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My name is Lydia Polgreen, and I’m an Opinion columnist for The New York Times and co-host of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast. I also spent many years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, working in Africa and Asia. And I spent a fair amount of time in war zones and in conflict situations over those years.
A few weeks ago, Patrick Healy, who’s the deputy opinion editor, had suggested to me that I might want to take a look through some of the images that we typically wouldn’t publish that are in the database of photographs that The New York Times has access to. This is a database that includes, basically, all of the wire photographers and different contributors to The New York Times. They’re all professional images from photojournalists, but they’re sort of unfiltered.
And one of the big and important decisions that you make, particularly if you’re in a leadership position at a news organization, is deciding what is acceptable to publish and what is not. And these are very difficult and sensitive decisions. So I’ve sort of plunged into these images. And what I noticed was that there were a lot of really, really hard to look at, very graphic images of injured and dead children among these photographs.
And as I was going through this, I found myself and I really sort of felt that I wanted to look away with most of these photographs. They were just really, really hard to look at. I think that I kind of was disassociating, in some ways, a little bit as I was going through these images. And then sort of out of the corner of my eye, this one image that had popped up on the screen really captured my attention.
This photo was taken by a Palestinian photographer in Gaza named Mahmud Hams. He’s a staff photographer for Agence France-Presse. And I thought as I looked at it, wow, this image actually looks like it could be from a slumber party, or it could be a bunch of children on a camping trip. And if you’re not looking at it closely, it almost looks like a kind of pastoral scene.
But then you notice that in the upper right-hand corner of the image, there is this drying smear of blood. And then you see that the children are all injured in various ways. And then you realize that the children are all dead when you look at the caption. It’s clear that this is a group of children who have been placed on the floor of a morgue, and they’re underneath a white sheet.
There was something about this image that I just really couldn’t look away from. And I really thought a lot about what is it about this image. And I think that there were a couple of things. One, that moment where you feel this sense of misapprehension that this could be children sleeping. And in fact, when you look at it closely, you realize, actually, none of them look like they’re sleeping. They all look dead, except for one child, a girl who’s in the middle of the frame, and her head is slightly tilted, and it almost looks like she’s kind of, in her sleep, whispering something to the child sleeping beside her.
I think the human mind is incredibly good at protecting itself from traumatic things, right? And so there is this kind of eyes glazing over dissociation that happens when you’re looking at a lot of images of this type. As it happens, like Susan Sontag wrote about this in her 1977 book “On Photography,” where she basically says that seeing a lot of graphic imagery has the power to kind of anesthetize us and inure us.
So even if your goal is to show the full horror of war, sometimes by showing graphic images, you’re actually kind of, like, dulling that sense. And I could actually feel that happening to me as I was looking at these images, until I came upon this image. And suddenly, my attention kind of snapped back, and I became very curious about what it is about an image that can seize us out of that moment of disassociation and pull us into attention and get us to see and be able to look at difficult things.
And this photograph, I guess, I thought of it as a photograph that had a kind of iconic quality not unlike the photograph of the girl who was burned by napalm during the Vietnam War. I thought of the iconic photograph of Emmett Till. Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, and his mother had insisted that his body be placed in an open casket and photographed, and that it be seen around the world so that the world would have to answer for what had happened to him.
And so those are the images that sort of came to my mind, and I thought, does this image kind of clear that hurdle? And I felt that this image really sort of said something powerful about war, and about this war in particular, and about the toll that it’s taking on children in Gaza. And as I looked more at this image, I thought, I need to write about this picture.
And as I started writing about it, I realized, I actually think that people should see this picture. And I knew that that was not going to be an easy thing to make happen because having been the editor of a publication, I was editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post at one stage, and I’ve been an editor at The New York Times on the international desk, and you make these really difficult decisions about what to show and what not to show. And they are truly wrenching, wrenching, wrenching decisions.
I think the question of whether or not to publish this image is a really difficult one. For me as an individual columnist, I argued passionately that we should publish it and that people should see it. And we had a lot of debates internally about it. The leaders of The Times, including our opinion editor, Katie Kingsbury, made very thoughtful counterarguments, and ultimately, the responsibility lies with Katie in making these decisions. And so I accept her decision and respect it.
And I think one of the big questions is these children’s faces are recognizable. And you’re thinking about their families. You’re thinking about the impact that could have on their families, our inability to reach their families, to talk to them about it and get their consent. And I think that intelligent people, caring people, can disagree on these questions. I think ultimately, making a link to the image available so that people who did want to see it, could see it, was the sort of compromise position that we ended on.
So as a kind of baseline, I think that writing about documenting, trying to tell these stories, is a way to say, I’m not OK with this. What I’m seeing is not something that I can accept. It’s not something that I can live with. And that might seem like a pretty feeble outcome or protest or way to take an action, but what I like about that way of thinking is that it doesn’t overpromise what can be achieved, but it makes the moral obligation absolutely crystal clear we don’t underwrite what’s happening here.