PARIS — It is a haunting image: a woman dressed in blue, her head covered, holding the body of a dead child covered in a white sheet.
The photograph from Gaza by Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem won last month’s World Press Photo of the Year award, and was part of the Pulitzer Prize winning series announced Monday in the Breaking News photo category.
Taken on Oct. 17, the portrait of such an intimate moment manages to capture the enormity of a war that has consumed the Middle East and the whole world.
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When I looked more closely at the photo, I noticed the woman was wearing a denim abaya — and it was her everyday clothes that locked me into the reality that we can so easily escape by clicking away or turning the page. What I was looking at was not just an award-winning news image, not a painting or representation, neither abstract nor necessarily political.
I see a woman, probably my age, in the deepest of pain, holding a child she loves who has been killed. A child who looks to be the same size and age as my older son.
My sensitivity to such a work of photojournalism is both personal, and professional. I co-wrote a manual about how to report on children for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a U.S.-based organization for journalists who cover violence and conflict.
For both words and images, a commitment to freedom of the press does not mean carte blanche for publication is the best practice. Most experts agree, for example, that it’s best to avoid photographs of deceased people, or people in the process of dying. For children, identities and dignity should be protected with even more care.
“Images that violate the privacy of children, in my opinion, do not convey reality; instead, they fuel hatred and animosity. Such images do not stop wars,” says Jamal Saidi, former chief photographer in the Levant region at Reuters in the Children First guide.
A cautionary tale?
There is the cautionary tale of another Pulitzer Prize winning photograph: “Napalm Girl”. You probably know it, one of history’s most iconic war images: a girl running away after a napalm attack on her town. The image captures her screaming in anguish and pain, surrounded by other stunned children. She is nine years old, and is completely naked.
Kim Phuc Phan Thi now lives in Canada and works with the Kim Foundation International, which provides aid to child victims of war around the world. While the scars are still visible on her body, and she still lives with the physical pain, she has finally managed to shake the shame and weight of that picture. Writing about the experience in The New York Times, she helped the rest of us understand how we should think about children during traumatic world events: “photographs, by definition, capture a moment in time. But the surviving people in these photographs, especially the children, must somehow go on. We are not symbols. We are human. We must find work, people to love, communities to embrace, places to learn and to be nurtured.”
How can the public understand how barbaric a war is if they are not shown images of the worst of the worst?
Yet the question of what the press should or should not publish is rarely simple. In October, during a march against Israel’s war in Gaza in the small Spanish town of Aranda de Duero, I saw that plenty of the demonstrators’ rage was reserved for the media. One woman said that news organizations weren’t showing images of dead and dying children, in what she said was an attempt at “sugarcoating” Israel’s brutal campaign.
I understand that anger at the media. Most traditional press outlets are hesitant to publish brutal images of victims for the reasons of privacy and sensitivity mentioned above. But how can the public understand just how barbaric a war is if they are not shown images of the worst of the worst?
“There should be no moral squishiness about any of this,” writes Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker. “If children are being slaughtered, if a father is carrying his dead daughter through a bombed-out street, or if there is footage of dead children in southern Israel, which, for now, seems to have been shown mostly in a selective way through screenings by the Israel Defense Forces, the world, at large, should see that.”
Kang continues: “Images of dead children have great emotional and political power because most people in the world rightfully agree that their deaths are intolerable.”
Other ways of depicting tragedy?
And for us journalists: How do we depict the daily indignities, pain and loss that comes with war? What do we do if the victims are children, if bombs strike on hospitals, playgrounds, schoolyards? What are we supposed to show, and what are we supposed to hide?
The World Press Photo winner is a clear example of how to handle this with care and dignity. The expression of pain is registered in time, amplified by what we don’t see. But there are other ways photographers have portrayed the injustice inflicted on Gaza children — without hiding the truth.
Yes, there are images that we need to see.
One picture in the second week of the war from Gaza City, taken by freelance photographer Samar Abu Elouf, shows the fear in the eyes of several children as they hear rockets nearing from overhead — but also the oblivious smiles of others caught up in play.
Another way to go about it: showing the images of slain while they were still alive — like this story published in The New York Times. Youmna Shaqalih, four months old, a smiling chubby baby wearing a white headband with a pink ribbon on top: “She was the center of attention. Her mother, Maram, loved to dress her up for pictures. She was killed in October. Her mother was killed in a separate strike 11 days later.”
"Napalm girl" by Nick Ut / The Associated Press — OneShot/Worldcrunch video
Images that cannot be unseen
These debates and sensitivities retrace the conflicts and tragedies of our times. The question of how much change even the most powerful images can actually bring. What happened when the photo of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy who washed up dead on the shores of Turkey, hit the front pages of international media? Did Europe change its lethal migration policies? Was he the last child to die in the water?
He wasn’t. Yet it is hard to think that a simple image could achieve this. And I dare say that, just like with the picture of Kim Phuc Phan Thi in Vietnam, Kurdi’s photo needed to be shown — it needed to become part of our lives.
Yes, there are images that we need to see, and that we should not be able to unsee.
So, who ultimately decides, and who looks after the rights of those who have died, with no voice?
The challenge, then, is to stay open-eyed, awake.
What would I want, I ask myself, if I were not in the safe country where I live, with a privileged passport? I would want images of myself, and my children, to portray our lives as they were ongoing, not when they came to an end. I would want for my pain to be immortalized and to penetrate everything, just as this year’s World Press Photo of the Year does.
Does that mean that other families may wish the same? Or that messier pictures should not be seen? That only non-graphic images deserve a spot on our front pages?
The mother of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, insisted that his brutalized body be photographed so the world would be forced to witness the horror of his death. The Syrian father of nine-month-old twin sisters who were killed by chemical weapons during an attack in Idlib Province in Syria, also wanted their faces visible.
U.S. writer Sarah Sentilles teaches college courses about photography and war. She has tracked the images of the dead that tend to be shown in U.S. media — mainly from other countries, and typically people of color.
She talks of the responsibility the media has to both capture reality and remain sensitive, and the responsibility we viewers have to not normalize anybody’s death, and not to turn away.
“The challenge, then, is to stay open-eyed, awake,” she wrote. “To get better at turning intense emotional reactions into political action that stops violence. It doesn’t matter what I feel when I look at this photograph. It matters what I do. It matters what I demand my leaders do.”