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 Hull Managing Editor
Karen is an attorney who 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. She has spent the last 15 years as a housing rights activist in San Francisco.
Ida C. Benedetto Editor & Producer, BagNews Salon
Ida is a media strategist who works with visual media and digital technology to support storytelling, collaboration and diversity. Her professional experience includes working for a foundation, a photo agency, two design studios, and a dozen NGOs. Ida has worked on documentary projects and community based media production in Guatemala, India and Ethiopia, including Fulbright funded work in Addis Ababa. She graduated from the New School University with a BFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design and a BA in History from Eugene Lang College. Ida is based in Brooklyn.
Sandra Roa Editor, BagNews Salon
Sandra C Roa is a documentary photographer who has expanded her storytelling into radio, video, and print journalism. She recently completed a Masters degree for foreign reporting from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. During her studies, she interned in The New York Times video unit and the Lens blog. Her work has been internationally published and exhibited. Since 2007 Sandra has been a faculty member at the International Center for Photography. She is based in London.
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.
Nina Berman 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.
BagNews Contributors
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.
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.
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.