Daniel Etter

 

Opinion

Photos don’t always tell the whole truth. Is that a bad thing?

By Daniel Etter July 10, 2023 at 12:09 p.m. EDT

Daniel Etter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, feature writer and film maker currently based in Berlin.

In March, I traveled to drought-stricken Somalia. At one point during my visit to a camp for displaced people, I was surrounded by a raucous crowd of children who were laughing and licking bright red popsicles. A local community leader had somehow managed to obtain a few dozen frozen sweets that he donated to the camp’s residents. Some of the older people were lucky enough to get one, too. Among them was a woman in a green headscarf, whose name, as I later learned, was Ruun Geedi Ali. I turned my camera toward her. She stopped and posed for a portrait, the popsicle poised at her lips.

When I published this shot on Instagram, it evoked reactions like few others. Thousands of people liked it and dozens commented. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of her wrinkled, desert-hardened face and the bright red popsicle. Maybe it was that people saw something in the image they could relate to — a childhood memory of hot summer days, the sweet syrup running down your hands to the inside of your arms, the taste of the wooden stick at the end.

And yet, in many ways, the picture is sorely misleading. That moment of joy doesn’t really show the tragedy Somalis face very day. Almost half of the country’s population of 17 million people don’t have enough food. Of those, 223,000 are experiencing catastrophic hunger, and at least 43,000 died because of the drought crisis in 2022. And more than 3 million heads of livestock, the main source of local livelihoods, have perished.

The Somali people bear little responsibility for their predicament. There would be no drought on this scale without climate change. According to one study, this overwhelmingly agricultural country has accounted for about 0.002 percent of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions since 1750. Germany, the country I am privileged enough to have been born in, has contributed 5 percent — and the United States a staggering 25 percent.

Throughout my visit to Somalia, I struggled to create images that communicate the severity of the crisis. Yet the popsicle photo reminded me that news photos often don’t capture the nuances of real life. Sometimes we photographers try to distill complicated realities into vivid but simplistic shots. At worst we fall back into clichés. class="article-body grid-center grid-body" data-qa="article-body">

This is not done with malicious intent. In a world oversaturated with images, we’re striving to communicate as directly as possible. In the case of a drought in Africa, that often means shots of malnourished children or carcasses of livestock strewn across arid landscapes. And if you challenge the cliché, you can end up with pictures that also end up misleading even though they depict something real.

At first, I worried that my image of Ali fell into this category – and to some extent it does. (Some people even shared it with upbeat music, celebrating the start of summer.) Yet now I find myself embracing it. Why? Because reality is complicated.

One often finds joy in the middle of chaos and violence, moments of brightness amid the misery. Popsicles and starvation can co-exist — which sometimes makes difficult situations all the more heartbreaking. Perhaps photographers, journalists and editors should have the courage to challenge the clichés more often.