A powerful newsstory from Afganisthan

Cold comfort

A child stands with his father as they wait to receive blankets and winter jackets from a German aid organization at a camp for internally displaced Afghans in Kabul, Feb, 20. More than 40 people, most of them children, have frozen to death in what has been Afghanistan’s coldest winter in years.

A classic example of powerful story telling, in which the photo-journalist supplements a highly telling image with powerful prose. Two things that have attracted me to this picture are:

1)The photographer is on level with the child, making it clear to the reader what his subject is and the central focus. The face of the father we do not see, only his protective hands around the child and a part of his woolen blanket protectively covering the child’s head and the child’s hands hid in pockets against the cold. There is no smile on the child’s face, only an expression of sadness.He does not even look into the camera’s eye.

2)Look at the picture with the description alongside, which in itself is powerful writing.It tells us that the child ,now under the protective blanket of his father is waiting for his blanket and winter jacket from a donor organization . Add to this the background information that more than 40 people,mostly children have frozen to death in what has been Afghanistan’s coldest winter in years.

The White woman who photographed India’s under-privileged

Margaret Bourke-White had in her time taken some fascinating pictures of life in pre-Independence India, some of them well celebrated like the famous Nehru pictures. What has struck me so deeply about her photographs is her concern for the under-privileged, which had taken her to the remotest corners of India documenting the ordinary lives of the people, man on the street, their struggles in the extremely difficult living conditions of the times. Not that the living conditions of our people have greatly changed for the better since but at least many of the social evils of the day have been eradicated with liberal education and the spread of literacy and a better standard of living.

Three of her photographs above show her grasp of the Indian reality so well : about a drought in rural India. Water had always been the biggest challenge , with a majority of our villages with no source of water except a truant monsoon.In the first of the pictures we see a cavernous village well, 200 years old, that had gone dry , with the villagers hovering over the rim of the village like tiny helpless creatures,powerless against the forces of nature,against a monsoon god who had always played fickle despite so many ritual sacrifices made by the believers. In the second one, we see a well in Mysore working at half capacity due to drought and from the still figures of the men and women around the well you can feel the hopelessness of the situation in which the well was almost dry and might not last long.

The third of the photographs is a commentary on India’s obnoxious social practice of untouchability, in which the people from the lowest castes are allowed to draw water not from the common village well but from their own well on the outskirts of the village. The drought of course affects them all,including the wells of the upper castes.

(Gratefully acknowledging pictures from Life's Archives of Indian Images)

Separating the wheel from the two-wheeler

Yala, Thailand: Security forces inspect the site of a roadside attack by suspected separatist militants
Muhammad Sabri/AFP/Getty Images

This picture , taken from the Guardian‘s 24 hours in pictures has caught my attention for the way its caption conveys a news so effectively adding to the visual contents of the news item. The picture is just about a severed front wheel of a two-wheeler vehicle, with the rest of the picture blurring out images of security men holding the passers-by at bay, the passersby standing under umbrellas at a safe distance etc. Now supplement the picture with what the caption says: a suspected separatist attack has just taken place on the roadside, with the security men now inspecting the site of the attack.

We know it is an attack by suspected separatists, who seem to have symbolically done a similar separation of the wheel from the body of the vehicle. We have reasons to believe that no collateral damage to human life has occurred :from the way passers-by are looking on from the blur of the picture under their safe umbrellas. We also see security staff doing their inspection duty in the blur of the picture.

A piece of effective news reporting.