jim sitton
PRO user
UMMMm, where's the link?
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.
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.
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.