Michael Forster Rothbart Photography

I've now been working as a photojournalist for 20 years.

After spending 2016-2017 in Donetsk, Ukraine, I returned home to upstate New York.

I do freelance photography and video for newspapers and magazines. Contact: 607-267-4893, mfrphoto (at) gmail.com. Reach my agency Zuma Press at licensing@zumapress.com or 949-481-3747. For help buying work from my archives, contact sales (at) mfrphoto.org.

The website about my years in Chernobyl is www.afterchernobyl.com.
My TED book on Chernobyl and Fukushima, Would You Stay?, is available on Amazon and iTunes.

Watch my TED talk here: http://bit.ly/TEDx-MFR.

Read what inspired me to move to Chernobyl and find other essays and interviews here.

I've returned to work as a university photographer for SUNY Oneonta 3 days per week. You can find our work here:
Campus Photo Library
Homepage
Social media

You can find me on Facebook and Instagram and once in awhile on Twitter.

The archive of my work prior to 2011 is at www.mfrphoto.photoshelter.com.
Note I have taken my business webpages mfrphoto.org and mfrphoto.com down for an overdue update.

Thank you for looking!
Mike F R

We're moving

Call it FREXIT: The Forster Rothbarts are leaving.

I'll be spending the rest of 2016 in eastern Ukraine, where I'll be documenting the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Donetsk.

My family will be living in Ivano Frankivsk, in western Ukraine.

Here's how to reach me while abroad:

CURRENT email is: mfrphoto@gmail.com.
(Note my old email address is currently inactive).

MY US cell phone 607-267-4893 is active but will go straight to voicemail. I'll check messages rarely.
My office phone 917-387-4952 forwards to me in Ukraine.
My Ukrainian cell number is +38 050 496 3811.

Upcoming Photography Presentations on Fukushima

I'll be giving three lectures this spring about my recent photography work in Fukushima, Japan:

• March 22, 7 pm. Hartwick College. Oneonta, NY. Anderson Center for the Arts, Room 138.
• April 22, 6 pm. Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Hamburg, Germany. Details: http://www.kas.de/hamburg/
• May 19, 7 pm. Guilderland Public Library. Guilderland, NY (near Albany). Details: http://www.guilpl.org

(Actually, "lecture" may be the wrong word, since I always ask people to get out of their seats and participate in interactive activities!)

Making Better Maps for Primary Elections

The maps that most news organizations are using to tell the primary election story fail on several counts.

Maps from the New York Times, Washington Post, RealClearPolitics and Mother Jones 
(clockwise from top right), March 2016, don’t show enough information.

These maps accompany articles about primary race results. The key question: who is winning? In other words, how many people are voting for a candidate, and how many delegates do they get? That, unfortunately, is not what these maps show.

There are two major problems with the above maps:

• Candidates win delegates, not states. In Democratic primaries, candidates win delegates proportionally, based on vote tallies. In Republican primaries, this is true in some states. Painting all the states a candidate “wins” the same color is misleading.
• Population matters, not geography. The relevant information is the number of voters, not the size of a state. However, traditional maps emphasize a state’s area, not the number of people.

As an example, compare Massachusetts and Georgia. Both are painted the same “Hillary blue,” although Clinton did far worse in Massachusetts.

Where did Clinton get more votes? This map doesn’t say.

(Clinton squeaked by a “win” with 50.1% of the votes, out of 1.2 million people who voted in the Massachusetts Democratic primary. She gets 46 delegates, and Sanders gets 45. In Georgia, Clinton won 72% of 760,000 Democratic primary votes; she’ll get 72 delegates out of 100.)

This map tells a reader none of this useful information. However, it does show that Georgia is 5.6 times the area of Massachusetts, an irrelevant fact.

An Attempt by the New York Times

Kudos to the Times, which switched last week to using much more detailed maps. Perhaps too detailed. Viewing individual county results can be fascinating, but it’s easier to get lost in minutiae than to see the big picture.

(Who knew Noxubee County, Mississippi, which is 72% black, had among the highest percent support for Clinton in the nation? Of course, only 1,531 people voted in the whole county.) Case in point.

It’s amazing to have so much information available so soon, but this map doesn’t help tell the main story of the primary race. Look at the map above and tell me, who won what in Nebraska? Beats me.

I’m a photojournalist. I think a lot about how to tell stories visually.

A news article tells the facts of a story; a news photo ideally provides a more gestalt understanding. The same is true of maps. Like photojournalism, news maps should be tools for storytelling. Ideally, they show information relevant to a story and leave unrelated details out.

Searching for Better Maps

I set out to create new maps that clearly show the vote and delegate results. First I tackled the problem of illustrating proportional wins. Instead of using just one color per candidate, I used a spectrum.

In my Democratic map, Hillary Clinton is marked blue, Bernie Sanders is red. The redder a state’s color, the higher the percentage of people who voted for Sanders. For example, Vermont is the reddest state on the map, 86% red, 14% blue. Clinton’s best showing was in Mississippi, 87% blue, 13% red.

Hopefully, this map shows readers at a glance who is winning by how much and where.

The next step is to eliminate geography from my map. I created a map based on one by Danny DeBelius and Alyson Hurt at NPR. Now it’s a “cartogram” — half cartography, half diagram. The colors are the same as before, but state shapes and areas are no longer shown.

 

The last information to add is the delegate counts. There are several ways to do this; for now I settled on simply showing the numbers on separate maps. Not because this is best, but just because turning the map into a 3-D rendering will take me some time.

Do these maps help you understand the primary election? Let me know why or why not — on Twitter or Facebook @mfrphoto.

Next up: four-color, four-candidate maps of the Republican primaries. Will it look interesting or just look like the shades of mud the candidates have been slinging? Check back next week to find out.

The haters gonna hate hate hate:

#black lives matter vs the photojournalists: What I learned from the Missouri protests.

Like a moth to flame, I keep getting pulled to read more about the protests at Missouri this week.

The whole series of events was historic, yes, but what has gotten the most discussion amongst my photojournalist friends is one incident in which Mizzou students and staff tried to keep journalists away from the "safe space" they had created in the middle of a "public space."

In a ridiculous moment, communications professor Melissa Click tried to evict a videographer.

Photo: Mark Schierbecker

I was among those incensed and hoping for Click to be fired after watching this video. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/university-missouri-protesters-block-journalists-press-freedom.html

However, I feel differently now that I've discovered a video showing Click at a different protest, a month earlier. On Oct. 10, about 11 black students interrupted Missouri's homecoming parade, standing in front of President Wolfe's car. Some white bystanders aggressively stepped in to break up the protest, and many more cheered these whites on.

Here's the video on Slate: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tim-wolfe-homecoming-parade_56402cc8e4b0307f2cadea10 ("The Incident You Have To See To Understand Why Students Wanted Mizzou's President To Go")

Now guess who is the first caucasian to step in and link arms with the black students? Our friend Professor Click. First visible at about 8:00 in the video, and recognizable at 8:57.

Click's academic career may be over, and maybe rightly so —who wants a communication prof who obstructs the first amendment? — but as a white ally to black students, she was on the front lines, doing anti-racism work that more of us should be — ok, ok, I'll speak for myself — that I should be working harder to do.

For me, it's a good reminder for me that people are more complex than any single action, and we do them an injustice by judging them for any single moment.

When is the right time for me to lay down my camera for a while, and participate rather than document?

"The “right to photograph” is more gray than black-and-white," writes photojournalist GJ McCarthy in this thoughtful essay: http://photographyblog.dallasnews.com/2015/11/unbidden-photo-advice-the-right-to-photograph-is-more-gray-than-black-and-white.html/

The Great Passport Race

Update, Monday Sept 14, 5:28 pm
Well, at least one thing was easy. I called Air Canada to change my ticket. The agent put me on hold for 15 minutes; while holding I discovered I could change my ticket online myself. She came back and told me it would cost $100 US to change. I told her I had a better offer online - $100 Canadian (that's $75 US). She didn't believe me so I proved it to her. I bought the new ticket while she waited and she confirmed that it worked.

So now I am flying Wednesday. Assuming my passport really does arrive tomorrow.


Update, Monday Sept 14, 3:07 pm
The post office told me to call after 3 to see if my package came in the afternoon shipment. It did not.

When I called, I spoke to Frank the mailman again. He told me tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. My passport could possibly come at 7:30 am but it is scheduled to arrive at 1:30 pm.

Now I need to change my flight. I'm scheduled to leave at 11 am. Air Canada claims I can change it for $100. Let's hope so.

Newsflash! Monday Sept 14 at 2:59 pm
My passport is in Albany. Only an hour away from me. However, it is impossible for me to intervene and get it. Like taming a stray cat or falling in love, I need to wait for it to come to me. Here, kitty, I've got passport kibbles for you...

My friends at USPS.com updated the tracking for my package. Apparently it flew for 37 minutes, from NYC to Albany and now it is just going to sit in the airport for the rest of the day.

I hate long layovers.

Update, Sept. 14, 1:22 pm
No, constantly watching the US Mail tracking page will not get my package here any sooner. I know that. But I keep refreshing the page.

Now the US Postal Service has informed me: yesterday over the course of 7 hours, my passport moved from one side of a midtown Manhattan post office to the other side.

What did we obsess about before tracking systems?

Update, Sept. 14, 8:06 am
WTF?! No, Jacob, that does not stand for the World Tildlife Fund.
It appears that 5 DAYS after the consulate said they put my passport in the mail, someone finally dropped it off at the post office.

Guess I am not going to NYC after all. Now the race is really on but it's between the post office and the clock. I am merely a spectator. The latest I can possibly leave for Montreal is 3:00 tomorrow morning...

Update, Sept. 14, 8:03 am
The rental car is parked in the driveway. I'm ready to head to NYC. Just need to reach the consulate and confirm they do have my passport still. (If not, I'm really screwed...)

Update, Sept. 14, 7:45 am
Is my local post office tired of hearing from me yet? Frank the mailman, Colleen's coworker, answered the phone just now and he knew who I was before I told him. But no, my untracked package did not sneak into the post office with the first morning delivery.

Update, Sept. 12, 3:09 pm
No news is bad news. No envelope, no info in the tracking system.
I'll leave Monday morning, drive to New York, get my passport, drive home, finish packing.

And then, gentle reader, I have news for you. See, I got a great price on my flight to Tokyo. But it flies Tuesday morning from... Montreal. Yes. That one in Canada. So I'll drive north late at night after first driving south in the morning.

Update, Sept. 12, 11:35 am
Just went to the local post office. Colleen, the friendly postal worker at the counter, looked up my package. It still shows no information. She said it would be checked in and out at each facility en route, so this means it's probably still on someone's desk in the consulate.

Or lost.
Or coming in a different envelope.
Colleen says to call after 3 when the afternoon express mail arrives in Oneonta.


Update, Sept. 11, 10:51 pm
This is not good news.
The embassy operator actually called me back! But he said no one will be in the visa department until Monday morning. This means I have no way to know if they still have my passport or not.

I plan to make an emergency run to NYC on Monday morning before I fly on Tuesday.

Worse, he said, they often mail passports on Friday COB. If so my passport is in transit and will definitely not arrive in time.

Update, Sept. 11, 10:17 pm
I did not reach anyone at the embassy. However, I called the after hours emergency number. (My passport is an emergency, right?) And — shocking this is — the operator took all my information and told me he would call the director of the consular office right now, to get an answer for me.

Can you imagine any US government office calling on your behalf in the middle of the night?

Stay tuned.

Update, Sept. 11, 3:03 pm: My USPS Express Mail with my passport should have arrived yesterday or today from New York. However, the post office says there is no record of my package. Calling the embassy as soon as I get home.

September 8. One week from today, I leave for Japan for a month. I'll be on assignment photographing Fukushima for several magazine articles.

However, I don't have my passport. I called the Japanese consulate today in NYC and they promised to mail it back to me today. Stay tuned...

Good news: a success story

Friends, I want to tell you a story about an amazing woman I met, many years ago, when I was still in college. This young woman was super smart and funny. And more importantly, she was one of the kindest and most compassionate people I knew. And beautiful. We got set up on a blind date and I quickly fell in love.

We dated for five weeks, but she was leaving soon for Moscow and neither of us thought it could last. Hard to believe, but back then, when somebody left the country there was no easy way to stay in touch. We wrote airmail letters. And I became one of the few people on my campus who used email. She found a public computer she could wait in line to use, and we managed to correspond once a month.

After she returned to the US, I convinced her to come work with me at a summer camp in Vermont and we had one day a week together. I loved her gentle thoughtfulness, her magnanimity, able to listen to anyone with empathy and draw them out and make them feel like the most important person in the room.

We returned to college. She was at Bryn Mawr and I was in school ten miles away. We still only saw each other once a week but we talked almost every day on the phone. My dorm had only one phone for the entire floor, but it had a 30-foot cord so I could pull it down to our quad and hog the hall phone for an hour. She was not only caring but ambitious — a double major in Russian and political science, and a leader of the college environmental group and an editor of the campus paper. We’d often talk late at night as she sat editing in the newspaper office.

After we graduated, we spent the summer living in my parent’s rustic cabin on a lake in Michigan. We cooked and swam and played games and worked in a Birkenstock store. We had no running water, no deadlines, and no idea what we wanted to do with our lives.

I got a job back in Vermont and she landed an internship for an environmental group in DC called ISAR. It was hard to go our separate ways but she was always intrepid and went fearlessly off on her own. She took everything in stride — new job, new city, new housemates — even getting mugged her first week in Washington didn’t faze her for long.

She started working her way up through ISAR — from intern to assistant to office manager to editor of their magazine. She was always a hard worker, although somehow she always found time to help everyone around her as well.

When I returned to the US after a year in India and China, I only knew one thing for sure: I wanted to live with this wonderful woman. We got our first apartment together on Capitol Hill and I watched her grow from a young student into a confident, articulate leader.

When we next moved abroad there was no question: we were going together. We spent two years in Kazakhstan. We wrote a book together. But as she traveled in Central Asia, still working for the same non-profit, she got frustrated that international NGOs and US policymakers had insufficient understanding of regional politics and were therefore ineffective. She decided to go to grad school.

By then, I knew I would follow this woman anywhere. On a cold October afternoon in the Almaty Botanical Garden, shortly after she’d gotten her legs wet jumping a creek, I pulled a ring from my pocket and asked her to marry me.

Amy said yes. We moved to Wisconsin, she started a Master’s in Public Policy and a year and a half later, we were married at the same camp in Vermont. We bought a house. Always altruistic, she was one of the few grad students who actively engaged in the community, volunteering and serving on our neighborhood association board. She discovered her master’s program was not challenging enough for her. So she decided she wanted to get a PhD and wanted to teach. She’s been this way as long as I’ve known her: intellectual but dedicated to using her intelligence to help others.

Four years later, she passed her prelims while pregnant. That summer her dad was dying, and we went to Maine. I tried to support her, but she really she was fine and was in fact busy supporting her mom and sister while simultaneously nursing Jacob and planning her dissertation. When Jacob was eight months old we moved to Ukraine for her research. Again, I was amazed by her ability to interview government officials and simultaneously negotiate a new country and be a new mother.

Becoming a mom did change her, however. She is still munificent, generous with her time and attention, but her devotion has become more focused on our kids. And it brings me joy to see her kindness reflected in Jacob and Natalie as they learn from her.

It was no surprise that Hartwick College wanted to hire her before she even finished her dissertation. We moved to New York and she dedicated herself to teaching and serving the college. She’s a great and innovative teacher — she has an ability to make any topic interesting and gets students to engage and participate fully. She works so hard. She starts at 5 am and after we get the kids to school she puts in a full day, comes home and serves as a caring parent until the kids bedtime. If she doesn’t fall asleep in Natalie’s bed she goes downstairs to keep working. And somehow she finds time to still be engaged in the community. I tell you, I thought I was a hard worker until I met her.

For the past 3 months, Amy has been nervous. She’s been under review for tenure. Although the rest of us knew she had nothing to worry about, she still fretted. But of course, ATP (the tenure committee) admired her so much that they didn’t know what to ask her, and the provost also told she was doing a great job.

The news, therefore, should surprise no one: Amy has been granted tenure! 
(Ok, technically the college president has recommended Amy for tenure. Tenure is not official until the trustees vote on it in February, but the trustees always follow the president’s recommendation.)

Congratulations Amy! We all love you and we’re very proud and we know you will continue to do great things in the world, in the community and in the classroom. I’m grateful for 22 years of watching you work and love and live and I look forward to many more.

Wisconsin Bookfest

I am looking forward to going back to Madison for my Chernobyl book reading at the Wisconsin Bookfest! Oct 19, 11 AM.
www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/event_overview

diary of a solo parent, week 2

Posts about parenting while Amy was away, continued.
Archived from www.facebook.com/mfrphoto

Week 1 is here: http://mfrphoto.blogspot.com/2014/06/diary-of-solo-parent.html

June 28:

Day 8 of solo parenting. Here are 2 things I think all new parents should be told about eating with kids:
1. Don't expect to sit down for a full a meal in the next decade.
2. Serve small portions and save some in reserve. 

When my kids like a dish they will eat serving after serving. Natalie reliably eats 4 or 5 bowls of breakfast cereal (the equivalent of about 2 full-size adult portions) but as soon as I give her a bigger portion she decides she is done or no longer likes whatever it is.

During lunch on our porch today, I felt lazy and gave Natalie a full cup of milk. No sooner did we finish grace than the full cup of milk came flying into my lap. Natalie's first response: to cry "I want more milk!" My first response: to pull off my dripping shorts. Jacob's first response: to run for a towel. 

Natalie, I said, the least you could do when you spill is to apologize or help clean up. I'm sorry daddy, she said very sweetly, then began fighting Jacob for the towel to help. Got a second rag towel but would not let either of them dry off my food.

Dad, Jacob said, looking at the neighbors, I think you should put some pants on.

June 30:

Day 10 of solo parenting. The three of us fixed the clogged bathroom sink. Underneath it was dark and hot and crowded. Seemed like there were more wrenches and elbows than possible for three people. Someone was always in my way and it took an hour and a half. At some point I wondered why I was doing this – alone I could get the whole job done in 20 minutes. As we started to get grouchy Jacob started wondering the same thing. 

Natalie keeps sitting on me and she's not really helping, he said. Could you get her to leave?

To be honest, there's not enough room here and this would be easier to do myself, without your help, I told him. He looked hurt. But I want you here because I want you to learn how to do things like this. My mom taught me to fix plumbing and rewire lamps and build bookshelves when I was his age. 

Nevertheless I was grateful this afternoon to have friends who took Jacob and left me alone for five full hours. I celebrated at lunch by eating the entire chocolate Easter bunny I've been saving in one sitting.

July 1:

Day 11 of solo parenting. I couldn't do this alone. So glad I've got a village.

When Jacob had a girl friend over today, they went to his room and shut the door. What were they doing behind that closed door? They are only 8. What's up with that?

Later they went to the kitchen and raided the fridge. Another first.

July 2:

Day 12 and a half of solo parenting. I fell asleep with Natalie last night and just woke at 4:40 am.

I was ready to put both kids out to pasture yesterday, but our yard is not big enough for two separate corrals.

July 3:
Day 14 of solo parenting. We're eagerly awaiting Amy's arrival. She landed in the US 17 hours ago, but she was too tired to drive home... At least that gave me a last night to vacuum the filthy rugs.

July 4:
The prodigal mother has returned.

July 5:

Day 1 of joint parenting. It is such a pleasure to be able to tag out when I need to. Of course there's plenty to do because we leave tomorrow for 2 weeks in the woods, but now I can leave home while the kids sleep!

Thanks to all of you who offered encouragement during my 2 weeks alone. It was nice to reconnect. Not the first time I've flown solo like this but it's the first time I shared it on FB. Let's do this again sometime.

diary of a solo parent

Hi blog readers,

My wife is away for 2 weeks and I started writing about it on Facebook. Below are the first few entries and you can find more here: www.facebook.com/mfrphoto

---
June 21
Day 0.
After 2 exciting weeks in Ukraine I came home - and today Amy left for 2 weeks in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Someday we'll travel together again... but for now I'm on dad duty until July 3. 

My question is: what should I do to surprise my wife when she returns? What would you want?

---
June 22
Day 1 of solo parenting: the kids begged for a swim and a picnic and I complied, even though it made for late bedtimes.

---

June 23
Day 2 of solo parenting: Natalie likes to make declarative sentences and then feels a need to prove herself right. As in: I don't need to hold hands to cross the street! Or: I don't like this toothpaste [which she has used every night for months], I like yours! Or: I need to wear a diaper! Why does Jacob get one, I need one too!

---

June 24
Day 3 of solo parenting. How do single parents do this? Today I was so busy working that I barely had time to go to Work. 

6 pm is not the best time to grocery shop with 2 young kids, but it was the only time it fit. Had I not kept policing Natalie, our cart would have ended up with matzoh ball soup mix, froot loops, honey nut cheerios, 16 hot dog buns, organic multigrain penne, and single-serving cups of cinnamon applesauce in it. As she proudly announced at checkout: "I helped my daddy the WHOLE TIME!"

---

June 25
Day 4 of solo parenting.
Me: Natalie, no more snuggles, you need to go to sleep. It's late, it's 10:30 at night.
I leave, followed by minutes of Natalie screaming and banging on her door.
Natalie: Daddy come back now, I'm really ready, I need a hug, I hitted my head.
Me: I won't come back unless you lay your head on your pillow and stop talking.
Natalie: I don't want daddy's rules, I want mommy's rules.

Confession: I am so cold hearted when Natalie has her meltdowns, which are frequent. But what am I teaching her by refusing her more coddling?

I read an article yesterday about the psychobiology of love, and the "micromoments of connection" that build love up. How important physical contact and eye contact are to feeling loved and teaching lovingkindess.

So at school drop off this morning, I tried asking Natalie to look into my eyes when she was upset and she refused to do it. Too much intimacy for her? She wanted to hug but averted her eyes and then pushed away.

When did you last stare lovingly into your kids' eyes? I am now convinced I do it too rarely.

June 26:
Day 5 of solo parenting. I was tired all day after Natalie stayed up late and woke up early. Tonight I just decided to fall asleep in her room. I'll stagger off to my own bed now after filing this report.

Week 2 is here:
http://mfrphoto.blogspot.com/2014/07/diary-of-solo-parent-week-2.html

Meet Vitaly, reluctant campaigner

 

 Campaigning in Kyiv

Watch Vitaly Valentinovich for a minute or two and it is clear that he’s quite shy. He bites his lip and rocks forward before launching himself into the crowd again. Shoppers and commuters rush past him at the Svyatoshin Metro station in Kyiv.

            Three days before Ukraine’s Presidential election, Vitaly is trying to pass out flyers for the Demokratiya Party. Despite his hesitations, he gets some takers. A few people grab papers out of his hands, unlike the advertisers down the aisle whom everyone ignores. I ask him why he does this work, since he is clearly uncomfortable doing it.

“I work because of the money. They pay me 18 hryvnia per hour” (about US$1.50), he tells me. “The money is the goal — politics is not what I care about. We have the war here and people were killed and that’s the main problem — it’s not about political views, it’s just about stability in the country. I still haven’t decided who I’ll vote for — there’s a lot of choice.”