Photojournalists Speak to Importance of Documenting Crises at Weatherhead Center Event

Three photojournalists spoke about the necessity of documenting humanitarian crises, as they often provide the only firsthand account of tragedies, during a Tuesday webinar hosted by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The event, titled “The Photojournalist as Witness,” brought together former Nieman Fellow Iason Athanasiadis, Sarajevo-based photojournalist Ziyah Gafić, and Kira Pollack, a director and former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

Athanasiadis described how his approach to photography revolves around “excavating time,” or documenting moments that might otherwise disappear from the historical record. He has traveled to take photos in the Middle East, documenting everyday life in Syria, Afghanistan, and Lebanon amid political unrest.

“I’m not a crisis journalist, I’m not a war reporter,” Athanasiadis said. “I just like to be in a region that I come from, that I hail from, and I can just do good old-fashioned journalism in the local languages.”

Gafić, who has photographed belongings recovered from mass graves in his homeland of Bosnia, similarly stressed the importance of documenting experiences overlooked in traditional conflict reporting, particularly the aftermath of humanitarian crises. Gafić said that many of the objects he photographed were often among the last surviving traces of victims’ identities.

“As any genocide, it was also not only an attack on physical existence of these people and a way to destroy them, but it was also an attempt to deny their identity,” Gafić said.

He described an obligation to document these otherwise overlooked objects, which he called “orphans of the story,” and said that preserving such histories requires not only documenting them accurately but also ensuring that the records remain accessible afterwards.

“I can take responsibility — and I do take responsibility — for the moral responsibility, the care with which I make the photograph, and the truthfulness of the information around it, and the effort to keep it available,” Gaffic said.

Pollack spoke about the potential of using artificial intelligence to help preserve and contextualize large photographic archives, inspired by the work she did during her Shorenstein fellowship. Her research sought to combine generated captions with photographers’ own accounts to preserve the context and meaning behind their images, exploring whether AI could generate historical context about photographs using limited metadata, such as dates and locations — aiming to make it easier for photographers to publish more of their work.

“A photographer might go out for a month or more or less, and have thousands of pictures, and only a few of them are actually published,” Pollack said.

Gafić said that a rise in public distrust of AI-generated images has shifted public trust from the photographs to the photographers themselves.

“Initially, the social contract that photographers, photojournalists had with the audience was very much based on the fact that camera doesn’t lie,” Gafić said. “Now I feel we made a full circle, where it’s the source that you trust rather than the medium, in this case, photography.”

“Suddenly, attention is back again on the person that tells the story, or makes an image, or writes the story,” he added.