The original thesis question

The fundamental question – Is journalism ethical? – has rattled around in my conscience ever since the first summer I thought to call myself a journalist. It's the only thing in my life to keep me up at night and then it comes to me in nightmares, and it's what got me into this thesis in the first place. These are the three pieces I think of most:

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Janet Malcolm
"The Journalist and the Murderer"

"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out."

Joan Didion
"Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

"An old woman was walking down the road when she saw a gang of thugs beating a poisonous snake. She rescued the snake and carried it back to her home, where she nursed it back to health. They became friends and lived together for many months. One day they were going into town, and the old woman picked him up and the snake bit her. Repeatedly. "O God," she screamed, "I am dying! Why? I was your friend. I saved your life! I trusted you! Why did you bite me?"
The snake looked up at her and said, "Lady, you knew I was a snake when you first picked me up."

Hunter S. Thompson
"Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie"

Thesis, interrupted

And this is the face Christina made last weekend when we thought the only thing wrong with her car was a little snow covering. We have since discovered the front door was left slightly ajar through two feet of snowfall, the battery died and could not be easily jumpstarted, and there is mold growing on the back seat. Gross.

This is the vehicle Christina and I will be theoretically using to get over to the other side of the state this weekend. The plan includes emus, ocean, Irish cream and an exchange of hostage books.

It also means I won't be getting much work done on my thesis in the next few days. This is probably bad, but I'm not much of a worrier.

Friday night thesis fun

I'm not the slightest bit embarrassed to be working on my thesis this Friday evening, which is an indication that I haven't been working on it as diligently as I should. Also I know no one reads this. Also I'm not by myself, so it's not that bad.

Anyway, here's a bit from a book aptly called "Press Photography: Reporting with a Camera" that sums up what I'm looking at with this whole project:

"But the favorable court decisions [for press freedom] have not entirely relieved the minds of photographers and editors, for there still remains the moral question involved. One newsman put the question this way: 'What business has a photographer to make a living by treating human tragedy as a natural resource?'"

Here's another quote, from a different book, from Dorothea Lange regarding her famous Great Depression photograph "Migrant Mother":

"There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that pictures might help her, and so she helped me."

A Robert Capa interlude

The other project I have this semester is my Honors thesis, regarding the conflict of loyalties in crisis photography. Maybe I'll start posting about that, too.

In the meantime, the New York Times has a good feature about war photographer Robert Capa, who did for photojournalism what Hemingway did for writing.

There's no point in me getting too giddy about this, at least here, but the article is about several cases of long-lost negatives from the Spanish Civil War – which is, as some of my friends know, my second-favorite civil war. The cases were found, and the negatives they've examined so far include images of Hemingway and Federico Garcia Lorca, along with photos taken by Gerda Taro and Chim Seymour.

The associated slide show is a nice way of getting the main points of the article.