One of the great cliches of war photographers

is the notion that until you’ve been there yourself, until you’ve dodged bullets, then you’ve no right to reject the increasingly redundant form of journalism (or propaganda) that is war photography (in the classical sense).

The ideal career trajectory for budding snappers should read something like this:

1. Go to a war and take random but very dramatic pics from the frontline (missiles going off, charred remains, overflowing hospital wards, soldiers holding guns aloft and cheering, a mother crying … )
2. Get lucky, win a few World Press awards, do some talks, join an agency like VII
3. Do a book of black and white photos that you have to pay to have published and which everybody says is great, but never buys
4. Make a ‘multimedia’ feature out of your photos. One in which you stare at the camera and say something amazingly honest and heartfelt but forget to include any of the voices of the people in the photographs (not mentioning any names but I’ll give you an anagram of a repeat offender: Laudable Screams)
5. Reject war photography (but only when you’ve established yourself and have had a show at Visa Festival of Shanty Towns)

Of course some photographers never get round to the rejecting war photography part, but that’s because they are a little bit further up their autistic spectrum than the rest.

Don’t believe the cliche, you don’t have to go to war to reject it.

You want some proof? Read this fabulous interview with Nigel Benett over on Conscientious. Terrific stuff and you have to seriously ask yourself why we don’t read interviews like that in the mainstream media? Here’s an extended excerpt:

I think with documentary photography this focus on front-page drama has a lot do with machismo as well. For some people it’s just a form of showing off to go into some fucked up situation. The content of their photos reflects on them personally. It’s like, “look how hardcore I am!”, so they play up that side of the story and ignore anything else that doesn’t fit the script.

I just came back from Medellin in Colombia, and researching before the trip it was almost impossible to find newspaper articles that weren’t just about drugs or violence. I mean, maybe 1% of what I found spoke of anything other than these subjects. And yet, what percent of the Colombian population are actually involved in either drugs or violence? Certainly not 99%! Not only has the average citizen spent the last 20 years being terrorized by the cartels, paramilitaries and a drug-crazed underclass, but on top of that they are now portrayed by the foreign media as being the very people that have made their lives such a misery in the first place! Try getting a visa to go abroad if you’re traveling on a Colombian passport.

I saw the work of one photographer who’d gone repeatedly to Medellin and just photographed in the poorest neighborhoods, following hitmen and other low-lives – in dirty black and white naturally – and it was thoroughly fucking scary and depressing. And you know, I could partly understand this if the photos were from the mid-90s, when things were much worse there, but the hitman story was from like 2 or 3 years ago! I’m not saying this side doesn’t exist, nor that we shouldn’t talk about it, but Medellin has got to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, surrounded on all sides by spectacular mountains and blessed with a climate of year-round spring. It’s so green and fertile that I felt like if we stopped too long at a traffic light then flowers would start growing over the car. Seriously, there are flowers everywhere, it’s not this filthy slum like some people want you to believe. Apparently it’s now one of the safest cities in latin America too, and the people I met were seriously good people, very generous, and very concerned as to what foreigners think about their country. But of course, you don’t get to see any of this in most documentary photographers’ work, because for all their talk of “the human angle” they are actually making action movies, not honest portrayals. Where’s the humanity in stereotyping an entire nation and fucking up their visa applications? Not to mention ruining the economy.