A few weeks ago, i had the honor and privilege of attending NYT photog Joao Silva’s first public talk since his injuries in the Middle East. It was the most awe inspiring and utterly overwhelming thing I have ever heard, and really got me thinking about documentary and bearing witness as a photographer. Always on the forefront of my mind, I asked Joao a question being the “human behind the camera.” Here is his response taken from the transcript…
The Human Being Behind the Camera
The camera buys you access to people’s most intimate moments. It’s very interesting that people for the most part will not allow a stranger into their lives.
Sometimes you’re going into a conflict that flares up somewhere and lasts a couple of weeks, and you might never speak to people again. I can’t speak on behalf of anybody else, but it’s not as if I make lifelong friendships wherever I go. That would be a lie, if I did tell you that. I’m a human being. I’m out there to do a job.
But there are bonds. You do make friendships and you do stay in touch with people. It’s inevitable. You spend a lot of time with people. You hire a driver, a translator — you might spend months on end with the same person. You’re two guys who are just human beings. You talk about family, you talk about whatever. You talk about life.
People often ask me, “How can you stand there and watch people hack each other and take pictures?” You have to have clarity as to what your role is. If you want to help people, then you should not become a photographer. Having said that, we do help people. We help people all the time. Sometimes you help people with just the smallest of things. I’ve put people in the back of my vehicle and rushed them to the hospital.
But unfortunately, the images are so stark sometimes that people tend to think that there’s a machine behind the camera, and that’s not the case. We are all human beings. The things that we see go through the eye straight into the brain. Some of those scenes never go away.
A very good friend of mine, Kevin Carter, eventually took his own life. He made the famous picture in Sudan. There’s this child lying face down in the dirt and there’s a vulture stalking the child. He was highly criticized for that picture. People who had no place in criticizing him — people who had no understanding of the dynamics that it took to make that picture — criticized him to the point that he got all conflicted. He took his life a month after winning the Pulitzer.
People always assume that this heartless photographer just walked past and shot the image of the child, and that wasn’t the case. For one, the child was a few hundred yards from a feeding center. That child was not abandoned. But that’s the power of photography. You isolate something, you transmit your image through that isolation, and it was the most powerful image. Ultimately that image was such a strong message of famine. Suddenly there was this influx of money that came out of nowhere. He saved more lives by taking that picture than he would have by not taking the picture.
At the other side of the camera, there is a human being, and that human being is trying to stay alive, trying to capture, trying to get the message out to the world, and trying to stay safe.
