In this video Dan Kloeffler of ABC News asked Michael Kamber, a photojournalist for The New York Times who wrote about the recent death of his colleague Tim Hetherington for GMPM, if Hetheringon’s death in Libya made him question his chosen vocation. Kamber said it has, but he stopped short of saying he’d find another profession.
Yeah, in all honesty it has, it has. It’s been very hard. I think the risks have always been there and we’ve been fully aware of that for many years. But when you see up close the toll that [Tim’s] death takes, particularly on his family and on his community. You see his mother grieving and his brother and his nieces and nephews, it’s just awful. It does give you pause for thought. A number of us are taking a long hard look at what we’re doing and trying to find safer ways to do it.
Finding perfectly safe ways to take war photographs seems like an insurmountable task. Joao Silva, a colleague of Kamber’s at The New York Times, had both of his legs destroyed last fall in an explosion in Afghanistan and is learning to walk with robotic legs. Last week Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, and Greg Marinovich, who co-wrote The Bang-Bang Club (2000) with Silva about the end of apartheid in Africa, visited Silva at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where they discussed the nature of war photography. The two photographers said the recent deaths of Hetherington and Chris Hondros had perhaps caused some people to sentimentalize the profession.
Marinovich: And World War II. How many people got killed? Nobody even counted them, actually.
I have this great difficulty with this sentimentalization of what happens to journalists in war zones. We go there voluntarily. We have a privileged position because we can leave when the going gets tough. And often, you have money, which makes a huge difference in your safety. Not that I think that journalists should get hurt and that I don’t have any sympathy.
Joao is my best friend and someone who has had something happen to him. But I don’t think we should start wailing about the safety of journalists in war zones. Most of it’s incidental casualties, when people are not targeted. Because it’s chaos in Afghanistan. There are land mines everywhere, so it’s almost impossible that this kind of thing is not going to happen if people keep going back or keep getting sent back. It’s going to happen.
Silva: No doubt. In terms of the kind of sentiment that’s in the air right now, I think it’s fair for us to mourn those who do get killed out there. I think it’s fair that the community feels somewhat under siege right now, because so much is out there. And it is a small group of people in the end. It’s just the way it is.
Related story: “Insanity: Going to War with Fake Legs and a Camera” (GMPM)