Friday, November 21, 2008 at 4:01am
Something about a bicycle and a backpack:
a camera (telephoto lens, please)
a notepad
a recorder
maybe a toothbrush
Something about Africa and the Middle East:
‘At least he had a gun! You want to go over there with some paper and a pencil!’
I couldn’t ever shoot someone, anyway.
sand in my camera
and sand in my skin
Something about the balance of journalism and environmentalism and humanitarianism:
ism ism ism
It’s hard to care about all three, harder than one would think.
I’ve really been struggling with that realization the last couple weeks.
Things need to be better. And so many say their lives are fine, so why change? I don’t think I can live that way. I’ll always have the memory of the day last spring I opened a book of photography done by American journalists in Iraq. The four photographers had chosen to un-embed to get away from the censorship of the military on their work. They felt it important enough to show the gruesome pictures and tell the whole story that they gave up their source of protection and went it alone. I looked at a series of photographs of an Iraqi man, probably about my age, who was shot and bleeding to death. He was laying on the sidewalk next to the street.
That’s just not how this world should be. It’s hard to be apathetic after seeing those kinds of things.
