Lurid Sensationalism or Just the News? (Warning: Image May Offend)

— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.

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Queens man Ki Suk Han, 58, died after he was pushed on the tracks by an unnamed attacker moments before an oncoming train arrived at the 49th Street N, R, Q subway platform in Manhattan on Monday afternoon, according to police. On Tuesday afternoon, police confirmed they had someone in custody in connection with the attack. The photographer who shot the chilling image, New York Post freelancer R. Umar Abbasi, has sparked outrage on social media from those wondering why he did not do something to help pull Han off the track instead of taking pictures.

Abbasi told the New York Post that he started running toward Han and hitting the flash on his camera while shooting photos, hoping to catch the attention of the train’s driver.

“The most painful part was I could see him getting closer to the edge. He was getting so close,’’ Abbasi told The Post. “And people were running toward him and the train. I didn’t think about [the attacker] until after. In that moment, I just wanted to warn the train – to try and save a life.”

“Getting a conductor's attention with a flash — and maybe even blinding him with it — doesn't seem like the way you'd necessarily help someone that's clinging to the subway platform,’’ wrote The Atlantic’s Alexander Abad-Santos.

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Mr. Abbasi said he was wearing a 20-odd pound backpack of camera gear for an assignment, and was standing near the 47th Street entrance to the platform when he saw the man fall on the tracks.

“Nobody helped,” he said. “People started running away.”

“I saw the lights in the distance,” signaling a subway’s approach, he said, so he started firing off flashes on the camera — 49 times in all, he said — as a means of warning the driver.

“I was not aiming to take a photograph of the man on the track,” he said, later adding that his arm was fully outstretched, the camera far from his face.

“If I had reached him in time, I would have pulled him up,” he said. At one point, the man said to have shoved Mr. Han came toward Mr. Abbasi, he said, so he backed up against a wall, still flashing his camera. He estimated the victim was on the tracks for 10 or 15 seconds before he was struck.

“The driver said he slowed down because he saw my flashes,” he said.

Mr. Abbasi said he brought police officers to The Post’s offices, where they examined the pictures for any images of the perpetrator, and he left the camera’s memory card with editors at The Post. He was not part of the decision to publish the pictures, he said.

“Every time I close my eyes, I see the image of death,” he said. “I don’t care about a photograph.”

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Poynter senior faculty Kenny Irby said by email Tuesday, “My problem is with the publication’s editors, who clearly had alternative photographs to use and chose to use the most disturbing.”
Other perspectives:

• Bryan Goldberg, Pando Daily: “Every single journalist should be appalled by what the New York Post did, and they have a responsibility to speak out against it.”
• Stan Alost, Ohio University photojournalism professor: “The decision to photograph or help is always controversial. Journalists are trained to observe and to not inject themselves into situations. The idea is that the power of the reporting/image can help society, if not the individual.”
• John Long, NPPA: “Your job as a human being, so to speak, outweighs your job as a photojournalist”
• Holly Hughes, editor of Photo District News: “News photographers in situations where something horrible has happened are often viewed as vultures who exploit other people’s suffering, and I think that’s an unfair rap.”
• Unnamed veteran tabloid photographer, Capital NY: “He’s just one person who had to make a snap decision under pressure. Far more deserving of fault I think are the tabloid vultures in the newsroom that negotiated, paid for, and published this photo; a photo that adds nothing to the conversation or the story except shock value. If that were my father or brother on the front page today I’d be livid.”
• Stephen Mayes, managing director of the photo agency VII: “The event happened in public, people saw it. Now it’s just been seen by more people … It is shocking. It doesn’t make me feel great to look at it. But it didn’t make me feel great when I heard about the incident either. To me, withholding that picture would have been a form of censorship.”
• J. Bryan Lowder, Slate: The photo “forces us into an almost unbearable exchange of gazes—between the doomed man, the helpless train driver, the onlookers further up the platform, and finally, the photographer, with whom we are implicated in choosing to look. Of course, we demand images like this with our news, yet we also clearly feel a great deal of guilt in consuming them. … In looking at an image like this, we can’t help but identify with the victim (or perhaps even with the train conductor); we are forced to imagine the horror of being in either of their positions because in a certain sense, the feared event hasn’t happened yet, to them or to us. For New York subway riders in particular, this image manifests a collective nightmare, the reality that something like this could easily happen to any one of us on our morning commutes. But no one likes a nightmare, and so we resent being forced to experience it.”

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Kitty Pryde said:

Remember that Pulitzer winning photo of the tiny emaciated African girl curled up in a ball in a field, with a vulture watching her? The dude who took the photo walked away after taking it. He failed to help a weak starving child unable to ambulate reach safety. After winning and being questioned countless times about the photo, he killed himself. I feel that kinda settled the validity of the bullshit notion of photographer as completely uninvolved chronicler. Everyone involved in this newspaper cover are human beings, but most of them forgot that fact.

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Gretad08 said:

I saw that photo and read the history of it about two years ago. No exaggeration, it has absolutely haunted me. It pops into my head on a regular basis, and makes me feel sick for that child.

Everyone, photographers included, has a responsibility for the safety of their fellow human beings. That is a duty that comes before all other things.

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raburrell said:

The photographer (Kevin Carter) committed suicide about 4 months afterwards - he certainly paid a heavy price for his actions around the photo. For that matter, he was not a well man either before or after the day he took it.

I read a bio (which was actually made into a documentary) about a group of photographers who worked closely with him. There's some debate, but they claimed the girl's parents were not that far away, and that she actually made it to the relief center, but it's unknown what happened to her after that. (I have also heard claims to the contrary, so it's possible this is not true).

The effect on the world of that photo was huge, however - donations skyrocketed. Is there value in that? I do think a case could certainly be made, but yeah, it's really difficult, if not impossible, to see how anyone could sit there and take that girl's photo and not do something.

The Post case is more clearly sensationalism to me. The photographer's 'explanation' is bullshit. Flashing the driver to signal? Please. The only benefit of the doubt I'm willing to give the guy is that he maybe thought he was about to capture a miraculous escape and it didn't happen.

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veinglory said:

I don't know what the photographers was trying to do, it may well be exactly what he said. Or he has a 'take pictures' reflex, which I would understand too.

I do know that in the one genuine emergency I was ever part of I completely froze, for at least 10 seconds--which is about how long anyone had to save him.

You never know what you are really going to do in an emergency unless you are in the kind of job or location where they happen a lot.

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In a stunningly self-aggrandizing Wednesday editorial by the “anguished fotog” who says “critics are unfair to condemn me,” Abbasi insists he was using his camera not to document the fate of Ki Suk Han but to heroically attempt to save him. “I just kept shooting and flashing,” he writes, “hoping the train driver would see something and be able to stop.” Not sure how pointing a flashing camera at a speeding train signals the conductor in a more efficient way than yelling or waving your arms, but OK. He goes on to explain that he was “too far away to reach him,” and that after the fatal blow, “a crowd came over with camera phones and they were pushing and shoving, trying to look at the man and taking videos. I was screaming at them to get back, so the doctor could have room because they were closing in on her; she thanked me.”

It’s not that a photographer has any more obligation to intervene in a dramatic situation than anyone else. Abbasi’s first duty, like anyone’s, is to himself and his own safety. It doesn’t matter that he says, “The truth is I could not reach that man; if I could have, I would have.” What’s repulsive is that he then chose to not just sell that photograph, but then brashly write a story in which he’s the guy using his camera to try to stop a train, in which he’s telling other people taking pictures to use restraint, and getting thanked for it. How can Abbasi even walk around, with cojones that big?

And though plenty of images of the “DOOMED” carry with them an inherently controversial aspect – raising questions about voyeurism and intervention – there’s zero comparison between the Post’s shamelessly tasteless stunt and the iconic image of a nameless man falling from the twin towers on 9/11, or Boris Yaro’s haunting photo of a mortally wounded Robert Kennedy. They were pictures that told a bigger story about a major news event. They had something to say about life. What does R. Umar Abbasi have to say, aside from how great he is? What does the Post have to say, aside from the fact that an apparently disturbed man pushed a commuter toward his death on Monday afternoon? Journalism without humanity is just exploitation. And the New York Post without a soul is just the New York Post.

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