After last week's discussion in class, I found this NY Times piece really fascinating. It discusses the lives of war time photographers, and how they're right there, embedded, in the middle of a war and still have to perform their own job. Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08lede-t.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print

The Inner Lives of Wartime Photographers

By BILL KELLER

This has been a grievous season for the tight-knit tribe of combat photographers. For The Times, the sorrow began last October, when a land mine exploded under Joao Silva while he was shooting pictures of an American patrol near Kandahar, Afghanistan, destroying both of his legs and shredding his intestinal tract. This spring, three other photographers working for The Times — Jehad Nga, Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario — were among the numerous journalists who disappeared into the custody of Libyan state thugs, where they were beaten and terrorized before we could negotiate their release. The darkness deepened by several hues last month when two admired lensmen — Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros — were killed while embedded with Libya’s hapless rebel militia.

Covering conflict is perilous for anyone — reporters, local stringers, the drivers and interpreters we depend on — but photographers are more exposed, in at least two senses of the word. They need a sustained line of sight to frame their photographs; a reliable source is never enough. And they cannot avert their eyes; they have to let the images in, no matter how searing or disturbing. Robert Capa’s famous advice to younger photographers — “Get closer” — translates in combat to “get more vulnerable,” both literally and emotionally.

Back in 2000, Joao and Greg Marinovich, a shooter who was my partner and guide on journalistic adventures in South Africa, published a book called “The Bang-Bang Club,” about four photographer friends who worked together during the bloody death rattle of apartheid. By the time Greg and Joao wrote their account, they were the only survivors. Kevin Carter, a charismatic, talented, addled mess of a man, had run a garden hose from his exhaust pipe into his car and, while smoking a hypnotic mix of methaqualone and marijuana, composed a suicide note. That same year, 1994, Ken Oosterbroek, the grown-up of the quartet, was shot dead in a crossfire in Thokoza township. Greg, who was standing nearby that day, took a bullet to the chest but eventually recovered. After chasing wars around the globe for another five years and being wounded three more times, Greg retired from combat work to write and do less hazardous photography and video documentaries. And that left only Joao, wedded to the life and seemingly invulnerable.

When I called on Joao at Walter Reed Army Medical Center last week — where he is getting accustomed to his new robo-legs and fighting off waves of infection — Greg was also visiting. Most afternoons, Joao straps on his prostheses and circles the physical-therapy room for an hour and a half, clinging to a walker. He’s months from being able to walk on his own, and until then he’s confined to a bed or a wheelchair, attached to a colostomy bag and a stream of antibiotics. His attitude is amazingly resilient. (The first time I visited Walter Reed, I remarked that he didn’t seem to be any older. “No,” he replied, “but I’m a bit shorter.”) Still, the serial operations and infections have made him more somber. As medics came and went tending to Joao’s gauges and nozzles, we spent a few hours discussing the various predicaments of their field, beginning with the obvious mystery: Why do they do this crazy work?

They do it for the most mundane of reasons (to feed their families) and the most idealistic (to make the world pay attention) and the most visceral (it is exhilarating; it is fun) and the somewhat existential.

“It becomes your identity in so many ways,” Joao said. “This is my identity. This is all I’m known for. Nobody sends me out to go shoot beautiful pictures for travel articles, you know?”

Greg, while conceding there is much about the life he misses, implored his best friend to give it up. But Joao hopes to go back to it as soon as he is firmly on his high-tech feet.

“I wish I was in Libya right now,” he declared at one point.

“If this hadn’t happened, or if you were in a position physically, you would go back?” Greg asked.

“If I was in a position to, yeah. Why not?”

“Why not? You’re asking me? I don’t know, what about your family, Joao?”

Joao, who has an endlessly patient wife and two young children, paused for a time.

“The families are very brave,” he concluded.

Perhaps because they are the sharp end of our journalistic spear, combat photographers have long been subjected to mythologizing. The most common myths are that combat photographers are reckless of spirit, or why else would they take such chances, and hard-shelled of heart, or how else could they bear it? “The Bang-Bang Club” was just made into a movie (which played at the Tribeca Film Festival to disappointing reviews), and one of its failings is that it falls for both of these superficialities. It shows the moments of cowboy exuberance — Greg, played by Ryan Phillippe, sprinting across a sniper alley to fetch Cokes for his thirsty comrades — but ignores the exquisite caution, the calculation of every footfall, the patient diplomacy that is more the rule in conflict coverage.

Another scene has Greg, at the site of a massacre, carefully adjusting the lighting so he can photograph a dead child while his girlfriend breaks down in horror.

“Maybe you have to be like that to do what you do,” she tells him afterward.

“Be like what?” the movie version of Greg asks.

“I think you have to forget that those are real people.”

For most of the combat photographers I’ve known, the idea that they are unfeeling is exactly wrong. You can see the almost-unbearable sympathy in the best of their work, and it is an adhesive that binds them to one another. What people mistake for emotional distance, I think, is an intensity of experience that an outsider cannot fully penetrate. Even most of their spouses do not pretend to understand.

“People just don’t get it,” Joao said. “You have to be there, and you have to live it.”

The moral implications of their work are not quite so readily dismissed. Any photographer who has snapped memorable images has had the experience of being damned for it, and it is something the most thoughtful of them take to heart.

One familiar indictment, a moral corollary to their ostensibly hardened hearts, is that they are voyeurs, paparazzi of doom, exploiting the misery of others. Three months before he killed himself, Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for a picture published on the front page of this paper: it showed an emaciated Sudanese toddler doubled over, as a vulture lurked behind her. Afterward, Carter was asked over and over, What became of the girl? He stammered through a variety of answers, failing to comprehend that while his picture, by awakening the world to a famine, may have saved many lives, he was being judged as a heartless opportunist for not rescuing the one life that he had put at the center of attention.

According to Joao, who was nearby, the child in the picture was within the perimeter of a feeding center, not far away from adults, not quite so alone or menaced as the picture suggested. Even so, Greg believes Kevin fumbled the question because he was ashamed that, in his exultation at a great picture, he didn’t think to carry the girl closer to shelter.

“Sometimes we fail our own moral compass, our own emotional compass,” Greg told me. “Kevin was a bloody warm, generous and fantastic guy, and I’m surprised that he didn’t pick up the kid, just to make himself feel better.”

The other knock on combat photographers is that they are cynics who have no loyalties or values.

Joao, on assignment in Iraq for The Times in 2004, talked his way into a company of insurgents of the Mahdi army in the battleground town of Najaf. For days he was accompanying and photographing snipers as they took aim at Americans. The coverage was vilified by some readers, for whom it was incomprehensible that we would show what the war looks like from the other side.

“I do understand, if you have a son fighting in the armed forces, or you might know someone who has lost his son, where that antagonism comes from,” Joao told me. “But from my point of view, I was just being a professional,” revealing the state, and state of mind, of the other side.

“Track suits and sandals, and they’re out there putting their lives on the line and fighting against the mightiest army on the planet,” he mused. “There’s something to be learned from that. . . . Because at that point nobody knew who these guys were and what they were capable of.”

An altogether different moral dilemma falls to me, and it has cost me some sleep at times: What is the obligation of those who send journalists to war? We pay these people to risk their lives. (The day rate for combat is double the rate for less dangerous work.) We put them up for prizes. We are literally their enablers. When someone gets hurt, is it my fault for encouraging them to take chances?

After the CBS reporter Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Egypt and our own Lynsey Addario was manhandled by her captors in Libya, some critics demanded to know how we could justify sending women into places where the threat of bombs and bullets is compounded by the threat of sexual violence. On that question, I defer to some of the intrepid Times women who have distinguished themselves in a field that is mostly populated by men — war journalists like Carlotta Gall, Alissa Rubin, Sabrina Tavernise or Lynsey herself, who says that compared with the beatings her male colleagues suffered during six days in Libyan captivity, “I felt like I got off easy.” The women who do this work will tell you that the question is patronizing, that they are capable of making their own choices and that, importantly, they have access to stories that men do not.

Lynsey recalls covering sexual assault as a weapon of war in Congo and in Darfur. The victims were more comfortable entrusting their stories and showing their wounds to a woman. In Muslim societies, Lynsey points out, female reporters and photographers have access to homes, to women and girls, that would be off-limits to any man who was not part of the family. For a sample of what you’d be missing if Lynsey Addario worked only in safe places, visit her 2010 portfolio of women in Afghanistan, who, in despair over brutal marriages or ostracism, set themselves on fire.

My general sense of the employer’s responsibility is this: We have an obligation to provide the equipment and training, to make clear that we do not consider any story or picture worth a life and, if they get in trouble, to do everything in our power to get them out. But they are there. We are not. We should hesitate to second-guess decisions they make on the ground. (They do enough of that themselves.)

I admit this formulation may be tested when Joao is ready to work again. If he asks for that posting to Baghdad or some other place where things blow up, what do I say? To him? To his family?

Bill Keller is executive editor of The New York Times.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

An essay this weekend on Page 11, about photographers who cover wars, refers imprecisely to Chris Hondros, a photographer who was killed last month while covering Libya’s rebel militia. He was a senior staff photographer for the Getty Images agency, not a freelancer. The essay also misstates the year that Joao Silva was on assignment for The New York Times in Najaf, Iraq. It was 2004, not 2006.