Maria
Maria
Nov 5 · 6 min read

Let the people talk: categories of the World Press Photo Contest 2019 that try to cope with the idea of the “voiceless victims”

Fig. 1: A selection of nominees of the World Press Photo Contest 2019.

Is there a way to deal with the standardised representation and media coverage of war, refugees and displacement? In March 2019 I decided to look at the latest nominees of the World Press Photo Contest 2019 to see if there are alternatives of reporting and informing about disasters. World Press Photo is a Non-Profit organisation that wants to promote stories related to visual journalism and digital storytelling they believe are important to be shared, while putting an emphasis on different perspectives and approaches. This essay focuses on the categories of “Digital Storytelling”, “Interactive of the Year” and “Online Video of the Year”. These three categories caught my attention since they do not belong to the classical category of photojournalism but are linked to video and the virtual sphere. Muyi Xiao, visual editor of ChinaFile, states, that “[…] a photo can no longer be the only medium that satisfies their storytelling purpose.” which, personally speaking, can also be applied to the medium of video clips. This statement is also supported by Zahra Rasool, head of the media studio Contrast VR at Al Jazeera and chair of the Digital Storytelling Contest jury 2019, who states that:

“It is important to have this contest because today we consume information and news through social media and online platforms and so we want to stimulate that stories are made for these channels and in new, innovative ways. We chose productions [which] will have an impact, [which] create more awareness of and draw attention to the politics of our times.” — Zahra Rasool

This idea presents a new way of fighting the feared “numbness” of the viewer, that standardised schemes of news coverage cause. In this context, “boredom” expresses a lack of new stimuli for the brain to stay focused. Instead, it might sense the given information but will not be too affected by it.

In the Category The World Press Photo Interactive of the Year an emphasis is put towards the use of different technologies, which also brings a new perspective to the (more or less) standardised ways news is presented. News reports try to create an objective overview of an incident, reducing the importance of the individual story to be able to explain the bigger picture. Individual stories are lost in the big tragedy and our numbness increases. One nominee for this category is “Notes from Aleppo” by Paradox. As one hears Aleppo, minds are filled with the tragic visuals shown by the media: people fleeing their homes and ruined cities. It is a “familiar” topic since it has its regular appearance in the media since 2015. In the following statement, Zahra Rasool mentions the potential danger of alienating the viewers through this sort of media exposure:

“There is no lack of stories from or about Syria and Syrians, but this is from a new angle. We need to keep talking about these important issues and in order to keep the audience listening, we need to find new ways to tell the story. Notes from Aleppo has that new way and is very effective through the way it connects to the viewer and is so deeply personal.” — Zahra Rasool

The trailer shows Aleppo in the early 2018. People are returning to their homes; others stayed during the war. Different people are being interviewed, reporting about their return and sharing their feelings about the current condition of their city. Not only local inhabitants are interviewed but also migrant workers like Philippine maids, who chose to stay during the war. I was surprised by the inclusion of migrant workers in this storyline, since you would usually not hear much about their experiences in the news. In contrast to statistical media reportings of returning inhabitants, this documentary has a more personal, individual-centred approach to it with a local perspective. It seems as if the classical news reports recreate a top-down process, since it’s often the countries or news agencies that are barely affected by the trauma, who collect the information to be presented to the population. In this case the information is coming directly from the affected area and its people, which then slowly makes its way to a bigger audience. It seems as if those returning are given an identity through this way of documentation. However, as Wright states, the voice of these people could remain at the end of a chain of edits since their statement could go through several processes of recontextualization and editing by the documentalist, editor, NGO, translator etc.

This individual-centred approach is continued in the category of Online Video of the Year. “I want to hear the voices of the people most impacted by these global issues that we’re hearing about. I want those people to be treated as an authority in their experience” (Zoeann Murphy). With all these categories it is obvious that the main narrators of an incident should be the ones who experience it. One such video following this principle is “The Legacy of the ‘Zero Tolerance’ Policy: Traumatized Children With No Access to Treatment” by Univision News Digital. As mentioned before, we often hear about these incidents in a very simplified way, shown as “icons” of horror or non-specific imagery which are put together to “compilations”. We see the drama, we feel compassion, but we only hear a few personal stories that go more into depth. We lose touch to the individuals and only see the caravan as an abstract whole. We hear and see reports about children being separated, and charts representing the amount of separated families, camps, deported and reunited families, but in a very statistic way. We are informed by sexual assault cases in the camps, deaths due to illness or malnutrition and psychological trauma. This documentary with it’s visual and private insight shows how horrific the psychological damage of Trump’s No Tolerance Policy really is, once they return to their home country or reunite with their families. Media coverage focuses on the policy, its tasks within the U.S. and the deportation process; this documentary focuses on the after-effects that get little attention. Could mainstream news coverage mainly aim to inform while most of the independent work seek to create a more empathic or human form of informing?

“[…] we hear directly from the people most impacted by this huge news story.“ — Zoeann Murphy

“It is widely reported on, but not on the people that suffer from it: the children, the families, the communities. The story follows a child returning to Guatemala, her school, her teachers, the children…This is the voice that was missing.”- Zahra Rasool

To conclude, the numbness created by TV codes and standardised news presentation (e.g. non-specific imagery that is put together to compilations), that is criticised by Terence Wright, could be dealt with by including more individual-oriented segments. This is already happening through very short interviews, however, it could be improved by different approaches of informing the viewer. Through traditional coverage we might see the bigger picture and how a war is harming the general population, but it is often the experience of individuals that capture our attention and affect us.

Bibliography:

Wright, Terence: Collateral coverage: media images of Afghan refugees during the 2001 emergency, in: New Issues on Refugee Research, University of Oxford 2002, p. 1–27.

Kleinmann, Arthur & Kleinmann, Joan, The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times, in: Social Suffering, MIT Press 1996, p. 1–23.

World Press Photo 2019, URL: https://www.worldpressphoto.org/ 2019 (6.3.19).

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