First of, I want to start this post by saying that this is my opinion, you may think different. This short writing was determined by an accident I witnessed in the city.
To give you a short description of what happened, a 40 ish year old man was cycling on the bike lane on Hero's Boulevard (Bulevardul Eroilor) in Cluj-Napoca, when he hit a car's mirror and crashed. The car was not moving, the fault was 100% on the cyclist. He landed face first, but he had no helmet. More people, including me, jumped to help him, turned him right face up, but at first he would not respond to what we were saying. A lady called the ambulance immediately, and after 5 minutes or so it arrived. Before it did, people were trying to keep the man still because he wanted to take his hand to his eye, but he had some glass around the eye from the car's mirror. Honestly, I think I saw the same man a couple streets ahead when he was getting on his bike. He seemed to stumble, and needed the whole width of the road to get on his two wheeler, but then he carried on.
But I don't want to talk about the accident, this is not the point of this blog post. Five minutes after the paramedics arrived, I went away, like some more people did. Than I heard a couple of ladies saying "And those guys just sit there and film him, look at those jerks!" (I did my best to translate the phrase as accurate as I could in English). Going back to the accident, a guy with a video camera showed up. He probably was a journalist, because normal people don't own such a big and professional camera. He came to the scene after the paramedics arrived and the medic told everybody to stand back. Basicaly, he could do nothing to help. He didn't get into anybody's way, he was respectful towards the event.
This old ladie's statement kind of made me ask some questions: Is what the guy did right or not?
Here comes the part where I have to specify again that this is MY opinion, it may differ from person to person. As a photojournalist, your job is to capture the world around you as accurate as you can. And we all know this same world is full of both good and bad things. In such a case, I think that if you have the ability to help someone you should go and help him, forget you have a camera while you can still do something for that person. But, how I see it, since he could do nothing more to help the man, since the paramedics told everyone to back off, it's ok that he, basicaly, did his job. He captured images of an accident that has happened, and I don't see the "jerk" part in this.
I think this mentality of calling people who document other people's hard moments "jerks" is wrong. Actually, for example, what this man did could help people realize why wearing a helmet is so important. We have to accept bad things happen and let the people who capture theese things tell a story from which we can learn something for ourselves. I never agreed to stay away and photograph a bad moment if you have the oportunity to help. Just to prove this, some may know the famous picture of the eagle and the child, an image that won the Pulitzer Prize. (If you haven't heard of it, just google "eagle and child pulitzer prize") The author of the image left the scene right after taking the photograph, and then ended up regretting it, as his journal said. After all the critics he received, he comitted suicide some months later.
This proves that helping a person in need is crucial, but I think that if there is nothing you can do for him/her, taking images, doing your job, is not a bad thing to do, and if it can help other people that see the images or video, why not? If this guy in the accident had a helmet, I bet he could stand up back again on his foot. People seeing this might realize how important the helmet is, and it might help someone in need.
This is just my opinion, be free to leave yours in the comments below.
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