Photojournalists: those images, man…
Girl post-Napalm, bullet to brain, grinning atrocities and abominations. Corpses that teach you anatomy and living people posing with shit that’s so wrong you can see how you’d have to be flip around it. And these guys and gals with cameras walk round everything with (damaged) rock star ease. Doing their job and putting their minds and souls through the wringer.
But it’s not just dispassionate (the photographer that link takes you to was killed in Afghanistan in April).
The love or the need or the drive or the duty to do it. You have to photograph, to report. Stick the camera in people’s faces. And these people know why they need to look into the lens and be the subject, too. Everyone feels it. This stuff won’t fit words; images and footage need to come out of the mess and stick well-spaced pins in people’s moral maps.
Video doesn’t always work in war. We know what frame-by-frame explosions look like – they’re things actors run out of with a bit of dirt make up on.
But the stills camera‘ll show you the percentage of body that’s GONE in an explosion. The dead body hurled into a tangle somewhere with a very alive expression on the face. Just how monochrome a person covered in the dust of a pulverized building looks.
So why kill them, photojournalists? (Still and moving pictures). They are neutral. Those fucking images are neutral – neutralizing. They annihilate war. They speak for themselves and they speak for neither side.
So why kill them, photojournalists? (Still and moving pictures). They are neutral. Those fucking images are neutral – neutralizing. They annihilate war. They speak for themselves and they speak for neither side.
That was October 21st 2012. The photographer, Fabio Bucciarelli, won the photo category of the Bayeux-Calvados Award for war correspondents the following year:
“I haven’t been back to Syria since then,” […] “The situation has been by far too dangerous in the last few months. The Syria war is a huge massacre against civilian populations. I know people who have been kidnapped there, like James Foley. I hope this award will help to make the people remember them, and remember all the innocent victims of this terrible war in Syria.”
This was one of many mentions James Foley got while he was still alive and a hostage (he was kidnapped on Thanksgiving 2012). Grisly, much-exploited murder done, he is now the first American journalist to have been killed in the conflict.
The Committee to Protect Journalists counts 67 journalists killed in Syria since the civil war began. They’ve named the country the most dangerous place in the world for journalists on the job.
But what a job, though. Foley’s last report for the GlobalPost has that potent, civilian-centric angle where he stands back, editing and punctuating devastatingly:
‘As Sayed recounted his near-death experience, he smoked a cigarette and tears welled in his eyes. Patches of gauze were still taped to his neck.
“You know one of the FSA leaders from Maraa?” he asked. “They go into the free area when there’s fighting in Salahhadin. I see them taking screens, computers, telephones, everything they can lay their hands on.”
He said he's seen civilians executed after rebels recklessly accuse them of being mercenaries for the regime.
“I saw one beaten to death,” he said. “The FSA didn’t check their facts, and now he’s dead. I know the man. He was 46. He has five children.”
“We have lost the civilians now,” he said, exhaling smoke.’
Less than two years before his Syrian kidnapping Foley’d been kidnapped in Libya – all sand dunes, Gaddafi forces and rifle butt beatings. South African photographer Anton Hammerl had been shot in front of Foley just before and was left to die from his wounds in in the desert: "I'll regret that day for the rest of my life. I'll regret what happened to Anton, […] I will constantly analyze that."
Foley was released, went back to the States to raise money for Hammerl’s widow and family, and returned to Libya to catch the successful hunt for Gaddafi. Not just closure but being useful: he helped source footage that showed that Gaddafi’s death was something more calculated than the firefight rebels initially claimed it was, prompting a UN investigation.
The night after Gaddafi was killed Foley polished off a bottle of Johnny Walker with Human Rights Watch’s Peter Bouckaert.
Syrians pay tribute to James Foley http://t.co/174KjjXJyq pic.twitter.com/lZz4f2q0G3
— i100 (@thei100) August 20, 2014
“I don’t have any pictures of Dana, but there’s not much chance I’ll forget what he looked like, that front-line face, he never got anything on film that he didn’t get on himself, after three years he turned into the thing he came to photograph.”
Michael Herr’s Dispatches is a devastating hoard of written combat photos itself. And he talks about the photojournalists around him. I think this was why James Foley resonated – something reared up from Sean [son of Errol] Flynn and Dana Stone’s capture/disappearance in April 1970 (Flynn was declared dead some 14 years later):
“I have pictures of Flynn but none by him, he was in so deep he hardly bothered to take them after a while. Definitely off of media, Flynn; a war behind him already where he’d confronted and cleaned the wasting movie-star karma that had burned down his father. In so far as Sean had been acting out, he was a great actor. He said that the movies just swallowed you up, so he did it on the ground, and the ground swallowed him up (no one I ever knew could have dug it like you, Sean), he and Dana had gone off somewhere together since April 1970, biking into Cambodia, ‘presumed captured’, rumours and long silence, MIA to say the least.”
(Michael Herr, Dispatches (London: Picador, 1979) p. 256-7)
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