Then we saw the decisive damning photographs of dead babies and pitiful villagers in the last moments of their lives, taken by combat photographer Ron L. Haeberle. And only the photographs of the victims brought home the stunning realization that 900 people really had poisoned themselves in the mass suicide in Guyana. Conversely, we can gauge the value of photojournalism by its absence. The shocking reality of trench warfare in World War I was deliberately kept from readers at the time. What happened to the people of Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge was imperfectly comprehended until the piles of human skulls, shocking enough, were transmuted into people looking into the camera for their formal portraits before execution.
Omission is a perverse complement to photojournalism.
The New York Times has shown sensitivity on this point. Malcolm Browne's photograph in 1963 of a monk setting himself alight in a street in Saigon was not judged fit for the breakfast table. It seems eccentric now, since the photograph demonstrated the depth of feeling of the Buddhists against their persecution by the South Vietnamese government, but the editors at least recognized that an image can distress. The risks that photographers take is only now beginning to be appreciated. No fewer than 135 photographers, from ten nations, died in photographing the Vietnam war.