Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Watching the Making of a Martyr

By Steve Gorelick, Ph.D.

Does this mean I have to watch it again?

That was my first thought when asked for my reaction to “the Neda video.”

I had watched it early on, before its provenance was clear, and felt I had already grappled with its horror. I remember forcing myself to face the screen, as if watching every second would admit me to some global community of the grieving. More »

An Icon but Not a Revolution

By Reza Afshari

A young woman, with her stunning eyes wide open, dies on the pavement, taking her last breath and muttering, “I am burning.” Depictions of graphic, bloody, and often senseless street violence hardly serve a constructive purpose as they are brought into our living rooms each evening. But the image of Neda Agha-Soltan dying in a street in Tehran presents something radically different: visual evidence of the passing of a significant moment in Iran’s tumultuous history. More »

Journalists Can't Be Choosers

By Roya Hakakian

What else is there to do amid a crisis that has been cordoned off from view? Hypothetically, the question could have applied to a situation where a variety of other material — graphic and non-graphic — was equally available and then a journalists had to struggle with the notion of which to choose. More »

Neda Agha Soltan and the Ethics of Imagery

By Fred Ritchin

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. More »