Scout Tufankjian Wrote Slate Essay About Gaza's War

 

NEW YORK, NY (January 7, 2009) – Photojournalist Scout Tufankjian, whose book "Yes We Can" about the campaign of President-elect Barack Obama is still on The New York Times' Best Sellers list, wrote an essay for Slate magazine about how to photograph war and its dead based on what she saw while covering the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

In "A Photographer In Gaza: How To Take Pictures Of A War" she wrote for Slate, "I photograph these bodies every morning, knowing the chances of one of these pictures running anywhere are pretty slim: Most readers have no interest in being confronted by a corpse while eating their cornflakes."

The essay takes readers through the mental process the photojournalist has exercised to be able to do what she does, to see and photograph what's before her in a war, and to survive it – both physically and psychologically. Comparable to Jim Nachtwey's credo of why he's spent his life covering conflict, Tufankjian's essay concludes with one of the most concise explanations written of late as to why photojournalists cover war.

A slideshow of what Tufankjian has photographed in Gaza accompanies the Slate piece. In the current conflict, international news photographers are not being allowed to cover the clash in Gaza and are being kept out, and sometimes arrested, by Israeli troops, which has forced the wire services to depend upon Palestinian journalists for coverage.

A veteran of covering the conflict in Gaza, Tufankjian is based in Brooklyn, NY, and is represented by Polaris Images.

 

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