Monday, March 31, 2008

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

[article reprinted in full from the New York Times]

Caption: In 1979, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border. He returned to Cambodia in the summer of 1989, at the invitation of Prime Minister Hun Sen. At left, Mr. Dith visited a museum at Tuol Sleng that is the site of the torture of 20,000 people, almost all of whom were also killed.
Photo: Steve McCurry/Magnum


March 31, 2008
Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65
By Douglas Martin

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died on Sunday at a hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation. His credo: Make no move unless there was a 50-50 chance of not being killed.

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”

The film, directed by Roland JoffĂ©, showed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news. He believed that his country could be saved only if other countries grasped the gathering tragedy and responded.

A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.

But despite his frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.

Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border on Oct. 3, 1979. An overjoyed Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

Caption: A 1974 photo by Mr. Dith of shells being fired at a village northwest of Phnom Penh. Photo: Dith Pran/The New York Times

“To all of us who have worked as foreign reporters in frightening places,” Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said on Sunday, “Pran reminds us of a special category of journalistic heroism — the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer, who knows the ropes, who makes your work possible, who often becomes your friend, who may save your life, who shares little of the glory, and who risks so much more than you do.”

Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for The Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events. In one, he turned the camera on mourners rather than the coffin to snatch an evocative moment at the funeral of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, who was murdered in 1990.

In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Schanberg recalled Mr. Dith’s theory of photojournalism: “You have to be a pineapple. You have to have a hundred eyes.”

“I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother,” Mr. Schanberg said. “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him.”

Outside The Times, Mr. Dith spoke out about the Cambodian genocide, appearing before student groups and other organizations. “I’m a one-person crusade,” he said.

Dith Pran was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a provincial town near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat. His father was a public-works official.

Having learned French at school and taught himself English, Mr. Dith was hired as a translator for the United States Military Assistance Command. When Cambodia severed ties with the United States in 1965, he worked with a British film crew, then as a hotel receptionist.

In the early 1970s, as unrest in neighboring Vietnam spread and Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more formidable. Tourism ended. Mr. Dith interpreted for foreign journalists. When working for Mr. Schanberg, he taught himself to take pictures.

When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Mr. Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of recreating Cambodia as an agricultural nation.

To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.

Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.

In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.

The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.

He had an emotional reunion with his wife, Ser Moeun Dith, and four children in San Francisco. Though he and his wife later divorced, she was by his bedside in his last weeks, bringing him rice noodles.

Mr. Dith was divorced from his second wife, Kim DePaul.

Mr. Dith is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow; his daughter, Hemkarey; his sons, Titony, Titonath and Titonel; a sister, Samproeuth; six grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.

Ms. DePaul now runs the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which spreads word about the Cambodian genocide. At his death, Mr. Dith was working to establish another, still-unnamed organization to help Cambodia. In 1997, he published a book of essays by Cambodians who had witnessed the years of terror as children.

Dr. Ngor, the physician turned actor who had himself survived the killing fields, had joined with Mr. Dith in their fight for justice. He was shot to death in 1996 in Los Angeles by a teenage gang member.

“It seems like I lost one hand,” Mr. Dith said of Dr. Ngor’s death.

Mr. Dith nonetheless pushed ahead in his campaign against genocide everywhere.

“One time is too many,” he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. “If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”

[photographs from the New York Times article and related media.]

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Strange Maps

[With thanks thanks to Clay for the tip, and in honor of cartography enthusiast Miro in Croatia: Strange Maps.]



[graphic from Strange Maps site]

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Lots of Things Like This

Apex Art
"291 Church Street - between Walker and White Streets, just two blocks south of Canal Street. The 1 and 9 trains stop at Franklin Station."
[New York, New York]

Lots Of Things Like This
organized by Dave Eggers

April 2 - May 10, 2008
Opening reception: Wed, April 2, 6-8PM


"This show will explore a very small and specific type of artmaking exemplified by contemporary people like David Shrigley, Raymond Pettibon, Nedko Solakov, and Tucker Nichols. This kind of art, which we refuse to name, is somewhat crude, usually irreverent, and always funny. It exists somewhere between one-panel cartoons and text-based art. What we're talking about, basically, is a show of about 100 works that subscribe (unknowingly) to the following criteria: a) they're drawings, usually very basic or crude; b) these drawings are accompanied by hand-drawn text on the artwork, and this text refers to the drawing, much like a caption; c) this caption-text is funny. So in many ways you might say these are cartoons, because we’ve just listed the qualifications of a cartoon. But the works in this show are usually found in galleries, not newspapers or magazines, and so we have something interesting to think about: Is humor allowed in art, and in what forms? Are captions allowed in art, and why? And most importantly, why doesn’t David Shrigley spell better?"

— Dave Eggers

[image by Maira Kalman, from exhibition catalogue available for download online on the apex art site.]

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Citizens and Strangers

Queen's Nails Annex
3191 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 648 4564

Ukrainian Citizens and Strangers


Jeff Cain
Adam Frelin
Olexander Gnilitsky + Lesja Zajac
(aka Institution of Unstable Thoughts)
Maya Hayuk
Tim Hyde
Yuliya Kostevera + Yuriy Kruchak
Angie Waller


In conjunction with Outpost for Contemporary Art
a selection of work from seven artists involved in Outpost’s current program of sending art professionals to and from Eastern Europe to produce projects that illuminate the complex socio-cultural transformations happening in the region today.

Through April 18, 2008

[image from Queen's Nails Web site.]

Alice Shaw

Jason Rulnick
547 W. 27th Street #309
New York, NY 10001
t: 212. 244. 7071

Alice Shaw




reception: Thursday, March 27 | 6–8 pm
through May 8

[photograph by Alice Shaw from gallery Web site. caption: "Untitled, 2000/2008, 7 x 9 inches, C-Print."]

Thursday, March 13, 2008

The Data Stream Goes On Spring Break

The Data Stream will be on spring break in Croatia next week, resulting in fewer posts to the site. We wish everyone a brilliant mid-March!

[image from a google image search for 'spring break']

The Empty Space Gallery

[below, fronm the Node.L designated list.]

"** NEW THURSDAY CLUB ** NEW THURSDAY CLUB ** NEW THURSDAY CLUB **


Supported by the Goldsmiths Digital Studios and the Goldsmiths Graduate School

6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor,
right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME
--

*13 MARCH with ANNA HOWITT
:
The Empty Space Gallery*

The Empty Space Gallery exists to foster creativity, and encourage debate about what ‘art’ is and what ‘artists’ are. It’s a novel way of encouraging people to engage with this thing we call ‘art’ and what it might be. Ultimately it is an experiment in ‘art’, ‘artists’, those that believe in them and those that think they are. The Empty Space Gallery can also be considered an anonymous art fair, where more established and well-known artists share the same space and audience as unknown doodlers.

How does The Empty Space Gallery work?

Individuals, whether ‘artists’ or not, are invited to submit anything they deem to be ‘art’, in any medium whatsoever. The purpose of the experiment is to gain some insight into, not so much how work is created, but how it is received, consumed, and engaged with. The aim is to uncover some of the processes we employ in order to decide whether something is ‘art’ or not.

Once the ‘works’ are received they are catalogued and sealed in plain white A4 envelopes. Only these envelopes are placed on display; no details of the ‘artist’ are available at this time. Visitors to the gallery are invited to pick, at random, any envelope they choose and own whatever they find inside.
In addition, visitors are also invited to create an ‘artwork’ there and then, for inclusion in the gallery, which is then passed on again to another visitor.

ANNA HOWITT is artistic director of The Forward Company, an interdisciplinary arts company based in Berkshire. She also is an arts and literary reviewer. She finished her MA in Contemporary Arts at the Manchester Metropolitan University in 2001 and has since had a residency at the South Street Arts Centre in Reading (2003-4).
--

** PLEASE NOTE: KATE PULLINGER & CHRIS JOSEPH (whose Club event had to be
postponed for personal reasons) WILL BE KICKING OFF THE SUMMER TERM OF
CLUB EVENTS ON 24 APRIL **

--

THE THURSDAY CLUB is an open forum discussion group for anyone interested
in the theories and practices of cross-disciplinarity, interactivity,
technologies and philosophies of the state-of-the-art in today’s (and
tomorrow’s) cultural landscape(s).

Friday, March 07, 2008

Stretcher at the de Young

stretcher.org
Gilbert & George at the de Young
Interview by Dale Hoyt, February 14, 2008
Video by David Lawrence

Exhibition through May 18, 2008

[screen grab from video]

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Obama | Bollywood

[follow up to last month's "Music + Politics" post, an intriguing addition from YouTube. Special thanks to D.L.P. in I.C. for the tip!]

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Grand Central Freeze


[no doubt many readers of the Data Stream are already among the 7 million YouTube viewers of Improv Everywhere's Frozen Grand Central in the last month.]


"This is one of over 70 different missions Improv Everywhere has executed over the past six years in New York City. Others include the No Pants Subway Ride, the Best Buy uniform prank, and the famous U2 Rooftop Hoax, to name a few."

Among our favorites, The Best Gig Ever, brilliantly rendered on Ira Glass's "This American Life," a segment of their 2005 show "Mind Games": "A group called Improv Everywhere decides that an unknown band, Ghosts of Pasha, playing their first ever tour in New York, ought to think they're a smash hit. So they study the band's music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans. Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy — to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn't see it that way. Nor does another subject of one of Improv Everywhere's "missions."

listen