BagNews Staff
Michael Shaw Publisher
Michael Shaw is a Clinical Psychologist, an analyst of visual journalism, and a frequent lecturer and writer on how politicians and the media frame political imagery.
Michael’s clinical training — which is woven into his commentary — involves the analysis of character and character styles. His research has dealt with the creative process, visual thinking, and how metaphors can create psychological insight.
In addition to his private practice, Shaw spent nine years as the consulting psychotherapist at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), the architecture and design program and think-tank in Los Angeles. For five years before that, he served the same function at Otis College of Art and Design. Counting both experiences, he has spent thousands of hours collaborating with students and design professionals in their creative process, as well as participating in the formal and informal analysis and critique of visual images.
Michael founded BAGnewsNotes in June 2003. Originally, it was the home for a civics tool/visual experiment/political cartoon called BAGnews. Beginning in mid-2004, however, spurred by the photo coverage of the Bush-Kerry presidential campaign, Shaw turned his attention to this new “discipline” — the visual analysis of political images.
Michael has also been a front page contributor to the Huffington Post since September ‘05, writing a blog feature called “Reading The Pictures.”
Karen Donley Managing Editor
Karen started her career in newspapers and publishing, writing and learning all aspects of publication production. Her managing editor experience encompasses both newspapers and academic publishing houses. She is the co-editor, with Douglas A. McIntyre, of The Harvard Advocate Anthology and the author of numerous newspaper and magazine articles.
Teresa Mahoney Technical Producer BagNews Salon
Teresa is a post-graduate teaching fellow at the Columbia Journalism School where she trains students and faculty in multimedia journalism including video, audio, interactive storytelling and web publishing software. She graduated from the Columbia Journalism School in 2012 with a master’s degree in digital media journalism and covered the fashion and clothing industry in New York. Teresa has interned for Portland Monthly magazine and KPTV Fox 12 in Oregon. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 2009 and has worked in marketing for the biotechnology industry.
Meg Handler Editor-at-Large
Cara Finnegan Moderator, BagNews Salon
Cara Finnegan writes and teaches about visual politics for a living. She is a professor in the communication department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where her research explores the role photography has played in the history of U.S. public life. Cara is the author of Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Smithsonian, 2003) and numerous articles and reviews about the history of photography. She keeps the blog first efforts and has served as the moderator of the BagNews Salon since 2008. Cara is also a contributor to BagNews Notes.
Loret Steinberg Consultant, BagNews Salon
Loret Steinberg is an expert on documentary photography, photojournalism, social responsibility and photography, ethics and documentary photography/photojournalism, community responsive media, civic journalism and photography, and building new ways of telling more meaningful stories with photographs. She teaches photojournalism and documentary classes at the Rochester Institute of Technology and lectures on ethics and photography. Loret writes on a range of topics in photojournalism education such as the impact of technology on audience perception, the role of reflection in professional work and photographers’ responsibility to a diverse community. Her work has been exhibited and published in galleries, museums and in publications across the United States.
BagNews Contributing Photographers
Nina Berman Senior Contributing Photographer, BagNews Originals
Nina Berman is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. Her work has been extensively published, exhibited, and collected. She is the recipient of two World Press awards, a 2006 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2005 grant from the Open Society Institute Documentary Photography Fund. Her work was selected for exhibition at the 2010 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Nina’s photography has been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and throughout Europe. She is a member of the NOOR photography collective based in Amsterdam.
Alan Chin Senior Contributing Photographer, BagNews Originals
Alan Chin was born and raised in New York City’s Chinatown. Since 1996, he has worked in China, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and many other places in the Middle East and Central Asia. In the US, Alan has explored the South, following the historic trail of the civil rights movement and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, covered the 2008 presidential campaign, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is a contributing photographer to Newsweek/Daily Beast and The New York Times, and member of Facing Change: Documenting America (FCDA), and an editor at Newsmotion.org.
Rita Leistner BagNews Originals
Rita Leistner is a “theorist-practitioner,” who brings together the field-work and attention to realism of a practice in photojournalism and documentary photography with the conceptual and aesthetic approaches of her training in literary theory and film lighting. She has covered stories of conflict and post-conflict in war-torn countries from Iraq to Afghanistan and Lebanon to Israel; from post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, to the on-going struggle of First Nations People in North America. Rita is co-author of Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq (2005) and The Edward Curtis Project (2010). In 2013 she releases her first short documentary film, MIKLAT: The Bomb Shelter Project, as well as her first sole-authored book,Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan; and essays in two collections, Memories of Fire and Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq. In addition to writing, photography and filmmaking, Rita teaches a course on the history of photojournalism and documentary photography at Victoria University in The University of Toronto.
Jon Lowenstein BagNews Originals
Jon Lowenstein specializes in long-term, in-depth documentary explorations that confront the realms of power, poverty, and social violence. He has spent the past decade engaging his adopted community on Chicago’s South Side where he is collaborating with the community to build the South Side Imagination Center, which will create a unique documentary and athletic dream space out of the ruins of an abandoned building. Lowenstein’s international assignments include covering elections in Afghanistan to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to social violence in Guatemala. His most recent work includes exploring the plight of immigrant workers without documentation in the United States in Shadow Lives USA and a project on the impact of inhaled Nitric Oxide on cerebral Malaria in Ugandan children.
Lowenstein has been the recipient of multiple photography awards and grants, including the Open Society Foundation, Getty Images, World Press, Nikon, Fuji, and NPPA Magazine Photographer of the Year. His fellowships include the John Simon Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship, the TED Global Fellowship, the Joseph P. Albright Fellowship, and the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Racial Justice Fellowship. He was a 2012 Hasselblad Master.
He is member and owner of the NOOR Images cooperative based in Amsterdam. More of his work can be seen at http://www.noorimages.com.
Katie Orlinsky BagNews Originals
Katie Orlinsky is a photographer from New York City. She received a B.A. in Political Science/Latin American Studies from the Colorado College. Her long-held interest in international politics and a desire to raise awareness on social and humanitarian issues led Katie to journalism, and upon graduation she moved to Mexico where she got her start as a photographer. In 2012 Katie completed her Masters as a Stabile fellow in Investigative Reporting at Columbia University Graduate School ofJournalism. She is currently a contributor with Reportage by Getty Images and regularly works for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and various non-profit organizations around the world. She received the Alexia Foundation First Place Student Grant in 2012 and the POYI Emerging Vision Incentive award in 2011 for the body of work “Innocence Assassinated: Living in Mexico’s Drug War.”
Radcliffe Roye BagNews Originals
Radcliffe Roye is a Brooklyn based documentary photographer specializing in editorial and environmental portraits, and photo-journalism. A self-taught photographer with over ten years of experience, Radcliffe is inspired by the raw and gritty lives of grass-roots people, especially those of his homeland of Jamaica. Radcliffe strives to tell the stories of their victories and ills by bringing their voices to matte-fiber paper.
Radcliffe has worked with magazines like Vogue, Jet, Ebony, and Essence and has also worked with local newspapers like New York Newsday. Radcliffe honed his skill as a photojournalist by working as an Associated Press stringer in New York covering journalism events.
Radcliffe has also been instrumental in leading the Instagram charge as a photographer showcasing his interest in his community of Bed-Stuy and Brooklyn as a whole. He was asked to take over the New Yorker Instagram feed when Hurricane Sandy ravaged the eastern shores in October 2012.
David Schalliol BagNews Originals
David Schalliol is a PhD student at the University of Chicago whose interests span urban sociology, social stratification and visual sociology. His writing and photographs have appeared in such publications as The American Sociologist, Design Observer, and Revue Gest, as well as in numerous exhibitions, including the inaugural Belfast, Northern Ireland Photo Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Project. He contributed to Highrise: Out My Window, an interactive documentary that won the 2011 International Digital Emmy for Non-Fiction. He is currently exploring the transformation of urban centers through hybrid ethnographic, filmic and photographic projects.
BagNews Contributing Writers
Karrin Vasby Anderson
Karrin Vasby Anderson is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University and coauthor of the book Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity. Her campaign commentary has appeared in the Fort Collins Coloradoan, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Swedish national news broadcast Varldun i Fokus. Dr. Anderson is a recipient of the Organization for Research on Women and Communication’s Feminist Scholarship Award, and is co-recipient of the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women in Politics. Follow Karrin on Twitter @KVAnderson.
Cate Blouke
Cate Blouke is currently a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, working in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing’s Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL). Last year Cate was a writer and editor for the DWRL’s visual rhetoric blog, viz., and she sits on the editorial collective of UT’s Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (TheJUMP). In addition to her roles as visual rhetorician and digital scholar, Cate reviews theater for the Austin American-Statesman. Her academic work focuses on the intersections of performance, identity politics and contemporary humor, examining the cultural implications of the kinds of jokes we make these days.
Peter Brook
Pete Brook is lead blogger for Raw File, Wired.com’s photography blog. He publishes his own writing at Prison Photography analyzing the visual culture of prisons and issues of civil liberties and social justice as they relate to photography and photojournalism. Pete is a teacher and working board member with University Beyond Bars in Washington State. Pete’s writing has appeared on Change.org, Too Much Chocolate, and Cool’eh Magazine.
Michael Butterworth
Michael L. Butterworth (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Bowling Green State University. He is also the Executive Director of the International Association for Communication and Sport. His research examines the relationships between rhetoric, democracy, and sport and includes his book, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity, as well as articles in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech.
David Campbell
Dr David Campbell is a writer and producer, specialising in photography, multimedia and politics. With both academic and practice-based credentials, he examines how documentary photography and photojournalism work, the opportunities multimedia bring, and the challenges presented by the revolutions in the new media economy. He also works as a multimedia producer in collaboration with photographers.
David writes regularly on his blog at www.david-campbell.org, which was named one of the ten best photoblogs by the British Journal of Photography (July 2011). The author/editor of six books and some 50 articles and essays, David’s academic research concentrates on how atrocity, famine, war and ‘Africa’ are represented.
David is a member of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies and Honorary Professor of Geography at Durham University, Honorary Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a member of the advisory board for the Program for Narrative and Documentary Studies at Tufts University, Boston, led by Gary Knight. He lectures on the MA International Multimedia Journalism program located at Beijing Foreign Studies University..
Stephen Ferry
Stephen Ferry has traveled to dozens of countries, concentrating on issues of human rights, social and political unrest, and environmental destruction. He is currently focused on documenting Colombia’s ongoing civil war and its impact on native peoples. Stephen’s work in Colombia has been recognized and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Knight International Press Fellowship, a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant, and the Howard Chapnick Memorial Fellowship. He has won numerous prizes, including two World Press Photo awards and many awards in the NPPA Picture of the Year contest. Stephen’s work on the Quechua silver miners of Potosi, Bolivia was published in I am Rich Potosi: The Mountain that Eats Men (Monacelli Press). He is currently preparing Tayrona Resistance, a book portraying the struggles of indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, based on his October 2004 National Geographic article, Keepers of the World.
Robert Hariman
Robert Hariman is a professor in the department of communication studies at Northwestern University. His publications include No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, which he co-authored with John L. Lucaites. He and John maintain the blog No Caption Needed, which provides commentary on photojournalism, politics, and culture.
John L. Lucaites
John Lucaites is professor of rhetoric and public culture, department of communication and culture and adjunct professor of American studies, Indiana University. He was a 2006-2007 Fellow at the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. His publications include No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, which he co-authored with Robert Hariman. He and Robert maintain the blog No Caption Needed, which provides commentary on photojournalism, politics, and culture.