(audio slideshow) “I’m the guy who puts the smile on your face,

other places you just look dead.”

Lets face it painting up rigormortis in a funeral home isn’t my idea of a fun Saturday morning sport, neither is it something I really want to watch over¬†my Cornflakes but this audio slideshow by Giano Ciprianio, about a funeral home in New York, is one of the best I’ve ever seen.

These days images of death are ten a penny. Go on type ‘dead body’ into google images and you’ll find over 24 000 000 results.

Photojournalism and death have become increasingly synonymous.¬† There is a folly that jetting off to a warzone and shooting some dead people is bringing back a ‘truth’ to the world that we all need to see. Actually it has more in common with the kind of senseless tourism where you speed from one country to another ticking off the boxes, sights seen, done, move on.

Too many wannabe journalists, photo or otherwise, just want to tick that box which says ‘atrocity, murder and mayhem’.

Actually there are many brilliant photojournalists covering war, few who are interested in the stories of dead bodies. The lens, the pen, is at its most powerful telling the stories of those living, still breathing, those that we can still reach out to, those with a right to expect our help.

That’s what moves me, that’s what might change me.

I was lucky earlier this year to spend time with two incredible photojournalists Jack Picone and Yasuyoshi Chiba, both who have covered conflicts. Of the hundreds of Jack’s photos that I have seen, spanning many wars, only a handful showed dead bodies. From the rest I learned that war is not one story, that we haven’t seen it all before, that amongst the debris, amongst the despair, there are lives worth living, moments to be cherished and futures to be fought for.

As this great audio slideshow shows, the dead still have their stories to tell, but the only way they tell them is through the living. On their own they are rarely more then a picture in a portfolio going nowhere.