Observer vs. participant

Sometimes it takes the fresh perspective of an outsider to have you reconsider something you haven’t thought about in years.

A Q&A panel for students at the Art Gallery of New South Wales that I sat on recently raised a couple of good examples.

To paraphrase one of them: when would it be right for a photographer to put down their camera in order to assist in the emergency or disaster that they’re shooting? And when might it not be?

That’s not so much a question directly relevant to me anymore, as these days I’d be more likely to have to put my cameras down to get a firmer grip on my coffee cup than the corner of a stretcher. But it’s a very worthy issue nonetheless. Like so many, I’ve been there before.

An Australian photographer not so long ago found himself covering the work of a US medevac helicopter crew in Afghanistan. When the medics were too few for the casualties, he suspended his role as photographer and did his best to save the life of a soldier by stemming the bleeding from a gunshot wound with the application of direct pressure. It didn’t work.

But, that a photographer in this situation would elect to even try to help is not a foregone conclusion. Some wouldn’t entertain the notion, countering that in this case the photographer’s responsibility is as record keeper, and that were the same approach applied elsewhere in time, who knows which of today’s historically valuable photographs would never have been made at all.

The importance of the visual record is one thing. But the abundance of already available photographic gore, and whether this photographer adding to it would make any difference to anyone or anything whatsoever, is altogether another.

But that’s not to understate the importance of creating the historical record. It’s all too easy for the casual bystander to label as callous, cold — a vulture — the photographer shooting what they might think he shouldn’t. But that stance disregards the function those pictures can go on to serve through informing, persuading and agitating. And it disregards what it might mean for us not to have them.

East Timor owes its independence in part to pictures. Abu Ghraib is only closed now because of them. We comprehend what we do today of the barbarism of the holocaust because it’s so starkly illustrated through photography. Each and every fundraising effort that follows a natural disaster owes a sizeable portion of its takings to the empathy that photography generates. And man’s tendency to romanticise and to glamourise war after the fact has always had the edge taken off it by courageous war photography.

That’s courageous not just in the physical sense, but also because in those circumstances they’re raising a camera to take difficult pictures in the most disapproving company – men whose friends have been killed or inured.

But the observer-or-participant conundrum isn’t restricted to theatres of war or to those who cover major disasters in foreign places for a living. Numerous media people have intervened at home to help police officers in distress, countless have stopped their work to render first aid to others, or have made available vehicles or redirected aircraft to help evacuations and rescues. But these are not the stories you tend to hear about on Media Watch.

For the photographer on that Blackhawk, his actions will be judged one way by those onboard, and in another by peers and commentators elsewhere. But there’s only one person who has to live with the consequences of that choice. And there are at least a few former war photographers who have faced that sort of decision and for whom the pangs of guilt have arrived with age.