The arm-chair warriors amongst us will like this post on NPR:

"Five times between June 2007 and June 2008 the writer Sebastian Junger traveled to a remote Army outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Junger, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, made the trip to embed with a company of soldiers from the Army's 173rd Airborne brigade as they fought to keep the Taliban from controlling a small, treacherous plot of land."

I have yet to read all of the article and listen to the excerpts, but I can easily predict that a book such as this one, and its supporting hoopla, glorifies war.

On my flight back to NYC, I tried to watch "The Hurt Locker"...5 minutes into the movie, I turned it off. Is it eyeball fatigue from all the war coverage since 2001 or is it moral disgust...or is it both?

My work will appear in The Complete Photographer by Tom Ang, which is being published by Dorling Kindersley Limited. According to Amazon, the book will be released on July 19, 2010.

I"ll be featured as a Master of Travel Photography, with a profile and work resume.

The Complete Photographer encourages photographers to explore every discipline and experiment with different approaches, and is based around tutorials on ten different genres-Portraits, Landscape and Nature, Fashion, Wildlife, Sport, Documentary, Events, Travel, Architecture, and Fine Art.

Photo © Pierre Claquin-All Rights Reserved

Photo © Pierre Claquin-All Rights Reserved

Whilst attending my Introduction To Multimedia class at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop (Istanbul), Pierre Claquin divulged that he had been a photographer at the age of 16 through a younger brother who owned a Foca camera and let him use it. Matters progressed, and Pierre graduated to an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, then a Nikkormat...and he stayed with Nikon ever since.

Pierre also divulged that he had produced a photographic book titled Surviving Dreams: The Struggling Circuses of Bangladesh, which documents the few remaining circuses in that country. Very few remain, struggling against bureaucracy, corruption, prejudice and financial difficulties. The book, of some 158 pages of which about 120 are black & white photographs, examines the origin and history of the circus in Bangladesh, as well as the realities of the performers' lives.

As to his choice of black & white, Pierre says" "I used black and white film for this project because, especially in the case of circuses, it is very easy to be distracted by colors."

I enjoyed the book immensely, and you can buy the book Surviving Dreams by contacting Pierre Claquin by email: lalbandor at aol dot com