A Fly Caught In Amber: On The Ethics of Photojournalism and The Exploitation of Suffering.

Words: Natalia Nowak (she/her)

Cw: war, violence, death,

The year is 1993, and the decade of change is well underway. The world is scrambling to get itself together before the turn of the century, and amidst digitalisation and political change, Sudan is starving: a civil war has the country tearing at itself, with famine seeping into the tatters, while the rest of the world is too busy to care.

That same year, photographer Kevin Carter was sent by the UN Operation Lifeline Sudan to capture the struggle. There he took the damning photograph ‘The Vulture and the Little Girl’ showing a starving boy, named Kong Nyong, crouched on the ground in exhaustion trying to reach a UN feeding centre. Behind Nyong, a vulture stands expectantly waiting…

The New York Times published the photo, and people were outraged. They argued and deliberated over the image, saying that instead of snapping the award winning shot Carter ‘should have helped the child’, offered food. Intervened.

This was however impossible with the Sudanese soldiers surrounding Carter who ensured the enforcement of the strict ‘no touch’ policy, employed to stop the spread of disease. But no one witnessed that. They only saw the picture. The picture of the vulture waiting for the starving child to drop. Transcending language and geography, the photo exposed the global population to the raw reality. It was a shot to our moral conscience. It successfully brought the world’s eyes to South Sudan.

Kevin Carter ‘The Little Girl and The Vulture’ (1993)

As a reporter trying to sway public opinion, if someone was to hand you that photograph, that’s pure gold. If it bleeds, it leads. Many argued Carter was equally the vulture, exploiting Nyong’s pain for personal gain. Yet, the photo had to be taken. Because suddenly it brought the crisis to people’s newspapers and TVs, as they sat down with their breakfast or dinner. They saw starvation, the pain of the famine in Nyong’s protruding ribs. The onlooking vulture reflects in the lens their self-serving, global indifference.

The relationship between a photojournalist and their subject is one that should obviously be subject to ethical limitations and responsibilities. It’s a perverse incentive loop because the more suffering that occurs, the more publicity it receives, and in return international sympathy and aid is garnered. Images of suffering are often used to move forward humanitarian campaigns, but it is necessary to zoom in to the individual subject and ask ourselves whether that award winning shot is worth it. A photo that begs this question is ‘Migrant Mother’ – a portrait of Florence Owens Thompson taken by Dorothea Lange. The photo, commissioned by the Resettlement Agency aiming to help poor families relocate during the Depression, showed Florence and her children living in poverty. Taken to raise support for social welfare policy, it left behind the woman who was the face of the campaign. Lange rose to fame while Thompson remained struggling. Many years later, Thompson was rediscovered and interviewed, where she expressed feelings of alienation at her commodification. ‘I wish she hadn’t taken my picture. … She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the picture. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did. … What good does it do me?’ she asked, highlighting that once the image leaves this bubble-like moment, personal autonomy of the subject often becomes touch-and-go.

This returns us to what the photograph is at its core: a fluid moment between Lange and Florence. One riddled with a power dynamic that makes the photograph harder to digest once you look beneath the surface. But even more so, you realise the seemingly invisible power and privilege threaded through the act of simply gazing at such a photo.

Dorothea Lange ‘Migrant Mother’ (1936)

You don’t have to see the details of a murder to understand that it is abhorrent. So, do we really need to see the agony to understand what is being said? What difference do photos make? They show that which cannot be compressed into words. They are the physical manifestation of a memory, the invaluable link to the dead. They transcend time and death, highlighting the impermeability of everything, everywhere. A photograph is an emanation – the traces of the subject remain streaked through it in a way that could never be done in a painting. The line between raising awareness and exploitation, toed by photojournalists, is a thin one. It is less complicated to take the photo, move on, and not bother crediting your subject. Photojournalists like Carter and Lange, however, have a responsibility to witness the worst of humanity, and amplify those forgotten, abandoned, and victimised voices. That is why the value of photojournalism, despite its often shaky morality, cannot be understated.

This sentiment is repeatedly highlighted in history. The Rwandan genocide. Al Graib. The Holocaust. The ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Photographs allow us to attend to the suffering of others, asking us to respond ‘appropriately’ to pixels on a screen or print on a page from the distance we find ourselves at. People must see human loss to understand human loss, because only then can we comprehend humanity. But should this be at the cost of the autonomy of the subject? Is it possible to maintain autonomy considering the nature in which such media is spread? A sacrifice to be made? These photographed atrocities are sustained political and humanitarian action. On a broader level, the transience captured in these photographs truly is journalistic.

To quote Susan Sontag: ‘Narratives can make us understand; photographs do something else. They haunt us.’

For a photograph to be effective, it must shock. Rather than allow easy buyer consumption, they allow us to remain vigilant to the costs of humanity which we tend to ignore due to our privilege. Taking the photo isn’t the issue. The question remains whether Carter should’ve helped Kong Nyong. If that was an option, of course he should have. But the photograph still had to be taken. That suffering immortalised, like a fly in amber, a reminder from the past still in its original form in the present. Haunting us forever.

References

1. Bloody Saturday – a crying Chinese baby amid the bombed-out ruins of Shanghai’s South Railway Station, 1937 – Rare Historical Photos

2. Transcript of Show 62 – Supernova in the … | Happy Scribe

3. Torture and the Ethics of Photography – Judith Butler, 2007

4. How Lee Miller’s photos remind us of war’s destructive brutality

5. How compelling photographs can change the course of history – Berkeley News

6. Documenting Tragedy: The Ethics Of Photojournalism : NPR

7. On ‘Exploitation’ in Photography | PetaPixel

8. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23736992.2020.1731313

9. The Most Controversial Photos: From Shocking to Scandalous

10. Images in Ethics Codes in an Era of Violence and Tragedy: Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol 21, No 4

11. Visual controversy and democracy: The rhetorical uses of the Abu Ghraib photographs – ProQuest