ROHINGYA - Cathal McNaughton: Exhibition and Talk Friday 6th March 2020, Belfast Exposed.
Just prior to lockdown and at the onset of the Covid 19 Outbreak, I had the opportunity to attend an artists talk and exhibition of Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Cathal McNaughton at Belfast exposed.
Cathal McNaughton is an award winning photo-journalist. He began his career as a photographer at the age of 16 as an apprentice at the Irish News where he worked under seasoned news photographers who were covering the troubles. Here he built a reputation as he learned the craft of photojournalism, having initially started photographing bottles of wine for a weekly wine column. A task which he found difficult at the beginning and under instruction from the picture editor Brendan Murphy was required to repeatedly retake the pictures until it was fit for publication, a “lesson in patience” Cathal claims, which stood him in good stead as his career progressed. Obviously photographing wine bottles in quite some way off from the harrowing scenes he encountered as a Reuters photographer that can be seen in this exhibition. But being in Northern Ireland and perhaps exposed him at an early age to images that others at a similar stage in their career may not have had seen.
At the age of sixteen he would go to riots and shootings, obviously accompanied, but still and one of his first solo assignments was covering the aftermath of the Omagh Bomb, a disaster that claimed the lives of 29 civilians as well as 2 unborn twins and was one of the worst atrocities of that dark period. He found the intensity and scale of the situation hard to grasp and noted that the older, more hardened photographers were finding it hard to process. At a funeral he took a image of a young boy wiping a way a tear, it was used for a wraparound, obviously a very powerful image and chosen for this reason.
From this auspicious beginning at a very young age Cathal went on to become chief photographer for Reuters in India and Asia and covered stories of massive global importance. He has also worked with the Press Association and The Daily Telegraph. As well as being highly regarded in his field, he has also won major accolades including POYI, UK Press Photographer of the Year, Royal Photographer of the Year and Environmental Photographer of the Year. The work being exhibited at Belfast Exposed documenting the humanitarian crisis of the exiled Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and Bangladesh has garnered him the Pulitzer Prise for Photography in 2018
““Documenting this crisis is a harrowing process. The thing you can’t appreciate in the photographs are the noises when thousands and thousands of people are fighting for their lives.... You see humanity at its most basic in front of you. Children fighting adults for food, adults stealing food and aid from children, it’s very hard to take in.... To see these people being beaten back from basic necessities - even though if the guards hadn’t done so there would be mass casualties - it’s a very surreal environment and not something you can be prepared for.”
The subject of the work is not intentionally images taken for exhibition, moreover it is images taken by Cathal in his capacity as a a photojournalist for the Reuters news agency. Assigned to document the plights of the Rohingyan people, McNaughton travelled to Cox’ Bazar in 2017 to cover the crisis as Myanmar’s army displaced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims forcing them across the border to Bangladesh. The imagery captured details the brutal human cost of conflict and shines a light on the fundamental role photojournalism has on bringing it to the worlds attention, in perhaps hope that humanity can rally against such things or at least insure that it happens less often.
I was fascinated by this image of refugees sheltering from the rain under a black tarpaulin, the intensity of the rain can clearly be seen in the photography. It shows the range of those affected, men, women and children, highlighting the need for one of the basics human rights of shelter or perhaps even the lack thereof. One detail that had caught my eye was how the line of the tarpaulin seemed to have a similarity to the ‘coastline’ of countries from Oman to Myanmar with India being the dip in the middle where the children are. There is a good chance that this is purely a coincidence but it interested me nonetheless. The image also suggested to me that the people in the image were actually looking out from under the fabric of the world that they were lifting up a curtain on reality to show the plight of their people underneath and that if they were to disappear that curtain would fall to the ground. It is to me a very revealing photograph in so many ways, there is an unreality to with the strong line of the tarpaulins edge, almost collage like yet in essence it could not be any more real in highlighting these peoples suffering and the failing of humanity to help them. Powerful stuff.
“At Belfast Exposed we consider it is important to shine a light on global issues of profound concern and importance. The extraordinary photography taken by McNaughton demonstrates not only the human cost of conflict but also highlights the vital role photojournalism can play in revealing it. This work is powerful and captivating, yet challenging in content for audiences to engage with, nonetheless it is important to give the public access to the raw, honest photographs presented in this exhibition”
“It was important to show the scale of the situation. To show the terrain, the earth where the Rohingya had to live. I waited for the element that would bring all this image together. The person in the bottom left of the frame holds the umbrella in the monsoon rains in an attempt to bring some respite from their situation.”
McNaughtons images were digital, a requirement of the photojournalistic era where in most cases the images would be required to appear online and to be processed swiftly. He spoke of how there was little of any post processing carried out to the pictures and in fact that it was a requirement of the agency that the images be shot as jpegs and not in RAW format. This was due to the fact that in RAW format an image is able to be greatly manipulated using post processing software such as photoshop or lightroom. Therefore the images been taken as jpegs lends a certain degree of legitimacy due to the fact that it is much harder to alter a jpeg images without it being more noticeable. Also on a more technical side RAW images are usually of a larger file size and would take longer to upload and download by the news agencies as well as it simply not necessary to have larger images for. I regret not asking him how he found the printing process for the exhibition and if he had any issues using the lesser jpeg format.
It interested me that the reasoning behind the use of jpegs was a factor and that there was trust issues even within professional and established journalistic outlets such as Reuters. I can only assume that they were covering all bases and protecting themselves from any possible accusations that they were in some way providing false visual narratives. I guess this is just indicative of modern, technically social society and a consideration even more important today as it has ever been.
In terms of how the photographs were exhibited it was quite straight forward, with certain images selected to be printed on a large scale on vinyl and applied to the walls and other images were printed on a smaller scale mounted framed and hung on the wall.
The images were, as you would expect from a photojournalist perspective a mixture of landcapes, portraits, group shots, crowd shots, some were extremely intimate and some were vast and incomprehensible. He was able to as many aspects of the horrors he was witnessing using these disciplines and by trying to keep the narrative as honest and true as he possibly could, in the talk he would elaborate on what the situation around certain images was giving us a greater insight and understanding of the story
I suppose the initial intention of the images taken was to fulfil an assignment, given to McNaughton by his employer Reuters. These images would then be used to form the content of their news service. However, this is
only really the practical outcome. On a more detailed level the intention is to raise global awareness of the crisis and bring it to the attention to the widest audience possible. The photographer uses his skills and abilities as well as his experience to capture the essence of the conflict. To not only make a practical and utilitarian document of what was happening but to tell a story. Each image taken has a narrative and it is due to the skill and experience of the photographer that that snapshot of a time and a place illustrates the story and communicates as much as it possibly can within that frame.
You can tell by the way that the artist talks about the images that this was not just a pragmatic exercise for him but that he felt a deep sense of responsibility to tell the story of what he was witnessing as empathetically and as accurately as possible and it is this personal attribute that elevates the images beyond mere documentation.
In fact I would argue that for this kind of photojournalism, empathy is a key character trait in producing high quality work, to capture what is needed to illustrate the narrative and raise the desired awareness. Such photojournalists passion and enthusiasm is what elevates them above mere documentarians and what makes Cathal an expert in his field and ultimately led to him and his team receiving the Pulitzer prize.
Photography from it’s inception has been used to Memorialise, document, communicate and illustrate, legitimise but also to deceive. It has the ability to ‘paint a thousand words, the old adage ‘photograph is truth’, although now
somewhat spurious still holds some truth if carried out with the purest of intentions. Objectivity can be difficult to achieve, even documentary photography can be coloured by the photographers interpretations, opinions and particular points of view, all be it not intentionally. And in many instance documentary photography is a personal pursuit and therefore open to interpretation.
Photojournalism however, although never truly pure might have a tendency to be more truthful as there is a very practical element to it. The images are used to illustrate the story, not create it. It is not the personal pursuit of the photographer but a job that must be done and must be done correctly and as accurately as possible as the news agency would not want to be accused of bias or a lack of neutrality.
It is sadly a fact that a lot of the photojournalism we see is work that is carried out covering the negative aspect of humanity, yes there is positive things covered by photojournalists but these are never as impactful or harrowing as wars, famine, death and destruction and from an early stage photography has been used in these situations . From Roger Fenton’s photographs from 1855 of the Crimean war, to Robert Capa’s famous images from the Spanish Civil war and WWII these are images that are studied and revered by students of photography today, surely influencing many in that particular career but helping us to understand the wider importance of photograph as a medium and as a means to document our existence and raise awareness.
McNaughtons images had similarities to those taken by Sebastiao Salgado of the Genocide in Rwanda. Stark, high contrast harrowing and almost ultra real.
Kevin Carter, another Pulitzer Prize winner took this heart-rending image taken during a famine in Ayod sudan in 1993 again an awareness raising image.
One of the aspects that I picked up from the artists talk was how he was emotionally effected by the the scenes he had encountered in Maymaar , seeing the negative side, the low points of humanity, how adults would be fighting with children for food, how the natural survival instinct of us as a species would lead to the discarding of compassion and empathetic tendency's, just simply one of the many unfortunate consequences of crisis and conflict.