these genres and get away by saying ‘I’m an artist, dammit’ when people respond to it.

16:01 - Molly’s sketches from Guantanamo: The Faces of Guantanamo in The Daily Beast

23:09 - Photos lie in two ways: by taking a photo of one thing and saying it’s another, or else by taking photos out of context.

31:05 - I think that being able to draw, it gives you permission to look in a way that’s socially unacceptable in most places. When I draw and I’m staring, I realize I look like a creep, but I get to say it’s ok, I’m an artist?

31:26 - Drawing is: Physically reproducing reality.

32:26 - Biggest advice to artists: total stubbornness. Be incredibly true to your work. And look in a sharp way at people making money off of artists, or people on the business end of your field - and if there are popular beliefs that are exclusively to your detriment...examine them.

Artists Molly Follows:

Ganzeer

Waseem Al Marzouki

Photographer Clayton Cubitt

36:17 - Molly’s Tools:

In areas where time is of the essence, I use fat gray markers and tiny little micron pens to sketch things down fast fast fast - used this in guantanamo and also in courtroom drawings.

In locations where I have more time, I take iPhone photos, and then examine them later, and focus on the scenes or details in them that I want to bring out - this is how I did my work in Abu Dhabi.

Molly’s Books:

Fiction - A Naked Singularity by De La Pava

Non-Fiction - The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War by Rohini Mohan

Molly’s Film: Exit Through the Gift Shop

Molly’s Music: Mashrou’ Leila

Sources and Methods #10: Jason Lyall

 
 

Jason Lyall 101:

Personal Website (you can find links to all his research here)

Yale Professor Page

MISTI USAID Page

Jackson Institute at Yale

Institution Social and Policy Studies

Show Notes:

3:58 - I’m interested in the effectiveness of violence - when it works, whether it works - and what it does to the victims. And I’m interested in insurgents and how they react to violence, and how does it affect them? Do they ramp up their attacks, or scale down their attacks?

4:40 - Counter insurgency is not a new practice. But it’s often been approached in a fairly crude fashion. What we’re trying to do is bring some new literature to the table from spatial economics literature or survey literature and better understand it.

9:00 - Study looking at artillery fire that the Russians were lobbing more or less randomly into populated settlements. They were doing this as a way of trying to separate the people from the insurgency, showing people what the consequences of continued support for the insurgency would be. Most of our theoretical literature would say that indiscriminate violence is incredibly counter productive and would not be be effective - would generate new insurgents and new grievances - so you should see this uptick in violence. What’s interesting in the Russian case is that you don’t see that uptick. It actually seems to have decreased insurgent violence in the periods after the shelling. So it’s an outlier case... And I would say it is what has led to the dismantling of the insurgency in Chechnya.

12:12 - I think the way I would read that paper - we should not assume that violence has any one kind of effect. We should be looking for the different effects, and looking for the conditions of those effects.

14:30 - The metrics used in this research is really good for short term effects, but entirely different methods may be necessary to take the long term view and understand those effects. The field lab I run is trying to merge those two perspectives.

17:58 - We’re not good at trends, we’re not good at regional patterns, we’re not even good at generalizability inside the same case we’re studying - and these are problems.

22:00 - It is possible to get the data in difficult areas, but you have to be really really smart and careful. You can do it, but it takes a tremendous amount of time. And the risk of failure is incredibly high. In Afghanistan, I’ll typically have two or three projects going at the same time with the understanding that one of them will likely fail.

23:04 - If you adopt the right methodology, you can get more data than we ever thought possible.

26:22 - I have a love/hate relationship with the Asia Foundation. I know what they’re trying to do, but I have questions about how they’re doing it.

27:32 - The latest Asia Foundation Report here.

27:49 - Surveys for me are about mapping patterns down, rather than getting really deep insights into what a particular concept means.

29:00 - For local level questions or regional questions - I think these are a nice middle ground, using a mid-range methodology, where I can do lots of things but not everything - is the way to go.

29:35 - Smart polling should be a key part of our toolkit, but the thing that we usually lack is baseline data. By the time we start caring about a place, it’s too late to run baselines. So we’re forever behind, because we never know what was there before. So I’m a big proponent of using smart, tailored surveys. Specific questions. Specific areas.

30:54 - With that, these surveys just measure attitudes, not behavior. Important to remember that.

33:01 - In Afghanistan, I think we vastly underuse SMS as a tool.

36:40 - Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan (co-authored by Lyall and includes the Endorsement polling technique). A primer on  the list technique in polling.

45:55 - Bombing to Lose? Airpower and the Dynamics of Violence in Counterinsurgency Wars, published in August 2014 by Lyall, found:

Evidence consistently indicates that airstrikes markedly increase insurgent attacks relative to non-bombed locations for at least 90 days after a strike.

We’d be hard pressed to find an example where an insurgency could be destroyed from an air - where air power alone has actually done this.

55:56 - I build project-specific infrastructure when I get to work. Sometimes I’m working with satellite imagery. Each project has it’s own methodology, research. A problem I’m having right now is that there’s too many platforms in play - we’re working to get everyone on the same

1:00:40 - Morning Routine:

  • I knock off around 2 or 3AM. The last thing I do is write a note to myself about what I should be focusing on the next day. If I don’t get centered quickly, I find that I lose the day, getting distracted by email, etc.

  • So that note shows me - which I keep with me - what I need to do, what I have to get through that day, it’s like my touchstone.

  • I set aside an hour or two every Friday about what I want to accomplish the following week, and these notes each morning help preserve my space to think.

  • It’s often a physical sticky - it tells me what I’m doing, and where I am in the master plan. Otherwise I write these things in Evernote.

1:04:22 - Also use:

  • RunKeeper, to remind myself to keep working out.

  • I’m a big fan of turning off my social media, letting it go dark. I use a software blocker often for up to a week at a time to keep me off of it.

Jason’s Book: The Peripheral by William Gibson. And The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber.  

Jason’s Film: Guardians of The Galaxy

Jason’s Song: Alt-J’s Taro