When We’re Simply Human

By Brian Hirschy

Occasionally in the life of an NGO photographer things can hit too close to home.

On April 14th at 7am my wife woke me up with the news that there had been a series of powerful earthquakes in and around Yushu, a town 500+ miles southwest of where we live and work. An earthquake in this area is significant. Not only was my Plateau Photo Tours partner living in Yushu at the time, but most of our friends, co-workers, and employees are from this area – not to mention we had two Lumen Dei tours planned to this area this summer.

Events like this have the ability to transcend a person’s identity as a photographer. The moment my wife told me about the quake(s), I felt entirely human – I wasn’t a photographer or business owner. At that moment I was just human – freaked out, sad, and changed. Immediately all my human effort was put to use in the form of helping with initial medical supplies, medical teams, and setting up channels for proper communication with the earthquake zones and our NGO headquarters.

As days past and the death toll climbed, reports of close friends losing everything started to come in, my identity as an NGO photographer was further pushed to the back of my mind. For the first 10 days I was more than willing to let the press photographically cover this story, not knowing if I had the capacity to even point a camera at something so uniquely personal.

Two sleepless weeks after the quake, my brain was ready to merely entertain the powerful impact a photographer can have on a situation like this. It was no small task for me to even pay attention to the media coming out of this area – seeing destroyed restaurants where I had enjoyed butter tea with close friends less than two months earlier, seeing pictures on the internet of my friends homes in ruin (literally), seeing a place that I have covered photographically in one form or another for almost 8 years suffering – all covered by photographers that I’m quite positive, with no real fault of their own, couldn’t have cared nearly as much as I did.

Whether it was true or not, I couldn’t help but feel that most of the photography coming out of Yushu was coming from photographers that were there simply covering a story.

Simply covering a story. Simply covering the story has to the the antithesis of what we as humanitarian photographers desire to do. You see, It’s easy to show up in a disaster area and instantly nab compelling pictures of tragedy in motion – it’s a different mater entirely to let it effect you. I think we must believe that the art of sensitive and dignified photography comes from buying into what is happening on an some emotional level – however personal or close to home that may be.

The lesson I continue to learn is that the pictures I take are almost always of situations, people, and places I can walk away from – and that they mean so much more to those personally impacted by such things than they do to me. How easy is it for us to separate ourselves mentally and emotionally from the subjects we cover? It is impossible to detach humanity from photography so why do we so often detach ourselves? This thought, at least to me, is a compelling argument to approach our photography with an overly sincere amount of sensitivity, professionalism, and dignity.

Matt’s note: If you are interested in the relief work in Yushu and the NGO Brian works with, please visit yushuearthquakerelief.com and plateauperspectives.org.  Brian is a friend and a fellow humanitarian photographer working in Western China.  While working as a humanitarian photographer, he also helps arrange Lumen Dei and other photo tours and workshops to the Tibetan Plateau.  You can see his work at brianhirschy.com.  Be sure and check out his latest photo series:  The Face of Relief.

I’d encourage you to visit YushuEarthquakRelief.com and see what you can do to help those suffering in Yushu. With the quakes in Haiti, Chile, and now Western China, many people are becoming “compassion weary.”  I understand this. But the folks at Yushu did not have a choice to the the first, second or third in the line of disasters. YushuEarthquakeRelief.com is the best place to get money directly to the field through a foreign and trustworthy NGO making a difference on the ground.
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