The telephone calls arrived fast. Some of the callers were furious.
The reason: a Page One photo on Saturday, April 13. The Associated Press wire service photo focused on a paramedic attending to a wounded, dazed victim of a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem market. The injured person’s clothes are shredded. The victim’s hair, skin and clothing are dirtied and coated from the dust and debris.
Some blood is visible around the face and neck, but not a lot. Nevertheless, the photo is shocking. The moment it captures is one of human trauma.
About a dozen readers responded, all but one upset, even angry that The Oregonian had published the photo. All but two or three were concerned with the graphic nature of the photo, not with Middle East politics.
One man said, “I can’t handle it . . . It is more than I need to see.”
About half complained that children should not be subjected to such disturbing images. “I’m tired of seeing blood and guts,” one caller said.
Despite such complaints, images from the Middle East in this newspaper in the last several weeks have not been particularly bloody — which is not to say they have not been graphic in other ways.
Photos this past week included evocative shots from Jenin, a Palestinian refugee camp: women lost among the stark rubble of their homes or at a mass grave; Palestinian men negotiating debris as they carry the cloth-covered body of a man found in the rubble; two Israeli soldiers fighting the stench of death from unseen bodies.
Other recent photos have shown Israeli soldiers with an injured companion and a blackened, bombed bus.
Until the appearance of the April 13 photo of the bombing victim, complaints about photo and story coverage from the Middle East had been focused on concerns about fairness, not blood.
Randy L. Rasmussen, assistant photo director for The Oregonian, keeps his finger on the pulse of international photos.
“I’m always looking for what defines these events in an emotional way and in a physical way,” Rasmussen said last week as we scanned computerized images in the photography department.
Some of the photos were graphic indeed: blood and bodies on the floor of a bar following a suicide bombing; the bodies of Palestinian men, two to a compartment in a crowded morgue; the body of a Palestinian man, killed by other Palestinians who believed he was a traitor, hanging upside down. None of these appeared in this newspaper.
The photo that upset some readers April 13, however, was not all that graphic, in Rasmussen’s view. While the image is startling, it contains little blood. It conveys emotional and physical trauma.
Rasmussen selected the photo in part because of the timing. That bombing, carried out by a young woman at a bus stop, occurred on the day that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Israel, and one day before he was to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Powell temporarily called off the visit with Arafat.
With the bombing coming at that pivotal point, Rasmussen said, the event took on added significance.
The photo offered something else, too: “This is a very human situation,” Rasmussen said. Photos of bombing aftermaths often show street scenes, but not the human toll.
By the same token, with access to the Jenin refugee camp becoming available during the past week, photographers have been able to capture the human sadness in the wake of the fighting there — something some readers said the newspaper had ignored.
“There is an invisible line between what is acceptable and what is not” in terms of publishable images, Rasmussen said. To draw that line too conservatively might rule out photos that are jarring, but it also would prevent editors from presenting a sense of the reality that others face every day. You can reach Dan Hortsch at 503-221-8221 or toll free from outside the 503 area at 877-238-8221, by e-mail at publiceditor@news.oregonian.com.
