Omar Mullick: See No Evil

Photo © Omar Mullick-Courtesy Foreign Policy Magazine

Foreign Policy magazine has featured See No Evil,  the work of Omar Mullick in Afghanistan, which was largely made with iPhones and using the Hipstamatic app. When Mullick's embed with the US Army ended, he proceeded to make trips in and outside of Kabul, documenting the lives of ordinary Afghans affected by the grim toll of war. The images in this gallery are from his travels during six weeks from March and April 2011.

Omar Mullick was born and raised in London, and studied politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in New York. He spent six years in fashion photography and the film industry, shooting music videos and commercials before turning to documentary photography. He has received fellowships and awards from the M100 Foundation, the Western Knight Center for Journalism, and the Annenberg Foundation.

Perhaps I'm old hat, but I'm still ambivalent about the fad of using the iPhone by photojournalists to document conflicts. My ambivalence is for purely aesthetic reasons...I'm still of the view that documenting conflicts (especially) needs to be as "pure" as possible, without being tainted by manipulative processing. An iPhone with Hipstamatic and similar software certainly produce interesting images and that, I suppose, is what counts for many photographers.

PS: I've recently noted that even David Alan Harvey seems to have a lot of fun with Instagram photography...but so far these are personal snaps.