Tragedy in Focus

Three acclaimed photojournalists, Peter Howe, Jenny Matthews, and Joseph Rodriguez came together at a special Dart Center and Center for Communication panel discussion on “Photojournalism: Tragedy in Focus” in New York. Below are some excerpts from the discussion.

On the Ethics of Photojournalism

Jenny Matthews: For me, it's important to communicate with the people I'm photographing. Through talking, which it usually is, or just through eye contact. There's an exchange there, that they know what I'm doing.

If you want to be very moralistic about it, there's an element of photography that is voyeurism, that you're exploiting a situation. A lot of the moral issues drop away if you know why you're doing it, if you feel this is story that needs telling, that there's a reason to be there. Photographers are often masochistic. They take on the most difficult subjects. You don't go for the easy, happy time in the park, you go for the hard edge.

I feel this is an unjust world. I've been born with privileges, and the only way I can redress the balance a bit, is to do this.

Peter Howe: You've got to check your motives. It is so hard to make moral and ethical decisions when somebody is shooting at you. It is so hard to do it when the car bombs go off. When the car bomb goes off, your first thought is not about moral and ethical issues. Photographers are trained to photograph.

In Salvador, a bunch of us were driving around — you spend a lot of time driving around, looking for something interesting — and there was a bus that had obviously been attacked by the guerillas. There was just one body, a guy who had probably been a police informer. He was executed with a gun put in his mouth, and it had blown the back of his head off. I was photographing him, moving around. You work the angles. While I'm photographing, I hear this voice behind me. "Peter, who the hell do you think is going to publish that picture? At that point I realized I was photographing his empty skull. Not only that, but it wasn't going to tell you any more about what had happened to that man than the picture from the front.

But it's so hard when the adrenaline is pumping, and you don't know if the guerillas are still there, to make those kinds of decisions. Often, particularly if you're a news photographer and you're shooting from the field, those decisions are made for you by the editor. To me, the editor's job is to be the first reader.

Joseph Rodriguez: It's personal, because I grew up in New York. Every Monday, you'd open the Daily News and the New York Times and see the crime stats. I wanted to get beyond that story, to a more in-depth story.

On Motivation

PH: During the '60s in London when I was growing up there were three professions that were acceptable to a male heterosexual child. You could be a soccer star, a rock star or a photographer. I couldn't sing, I couldn't play football, so I became a photographer.

I ended up in this by sheer chance. I was working for a photographer, David Montgomery. I was his assistant. He was the archetypal groovy '60s photographer. He drove a Bentley Continental. He had this groovy studio. He had beautiful models hanging around. That was the other motivation.

When you're an assistant you get to know who all the picture editors are. He sent me to an picture editor he used to do a lot of work for, at a women's magazine called Nova, which was one of the most wonderful — never mind women's magazines — magazines ever published. And the art director saw me and gave me a job. It happened to be a documentary job. I was looking for a fashion job, but I got this instead. And I did it pretty well. He gave me another one. I started to get into it. I was doing great stories. I did a story about child poverty in Britain, I went on the road with the British ballroom dance team, which was a wild story.

Suddenly I realized telling stories was a lot more interesting that photographing very thin women in dresses.

JR: Basically, this saved my life. I was a drug addict, a criminal, and I found photography, and it turned my life around. Made me what I am today. That's why I spent three years with gangs in Los Angeles, four years in Spanish Harlem, three years in Mexico. These are issues that are related to me personally. I'm speaking to myself first, and then to the world. I'm very honest about that. I'm not a very good objective journalist.

JM: To some extent, the economics of survival as a photographer. No one's going to be interested in pictures from a country where nothing's going on. If you're working in a country where there's news, more people are likely to buy your picture.