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Trauma sells, it dominates the news. We read about it every day, images of trauma bombard us through every media outlet. But what happens when the photographer becomes traumatised?

Following our last branch meeting Dealing with Trauma, myself and Branch Secretary Jason Parkinson were invited to a Trauma Retreat, hosted by the Dart Centre in Whitby. We had previously been part of a Dart round table discussion with journalists who had covered the revolution in Egypt, sharing the experiences in covering the uprisings in the Middle East with a view to working more safely in the future.

Despite the high volume of traumatic work carried out by journalists and photojournalists, we rarely give ourselves the time to sit down and to take full stock of the material we are handling. Taking the time to do this is important, because it is the first stage in arming ourselves with the tools and techniques that we can use to protect ourselves and our colleagues. The question is a dual one: what can we do to make ourselves both more resilient and at the same time produce more insightful work?

Talking about trauma in this way, during the weekend in Whitby was intense and demanding. We looked at situations journalists are confronted with when covering stories about trauma victims. While most of us bear up extremely well in instantly stressful situations, and deal as well as we can when listening to the harrowing accounts of survivors, it was clear that long-term exposure can have an accumulative impact on those documenting traumatic events.

We heard many harrowing accounts from the journalists, both staff and freelance, working for a variety of media outlets who have covered war, public order, or stories involving children which presented ethical dilemmas and emotional challenges. We also covered specific issues for female journalists and sexual violence.

One of the issues we explored in detail was Post Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). A lot of mythology surrounds the condition, but it is clearly a danger for people working around violence and trauma, just as it is for the victims whose lives we are documenting. As photojournalists we are often in the thick of it and right in the frontline. And nobody, however experienced they are or strong they appear to be on the surface, is necessarily immune from the toxic effects of working on this kind of material.

Some talked about feeling like a “trauma sponge” others about the “toxic buildup” associated with their work. And these responses are common in journalists who don’t go onto develop a clinical condition like PTSD.

So what we can do to look after ourselves and our colleagues?

Our mental wellbeing is as important as our physical health as journalists. We were taught by psychotherapists and industry professionals how to recognise the signs of trauma trouble in our colleagues: short temper, panic, lack of sleep, flashbacks, irritation, anger, lack of concentration, nightmares.

Traumatic stress still has an impact, even when PTSD as a clinical condition is not suspected.  There are a number of simple things we can do to reduce the pressure level. We were given practical methods to relieve stress, aerobic exercise is very good, as is meditation and breathing techniques. Healthy eating and a balance of vitamins also helps your body process stress, as is trying to maintain a regular sleep pattern.

Finding help is important, especially if somebody suspects they may have developed PTSD.  Sometimes people may worry that admitting they are not coping well might derail their work and make it less likely they’ll be employed. The truth is that doing nothing about a condition, which responds well to treatment, is more likely to have a devastating impact on the relationships around you and your work.

A supportive network of colleagues can be a great help, many of us go for the obligatory post assignment trip to the pub which can be very useful in sharing experiences and allowing the brain to start processing the memories.

Some media organisations have set up peer support groups which pair up journalists. We heard from the Australian Broadcasting corporation (ABC) who have done this very successfully, especially coping with the devastating forest fires. (Another group of Australian journalists trained by the Dart Centre even provided peer support to their colleagues in Samoa after the 2009 Tsunami  -  a wonderful gesture of solidarity)

Even if it is just a friendly voice on the end of the line, or a text asking if you are ok when you are away on a job helps. We are thinking of running a similar scheme through LPB. Many of our members are freelancers, but others who are attached to news organisations or publications are also unsupported.

Media professionals are very resilient – it is the nature of the job. But some maybe in denial, others feel embarrassed, inadequate or that they wont get work again if they talk about their situations. But negative responses to stressful situations are a natural human reactions and the down time needs to be factored into any workflow.

We are exploring with the Dart Centre a new initiative to provide photojournalists with relevant training. This is mostly about learning to listen and deal with stress and will be on an informal basis. It will provide us with the skills and care needed to be more resilient. It will give us the tools to help our colleagues, referring them to health Pro’s if necessary. We’re trying to create a trauma aware culture for us as journalists and how we cover events. Also making our editors more away of the effects of work overloads, deadlines, organisational pressures, logistics in the field.

Setting up a peer-support programme for journalists is going to take time and some careful planning to get right. If that sounds interesting and you’d like to contribute to that discussion, please get in touch.

© Jess Hurd

A Pakistani man holds his baby, both affected by last Saturday's earthquake as they wait to be airlifted to capital Islamabad for further treatment, at an army base in the northern Pakistani town of Muzaffarabad, Friday Oct. 14, 2005. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

The film showed by the DART Center for Journalism & Trauma can be viewed here:

Meeting audio is available to listen below:

It’s a seductive take: right now there are many reasons why the “concerned photographer” (a term current back then) might think their chosen medium is on a downward path. Magazines, and many newspapers, are dominated by celebrity and lifestyle trivia, with virtually no space for serious picture stories; staff photographers on the nationals are an almost extinct species; freelancers are ten a penny, their ranks swollen by digitally-equipped wannabes and hobbyists prepared to work for peanuts; commission rates and repro fees have been static or falling for years, and copyright is under threat from big business interests and business-friendly legislators. Many photographers are feeling very hard pressed indeed.

The days of news weeklies filled with extended picture stories were undoubtedly a high point in the relatively brief history of print photojournalism, but their demise was not the end of the line. Today, the web is spawning new outlets and multimedia forms that expand the ways in which photography can be used to tell stories. And pictures are everywhere, made and seen in numbers and formats that would have been unthinkable before the advent of digital technology. It is true that the majority are dross, and too many picture editors seem happy to make choices based on cost, not quality, but the new technology has created at least as many opportunities as problems.

Many of those problems are the result of its revolutionary impact on publishing. The industry is struggling to adapt to a completely new business model – or possibly several of them. And it’s only part way done. The big question is, how do you make money distributing content on the web, when everyone expects it to be free? Cut costs with copyright grabs and rate cuts? Boost revenues with paywalls and advertising? Probably all of the above and more, with no-one sure what is going to work, and who will go to the wall.

We are in a period of transition, but the death of photojournalism is not inevitable. Sooner or later, viable revenue streams for publishing on the web will be established by the big corporate players, and smaller niche companies will follow in their wake (or vice versa). Who knows – even print might survive in some form or other. However it works out, there will still be an enormous demand for photography. And if paid-for content is to stand out in a web awash with oceans of cheap-and-cheerful mediocrity, dross will not be good enough. Quality will be at a premium, and quality will only be possible if the new reality is a sustainable one for photographers. Cutting rates and grabbing rights isn’t going to work in the long term.

So maybe there are good old days still to come. Of course, to get to there we have to find ways of surviving the short term. Undoubtedly, as a first step, that survival requires a vigorous defence of rates and rights. As for what else – answers on a postcard, please.

Phillip Wolmuth is a freelance photographer and branch committee member. This article originally appeared on Phillip’s blog.

Comment pieces from branch members are always welcome. Articles should be 400-600 words long and sent to editor@londonphotographers.org

Members have been looking at two existing sets of guidelines as the basis of discussion so far; The National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics and Reuters Guide to Standards, Photoshop and Captions.

The working group is open to all branch members and will report it’s findings to the branch as it continues.

At last nights branch meeting photographer Stuart Freedman gave an excellent talk on ethics & photojournalism. You can read the text that formed the basis for the talk below and the audio from the discussion after the talk is available as well.

Download MP3

Before I start, I’d like to make it clear that I neither consider myself to be a particularly ‘ethical’ photographer (whatever that is) nor am I trying to preach… this talk was the result of a surprising invitation from Jess (Hurd) after a blog entry that I wrote about Ryszard Kapuscinski called ‘Photoshopping Herodotus’. I don’t pretend to have answers to the conundrum of journalistic ethics anymore than the next photographer but what I am going to talk about comes from my observations about the ethical dimension of a business which I’ve been part of for eighteen or so years and this formed part of a lecture that I gave in Bangladesh in January. The debate about Kapuscinski got me thinking about my role in visual journalism…

While I speak, I’m going to run a set of images that I hope illustrate some of moral and ethical choices that I’ve encountered. I start with a set that I’m going to be working on for this year about the mental health crisis amongst the Delhi underclass. The other material is from various stories and I hope illustrates various ethical dilemmas that I’ve had just before I pressed the shutter.

I leave it to you to decide whether I made the right choices…

To refresh your memories, a new biography of the famous Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski was released a couple of weeks ago. It accused him of inventing a good deal of his work. The biographer, Artur Domoslavski, observes that Kapuscinski “consciously built on his status as a legend” and “extended the boundaries of reportage far into the realm of literature”.

I have few heroes in photography, but I held people like Kapuscinski, like Chatwin and Lewis et al, as great writers that I could read as much for pleasure as literal accuracy. I don’t read Polish and so the details of Domoslavski’s allegations are a little hard to substantiate but they are not new: that he was a spy, that he was a womaniser. Much of it to me smacks of a jealousy and a pettiness and the disturbing tendency in modern life to have an icon to smash.

We live in a celebrity culture controlled by big business and advertisers that have a financial stake in selling things – people – as commodities. That requires constant banality and revision. Orwell called it Prolefeed.

We live in an increasingly Prolefed visual culture and I am interested in making a new generation of photographers think before they lift a camera to their eye. Whilst not explicitly defending Kapuscinski’s voracity for factual reporting I think that his work has to be seen in context. Obviously no saint, he called what he wrote ‘literary reportage’ and drew on his own hero, Herodotus, whose work was based on a much earlier oral tradition of story telling and interpreting the world from his travels.

Now, I could debate endlessly the authenticity of Kapuscinski’s work but ultimately this is a defence of him and his tradition. As a master storyteller he was entirely aware of what he was doing but had the intellectual rigour to understand the context that he was working within.

It is that wider understanding of ethics and cultural reference that is increasingly missing from a whole generation of photographers.

As you all may be aware, a young photographer, Stepan Rudik, was disqualified from the World Press Photo competition for altering an image. Rudik photoshopped out an offending foot from a frame but he also savagely cropped the picture and converted it to black and white.

To be fair, it isn’t a million miles away from what Eugene Smith did with his Haiti pictures – except perhaps in intention. Smith was working in not a dissimilar way to Kapuscinski – attempting to change the world by showing itself to itself (albeit with some literary license).

Rudak was trying to win a prize, which has somehow (and very sadly) become the defining element of a successful photojournalistic career.

My contention here is not that Rudik was wrong or right (and I honestly feel rather sad for him) but that as photography and journalism stumbles further into the abyss of uncertainty and change, it shows clearly the dilemma that we face:

The industry relies increasingly on (young) freelancers brought up in a PR-soaked, compromised environment armed with digital cameras to cover the world. Cheaply.

Perhaps it’s my age but I see an erosion of professional standards and training. As a young photographer I aspired to those in Magnum, Network, Rapho, etc: the business was difficult to break into and there were identifiable mentors. No longer. It’s a free-for -all.

We’re all journalists now and as far as I can see, there’s an ocean of visual mediocrity masquerading as the best of photojournalism – heavy post-production: a snapshot aesthetic. Easy frames – boring frames. There’s an army of young photographers treating the Developing world as an extended gap year in which to launch their careers into a media that they have no understanding of.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have meant a generation covering war by treating ‘embedding’ as the norm.

But more – it seems to me that photojournalism itself as a mechanism for storytelling is having an identity crisis.

We can’t go back to the classical formalism of the 19^th/early 20^th century but we are unsure where to push the documentary ethic.

In the last decade or so we have seen photojournalism turn inward. The lack of traditional outlets (and therefore wider audience) have led to photographers simply engaging with and congratulating each other. We are all heroes striding the world making bold statements and saving humanity. As Steve Mayes commented last year, “Photojournalism (as a format for interpreting the world) is trying to be relevant by copying itself rather than by observing the world”. In many cases we are making a ‘cartoon of suffering’.

Because suffering sells and advances careers.

Two styles have come to dominate photo documentary.

The first, a cold, bastard child of formalism seeks to show people dehumanised – as stationary butterflies under glass. Static, bored, unengaged: an out of context fashion portrait.

The other, which has come to dominate contemporary reportage, shows photographers recording in a sub-Gilles Peres pastiche almost purely abstracted work of shadows and blurs. This technique bears little relationship to what they are photographing. It is “stylistically derivative”. There is no attempt to explain and let ‘truth be any kind of prejudice’ (to paraphrase). It is all about the photographer and “never dignifies anyone as a fellow human being”. It also fundamentally fails to understand the context within which Peres worked in Iran.

It seems to me that in all the rush to create a new visual storytelling in the post-newspaper age, many photographers are overtly marketing themselves as ‘brands’: heroes that interpret the world in singular ways. The problem is that few of them actually have a singular worldview and are parroting the same political and visual clichés that they see winning accolades. Alongside this, photography (always the most democratic journalistic medium) has been swamped by an ever-increasing flow of new practitioners that are removed from the back-story of an industry for whom these ethical dilemmas are not new.

To be clear – if we seek to enact change through our work within the Humanist Documentary tradition (and surely that’s the point – otherwise we are just voyeurs), we have to speak a language that the majority of our audience can understand.

I am not suggesting we stop exploring new, creative ways of expression but within that we engage in honesty about ourselves, our stories and the way we cover them.

Part of that is going to mean looking at the stories that we want to make. Not the stories that the magazines may ask us to do – that’s simply illustrating other people’s words – or the ones that we think are fashionable and will win awards.

We do need reportage that shows difficult things, but not one that reduces the people in the frame to symbols. Young journalists have an extraordinary responsibility in the coming years to show truth to a world that has become increasingly blasé about itself.

The marketplace is saturated with photographers touting stories of misery. A journalistic cliché. It’s not that we necessarily need fewer pictures of war and famine and misery but we need more thoughtful ones. Difficult stories need to be told but they seem increasingly ham-fisted in the telling as if that’s what photographers think that they should be doing to the exclusion of anything else.

I think that we, as an established generation of photographers, have some kind of responsibility to make a contribution to our industry – be that through direct education or mentoring.

I know that this branch is thinking about a mentoring scheme and, depending on the final form, this proposal has my backing.

We could do worse than look at the NPPA’s ethical journalism treatise which, although a little earnest, at least creates a benchmark. It states that the primary goal of a photojournalist is the “… faithful and comprehensive depiction of the subject at hand”.

We might even try and formulate an ethical framework in this branch… I know that the NUJ has a set of ethics but perhaps we can add something specifically photographic to it: I’m not suggesting a moral minefield here, but something that’s specifically about images.  I am not going to outline in this talk what should be in it but rather in the process of creating such a code we re-engage with why we became photographers as opposed to ‘image monkeys’ for an industry that treats us as disposable and sets us against each other in a financial race to the bottom.

We might start by asserting that at least we value and respect what we do even if those that seek to ‘employ’ us and use our work often do not.

The point seems to me to be that we have to rapidly set ourselves apart from those amateur ‘citizen journalists’ who record events on an i-phone. It may be that in the absence of a professional journalist, their images may run first. But whose images will the public trust? The voracity of what we as professionals produce should be the defining factor that sets us apart from the herd.

Our images should be the trusted ones – analogous to a journalist’s direct quotes.

I asked my students in Bangladesh where they expected to be in their careers in ten years time. I asked them for a second to put aside financial considerations. I asked:

‘Will you have communicated anything about the world? Will you have done what you believed in rather than what you think your clients wanted?’

‘Will you have thought for yourselves?’

Wherever we are working, we will at some point be faced with choices about the kind of images we make – and I want the generation that is shooting now to be at least aware of issues that have an ethical dimension.

So this talk is a plea: I want to see a return to a storytelling in photography as rigorous in thought and research as it is beautiful in construction and execution. It should have self knowledge and a human centre but understand the tradition from whence it came.

Ultimately we will be judged not just on our photography but our humanity and approach.

Be close to people. Engage with the world. Be excited by it and want to make it a better place by your work

As Robert Capa said:

Like the people you shoot and let them know it.

This months branch meeting will feature an illustrated talk by photographer Stuart Freedman ‘Trying to tell the story? Ethics & photojournalism‘

We will also be discussing the Digital Economy Bill, threats to journalists from the EDL/BNP and proposed rate cuts at Guardian News & Media.

At last months meeting we hosted a panel discussion on the future for photography, the full audio from the discussion is also online.

Any motions to the branch should be sent to the Branch secretary prior to the meeting.

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