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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Documenting pain
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Documenting pain

Three photojournalists share the stories behind difficult images

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In times of conflict or during a natural disaster, the photojournalist’s lens is our window to that world. They fearlessly go where others won’t or can’t, documenting the most painful of human experiences. We reached out to three such photojournalists and asked them to share one of their recent photographs and the hard stories behind them; images that left a deep impact not just on the viewer, but on the image-maker as well.

Narendra Shrestha

On 25 April, an earthquake of 7.9 magnitude left Nepal devastated. More than 9,000 people were killed and 20,000 injured seriously. Over half a million houses were destroyed.

I was on the top floor of my five-storey house, planning to take my daughter out since it was a Saturday. Suddenly, I felt the tremors. I went to my daughter’s room and positioned her under the door. Things started falling from racks, and I felt my home swinging from left to right. My daughter started crying; I began praying. It lasted 57 seconds, the longest 57 seconds of my life.

After it stopped, we went to the roof. There lay before us the Kathmandu Valley, in heaps of rubble. From the dust everywhere, I deduced the intensity of this earthquake. In the streets, panic-stricken people were running, some without clothes, crying and shouting for help. The police and armed forces were rushing to the affected areas for help.

About 100m from my home, almost 40 people were trapped in the debris of a building under construction. People were trying to free themselves.

At another site, a seven-storey guest house had collapsed. I saw a man bleeding. Locals were helping in the rescue effort. I had never seen such devastation up close. At one point, I was holding the camera but was unable to shoot pictures.

Since April, I have been travelling around Kathmandu. After a week, I was glad to see Kaaji Bogati, the first person I had photographed on the day of the earthquake. Bogati, a construction worker, was rescued from the rubble and was in hospital with his wife. He had suffered broken ribs and was awaiting surgery.

Today, Bogati is not physically fit to return to work and is dependent on his wife and daughter. His two sons have deserted him. Bogati told me he doesn’t know what to do next. “It would have been better if I was dead; my family could have moved on. I feel like I am a burden."

Narendra Shrestha, 40, worked for several daily and weekly magazines before joining the European Pressphoto Agency in 2003. He has documented the Maoist insurgency (1996-2005) and the second people’s movement (2006) in Nepal.

***

Adam Ferguson

I remember a couple of weeks in 2009 I spent embedded with US army troops in Tangi Valley in Afghanistan, on assignment for ‘Time’ magazine. It struck me how desensitized and digital modern warfare has become and how misunderstood the combatants on the other side of the war are. To me this picture epitomizes the abstract idea of the “enemy" that existed within the US-led war in Afghanistan.

A young infantryman watches a road with a long-range acquisition sight, surveying for insurgents planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs). US army infantrymen rarely come face to face with their enemy knowingly—combat is fleeting, and fought like cat and mouse. The most decisive blows are determined through intelligence gathering and then delivered through technology that maintains a safe distance, just like a video game.

I often wondered who these insurgents were, what their family lives were like, and what drives them. These questions are obvious ones, I know, but the answers are not often explored.

The soldiers didn’t catch anyone planting IEDs that night. All they saw was a group of about 20 men gathering at a house near the road. At first they thought it was a group of insurgents, but it turned out to be a wedding party.

A few days later, I was on a foot patrol near the road we had been watching when a mine- resistant army vehicle hit an IED. It was a big blast; the vehicle flew, spun 180 degrees and landed upside down some distance ahead. All three soldiers inside were evacuated by a military helicopter. Fortunately no one died.

Adam Ferguson, 37, is a New-York-based independent photographer who has photographed the war in Afghanistan, strife-ridden Palestinian territories and illegal sand mining in India, among other things, for various international publications.

***

Ruhani Kaur

This was the window. It looked like any other, a rectangle of light with a wooden frame and iron bars. It was through this window that Mohammed Wahid Ali had seen his son Azad being dragged out to his paddy fields and shot in cold blood, allegedly by the Assam Rifles. It’s said that the Azad Khan they had been looking for was a 35-year-old leader of an insurgent group, the People’s United Liberation Front. Ali’s Azad was just 12.

It was 2013, four years after the alleged extra-judicial killings in Manipur. I had known that the stories would be disturbing, heartbreaking even. It came with the territory.

Yet, when I set my frame, my actions seemed almost mechanical. As always, my hearing dipped and the sounds faded. It allowed me to focus on the familiar predicament of taking a picture in low light, without flooding it with the coldness of a flash. What unsettled me, though, was the unforgiving silence that had fallen from the moment we had entered the room. Looking a lot older than his years, Ali slumped into a chair, while his wife Garamjan looked sharply away. Perhaps they were still unable to confront the window. It had been their sole witness on that unfortunate day, when Ali was locked up inside his house. His wife had fainted outside, with her 40-day-old daughter Tabassum still in her arms, as the men in combat uniform had pushed past her. They couldn’t forget. Neither could Tabassum, it seemed. She died three months later.

Later that day, Ali wept inconsolably at his son’s grave near his house, the site now overgrown with grass. His wife had found other ways to cope—she still kept Azad’s school uniform in her wardrobe. She took it out and showed it to us, caressing it gently. On our way out, we met their daughter Sureiya (younger than Azad), returning from school with the same bag on her back that had once been Azad’s.

But what I found most telling was the uneasy silence in that room, when Wahid Ali and Garamjan almost didn’t see me. I peered through my viewfinder, checking on the frame. It was, for that brief moment, my window to their lives. And with the sharp click of the shutter, I too finally became a witness.

Ruhani Kaur, 38, an award-winning freelance photojournalist, has been composing photo essays since 2002.

Compiled by Pradip Kumar Saha

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Published: 29 Jan 2016, 11:21 PM IST
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