27th March 2021
How do we compartmentalise? By that I mean when we are perpetually exposed to human inflicted horror and hurt – how do we carry on? How can our minds, our spirits be so elastic and accommodating; surely at some point it fragments because it is too exhausted and cannot process anymore. There are so many professions – medicine, law and order, social, aid work, the army – and more, where dealing with such trauma is a normal part of the job. Where the terms Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Anxiety and Depression are commonplace.
This link is really arresting if you have time as it offers the stories behind Time magazine’s 100 most iconic photographs. Not surprisingly many of these terrible images are like a kick in the stomach. Imagine if you were there taking the photo; imagine the impact on your mind as you realise the cost of your profession on your soul.
Looking through these photos, encouraged me to read about this fracturing of the mind from the perspective of three correspondents who have eloquently spoken about their inability to cope.
Marie Colvin was a war correspondent who was killed in Syria in 2012. I believe the latest verdict says that she was targeted and hence it was murder. She visited Chechnya, East Timor, Syria and many other difficult places to report back to the public. A line about her says that ’she was haunted by the images she could not un-see’ (FT, Linsey Hilsum).
Colvin in a speech in 2010 said:
‘Just last week, I had a coffee in Afghanistan with a photographer friend, Joao Silver. We talked about the terror one feels and must contain when patrolling on an embed with the armed forces through fields and villages in Afghanistan … putting one foot in front of the other, steeling yourself each step for the blast. The expectation of that blast is the stuff of nightmares. Two days after our meeting, Joao stepped on a mine and lost both legs at the knee.’
This is the link to the full speech which is well worth reading. Marie Colvin was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress in 2004.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin-our-mission-is-to-speak-truth
Many years ago, the Tate put on a stunningly curated Don McCullin exhibition. McCullin is an exceptional photographer who travelled across the world taking many moving photos in very difficult circumstances in Nigeria, Vietnam, Cyprus, Congo to name a few. He has been credited with many striking comments. Of his profession he has said that he ‘used to chase wars like a drunk chasing a can of lager’ and on why he took photographs in Vietnam : ‘Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see, is what my life as a war reporter is all about.’
McCullin is back in the UK I believe, married with several kids and although on the face of it seems to be coping, he describes the darkness of his previous work as ‘a contamination of my mind that will never leave me’.
As I mentioned above, horror and its mental impact is not constrained to being a journalist or photographer. Don McCullin mentions how he took a photo of a shell shocked US marine whom he discerned had reached his limit. According to an article in the FT (23rd March 2021), psychologists were brought in to unpack the trauma of their returning personnel from Vietnam. What they found aside from PTSD was something called ‘moral injury’. This was less about what horror personnel had seen whilst on duty and more about ‘the sense that they had violated values that were critical to their being’ due in large part to the ethical choices they had to make whilst fighting, coupled with the inability to act freely. This moral impairment impacts many other professions – for example doctors who have to make life or death choices when there is no right or wrong answer – just suffering. Being incessantly exposed to pain (even when your choice) is crippling in ways us ignorant souls may never understand.
Kevin Carter was a young South African journalist. He took a prize winning photograph he called ’The struggling girl’, taken in the famine of Sudan in 1993. It depicts a malnourished young girl trying to crawl along the ground watched by a vulture. The photo is haunting. Carter was not allowed to intervene and help the child which threw up lots of debate as to the role of a photographer in the face of horror and this concept around moral injury. Carter was 33 when he committed suicide, shortly after winning a prize for this image. He had his own demons but it seems obvious from his suicide note that through his short career he was witness to much violence and pain.
I only mean to look at the impact of dread on our mind this narrowly to explain that I have a huge amount of awe and respect for people who do what they do to look atrocities in the face – to expose the evil in our world or to try to make it a better place. We need individuals like that. But we also have to recognise that the personal toll to them can be enormous. The price of shouldering this terror for us, surely means it is society’s duty be there to support them at all costs when they ask us to.
Curiosity and the rascal 