jim sitton
PRO user
UMMMm, where's the link?
I've thought about that many times. I have a friend who is a Marine over in Afghanistan now. He was actually in the battle of Fallujah and told me stories about it. When he came home he was completely misunderstood by some of the very people who supposedly supported the war. When he came home all he wanted to do was spend time with his wife but people expected him to immediately be sociable and reenter society. I can't imagine what he saw... But I felt honored when I talked to him about how I felt about seeing what I saw in the business. When he came back he eventually was a counselor for Marines readjusting to "normal" life. He once told me that he'd personally never considered what photogs see out in the field. I respected him because he didn't pull an attitude like "I've been through worse things than you". Instead, he told me that I could talk to him anytime. That he'd treat me like any of his Marines.If we feel this way, imagine how the folks we send off to do battle in our name must feel. We train them to fight...to kill...to witness carnage...and then they come home and we expect them to go back to being normal.
Thank you for your comment. When I started this thread awhile back I wasn't sure if it would receive any response. I felt like this subject was completely ignored. It has been great to read all the responses.This is a loooong overdue subject for us to touch on.
As it has been well pointed out, each of us react differently at different times of our lives. There is no shame in how you feel. Images of yesterday may not hit us until 20 yrs from now or tonight. What makes TV so powerful is how we can capture the emotions in sound and movement, it is also how we get impacted. When I started, a boss pointed out with a twist on Capra's quote on TV photojournalism: "If you don't feel it, you aren't close enough with your camera."
Keep in mind, that although our cameras only do pixs n sound; we not only see the moment, we smell it, taste it, hear it, and feel the emotions of those involved. I am sure we can all create of list of moments that we have been touched by, good and bad. I have my list, with some great ones both good and bad.
So yeah, it does affect us, each differently than the next. We are after all "News Photographers." What we air is one thing, but we generally don't censor what we cover.
A good friend in the Marines pointed out the following that has been helpful:
"Pain shared, is pain mininized,
Joy shared, is Joy multiplied"
Waiting to talk is the wrong thing to do. Reach out and talk, or better yet reachout to your colleague to share their moment, to just listen without judgement.
Good stuff... I'm thankful that I never had to encounter any serious physical danger. But the psychological side of what we deal with is very real. Over the last few years it's struck me that in the journalism community there seems to be little discussion about it.People always seem to think that our job is cool until they realize we are the ones shooting all the deaths they see on the news. We covered a story a couple months back were a little girl was abused to death and i put the story idea out to show how police and first responders deal with seeing things like that. I tear up on stories were we have to talk to family members of someone who has died. The stories that really hit home are service members and first reponders. I try to put the best story I can together to honors those whose job it is to put thier lives on the line.