The Frontline Club

Those who aspire to a career in photojournalism and photographers established in the industry often hope to do the lion’s share of their work abroad, covering war zones and absorbing foreign cultures.

Multicultural Britain has plenty to offer by way of contrasts and acute social issues for photojournalists to explore though. Save The Children has brought together a collective of British photographers to put the spotlight on poverty in the UK. An eye-opening presentation of photographs will be accompanied by a discussion with two photographers. Liz Hingley and Gideon Mendel will speak about their experiences of working in the UK, covering issues on their doorstep. What are the challenges photojournalists face at home compared to overseas? Problems of access, media interest and legal issues will all be covered.

This event will be moderated by Diane Smyth, deputy editor of the British Journal of Photography. She has written about photography for Aperture, PDN, Guardian.co.uk, Thetimes.co.uk, The Telegraph’s Telephoto site, Creative Review and Philosophy of Photography.

Liz Hingley ‘s photography intimately documents political and social issues, with a particular interest in alternative modes of community living. Hingley graduated from Brighton University with a first class BA Honours in Editorial Photography in 2007. Her work has been exhibited internationally, her recent awards include being selected for PND’s top 30, The Eugene Smith award, the Ian Parry scholarship and Canon female photographer of the year. Dewi Lewis Publishing launched her book Under Gods: stories from Soho Road in March 2011.

Liz Hingley‘s work for Save the Children has been made possible through the generous support of Fuji film.

Gideon Mendel is a South African photographer based in the UK and has won six World Press Photo Awards, the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and the Amnesty International Media Award. The bulk of his work is for NGOs overseas, but he stayed in the UK for one of his recent projects, Kingsmead Eyes, developing the photographic talents of children from the deprived area around the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney. The project was part of the 3EyesOn project which Mendel developed with fellow photographer Crispin Hughes. Mendel spoke at the Frontline Club in 2008 about nearly 20 years of photographing HIV in Africa and raising awareness of the problems AIDS sufferers face. In his current practice he is addressing the issue of climate change through developing a body of work on the global impact of flooding on the world’s poorest people.

Chair: Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman.

Proposition:

Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks

Clayton Swisher, head of Al-Jazeera’s Transparency Unit

Mehdi Hasan, senior political editor, New Statesman

Opposition:

Sir David Richmond, former director, defence and intelligence, British Foreign & Commonwealth Office

Bob Ayers, former director of the US Department of Defence Information Systems Security Programme

Douglas Murray, author and political commentator

Also participating: former MI5 whistleblower Annie Machon and HBOS whistleblower Paul Moore.

To mark the publication of Face The Future: Tools For A Modern Age edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble. Join us with a panel of experts to ask; will the internet wipe away newspapers and more in its wake? Is digital the only way? Will Twitter and Facebook be the new vanguards of the revolution?

Chair by Raymond Snoddy, freelance journalist who presents the BBC’s Newswatch and writes regularly for a variety of publications, previously media editor of The Times.

Kevin Marsh, executive editor of the BBC College of Journalism;

Laura Oliver, community co-ordinator for Guardian News and Media and formerly editor of journalism.co.uk;

Judith Townend, freelance journalist and events co-ordinator, former journalism.co.uk reporter and co-organiser of the news:rewired conferences.

The start of 2011 will be remembered as a period in which the barrier of fear fell across the Middle East and North Africa as people took to the streets demanding freedom from the tyrants who had governed for so long.

No one can predict where these momentous events will lead and what the repercussions will be for years to come.

For this special event held at the The Royal Institution of Great Britain the Frontline Club and BBC Arabic Service will be bringing together some of the key players, journalists and experts to discuss what has taken place in Egypt and the surrounding region so far and to try to gauge what the future might hold.

With those that were instrumental in organising the uprising in Egypt we will be discussing the role that new technology has played; is social media simply a new tool or has its role been more fundamental, changing not only the way that people communicate but also the way that they think and act? We will be discussing how and when the movements where formed, what common ideas they share and how they see things moving forward.

The discussion, which will be in two parts, will be chaired by Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House.

Panel:

Part 1:

Alaa Abd El Fattah: By day a Free/Open Source Software developer, by night he dons his mask and cape and patrols the streets of Cairo, jumping from campaign to campaign building websites, providing support and training, looking out for activists in need.

He “likes to pretend” that his work on the Egyptian Blogs Aggregator helped bring in a new era of citizen journalism and usher in a new generation of digital activists.

Sam Farah is the lead presenter of BBC Arabic’s flagship interactive programme Nuqtat Hewar (Talking Point). He has interviewed leading personalities and over the last months has conducted numerous programmes linking bloggers, activists and supporters of regimes from across the region live on television and radio to discuss events as they unfold.

Manal Hassan, is co-founder of the Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group (EGLUG) in 2004, and has extensive experience in working with NGOs, human rights activists, and children on web technologies and new media. She won the Best of Blogs (BOBs) and Reporters without Borders award together with her husband Alaa Abd El Fattah in 2005.

Louis Lewarne, was born in Edinburgh in 1979 and has been living in Cairo since 2006. He is normally involved in independent film production, but at the start of the Egyptian revolution and the internet blackout he started occupiedcairo.org, a collectively written blog on the events in Egypt.

Part 2:

Khalid Abdalla, British-Egyptian actor and producer, whose films include United 93, The Kite Runner, and Green Zone. Co-founder of Zero Production, a film and documentary production house based in Cairo, he is currently setting up a non-profit media centre called Mossireen (Adamant) to support filmmakers and citizen journalists through the revolution.

Dr Omar Ashour, lecturer in Middle East politics and the director of the MA in Middle East Studies Program at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, author of The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements and a pro-democracy activist close to the youth movement in Cairo.

Omar Robert Hamilton, Egyptian/British film-maker and the producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. He is currently in pre-production on his third short, Though I Know the River is Dry, a crowd-sourced fiction film that will be shot in Palestine this May. He flew to Cairo to take part in, and document, the Revolution. www.orhamilton.com

Salma Said, Born in 1985 in Cairo, to a political family she has been involved in political activism since the age of 15 with the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada and joined Kifaya movement in 2005 when she discovered the so-called Egyptian blogosphere.

An opportunity to hear the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson talk about his work reporting from the heart of Westminster.

Nick Robinson will be looking back at a career that began at Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio before he joined the BBC as a production trainee in 1986. Apart from three years at ITV News as political editor until 2005, Nick Robinson has remained at the Corporation.

Showing clips of his work and the work of those journalists who inspired him, Nick Robinson will be remembering the significant milestones in a career that includes stints on On the Record, Panorama and 14 years on the politics beat.

In association with the BBC College of Journalism.

At what stage are peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban and what role is the international community playing?

Following recent reports of talks to discuss peace proposals aimed at ending the fighting in London we will be looking at the peace process and examining what the price will be for people in Afghanistan.

What are the demands of the Taliban and what will it mean for the people of Afghanistan, including women who have until now been left out of the peace process?

Chaired by David Loyn, BBC international development correspondent.

With:

Rachel Reid, Afghanistan researcher fro Human Rights Watch;

Shaykh Abdullah Anas Bashir, founder of The TARUF Association and a veteran of the Afghan Jihad;

Karen Pierce, FCO Director for South Asia and Afghanistan and UK SRAP;

Emal Pasarly, multimedia editor for the BBC Pashto-Persian service.

Renowned photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg has documented Afghanistan since 1988, when he accompanied a group of mujahideen crossing the border from Pakistan. Since then he has returned to the country numerous time for Time magazine, capturing the brutality and suffering, and often the beauty, of the convulsions that have engulfed the country.

Afghanistan – A Distant War presents an extraordinary portfolio of the country’s history, from the mujahideen’s expulsion of the Soviet Union to the US withdrawal 25 years later.

Nickelsberg will be joined in conversation by Owen Bennett-Jones, freelance journalist, BBC correspondent in Pakistan between 1998 and 2001 and author of Pakistan: Eye of the Storm.

Renowned photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg has documented Afghanistan since 1988, when he accompanied a group of mujahideen crossing the border from Pakistan. Since then he has returned to the country numerous time for Time magazine, capturing the brutality and suffering, and often the beauty, of the convulsions that have engulfed the country.

Afghanistan – A Distant War presents an extraordinary portfolio of the country’s history, from the mujahideen’s expulsion of the Soviet Union to the US withdrawal 25 years later.

Nickelsberg will be joined in conversation by Owen Bennett-Jones, freelance journalist, BBC correspondent in Pakistan between 1998 and 2001 and author of Pakistan: Eye of the Storm.

In the wake of recent homophobic attacks in several African countries, the Frontline Club will host a panel discussion about gay rights in Africa.

The talk will feature an exclusive preview screening of an excerpt from an expolosive BBC World Debate which will be broadcast by BBC World News during March. The BBC debate is entitled “Is Homosexuality unAfrican?”. It features prominent African leaders, including legislators who have proposed clamping down on homosexual activities, as well as gay rights activists from the continent.

After highlights from the BBC World Debate, a panel of experts will be discussing gay rights in Africa and the men and women who seek asylum in the UK to escape persecution as a result of their sexuality.

On the panel:

John Bosco Nyombi is a gay Ugandan man. Fearing being imprisoned or killed in Uganda, he fled to Britain in 2001 and started an eight-year campaign to claim assylum in the UK, which he eventually won in 2009.

Jonathan Cooper OBE is a barrister specialising in human rights, and Chief Executive of the Human Dignity Trust. The Trust is a new body set up to investigate the legality of laws that criminalise homosexual acts wherever those laws exist in the world.

Moderating the event: Ben Cashdan, producer of the BBC World Debate “Is Homosexuality unAfrican” and director of Broad Daylight Films in Johannesburg. Ben has produced more than 20 documentaries about human rights issues in South Africa and around the world.

As protests continue across the Middle East and North Africa, March’s First Wednesday event will be an opportunity to discuss the Libya crisis and take stock of events elsewhere in the region.

The focus will be the latest news from the region and a broader look at the people behind the protests – who are they, what has shaped their ideas and what do they plan to do next?

We will also be beginning to look forward at the prospects for democracy and examining Western diplomacy in the light of such great political shifts.

This month’s First Wednesday will be chaired by BBC presenter Mishal Husain.

With:

Noman Benotman, a senior analyst at Quilliam. He was previously a leader of the jihadist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and an associate of senior al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan. In September 2010, he published an open letter to his former colleague Osama bin Laden calling on him to abandon violence;

Professor David Held, Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, co-director of LSE Global Governance;

Sir Richard Dalton, associate fellow of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House and a senior former diplomat and ambassador to Libya (1999 – 2002) and Iran (2003 – 2006);

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst.