Message from Keith

The adage holds that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I was reminded of that this month when I was fortunate to attend a luncheon talk by renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Liu Heung Shing.

Liu first went to China as a photographer in 1976 and was there, working for the Associated Press for some of the most pivotal events of recent history, in China as well as the former Soviet Union.  He spoke about how some photographs become indelibly etched in our minds. “These images help us build a collective memory of a story, through an iconic image,” Liu said.

For many, the Vietnam War is perhaps best captured by the image of the small girl running, her clothes shed, after a napalm bombing attack on her village. Or the image of the South Vietnamese police chief pressing his pistol to the temple of a captured Viet Cong suspect and pulling the trigger. The catastrophe of Syria’s civil war was captured in the photo of a five-year-old Syrian boy sitting dishevelled and disoriented on an orange ambulance seat after the bombing of Aleppo.
 
Here in Hong Kong, the 2014 “Umbrella Movement”, which will mark its fifth anniversary this September, produced several iconic images of young protesters wielding yellow umbrellas to fend off police pepper spray in the streets around Central and Admiralty.

And speaking of anniversaries, this year will mark 30 years since the tragic events of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which for many will be forever associated with the image of “Tank Man”, the brave protester who stood defiantly in front of a row of advancing tanks on Chang’An Avenue.

The Tank Man image, like much of the story of what happened from April to June 4, 1989, has been subjected to heavy censorship in China in an attempt to erase the episode from the collective memory. Those attempts at erasure, and the concerted effort by journalists, scholars and others outside China to keep the memory of June 4 alive, will be the theme of a JMSC seminar to be held on April 15.

I have covered a lot of historic events, and written untold thousands of words—on the Somali famine, the Rwandan genocide, the Hong Kong handover to China, the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul, and the American invasion of Iraq. But few of those words are as embedded in the collective consciousness as powerfully as a handful of potent images.

With digital cameras now ubiquitous, we are experiencing an historic proliferation of images. There are now 100 million photos and videos posted to Instagram every day, and 136,000 new photos uploaded to Facebook every 60 seconds, according to one source. We now take pictures of all the food we eat, every drink, every silly pet trick. Historic events these days are as likely to be captured by a tourist with a mobile phone as by a professional photographer.

Just as we now have to be on the lookout for fake news, technology also makes it easier than ever to alter images. So we need to be vigilant. But I believe images still hold the power to raise awareness, shape the public consciousness and sway opinion in a way words rarely can.  And iconic images remain as relevant as the time Liu Heung Shing was shooting photos in post-Mao China.

So next time you are consuming your daily news, or perusing a weekly magazine, take a moment and really savour a truly good photograph. It will likely linger with you long after the words are forgotten—and may tell you more about what is happening than the story itself.

Keith Richburg
Director of the JMSC