Thorn Tree travel forum

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What

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Is the photo intended to motivate people to take some action, big or small, to provide assistance? Is the photo meant not only to raise consciousness, but also to encourage action? If so, then I think it's legitimate in general, of course there are also questions of permission and respect offered to the subject of the photo. I was initially disturbed in the same way by the photo of the two boys walking down the street, one with a leg missing, the other in a bad way with sibling attached, but I read the caption and other posts by the photographer and I think I understand his motivation.

Photos taken as prizes just to be shown as a reflection of the photographer's skill or sense of drama, to draw attention to the photographer, that's a problem, but I don't think that's what happened in this particular case.

michel, you've raised a very interesting issue.

Palin 2012

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ngythanh has taken some outstanding photos and I have the utmost regard for him and his photographic skill. Having said that, I don't understand the attraction in going to a garbage dump to take pictures of poor kids. If the photos are used to bring awareness to the plight of these young children, that's one thing, but it seems to me that, with all these photographers going to this site, some are probably just going in hopes of catching a few glimpses of human depravity on film.

Again, this is absolutely nothing against ngythanh, who I admire. I'm a very inexperienced photographer (I just take my crappy photos to stir up memories when I look at them), but I'm also curious as to how this gardage dump became such tourist attraction.

Lonely Planet supports plagiarism, bribery and false reporting. Fuck 'em.

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but I'm also curious as to how this gardage dump became such tourist attraction

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Because people went and took photos of the dump, published them somewhere and raised, depending on your perspective or intent - awareness, interest, desire, etc. Had no one, for whatever reason, bothered to take photos in the first place not only would we not be having this conversation but most of us would have never heard of the Stung Meanchey garbage dump or what goes on there. Raising awareness of such conditions - that children forage through toxic garbage dumps for survival - is, I believe, best achieved by a shotgun effect. Take the photos - spray them out there like shotgun shells - knowing that you will reach as many people as possible... some will be indifferent, some will try to make a difference - donations to an aid organization working at the dump, and some will turn up and have a look of their own for whatever reason. You can't expect only to have altruistic individuals shooting photos solely for the consumption of altruistic viewers who will take altruistic actions to save the world from such injustice as children foraging in garbage dumps.

Stories and photos of Asia at:
http://talesofasia.com

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There is a fabulous book called 'Regarding the Pain of Others' by Susan Sontag. It is worth the read. It is an account of photography and war but many of the issues she raises are about the ethics of photography...that is taking, using and viewing photos of other peoples' suffering.

As for this photo...I agree with MrM, it is a very interesting issue. And I think the ethics of taking their photos are nothing short of a minefield. At one extreme is the first photographer who goes in and brings these kids to the attention of the world. At, perhaps (others might have other ideas), the other extreme is the tourist bus that stops for ten minutes so everyone can grab a photo of them. And then there is that grey line in between that somewhere along the way we are supposed to draw a line and say everything above is OK and everything below is not. It is just a minefield.

My only concrete thought is that I don't want to live in a world that has more problems with photographs being taken of these kids then it does with the fact that kids have to live their lives like this.

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My interest is psychology, not photography. Nor it is my hobby.
However, if a thread could offer me something to improve my poor knowledge, I am in.

Thanks to #5's reference rabout 'Regarding the Pain of Others' by Susan Sontag, I learned something new today that I want to share:

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‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’

During a recent appearance on Bill Moyers’s PBS news program “Now” (4/04), Susan Sontag ruefully noted the timeliness of her new book about pictures of the victims of violence in general and of war in particular. It had, she admitted, “an obscenely topical character.”
This sequel to Sontag’s masterful On Photography (1977) arrived even as we were being flooded by the latest and most graphic wave of war photos in our history; and, like the six groundbreaking essays in her first volume, these nine brief, loosely linked pieces shed some clear and disturbing light on the American appetite for images that “shock and awe.” (As television news producers say, “If it bleeds, it leads.”)
Sontag is no more a photographer now than she was a quarter-century ago; nor has she changed her severely intellectual method of discussing photographs without providing a single illustration. But now, as then, her voice is little short of magisterial; and we have no choice but to pay attention.
Her approach, once again, is skeptical and demythologizing. “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave,” she wrote in 1977, “still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” While acknowledging the fantastic hold that photographs have on our imagination, Sontag has always pointed to the alienating features of the process. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” she wrote. And “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”
All this is even truer of war photography. Sontag considers war the “largest crime” of all (she voices, but does not elaborate on, her agreement with Virginia Woolf that “the killing machine has a gender, and it is male”). She admits that war photographs have a unique, irreplaceable documentary value. (Speaking on “Now,” Sontag said that her life was changed forever when she first saw the famous U.S. Army film reportage from Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.) But beyond that she sees a lot of sloppy and self-deceptive thinking that she aims to expose.
War photos, for example, “create the illusion of consensus.” That is, they (briefly anyhow) disturb or horrify the spectator, who self-righteously condemns the cruelty they depict—and then moves on to other things. “No ‘we’,” Sontag insists, “should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pains.”
First of all, the spectator is, by definition, safely removed, always in space and often in time, from the agonies he or she is witnessing. Consciously or otherwise, the viewer thinks, “This is not happening to me.” Pity is cheap, unless it issues, as it seldom does, in concrete intervention to alleviate suffering. Sooner or later, emotional overload kicks in, and we look the other way. So prevalent is human egocentricity that survivors of bombing attacks, Sarajevans for example, revolt at comparisons between their unique torment and the traumas of Chechens or Rwandans: “It is intolerable to have one’s sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.”
Beyond that, Sontag warns against naïve literalism in looking at war photos. Some of the most celebrated ones, such at the pictures of Civil War dead by Matthew Brady’s assistants, the Rough Riders’ charge up San Juan Hill, the immortal icon of the six G.I.s raising the flag on Iwo Jima or the execution with a pistol by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan of a Vietcong suspect on the streets of Saigon, were all in one way or another posed or redone. And pictures need captions and narratives; they are not, as competing coverage of the war in Iraq by Al-Jazeera and Fox News has proved, self-explanatory.
Above all, despite the vivid illusions that pictures, especially moving pictures, conjure up, they do not initiate us into the actual world of other people’s on-the-ground suffering. Sontag is speaking here from personal experience. Though she barely mentions it in these pages, she spent almost three years (1992-95) in the war-torn desolation of Sarajevo. Addressing all spectators of war photography, she concludes her last essay with the emphatic reproach: “We don’t get it. We can’t truly imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”
But for all her strictures—against the objectification of the persons portrayed, the voyeurism of spectatorship, the supposed (but exaggerated) empathetic deadening it gives rise to, etc.—Sontag attacks critics who dismiss all images of violence as banal and unreal. On the contrary, they play a crucial role in reminding us not to forget. “Heartlessness and amnesia,” she writes, “seem to go together.” At the very least—and in view of the countless wars that have been the rule, rather than the exception, in human life—this is no small advantage. “To paraphrase several sages: ‘Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.’”
And no one who reads Sontag’s lucid, trenchant prose is liable to forget her vigorous, “obscenely topical” argument.

(Peter Heinegg)

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Je suis bon marché et stupide. Aidez svp à m'enseigner ce que je suis mal et à ignorer ce que j'ai dit, parce que je suis cheap'nstupid.. Merci.

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“Heartlessness and amnesia,” she writes, “seem to go together.”

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There it is.

Palin 2012

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"I was in this really squalid market and there was this old woman begging there, sitting in the mud and muck, just dressed in rags, all skin and bone, with two little kids with her, and she had just a tin cup with a few coins, looked as if the kids hadn't washed in weeks and hadn't eaten in days, and there were flies crawling in their eyes and they had sores and ringworm, and people were just going by and just ignoring them..." "Really? What did you give her?" "F6.7 at 1/250"

Steung Meanchey is getting to be quite a tourist attraction. Pretty soon the authorities will start charging an entrance fee, with surcharges for cameras.

http://prawnseyeview.blogspot.com

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I need to get something clarified here. Is this photographer responsible for this dump becoming a tourist site because of his photograph.

If so, that is just so tragic. I hope i have misunderstood this.

but in response to the above post, the authorities should probably be charging an entrance fee and giving it to the people who are foraging there if this is the case.

further, if the site has indeed become a tourist destination as a result of one person's photograph, it proves the point that a photograph doesn't hold implicit the outcome that is intended by it. People used to believe that documentary photographs bring about change - hence the early history of documentary photography which was full of the lives of poor people. But the truth is change can only be brought about if the photograph is accompanied by words and or a campaign of focussed activitism, if for no other reason than the majority of viewers are apathetic. Its easy to take a snap (most of the time). A lot more effort is required to put that picture to work for real effect.

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I'm not aware of the debate preceding this thread or the photograph in question, but I was at Stung Meanchey twice last week with my camera. Despite it's proximity to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields I'd say it's a vast exaggeration to label it a tourist attraction; there may be some voyeruristic snappers who come by but I'm not aware of them.

I agree that the motives of the photographer are the key issue here. For myself (My background is in founding schools for street children) I found myself involved in a new school that has taken a dozen children out of the garbage dump and turned their lives around and I went to see the situation of the children 'left behind'with the intention of using the photos to raise awareness in the West to encourage more support for the project.

I'm no photographer though, and I can't speak the terminology but I'll say one thing - a picture may be worth a thousand words etc. but there is still so much that it cannot demonstrate. Leaving aside the chocking dust, toxins etc in the air the most powerful sensation for me is the silence. Except for the sound of constant coughing the children are grimly silents as they pick through the garbage. The contrast with the children in the school who are now normal happy laughing playing children is astonishing.

Anyway I see that this is not a debate about the people but the ethics of photographing them; my point is that providing the motives are 'just' the practice is acceptable.

"After a week in the country I thought I could write a book. After six months I thought I could write a story. After a year I didn't know what to say."

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#10: The OP was asking what we (the TT community) thought of the ethics of taking photos at Steung Meanchey (and by extension photos of the disadvantaged in general). The phot he refers to is by another user called ngythanh, who is a former war photographer. That's just to fill you in the background.

The OP's question is a good one. And I think you've given the best answer: taking a photo has no ethical/moral value whatever, it's the use made of it that counts.

No, the authorities are not thinking of charging a camera fee for Steung Meanchey. But yes, it does come up from time to time as a tourist destination from peoplem whose interest seems to be mere curiosity. That was the point of the little story/joke I posted: the way photogrpahy as a hobby can blind the photogrpaher to the human reality of what's in front of the lens.

http://prawnseyeview.blogspot.com

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I am new to this forum.
Following up your discussion, I had a quick look on the photos you are talking about. Strange to me, one of Mr. Thanh Nguyen photo has been condemned "nonsense... talking" by an another Vietnamese, Durius Nguyen:

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Cambodia/photo155242.htm

On my first day in this world, I saw that the "war" between the Nguyens (or between Vietnamese themselves) is not over. I wonder what's wrong with them? Can any of you tell me, please?

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#12 - On the photo you're talking about, (it shows 2 children in a street in Siem Reap, one of them missing one leg), the photographer (ngythanh) said this to introduce it:

"The adults named these kids so many ways: victims of landmines, victims of war, victims of society. Nobody accepts the real responsibility and admits that they are the victims of ours — the adults."

Darius Nguyen made a comment that it was a good photo but 'nonsense...talking'. He goes on: "The languages are not ... well-defined ! Who are "Us" ? who are "adults" ? are you "Adults" ? did you create the so-called War of Ideology ? did you gain something from the war ?. Perhaps the best thing to do is, never mind the languages and always try to do something ..."

That's p[retty much what ngythanh himself was saying - that we all have a responsibility to do something for the disadvantaged. The only difference between them seems to be that ngythanh is saying that adults are responsible for wars, and are therefore responsible for child victims of wars, while Darius is saying that adults don't share guilt as a group.

All in all, it doesn't seem to me to add up to a war between the Vietnamese. :).

My own feeling is that ngythanh is a very sensitive and humane man who feels a bit lost about what to do about all the victims of circumstances he finds around him in his part of the world. He was a news photogrpaher in the Vietnam war, and has had a pretty hard life, seen things most of us will never see, and for sure it's affected him. An honourable man seeking answers. Darius lacks the element of personalised guilt but is just as concerned about the child mine victims (and the kids at the PP garbage dumP.

But all in all this is a travel forum, not a conference on morals.

Welcome aboard. :)

http://prawnseyeview.blogspot.com