Visualizing Conflict

Visualizing Conflict: The relationship between images and war

In this episode, we look at the importance of images in conflict zones and how news organizations...

نص الحلقة

It is a big conundrum the purification of images it's not from the conventional sources such as news agencies it poses a number of very difficult questions the first one where they come from who produce them what what they actually showing

Verifying images that are coming from conflict zones can be a challenge, especially when journalists do not have direct access to the location and cannot tell if the images or videos they are using are true or accurate to the story they are telling. Many journalists have been looking for a way to address this issue..

In this podcast we will tell you more about this challenge and what journalists do to overcome it during their coverage. 

You are listening to the second episode of the Visualizing Conflict podcast brought to you by SOWT . All interviews included in this podcast were conducted during visualising conflict conference at University of Copenhagen under the title Photojournalism and the politics of participation organized by IMS (international media support).

Federico Escher, a Program Editor for Channel 4 News who produced the award winning series of reports “Inside Aleppo,” tells us that generally, news channels or reporters verify their materials by reaching out to people they trust or NGOs that work in the field.

There are a number of companies out there and NGOs trying to help you but often you cycle doesn’t allow you to wait for to give you a response about how it works. So we have people in house who can do that we rely on who we trust and and then we have legal advice and compliance where people will tell you that it’s fine to use those under the circumstances you get a credit to someone you ask them if you can use it or you try to ask them and if you can’t reach out to the person who do the footages credit the source and try to pay them fee. 

The concept of citizen journalism, which became increasingly known in the last 10 years, helped many professional journalists access material, including images and videos from war or conflict zones. However, some of these images, especially in relation to the Syrian conflict, were fake. In order to avoid falling in this trap, some researchers and professors use specific techniques to verify images and their sources. 

Nina Grønlykke Mollerup, who is a postdoc at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen, conducted research on local Syrian photographers from Aleppo and her findings provide insights to those techniques… 

International news organizations have not been able to get images from inside Aleppo and other places because simply the war is too dangerous and they did not want to send their staff to Syria.

The local photographers wanted to get their images out they were more interested in dissemination rather than pay to the news organization, so they were happy not to pay and often taking their work without paying.

NGOs stepped up to fill these gaps both in terms of training and professionalization also in terms of financially supporting these local photographers and different initiatives.

This relationship has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it gives photographers the chance to publish their pictures globally. On the other hand, according to Zeynep Devrim Gürsel who is the author of ‘Image Brokers’, some NGO’s buy images from photographers without giving them credit. Nina believes this is very dangerous for the integrity of journalism. 

you'll see a photographer getting paid by an NGO to produce a body of work and then go to the Press with a finished body of work and offered to sell it to stop at a much lower rate. This is good for the publication because they can use this material without having had to contribute resources to its production.  But I would say as a public news reader. This is dangerous because we have to ask where does journalism happen? I believe journalism also happens in the production process. 

Maybe we think about the photographer. We don't think about all of the steps an image has to go through to reach us 

Those photographers usually need professional trainings on how to deliver an image with high quality, as well as how to keep themselves safe while operating in danger zones.

Nina thinks that NGOs played an important role in helping amatuer photographers, regardless of the tough position they are in when trying to help photographers without compromising their safety.

NGOs have definitely worked to support photographers in terms of safety training etc. But there is this fundamental challenge of I mean these are not typically typical press photographers they are people who are very invested in a cause who were living daily in a war zone, so there first of all, I mean, the dangers every day to them and they are because they so invested and willing to take a lot of dangers that typical press photographers probably would not, so that left the NGOs in a very difficult position in terms of how to actually help they don’t want to endangering people but at the same time people are willing to take extreme risks

Visual journalism can have a huge impact on any topic, including war journalism and covering news of people living in conflict zones 

The greatest impact visual journalism can have is when it focuses not on conflict but on everyday life or citizenship as it is lived not only an extreme moments of conflict, but the before and after I wonder if we would be thinking differently about Syria if we as world news readers  had seen Syria and the vibrant civil society and education and health facilities in Syria in the years and decades long before this last a conflict so I think not just focusing on conflict is very important.

But Fedrico thinks that the reputation of media is all that matters..

Ultimately what we want to do is to be truthful and manage to stick to what actually happened and the other thing we care the most about our major currency is reputation. So we wouldn't try and we would stay away and shy away from trying to do something that is not true. 

You were listening to the second episode of Visualizing Conflict podcast brought to you by SOWT . All interviews included in this podcast were conducted during visualising conflict conference at University of Copenhagen under the title Photojournalism and the politics of participation organized by IMS (international media support) with funds from Danish Arab Partnership Programme and SIDA, and the research group Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images at University of Copenhagen, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication.

This episode was produced by Rabbie Hamamsah, Sabreen Taha, Mayss al-Alami and Tayseer Qabbani from SOWT podcasts. 

We will share more stories with you in our coming episodes of visualizing conflict podcast, so stay tuned.