Abstract
Images of tragedy can change the world, but we must always question whether it's right to print them, says an award-winning photographer
Every now and again a news photograph lingers in the public conscience, stirs up agitation, even leads to change. The most recent was of a Turkish policeman cradling the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy who had drowned while attempting to cross the Mediterranean with his father.
After she made sure that there was nothing that could be done for the child, the photographer Nilüfer Demir felt she had a responsibility to make sure the “silent scream” of the body was heard through her images. The BBC had footage of Aylan Kurdi being carried ashore, but it was Demir's photograph, from the Doğan News Agency, that they chose to show first. That still image, which appeared across many front pages the next day, is what people remember.
Over the years it has often been the image of one dead or injured body that has the power to represent the grief of thousands. Who will forget the charred head of an Iraqi soldier taken through the windscreen of his burned-out vehicle in 1991 by Kenneth Jarecke of Reuters? Or Nick Ut's powerful photograph in 1972 of a naked and severely burned girl, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, running from a napalm attack? That image deepened the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and became one of the last century's most enduring images. Richard Nixon wondered if it had been “fixed”.
There are many other individual figures, seen through the lens of a camera, who have become emblematic of disasters, wars and famine affecting thousands. In 1969, Don McCullin visited a school compound in Biafra and found a nine-year-old albino boy holding an empty tin of corned beef.
“I walked into a school complex in Biafra and found 800 children standing on their dying legs. It was one of the most shocking things I'd ever seen.” He is still tormented by the memory, “that haunts me to this day”, a single starving child among hundreds he encountered. “He was an albino boy and he was standing looking at me, barely managing to stand on his spindly legs… He was making me feel so ashamed.”
As picture editor of The Guardian I ran two photographs that demonstrated the principle. One was of a woman grieving for her lost loved ones after the earthquake in Armenia in 1988, soon after I became picture editor. More than 25,000 – perhaps as many as 50,000 – people died, but it was through the personal tragedy of this one woman that we showed the enormity of the story. I had letters from readers who were appalled that I had intruded on this women's grief but, as I argued at the time, I wanted to show what this story, from a place that hardly anybody knew, meant – and there were very few pictures getting through. In the following days relief crews from Britain flew to Armenia and huge sums were raised in aid. I like to think the picture helped.
Then, in 1995, early in Alan Rusbridger's editorship of The Guardian, a photograph came in from Bosnia of a woman hanging from a tree outside a refugee camp at the US base at Tuzla airport. She had fled from Srebrenica. This was the biggest debate I got involved in during 13 years of picture editing. The picture was very disturbing, but I remember being really shocked by how ordinary she looked; it was as if she has just stepped out of a Marks and Spencer store here in England.
Luckily, Maggie O'Kane, the great war correspondent, was in the office. She felt passionately that we should use it. We took the picture to Alan Rusbridger. He was worried, was it genuine? We had to find out.
We didn't use it the night it came in. We needed to know more about it. Then we had a stroke of luck. Julian Borger, our correspondent in Bosnia, had actually witnessed the grim scene. We had our eyewitness, our proof. We knew it had actually happened. We published it on the front with Borger's report. The next day was Saturday, when editors like their paper to have a lighter feel to the front page. Here, on a day people tended to spend time over a more leisurely breakfast, was a dead woman hanging from a tree. Next morning, at about six o'clock, my phone rang. It was Rusbridger. I was nervous. I never had an editor ring me at home, let alone so early in the morning. But he was ringing to say thanks for pushing him to use it.
Eyewitness corroboration
The Mirror was the only other paper to run it, small and inside, but I was still nervous. The readers split roughly down the middle in favour and against our using it. For days I had letters (this was before email, remember) from university professors saying that there was no way that woman had hanged herself. They argued the rope was too short, and that she was facing the wrong way. How do people know these things? Without Borger's eyewitness we would never have run it.
Darko Bandic was the freelance photographer from Croatia, covering the Balkan war for the Associated Press news agency who took the photograph of Ferida Osmanovic “I had arrived at this massive makeshift refugee camp in Tuzla early in the morning, around 5.30am. Tens of thousands of distraught women and children had poured into the camp the previous day.
“Just as I was about to enter the camp, two or three young girls told me they had spotted a woman hanging from a tree in the woods. They took me to her. I was actually a bit confused. I didn't know exactly what to do. From the direction I was walking I could see her face, but obviously I didn't want to shoot that. I shot just a couple of frames then went back to the UN guard. I remember he was a Swedish soldier and I told him what I had seen. He said: ‘For now, let's take care of the ones who are alive.’
“I saw so many really awful things in Bosnia's war; that was just yet another of them. I did wonder what horrific things must have happened to her to drive herself to take her own life. But I never found out. I never even knew her name until a year later.”
At home I have a battered box of prints. It contains some of the worst memories of my own photographic career. I took the pictures in the box, but I hope nobody ever gets to see them. They are my ghosts; I like to keep them hidden. At every major anniversary of the Heysel stadium disaster, magazines and TV companies ask to look at them. Then, thankfully, they decide not to use them. It is an odd position for a photographer to be in but I'm glad they stay in the box.
Although it's 30 years since that balmy May night in Brussels, the memories are still vivid of an evening that went from being a dream assignment to a nightmarish horror. And I went from being a sports photographer to a news photographer, in the course of 90 minutes, or less.
It is hard to imagine in this age of wall-to-wall European football on TV how exciting the prospect of covering the European Cup Final for The Observer in Belgium was. I was really looking forward to photographing the flamboyant Juventus fans with their huge flags and crazy black and white costumes, illuminated by fireworks and flares and floodlights. It was all so dramatic. We hardly ever got to see these teams.
I spent the half an hour before the start of the game in amongst this colourful Italian chaos, enjoying every second. I kept an eye on the Liverpool fans at the other end, but all seemed calm and I thought I would stay where I was until the kick-off. This was great fun and making some wonderful pictures.
Many fans of both sides had been drinking all afternoon, but the mood seemed good. And then, at the far end of the ground, I noticed a red wave running from one side of the terracing to the other.
I have covered hundreds of games of football and these skirmishes usually peter out, but I thought I'd better get down there, for you never know what might happen. As well as my long lenses for the game, I was carrying a small compact camera around my neck, which was intended to photograph the winning team with the huge European trophy at the end of the game. Within seconds it was clear that this was not a little showpiece rivalry between fans, but a determined charge on the Italians.
Just as I reached the other end of the ancient, gladiatorial stadium, the wall holding some Juventus fans broke right on top of me. I got two shots with my tiny camera before getting out of the way, while these fans escaped onto the pitch. It is the photograph that The Observer used a few days after the tragic events of that night. It has been used several times since. I like to think it helped get the stadium pulled down.
Minutes later, other fans were not so lucky. They realised they couldn't get out by running up to the back of the stand, for that was a sheer drop to safety. The way out now was to run down the steps. In the panic that followed, many died on the terracing, trodden to death by their fellow supporters in the rush to escape.
I could tell pretty quickly many had died and I rushed to where the press were, in a press box from which they could not see the corner where the wall had broken and could have had little idea of the seriousness of the situation. I spotted Brian Glanville of The Sunday Times in the gloom of the box and indicated with three sets of ten fingers and a rather dramatic drawing of my finger across my throat that a least 30 had died.
Shooting dead bodies
You probably know that 39 people died at Heysel that night, but when I took my first shots I didn't know what the story was and what huge consequences it was to have on football in Europe. I was in a daze of adrenalin and fear and found myself shooting dead bodies on the pitch and on improvised stretchers used to carry the wounded to ambulances.
The sounds of screaming were horrendous. I'll never forget one Juventus fan standing amongst hundreds of shoes that had been dragged off in the chaos. He was looking in vain for his friend: “Mario, Mario!” I shot photographs of people dead and dying, not realising at the time that they were too strong for any paper to use.
I know that the photographers covering Heysel, the Bradford football club fire and the Hillsborough disaster came in for criticism for taking pictures at these terrible events, but our responsibility is to try and tell the truth with our pictures. It felt especially important when we were abroad. Brussels seemed a long way from London in 1985, long before Eurostar and mobile phones.
The authorities chose to play the match, which seemed to go by in an instant. They were worried there would be more trouble on the streets around the ground if the fans were turned out of the stadium after what had happened. I never processed the film from the game itself; it seemed so pointless.
