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crisispictures.org
Pictures you won't see in the corporate media. Tag line:
Each day Crisis Pictures shows pictures of Iraq you should see in your morning newspaper but for some reason don't.Crisis Pictures solicited donations and claimed to support photojournalists by paying for all of its pictures. Near its end, this "Coda" appeared on the site:
Crisis Pictures started by accident in November of 2004.
It was during the election. By the time the results rolled in, I was sick of "sides", sick of Fox News and Air America. Sick of red and blue.
When I found that the chaos in Fallujah was so much worse than the tough guy with the cigarette on the cover of Time, I was sickened, truly. I posted the pictures on a blogspot blog, and left a note to the effect of "This is What You're Paying For".
I posted a bunch of pictures from Fallujah on a blog. That's it. I didn't expect a few million people to show up. I didn't seek the attention for myself, or for anything. It was outrage, a yelp of shock and outrage at a world that could produce such a horror.
In simple minded way, it was about God. If we, as human beings, could do this to each other, did that mean that we were by our very nature cruel and selfish, and if that is true, how can there be a God?
When a few thousand people wrote me in a the space of a week - and ever since - when so many people identified I became convinced that there was indeed a God, people are good, but we lack the basic information to internalize this.
It's not about the fact, and spin, it's the face of a mother who has lost her kid. It's looking at her face and know that her pain is the same pain you would feel if you lost your kid. Which we don't
So then there was Crisis Pictures. I dreamt that I could just buy all these pictures that we weren't seeing that told these stories and publish them every single day.
I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never done any programming or design in my life, and I tried, really, tried to rise to the occasion. I made the site you see now, and I have spent the last six months programming this elaborate content manager to manage thousands of pictures to tell stories in a way that goes beyond "another bad day in the third world."
I learned PHP, MySQL, XML, XSLT, Javascript. I learned about IPTC and XMP and EXIF. I incorporated a 501c3 nonprofit.
I tried, I swear, I really tried.
I have to be honest now, I don't think I can do this anymore without some significant help. No one asked me to do this, but I still truly believe it can do something important. I hate to let it die, but it's at the point where it's Crisis Pictures or me. I am out of money and out of energy.
Please understand, I really did my best. If I can find a way to keep going, I will. Otherwise, I'm sorry. Truly.
Trevor Davis
Expired: 2007