An American Life (or why cameras turn some of us into arseholes)
Written by Ciara LeemingA recurring topic of conversation for many of the journalists and photographers I know is the responsibilities that go hand in hand with picking up a camera, an audio recorder or indeed a pen and paper with the intention of telling other people’s stories. As is the motivation for highlighting their plight in the first place.
Is it genuinely to shine a light on under-covered stories, give a voice to ‘the voiceless’ and all the other cliches that so many of us would trot out? How often is it actually more about voyeurism, about ego or about taking pictures or publishing stories for a portfolio of black and white misery pics. I could well be being disingenuous but this line of thought brings me next to the impact on that reporter or photographer of seeing a lot of suffering, violence or crap. Or indeed of simply turning very real events and traumas in real people’s lives into words or pictures on a page..reducing it to nothing more than ‘a story.’
Is it even possible to do this job – whether it’s on the battlefields of Iraq or indeed doing regular ‘death knocks’ for a local newspaper (something I had to do while cutting my teeth) – without becoming desensitised to some degree?
Anyway, maybe that’s why this wonderful clip from the show This American Life resonated with me so very much. Maybe you need to have worked in the media to fully get it, but I suspect not. I think it’s brilliant….enjoy.
Discussion (4 Comments)
So true … so true … so true!
Ciara,
so true…as I type this the pangs of guilt for nearly knocking a lady over while in a particularly rough scrum resonate to the pit of my stomach.
All I could muster was a rude glance as though it was her fault for been in MY way…
…before continuing.
I wouldn’t walk down the street knocking people out of my way…why do I feel the right to act a knob with a camera in hand.
Great find…and hopefully when I find myself in that situation again – I will have the decency to stop and AT LEAST flash an apologetic eye.
Sorry.
No you don’t need to have worked in the media to fully get it. you just need to be a human being… and a driver. I am no photographer but it seems to me that a car also has this power of turning some of us into arseholes…
Matt, I think we’ve all done things we’ve been ashamed of…par for the course in this industry. I can remember very clearly being forced to write a very problematic piece linking a local town councillor with the misdemeanors of a young woman who may or may not have been his estranged daughter, who I think had a drug problem and who ended up in the magistrates court in another part of the country. I had been in the job maybe 3 months at the time. I remember how shit it felt to have my managers make me phone him back something like 3 or 4 times for something that wasn’t a valid story anyway, and in any case broke the PCC code of conduct (linking a family member with someone in court for no good reason). I knew that and felt like a shit doing it, but I didn’t have the confidence to tell them where to go. Then I was made to write a story – I remember people standing behind me dictating what I had to write. I felt sick as I did it but I was the most junior reporter on the desk and we had no splash and deadline was looming….needless to say my byeline was put above the story. I went home that night and started to think seriously about whether I was cut out for this job. Then, a few weeks later I was opening the post one morning and my heart sank when I found a PCC complaint from this poor man, who was a really nice guy, about this story and mentioning me by name. Needless to say I was pretty much left as the fall guy. Those who found the story and forced me to ring him and write it melted away, their memories erased and their consciences (bizarrely) apparently completely clear. I came very, very close to leaving journalism at that point….I started applying for other jobs.
sorry for the rant but I think my point is that it’s not only cameras that turn people into wankers. It seems to be the very act of having to fill pages (or airtime) and the pressures from above that make perfectly nice people reduce people’s lives to nothing more than a soap opera. I still don’t get it.
as you can tell, 6 years on I remain very bitter about that particular incident. It taught me a lot about this industry and about people.
Val – you’re totally right. I know you get this everywhere…so true