Warring Photographers

There are photographers, then there are photographers. Just like oils aint oils! When the viewfinder has composed the image simply press the shutter and ‘hey presto’ you have an image. Simple? Well not really. Of course in moments of extreme danger that may well be the case, but for an image to tell its story and allow the viewer to interpret it, some thought has to be exercised.

This image needs no words to explain its horror

War Photographer, Hung Cong Ut, caught this iconic image from the Viet Naam war in 1972. Like everyone else he was fleeing the little village of Trang Bang after its bombing by South Vietnamese pilots. Hung Cong was born in what was then South Viet Naam but has lived in Los Angeles since 1977. At the time of this photograph he was 22 yrs old and worked for Associated Press. He took this photograph on the afternoon of June 8, 1972, just outside Trang Bang village, 30 miles northwest of Saigon. Ut had witnessed the napalm bombing and the subsequent flight of refugees from the fiery destruction. The central figure in his most famous image, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is of a 9-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, screaming in pain as she runs naked down a country road.

Napalm was a gruesome mixture of naphthalene (used in mothballs) and palmitate (often found in soap powders) mixed with with petrol. The result is a sticky gel that is a powerful and persistent fuel, yet does not consume itself quickly. In use it is very difficult to extinguish and adheres to anything with which it comes into contact; a sort of burning sticky super glue.

War photography holds a captivation for the viewer. The horror of the deathly and painful situation is viewed through the wormhole of the medium. Some photographers vowed to express the horror as a warning to future politicians and voters to never let it happen again. Others were carrying out a documentary process without making any judgement, rather letting the viewer make those choices.

Alexandra Boulat, an award-winning photographer known for a clear, descriptive style and a knack for making emotionally moving, often idiosyncratic images of people affected by war, died in Paris during October 2007. She was 45. Ms. Boulat often focused on the displaced: an image of hers seen pictured of an Afghan family in 2001 with the body of a boy who died in a refugee camp. She died after suffering a brain aneurysm in June and falling into a coma from which she never emerged, her friend Gary Knight said.

War means very little other than death

Ms. Boulat’s work appeared in many publications, including National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and Paris-Match. For most of the 1990s, she photographed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Her picture of Kosovar women surrounding a flag-draped coffin was a runner-up in the Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards for Magazine Photography presented by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and she won many other awards for her work.
Before the current war with Iraq, she was in Baghdad for National Geographic and gave attention to the lives of affluent people at a time when most photographers were interested in showing only Iraqis  misery. During the war she took pictures that told about death in different ways, like a body wrapped in a white sheet.

If you’re not familiar with Michael Yon, he is an independent pro-war photographer embedded in Iraq.  He has been invited to testify to Congress by Rick Santorum, and his images have been used as presentation material by Senator Asa Hutchinson.  On returning to Iraq this past October, he was denied embed status on his own, so he became nominally affiliated with The Weekly Standard.

 
Mr. Yon’s self-published biography tells the story of a young man who received special forces training, and then was tried and acquitted for murdering a bar patron right after becoming a Green Beret.  His website, consisting of regular “dispatches” from Iraq, has become quite popular with the conservative blogosphere.
Mr. Yon’s work is relevant right now because his photograph, shown above, is one of 10 finalists in TIME’s year end run off for most popular “Viewer’s Pick.”  (On the voting page, you can see the 10 finalists that received the highest vote totals from viewers over the past year as “best photo of the week.”)
In an ideal world, one would be able to examine news image in a deeper context, pairing each picture with a comprehensive explanation of how, where, and why it was taken. 

Is it always the children that suffer who claim the most emotive images

Thanks to Mr. Yon’s reporting, this photo is accompanied with some backstory.  Here are his comments:
The photo of Major Beiger cradling the Iraqi girl, Farah, was the people’s choice the first week of May, 2005. Time Magazine titled it “In his Arms” and used this caption: “A US Soldier comforts a child fatally wounded in a car bomb blast in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.”

It was an instant of clarity in a blur of chaos that, for many of us, frames and defines the nature of this war. Any US soldier who has ever served in combat can probably give countless examples of moments like this. I just happened to be on the scene that day when a terrorist who had been trailing a Deuce Four patrol in a car packed with explosives waited until a crowd of children had gathered around the soldiers and selected that moment to drive into the crowd and detonate. Although little remained of him to be shown in this frame, the image somehow still reveals the true nature of our enemy in this war.

 

 If you google gaza a multitude of information will hit you. But the common thread of any conflict which deepens into war means one thing and one thing only. Civillians die. Women and children die. The old perish as easily as the young. There are no winners, ever. Will man consantly wish to kill his neighbour in  belief its ‘my way or the highway’? So futile.