Photojournalism: Why do it?

One of the more succinct articles I've seen on why news journalists do what they do comes from Scout Tufankjian, a photographer for the Polaris agency who is based in New York City but does a lot of her work in Gaza. Writing in Slate.com about the latest round of violence there, she summed up what it's like to report on a war zone where people's lives are broken daily by random brutality:

I asked one of my best friends, a local AP photographer, how he was doing and he said, "Work is good. The situation is kharra (shit)." That pretty much sums up life here. It's the essential contradiction of what I do. If my kid were killed, I wouldn't want some grimy little snapper sticking her lens in my face, but I do that to people every day. I don't beat myself up for it, either. I'm here to work, not to watch or to hold their hand and experience their pain. And it's my job to show that the shelling leaves real people, crying real tears, over their really dead sons and daughters.

That probably sounds cold, but there's a context to it. And a reason for doing it.

It comes out slowly in Tufankjian's piece. And it comes out not so much from anything she actually says as it does from her matter-of-fact description of the daily life of a photojournalist in a war zone. She begins with a classic understatement:

GAZA, July 19, 2006—I love being a photographer. I doubt that I could possibly love it more. When I'm trying to compose an artful image out of the tattered remains of someone's son, however, I start to wonder if maybe my job is a little strange.

I've had this thought a lot during the last few weeks here in Gaza, where I've been working for various magazines and newspapers. While it may seem odd to commute between Gaza and New York, I've been working here off and on for almost three years, and the situation now is as bad as I have seen it. ...

There is a world of difference between Tufankjian's job and my experience covering courts and cops for daily newspapers in the U.S., but what she says I can relate to. Cover the news, and at some level you're trafficking in human misery. It's unavoidable.

Tufankjian is most effective when she tells about her day. In Gaza, with the Israeli Defense Forces pounding the area in response to provocation from Palestinian militants, it's impossible to plan much in advance. She says:

Most days here in Gaza begin in the morgue. My driver and fixer, Mahdi, picks me up at my occasionally air-conditioned hotel in the morning and we head to whatever hospital is closest to wherever the Israelis are currently. The Israelis have been moving around a lot—a few days here, a few days there. The militants tend to operate only in their own neighborhoods, so the press corps has been speculating that the Israelis are trying to attract the most intense militants in each area to the tanks and then kill them all. Whatever the plan is, that has certainly become one of the results. The problem, of course, is that these clashes are taking place in and around residential neighborhoods, so every time a tank shell misses the militants, there's a good chance it'll hit someone's home or someone's kid.

No matter where we are heading, we listen to Radio Shebab along the way to find out what's going on. Radio Shebab -— which is run by [the Palestinian opposition political party] Fatah -— is a mixed bag. Their local reporting is good and generally tells you what you need to know about where the clashes are, who's been killed, and where people are bringing the wounded. Unfortunately, the station also plays really horrible homegrown songs about the various factions, most of which would not sound out of place in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical, if Gilbert had written lyrics like "The death! The death! The death of Israel!"

In other words, they drive around looking for action.

The nature of news being what it is and Gaza being what it is, Tufankjian and her Arabic-speaking "fixer" (the local journalist overseas correspondents rely on to get them around) wind up at a hospital. She writes:

The news this morning is that there will be no funerals today. Israeli tanks are still in the area, so it's unlikely that Hamas will be able to hold a service for its gunmen that doesn't end in a massacre. I wander back to the hospital, where the normally quiet lobby has become a triage center. There are only six beds in the ER, and around 60 people have been wounded this morning, so the hospital has thrown a bunch of cots on the ground, and doctors are rushing around trying to stabilize people. Young militants toting Kalashnikovs keep getting in the way, tugging on the doctors' arms, trying to get them to treat a brother, a friend. Small kids from the neighborhood have also sneaked in and are looking around like it's a carnival. Meanwhile, the lights keep blowing out, so a janitor is on a ladder, changing the fluorescent tubes.

Since funerals in Gaza often turn into street demonstrations, as in so many of the world's trouble spots, they're good copy. They're where the news is. So are hospitals, though. Another reason for going to the hospital is that it's safer today than working the streets:

I've spent a lot of time in working in hospitals during the last few weeks. You get unfettered access here (Wanna see us try to save a guy missing his entire lower body? Come on in!). But the streets are also becoming more dangerous. The current Israeli incursion is a little bit outside town, where there are no side streets I can use to approach the action safely. Plus, the Israeli tanks are backed up by helicopter gunships, which scare the crap out of me. At least with tanks, you know what direction they'll be shooting in. Over the last few weeks, two journalists have been shot, and a lot more have been shot at, so unless you have an armored car, it makes more sense to cover this incursion from the hospital. Still, the thought of missing good pictures eats at me, so I'm relieved to see all of the local journalists sitting in front of the hospital smoking cigarettes.

Tufankjian says it's quieter in Gaza at the moment than it was before fighting broke out in Lebanon and most correspondents flocked to Beirut, but "the violence here continues unabated." Poignantly, I think, she adds:

... the Gazans generally treat me with warmth and courtesy. They see the foreign press as a lifeline—a chance to tell the world their story. Almost everybody believes that the world will listen.

I have my doubts. Polaris, my agency, sends me plenty of e-mails reassuring me that my pictures are not being sent out into a void, but the outside world doesn't seem all that interested in making the shelling stop. My politics are pretty simple. Killing people is bad. Killing civilians is worse. Killing children is an obscenity—whether it's the Katyusha rockets that killed two kids playing in their yard in Nazareth or the 6-year-old girl killed in her house in Shajiya. But no one in charge of this conflict has much to gain by stopping it. With each new atrocity, the extremists on both sides gain greater strength. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has never been more popular in Israel, and Palestinians are hunkering down behind [the militantly anti-Israeli governing party] Hamas.

Which leads Tufankjian back around to her friend's observation that life in Gaza is kharra, it's shit. But someone has to tell the world that's what it is. Someone has to be a witness.