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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (May 27, 2011)
street roots May 27, 2011 9 11 i r V - X T À y r i > i n WITNESS, from page 8 won’t always believe a story’s words, but most of the time they’ll believe the pictures. had been fired upon and lawfully returned fire. Not to muddy the waters, but it could have been a balloon popping that sounded like a shot. A newsreel cameraman from a major station got a picture of a demonstrator with a pistol in his hand, and that lent support to the government’s version of events. But it was not unusual in Central America back then to carry a pistol. The government had a press liaison person come to see me at the Camino Royal. He wasn’t at the massacre, but he tried to tell me what happened. He told me that perhaps I didn’t hear correctly. I was 25 yards away. I heard correctly. S.B.: What are you working on now? K.H.: I started two websites: 52Selects. com and EverySecondChild.org. 52Selects is a collection of affordable, original prints from lots of great photojoumalists. EverySecondChild spotlights the efforts of committed photojournalists around the world who document the issue of child poverty. We’re frying to be a visual catalyst to help tackle that number. S.B.: What inspired EverySecondChild.org? K.H.: I was in Guatemala in the mid- 1970’s when an earthquake killed about 24,000 people. When I got there, they were still digging through the rubble. Many of the survivors were children because they are small and resilient and could fit in the cavities of walls. Many of the children were orphaned. There was one little girl who was rescued by her neighbors and the drily thing she had was the shirt on her back. The neighbors were trying to find other survivors, and the girl kept crawling away, so they put her in this wooden box. And there she was, half-dressed, crying her eyes out, covered in dirt, and condemned to a life of poverty. I often wonder what happened to her. S.B.: Are you looking forward to going back to San Salvador for the memorial event? K.H.: It will be a chance to close some doors arid open others. We will be opening a museum Saturday, May 28, to commemorate arid memorialize political struggle in Central and South America. S.B.: So many foreign news offices have shut down. Do you think a reporter would have been on those steps in San Salvador today? K.H.: If the massacre had happened today, there would have been bloggers from both sides and then a reporter to report what the bloggers were saying. That’s the way it is, but it’s unfortunate for the Truth with a capital “T” because bloggers can’t be expected to hold up the same kind of ethical standards. Everybody has opinions, but the idea of professional reporting is to manage that opinion and a great majority of btoggers do not. Even though there will never be a clear cut version of the San Salvador massacre, the fact that international journalists were there was probably enough to tip thefruth.^ That picture of a Semonstrator w ith a p is to i^ could have defined the story, but we were there to share our side. S.B.: The San Salvador demonstration and the others during that period bring to mind the democratic, youth-led protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Jordan. What similarities do you see in this Arab Spring? K.H.: The Arab Spring has proven that bloggers are better than no reporters at all. Bloggers are catalysts prompting international media to stay on the stories. What I don’t like is how international media offices are just quoting bloggers, instead of having a reporter on the ground. But that’s the economy now. The Arab Spring is also a young revolution, just like Central America was. That was a time when-revolutionary kids were feeling their oats, and it s happening now in the Middle East. S.B.: Describe your experience covering Jonestown, the cult ‘Kool-Aid’’ mass suicide led by Jim Jones. K.H.: I werit in with a team from Newsweek the evening after th e suicides. All I was told was that a congressman had been murdered in Guyana. I didn t even know where Guyana was. As ittu rn s out, I I besides Congressman Leo Ryan, two of my photographer friends had been killed - Bob Brown of NBC and Greg Robinson of the San Francisco Examiner. It was horrible. Some of the people had been shot. Some had hypodermic needles hanging out o their arms and legs. Jonestown was not a mass suicide. It started o ut as an induced . suicide, but when people saw that others were actually dying', many tried to get away and were stopped by security forces, ome were able to hide in the jungle, Y^cm Thrash was an African-American lady tha met who had gone to the bathroom, en S.B.: What is your mission of EverySecondChild.org? K.H.: My hope is to present folks, especially in various faith communities in North America, with a way to engage in the issue of child poverty around the world. Photojournalists put up their images and stories, and then there are links to vetted charities, like Doctors Without Borders, where people can help with money or p ra y e rs o r anyw ay they c h o o s e . The lr f ip c a K n tilin g is T O D ieco m eacq u am tecl ine year old Santiago Dominguez returns to the shambles of his family home outside of La 2sca Tamaulipas, Mexico, after his impoverished family survived a category two humcane. intiago left his home to try to find some o f the family’s eighty chickens winch had been blown way by the high winds. Two dead laying hens were all he returned with. This is one o f the tany photos on display atEverySecondChild.org asleep and woken up to everybody dead. You can’t make that kind of Stuff up. We took photos of the bodies, photos of the People’s Temple in Georgetown and photos of Jonestown. When I saw Jim Jones’s body in the pavilion, he had one small caliber bullet behind his ear. That couldn’t have been self-inflicted (as the coroner eventually concluded). - For years, I didn’t realize that I had post- traumatic stress disorder. Adrenaline plays a big part. Camaraderie with friends. You’re sitting around at home and people you know are reporting in the Middle East and you just want to be there? You want to be ift the action. It’s perverse to crave conflict, but I was drawn to i t Readers . S.B.: Journalists, like you, risk their lives all the time reporting in protests and conflict zones. What kind of toll does that take? K.H.: It’s a.noble , thing: conflict journalism. Day after day of finding the truth with cameras. I was short-lived. I don’t know how career conflict journalists handle it. American GIs in Saigon “process” Vietnamese orphans. P H O T O BY KEN H A W K IN S Missed A story? Check out wwwsbrèeM with the problem and try to-find a way to help. Another thing I want to do is connect photojournalists with nonprofits. There are amazing PR photographers who want to help NGO’s present their missions. We want to bring corporate and faith-based communities into the mix to help fund these photojournalists go into the field and get stories for these NGOs. We just want to get everybody thinking about the subject of child poverty. They , might be somber stories, but we think it’s important that everybody do a little bit and help get the word out about this enormous issue.
