Forgive that in this travel space and go around the globe to talk about this. But VAP is a project that we do in large journalists and that as such we always work in that conflict that is the image and its after. I have never been clear that photo yes and that photo should not be published, But in principle let me explain my doubtful response full of nuances.
Leo on the Internet a whole global controversy, One of those that are manufactured in this Egos network, stupidities and contempt that Twitter has become, On the use of photos in the Barcelona attack. Terrible, bastard, sad… Little to add and much to cry and think.
It is not necessary to be an attack and a dead body on an sidewalk, Many times I have wondered if that person knew or wanted me to portray it and publish his photo. Is in a public space, But does that justify that I take a sleeping photo, rubber, dirty, poor, in tears, dancing, Kissing…? I do not know, But I know that without that possibility of doing so there is no journalism, There is no world to tell. Maybe I didn't want anyone to see him, Maybe I shouldn't be there, Maybe I kissed another, Maybe he doesn't like to see how he cries… And all that happens because a guy goes ahead and takes his photo. His individual freedom of not wanting to leave was missed for my freedom to want to take a picture and the right to information.
In South Africa I learned a lesson on this that I have once told in this magazine that is already seven years old. Visiting the Hector Pieterson Museum in Johannesburg I saw the photo headed by this article. That snapshot, very hard, He teaches a dead child who goes in his arms while his sister with a horrified gesture cries by his side. The child has just died of a shot of the Apartheid Police in the famous students' protests in Soweto in 1976.
If any medium gave that photo today on its cover it would be stoned by the meat crusher of social networks
If any medium gave that photo today on its cover it would be stoned by the meat crusher of social networks and, however, That photo was the beginning of the end of apartheid. For years US and Great Britain had paralyzed all resolutions against the South African racist regime in the UN. That photo, that went viral in the global village, It was the first UN sanctions.
Anglo -Saxon governments had no stomach to tell their voters, That is the key, that a photo that had indigestible to all of their breakfast, to your voters, insist, I was going to be unpunished. That photo is seen today hundreds of tourists who go to Johannesburg every day and go to the museum raised by that famous snapshot and that explains decades of terror that sometimes the only trace are some hard photos like that.
And Hector Pieterson also had a family. His sister crying horrified goes to his side. And the boy who holds him in his arms, Misho Return, They say he was persecuted by the police, or who killed him, or that he hid, or that he was exiled to Nigeria and who died far from his land… There are various theories about your destiny. That photo made it a goal of the white supremacist government that did not want a hero, a martyr or, something worse, both. The photo made him all that. In the museum, At the entrance, There is a wonderful message from Mbuyisa's mother who does not criticize the lack of photo sensitivity, the crudeness, The one who screwed with that photo life and freedom to his son… Talk about your son did what he should do, Help that other child. Says that is what she taught him.
¿Aylan? A dead child on a beach. A baby, rather
Imagine a similar photo in Las Ramblas in Barcelona. A child carrying another child in her arms, dead, while her sister cries by her side. do we publish it? And now let's think about other photos. ¿Aylan? A dead child on a beach. A baby, rather. lasts too. Were there refugees drowning in the Mediterranean before him??
And the photos that win the Pulitzer awards every year? Those are venerated. If they make an exhibition in their city, They run, van, They observe them carefully and applaud while they leave horrified. The toughest are in fact those who liked them the most. There they stop to see everything in detail. Not to give examples that fall in cascade, enter the Internet, Tittle Pulitzer Photographs and you will see executions, disease. cruelty, misery, corpses…Do you remember them?
What are those photos differentiate with some of the cruel images we have seen from Barcelona? That those dead are the others, strangers, distant, And these are ours. Too close, My sensitivity too altered, My sadness and anger too high to endure see it on my face. In my country that does not happen, There are no corpses in the streets, There is no dog's son who is traveling with his van in Zig Zag a avenue killing people.
A week before we had seen an American Nazi to take a mass of people ahead
Just a week before we had seen an American Nazi to take a mass of people ahead, where a woman also died and they could also die dozens. Did not calculate that other dog's son if he killed one A or twenty, accelerated his car and took every human being behind or in front. And I did not hear a single word that asked that the images be censored.
I live in Mexico. Here violence is sometimes atrocious. And some media teach it in an atrocious way. I have had photos on my unfair computer, of a dead child with a shot between the eye and the nose in which the hole looked perfectly, of heads cut and thrown in the asphalt… I remember once one of these local newspapers that carried the photo of a dead woman on its cover, sitting on the ground and with all your bloody open chest. He titled something like "They cracked her". The holder may be another. The truth is that the holder does not remember, The cover photo has not forgotten. It was unnecessary and violent to be exposed in the street; Maybe it was not so much to be hung in the office of some political leaders.
I suppose that in Mexico we should control these images and I suppose it is also good that people somehow see it from time to time. Because when hiding them perennially there is a risk that where I live, A good and quiet neighborhood from Mexico City, people believe that life is just that. Generally, This does not fail, Violence is lived in the poorest areas, Where are there less resources.
Violence is unpleasant, rude, dirty. Talking and teaching it is a vulgar gesture of scavengers
There is a risk that where the power is, The money, falls into oblivion, contempt, The denial of the harsh reality. That happens to others so I don't have to worry. Violence is unpleasant, rude, dirty. Talking and teaching it is a vulgar gesture of scavengers. But others need a solution to stop decapitating, stop cracking, They stop passing cars and trucks over. Those of Barcelona, Aleppo, Johannesburg, San Salvador, Tampico…
That is the work of this work, to count reality. And sometimes it is hard. Much. In good part of the globe, events like Barcelona occur daily. They do not die 13 a hery a 100 One day each 14 years. Die 27, 50 the 90 daily. Every day of their lives that happens. Without failing. With a Swiss precision, where no one dies and it is news if the train is late, They kill dozens of people, They have kidnapped populations of tens of thousands of human beings who live without freedom in a regime of terror.
Canibalism is practiced by violence, Mothers are forced to execute their babies to sticks
On the planet, cannibalism is practiced by violence, Mothers are forced to execute their babies to sticks, The living and naked enemy tied with ropes to the ground is chopped. I have seen all that in my years of African journalism and now here in Mexico and Central America. Next to a normal life, of happy people, amazing and full of positive and remarkable stories. Those also have to narrate them because they also occur.
But the other, The atrocious, We don't want to see it. We demand not to see it. We criticize when they teach us because it violates our comfortable lives in which those barbarians do not happen. And my question is, Where is the lack of ethics to teach it or not want to see it? In tails to see the exhibitions of the photos of the dead when they are the others or to demand that our sweetened world teach us? Can a raw complaint help change something? Do you remember any photo that will teach them more hung? Carrion, Maybe from a nearby dump and not of the child, It was what the vulture was looking for. A photo, Very hard, Hit, He told the balloon better than a thousand chronicles that there were millions of people starving.
I don't have a clear answer on this topic. I don't have it on almost anything. Management two variables: The right to privacy of crying and the good taste of not putting free viscera on the covers, and the total conviction that the human being is so understandably selfish and shrunk that he needs to see a dead baby on a beach to horrify by the daily routine of a sea that people are going to bathe called Mediterranean.
About, Voters do not seem to have forced their governments much to change anything, Another raw photo will be needed to remove consciences and avoid a few hundred drowned. I don't talk about Europe, clear, There with all sadness violence hits rawly and wildly only from time to time. I think more about my house, It is possible that today, And tomorrow, And tomorrow tomorrow, No excessive distance from where I write this dozen dozens of decapitated people die, raped, executed and their bodies have been hidden in one of the illegal graves where there are at least 30.000 Buried dead. Without photo. No crying audience. No one sees them.
