ed's Photojournalism blog
Our editor leads a double life as a local newspaper photographer. The world of a photojournalist is an exciting one, with everything from shooting sport to being shot at by deranged serial killers forming part of the daily routine. He encounters some very strange situations along the way, meets some friends and always lugs his digital camera along to tell the story. One thing is sure, there is never a dull moment. Read his latest blog entry below.
Photojournalists, I like to think, are the world’s only professional witnesses.
Our role requires us to be on the scene when the news breaks. I have written about this before, but there is one interesting dilemma on which I have not yet touched, namely how we interact with the world while photographing the developing stories.
Every witness of every event plays a small part in the event itself. Whether you are a football fan cheering on your team to victory, or an interested bystander peering into a car after a horrific accident, the mere fact that you are there has an influence on the events and how they unfold.
When I started my first job as a local newspaper photographer, my editor took me out to the scene of electricity substation explosion. “What would you have done,” he asked me, “if you were here when it happened and you saw an injured man lying nearby?”
“I would call an ambulance and then take pictures,” I said.
“Very good,” he replied, “but you have the order wrong.”
For many years I have thought about his words, and I agree with him even less today than the day he said it.
There is a school of thought that believes that we, as witnesses, have a very specific role to play when events unfold around us. The doctrine goes that we should have a responsibility to record what has happened, not to play a part in it. If we find a lost man in the desert, on the verge of dying of thirst, it says, we should stay there, take his picture, and watch him die.
If we saw a monk burning to death, our responsibility is to capture the moment. If we saw a father raping his daughter, our best course of action is to get the picture and expose him to the world.
We have no right to interfere, only to record and alert.
Over my dead body.
As witnesses, we are by default human beings, and as human beings, our first responsibility is towards our own humanity.
I contend that we not only attempt to change the world with our presence on the scene, but that we also have a responsibility to interact with the reality around us while we take the pictures.
Go on, be the difference you want to see in the world.