(This is the second part of a two-part article. Click here for the first part.)  The photographs finally arrived by e-mail, and Ben Curtis and I got back on the phone. BEN CURTIS: So there should be 19 pictures, numbered 101 to 119. Basically, I spent the whole day out and then came back and sent pictures. The numbers represent the order of when I filed the photos, not necessarily when they were taken. If you look at the pictures of the very small baby, that was what I did first in the day. That’s unrelated to the bombing incident with the Mickey Mouse.  ERROL MORRIS: Where are those taken?  BEN CURTIS: In the morning, we went to Najm Hospital. There are two hospitals in Tyre that received casualties and wounded from throughout southern Lebanon. Najm Hospital is on the outside of town. It was a bit more dangerous to get to because there was some bombing around there. And then there was the main hospital in town, which is called Jebel Amer, which was where we went later. So, we went to the Najm hospital speculatively in the morning, to see if they’d received any casualties or wounded. And when we were there, we heard that they had this two-week-old baby who’d been transported across southern Lebanon in an ambulance, during the night, and had arrived at the hospital that morning. It was two weeks old.  BEN CURTIS [continued]: It was unclear what had happened to his parents or his mother, but he had been born in the middle of the bombing zone and an ambulance had transported him across southern Lebanon for about nine hours to get to the hospital in Tyre, because that was the only medical facility. Some days there’d be bombing in Tyre itself, other days there wouldn’t be so much bombing in Tyre, but you could hear it and see it in surrounding areas. But they weren’t safe to go to, so quite often we’d go and check on the hospitals twice a day or something to see if they’d brought anybody in, whether they might be Lebanese soldiers or civilians.  An AP wire service story was filed by Kathy Gannon [5].  ERROL MORRIS: So, were you with a reporter this day?  BEN CURTIS: AP had a reporter in Tyre at the time. I would generally move around with other photographers, because in that situation often the reporter’s interests are different from the photographer’s.  BEN CURTIS: Well, you might have a reporter who’s writing a story about something specific or they might be doing a roundup of all the events that have happened in southern Lebanon, most of those places you can’t get to–– They might do a lot of that stuff on the telephone. They might spend a lot of time speaking to people, for example, hospital workers or maybe local government people or officials. They’re seeking information that’s useful to them. But as a photographer, it’s not really what you’re looking for.  BEN CURTIS: If a reporter thinks they’re going to be interviewing someone in particular who they’re going to use as a major part of their story, then you’ll go and photograph with them. A lot of it depends on the situation. We generally try and coordinate what we do, but it doesn’t mean we would spend the majority of the day working together.  ERROL MORRIS: Yes. So, you wouldn’t remember the names of any of the people who might have been there with you that day?  BEN CURTIS: The first bit with the baby, I think we had the only pictures. There might have been one other photographer. If you look at 116, you’ll see a casualty, an injured person, arriving at the Jebel Amer hospital. And we were waiting outside the hospital. During the day ambulances would sometimes come back from having gone out into the field and sometimes they’d bring injured people or elderly or people who were ill rather than injured, and bring them to the hospital and people, reporters and photographers would try and speak to them and see what information they had, what their experiences were, that sort of thing. So we were outside this hospital waiting around when these explosions occurred.  ERROL MORRIS: You could hear them there?  BEN CURTIS: Yes. Those pictures, 102 and 103, were taken from outside the hospital. If you see where the photographers are in 116, it’s right outside the emergency entrance to the hospital. And that 102 and 103 pictures are taken from that position. It was deafening. It was incredibly loud.  ERROL MORRIS: And it’s the aftermath of this explosion that we’re looking at right now?  BEN CURTIS: Yes. There was a succession of explosions, at least quarter an hour apart.  ERROL MORRIS: And this is in a residential area?  BEN CURTIS: Yes. You can get a feel of it in 101, 104, 118. It’s a residential area of tower blocks and five-story high apartment buildings. ERROL MORRIS: Right.  BEN CURTIS: Now, most of the people in those buildings had left by this point. They had fled. And then, I don’t know exactly whether there were still civilians still living there. The pictures, 105, 106, 107, of the mother and her daughter — they were residents of an apartment block opposite the ones that got bombed. But they were obviously still living in the area. And there were also Hezbollah people living in that area, as well.  ERROL MORRIS: The mother and daughter, tell me something about them?  BEN CURTIS: The only information I have is that they live in an apartment block opposite. They could have nothing to do with Hezbollah. They could be the wife and daughter of a Hezbollah soldier. I don’t know.  ERROL MORRIS: And 104, the picture that’s taken inside an apartment, presumably?  BEN CURTIS: That was taken in one of the apartment blocks that was still standing, looking through the window at one of the apartment blocks that had been flattened completely.  ERROL MORRIS: Aren’t you nervous that there will be another airstrike?  BEN CURTIS: Absolutely. Absolutely. When we saw these explosions from the hospital, we waited a while, because these days journalists are more aware than they used to about the dangers of going into places where there’s been a recent bombing. Where there’s one, there’s often more. So we waited around outside the hospital. One of the ambulances went off to the scene to try and find injured or wounded or dead, which was when the second explosion took place, and the ambulance then came screaming back to the hospital. Before that happened, we were standing around, debating whether it was safe to go there. When the second explosion happened, it made things a bit clearer. And so, we waited a bit longer. And then we made a decision to go up there and see what we could find.  ERROL MORRIS: So, this would be a group of photographers?  BEN CURTIS: Yes. Nobody likes working in a group. As a photographer, I would prefer to have the scene all to myself, not to have other media walking around in it. But you have to weigh that up with general safety. I’m not sure whether it’s an unjustified psychological feeling of safety or whether it’s real, but at least there’s a feeling that if something happens, there might be someone there to help you or to get you out of a situation. So, when things are looking fairly hairy, photographers and other media quite often travel around in groups.  ERROL MORRIS: Maybe it’s a magical thinking. You think if there’s a lot of you there, the chances —  BEN CURTIS: We knew that the Israelis were watching what was going on because of the drones. There’s the feeling that if one or two photographers go up on their own, they could be mistaken for somebody carrying a gun or a rocket launcher or mistaken for someone in that area and attacked. There’s a feeling that if a bunch of journalists turn up in five vehicles that are marked “TV” and the drones can clearly see that, well, there’s a hope at least, that there’s less of a chance of being attacked.  ERROL MORRIS: Do you mean the drones have cameras?  BEN CURTIS: I’m no expert. From what I understand, the drones are remote controlled aircraft that would fly around pretty much all day long, probably all night, as well, and they have video cameras that relay a live link back to whoever is controlling them. I don’t know what the range of that signal is, but whoever is controlling them gets a bird’s eye view of whatever the drone is seeing. And some drones also have small missiles attached to them. There’s a couple of cases of men driving on motorcycles who were believed to be Hezbollah people, although we weren’t able to confirm that, and they were attacked, we thought it was by drones, due to the very small damage the missile makes when it hits. But I’m not certain whether or not the Israelis had drones that fired missiles or not. So, I couldn’t say for sure. All you could hear all day was this “bzzzzzz” in the sky. It’s very rare to see them, because they’re quite small, and they don’t need to fly particularly low. You’d see one or two, if you looked very hard and were lucky, but generally you could hear the sound of them all day long, pretty much for the whole war. There was always a feeling that you’re being watched.  ERROL MORRIS: It seems very spooky to me.  BEN CURTIS: Yes, it was. It was. It was very strange. That’s one of the reasons why journalists would often drive in convoys, because there was a certain feeling on our side that one car driving on a road is more suspicious than a big group of cars who clearly aren’t trying to hide?  ERROL MORRIS: Probably more magical thinking. So, what was the exact date of this?  BEN CURTIS: These are all on Aug. 7. ERROL MORRIS: I was wondering if that was a transmission date or the date — ?  BEN CURTIS: It was both. They were filed the same day.  ERROL MORRIS: So, you arrive at the scene of this bombing, the apartment building. Tell me about this.  BEN CURTIS: We arrived at the scene and we cautiously made our way into towards the buildings that had been flattened. We parked in an open area nearby, and then walked in on foot. There was still a lot of smoke in the air and huge piles of rubble from where there had been five or six story apartment block complexes that had literally been flattened into a huge pile of rubble. So we were walking around, trying to see what we could find, to see if there was anybody there . . . There were not many people on the scene. We came across one guy at the actual scene of the bombing — but that was it. Some of the apartments were still on fire. And there’s always a danger of them collapsing from structural weakness. So you have to be pretty careful.  ERROL MORRIS: Yes, I would think so. So how did you stumble on Mickey Mouse?  BEN CURTIS: There were hardly any people at the scene. You can send pictures of the rubble, it tells you something, maybe, but you’re looking for something that shows some humanity or shows some indication of what the place was like, who was living there.  BEN CURTIS: It was very strange. I remember there was an apartment on fire. It was on the second or third floor, but we heard a door banging. We thought it might be someone in the building, so we went up there. The whole thing was ablaze, and we realized the door was banging because of the heat coming out of the room. But those sorts of memories, you think, “this is a strange place to be.”  ERROL MORRIS: So, there were very, very few people in the streets?  BEN CURTIS: There were very few. The woman and the child that I photographed. It’s possible there were more people living there that didn’t come out of the apartments for whatever reason. My guess is that after the first explosion, anybody who’d been there would have left.  ERROL MORRIS: Now, 109 is a picture in that same area?  BEN CURTIS: Yes. That’s a picture of a photographer standing on top of one of the buildings that had been flattened by the strikes, and he’s taking pictures of the damage done. I’m photographing him from another building.  ERROL MORRIS: And this is, again, the same area as the Mickey Mouse?  BEN CURTIS: Yes. I couldn’t say it’s the same street, but it’s the same area. We’d been in a building where we had come across some weapons and, what do you call them, those green khaki pouches that you’d wear around your waist that soldiers would wear? We’d come across some of those piled up next to a door with nobody around. And we took a couple of pictures of them, but it wasn’t particularly exciting visually. We were going street to street around this whole area in between the apartment blocks and the flattened apartment buildings, looking to see what we could find. We left this one building, and then we walked down a street in between two apartment blocks, and I came across this Mickey Mouse lying on the ground. I spent a minute, only about a minute or 45 seconds photographing it. I did about, I don’t know, 10 or so exposures of it, and then carried on, touring the area. It’s strange, to be honest, talking about this one image so much, because at the time it was really one image among a huge number, and it wasn’t something that I spent a lot of time photographing. Your adrenaline is pumping so much, and what you’re trying to do is investigate the whole area and see what’s happened, what you can find visually and photographically, and then get out, because you don’t want to hang around. If there’s been a couple of strikes, it’s entirely possible that there’s going to be another. It was very focused: shooting pictures, shooting, shooting, shooting. And, to a certain extent, when you’re shooting pictures in that situation, you’re not editing in camera, you’re not selecting what pictures you’re going to use. You’re going around photographing pretty much anything that you come across that looks vaguely visually interesting, and then, when you sit down later, on your laptop, that’s when you edit. And with digital cameras, it’s very easy. I can shoot 400 or 500 frames and it doesn’t cost me anything. I don’t have to develop film by hand anymore, so you can afford to shoot a lot of pictures.  ERROL MORRIS: With what camera was that picture taken?  BEN CURTIS: A Canon EOS 1D Mark II. I carry two of them.  ERROL MORRIS: And the lens is a wide-angle?  BEN CURTIS: Probably around a 20mm. [The 20mm is a wide-angle lens. We discussed the nature of various lenses used with digital cameras, conversion factors to compare the lens with standard 35mm lenses and then turned to the issue of posing.]  ERROL MORRIS: We don’t even really know clearly when we make the accusation of posing exactly what the claim is, except we are supposed to know, “That’s a no-no. That’s a bad thing.”  BEN CURTIS: That’s true. There’s no single definition of posing. When the president is photographed at the White House is that posing? He’s posing for the cameras. The photographers know that he’s posing for the cameras. And I find there’s a bit of a difference, at least amongst the photographic community in Europe and America on this. Okay, you have the British prime minister outside No. 10 Downing Street, and he’s doing a photo call, shaking hands with some visiting diplomat. They’re both looking at the camera and not each other when they’re shaking hands. The photographers know they’re posing. Is that illegitimate? That’s a question.  ERROL MORRIS: The answer is, of course not. Portraits, for example, are all posed.  BEN CURTIS: My feeling is: you have to credit the reader with a certain amount of intelligence. And the reader knows what these situations are like. They know that inside No. 10 Downing Street, the photographer wasn’t passing through on his way to the shop and happened to come across a candid picture, But in a war zone, different standards apply.  ERROL MORRIS: I would describe it somewhat differently. We know that certain conventions apply. We know that the photograph of the Prime Minister is posed in a way that satisfies certain conventions, certain expectations. The Mickey photograph is different. When we ask whether the Mickey was posed, aren’t we asking questions about how it got there and what its presence in the scene means. Was a child killed? Was the Israeli bombardment justified? And if so, under what circumstances? We want context. We want additional information. So, here’s a question. Would you be willing to share with me all of your mouse pictures from that day?  BEN CURTIS: I’m not totally comfortable doing that, to be honest, as a general matter of policy about images that have not been transmitted, simply because once I select and file my images for the day, it’s pretty much case closed, you know? I’m willing to look through them and discuss them with you. To be honest, they’re all pretty much the same. ERROL MORRIS: Some people are suggesting that you put the Mickey Mouse in the rubble?  BEN CURTIS: That’s what the allegation is, yes. Either I put it there or I moved it from somewhere else in order to get a visual effect. I don’t think it’s that great a picture, so I can’t imagine moving it from somewhere else to this particular position, in this position where it is, it’s not really visually that great a position. You have a lot of empty space in the middle between the Mickey Mouse and the building, which, if you’re looking for a single image that says something, you don’t necessarily want a lot of empty space.  ERROL MORRIS: I like this as a new genre: talking to photographers about why their images are no good.  BEN CURTIS: I’m looking through the [other Mickey Mouse] pictures. I arrived. I took a straight shot, looking straight down on it from about, with no background at all. That doesn’t work to me, because it could be in LA; it could be in a garbage dump. There’s no context to it. The first two images are the one that you’ve got there. And then, after that, I put the camera lower to the ground to get the Mickey Mouse close visually to the burned-out building. So that I can get a tighter crop without the empty space in the middle. But looking at my pictures, it wasn’t sharp. I was trying to crouch down on the ground. It was late-ish afternoon at this point, and I’m shooting at a 30th of a second, and I was trying to shoot a very small aperture to get everything in focus. And bear in mind, I’m carrying two cameras, a belt full of lenses, a bullet proof vest, and a helmet. It’s hard to crouch down and maintain a very stable position for the camera. So all of those pictures didn’t come out, which is why I didn’t use them.  ERROL MORRIS: Did you put the camera on the ground and take a picture? That’s what I would do.  BEN CURTIS: Well, the problem with that was the Mickey Mouse doesn’t look like a Mickey Mouse, because you don’t see his face. You only see the side of him. And it’s not —  ERROL MORRIS: That makes complete sense, yes.  BEN CURTIS: I didn’t get them sharp. There was movement blur in them, so it was unusable for that reason alone. It looks like I did put the camera on the ground, but visually it didn’t really work because you couldn’t see Mickey’s face. Now if I was, as the blogs accuse, manipulating or moving the object on the scene, it would have been best visually to move him on his side, so that he was facing me, and put the camera on the ground and got him without all the empty space but still facing the camera. But, of course, I didn’t do that, and so I couldn’t get that picture. Which is why the one that I sent has all this empty space, because it was the only way I could get him in the picture and the burning building. If I’d had a wider lens, it would have been useful because I could have been closer to the Mickey Mouse and still got the building. ERROL MORRIS: You needed a 14. [An extremely wide-angle lens that I am very fond of. Modern lens design has even produced a 14mm lens without substantial distortion.]  BEN CURTIS: I know, I know. But you know what? It’s a compromise. I have a 14mm, but I never carry it, because, firstly, that means you’re going to be changing your lens in that scene which a) slows you down, b) means you’re going to get dust in your camera, which, in that situation, you might be in that place for like a month or two without being able to get out. We can’t even get our cameras cleaned in Egypt, so it could be months. So, I try and minimize changing lenses. But also it slows you down in terms o of the weight you have to carry. You really try and go as light as you possibly can, because you’re already wearing a bullet-proof vest that’s like 10 kilos or something, plus a helmet, plus two digital SLR bodies, 16-35, 70-200. I usually carry a 100-400 with me. It’s a lot of equipment. Generally, I don’t take the 14. But on that occasion, it would have been useful.  ERROL MORRIS: Well, when you said that you took a picture of the Mickey looking straight down, you do have a photograph like that, which is —  BEN CURTIS: I have a photograph of literally 90 degrees perpendicular above him, looking down at the ground, and it’s him with the ground and a bit of broken glass. But I didn’t send that picture, because, to me, it didn’t say anything. There was no context for it. You needed to have the burned-out buildings.  ERROL MORRIS: Absolutely. For example, #117 is a picture looking straight down, a picture frame, a blue picture frame with a child’s face.  BEN CURTIS: Ah, that’s true. I can’t remember the exact circumstances of that. I can have a look. I’m guessing it wasn’t possible to get rubble or damaged buildings in the background.  ERROL MORRIS: If you went much lower, the image in the frame would vanish.  BEN CURTIS: Exactly. That was the situation. It’s on an 80-200, probably the equivalent of a 100-mil lens looking straight down on it from above. But I imagine if you took that at any angle, you’re not going to see the face. Plus there’s dust on the plastic, so you’re probably going to get some reflection from the sunlight.  ERROL MORRIS: Yes. And the idea is to see the frame within the frame or the frame within the frame within the frame.  BEN CURTIS: I’ve got pictures of the burning interior of this apartment, which is the apartment in the background of the Mickey Mouse picture. That’s the one I went into. This is why I didn’t send it, because it’s literally a burning door frame. It looks interesting because there’s flames and charred wood, but there’s absolutely nothing to contextualize it. You can’t see outside. You can’t see the apartment. All you can see is flames and burnt wood.  ERROL MORRIS: But you are contextualizing it with the story that you’re telling me.  BEN CURTIS: Yes, but when I send pictures to the wire, I don’t have the opportunity to. I can see that that picture as part of a feature with a long narrative by the photographer might work. But as a wire agency image, there’s no context. It could be a house fire in Dundee, Scotland. There’s nothing intrinsic in the image that conveys anything to the reader. And that’s what as a photojournalist, you’re looking to do. And especially as a wire agency photojournalist, you’re looking to do that from a single image. You’re looking to find an image that hopefully conveys to the reader what has happened at this scene. And a burning door frame, to me it doesn’t do anything.  ERROL MORRIS: It’s narrative compression.  BEN CURTIS: It’s very compressed. You’re really trying to compress a huge amount of things. An air strike. Destruction. Some humanity. You’re trying to convey all of that in a single image. And, frankly, it’s pretty hard, especially when there’s not many people around.  ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Your stories are endlessly interesting, because you’re telling us about the exigencies of photography, that photography requires us to do certain kinds of things. The way in which stories are told by newspapers, by photographic convention, all influence how photographs are made, how they’re distributed, how they’re printed and published and disseminated, etcetera, etcetera. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but it’s interesting to take a step back and to talk to a photographer, particularly when we’re dealing with a controversial photograph, a supposedly posed photograph, and attempt to contextualize it thoroughly for the first time. BEN CURTIS: The explanation is often very mundane. ERROL MORRIS: That’s good.  BEN CURTIS: And when you understand how people who work for the media work and the difficulties they have there is a lot of mundane reasons why things happen — light, dust, cameras, trying to compress everything into one image. If the public understood more about the process, then perhaps there’d be less suspicion of it, although I suspect that’s probably not the case.  ERROL MORRIS: I suspect they would still be suspicious. But you can act in such a way as to explain something which might be unexplained, and then people can think about it. At least they have that choice as opposed to not thinking about it at all. You have these two photographs — the one of the Mickey and the apartment building in the background, taken with a relatively wide-angle lens, and you have a picture of a picture-frame taken with a longer lens — and it’s absolutely essential for the nature of what you’re photographing to be at a certain angle to the object, or otherwise the picture doesn’t work as a picture. BEN CURTIS: In an ideal world if the Mickey Mouse had been lying on its side that would have provided the optimum image. You would have been able to capture him very large in comparison and next to the building. But that wasn’t the case. I’m looking at the one of the photo album here. I basically, I shot two frames of it, that was it. It was when we were about to leave, so I suspect that I was in a I-don’t-want-to-hang-around-here-much-longer mood. So, I shot two virtually identical frames and then carried on. There was one other thing. There was a photo album with a lot of pictures that one of the reporters had started leafing through. And he picked it up and put it onto a piece of rubble so that he could be in a better position to look at the pictures and take notes at the same time. ERROL MORRIS: Right, he picked it up to look at it. BEN CURTIS: Exactly. I shot some pictures of him looking at the photo album, taking notes, but I didn’t use those pictures, because it had been moved. It hadn’t been moved for any ulterior reason, it had been moved by a reporter who wanted to look through it and take notes. But as a photographer, okay, it hadn’t been moved by me, but it had been moved by the media, so I felt that it wasn’t justified to use that picture.  ERROL MORRIS: People look at the Mickey Mouse picture and they say, “He’s trying to say that Israel is killing innocent children.” But wait a second. To take a step backwards. Are the bloggers saying that there were no children killed or injured in these bombing attacks? Is that the claim? Or is it only that I don’t like this image because it telegraphs political ideas that I disagree with or that I find offensive.  BEN CURTIS: I see your point entirely. I’m not trying to imply something. I’m showing a scene. I’m showing what I consider the reality of the scene. It’s a window into the scene. And for me, the caption is very important. Somebody else who took the picture could have written a caption that was misleading, and put in pieces of information that they didn’t know for sure to be true, but maybe they suspected and put that information in the caption. The caption is key. “This is what is here. This is what we know happened.”  ERROL MORRIS: The other picture that I wanted to ask about, 118 which is of a demolished truck, and then 119 which is of an apartment building?  BEN CURTIS: Yes. The truck. If you see the pile of rubble, it’s hard to see, but above the truck, that used to be an apartment building like the one in the very top right-hand corner. I don’t know what the truck was, but all that rubble behind it used to be an apartment building like the other ones you see at the top of the picture. These pictures are taken on Monday, Aug. 7. There was an Israeli commando raid on Saturday near this area. None of us got to the scene then, because it was in the middle of the night, and we were in the hotel — or I was staying in somebody’s house opposite the hotel that we’d rented — and we were woken up, like 4 o’clock in the morning, with heavy gunfire. It shocked all of us because the conflict was all aerial. Hezbollah firing missiles at Israel and Israel air striking Lebanon. And in the areas where the media were able to go, there wasn’t really hand-to-hand small arms fighting. So, when we heard small arms fire, plus heavy caliber fire, it was very surprising. I remember at the time, we thought it was some invasion, possibly from the sea. I remember getting up, waking up my driver, and packing everything we had in case we had to leave. And then venturing out. There was a hotel opposite where a lot of the media was staying, and so I went over there to see what I could find out. People were saying it was some attack on Tyre and the Lebanese Army were firing back. Now, that was quite unusual. Pretty much throughout the whole conflict, the Lebanese Army wasn’t involved. It was a fight between Hezbollah and the Israeli forces, and the Lebanese Army tried to distance themselves. So, this is unusual. But there was a lot of gunfire and heavy arms fire and explosions in the middle of the night. Now, at 4 o’clock in the morning we didn’t go out, because a) moving around at night is very dangerous, and it’s also somewhat suspicious to any combatant who might be in the zone. b) as a photographer, there’s really not much point. All hell could be breaking loose, but for sure you’re not going to open up a flashgun at 4 o’clock in the morning, and it’s way too dark to shoot without flash. So, visually and photographically, if you weigh up danger versus what you think you’re likely to achieve photographically, it’s pretty much unarguable that it’s not worth it.  ERROL MORRIS: Were any children killed in this particular raid, or was this more like a raid on an apartment building?  BEN CURTIS: I don’t know whether children were killed or not. What I would say is, on the day, or at least when I filed the pictures, I didn’t have any hard information one way or another. Now, I know the ambulance people went up there, and I seem to remember some of them saying that people had been killed or people had been injured, or whatever. I didn’t see any bodies personally when I was up there, which doesn’t necessarily say anything one way or the other.  ERROL MORRIS: And the last photograph, 119?  BEN CURTIS: Ah, yes. I almost didn’t send this picture. I thought it was incredible, this bed with the pink sheets standing in this part of an apartment block where the outside wall had been blown off. You can see there’s like a teensy bit of rubble on the right, in the bottom right. That’s the top of one of these large mounds of rubble that used to be an apartment block. If I’d had more time, I would have gone up into an apartment block opposite this bed and shot down, so that you could see the bed and a bit more of the surroundings, a bit more of the area. But at this point, there wasn’t time for that.  ERROL MORRIS: This is telling you that this is a residential area?  BEN CURTIS: You might see people who you thought were Hezbollah, but do you know they’re Hezbollah? If you go up and ask them, they’ll probably say no. Now, I may be pretty sure that they are Hezbollah — perhaps the way they’re dressed, perhaps the location or the way they’re moving or the way they’re behaving. But do I know that well enough to write that in a caption? Not really. And that was one of the frustrating things — the lack of direct coverage of Hezbollah activities compared to what everybody was receiving from the Israeli side. You had many photographers embedded with the Israeli forces, providing a daily stream of images of right up close military activity, firing missiles, traveling around in tanks — the whole lot. Obviously, a lot of their secret operations, they didn’t allow the media access to, but there was a daily stream of many, many, many images from very up close to what the Israeli military was doing. Now, on the Hezbollah side, there was virtually none of that. Now, why is that? Because it was impossible. Hezbollah wouldn’t allow the media to be in areas where Hezbollah military activities were taking place. At least they wouldn’t allow them to be close enough to photograph them or video them. So, there was a certain frustration. At one point, I remember, we called them up, and said, “Look, we want to cover your activities,” and it was always, “Absolutely not.”  ERROL MORRIS: Hmm, that’s interesting.  BEN CURTIS: There were some times where I felt that somebody was probably from Hezbollah, but I didn’t feel confident enough to say that in a caption. I did a picture, a separate incident of somebody on a motorcycle who was hit by one of these very small rockets. I don’t know if it was fired by a helicopter or a drone or something like that, but a very small rocket that killed the person, two people, who were riding on a scooter. And I was maybe 30, 40 meters, around the corner, when it happened, and I was very quickly on the scene. And there was a guy at the scene with a pistol tucked into his jeans, telling onlookers to move away from the scene. So, he was instructing people to keep back a bit. Now, who is this guy? I’m pretty sure he was Hezbollah, but can I say that in a caption?  Ben Curtis is deeply concerned about maintaining a standard of veracity and objectivity in photojournalism. He is not alone, complaints about photo fraud are rampant on the Internet. There are Web sites entirely devoted to the manipulation of photographs, in particular many Reuters photographs from the war in Lebanon. Among them, The Reuters Photo Scandal: A Taxonomy of Fraud, A comprehensive overview of the four types of photo fraud committed by Reuters, August 2006. The copy tells us, “It’s important to understand that there is not a single fraudulent Reuters photograph, nor even only one fraudulent photograph. There are in fact dozens of photographs whose authenticity has been questioned, and they fall into four distinct categories.” The four categories (as discussed) are: (a) digitally manipulating photographs after the photograph has been taken; (b) photographing staged events as if they were real events; (c) staging scenes or moving objects and then photographing them, (d) providing false or misleading captions.  The photograph of Mickey Mouse in the rubble of a Tyre apartment building doesn’t fit into any of these categories. It was not posed or manipulated in any way. But nonetheless, it is a photograph that telegraphs a message. Like Rothstein’s cow skull photographs from 1930s, does it advance an idea that many people do not want to hear? What are we objecting to? What are we really objecting to? Are we objecting to how a photograph was produced or the inferences that can be made from it?  Unlike the Mickey Mouse political cartoon [Hamas Kindergarten], the Mickey Mouse photograph serves both political camps with equanimity. You can read into it two contradictory messages: Hezbollah puts its civilians in the line of fire vs. Israel recklessly targets civilians. When I first saw the Ben Curtis photograph I assumed that it would be interpreted as anti-Israeli propaganda. I was wrong. It also can be interpreted as anti-Hezbollah propaganda. On Aug. 8, 2006, John Sullivan published an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times. It was illustrated with Ben Curtis’s Mickey Mouse photograph.  In its three major wars since 1967 — the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur war, and the 1982 Lebanese incursion — Israel has enjoyed little international support but it has triumphed easily in military terms. Those victories did not always produce good political outcomes for Israel. But they gave the country a strong bargaining position — and its adversaries a weak one — in later diplomatic negotiations at Camp David and elsewhere. This war has been different.  …would Hezbollah agree to be disarmed even as part of a general disarmament agreement in Lebanese politics? Such an agreement would mean that Lebanon was becoming a stable country — prosperous, at peace with its neighbors, and linked with the West — in which democratic politics had replaced civil war.  That is not exactly utopian; Lebanon used to be exactly that. But it is not what Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran want. They launched the anti-Israel offensive — and devised the tactic of using Lebanese civilians as “human shields” — to unite the Islamic and Arab worlds in a global anti-Western jihad on their terms. It has worked well for them. They are unlikely to sign onto a U.N. peace plan that reverses this success…  The line in the editorial which might serve as a caption for the photograph — “they . . . devised the tactic of using Lebanese civilians as ‘human shields.’” Here, the civilian deaths are blamed on Hezbollah. The photograph becomes part of a protracted argument on barbaric behavior. But whose barbaric behavior?  Photographs can give us a glimpse of the specific, of the particulars in a cauldron of seething politics. And yet, the meaning of what we’re looking at remains unclear. The Mickey Mouse photograph can function as pro-Arab or as pro-Israeli propaganda depending on the text it accompanies. Not just the text, but the mind-set, the mental captions, that inform how we see it. Mickey Mouse after all is “so human, that’s the secret of his popularity.” Images are plastic, malleable, and lend themselves to any and every argument. They can exacerbate, as well as mollify. It seems that Walt Disney was right, “It was all started by a mouse.”  [NOTE: This interview was done in 2007. More recently, I asked the AP about the possibility of interviewing David Guttenfelder, an AP photographer embedded in northern Israel during the same time period. I was concerned that I had not provided balance. Unfortunately, I was told by AP corporate relations that such an interview would not be possible.]  I would like to thank Ben Curtis for generously sharing both his photographs and insights; Santiago Lyon of the Associated Press for allowing us to reprint the images; and, as always, my researchers Julie Fischer and Ann Petrone for their assistance in preparing this essay.  August 7, 2006 Monday 6:01 PM GMT  Premature baby winning fight for life after being left in a hospital  BYLINE: By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer  Only two hours old, Raad fought for his life in an ambulance that screamed along a treacherous, bombed-out stretch of road out of the heart of southern Lebanon’s war zone.  His shock of black hair was still matted with blood from his birth and his frail body was swaddled in a blanket when ambulance drivers brought the barely 3-pound infant from the village of Tibnin to the Na-jem hospital in the port city of Tyre.  He was born two months early, delivered by Caesarean section at a smaller hospital in Tibnin after his mother fled her home village. Tibnin, some 12 miles from Tyre, has been thronged by thousands of refugees from nearby villages, escaping heavy Israeli bombardment in the area.  Tyre also has been repeatedly hit by Israeli strikes. But the hospital has far better facilities to care for a premature newborn.  For now two weeks after his birth Raad is effectively abandoned. He was rushed out of Tibnin, but his mother stayed, either too weak or too frightened to come along, hospital worker Ali Jawad Najem said Monday.  She called the Tyre hospital once to ask about her son, but hung up when a nurse asked when she would come for him. Later, a man who said he was Raad’s uncle came to the hospital to check on him, but refused to take the infant.  “I don’t know why she doesn’t want her baby or if she will come after the war to take him. We haven’t heard anything since that one telephone call,” nurse Nada Daeg said.  The mother identified as Reema Jawad Hameer on a form filled out by the Lebanese Red Cross might be afraid to risk traveling or may believe the baby is safer and better cared for in Tyre, the hospital staff said.  Without a relative to claim him, Raad now has “five mothers and six fathers,” Daeg said of the nurses and doctors. “We love him very much. He is our family now.”  Raad’s face was so small it seemed lost in the palm of Daeg’s hand as she held him. His tiny feet were blue. His fingers clutched tight to Daeg’s fleshy finger, and he frowned as the people around him talked about his short life.  He was born July 23, 11 days after the start of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas, and his life was a struggle from the beginning. His lungs were weak and his breathing labored when ambulance drivers scooped him up and brought him to Tyre, said Najem.  Then he developed jaundice, common among premature babies, and his tiny body took on a yellow tinge, the nurse said. `  But Raad is gaining strength, Daeg said.  “It’s slow and he looks very small and weak but he is eating fine and everything is OK,” the nurse said.  Many of the hospital workers have lived at the hospital since the outbreak of fighting, unable to return to neighboring villages because the roads are cut.  With no mother to name him, one of the hospital doctors, Nidal Mahboob, picked a name one that indicates the depth of support for the Hezbollah guerrillas here in southern Lebanon.  In Arabic, Raad means “thunder” and Mahboob said the name represents the sound of Hezbollah rockets being fired into Israel. Raad is also the name of one type of rocket the guerrillas have launched.  Held gently in Daeg’s arms, Raad was silent, his eyes wide, as she said, “We want him to be like the Hezbollah rockets when he grows into a young man a fighter against Israel.”
The conclusion of a closer look at a child's toy among bombed-out ruins, and at what it's like photographing a war.