May 23, 2007 © AP Photo/Oded Balilty
By Daryl Lang (PDN)
A day after accepting the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News photography, Oded Balilty credited two fellow Associated Press photographers with helping him get his winning photograph.
Balilty was working as a team of three – along with staffer Emilio Morenatti and stringer Baz Ratner – to cover a confrontation between settlers and Israeli soldiers on a hillside in the West Bank in February 2006. With Morenatti covering one side of the scene, Balilty said he was free to move to the other side for a different angle. Then, once they had the pictures, Ratner rushed to Jerusalem on his motorcycle to transmit them.
"It's a great example of teamwork," Balilty said. "Sometimes to take the picture is the least thing you can do."
Balilty spoke as part of a panel discussion on conflict photojournalism at the AP office in New York. He was joined by photojournalists Horst Faas, Hal Buell, Anja Niedringhaus and Santiago Lyon.
Lyon, the director of photography for the AP, said photo editors considered cleaning up the dark specks in the upper right corner of Balilty's photo, believing they were caused by a dirty lens or camera sensor. But then they realized the specks were rocks flying through the air.
Lyon asked the panel about the importance of local staff in conflict areas. He mentioned Balilty, who is based in his home city of Jerusalem, and Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who has been imprisoned in Iraq for more than a year.
"In Baghdad, we tried from very early on to get local photographers," said Niedringhaus, who was part of the team that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Iraq. After seeing the staffers work for a while, "You know who's really good, and Bilal was one of them."
Niedringhaus and Faas, who was the AP's chief photographer covering the Vietnam War, discussed the differences between photo coverage then and now.
Niedringhaus said as part of the ground rules for embedding, photojournalists are supposed to secure advance permission from the troops to take their photos if they are injured. It makes it difficult to make a friendly connection, she said.
"How do you want to make friends when you're asking, 'In case something happens in the next 10 minutes, can I take your picture?'" she said. New rules that let police keep journalists away from bombing scenes have also made photography more difficult in Iraq, she said.
By contrast, Faas said journalists were welcomed by the troops in Vietnam. One reason for this was that soldiers had less access to news – no Internet or TV, and little radio.
"They were so grateful if a reporter hung around and talked to them and explained the situation," Faas said. "We were welcomed for what we were, messengers. The Army didn't provide any of that."
The photographers also talked about how they cope with seeing terrible things in war.
Faas said he and other journalists enjoyed collecting pottery in Vietnam. "That was a wonderful relief from the ugly work you're doing," he said. He also said it helps when you're convinced your work serves a purpose.
Balilty says he paints and works on features to take a break from conflict photography.
"I think I'm too young to realize what I'm seeing, what I'm in to," said Balilty, who is in his 20s. "After seeing a bus blow up, when you see people on fire, how can you forget it? And you have nightmares sometimes."
But having been off for three weeks, he said he was feeling "itchy" to get back to work. "I don't know how to deal with that, I just do what I'm doing."
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