For the World Press Photo of the Year 2004, judges had the daunting task of choosing among 70,000 pictures from 4,000 photographers around the world. We scribes can write about photos all we want, but words simply cannot do justice to many of them. The selected entry, from the Spot News category, of a natural disaster last year of which the world is still incredulous, is one such picture.
Taken from above for emphasis, the picture shows a woman bent nearly prostrate. Her arms are outstretched as if hugging the earth. Her palms, however, are turned toward the sky, her fingers splayed wide in great tension. One need not see the caption to surmise that she is mourning a relative killed in the Asian tsunami. That’s because also on the ground, several feet from her closed eyes, is an arm, bloated, muddied, tangled in debris. Stretched toward her, yet inanimate, the arm suggests the body not visible in the picture. Meanwhile, in the dirt several feet behind her, lies a solitary sandal.
The photo by Indian photographer Arko Datta of Reuters can be seen at worldpressphoto.com. It was one of many screened by Eamonn McCabe, himself an award-winning picture editor and photographer, and former picture editor for The Guardian newspaper of London, during a recent meeting of the world’s news ombudsmen. “I know the photographer has got pictures far worse than this,” Mr. McCabe said during the session on the limits of acceptability. “But this is the one he chose to send.” It’s a photo that artfully captured the dreadful loss of life. “We have the grief of an enormous amount of people, through this one woman. There’s only two people in this. And the memory of a third. But you get the feeling of thousands.” And that helped make it effective.
I’ve reported before on such photo sessions, including how our discussions underscore the unlikelihood of finding two ombudsmen, much less two editors, who’ll always agree. Yet a good number of ombudsman columns have been generated by concerned readers who don’t want to see dead people in their newspaper, or don’t want their children disturbed by them; who consider it inherently dehumanizing or unpatriotic to show, for example, U.S. soldiers or civilian contractors who have been killed.
The Post generally doesn’t publish such photos. When they depict significant news, as judged by admittedly subjective editors, there’s an obligation to show the reality of what’s happening, though that may be a hard look at times. Which helps explain the fairly recent phenomenon of readers feeling a need to thank their newspapers for running such photos. There’s nothing like a picture to tell a story, or to galvanize the nation’s consciousness. In my view, the untold hundreds of Abu Ghraib photos, seen only by some members of Congress, would further bring home the reality of what’s happened in our national name.
But Mr. McCabe provided a reminder that photo editors see many more such photos than readers can imagine. The Post’s photo director touched on that point, too, when I asked him about the picture that was the impetus for this latest focus on photos of tragedy. With the overline, “Mourners bid tearful farewell to West Palm teens,” the picture ran with the June 19 article, “Pleas to stop violence go out at funerals.” The caption read: “Mourners view the body of William D’Vorris Russell, 17, during his funeral Saturday at Bibleway Missionary Baptist Church. Russell was shot and killed June 8.”
“I was absolutely appalled,” a reader e-mailed, “to see a picture of a dead man lying in his casket plastered on the front page of the local section. I know the paper is going for the ‘shock’ effect, but that’s just overboard. I think the paper can make its point without showing the actual body.”
In explaining editors’ rationale for publishing that photo, Assistant Managing Editor/Photo Pete Cross said: “Death is a part of life. Open coffins are a way some mourn their dead. Seventeen-year-old William D’Vorris Russell was murdered so his family displayed him one last time for friends and loved ones – photography can be a window into the world we live and die in – and that’s how they bid William farewell.
“But you don’t see the really gruesome and graphic photos the editors see,” added Mr. Cross. “Recently, a photo moved over the AP wire of a 12-year-old boy whose leg was blown off by a bomb blast in Baghdad. If we wanted to shock readers, we could do it daily – minute by minute on the Web. No, open coffins are not shockers, they’re a normal part of life.”
The editors’ news meetings might be described as an exercise in self-censorship. I’ve quoted editors who have described their differing views, including some strong dissent, regarding pictures that ultimately ran in the newspaper. Most pictures, of course, don’t make it. But news photographs, as a colleague noted during our meeting, are the news just as much as any story is. And sometimes, like the news, they’re quite shocking.
C.B. Hanif is an editorial writer and ombudsman for The Palm Beach Post. Items for Listening Post may be sent to lp@pbpost.com
