Looking at horrible pictures
[published in nrc.next, May 10th 2011]
This is an article I wrote about how I, as an image editors, have to deal with horrible pictures of massacres in Ivory Coast every day. By showing these pictures to the readers we always get a lot of angry letters of people telling us that they don’t want to be confronted with these pictures with their children at breakfast. So readers are to upset and don’t read the article at all. At the same time, by not publishing these pictures, the newspaper don’t tell the real horrible story going on in Ivory Coast.
So maybe – and that is my statement in this article – it’s better to show, instead of the bloody pictures of dead bodies in the street, pictures of journalists trying to make their stories in this warzone. By looking at then, and leaving the horrible elements outside the frame, we can see and image what it’s like to live out these. Your imagination fills in the bloody parts, and maybe that increases the real impact the newspaper is trying to make with this article.