“Warn­ing: view­ers may find some of the images in this report dis­turb­ing.” Can there be a more point­less and insen­si­tive caveat to a sto­ry about the civil­ian vic­tims of war? You are sup­posed to be dis­turbed by war and suf­fer­ing. The jour­nal­ists who cap­ture those images often take hor­ren­dous phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal risks. So why do they do it, even though their boss­es tell view­ers to look away?
Sir Win­ston Churchill, a war cor­re­spon­dent long before he was a wartime leader, famous­ly not­ed that: “Noth­ing in life is so exhil­a­rat­ing as to be shot at with­out result.”
The flash, crash and roil­ing smoke of bomb and mis­sile strikes are pow­er­ful, essen­tial images in war cov­er­age. And adren­a­lin can be a addictive.
But it’s not the be all and end all. Yes, there are what are termed “war junkies”. But they are in the minority.
Nick Turn­er, one of the most gift­ed, sen­si­tive and brave cam­era­men I ever had the priv­i­lege to work with, summed it up this way: “The job of being a trav­el­ing news cam­era­men choos­es us, not the oth­er way around. It finds those inter­est­ed enough in the world to sac­ri­fice fam­i­ly life and secu­ri­ty, who are pre­pared to go to awful places in the mid­dle of the night for the news.”
And the job comes at a price.
Every ter­ri­ble, heart-wrench­ing, gut-twist­ing scene they point their cam­era at doesn’t just go direct­ly onto video­tape. It sears its way through the viewfind­er and straight into their brain and psy­che and soul. Nick Turn­er says cov­er­ing pret­ty much every war was there dur­ing his forty-five year career left him“with what I guess is mild PTSD. I can’t watch movies and news about chil­dren suf­fer­ing, for example.”
It’s a safe bet Ukraine will pro­vide a sur­feit of that.

                      STRIKING SCENES        

BBC cam­era­man Jon Hugh­es just fin­ished a sev­en-week rotation:
“I grew up hear­ing sto­ries of Lon­don in the blitz with peo­ple tak­ing shel­ter in the under­ground, and here we were in the 21st cen­tu­ry with peo­ple liv­ing in exact­ly the same conditions.

 

This is a part of the job which always gives me thought. You’re there to record what is going on…to depict the true hor­ror of the sit­u­a­tion.  But these are real peo­ple, at their worst moment, at their most vul­ner­a­ble, and you have to film that. You try and do it sen­si­tive­ly, but to some extent it does feel like exploita­tion. If peo­ple object to being filmed, I always put the cam­era down. What amazes me is how in these cir­cum­stances, peo­ple do let you film them. They often want you to show the world what is going on, the injus­tice and suf­fer­ing that they’re experiencing.”
If the cam­era isn’t there, how would any­one know? Or care? The obvi­ous answer is — they wouldn’t.
Fed­eri­co Puc­ci, an Ital­ian cam­era­man, was struck by the courage and for­ti­tude of the Ukrain­ian people.
“At the Pol­ish bor­der, I filmed a father get­ting out of a car with a small trol­ley bag and a back­pack. His wife was hold­ing the hand of their dis­abled daugh­ter. They were head­ing for safe­ty. He would go back to fight. They didn’t cry. War is not for the weak.”

        A DIFFERENT KIND OF ‘SHOCK AND AWE’

Free­lance cam­era­man James But­ler has cov­ered the wars in Syr­ia, Iraq, Afghanistan and at the time of writ­ing was in Kyiv.

“It always amazes me how quick­ly a per­son, city or coun­try becomes accus­tomed to war. You get used to the explo­sions, loud nois­es and unso­cial hours. But one thing I don’t think, or hope, I’ll ever get used to is the amount of human suf­fer­ing you’re exposed to. You’re always ques­tion­ing — when do you point the cam­era or when do you allow peo­ple their dig­ni­ty and refuse to film them at their low­est and most des­per­ate times. I nev­er get used to it, and for months after always ques­tion if I made the right call.”
Thorsten Hoe­fle, a Ger­man cam­era­man for CBS, summed up Ukraine and all the oth­er wars and human tragedy he’s cov­ered this way:
“You feel sad. You get teary eyes. Your viewfind­er fogs up. You have a feel­ing of guilt that you are film­ing peo­ple in ter­ri­ble sit­u­a­tions, in their weak­est moment. You’re aware that you are only vis­it­ing and get to go home to a safe place, a hotel, with food, nor­mal­ly run­ning water and elec­tric­i­ty, while they can’t escape the hor­rors of war. And yet you feel it’s impor­tant that these pic­tures are tak­en. So that the world can see them. That politi­cians can see them. Even if it doesn’t always make a dif­fer­ence, we have to keep on try­ing. If we don’t show the bru­tal­i­ty, the sad­ness, noth­ing will change, will get stopped, peo­ple won’t feel like they need to donate to help.”
The writer Mar­guerite Duras syn­the­sised all of the fore­go­ing in three lines: “Jour­nal­ism with­out a moral posi­tion is impos­si­ble. Every jour­nal­ist is a moral­ist. It’s absolute­ly unavoidable.”
In many ways the ones truest to that are the men and women you don’t see, but who see every­thing for you, through their viewfinders…and hearts.
And you damned well should be dis­turbed by it.
Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.