I used to hate journalists. I thought that the media industry could not have chosen more callous people to document tragedy and war. Sticking cameras in the faces of dying children, probing into the life of a father struggling to provide for his home and capturing women in purdah in their most vulnerable state seemed unforgivable.
Then I took a course called Media Writing in my freshman summer, and we were shown a documentary titled Dying to Tell the Story. And to say my perspective changed is to say the least about how that film impacted me.
Made in 1998, the documentary follows Amy Eldon, sister of 22-year-old Reuters photographer Dan Eldon, who was killed while working as a war correspondent in Somalia. Although it was made decades before I ever watched it, I found myself thinking about it in the context of something much closer to home: Palestine. The suffering it documented was not confined to the wars of the past. It was a reality that, years later, I would find myself witnessing on my own screen, unable to look away and yet unable to do much about what I was seeing.
Since October 2023, the world has been made witness to the atrocities being committed by Israel against Palestinians. Images and videos which, till this day, are ingrained in my mind. Images I believe I won’t be able to forget. When Israel first started its genocide, pro-Palestinians were optimistic that it would end in a week. Once a week had passed, they gave it till the end of the month. And once winter came, our hopes crumbled like the rubble on Gaza’s streets.
What’s bothered me the most about these past two years is how unbothered a lot of people are. How, when they see fathers carrying their children’s ripped-off limbs in plastic bags, they somehow convince themselves there is nothing tragic to be seen. And when journalists stand over the dead bodies of pregnant women, their intestines splayed out like they’re on display, the world refuses to acknowledge it.
Perhaps this is why Dying to Tell the Story affected me so deeply. While we are often moulded to see conflict through the eyes of its victims, we rarely consider the people who document their suffering. Since Palestine came to Instagram, I’ve seen countless images of civilians suffering, but hardly any discussion about the people who capture them. To be honest, I don’t think I ever gave much thought to the people who bring their reality to us.
One journalist in the documentary describes photography in danger zones as a ‘one-way ticket to hell’. Dan Eldon was just 22 when he was killed covering the conflict in Somalia. His colleagues describe a place filled with palpable anger, tension, fear and hatred. To physically feel such emotions and then document them through a camera is not only brave, but extremely risky. As one journalist explains, ‘You can’t get an action replay or a second take on reality.’ What looks like a simple click to us involves anticipating bullets coming your way as you focus the lens.
Yet the danger is only one part of the job. Journalists put their lives in jeopardy to make people aware of suffering, only to discover that people don’t want to know what they don’t want to hear. We can scroll past a photograph, but they cannot simply forget what they witnessed. As one interviewee explains, you can hear and see war, but you cannot truly understand it without being there. ‘The smell of death, there’s absolutely nothing like it.’
I used to wonder how journalists could disregard the pain of those in front of them to capture a moment. Martin Bell, a respected British war correspondent, acknowledges that there is something “unnatural and shameful” about photographing wounded people instead of helping them. Sometimes, a situation is crying out for doctors, food and blankets, yet the journalist’s responsibility is to make the world understand what is happening. I found this contradiction difficult to accept. Surely, if a child were crying in front of me, I would put my camera down and help them?
But then I thought about journalists like Motaz Azaiza and Bisan Owda, who have repeatedly documented the atrocities in Palestine. Without their work, how many of us would have witnessed the extent of the suffering? How many would have felt compelled to act? Journalists in Somalia similarly helped bring about a major humanitarian response. Their photographs did not simply capture suffering; they helped make it impossible to ignore. Sometimes, the camera can do what the hands holding it cannot.
Of course, their work does not always produce results. The documentary shows journalists returning from conflict zones only to find that the world remains indifferent. Yet they continue, driven by the need to make people see what they would otherwise ignore.
What struck me most was that these journalists were not untouched by what they witnessed, unlike what I had previously thought. Don McCullin described himself as a ‘broken man half his life’, eventually turning to photographing landscapes and flowers as an escape from the death he had spent years documenting. The camera did not shield him from suffering; if anything, it brought him closer to it.
I went into Dying to Tell the Story believing that photojournalists were insensitive people who stuck cameras in the faces of those who needed medicine and aid. I came out questioning why I had been so quick to judge the person behind the lens, while giving so little thought to the circumstances that made the photograph necessary.
I still wonder whether someone should put their camera down and reach out a hand. I don’t think that question will ever entirely leave me, nor should it. But I understand now that the person behind the camera is not necessarily indifferent to the suffering in front of them. They might be just as desperate to help, just as disturbed by what they see, and just as helpless in the face of it. The difference is that they have chosen to document what is happening, knowing that the rest of us might never understand it otherwise.
When I think about the journalists in Palestine, I think about how much of what I know about their suffering has come from people who have put themselves in danger to show it to me. I think about the images I’ve struggled to forget, and about the people who had to witness those moments firsthand before the rest of the world could see them. I cannot imagine what it must be like to live with those memories, to return to them every time you look through a camera, or to keep documenting a tragedy when you know that people might simply scroll past it.
I thought the cruelty lay in photographing someone who needed help. I hadn’t considered that sometimes, cruelty lies in a world that needs to see such suffering before it believes it exists. I still wish that fewer photographs like these had to be taken. But I am grateful to the people who take them, because without them, so much of what we know, and so much of what we have been able to do, might never have been possible.