FOOD FOR THOUGHT: You live your life with the values you got somewhere along the line. I do not approach photojournalism as the be-all and end-all. It’s an honourable profession but the values I bring to my job come from other sources. — John Long, photographer
AN accident caused oil to spill onto the road. The vehicles involved were removed but nobody seemed to remember to clear the oil slick on the road. A typical scene at a road mishap.
An expatriate happened to drive by and not surprisngly, his car spun off the road on hitting the oily patch, and landed in a drain. Passers-by stopped to take photos and get the plate numbers.
A while later, the stunned driver, with a cut in his forehead, crawled out of his car and used his own handphone to call a friend for help. Another typical scene at a road mishap.
A little bird laments the cavalier attitude that is responsible for such road accident scenarios. Her friend was recently involved in a mishap of a similar nature.
What she also finds disturbing are media reports tending to assume road accidents that happened at this festive time were due exclusively to one worst cause – drunk driving after CNY celebration, and this without the benefit of a breathalyzer test! Why was there complete silence on the oil spill that led to the accident in the first place?
One could also ask why didn’t anyone present at the scene think of helping the injured expatriate driver?
We seek answers, do some soul-searching and hope if we ever find ourselves in the same situation, we will act with courage in coming to the rescue of the victim instead of assuming everything is fine, or standing by taking snapshots of the licence numbers, desiring to strike a lottery and make a fortune out of somebody’s misfortune.
Isn’t lending a much-needed hand to a person in distress the civilised thing to do?
Most people would think so but behaviour science seems to suggest otherwise – like it or not.
On Friday, March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was returning home from work. As she approached her apartment entrance, she was attacked and brutally stabbed to death by a man.
Despite her repeated screams for help, some 38 people who heard her from their apartments did nothing – not even call the police.
After the story gripped the country, two young social scientists, Bibb Latane and John Darley, conducted a series of experiments on the behaviour of bystanders.
Their conclusion which is starling and now known as Bystander Effect, is that the greater the number of people present, the less likely people are to help a person in distress.
The study concludes it is partly because of diffusion of responsibility – you think to yourself, there are all these other people here. This isn’t entirely my problem.
A New York Post’s front page photo of a man about to be killed by an approaching subway train which generated fury in the US just before the close of 2012, has many similarities to this infamous story of Kitty Genovese.
Ki Suk Han, 58, was pushed by an assailant off the platform at Manhattan’s 49th Street subway station in New York.
Onlookers did not try to save the man. Some kept taking pictures of the scene. Ki was later killed in full view and right before the eyes of the crowd.
When viewed through the prism of behavioral science of Bystander Effect, it means each onlooker is possibly thinking someone else was closer, someone else was stronger, someone else would do the heroic act.
As a result, no one acted.
The next day, the New York Post flaunted the shocking picture on the whole front page under the headline: This man is about to die.
A photographer freelancing for the tabloid who was at the scene, took the picture.
The reaction from the public was ferocious. In condemning the photopgrapher, many people asked whether the lensman was uncaring and more interested in getting a picture that would make him richer than saving a life? Was it ethical photojournalism?
They expressed shock why the newspaper decided to publish the photo of the tragedy.
Under tremendous public pressure, the photographer later said he was not deliberately taking pictures of the man on the tracks but was flashing his camera in an attempt to alert the conductor of the train that there was something wrong. The pictures were taken just by accident.
He also said he thought it was important enough to take the pictures to help police find the man who perpetrated the attack.
He was also quick to point the finger at others: “Why didn’t the people who were close enough help him? If I could reach him in time, I would have pulled him up.”
If you were there, what would you have really done in this 22-second life-and-death situation?
It’s certainly a disturbing story but also one that provides food for thought, especially on the behavourial study attributing the non-action of the crowd to the Bystander Effect.
Photojournalistic instincts could have taken over in the case of the photographer. But what justification did the other bystanders, reportedly busy taking pictures, have for not lifting a finger to save Ki Suk Han that day?
Let’s do some soul-searching. What have we become when every other person in our community is trying to be the first to capture an event and post and share it on Facebook, Twitters and Instragram?
At corporate or private functions, shows, performances, birthdays, weddings, funerals and graduations, we see people holding their smart phones, ipads and cameras busy shooting away.
It’s no longer the exclusive rights of reporters and official photographers, and the privacy of the hosts is no longer an issue.
Has the longing for self-preservation in getting as many “like” clicks on our personal social media spaces taken over the virtue of respect for others’ privacy as well as the urgency to help people in distress?
John Long of America National Press Photographers Association, when asked about the duty of the photographer in a life-and-death situation, replied: Your job as a human being, so to speak, outweighs your job as a photojournalist.