AFP photographer Hazem Bader photographed a Palestinian construction worker screaming in agony as an Israeli army driver drove a trailer over his legs on a construction site on 25 Jan. The Israeli army had turned up to seize the tractor and trailer as the Palestinians were building on land that they owned in an occupied zone where Israel has forbidden them to build. The picture – and it is a striking image – was widely published in the USA and the Israeli embassy in Washington wrote to the US newspapers alleging that the vehicle shown was stationary, that the worker was not injured and suggesting the picture was staged, and asking the newspapers to issue a correction, and to “to consider ceasing to publish the photographs of Hazem Bader“.
AFP have now issued a statement which includes a translation of the medical certificate confirming the injuries sustained by the worker and an interview where he describes what happened. Their press release, which includes the picture concludes:
In the light of these inquiries and based on the trust we have in our photojournalist, AFP Management does not believes that this event could ever have been staged.
Given the ferocity of the attacks against the AFP Photo service, we have decided to release this statement in order to set the record straight. We will not make any further comment.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America continues to dispute the veracity of this image, although some of the points it raises appear to be minor quibbles, for example when they state that the confiscation operation would be a “civil administration mission where soldiers provide security“ rather than an army operation and so any driver would not have been a soldier. You can also read similar comments on the CiF Watch site, which also attacks Bader for the contents of his web site, which they say “quite consistently portray Palestinians as victims of Israeli villainy (something of a specialty for Bader), and further demonstrates an egregious pro-Palestinian bias decidedly at odds with any pretense of objective photo-journalism.”
I can’t tell you for sure about the exact circumstances of the particular image, I wasn’t there when it happened, though I have an opinion on it, but I can say something about photo-journalism. Having looked through a considerable number of the pictures on Bader’s site – with some difficulty as it is an exemplar of poor web design – I think his work as a whole seems very much in the fine traditions of the genre.
I thought of the work of one of the great heroes of the genre, Gene Smith. Would CiF Watch find his work at Minimata unacceptable because of his concentration on the tragic effects of mercury poisoning on the inhabitants of that fishing village?
The photo-journalist is a witness, one who tells the story that he or she sees; in Smith’s phrase “Let Truth be the Prejudice.” At its heart is subjectivity. It isn’t the same as bias or distortion. And there is fortunately no such thing as objective photo-journalism – which would be a real pretence.
But perhaps for me the the most important part of the story is not about the detail of a particular picture but about laws and ways of thinking that make it seem normal and acceptable that when people start building on land that they own, soldiers should come that their equipment should be confiscated at gunpoint and the building destroyed.
