donderdag, december 23, 2004
The psychic costs of war reporting
Journalism is slowly coming to grips with the psychic costs of war reporting; though many still suffer in silence for fear of ruining their careers.
Weekends spent alone at home, drinking to the point of unconsciousness. Romances that always seem to crumble after a couple of months. Feeling too paranoid to go to a movie or too agitated to sleep. Anyone who has covered violence is aware of the psychic damage it can wreak — the guilt, the sense of being a parasite, the unbearable pettiness of daily life. The tribe of war correspondents is notoriously macho, and to even admit the damage — let alone surrender to it — has always been considered a sign of weakness. We are dispassionate chroniclers, after all, protected by the talisman of the notebook and the camera. The standard practice has been to go forth with a bottle of Scotch, absorb the pain and fear, and never tell your editors.
Greg Marinovich, a freelance photographer, felt a deep sense of impotence as he witnessed a gruesome period of South Africa’s history in the early 1990s, when his daily routine involved taking pictures of people being shot or hacked to death. When he won a Pulitzer in 1991, he found it difficult to celebrate. The winning photos, taken for the AP, were of a mob savagely murdering a man. Marinovich had been unable to save the victim as he was dragged from a train in Soweto by five men who then beat and stoned him and stabbed him in the head before dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire. “I felt shock, repulsion, fear, excitement, dread — always the dread,” he says. “Now, having said that, there is the issue of enjoying, and being excited at, getting good photographs. So all these weird and disturbing thoughts, combined with the fact that we were earning money, added to the guilt — terrific guilt.”
During the same period, one of Marinovich’s best friends, Ken Oosterbroek, also a photographer, was shot dead in a crossfire just yards away from him in Tokoza township. Marinovich took a bullet in the chest in that incident and nearly died. He recovered, went back to work, and later buried two more colleagues who had committed suicide. Marinovich escaped the numbing trap of drugs and alcohol that ensnared many of the journalists he worked with, but he endured terrible spells of depression and, as he puts it, “destroyed some relationships.”
Photographers are among the most susceptible to PTSD, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2002. Because photographers have to get close to capture their subjects, they must switch off their human instinct to help, and this can cause inner conflict. Mark Brayne, a former BBC correspondent who became a psychotherapist after experiencing his own anguish, hypothesizes that writers often cope better than photographers because they create a narrative. “When it has a beginning, a middle, and an end it can be put to bed,” he says. “But a photographer creates fragmented images, and the brain stores these fragments that cause distress.”
Corinne Dufka dealt with her distress by shutting down emotionally. Dufka, who has won nearly every major photography award for her macabre images of Africa, says she grew so desensitized that she began to lack feeling even for friends. She had an “epiphany” after the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998, when she agonized over missing the story rather than the fate of the victims. Dufka cried days later, when it dawned on her that real people had been blinded (her mother is blind). “I was ashamed about my lack of empathy and sense of humanity,” she recalls.
Soon thereafter, Dufka quit photojournalism to become a human-rights campaigner. (She won a MacArthur “genius” award last year for her activism in Sierra Leone.) These days she only takes snapshots of her five-year-old daughter, Eloise.
Judith Matloff, in Columbia Journalism Review
Weekends spent alone at home, drinking to the point of unconsciousness. Romances that always seem to crumble after a couple of months. Feeling too paranoid to go to a movie or too agitated to sleep. Anyone who has covered violence is aware of the psychic damage it can wreak — the guilt, the sense of being a parasite, the unbearable pettiness of daily life. The tribe of war correspondents is notoriously macho, and to even admit the damage — let alone surrender to it — has always been considered a sign of weakness. We are dispassionate chroniclers, after all, protected by the talisman of the notebook and the camera. The standard practice has been to go forth with a bottle of Scotch, absorb the pain and fear, and never tell your editors.
Greg Marinovich, a freelance photographer, felt a deep sense of impotence as he witnessed a gruesome period of South Africa’s history in the early 1990s, when his daily routine involved taking pictures of people being shot or hacked to death. When he won a Pulitzer in 1991, he found it difficult to celebrate. The winning photos, taken for the AP, were of a mob savagely murdering a man. Marinovich had been unable to save the victim as he was dragged from a train in Soweto by five men who then beat and stoned him and stabbed him in the head before dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire. “I felt shock, repulsion, fear, excitement, dread — always the dread,” he says. “Now, having said that, there is the issue of enjoying, and being excited at, getting good photographs. So all these weird and disturbing thoughts, combined with the fact that we were earning money, added to the guilt — terrific guilt.”
During the same period, one of Marinovich’s best friends, Ken Oosterbroek, also a photographer, was shot dead in a crossfire just yards away from him in Tokoza township. Marinovich took a bullet in the chest in that incident and nearly died. He recovered, went back to work, and later buried two more colleagues who had committed suicide. Marinovich escaped the numbing trap of drugs and alcohol that ensnared many of the journalists he worked with, but he endured terrible spells of depression and, as he puts it, “destroyed some relationships.”
Photographers are among the most susceptible to PTSD, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2002. Because photographers have to get close to capture their subjects, they must switch off their human instinct to help, and this can cause inner conflict. Mark Brayne, a former BBC correspondent who became a psychotherapist after experiencing his own anguish, hypothesizes that writers often cope better than photographers because they create a narrative. “When it has a beginning, a middle, and an end it can be put to bed,” he says. “But a photographer creates fragmented images, and the brain stores these fragments that cause distress.”
Corinne Dufka dealt with her distress by shutting down emotionally. Dufka, who has won nearly every major photography award for her macabre images of Africa, says she grew so desensitized that she began to lack feeling even for friends. She had an “epiphany” after the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998, when she agonized over missing the story rather than the fate of the victims. Dufka cried days later, when it dawned on her that real people had been blinded (her mother is blind). “I was ashamed about my lack of empathy and sense of humanity,” she recalls.
Soon thereafter, Dufka quit photojournalism to become a human-rights campaigner. (She won a MacArthur “genius” award last year for her activism in Sierra Leone.) These days she only takes snapshots of her five-year-old daughter, Eloise.
Judith Matloff, in Columbia Journalism Review
# posted by Jan-Edward : 19:11
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