Wenn's photograph made the front page of five national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph.

It’s become the iconic image of the London riots: A woman, black against a background of flames, leaps from a burning building and into the arms of a faceless throng of people. Now, the photographer behind the dramatic picture has revealed the story behind it.

Amy Weston, who works for the WENN photo agency, was driving to the scene in Croydon just outside of London when she heard screams.

“There were six or seven people screaming and crying outside, and they looked like they lived at the flats that were burning. The flats were above small independent shops,” Weston said in an interview with The Guardian.

“A man in a white shirt was screaming that a girl was at the window and that she was ready to jump. He ran towards her but riot police had appeared and pulled him back, and they went to her instead.

“As soon as she dropped, the crowds pushed back and there was no way to see what happened to her. I remember hearing people screaming that there were more people in the building. The crowds started getting angry with each other, with one group blaming another group for starting the fire.

“There were warnings of gas cylinders being fired into the crowd from riot police so I got out of there. I couldn’t get to my car so I had to walk, wrapping my camera in my clothes to avoid being mugged.”

Weston’s photograph was used on the front page of at least five national newspapers on Tuesday morning and has since become one of the defining images of the disastrous riots. The photo is already being compared to the famous kiss captured during the Vancouver riots earlier this year, in which a young couple locked lips amidst a surging battalion of riot police.

The woman kissing Elvis has been revealed after over half a century.

Long before Elvis Presley’s hips scandalized America, his tongue found its way into lusty legend. Now, 55 years after the infamous photograph of the King of Rock ‘N’ Roll swapping spit with a mysterious blonde, a photographic mystery has finally been solved.

Barbara Gray of Charleston, South Carolina, has been identified as the young blonde woman kissing the music icon in the popular picture taken by photographer Alfred Wertheimer.

Vanity Fair has revealed that Gray, now 75 years old, is the woman at the center of Presley’s attention in the photo, which was taken backstage just before a concert at the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, in June 1956. “The Kiss,” as it’s now known, ended up being the crown jewel in Wertheimer’s coverage of Presley.

Yet for all these years, Gray’s identity has remained a mystery. “I never bothered to ask her name,” Wertheimer said. “And she never bothered to tell me.”

Then, last year, Gray at last grew tired of constantly being referred to as “the unknown young woman in the wings.” So she messaged Wertheimer on Facebook, gave him her maiden name and told him she had a “good story.” The rest is history.

As for her memories of the photo, Gray said in an interview on the Today show on Monday that, despite the apparent connection in the photo, she didn’t feel any real chemistry for the rock star.

“Maybe he had sparks, but I didn’t even know who he was,” Gray told host Matt Lauer.

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Is your app the next face of New York City?

Have a knack for coming up with unique and useful photo editing apps? Introducing Photo Hack Day, the perfect opportunity to get some major recognition for your app design skills by putting your face up on the big screen. The REALLY big screen.

On August 20 – 21, Aviary, a multimedia application suite that offers free use of a range of image editors, will host the first annual Photo Hack Day in New York City. Sponsored by NASDAQ, the “hackathon” aims to bring together the world’s best and brightest minds in “photography, photo-editing, web design, computer science and more” to develop “awesome photo hacks using open APIs.”

Participants will have the opportunity to compete for cash prizes, while the selected winners will have their work featured in the NASDAQ Times Square display. Talk about exposure.

A number of companies, including Instagram, Foursquare, Etsy, Pixable and Twitpic, will also be at the event trying to persuade developers to use their applications.

Frank De Maria, NASDAQ OMX Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, released a statement saying, “NASDAQ has driven grassroots innovation since it created the world’s first electronic stock exchange 40 years ago. NASDAQ is excited to sponsor the 2011 Photo Hack Day at General Assembly and support the start-up community in New York in their pursuit of innovation. We can’t wait to see the results.”

To register for the event, just head to the Photo Hack Day website.

Terry Richardson and Lady Gaga.

Get ready to clear some space on your coffee table. Lady Gaga is teaming up with renowned fashion photographer Terry Richardson for a new photography book that will chronicle the “Poker Face” singer’s hectic life on and off tour.

Dubbed simply Lady Gaga, the book will feature 350 photographs shot by Richardson over the course of 10 months, and will include images taken during the 2010 Lollapalooza festival and the culminating shows of Gaga’s record-breaking Monster Ball tour.

According to Gaga herself, the book is the result of Richardson’s unprecedented access to her life:

“I didn’t hold anything back from Terry … he was with me every minute, every moment,” she told MTV News. “It’s completely unfiltered. He has photographs of me waking up in the morning, brushing my teeth, in the bathroom, in the bathtub, the shower. And the thing about Terry, if you know anything about his photography, is that nothing is staged; I mean, that’s sort of what he is renowned for. He can get you to do things and he can capture things that no one can ever capture.”

Gaga and Richardson have collaborated before, often with both provocative and controversial results. In September, Richardson snapped the singer topless and as her male alter ego, Jo Calderone, for Vogue Hommes Japan, and then in February of this year he photographed Gaga in a preview of her now-infamous raw meat dress.

The pair’s new book will hit shelves on November 22, just in time for Christmas.

Joao Silva's image of spectators at the closing of Walter Reed Medical Center landed on the front page of the New York Times.

For New York Times photojournalist Joao Silva, the road to recovery has been long and arduous. But now it looks like the light at the end of the tunnel is finally getting brighter.

Silva, who lost both of his legs after stepping on a landmine while on assignment in Afghanistan last year, had one of his photographs featured on the front page of the Times yesterday, marking a triumphant return for a man whose life hung in the balance only a few months ago.

The new image — of spectators watching a parachute demonstration — ran with a story about the closing of the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington D.C., the very hospital where Silva himself spent the last seven months in rehabilitation.

On October 23 last year, Silva was in the Kandahar Province when a bomb exploded beneath him, resulting in severe internal injuries and the loss of one leg below the knee and the other above the knee. Amazingly, Silva managed to keep shooting even after his devastating injury. The resulting photographs were recovered from the memory card in Silva’s damaged camera and featured on the Times’ photo blog.

Though he now uses two prosthetic legs and a cane, which he has to shift before taking a picture, Silva is still happy that he was able to get out and document such an important event.

“It was a matter of making the best of what I had,” he told the Times. “There will come a time when I can run, but now I can walk.” And he means that: Silva has entered to compete in this year’s New York Marathon, which he will run using a specially designed handcycle.

Kirk Weddle's photo for Nirvana's classic 1991 album.

That famous Nirvana baby may be all grown up, but he can still have his old job back if he wants it.

For the 20th anniversary of Nevermind, the seminal rock record from Nirvana that catapulted the Seattle grunge band to super stardom, the photographer behind the album’s iconic cover wants to reunite with its naked swimming baby.

Kirk Weddle snapped the startling image of an infant in a swimming pool for the cover of Nirvana’s 1991 album, and now he wants to recreate the image with the same kid. Except now that kid, Spencer Elden, is an adult.

“Now that Spencer’s old enough, I’d like to shoot him swimming nude again,” Weddle said.

The story behind the cover image has become part of the legend surrounding the album. Conceived by singer Kurt Cobain while watching a documentary on water births, the idea was passed on to Weddle after stock photography of babies proved too expensive. Renata and Rick Elden eventually agreed to let their son Spencer be photographed underwater for a flat fee of $200.

While Weddle was able to find a way around the cost, little Spencer’s budding manhood was another matter. Record label Geffen created an alternate cover for the album out of fears that the child’s penis would offend people, prompting Cobain to say that the only way he would compromise would be to put a sticker over the offending body part with the words “If you are offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.”

Needless to say, Geffen caved and the photo remained. To this day the album and the image have sold over 30 million copies worldwide.

Elden, who now works for a street art and viral marketing company in Los Angeles, agreed to pose for a recreation of the image in Rolling Stone for the album’s tenth anniversary in 2001. Thankfully he kept his clothes on this time around.

A man in North Waziristan, Pakistan, holds a piece of missile fired by a U.S. drone. Photo by Noor Behram.

Photographer Noor Behram’s new photo exhibit makes a shocking claim that many supporters of the War on Terror don’t want to hear: far more civilians are killed by U.S. drone attacks than the United States wants to admit.

“For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” says Behram, who has spent the last three years documenting the aftermath of drone strikes along the Afghan-Pakistan border. “I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed.”

Behram’s new exhibit, which opened Tuesday at the Beaconsfield gallery in London, features photos from 28 drone strikes that showcase the horrors of war suffered by civilians. Documents From the Frontier will feature “a cache of hitherto unseen images taken by a local journalist in the tribal regions of Pakistan reveal the unequal human cost of remotely controlled war machines,” according to the Beaconfield website.

Sponsored by rights groups Reprieve and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a British association established to help drone strike victims, the exhibition features photographs, many of them gruesome, of the destruction left by the attacks. One heartbreaking image shows an 8 year-old child allegedly killed by a drone, his body decorated with flowers in preparation for burial.

While verifying kills made by drone strikes is highly difficult, and local support for the military tactic depends on al Qaida influence in the area, it’s undeniable that these sorts of images show a side of the war that not many officials are willing to talk publicly about. And for Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith, the photographs are one way to show people the truth.

“I hate to expose the world to pictures of a child with his head blown half off, but that is what the U.S. military calls ‘collateral’ damage,” said Smith. “This is another terrible U.S. policy in the war on terror.”

To read more about Behram’s photos, head to the Guardian.

Kyle McDonald's People Staring at Computers project. Image from Notcot.org

Right now, as your eyes follow this text, the look on your face would probably surprise you. The way we stare at our computer screens can make us look drawn, deadpan and hypnotized, and its a self-portrait many of us never stop to think about.

Photographer Kyle McDonald tried capture this look on the face of strangers. After setting up software at two Apple stores in New York City that forced computers to automatically take one photo every minute and send them back to his server, McDonald then compiled the images into a piece called People Staring at Computers.

The results — which show hundreds of anonymous faces staring blankly at screens — are fascinating, thought-provoking, slightly disturbing … and possibly illegal. McDonald’s project has landed him in hot water with the Secret Service, who confiscated his computer after obtaining a search warrant for computer fraud.

So, aside from the inherently creepy thought of someone taking a picture of your face and saving it at home without you knowing, what exactly has McDonald done wrong? It’s not easy to say, especially when we are photographed in much the same way by other sources.

“My guess is that virtually everyone who appears in this guy’s slide show also appears in the stores’ security video, sometimes perhaps from the same angle(s), and few people would be surprised or offended that they have been monitored in this way,” Craig LaMay, a professor in media law and ethics at Northwestern University, told Mashable.

While privacy violations might be hard to establish, the fact that McDonald put his own software on Apple computers that sent information back to him — what if it had been log-in info or credit card numbers instead of photos? — makes the Secret Service’s actions more understandable.

What do you think? Is McDonald within his rights as an artist to take public photos, or did he invade privacy AND illegally manipulate Apple computers?

While photographing world leaders can be one of the most high profile gigs in photojournalism, being so close to power can also get you burned. As part of a crack-down on suspected spies within the country, the photographer to the President of Georgia has been arrested on suspicion of espionage.

Irakli Gedenidze, personal photographer to President Mikhail Saakashvili, was arrested Thursday along with three others (including his wife) after being accused of spying and “operating under the cover of one of the foreign country’s special service, with various information, against the interests of Georgia,” the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced Thursday.

Also detained was the photographer for Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as Zurab Qurtsikidze, a photographer for the European PressPhoto Agency (EPA).

Georgia officials did not disclose how they were suspected of spying, nor exactly what they did, but sources say the journalists have been accused of giving state secrets to Russia.

“They say he sent pictures to Moscow,” Qurtsikidze’s boss, EPA editor-in-chief Cengiz Serem, told ABC News. “These were pool pictures and were given to all agencies… The pictures are even vetted by the President before they’re sent out.”

Georgia is one of the few former Soviet states to maintain a free news media, so the arrests have prompted widespread protest. Georgia’s Human Rights Center called the move a “violation of the freedom of expression,” while a dozen journalists protested outside the police station in the capital of Tbilisi.

Photography is not a crime. But for Miami shutterbug Sandy Dewitt, taking a picture of an airline employee was apparently enough to deem her a security risk and get her barred from flying.

U.S. Airways has stirred up a firestorm of protest from photography rights advocates after escorting Dewitt off a flight because she took a picture of an employee’s name tag. After witnessing Tonialla G. being rude to a number of passengers in the boarding area of a flight from Philadelphia International Airport to Miami on Friday, Dewitt pulled out her iPhone and snapped a picture. She planned to use the photo later when reporting Tonialla’s behavior to U.S. Airways officials.

However, once aboard the plane, Dewitt says the employee confronted her and forced her to delete the photo. And she wasn’t done there. Tonialla then went to the cabin and informed the pilot that Dewitt was a security risk and had her escorted from the plane by flight attendants.

“I announced to the other passengers that I was being removed because I took a photo,” Dewitt told Pixiq.com.

Dewitt was then told she could no longer fly U.S. Airways and had to catch a flight the next morning with SouthWest.

While Dewitt’s removal has sparked strong criticism for the airline, Todd Lehmacher, a spokesman for US Airways, says the photographer displayed belligerent behavior before she was kicked off. “Once onboard, she was using foul and explicit language,” Lehmacher told MSNBC. “She was removed at the request of the captain.”

So what do you think? Was Dewitt unfairly treated, or it US Airways within its rights to have her removed?