Ways of seeing: you, me and them

Does the camera lie? One of the pictures taken by a photojournalist during the 1976 Soweto riots helped bring down apartheid. Today, with cameras in every cellphone, social media can send images, not always accurate, across the world instantly

SAM NZIMA died two days before last week’s killings along the Israel-Gaza border. He was the South African photojournalist for The World newspaper who took the picture during the 1976 Soweto riots of the bloody schoolchild Hector Peterson being carried in the arms of a frantic young boy after being shot by apartheid police. Most people don’t know Sam’s name. But by the next day the photo was splashed across the front pages of newspapers from New York to Moscow and is held worldwide as a symbol of the reality that was black peoples’ lives. It marked a turning point in the struggle.

Israel is not apartheid, nor are Palestinians black South Africans. But the pictures flashing around the world from the Gaza killings are seared into peoples’ minds as symbols of what happened. Israel looks as bad as apartheid – how many Hector Petersons were there that day?

After thousands of words have been written about historical events, it is often the photographs that most define their meaning. For example, the naked 9-year old Vietnamese girl running down a road in 1972 away from a napalm attack – known later as Napalm girl – which made Americans see the Vietnam War differently; the lone man – later called Tank Man – who stood in front of a column of Chinese army tanks in 1989, after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests; an unidentified man falling headfirst after jumping from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center – later nicknamed Falling Man – in 2001 after Al Qaeda terrorists crashed aircraft into the building and destroyed it; the picture of the Jewish boy with a yellow star of David on his lapel, walking out of a building in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, hands in the air, surrounded by German soldiers with rifles, which became emblematic of the Holocaust.

Three Israeli pictures from May 14, when seen together, capture the crudeness of what happened that day: The first is a beaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the new American embassy building in Jerusalem, with a Barbie-doll-like Ivanka Trump unveiling a plaque with her father’s name – US President Donald Trump – followed by the singing of “Hallelujah” by the right-wing politicians from both countries.

The second smiling image was when 50,000 Israelis congregated in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square to celebrate Israeli singer Netta Barzilai’s win at the Eurovision Song Contest, and hear her sing her song ‘Toy’ twice over.

The third, as if on another planet yet just an hour away, was the bloody confrontation between IDF soldiers and 40,000 Gaza Palestinians who were storming the border fence, resulting in 60 Palestinians killed and thousands injured. To viewers around the world, particularly South Africans, the melee looked like Soweto, June 1976 – stolid security forces facing frantic rioters. It wasn’t, but that’s the way it looked.

“What a glorious day. Remember this moment. This is history,” Netanyahu told the inauguration ceremony at the US embassy. The mixture of the three scenes will be viewed by future historians as so bizarre as to wonder if the facts are correct. Why was he smiling so cheerfully when the Gaza border was burning?

Images can be spread instantly worldwide these days via social media. But life is not made up only of images. Beneath, lies a reality. Gaza is a desperate place. Israel is not fully responsible for what is happening there. Hamas rules cruelly, and wanted the world to see Israelis killing Palestinians. It succeeded wildly.

Sam Nzima’s picture of Hector Peterson influenced millions. Last week’s pictures of Israel, looked at together, swayed millions against it. Can this negative tide be turned, for now and for history?

GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za 

Terror victims’ dignity: Should bloody pictures go viral?

 

When to show blood on the floor? Israeli officials examine the murder scene of members of the Salomon family in Halamish by a knife-wielding Palestinian. Controversy abounds about whether publishing pictures of the edge-to-edge blood-soaked floor by the IDF violates victims’ dignity (photo: ZAKA)

WHAT’S in a picture? The violence at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and the terrorist attack in the West Bank settlement Halamish on Friday raises questions about how much blood and gore should the general public see through photographs when civilians are killed.

The morning after the Halamish attack, in which Yosef Salomon and his two adult children were stabbed to death by a Palestinian with a knife during Shabbat dinner, the IDF released photographs of their kitchen floor, drenched edge to edge in thick blood. Another picture showed the attacker lying face down on the bloody floor.

An Israeli official posted it on Twitter, captioned, “This is the terrorist lying on the floor… full of the blood of three innocent family members…”

Arguments for and against such pictures’ release are many-sided. In this case, there was some discomfort in official circles and among ordinary Israelis.

A major humanitarian consideration is preserving the dignity and privacy of victims and family. From a policy viewpoint, Israel also wants to avoid creating an image of Israelis and Jews as “victims.” An Israeli official quoted this week in a national paper referred to the famous Holocaust-era Warsaw Ghetto photograph of a Jewish boy with his hands up, watched by a German soldier: “[Pictures of Jews being humiliated] makes our enemies happy, and demoralises us.”

People arguing that such pictures evoke sympathy for Israel and discredit the terrorists’ cause are only partially correct, since a myriad pictures are also published by Palestinians of their victims of Israeli attacks; it depends who is seeing them, and from what perspective. For some, the attackers are terrorists; for others, heroic martyrs.

Dramatic war photographs have sometimes had major effects on public perception of a conflict. Think of the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked and screaming down a road in June 1972 after being burned by a South Vietnamese napalm attack during the Vietnam War. The war’s moral imperative was never the same after that. Or the picture in September 2015 of a three year-old Syrian boy’s miserable body washed up on a Turkish beach, becoming a symbol of the refugee crisis and the world’s ignoring of Syrian atrocities in which 400 000 have died in the six-year war, many of them civilians. The photograph went viral, shifting some attitudes towards migrants.

In South Africa, the image during the 1976 Soweto uprising by photojournalist Sam Nzima of the dying, bloodied 13-year-old Hector Pieterson shot by apartheid security forces, was published worldwide and became an emblem of the anti-apartheid struggle. Later, South Africa’s social problems shot to the headlines in May 2008 through the image of 35-year-old Mozambican Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave being set on fire in a village street during xenophobic attacks on foreigners by locals, causing an uproar about the society’s moral values.

After a terrorist attack in Israel, the IDF is often in charge of the site, with a say on what images are released. But it cannot control photojournalists working for global media, or civilians’ pictures taken on smartphones and tweeted out to the world.

Newspaper editors are themselves caught in a dilemma. They cannot publish only sanitised images giving no sense of the horror. Yet they cannot fill their pages with gory pictures which will make readers recoil. The balance is difficult to find.

In the Halamish case, the IDF had control of the scene, which was in a fenced-off West Bank settlement. Arguably, the violation of the family’s dignity with images of the Salomons’ bloody kitchen floor, could have outweighed any positive result of their publication. Yet, in the emotions of the moment, one can also understand the rage which led to the opposite decision.

(GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za )

• Read a review of the photo-exhibition Refuge  by Muslim photographers Hasan and Husain Essop, from arts critic Robyn Sassen