The Long Telegram

My friend, Maja Hitij, is an amazing photographer, especially when she’s roaming the streets and looking for what she calls “moments.” When she asked me to make up some kind of presentation of her stunning street photography from Jerusalem, I was totally psyched to get to work with her content. Every image here is definitely a “moment” and more. Here’s the result:

Filming from the top of the Citadel in Erbil, Iraq. Courtesy: Jon Vidar / The Tiziano Project

Here in Iraq, I’m free from the constraints of what would normally be considered a j-o-b. Luckily with The Tiziano Project, I have mostly free reign to play photography and video for the next month and a half. I’m hoping to make a few more leaps forward before the summer ends and I take a short hiatus from video to finish grad school at Medill’s Washington, D.C., campus.

While I’ve made a lot of strides in the last year learning the ins and outs of dSLR video, I look at the great work being produced by others and realize I have a lot to learn.  As I’ve done in the past, I wanted to hammer out some of my frustrations here in public so anyone else doing this might be able to look them over. (more…)

On my brick of an external hard drive, I have about 300 GB of raw video collected between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River that is waiting to be edited into some entertaining/informative format. Before I started that culling process, I needed a little pick-me-up, a dose of uncut HD smack to get me going.

As always, it wasn’t hard to find. These videos, some old, some new, all summer, are the stuff of aspiration, inspiration and, since its at least 105 F here in Iraq every day, perspiration.

California is a place. – Borderland

Drea Cooper is a filmmaker with a flare for making awesome videos that make you want to buy stuff. Zackary Canepari is a silly good photographer who has done a lot of work on the subcontinent. Together, they released a series of videos a few months ago under the “California is a place.” moniker. Every stunning video lays out a California story, but Borderland stands out for its amazing characters and coherent color grading, a darkness accented by strong greens and blues that really snap. If you like it, check out Scrapertown. Awesome in a totally different way.

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Ramallah, West Bank

I spent three months between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. I visited every major population center from Haifa (up) to Eilat (down). Mind you, this isn’t really hard to do considering I visited those last two cities over the span of one day. Most of the time, I was reporting from Jerusalem, but on the weekends, I tended to venture out on my own for video projects (coming soon) and photography. Nomenclature in this region is tough. So, Israel/Palestine really just refers, in my mind, to everywhere I could go without getting a new passport stamp.

Now, I thought I was no slouch when it comes the international peculiarities and issues at stake in this region before I went. I quickly realized that I’d never actually argued with anyone about the problems presented by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was woefully under-prepared to challenge the stubborn rhetoric of people from both sides of the armistice line. Over time, I got better, and I want to share with you what people in the region told me.

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