SHOOTING GHOSTS
Combat photographer O’Reilly on the trauma behind documenting human misery
In 2005, combat photographer Finbarr O’Reilly took a photo that would be seen around the world.
The photo won the World Press Photo of the Year 2006. It showed one-year-old Alassa Galisou’s tiny, malnourished hand pressed to the mouth of his mother, Fatou Ousseini, at an emergency feeding clinic in Niger. In a single frame, O’Reilly had distilled the tragedy of a drought that was ravaging the region.
Capturing images that became shorthand for complex situations was something O’Reilly did well.
“The thing that drew me to photography was the ability to tell stories in an immediate way,” O’Reilly said in an interview last week. It was a life full of adventure, danger, accolades, rewards and the almost immediate gratification of seeing his work in print, but he was descending into despair and cynicism.
O’Reilly will be at Carleton University on Wednesday to launch Shooting Ghosts, a memoir he wrote in alternating narrative with Thomas Brennan, a U.S. Marine he met while on assignment in Afghanistan. On O’Reilly’s side, the memoir traces more than a decade of his life as a reporter and photographer for Reuters news agency, a life that took him to conflict zones around the world.
O’Reilly was born in Wales and grew up in Canada, starting as a print journalist. (He spent the summer of 1997 at the Ottawa Citizen as an intern.) He started to take pictures to augment his stories while working as a reporter in Africa, believing that images could inform people and decision-makers.
However, O’Reilly eventually started to question the value of seizing on human misery. The years of violence and stress finally took a toll, leaving him feeling empty and depressed. He started to feel like a vulture “swooping in to feed on the carrion of the human condition.”
He also came to a realization that the story was being told over and over in almost exactly the same way.
A year after he took the picture in Niger, a German photographer tracked down the mother and son roaming in the desert and sent O’Reilly a photograph of them holding his famous photo. Ousseini was wearing the same robe and head scarf as in the photo, but they were faded by the sun and tattered by the wind. Alassai had survived, but he was still emaciated and his eyes were hollow and dull.
O’Reilly noted that the 1975 World Press Photo of the Year by U.S. photographer Ovie Carter showed another mother’s hands resting on the head of her starving child. It was also taken in Niger. Thirty years has passed, but not much had changed.
“There is cyclical shortage of food. It’s not something that is easily resolved,” O’Reilly said of recurring famine in Niger. “It’s a very rare photograph that will change the course of history. What photojournalism does is valuable. But I wanted it to do more. Perhaps it’s naive. It’s one of those things that I want to try to reconcile.”
In 2007, O’Reilly sensed the beginnings of a shift. He was
covering a plane crash in Cameroon in which all 114 passengers had perished. As workers picked through debris and bodies and he snapped photos of objects belonging to dead passengers, O’Reilly questioned whether his pictures would contribute to an understanding of what had happened. It was, he noted “a crack into which later trauma would become wedged.”
It all came crashing down in 2013. Following a sabbatical at Harvard, O’Reilly learned his job in West Africa had been cut, but he was offered a job as a photographer in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The tipping point was being assigned to cover the 2014 Gaza war.
“Every conflict that occurred followed the same cycle of images. It was a simplistic view of real complexities,” he said. “I felt that I couldn’t contribute to an understanding of the complexities.”
In November 2014, he learned he no longer had a job. O’Reilly and Brennan, who had suffered his third traumatic brain injury in a grenade explosion in 2010, have spent the past two years writing the memoir. Brennan, who went back to school to study journalism after leaving the military, founded an online magazine focused on the military called The War Horse.
Photography became difficult for O’Reilly after he left Reuters. His ability to empathize with others felt exhausted. He has been teaching, mentoring and slowly returning to photography. He recently went back to Senegal, once his home base in Africa, and photographed fashion week.
“It’s about beauty and creativity rather than destruction,” he said. “I have found certain projects that I enjoy. I’m feeling the itch.”
Carleton journalism professor Allan Thompson, who teaches a course in journalism and conflict, invited O’Reilly to speak to his class via Skype last year to give students an idea of the challenges faced by correspondents and the personal toll that work has on their lives.
“I think Finbarr’s work reminds us of the awesome responsibility that war correspondents have to make us understand the dark side of human nature. These are stories that are as difficult to tell as they are for us to absorb and I think Finbarr’s experience makes clear the impact that this kind of work can have on the storytellers themselves,” Thompson said.
O’Reilly advises students to be clear on their motivations for doing this kind of work, but adds he wouldn’t do anything differently.
“I want to cover stories that interest me. I felt I did good work. But, after repeated exposure to trauma, my capacity to deal with it was tested.”