I am shooting photo and video for an international client in a 5-star hotel in Central Jakarta, Indonesia. This assignment involved a lot of planning and pre-production to make sure the setup is right and everything runs smoothly today. The assignment included multi-camera, continuous recording of a live event with 100+ people and several interviews.
All ready for the interviewee!
Today, the 8th of March, is International Women’s Day. This day serves as an occasion to celebrate the achievements of women, but also to campaign for gender parity. Many people wrongly believe gender parity only benefits women, but in fact it benefits society as a whole, propelling economic, social and cultural progress.
One of those women who had an effect on social and cultural progress was photojournalist Françoise Demulder.
Source: Linternaute.com
Copyright: Georges Beutter
She once said that she hated war, “but felt compelled to document how it is always the innocent who suffer, while the powerful get richer and richer”.
She was the first woman to ever win a World Press Photo award, in 1977, for a photo of a Palestinian woman pleading to a Phalange militiaman in Karantina, East Beirut.
Source: World Press Photo
Copyright: Françoise Demulder
She was known by her nickname, ‘Fifi’, apparently coined by Yasser Arafat, whom she met during the war in Lebanon.
She started her career in Vietnam, documenting the onset of the war in 1975 and she went on to photograph most of the major conflicts of the end of the 20th century. She was one of the few women who managed to forge a strong professional reputation in the predominantly male world of photojournalism.
She passed away in Paris in 2008, aged 61. You can read her obituary and more information about her life and work in this obituary published by The Guardian. This website has a collection of pictures of her through the years. Some of her work is available here.
To know more about International Women’s Day, go to http://www.internationalwomensday.com
Last month I shot a portrait of Mochtar Riady for the Business Life section of the Financial Times.
It was published on all the print editions of the Financial Times on February 29, 2016. It was also published on all the online editions.
Mochtar Riady is the founder and chairman of multinational conglomerate Lippo Group. According to Forbes, he currently ranks #6 in the list of Indonesia’s richest and #854 globally.
Executives have limited time, so shooting portraits is an art that requires a combination of technical and interpersonal skills. In another post I will share more details about how to approach an assignment like this.
