by Jim Algie
But after a year on the job he could not blame them for it any longer. Working at the paper was depressing. Every day, the front section was filled with one horror story after another: a typhoon in the Philippines that left thousands homeless, a ferry sinking off the coast of Indonesia with hundreds lost at sea, mining disasters in China, a psychopath going ballistic in Tasmania and shooting thirty people, a fortune-teller and serial rapist in Hong Kong targeting schoolgirls, a son killing his father with a shovel in small-town America, Muslim extremists making videos of the men they beheaded: oceans dying, icecaps melting, crops failing, children thin as stick insects starving, another war starting.
Who publishes good news in a daily newspaper? Do-gooders, except when they’re celebrities or tycoons, are bad news for advertising revenues and circulation figures.
Day after day, week after week, the same kinds of stories appeared, using the same structures and the same clichés. If you changed the dateline and the byline, swapped a few names and details, the same articles could run over and over again. The endless recycling of clichés and headlines made the bad news seem relentless. There was no respite. It was enough to turn the sunniest optimist into a bleary-eyed cynic and alcoholic.
None of this upset him like the “The Weeping Widows and Starving Orphans Pool.” It was a game that the sub-editors on the front desk played. Every time one of the subs got a photo of a widow or orphan on his page, he put five dollars into a beer mug. At the end of the month, the sub with the most photos of those two subjects on his pages won the pot. During the outbreak of the most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when the widowed wept over corpses and coffins, and orphans ran amok, the pot fattened to more than two thousand dollars.
In the pub one night, he gave the three subs a tongue-lashing. “This pool is a fucking disgrace. It’s not on. It’s cashing in on other people’s misery and making a mockery of the dead and journalism too.”
The balding sub, a twenty-year veteran of the paper, who always looked slumped in front of a computer, said, “Who let Peter Pan in here? He’s too young to drink.”
The only response was a few gruff laughs. Otherwise, nobody even turned their head to look at him. Instead, they continued watching the Aussie rules football match on the wall-mounted TV. Their eyes had the brightly empty glow of a computer screen, dulled by thousands of stories about wars, famines and natural disasters, and millions of megapixels of weeping widows, starving orphans and dead bodies.
Nothing Kendall said about ethics and journalistic integrity elicited any response from them. Now and then, one of them would say, “It’s my shout,” and order another round, but nobody except the bald guy said anything: “We have to keep shoveling the shit and filling those pages.”
“It’s not shoveling the shit. It’s mining grave dirt.”
“Grave dirt is pay dirt in this business. That’s the first rule of TV news. If it bleeds it leads.”
If it bleeds it leads? Had the news business really been dumbed down to such childish expressions?
Yes it had and, as he soon found out, that was benign compared to the sewer-like depths that some editors would wallow in to get fresh blood and dead meat on their front pages.
His first break on the paper came when he had to replace the crime photographer for an afternoon. The editor assigned the reporter and him to do a “death knock.” Kendall didn’t know what that was. So the reporter explained it to him as they drove to a satellite city of Sydney on the periphery of the mountains. “It’s like this. We’re supposed to get the mother or father at the front door. Then we break the news that their son has drowned in a backyard pool. I get fresh quotes. You take a couple of pictures of them breaking down in tears.”
“What if they don’t want their photos taken?”
“That’s another sticky wicket. But here’s how I handle death knocks. I go to the pub, have a few pints, go for a feed, call back the editor and tell him the family didn’t want to talk. And that’s the end of the story, sunshine. Intruding on families grieving is not my cup of arsenic. As a father myself with two young boys, covering stories about children dying gives me the wobblies.”
This fella, who had a face full of death knocks and a voice like a gravel pit, did not seem like the type who’d be easily intimidated.
They drove past a beach that was half deserted because of a recent shark attack. Kendall said, “Aw let’s give it a go and not pike out. Never done a death knock before and I could use the experience.”
“Aren’t you the pretentious bugger who gave the old hands a bollocking the other night in the pub?”
“Aw yeah, but as a member of the human race I fully assert my right to be a self-righteous hypocrite when too rotten drunk to know better.”
The crime reporter laughed. “Dinkum. Fucking oath, mate.”
Outside the front door of the house, Kendall stood a little to the reporter’s left. From here, he could take a portrait shot with some suburban trimmings, the vase of plastic flowers and the sign about a guard dog, to set the scene a little.
The young guy who answered the door looked like a bodybuilder. The reporter had only begun to introduce himself, when the man cut him off. “You’re the fifth lot of cunts we’ve had at our front door today. Don’t you fucking ghouls have any sense of human decency at all?”
Anger flared up in his cheeks and outlined veins in his forehead. Kendall had to get this shot. He raised the camera to focus it and set the exposure. The man took a step forward and swung a right that smashed the lens. As he was falling backwards, Kendall triggered the shutter. He landed on his tailbone first, then smacked the back of his head on the sidewalk and was knocked out cold for a few minutes. When he came to, the crime reporter said, “Welcome to the news business, sunshine. Glad we didn’t pike out, are ya?”
After Kendall developed that roll of film in his dark room, he didn’t care that his camera was destroyed, that he had a black eye which would last a week; he didn’t even care that the editor knew that the news of the boy drowning was hours old already and had not bothered to warn them. He didn’t care, because it was the best picture he’d ever taken. The black and white image, shot through a cracked lens, showed a fist held aloft. Over one of the knuckles peered a single out-of-focus eye. The fist waited menacingly. It would strike again.
During the workshops he would later do, by way of an introduction to his work, he would always start off the slide show with that image. “It was a lucky shot. It was a fluke but I was in the right position. I knew where I had to be to catch the light and frame the subject.” To get the students to relax he’d throw in the same joke. “Oh, by the way, that was me getting smacked in the head for being a ghoul and a vulture, which was well deserved. Trust me when I say that photojournalism is another school of hard knocks.”
He would move on to other shots he’d taken of angry faces at a political protest in Bangkok, limbless landmine victims in a veteran’s hospital in Phnom Penh, a Vietnamese karaoke hostess putting on her make up in a cracked mirror, a tribesman in Sumatra holding up a severed leg he was ready to bite into. “After that first minor epiphany as a rounds man on the crime beat, that became my style, getting in close with a wide angle lens to find my own angle on events, no other camera bodies or lenses, no filters, no tricks in the dark room, no photoshopping afterwards, and no color either. If you’re subject matter is strong enough and your compositions solid, you don’t need to shoot color. Personally, I find colors too distracting, especially in Asia where they love all these gaudy shades, fluorescent lights and neon signs.”
Then he would move on to his first black and white shots of Bangkok: a man with no legs propelling a makeshift bicycle by using his hands on pedals mounted on top of the frame; two dogs stuck together after copulating in a narrow lane filled with laughing schoolchildren in uniforms; a miniature Buddhist shrine on the dashboard of a luxury car; a laundry line in a back lane. “To me, Bangkok is the most photogenic city in the world because of its jarri
ng contrasts. And I need to live in a place where life is all around me, where I can walk down the street and be surrounded by people, animals, little restaurants and noodle stalls on wheels, laundry lines strung on metal fences outside empty lots where locals go to pick wild herbs, a real place where folks live, work and raise families, not in a suburb where I grew up, where you don’t even see your neighbors because they live in another fortress with three burglar alarms and two guard dogs.”
During question time at every single lecture or workshop, someone would always ask, “Why don’t you wear a watch?”
“Nothing sadder than watching the time passing, I reckon. That’s part of the reason why I love photography so much, because you can freeze time and preserve those moments forever. Through the camera and film we’ve been given an almost god-like privilege of rendering folks and scenes immortal. It’s a privilege that should not be abused or used frivolously to prop up one’s vanity.”
During the workshops and slideshows he’d throw in all sorts of personal anecdotes to illustrate his points and add a few lighter tones to the dark portrait that had been painted of him by his many detractors, mostly other photographers jealous of his success. “Unless you have empathy with the people you’re photographing, all the techniques and expensive gear won’t help you a jot. I became interested in photography after my Gran gave me one of those old Polaroid cameras for a Christmas prezzie one year. I used it as a diary. Anything that was happening around me, all the kangaroos around my uncle’s farm, and the one that reared back on its tail to kick me in the chest, I photographed. But I wasn’t conscious of how powerful the medium was until my dear old Gran got sick and I was visiting her in the hospital. As a lad I was obsessed with comic books and thought I could develop a superpower too. Mine was this. I wrapped my hand around her skinny old wrist to give her a kind of transfusion of my youth. That way she could get younger and I would age quickly enough to get my driver’s license next year. For hours I’d watch the second hand on her watch circle the numbers and listen to the minutes crawl past. The ticking grew louder than her labored breathing, louder than her pulse, even louder than my own heart. It’s relentless, the time passing and feeling powerless to stop it. But my superpower didn’t work and when I woke up one morning after a long kip, she’d passed away already, they’d taken her to the morgue and the bed was made up. It was like she’d never been there at all.” Something caught in his throat. He paused to take a sip of water. “That’s when I stopped wearing a watch. I will not live my life marking time like it’s an office or factory job. I mark time through these photographs and shoots and whatever relationships develop from them. At the end of the day, we don’t have much to remember our loved ones, except our memories and these old Polaroids you can see here of Gran playing poker and drinking beer. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m memories are constructed from photos or is it the other way around?”
KENDALL WAS ON HIS WAY to teach another workshop in Europe when his connecting flight was delayed in Singapore because of the tsunami. In the airport lounge he overheard a journalist shouting into his phone. “Can you believe this? I’m gonna miss the story of the century so they can send me to cover a coup in Africa? Like I need another African uprising on my CV, right? Time I get back to Asia in another two weeks or so, the tsunami will be, uhh, pardon the pun, dead in the water.” He laughed. “Sorry, haven’t slept in fifteen hours now and the nerves are fried rice.”
Kendall got his attention. “G’day, haven’t I seen you on TV before?”
The pretty boy smiled. Kendall reckoned that he must have been hired for his looks and smooth voice, not his reporting skills or dedication to the news. “Hold on a sec,” he said into the phone. He looked like he was getting ready to sign an autograph.
“I’d just like to say fuck you, you egotistical wanker.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“The ghost of journalism’s conscience and integrity.”
Such was the fearsomeness of his presence, and the self-righteous anger in his voice, that few men dared to argue with him. The soldier’s haircut, the earrings, the tattoos and military fatigues gave other journalists the impression that they were not dealing with one of their own, but a guerilla and sniper from some militant media watchdog.
Hastily, the foreign correspondent retreated. He kept shooting glances over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
Kendall had missed working on the front lines of photojournalism. Following the breaking stories and playing a part in the world’s biggest events was a lot more exciting than teaching.
On a whim, he changed his ticket and got rerouted through Phuket. At Patong, where the waves had washed across Beach Road and drowned dozens of guests eating breakfast in basement restaurants, the authorities had already cleared the roads of cars, motorcycles, and buses. But piles of debris still stood like grave mounds, and chunks of the road had been chewed up and spat out. That was not the strange part, though. On a beautiful sunny afternoon like this in the high season Phuket’s most popular beach for tourists should be teeming with tourists. But it was more like a ghost town, the streets deserted, shops closed, and the mood subdued.
The only people in abundance were journalists, touts and tuktuk drivers (the last two almost interchangeable, which made the former look more dubiously opportunistic by proximity). To get to an internet café he had to walk a gauntlet of drivers, all calling out variations on, “Hey boss.”
The first person he recognized there was a stringer for a British daily. Jane had covered the genocide in Rawanda, among many other conflicts, and had the machete scars to prove it. In bars in Phnom Penh, Bangkok and Jakarta, they had compared their battle scars, which used to be the medals of honor and badges of courage among foreign correspondents, before embedded journalists and internet commentators reduced most of them to relics and anachronisms.
Jane wore her usual get up, a fisherman’s vest with a dozen bulging pockets in the front. Her ponytail stuck out the back of her New York Yankees baseball cap. “Compadre,” she called out as soon as she saw him, “answer me this. Are the papers getting worse or am I just getting older and even more bitter? First story I filed was quite a sensitive, well-balanced piece with some powerful details about a school around Kamala flattened in the middle of a class. But in paragraph fifteen or so, I mentioned that a couple of bars had reopened and there were a few bargirls around. Here’s the headline.” She put her face up to the computer and squinted at the screen, “‘Prostitutes and Jet-skis Return to Patong.’ Gimme a break, man.”
“Isn’t that the paper Orwell used to work for?”
“Yeah, he must be break-dancing in his grave or laughing and saying I told you so. John Pilger, one of your guys, used to string for them too. After Murdoch bought the paper and turned it into a tabloid, Pilger said the front pages went from hard-hitting news to contests like, ‘Wingo Bingo, win George Michael’s trousers.’”
Kendall wished he could be more like her and learn how to laugh at the crass side of the news business. But he saw nothing amusing in wasting his life on a profession that was more and more tasteless, heartless and irrelevant.
Among journalists Jane was unusual in that she’d actually talk about what stories she was working on, and share her contacts and sources. On this occasion, she even offered to give him a lift over to Khao Lak in the car she’d rented. Jane had hired a Thai fixer they could both use, if he paid for the gas. “It’s the usual deal,” she said, when starting the car, “you scratch my back and I tickle your balls.”
Kendall blushed and looked out the window at a local man cycling past with a live beehive on the back of his bicycle, behind a mini-van with posters of Thai boxers wearing garlands around their necks and a loudspeaker announcing the Muay Thai matches that night.
“Relax, buddy,” she said. “Last time I got laid was during the fall of the Berlin Wall to the sound of riotous applause. I swear it was like having cheerleaders at our bonking session. No s
hit.”
To be polite, Kendall laughed along with her. He was glad for the company. Having a trusted mate and colleague around was the only shock absorber when covering a story like this.
Along the coast, on a serpentine road that wound past the Snake Farm, mansions on the “Millionaire’s Mile,” rocky bays, secluded beaches and rubber tree plantations, the tension grew as they followed the trail of devastation: beach bars gutted and left as concrete skeletons, bungalows with their windows punched out, coconut palms bent at the painful angles of broken limbs.
The two-hour drive gave him enough time to read over all the stories he’d printed out for background details. They stopped once for water and snacks. Kendall walked around the parking lot of the convenience store to see what interview subjects and story angles he could find. Journalism was like detective work for him, hunting down clues, interviewing eyewitnesses. That was the fun part. But he would not play any cloak-and-dagger games with anyone. After some small talk, he introduced himself to the elderly eco-tour operator by saying, “I’m a photojournalist working on some pictures and stories down there. What do you think I should shoot and report?”
“First off, you could get your facts straight. My phone is ringing off the wall from friends and family back in the States who think I’m stranded here and about to die. On Phuket, we’ve got electricity, food, and running water. Most of the island is dry as a bone. But if you guys keep showing the same footage over and over again, what are people supposed to think? I mean, Christ, how many times did they have to show that footage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers? We get the point, okay? The public is not retarded. So you can stop treating us like idiots.”
