Scholar: Objectivity Imperils Photojournalists

Photojournalists provide the world with stunning portraits of poverty, war and strife.
 

Witness the shot of a stick-thin, malnourished toddler who stopped to rest on her way to a feeding station in war-torn Sudan. The picture, taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter, shows the girl on her knees, bent at the waist with her forehead resting on the dry, dusty dirt.

She is alone except for a vulture behind her, waiting for her to die.

This picture captivated the world in 1993 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. A few months later, Carter taped a garden hose to the exhaust of his pick-up truck and fed the other end into the passenger side window.

Broke and depressed over the loss of a friend, his suicide note read, in part, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners . . . “

The professional identity of photojournalists like Carter force them to repress artistic impulses at their peril and “to the detriment of the people whom they serve,” according to Clemson University Assistant Professor Peggy Bowers in a speech Wednesday night in the Northside Recital Hall.

Bowers teaches courses on the history, criticism and theory of the mass media as well as on media law and ethics. In “Through the Objective Lens: The Ethics of Expression and Repression of High Art in Photojournalism,” she asserts that knowingly or not, photographers employ elements of art in terms of composition, line, texture and light.

In a profession that requires emotional detachment, photojournalists can share traits with painting without sacrificing ethics.

She contrasted examples of art from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century with photos or descriptions of photos, pausing at times to let the audience, which filled three-quarters of the hall, absorb the images.

For example, the use of light evokes mood and drama in both painting and photography.

Bowers showed a photo of a Japanese woman bathing her 15-year-old daughter, who suffers from mercury poisoning, which used light to highlight the face of the mother and the body of the daughter.

Portraits by Rembrandt share this quality, where light focuses on the essential elements and the less important fade into a darker background.

The photo has a stillness about it, and illustrates the quiet tenderness and care the mother feels for her daughter.

Bowers’ argument lost some of its emphasis, however, because due to copyright laws she could only describe, and not show, some images she used for her thesis.

Still, she asserted that denying this creative impulse to serve the goal of objectivity in newsgathering comes at a price, both to the photographer and the public.

The images captured by news photographers, often in traumatic situations such as war, the circumstance where Carter snapped his photo, are rife with moral conflicts.

Carter wandered from a feeding station and saw the starving girl and the vulture. He said he watched and waited for 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings, thereby creating a more dramatic image.

Avoiding emotional engagement in provocative photos due to ethics exploits the feelings these photos create, Bowers said. Photographs are not impartial slices of reality, she said. They evoke powerful feelings in the public who views them, but without meaning to (did you mean “without intending to” ?); they create a voyeuristic culture.

“If the photojournalist’s task is to help make sense of the world, these elements are essential to that goal,” Bowers said.

Photographers can use “explicit referencing,” in which images found in familiar works of art serve as a framework. In this way, photojournalists have access to overt values found in art without using their own “voice” to communicate.

For example, Bowers showed a famous photograph taken after four student protesters where shot at Kent State University in Ohio. A woman, kneeling beside one of the victims, is screaming. It mimics the “The Cry” by Edvard Munch, she said.

Bowers ended her speech asking, “So what’s the big ‘So What’?” Then she told the story of Carter’s famous photo and his death.

While lauded, many wondered what happened to the girl, and some called him another vulture.

“What kind of world do we create to take this photo and do nothing to change it,” she asked. The ties to artistic values can liberate photojournalists.

After all, the girl was not entirely alone.