Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Video of the death of Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot in the chest as she stood near a peaceful protest in Tehran this Saturday, has become a powerful symbol as it has spread worldwide through social websites and news media alike. But for news organizations, this video also poses hard questions: When, how and in what context should we use graphic, violent, deeply upsetting images and video?

In the first in a series of guest posts, author and NYU photography professor Fred Ritchin addresses what journalists need to know.

The 1972 photograph by Nick Ut of children being napalmed in Vietnam, an iconic image that did much to focus the world on the war’s horror, was almost not published because it showed a traumatized, naked Vietnamese girl from the front.

In the mid-1980s in Palermo, Sicily, I asked families with children to consider leaving before I showed Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of people suffering from a devastating famine in the Sahel region of Africa. None did, and afterward I was told that it was not the imagery showing deaths of individuals that bothered them — Mafia killings were nearly a daily occurrence — but it was the crowd scenes of refugees that they found upsetting due to the sheer number of people depicted, photographs that I found to be comparatively benign.

Imagery of people jumping to their deaths on 9/11 in New York was widely condemned and rarely published locally, deemed insensitive, but shown much more widely in media based further away.

Clearly images are viewed differently by different people, so it is difficult to generalize on what should or should not be published given the increasingly global reach of the World Wide Web. The best strategy is to clearly warn readers of the painful nature of what they are going to see, and let them proceed as adults. The greater risk may not be to the reader, but to the subjects of the photograph who may be arrested, imprisoned or tortured on the evidence that they were participating in a particular event, or even attending to a person who lay dying.

Given the enormous amount of violence seen in media daily, especially on television, it seems to me hypocritical to expect that news events should be sanitized for the reader.

On the other hand, there is a great deal to be lost in always looking for and publishing the most gruesome imagery available. Death and suffering lose their meaning, and the world is seen as perpetually out of control, irrational and beyond redemption.

Read the second post in this series, where Iranian-American writer and journalist Roya Hakakian considers the Neda video in the context of restricted information and access.