Day One, Panel Two:The Riskiest Job of All: Photography on the Frontline

Moderator/Discussant: Susan Moeller, Fellow, Joan Shorenstein Center on Press Politics and Public Policy, The John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University

JOHN OWEN: The next two sessions are really interrelated. We're now moving into the area of what can we all do to ensure that there are eyewitnesses to war crimes. And everything that's going to be talked about has that as an objective. Not that anything that we're talking about should do anything but make it more possible to get more journalists to the scenes of the war crimes.

All of this discussion about safety, all of this discussion about freelancers, all this discussion about insurance has that as a paramount consideration. More journalists to the scene.

And first we want to concentrate on the still photographers because, as we all know, still photographers, more than any other breed of journalists, are the most at risk. And also the most vulnerable and also those that cannot simply turn away from the lens and forget about what they've seen.

And this next panel is going to readdress the risk that they take, and how they approach their jobs. And we're indeed fortunate to have, as a moderator, Susan Moeller who has written an exceptionally good book called Compassion Fatigue about the coverage of war and is at the Shorenstein Center on Press Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard.

So Susan will introduce her panel. This is going to go for about an hour. We'll be open to some questions and then following that we'll set up and I'll introduce the trainers from Britain-the centurion trainers who do safety training outside of London. So, Susan, over to you.

SUSAN MOELLER: Thank you, John, and I'm hoping you're going to help us wrestle with some of the issues on the panel, too. On behalf of the panel let me thank everybody for coming, and particularly Roy and John for putting this panel together.

We're going to start in a minute by looking at some slides. But before we do that, I want to just make a couple of comments. I think most of you in the audience heard Madeleine Albright right before lunch. And in her comments she talked about images that had come out of Sierra Leone and how those images galvanized public opinion and perhaps more than that. She also talked about domestic accountability for conflicts such as the one in Chechnya and East Timor. She also talked about the Khmer Rouge trials. In all of those situations, to a great extent what we know is coming to us through the lenses of photographers.

David Scheffer, as well, also talked about speaking about perception. In talking to my panelists, I asked them how they wanted to be introduced, and we decided that the best way to introduce them was not by recapitulating what you have in your folder in front of you, which I suggest you turn to for references in terms of how many awards these three gentlemen have together accumulated, but just to give you a sense of what kinds of conflicts they have covered.

Basically, from 1989 to last summer, they have covered, and this includes, but is not definitive, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Tibet, China, all of Yugoslavia, Albania, Chechnya, Russia, Angola, Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Zaire, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Israel, Lebanon, the West Bank, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Peru, Haiti, and Panama. I'm sure I've missed several.

Just to sort of wind up the joint biography with one joint explanation of where their images have been published in such publications as Stern, Speigel, Match, Life, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, The New Yorker, London Sunday Times, New York Sunday Times Magazine and as well on television, ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC, and so on.

As one of my fellow panelists said, but I won't identify which one, he said, “we've been abused by everyone from all the worst places.” But let their photographs be their real introduction. As someone else has said, words are never enough. Images, of course, are how most of us experience conflict. And for those of us who haven't been on the front lines or haven't been on certain front lines, the way we learn about the world, the way we learn about war crimes, particularly, is often through the camera.

We take for granted in the 24-7 environment in which we live that we can be up front, impersonal, live and on the spot, but it remains the case, that those who take the most risks to make us up front and personal are the photographers.

Think of where the photographer had to stand in order to take some of those images. The photographer in many of those cases was not on the front lines. He was in front of them. Yet the images that the photographers take, even by those within the media, are often taken too much for granted. They are used as illustrations. And I use that word in a pejorative sense. They are used as attention grabbers. But they often are not considered as thoughtfully as the text that accompanies them.

There is often little integration between the text and the images. And I would suggest that this problem has only worsened and is particularly a problem on web sites, on traditional news institutions that are going online. And if you want any second opinion of that fact, I recommend to you the Pointer Stanford study, which has just come out on I-Tracking, which takes a look at how online news users, use online sites. A lot of it's counterintuitive, but the study also talks about how photography is looked at differently than I think many of us might expect. But what it suggests is that in order for photographs to be used well, they have to be very integrated with the text they accompany.

Well, this trend and this general habit is happening ironically at the same moment in time when we're seeing photographs at least as much as they have in the past being used as weapons in spend debates. Just I think this past week, on the cover of at least two of the three news weeklies, you saw a battle of photographs over Elian Gonzales.

This is also seen, ironically again, in this age of morphing photographs when photographs are still seeming to best communicate the truth that may lie out there. Yes, all of us know that there is no such thing as truth. Yes, all of us know that there are individual perspectives on every situation. But so often the documents that are referenced, and you saw several of them up there, and one I draw your attention to was the one from Tibet that had the grease pencil of the Tibetan soldier fighting and firing into the crowd.

So, for those of us who are concerned with witnessing about war crimes, our photographers and camera people are essential and integral. And if moral universalism and human rights--which Michael Ignatieff was speaking about this morning--are important concerns, and if accountability is a policy issue that we want to pursue, then we all need to learn better how to use photographers' work.

Let me now open it generally to the panelists. I'm not asking them to speak for 15 minutes at a clip. They're going to respond to a series of questions. We're going to open it by talking about the environments in which photographers worked and work, and also about minimizing risk. And I think sort of the one idea to start with--and then I'll turn to Gary--is how photographers need to minimize risk by staying in control. And what that takes, as you'll learn and as you'll hear, it takes information, it takes money, it takes experience. Gary.

GARY KNIGHT: Yes, I'd like to introduce just a sort of picture of what could be a week in the life and all of these things happened to me. A week in a life. Two weeks in a life. If you like an assignment or guarantee in the life of the journalist in the field. And I'd like to start by introducing here my wife, who is a producer for ABC news in London.

Fiona and I would often find each other in Bosnia, in Sarejevo, especially. We would typically leave our house in this way. She would be met in the morning by a limousine. Inside the limousine, there would be about $15,000, a whole folder of research material, a business class ticket straight to Split, flak jackets in the back of the car, everything she really needed. She'd race off to Heathrow, get on a business class flight, bang, land in Split, fixes at the other end, the crew are all there, couple of armored cars at a thousand dollars a day, driving the convoy into Sarajevo.

I'd leave a little later to catch the cheap flights and I'd typically take the tube and en route I'd hit every ATM machine en route to Heathrow to try and get as much money out of the accounts as I could squeeze. I'd get the cheap flights and if my flak jacket wasn't stolen, I'd find myself at the other end with all my gear and a basically World War II vintage flak jacket. And once in Split, I'd search around a hotel and the environment to try and find some friends and hitchhike into Sarajevo.

Occasionally, this would involve walking. There was, in fact, a trip that involved walking down Igman Mountain into Sarajevo, because we just couldn't stand the drive on a soft skin car. A soft skin car is a car that's not armored. I'd usually meet up with Fiona. You know, I'd stay in her hotel room and so the following morning she'd wake up, go off in the armored car and work in the TV.

I would scrounge around for a ride with some friends and on one occasion I remember John Burns, a great New York Times correspondent, very kindly offered me and another photographer a car. Bonus. Free car. He said the catch is it's been here for six months. I couldn't stand to drive it out of the city. It was a Honda. It did about 60 miles an hour, tops.

He said you have to deliver it back to Split. Good deal. So we get inside the car and the car, it turned out as we headed out of the hotel and hit Sniper Alley, was stuck in low ratio. So we were doing about 20 miles an hour down Sniper Alley with the seats fully reclined, because we were figuring that if the Serbs couldn't see anybody driving the car, they maybe wouldn't shoot. This really sounds comic, and it was in fact comic at the time, but this is really very typical. Photographers would team up. I'd often find myself working with photographers working for people I was really in direct competition with as far as my editors were concerned. But this was really never an issue.

Without working with our colleagues there was just no way to accomplish the task. And much of the task would end up dealing with really basic logistical issues like traveling. It was a nightmare getting out of the hotel. If you don't have an armored car, it was at least, I'd say, a hundred-yard dash to safety. And often you'd be running with all your cameras in full view of the snipers. If not, you took the soft skin car option. Either way it was a nightmare.

Sometimes we'd have to drive down Sniper Alley to make a phone call which was a three or four kilometer drive down to the television station where the TV crews are with all their gear and all the SAT phones. And they were very kind and used to let us use these phones. You'd then phone your editor if you got a line and you might spend five minutes at $45 a minute waiting to speak to him if you were lucky.

This whole process might take two or three hours, taking you away from the point of the news, taking you away from your work, and I found it very frustrating- and I know my colleagues did- just trying to find time to shoot, almost. The business of staying alive took up most of your day.

Often the story would be outside of Sarajevo. This would involve a terrifying drive down Sniper Alley. You'd hit this big curb, drive around the curb, and take the airport road. Halfway down the airport road there's a French APC. These guys sitting behind six inches of steel. They'd make you stop the car, get out of the car, go and show your ID cards. You're already in a soft skin car on the front line. The road was the front line. One side the Bosnians, the other side the Serbs. Get out, show your pass, in a low ratio you'd hurry off as fast as you could- you're not kicking up much dust- and drive out of town.

And I'd like to now take you to a different scene. I once had to go to a town called Gorazde. And this will illustrate some of the other logistical issues that we have to deal with. I'd just arrived in Bosnia after five or six years in Thailand. Really didn't know much of what was going on. Found out by mistake, actually. Somebody told me that I was indeed on assignment for a big American news magazine. So I'd better produce some pictures.

And the correspondent was going off to this place called Gorazde, which you might not know was an enclave surrounded by Serbs at the time. He said it's just a war. We'll make it, no problem, some other journalists going. Drove out of town. To cut a long story short, this turned into a 16 and a half hour walk at night over mountains about 3,000 meters high through about three or four feet of snow. I'm wearing a pair of Levis and some Timberlands and something called a Bomber jacket- completely inappropriate- carrying all my gear.

During the walk, typically, we get mortared, you'd get hit by the Serbs. You'd be lying in the snow for 20 minutes, machine gun fire going all over the place. You're lost. You don't know where you're going.

Eventually, we arrive in Gorazde. One of the photographers lost all his equipment--he's freelance, no one's paying for it--because the donkey that he put his rucksack on died.

We get into Gorazde. I get sick. So I spend a night in a hospital in Gorazde. It's got no windows. It's got no roof. It's got no medicine. Pretty grim. We spend two weeks in Gorazde. At this point the correspondent had sent a message to New York saying we're here. We've arrived. This is the route. This is what happened to us. Basically, as I described it to you.

I get a message on the SAT telex saying, can Gary hire a car and drive into Sarajevo and ship his film? No, the way I ship my film was on horseback and fortunately there was another photographer working for an opposing magazine on the other side of the mountain range who drove my film down to Split and shipped it for me.

So the assignment's over. You drive back into Sarajevo. You'd get on a plane, fly out. You'd arrive in Split, bullet holes all the way through the plane, get home. The bills come in. Often the way these things work is if you're fortunate, you're on assignment. But Sarajevo became such a difficult and dangerous story to cover, a lot of news organizations would put us on something called a guarantee. That basically absolves them of any risk because what they're doing then is they're paying you for your productivity for two weeks. You divide that fee with your agent, 50/50, of course, and by the time you pay all of your own expenses, in some cases the agent will split that.

So by the time you've gone through this nonsense, you're right back home. Sometimes you've made maybe four or $500 from a two week trip. And this is the reality of photojournalism. And I'm not complaining. I love it, and I won't stop. But this really is the reality.

SUSAN MOELLER: Thank you. Ron.

RON HAVIV: I'll describe a specific situation that I was involved with also in Bosnia. Some of the pictures you saw on the screen of the soldier with the tiger and his unit and then executing some people. The guy with the tiger's name was Arcan . He was one of the more famous warlords of their wars in Yugoslavia. Fortunately, for all of us, he was executed several months ago in Belgrade.

But before that he was responsible for killing thousands and thousands of people. And I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to travel with him and his unit called the Tigers, hence the small tiger, into the first battle of Bosnia. And I was traveling with a friend of mine, a Serb photographer. I was actually there to do another story and the tension has been rising in Bosnia, but nothing- no fighting had really started. And we heard on the radio that there was some fighting in a small town just near the border with Serbia.

So he and I drove there and proceeded to see what the situation was. And the town had been split in half- Serbs on one half and Muslims on the other. And there was street fighting starting between the townspeople. And this basically was the beginning of the war in Bosnia. And at that point, even though there had already been two wars -- the Slovenian war and the Croatian war - people still to some degree were open to journalists and willing to let people - or willing to let us show people their side of the story.

So the local Serbs said we could work. So I spent a day or two working with the townspeople as they were fighting against the Muslims. And by the third day, when the battle lines had pretty much had not changed, Arcan and his unit arrived in town to help their Serb brethren.

I had already met Arcan earlier during the war in Croatia, and he was a very flamboyant personality. He was very charming, deceptively evil, spoke seven languages, and was always very conscious of the way that he would look in the media and was always very anxious to portray himself as a great Serb warrior and the savior of the Serb people.

And playing upon those emotions, I asked if I could travel with his unit as they attempted to liberate this city from the quote, “Muslim fundamentalists.” To which he smiled and said, sure, and sent me off with a small unit of probably about 10 or 12 people and the Serb photographer went elsewhere. So I was basically alone. A lot of the soldiers spoke some English so between my broken Serbian and their English, we were able to communicate.

Of course, in these situations, it's relatively simple. The orders are run this way. Don't run that way. They're shooting. We're going to shoot, so you can run across the street. And it's all sort of- between the sign language and the actual shooting- it's all pretty straightforward.

And we moved through town basically fighting from street to street and we then arrived at the center of town at one of the mosques. And they immediately broke into the mosque and went upstairs, took down the Islamic flag, hung up a Serbian flag, and defaced some different property and things like that inside the mosque.

And there was still a lot of shooting going on outside. I was inside at the time photographing the soldiers inside the mosque. And I heard sort of a higher level of shooting and I walked outside and I saw the soldiers bringing out people from a house across the street. They first brought out a man and were shouting at him in Serbian. I still don't know to this day exactly what they were saying. And then they brought out a woman who was his wife and she started to scream. And a couple of shots rang out, and the man went down. The woman screamed some more.

Meanwhile, while this is all happening, several soldiers are looking at me. Well, I'm standing there with my cameras watching and wondering when they are not looking so I can actually take a photograph, and they're screaming at me in Serbian, don't take any photographs. Don't take any photographs.

So the tension level obviously was quite high for me. I had had previous experiences in the other wars in Yugoslavia, and I had witnessed two other executions at which I had a gun pointed to my head, and I was not allowed to photograph it.

I had made a promise to myself that the next time I was in this situation I would do my best not to leave without a photograph, because otherwise there's really no reason that we're there. I mean, we're there to document that, and I was going to do my best to get this on film.

So there's a crashed truck parked in the middle of the street. And during the commotion I sort of walked very, very slowly, like inch by inch, so it didn't look like I was moving too fast, and hid by part of the truck where my view was blocked. The soldiers couldn't see me because my view was blocked. But I was able to see the man and the woman, and I was able to photograph the two of them together as he lay dying.

And then- and this is all reasonably fast. This is within several minutes. Some more shots rang out and they shot the woman. And they brought out another woman and then, of course, if you remember the photograph, then she was killed. And all three are lying dead on the street.

Now, I know I have a photograph of the people, but I don't have a photograph of the soldiers with the people, which is what I need to prove that these Serbian soldiers were the ones that killed them. I mean, aside from my word, I wanted to have it actually on film.

And the unit decided to leave, and most of them left, and there were three guys behind. And I went and I stood in the middle of the street- this time completely exposed. And I wanted just to get a photograph of the soldiers walking past the bodies.

So as they came past the bodies, I raised my camera. And as they came past, one of the soldiers, cigarette in his hand, sunglasses on his head, brought his foot back and kicked the bodies. And I was able to take several photographs of that. And luckily for me, they didn't see me, because two were looking to their left and one had his back to me as he was kicking the bodies.

I took the pictures, I put my camera down, and I said to the soldiers, let's go, great job, let's go. And we ran off like trying to hope that they wouldn't have any idea what had happened.

And they had taken another prisoner at the same time and this guy was still alive, and as we were running up the street, I wanted to try and get a photograph of this prisoner. So I ran ahead to the soldier that was holding him and I said, I want to take a photograph. So he grabbed the prisoner, put him down on the ground, and the photograph is of the prisoner with his hands up in the air with the gun to his head and several soldiers in the background.

For me it was very difficult because his hands are in the air and he's begging for his life, but he's begging to me to try to save him and there's nothing- there was nothing at that time that I could do. And this is a situation that I've been in, other people have been in and these are very difficult situations for photographers and journalists and cameramen. And when do you decide to intervene if you can and what influence can you have over the situation?

They brought that prisoner back to the headquarters or house that they had taken over. They were interrogating him. I was standing outside waiting to see what happened and I heard a great crash. And I looked up and out of a third story window, the prisoner came flying out of the window and landed at my feet.

Then a couple of soldiers came out and they started kicking him and beating him, and I started taking some more photographs of that. And they dragged him back into the house. A few minutes later, Arcan arrived, returning from directing the battle from a different part of the city. They told Arcan that I'd taken these photographs, and Arcan knew immediately that this was a problem and asked for my film.

I then proceeded to get into an argument with Arcan about how valuable the film was to the Serbian cause and things like that, to which he replied that he would process the film and edit the film and whatever pictures he thought were okay he'd give back to me. To which I replied that the labs aren't very good in Belgrade. The quality isn't good. Let me process it myself and then I'll give you the pictures and you can use them.

At the same time while this was being done, I was hiding several of the rolls of film that I'd already taken before and was able to save most of the film. Unfortunately, I had to just give one roll to Arcan, and that roll was of the prisoner falling out of the window.

A few weeks later, actually the next week, the photographs were published in Time magazine, and several others. And what's interesting about these photographs is that this was a week before the war began officially in Sarajevo. Before the war really sort of officially kicked off. And these pictures were published by American magazines and seen by American politicians, as well as German politicians and French politicians.

And I was always quite sad that there was no reaction by the politicians to these photographs and that they had seen that this ethnic cleansing had started and they still had an opportunity to stop actually what was going to happen three weeks later in Sarajevo.

As for myself, there was a big backlash. Arcan got into a lot of trouble for letting me take these photographs. Milosevic was quite upset. There were some internal documents that were actually published a few years later from Milosevic to Arcan about this attack and their strategies and stuff like that.

And what happened for me personally was that I was put onto a death list by the Serbs and I had a great deal of difficulty in the following years covering the story, always wondering who was looking for me, trying to avoid Arcan in all possible cases. I wound up in Kosovo missing him twice in the lobby of a hotel.

In fact, at one point, there was another photographer that has very similar characteristics to me who was arrested in Sarajevo by Serbs and accused of being me. He wasn't very happy, but I was. He was released, and I realized how serious my situation was.

But this is, I think, an indicative story maybe in a little bit of an extreme, but myself and all of my colleagues have gone through these type of situations in many different scenarios. We've all been threatened to different degrees. Several people have been captured, myself included on a different story, mock executions, things like that, and throughout all of this, we're basically alone. It's usually just us. I mean, we don't have a lot of support and it's basically we're off and left up to our own wits.

If we lose our equipment or we get wounded, it's often up to the freelance photographer to protect himself or herself.

SUSAN MOELLER: Thanks. Steve.

STEVE LEHMAN: I'll pick up where Ron had left off. One thing that's important to stress in terms of magazine photography, it's entirely freelancers. There are no staff photographers at least in the United States. Ron and Gary are contract photographers for Newsweek and they are guaranteed a certain number of days each year to work. But Newsweek is not paying them benefits or always covering health insurance and those type of things. And they're free to work for other publications.

So, in that context, it's because our resources are limited there is often an added risk. And the three of us are quite established and have been doing this for many, many years. But it's taken us time to get to this point in our careers where we're able to get work and get backing. And there is a younger generation before us who often go to these situations to cover conflicts and they really can't put out that much money to protect themselves. And money and resources bring protection. It allows you to be more in control of your situation.

If you could have an armored car. If you can have the best translator. If you're able to pay bribes. Those things help and make a real difference in trying to cover these situations. In terms of the risks that we face, just to give you a sense of some of the environments, I'll tell two stories. One is a very dramatic story that took place in Grozny. It was at the very beginning of the war in 1994, and the Russians had just started to bomb the city.

The first night they bombed, there were a few planes that had flown over and maybe there were three locations that had been bombed. A couple of houses had been blown up. One bomb had hit an apartment complex. No one was killed. There was a couple of people missing and a few people injured. It wasn't that major.

The next day, Paulo, myself, and Cynthia Albom went out to investigate what had happened, to take pictures of the damage. And went to a site that had been bombed the night before and we were photographing that site. And for some reason there was this broken-down house and there were some people inside this house and they were looking for a man who had been missing and they were in this house and they were going stone by stone looking for this person. And for myself, in these situations, the most important thing for me is to always follow my instincts, to follow what draws me and to be in control of my circumstances. And so I just wanted to be in this place. I wanted to go in this house and take a few pictures and just see what was going on.

While I was in the house I ran into a person who had taken me up to the front line the day before and had been very, very helpful to me. And while we were at the front line we had been attacked by a helicopter and were separated. He ran one way. I ran the other way. And tank shells were coming in. And so it was this great coincidence to run into him in a completely different location. And we saw each other and we started laughing and I was asking him what had happened.

And when I saw him, I wanted to be able to speak to him because he hadn't spoken any English and I was with Cynthia and I had a translator and they were both outside the building. And I turned to look for Cynthia because she spoke Russian very well and her translation was actually better than my translator's, and I looked for her and she had gone off. She had wandered off. I'm not sure where she had gone.

And so my translator was there and I called him in and we began to talk with this man. And I was asking him questions. It was a very, very short conversation. And then I felt we had spent enough time since we were in a dangerous place. We should be moving on. And just as I was going to take one more picture I heard the sound of planes and I knew that the planes were too close. I just instinctively felt the planes were too close.

And so I started to look around in just those few seconds. And I was in a horrible place as far as cover was concerned, in case something was going to happen. There were beams overhead and there wasn't much of a wall between me and the outside. But at the same time I moved away from the door. Just in like 10 seconds, 30 seconds. And just as I did that there was a kooosh, this huge screech of a jet that was right on top of us and then a ripping explosion. Very, very, very, very powerful explosion.

And then I was enveloped by this black cloud of smoke and dust. It was similar to being in the ocean and being hit by a wave. And I was trying to get out and there was not really a way to get out. And finally there was a little bit of clearing in the smoke, just a very, very faint rippling where I could see a little shade of gray. And I saw some movement and I ran towards that and I stumbled out into the street and I remember looking back and there had been people around me and I thought to myself they're dead and there's nothing I can do for them- and I just went out. And I felt like there was going to be another plane so I was looking for cover and then I stumbled out onto this street and this horrible scene of carnage.

And so on one hand, I'm looking for my colleague and, and looking for cover trying to protect myself and then here's this story. This is really the first major attack on Grozny. And 18 people were killed and there's cars on fire, people screaming. And it was necessary to make a decision about what to do, and I had a job to do. I mean, I was there to cover the story and this was a major news event that had significant implications.

So I started. I flipped down my video camera and started taking pictures and at the same time was looking for my colleague. I found Paulo, who had also been in the house with me. And then we started looking for Cynthia, and she was killed along with the 18 other people, primarily civilians.

And so I bring this incident up to just show what can happen. There are dangers in this job. And no matter how safe you try to be, if you're out there covering a war, things are going to happen. And it is dangerous. It is lethal.

And, if people are going to do it, they need to recognize that those dangers are real and need to be prepared and need to be well trained.

In this situation, it happened so very quickly. So all the experience in the world wasn't necessarily going to save a person. But in those few seconds that I had I did a couple of things that helped me by getting down, by moving away from the door. And those things can make a real difference, and also following my instincts.

And I tell the story to give a clear sense of what we can be up against. And just a short example of some of the more hidden dangers. While I was in Kosovo, I contracted Hepatitis A from some bad water, and normally I'm very, very careful about the water. And my translator had switched bottles of water with me and I ended up drinking some local water. And I think that was the root of my hepatitis. It tasted bad and I was uncomfortable with it.

But I've been sick for the last nine months. That is, I'm here speaking today, and I can do this, but it is a definite strain. So I think if you do this job for a long period of time, no matter what, you're going to have illnesses. Even if you get your shots, even if you take your medicines, you're going to end up getting malaria at least once. You're going to end up with some strange tropical disease. You're going to have digestion problems. You're going to have physical problems. You're going to have stress-related illness.

So hopefully that gives you a better sense of some of the things that we're up against, and hopefully we can move discussion along into some more conceptual issues about our role as journalists.

SUSAN MOELLER: Years ago I was speaking to Philip Johns Griffith, who you may know as a photographer for Magnum who also covered the Vietnam War, about how one of the greatest needs, particularly for photographers, but also for any journalists who cover conflict, was a recognition of just the strains of covering onflict.

There was a lot of beginning understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, among veterans, but not among journalists. And I think you've heard some stories here that might suggest their health repercussions, but also other ones as well.

But I want to ask the three photographers and then John to speak a little bit about some broader issues. And speaking to particularly the role that Ron mentioned of the photographer as an observer and a witness.

I don't need to tell anybody in the room, probably, that there's been a general retreat from international coverage. And there also has been, of course, a decade-plus of media mergers. Particularly in photography. This has hit hard so that we, right now, have effectively five major corporations that control photography: AFB, AP, Reuters, Getty, and Corbus.

And I wondered if the three photographers could speak to the kind of coverage that they have been doing in their careers. The kind of inhibited coverage that brings the public to the front lines. Can it continue in this kind of environment? Will it mean fewer individual offers? What does it mean when you don't have the support of the media institutions? And then if Steve could, because of his experience on the new media, could speak perhaps to whether the new media can help practically. Then I'd like John to sum up some of the questions about freelancers versus health and other kinds of risks that freelancers versus staffers might face.
Gary.

GARY KNIGHT: Well, I have some pretty strong opinions. I think it's a very dangerous situation that we're all getting ourselves into if we have, basically, five corporations or five bodies that are producing most of the world's photojournalism. The implications are really obvious. I don't need to explain them here.

But I think it is the responsibility of many editors- and I know there are many sitting here- to really take the step and send out your own photographers, send out your own journalists- and I mean photographers as journalist- to go and get this information for you.

I think if you take Kosovo for an example, take Albania, you would have had photographers for most of the world's biggest photo agencies. Those agencies now belong to Corbus for example. And it has to come to their minds at some point that it isn't rational to spend the money to get eight individual offers there to look at the questions that we have to address.

So at some point you'll end up with a hand full of photographers and those are the only images available and I think whether that's seen on the Internet or in the terrestrial media is basically irrelevant.

The number of offers out there is diminishing every year. There are fewer young photojournalists coming through. We're all 34, 35, 36, and considered the young kids on the block. And there are very, very few people in their 20's coming through in this industry and I think that's very, very scary because I, for one, will not be doing this in another 30 years, I can assure you.

So as editors you really have to address these issues. Where are you getting your pictures from and are you really getting a fair reflection of what's going on? And I would suggest that you have been, but you might not be in the future.

STEVE LEHMAN: I think what Gary says is really, really important. Specifically, you look at news on the Internet, more and more it's coming from the same sources, which are very, very narrow sources. And so when I look around, especially visual imagery is all coming from Reuters and AP.

So essentially you on a particular story, one or two individuals covering that story for the entire world. And that makes me nervous. I think that the more eyes you have out there, the more different perspectives you have. And the more chances of finding and uncovering important stories. And I think on one hand we have this enormous consolidation going on in terms of the visual content industry, but also we as individuals are being empowered, too, where for the first time we can access an audience directly through the Internet. We don't necessarily have to go out and build a television station. We don't have to print a magazine each week. And the barrier to entry as far as the news business is concerned is a lot lower. And hopefully that will be a balance to this huge consolidation going on. And hopefully it will encourage a new type of journalism.

GARY KNIGHT: If I could interject, Steve, though. All the web pages and the media photos on the web can do is use material that's already been produced because they're not currently- well most of them- are not financing photojournalists to go out and gather the news.

So they're only really coming to deliver the pictures because they'll only be sort of five of us out there shooting them. This is really the fundamental problem. It's one thing having all these places to publish. It's great. But who's going to go out there and produce this stuff?

STEVE LEHMAN: I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm hoping that this will create new avenues for photojournalists and videographers or multimedia journalists. I personally feel that traditional media really needs to look at the web because more and more things are going in that direction.

And for us, as photojournalists, currently we're pretty much being regulated to the role of illustrators. And I think the new technologies will help empower us. For so long we've had a print- dominated media. I think in the next few years it's going to change in a very, very dramatic way. And what I'm trying to do is embrace those changes and bring photojournalists and text journalists and video journalists together to forge a new type of programming, a new type of communication.

And so I want to be optimistic about it, but at the same time it's a tough battle that we have and it's something that we all should recognize because nobody wants to spend money on international news.

SUSAN MOELLER: Ron.

RON HAVIV: I think it is very optimistic. But also I think something we have to remember is that everything we're talking about in terms of traditional print media still has to exist in this new form of media. And those basic needs are not going to change and they might even increase more as there are more people going out and trying to create new media. A producer and photographer going together or a writer and photographer going together.

SUSAN MOELLER: Ron, I wonder if you could speak to the question of having photographers also being seen as journalists that are the story sources and whether it might be useful to have lines not only from photographers to photo editors, but to foreign editors.

RON HAVIV: Speaking from my personal experience and from stories that have been told from colleagues, there definitely seems to be a division between photography and text. And a serious division that I found in international news where the text editors seem to look at photography quite often, unless it's something incredibly dramatic, as illustrators. And I think that most photographers feel that we're not often given the respect given to the traditional journalists. That the concept of the photojournalist does not seem to have gone through all the different levels that exist at newspapers, magazines, and wire services.

JOHN OWEN: On that point I think the audience should weigh in. But in hearing these three stories, I think they illustrate all the concerns about the way they work. The fact, amazingly, that they're all still with us given the kind of chances they've taken, and that might be what they learn from experience and also maybe they were lucky. And it need not necessarily be that way. And I think what's disappointing here is -and Chris Kramer, the president of CNNI, talked about this recently and he can talk about it tomorrow-there are no formal safety training programs linked to insurance for freelance journalists in this country.

And Gary and I think Ron have done the courses now in Britain. And if you were at the Freedom Forum on Monday night- this coming Monday night- your would see the re-launch of what we call the subsidized freelance schemes. This means that if you're a freelancer, thanks to the support of the BBC, CNN, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and us, you can go through one of the courses- and you'll hear about one of these course from Paul Rees in Centurion-that run for three or four days and what would normally cost 1000 pounds, costs 250 pounds.

And beyond going through the course- and this is the key- is that you then get insurance. These guys have never had insurance. And I think it's scandalous, again, that American news magazines and newspapers are living off their work without being prepared to up front finance their training and finance their insurance or at least make sure they have access to insurance.

And the wisdom exists. We know about this. These programs work. And young, old dogs can learn new tricks. But I think the time is long overdue for someone to take leadership in ensuring that if you are commissioning somebody, you make sure they're trained and insured.

And David Feingold, former CNN bureau chief in London, formerly managing editor of Reuters, used to talk about the moral slippery slope, and he defined it this way. He said, if a freelance photographer approaches an editor about going somewhere that he's unwilling to send a staff photographer to- Chechnya, East Timor- and has made a decision that it's too dangerous an assignment, then the moral slippery slope can work this way and it slides this way. The most moral thing to do, to say to that photographer is, this is too dangerous a story. We think you might get killed. Don't send us any pictures. We're not going to run them, because your life is too important.

But instead what happens, as usual, is you get there. We're not paying you anything up front, and if you get the pictures, then we'll consider them, which is an informal sanction to go there and take a risk that your own staff photographer won't be in a position to take.

And Feingold said, it's either one or the other. You either make sure they are trained and given insurance or the alternative position is we're not taking them even in the most competitive of situations. That might be an editorial suicide note, I realize, for any editor to say here are great pictures from Chechnya by somebody we didn't think it was a good idea to go to. I realize that.

But in an exaggerated kind of way I think the responsible thing is to make sure they're trained, make sure that they have access to insurance and then make sure that you support them when they come back. Because in hearing these stories, they obviously have some things to talk about as well.

And that's another part of what's going on now. There are programs for post-traumatic stress disorder. You're going to hear about them tomorrow. There's a survey that we're collaborating with Anthony Feinstein from the University of Toronto to make sure that journalists that have been in conflict areas are having an opportunity to fill out questionnaires. That there is data, and for the first time they'll be some information that links long time experience in some of these horrific conflicts to what we now know to be something that's eminently diagnosable and treatable.

A PARTICIPANT: John, if I can take up from you. I know you and I have discussed this many times before, but I accept it for editors. You can't train every freelancer that comes through your door. But what could be done through, for example, the National Union of Journalists in England, the National Press Photographers Association here, through some of the universities who run media courses here, is to have training programs that are subsidized. And if you could get together through one of these associations or organizations 1,000 freelance photographers, you have a lot of buying power when you go to an insurance broker and ask for an insurance program.

GARY KNIGHT: Ron and I both take out insurance and it isn't that expensive, and it could be an awful lot cheaper and really attainable for a lot of young freelance photographers if you could organize them collectively. And it's not really a difficult thing to do, and I think through the auspices of possibly the Freedom Forum. These are things that you should really be discussing as editors and people who are out there generating stories. You have to be responsible for the people who are providing you with your material. Freelance photographers are the most vulnerable and exposed people in the field without question, and it wouldn't really take very much to alleviate much of that risk if you were to take the initiative, and I know you'd get a very good response from the photographers.

STEVE LEHMAN: Definitely. I think it's important for institutions to take the lead on this. I mean everyone wants the information, but are they willing to put up the resources to help protect the people who are gathering it? And every organization uses freelancers whether they like to or not, and the magazine industry is dominated by freelancers. But newspapers very often are using them too, especially in international situations. It's very, very rare that you're going to see a staff photographer from a major newspaper out on an international story, only on the very largest international stories usually.

GARY KNIGHT: Especially in terms of conflict. You'll rarely see a staff photographer at a conflict.

A PARTICIPANT: But I think it's shocking, and I won't mention the magazine, but there was an American news magazine that only gave guarantees during a very dangerous period in Bosnia deliberately to avoid having responsibility for the people working for them. So you really have to think about these issues, they really are crucial.

John Owen, Bio.
Director, European Center, The Freedom Forum

Susan Moeller, Bio.
Fellow, Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, The John F. Kennedy School at Harvard

Gary Knight, Bio.
Photographer, Newsweek

Ron Haviv, Bio.
Photographer, Newsweek

Steven Lehman, Bio.
Firsthand Media

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