I am always skeptical that the photos are representative of the events on the ground, but I find them nonetheless mesmerizing, and in the case of the photos from Haiti, haunting.
Their cover photo from Jan 15 {below} was -- I am struggling to find the adjective here -- "spectacular"?
But the photo that really struck me was photo #22 from yesterday's edition:
My reaction:
I am perusing along through 21 photos telling me -- at times, graphically -- the story of Haiti, and then, all of the sudden, this one: Now it is telling the story of the story tellers.
You wonder if the person behind the camera -- who had likely been trailing the officers for hours, partially for photo-worthy material but even moreso for the comfort of their rifles -- suddenly had a zen moment where he stepped away from the anxiety-ridden moment as the policemen lifted their rifles toward the looter, and saw the event for all that it was: grotesque and absurd.
It is the type of story readers eat up: Scantily-armored policemen patrol the streets like pawns, trying to prevent survivalistic young men from ruining even more what ruins are left. "The right photograph," he might have thought, "could pull a higher price than these young Haitians see in their lifetime."
Something has to pique your conscience when the cameras outnumber the policemen twelve-to-two.
You wonder if the photojournalist felt suspiciously like all his training and his C.V.'s pages-long list of experiences demonstrating his superior photomechanistic-prowess led him here, to the Hollywood Boulevard of Hell.
Can we really excuse such photographs as "documenting" historical events, or is this thinly-veiled disaster pornography? And to what extent is this better than Hollywood's "photojournalism" when the appeal to both rest in minor empathetic revulsions?
Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe it is a necessary evil. The more eyes seeing such photos, the more help will be delivered to Haitians. (Although to be honest, it saddens me how disproportionately our moral capital flows to the areas with the most sensational news stories.)
I can't help but to think of the photojournalists as the starving artists at the front lines, thinking of themselves as "creatives" but better-described as "cogs", taking orders in the usual way.
It is not something you can or should suppress. I am not calling for a moral revolution to boycott sensationalistic photography -- that would be idiotic. This post was only an attempt to express my feelings from seeing photo #22, when I felt awoken from a trance, and, in a word, dirty.
