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Saturday, July 29, 2006

How not to take pictures of a war

Most days here in Gaza begin in the morgue . . . . Today and yesterday we ended up at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Hospital [n. b., The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades is a terrorist group on the State Department's list, best known for various suicide bombings inside Israel]. Their morgue is tiny. In some drawers, two bodies share one gurney, curled up like brothers or lovers, something I have never seen before. The morgue attendant is reluctant to open the doors, but he relents for me after Mahdi convinces him that it is the only way to show Americans how many people are dying here. I photograph these bodies every morning. - Slate, "A Photographer in Gaza: How to take pictures of a war," July 28, 2006
In a way it's hard to criticize someone who works as a photojournalist in a war zone. But starting every day at the morgue is not only ghoulish, it's uncreative. I mean no disrespect to the dead and suffering when I say that morgue and hospital photos from war zones have a clichéd, numbing sameness about them. There is simply no call for a fresh batch of them every day. That's not a political statement but rather a journalistic and an artistic one.

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Welcome, visitors from hughhewitt.com. If you haven't realized already, you're lucky to have Dean Barnett as a guest blogger. You won't often find such an engaging combination of analysis, playfulness and wit. I have no idea if you'd like to read something wholly apolitical while you're here, but if so I'm fond of this post about photography from a few weeks back. - MWR


posted at 12:43 AM

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