About the media.

For those of you who don't know me personally, I work as a freelance photographer. I do mostly live band work and some model and portrait work on the side. Due to my photo nerdness, I have a subscription to Popular Photography. I got the new issue yesterday and cracked it open tonight. They have an article in there that I'm taking as a sign that I figured out what I'm supposed to be doing with my life.

The article was a simple 6 page feature on three different photographers. The feature is called "Saving The World One Photo At A Time". Basically it chronicled three different photographers who use photography to show people different things they normally would never get a chance to see. The first photographer, Stephen Wilkes, went down to New Orleans about six months after the hurricane and took pictures of the survivors there, showcasing their hope that their life will return to normality. The second photographer, Shannon Eckstein who normally works as a child portrait photographer, volunteered for a nonprofit organization to go to one of their missions in India and take pictures of the children there for promo and ad use, showcasing the work the organization was doing. The third photographer, Robert Glenn Ketchum, takes pictures of landscapes in Alaska. Those pictures spurred the passing of the Tongas Timber Reform Act in 1990 to preserve over a million acres of old-growth forest.

While I'm all for protecting the environment and believe we should be doing more about that, the first two photographers are what really caught my attention. Shannon Eckstein is the one in particular who really got me into this article. She got me thinking, what would happen if more people used their cameras and photography ability to open peoples' eyes to the world around them.

I've always thought it would be cool to be a photo journalist. I think war torn areas in particular would be amazing. Now, as much as that sounds like I'd love for a war to break out so I can go take pictures of it, ya got it wrong. I'd want to go, not so much to document the war, but to document the lives of the people in the lands where the war is being fought. Instead of photographing the explosion as the bomb goes off, I'd rather show people the irreparable after effects. While the destroyed building may be a powerful image, a much more powerful one would be of a family watching helpless as the war destroys their jobs, their homes, and their family. But that story isn't what the media wants so it's rarely told.

Maybe if we'd come to learn that people really are basically the same no matter where in the world you go, we wouldn't be so eager to drop bombs on them. Maybe if we saw what effect we were having on the citizens, we wouldn't cheer when city after city is "liberated" at the cost of only 24 U.S. soldiers and over 1,000 Iraqi "insurgents" (On a side note, I am in no way saying there aren't insurgents. But when we're in a kill first, ask questions later mindset, there's no way of knowing how many were insurgents and how many were civilians caught in the crossfire). Maybe then we'd find a way to help them that didn't destroy their land, their lives and their cultures.

But hey, I'm only 18. What do I know about the world?