Shooting the MILF

I recently traveled to Mindanao--an island many Filipinos regard as their "Wild West"--to photograph the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The MILF is an army of Muslims that has been fighting the Philippine government for independence since the 1970s. The occasion for my visit was that Salamat Hashim, the MILF's chairman, had taken advantage of a ceasefire to return from exile abroad and was to make a rare appearance in front of the press. I was ambivalent about making the trip. I am a freelancer and do not have deep pockets, so traveling to Mindanao on my own dime is relatively expensive. But I did not have any pictures of the MILF, so I decided to go.

I had a general idea of what to expect from the trip. I had been to Mindanao once before in 1992, a time when several different groups were actively fighting the government and the level of militarization on the island was generally high. Before that visit many people strongly warned me against traveling that far south. It was very dangerous, I was told, and I stood a good chance of being kidnapped or otherwise harassed. You can't trust the Muslims, my Manila friends said. After questioning these Cassandras further, I found that those giving the strongest warnings had never actually been to the island.

But the warnings were not without basis. Mindanao has long been a troubled place. Both Muslim and Communist insurgents have been fighting the government there for years. There have been kidnappings, church burnings, and countless terrorist grenade attacks both in the hinterlands and in relatively modern cities like Davao and Zamboanga. All of these attacks were dutifully documented by Philippine newspapers. Occasionally they received a wider audience through the foreign media.

Despite these reports, when I traveled through Mindanao in 1992 I encountered nothing but the warmth and hospitality that I have come to expect from Filipinos in the provinces. Traveling by land, I traced a check-mark on the island, beginning in Cotabato on the west coast, traveling to Davao in the south, and then finally heading north to Cagayan de Oro. Along the way I passed through many militia checkpoints, but most were unmanned. The mood certainly did not match the tone of the ominous warnings I'd been given in Manila.

The peace and order situation in the Philippines has changed dramatically over the years. There have been times in the past when I was afraid while traveling. In 1988, when I was working in Bataan, some friends and I were even run off a beach one night by armed men. The area was Communist-controlled and the insurgency movements in the Philippines were near their high-water mark. The country was still recovering from a serious coup attempt earlier in the year and would suffer an even more serious attack the following year. Several American servicemen were assassinated outside the US bases. There were daily Communist ambushes in the countryside. It was not considered safe to travel between towns at night. The sense of fear for many was real. Sometimes, for an American teenager, it could be dangerously and intoxicatingly surreal.

Yet at no time during my travels through the islands in 1992, including my trip to the mysterious island of Mindanao, did that fear ever return. The Philippines was clearly a different place. It was a revealing lesson for me about the media's ability to shape our perceptions and prejudices, and how those perceptions continue to linger even after the facts they were based on have changed. Now, in 1997, despite the fact that I was preparing to visit a stronghold of the MILF, one of the last major holdouts from the Philippine government's peace initiatives, I had confidence that though I might see many guns, I would not feel any danger.

There were a few surprises in store for me when I arrived at the camp. The meeting was much more highly organized and official-looking than the ad-hoc gathering I had expected. We were required to register and pick up ID tags that identified us as journalists, though we were already fairly conspicuous due to the fact that we were the only ones--aside from Chairman Hashim--who were not wearing camouflage. I realized that the Armed Forces of the Philippines might finally make some progress against the MILF now that the rebels appeared to be building a bureaucracy to match that of the central government's.

Amidst a sea of a thousand semi-automatic weapons, I was deftly disarmed of my pocket-knife before I was permitted to move freely among the troops. The soldiers stood at attention on the parade ground and were clearly under orders to remain serious and not talk to us. But many of them dropped their guard as I approached and called out greetings or asked to be photographed, only to be rebuked by their superiors.

The plan was for the troops to be seen but not heard. The guns these men and boys bore are easy symbols to play on and I was being encouraged by the MILF's leaders to exploit them fully. They understood clearly that the greater force they could publicly project, the greater leverage they would have in their upcoming negotiations with the Government. They were propagandists (nothing wrong with this), and the press was a necessary--if unreliable--tool in this effort. Guns sell pictures, and the MILF leadership knew that guns sing "power".

In some ways it seems an ideal working environment for a photojournalist: your subject ignores you while you are free to document what is happening without disturbing the frozen scene. But that wasn't what was actually going on. The soldiers were play-acting for us. Under orders, they were only pretending to ignore us so that the intensity of their devotion to the cause would later shine through in the photographs and in the "color" of the correspondent reports.

That intensity did not last long. As soon as the writers trooped past the columns of soldiers and piled into a meeting hall for the press-con, the soldiers outside relaxed. As a photographer, the press conference was only of secondary importance to me, so instead of joining my colleagues I waited outside and hunted for pictures. Do I photograph these men as grim warriors who have nothing on their minds except fighting for an Islamic state? Or do I portray them as I saw them, as soldiers with widely varying degrees of discipline, many of whom struggled unsuccessfully to keep straight faces when I turned my attention to them. These men found it hard to stay in character, and they seemed to try only when directly ordered to by an MILF officer.

With the bulk of the press corps inside, supervision of the troops was now minimal. I started to circulate among the men. What do you think of the ceasefire, I asked one man. I hope it ends soon, he answered. Why? Before he could explain, someone advised him that he shouldn't be saying this. He clammed up. I moved on. Another group of soldiers called me over to take their picture. They struck macho poses, one man giving the camera "the finger" until the group's self-conscious posturing dissolved into embarassment. Some other soldiers, horsing around, pointed out a young boy in a fresh uniform carrying a full array of lethal weapons. The men obviously liked the boy, and they were teasing him. The boy tried hard to look serious but he couldn't stop smiling--until I asked him his age. The laughing stopped, my question quickly rippled through the ranks, and some men in charge suddenly appeared to politely but firmly lead me away. I was reminded by my hosts that I should not speak directly to the troops.

The general good humor of the troops clashed with the image of stern resolve they were ordered to project. I had a choice. If I shot the casual atmosphere that generally prevailed, I would produce mostly boring pictures that would likely never see publication. If I instead played along with the leadership it would lead to more saleable pictures. Yet, during this visit, the drama I might shoot would only show a very small part of the scene that I actually witnessed. Though the camp was brimming with guns, the atmosphere was not particularly intimidating.

Photographers feed the world with a steady diet of guys with guns. James Nachtway is widely known and respected among photojournalists for his combat photography. Yet Nachtway's picture of an African woman burying the shrouded body of her starved child has far greater impact than yet another picture of the young toughs with guns who implement the policies which contributed to the famine that killed the child in the first place. Nachtway has shot many, many guys with guns. But off the top of my head, I cannot bring to mind a single one of these pictures. We see and expect to see so many guys with guns that their impact as symbols has diminished. A guy with a gun is a visual cliché.

All of us in the business succumb to cliché to some degree or another. At the camp my camera was drawn to a man who was flamboyently carrying a large gun. To me, the soldier had the look of someone who had killed before and found that he had a taste for it. Maybe he doesn't look it to you from my picture, but if not then that's my failure--a good photographer creatively uses his camera to convey his point of view and impose it on the viewer. This flies in the face of the objectivity that many choose to believe about photojournalism. I am conveying in a snapshot--literally--something I see in a person that you may never have the opportunity to judge firsthand. And had you been there, there is no guarantee that you would have agreed with my impression. Though I make every attempt to be honest in my photography, I don't like wrapping myself in a cloak of objectivity. Like you, I have biases that affect my work. A strong point of view is by definition essential to successfully doing what I do.

Large Gun Man, smirking, asked me to give him my camera. I offered instead to trade my camera for his gun, saying in rudimentary Tagalog, "Without a camera, I have no work. Without a gun, you have no work." He declined the swap. That's okay. I didn't really want his gun--I'd much rather get my thrills taking pictures. And there is no doubt that part of the reason I got into this was to get my thrills. I couldn't help but see myself in some of these MILF soldiers. Many of them were about my age. Right now they believe that their cause is worth dying for. And their cause is made all the more noble because it places them in the continuum of the many remarkable Islamic civilizations that have preceded theirs. To want to do remarkable things is natural enough. Certainly it is one of the reasons I do what I do.

When I decided to pursue photojournalism I thought that combat photographers were the men and women I wanted to emulate. I was swept up by the romance of the idea of covering conflict. Experienced in traveling within Southeast Asia, in 1994 I headed out to Cambodia, where I intended to earn my fame and fortune as a photojournalist. Boy did I have a lot to learn.

Soon after I arrived in Phnom Penh, the Associated Press took me on as a third-stringer. Naively, I had expected to be following the Big Story. I soon found that the Big Story wasn't what I thought it would be. I learned that photojournalism isn't usually made up of Big Stories. A good photojournalist makes an interesting and insightful picture out of almost any subject -- the key to a good picture lies in the photographer's honest understanding of his or her subject. This lesson doesn't take easily. It is one I have to remind myself of on a daily basis.

I had missed the point with many of my reasons for going to Cambodia. There is more than one kind of combat photography. Donna Ferrato has done phenomenal work about wife-battering. From her pictures I have no doubt that she has more than what it takes to produce exceptional war photographs. But she didn't head to the nearest, loudest war to make a splash like many of her colleagues have. Ferrato's pictures are immediate, direct, and unquestionably honest. The nearest war is easy to find; spousal abuse may be sickeningly commonplace, but it is uncommonly difficult to document. To do work of that caliber and importance takes an ingenuity and courage that I have yet to muster.

Editors definitely want to see good pictures with subjects other than guns. But there is no question that a gun is a visual shorthand that editors and photographers find hard to resist. Some guys with guns are genuinely menacing, but others we just make to look menacing. In selling this shorthand we reinforce a distorted visual lexicon. In the Philippines, with its strong macho ethic and its oversupply of guns, sensationalism may encourage some to indulge in violent, destructive fantasies of the Jean-Claude van Stallone genre. To a certain extent we idealize what we watch in the movies, and the movies often are only an exaggerated version of what we see on the news. If that news has been sensationalized to begin with, then we have unnecessarily fed a dangerous cycle.

I don't mean to suggest that dangerous situations do not exist or that all photographers avoid them. You need only look at the recent book Requiem, a collection of photographs from photojournalists who were killed while covering the Vietnam War, for evidence of the real dangers that some journalists volunteer to face.

The men and women who do this sort of thing are exceptional, and I greatly admire their work. But no picture is worth dying for, and if the dead photojournalists had known that a particular picture would result in their death, I'll bet that they would have passed on taking that picture that day. The key is not to avoid any risk, but to avoid stupid risks. If the only thing that drives you in photography is the Pulitzer that is swimming in your imagination, then I promise you will be forever unsatisfied in this profession.

The beauty of photography is that every day really is a new day with as much potential as has existed in all of the craft's previous history. Different films may have different personalities, but unexposed film has no memory of your successes and failures. I carry mental baggage about every picture I have taken in the past, but that is my problem. My equipment doesn't share these mental blocks. Every shot can be a fresh start. One day you're a genius, the next you aren't even employed. It isn't luck. Some of it can be taught. All of it has to be practiced.

My training in photography has come from self-directed experimentation and from the criticism and advice of other photographers who, with varying degrees of patience, have tolerated my persistent attempts to pick their brains. My friends will tell you that I don't consider myself an excellent photographer. This is both a frustration and part of the appeal of the profession for me. Many skills have come easily to me but photography is not one of them. That makes my successes all the more satisfying. Though I have never returned from an assignment without an acceptable image, the stage fright when I head out with an unexposed roll of film has still not left me. In some ways, I hope it never will.

A prominent photojournalist once advised me that photography should simplify. This is a good guideline to keep in mind when shooting, with one caveat: though simplification often makes a stunning photograph it can also produce bad journalism. A good picture is not enough--as challenging as it is to get an interesting picture on film, it is even more difficult to ensure that the image constitutes honest journalism. Much talk is wasted on the impact of digital manipulation of photographs when the reality is that photographers regularly manipulate photos in more subtle ways as they are taking the picture. If judgement and choices weren't an integral part of photojournalism then "any monkey with a Polaroid could do it".

Consumers of photojournalism need to recognize that shooting photographs is a process of interpretation. When you see a picture that strikes you, try to imagine the full context of the scene. Is the complete context given through the picture? Many dramatic pictures you see come from media frenzies, yet most photographers will isolate the action and eliminate any evidence of other journalists from their shots (this is part of the simplification process). To look at these pictures you'd think that there was only one journalist present. The reality of these situations is that there usually are several photographers present at any given news event, and they are often as much a part of the action as the participants they are covering--it is unlikely that a twelve-year old Palestinean boy would start throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers unless the necessary quorum of journalists was present.

Captions are another area that can greatly affect the interpretation of a picture. You might think that it would be easy to provide context and perspective to a photograph through effective captioning. But the caption I provide an editor often differs wildly--or even contradicts completely--the caption that is ultimately published in the magazine. It is increasingly rare that photographers are employees of the publications that use their photos, so photographers do not have many opportunities to oversee how their images are used, and their captions have a way of running away from the pictures they are supposed to be attached to.

Though a single picture may be worth a thousand words usually it takes several well chosen pictures to tell a complete story. A picture that is honest among other pictures may give the completely wrong impression if used alone. I shoot the gamut, but I don't get to choose what plays. Photo-editors have their job, we have our own. A certain amount of tension can be healthy and produce results that benefit the reader. But as photographers and editors become more and more distant in the process of putting together a story, I find it hard to see how the reader is served.

The only place I have control over both the edit of my stories and the content of the captions is on this web page. I spend a lot of time maintaining it, and I am gratified by the response it generates. Often this response comes from photographers who want to do what I do. Usually their questions get bogged down in the mechanics of working and shooting. "Why don't I get the same results as you do even though I am at the same event--what camera should I be using? How do I get a job with AP? How do I get a press pass."

I understand why people keep asking these questions. I have asked the same questions in the past. At different times they have seemed very important. But nowadays, the questions that interest me most are the ones that I have tried to address here about honesty in photography. I am still very much stumbling my way through all this, trying to learn from the people I meet and the situations I encounter. There used to be a sign in a bar I go to: "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." In a short period of time I have managed to wrack up a reasonable amount of experience. You can infer from this whatever you like.

My visit with the MILF added to that experience. As an invited guest of the MILF I expected and received nothing less than polite hospitality. Indeed, I even left with a lovely parting gift: a t-shirt that said "I visited camp Bushrah and all I got was this MILF t-shirt" [Okay, so I paraphrased it a little]. There was a ceasefire on, and the mood in the camp reflected that. Visiting the camp under fire would certainly have left me with a different impression.

I spent only a couple of hours in the camp. Once the press-con was over, the troops dispersed to their homes. With nothing left to shoot, I left the camp with my group and headed to Iligan, where I split from the other journalists. To save money I opted to return to Manila by boat, which is a fifth the cost of flying but a thirty hour ride. My thoughts on the boat were the impetus for this essay. By the time I arrived back in Manila, I realized that the trip had done much more to help clarify some of the things that drive me in photography than it had done to inform me on the MILF and their cause. I'm definitely glad I went.

Stephen Wallace, December 1997.