Appreciate the photojournos, but don’t romanticise them

June 5th, 2011

We should be careful not to romanticize war photographers. Anyone who has spent time with a bunch of them will know that it is easy to glorify the mixture of courage and foolishness, the adrenalin addiction, the search for “bang-bang” that drives them.

But we must never stop appreciating them, and what they do for us.

They stand between each of us and our natural desire not to face up to the harsh realities of war. They have made conflict more real and vivid for people everywhere. They have brought all the distant wars into our living rooms and made it impossible to ignore the suffering. They have helped end the notion of war as glorious and manly.

In South Africa during the civil war of the 1980s, they made sure they world saw what was happening here. And it meant that those who wanted to know the cost of apartheid, could know. Only those who chose not to know, did not know. More than anyone else, it was the photographers and cameramen that achieved that.

They have done it at great cost. This year we have had the death of Anton Hammerl and Joao Silva’s loss of his legs. According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, based in New York, 30 journalists have died so far in 2011. Forty-four percent were lensmen.

Since 1992, the CPJ have recorded 863 journalists killed. Eleven of these, by the way, were women. About 50 of them died in the “fog of war”.

Reporters can use the telephone. They can speak to eyewitnesses afterwards. Of course, the best get there and see and feel it for themselves, but when it is too dangerous, they can still get a version of the story in other ways. But for the photographer, there is no escaping the need for proximity. As one of the pioneers, Robert Capa, put it: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” Capa died when he stood on a landmine in Hungary in 1954.

Former war reporter and editor Max Hastings recently wrote a piece of notable honesty on the topic in the Financial Times. “I never doubted the worth of what we were trying to do. But nor did I suppose that I, or more than a tiny fraction of my colleagues, put ourselves in the line of fire in the cause of suffering humanity. We did it because we loved adventure and every ambitious journalist knows that conflicts offer the fastest and most glamorous path to a reputation.”

And we know that the adrenalin is addictive. Those who experience it find it hard to give it up. They become battlefield junkies. Nothing else can bring such an edge to their lives, and throw up such opportunities for extraordinary and impactful images. Silva is said to have continued taking pictures as he was taken off the battlefield without his legs.

“My motivation”, Silva said, “was always to be on the edge of history, to get the message out. If I could go back and do it all again, would I do it? Yeah, most certainly, because this is what I do. I’m fortunate enough to get to see people’s lives in some of the most intimate moments, and record history.”

Fortunate. Enough.

Not many of them are like Greg Marinovich, who won a Pulitzer, got shot four times, wrote the definitive book (The bang bang club, with Silva) and said he had had enough.

They war photographer has to be caring and callous at the same time, they have to have their eyes wide open while their hearts are numbed to pain, they have to see the beauty and ugliness all mixed up, they have to find clarity in the fog, and they have to see all this contradiction and get it into sharp focus.

A good war photographer might hope that one day there is no war to go and record, but they also know they would be at a loss for what to do. The rest of us can only look upon them with awe and unbounded appreciation.

*First published in Business Day 24 May 2011

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print, TV