| reportage Moving pictures | |
| John Sweeney
A barefoot African boy crawls in the dust, his whole body, as thin as sticks, keening with misery at the sight of his bag of maize disappearing. He had queued for hours and is on the verge of death, but now his maize has been robbed from him by a fit man who strides confidently away. |
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| Winter 1998 | Tom Stoddart (IPG) and related links | Archive | Back | Next | 4 of 10 | |
The boy’s head is tilted, as if asking a question: now that I am dying of hunger, how could someone steal my food? Tom Stoddart’s eye has caught a moment of unutterable misery. He wrote, on his return from the famine in southern Sudan, the following: ‘The first skeleton drifts into sight. The feeding centre reminds me of the terrible scenes in Belsen or Auschwitz. Everywhere emaciated, weak, silent children painfully move around looking for food. Mothers squat under hordes of flies with tiny motionless bundles, waiting for the gravediggers to collect. The stink of death is everywhere as nurses hurry here and there, trying to comfort and feed the weakest people lying in the shit and vomit on the ground. This place is truly a mixture of heroism and evil. I watch as a woman gives birth to a baby boy while a skeletal man dies next to her.’ What is happening in Sudan, where the northern, Muslim government is using famine as a weapon of war against the southern, animist, Christian people, has been ignored by the rich world. Stoddart travelled to Ajiep, where more than 100 people were dying every day. The death rate there this summer was worse than in the Horn of Africa at the time of Bob Geldof’s LiveAid. ‘It’s a forgotten famine,’ says Stoddart. ‘The wretched,’ wrote Dr Johnson, ‘have no compassion.’ That insight is some kind of corrective to the intense despair for the human condition one feels on looking at Stoddart’s photographs. But the question asked by the crumpled, broken, pleading posture of the robbed boy raises a second question, one that journalists and editors and thoughtful people in comfortable places in the West should answer. Do we, the rich of the West, have enough courage to publish these pictures, and enough compassion to care—and to give? And, unbearable as Stoddart’s images are, the answer is a resounding yes. His pictures first appeared in the Guardian, with words by Victoria Brittain, along with a telephone hotline for Médecins Sans Frontières, the charity that had helped Stoddart travel to Sudan. The day the article was published, MSF had 700 calls and £40,000 was pledged. Later, the same pictures appeared in the Guardian Weekly, attracting more money, including one single donation of £10,000 from someone in New Zealand. Le Figaro ran 10 pages of his pictures, Stern magazine nine pages, US News and World Report five. The photographs have appeared in magazines in Holland and Spain, and across the world. Of all the images, the most powerful is that of the boy being robbed of his food. Stoddart has been criticized because he did not stop the robbery. ‘I am not a policeman or an aid worker,’ he points out. ‘All I can do is to try and tell the truth with my camera.’ And Polly Markandya points out that Stoddart requested that the Guardian run the credit card hotlines of MSF and Unicef next to his pictures, so that, in her words, ‘he wasn’t just an observer of other people’s misery. He is playing an active role.’ Clare Short, Labour’s voice for the wretched on earth in the British Cabinet, criticized the Daily Express, among others, for harping on about the famine. Short argued that such reportage not only misses the point that such situations need political solutions rather than individual donations, but worsens compassion fatigue. Seeing yet more images of fellow humans in agony, she said, merely makes people ‘inch and turn away’. The success of Stoddart’s pictures suggests that the idea of compassion fatigue is a convenient myth for those who hold political power. The Daily Express has raised £500,000. I think people respond magnificently. Readers are not morons. Let them decide. Stoddart is highly critical of the British media’s obsession with celebs, royals and soaps, pointing out that even historically gritty magazines like the Observer’s have become obsessed with style journalism. Paul Lowe’s photographs from Sudan did appear in the Sunday Times magazine, but most weeks that magazine, too, stresses style over story. Style journalism is so untruthful. Every word is sanctioned by PR. They’re always trying to sell something. ‘Everyone accepts,’ says Stoddart, ‘that you have to run whatever the market demands, but the reaction to my pictures from Sudan shows that committed photojournalism still has a hold on people’s minds. There are a lot of people out there who want to know what is really going on in the world.’ He’s right. There is another, narrower point, but one that speaks to the herd mentality of most magazine editors. It’s all too easy to fill your magazine with style journalism, and with the current form of ‘me’ journalism where writers list the contents of their trouser pockets—one bus ticket, an invitation to the latest book launch and a note from my girlfriend telling me to wash behind my foreskin. This kind of work is not only dull but self-obsessed and inward-looking. It’s past its sell-by date. Me journalism began in the eighties, when the zeitgeist was driven by the moronic cry of Mrs Thatcher that there was no such thing as society. If you think people are bored by compassion fatigue, look at Stoddart’s work, look at the facts, and think again. No editor need be frightened of losing readers by running images such as these. They may flich, but they will not turn away. |
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| Winter 1998 | Tom Stoddart (IPG) and related links | Archive | Back | Next | 4 of 10 | |