Millions of people see the world through the eyes of Reuters photographers every day, a collective vision of events shaped by the split second instant the photographer chose to record. Our World Now 5 draws on this extraordinary resource, encompassing the diversity of stories, trends and moods that defined 2011. Featuring images by 144 photographers of 56 nationalities, the fifth volume in this collector’s series offers dramatic breaking news, in-depth photo essays, photographer profiles and moments of pure visual delight. We asked Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, picture editor of the book to describe the experience.
“I left my role as Editorial Director at Magnum in Paris in 2003 to join Reuters where Monique Villa, President of Reuters Media at the time (now CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation) wanted to respond to a changing market and develop news photography in more contemporary ways than the traditional events related “wire” approach. From having worked with some of the most iconic photographers in the world, who focused on individual bodies of work spanning long careers, I arrived in a giant, global organisation with a focus on immediacy and team work.
One of our first projects was to establish a partnership with renowned British publisher Thames & Hudson, particularly famous for their photography books. We wanted to make a visual statement, digging into the archives from the year 2000 onwards, some 500,000 pictures, looking for different perspectives, setting a new tone and establishing Reuters as one of the worlds key visual history providers. We published “The State of the World” in 2006 in 10 languages, the success of which gave us the opportunity to publish a new series of books called Our World Now. The series has become a collector’s item and it has made it possible for us to take our documenting of the century to a new audience.
Editing these books is an ongoing process throughout the year, reflecting on each quarter. There is something highly addictive about selecting from 1600 daily images, shot, processed and edited by worldwide teams. After having made a preliminary selection in a series of lightboxes, Johanna Neurath the design director of Thames & Hudson and I, print out thumbnails and start pasting series of images on the wall in giant London or Paris meeting rooms. We are guided by our experience, our respect for the team of photographers and our commitment to being truly visual. Not trying to recreate events through photography, rather trying to create surprise and engagement around them. Some events are frontal, like Libya, others require a step back, like the Japan Tsunami, in order to better understand the ordeal of the local population. Daily life images come alive, colours become a unifying thread and details find their place.
The unique quality of this fifth volume is that we meet the faces of many people who would never have been pictured earlier, “spring” in the Arab World, a population referring to itself as the 99%, unseen famine in North Korea, despair in the once booming American Rust belt and unprecedented hope for change worldwide.
Reuters as the world’s largest news organisation reaches over 1 billion people a day, when thinking about this incredible reach, what touches me is that there is always an individual behind an article, a video, a photograph. Here is the opening quote of award winning photographer Damir Sagolj to his piece on “The Hague Hilton”, the detention unit of the war crimes tribunal:
I have followed their bloody trail for 20 years now. As a Bosnian and as a photojournalist, I have tracked them through the ruins of Sarajevo, to the mass graves of eastern Bosnia and villages that were ethnically cleansed and destroyed forever. I followed their war crimes with the passion of a photojournalist and the guilt of a survivor.
His pictures are sober, an inventory of how accused mass murderers live. It could almost be a travel reportage. Underneath lies the tension of a photographer who has documented and lived the history of the Balkans all of his adult life.
Journalist Samia Nakhoul was seriously injured when an American tank fired on her hotel on the day Baghdad fell. She is now the Reuters Middle East Editor. She starts her introduction to the fifth volume of Our World Now:
It all began with a slap and a slur hurled at a vegetable seller by a policeman in a poor provincial city; Mohamed Bouaziz set himself alight in protest. One year after his death he would scarcely recognize the Middle East he knew.
Neither would Samia.
This constant go-between of the personal and historical is what characterizes this series. It is ironic that in a team of journalists where the focus is not on being individualistic you find some of the strongest and most challenging individuals. These days it is an immense privilege to be a part of daily documentation of the world and to closely follow the evolution of generations of photographers globally. Our World Now is about the potential between what the photographers shoot and how a different editing and design can reveal their images, confirm perceptions or raise questions. The book is a tribute to news photography and to the teams that cover the world.”
Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, Vice President Pictures at Reuters, currently on sabbatical leave heading global photo project Aday.org.
The latest volume in the best selling Reuters Our World Now series is now available internationally, and from the end of May in the U.S.
Published in English and French
Our world now 5
By Reuters
Published by Thames & Hudson
ISBN- 10: 0500289867
