Shani Louk immortalised by photojournalism award as the mainstream media continue to erase the horrors of October 7th.
Victims father defends the photograph as, “One of the most important photos in the last 50 years.”
Photojournalism is the art of communicating news via photography. With the decline of audiovisual news reporting today as a consequence of endless editorialising, its mute power is much in need. Most human communication is non-verbal. As such, the non-verbal arts, such as painting and photography, are called the high arts. Art must convey something to us about what it is to be human. High art tells us unspoken, unutterable truths about the darkness of human nature. Photojournalism is especially visceral in this genre. They often show unspeakable acts of depravity and unimaginable suffering such as those taken by Greg Marinovich and Kevin Carter of the “Bang Bang Club”. These were four young photojournalists documenting the internecine horror as it unfolded between supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa in the early 1990s.
Marinovich won the Pulitzer Prize for The cleaving of of Lindsaye Tshahabala who was suspected of being Zulu by ANC supporters and mercilessly attacked. Marinovoch captured the moment of hopeful release from pain, in his death.
Kevin Carter also won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his picture of a starving child being stalked by a vulture during the Sudanese famine caused by the Arab Muslim governments persecution of black and non-Muslim populations in 1993.
Hell is murky, as Shakespeare wrote, and war is hell. Documenting such horrors is too. Carter came under intense scrutiny about what happened to the child and if he had helped them to reach UN feeding center nearby. He committed suicide four months after winning the prize.
Humans can be monsters. Pretending this is not a fact will not protect anyone.
Speaking of vultures, feminists are usually the first to come pick on the bones of female victims of violence. They think nothing of reanimating a corpse, whatever the actual woman’s political opinions, to become a new mascot. They did this with the tragedy of Sarah Everard, even as people who knew her protested she would not have wanted to be used in such a way. Feminists didn’t care, she was good cannon fodder for their ideology. Her individuality in vita and right to dignity post mortum mattered as little to them as it did to her murderer.
People left, right and center are declaring their horror that freelance photojournalist Ali Mahmud's picture of 23-year-old German-Israeli Shani Louk, dead and face down in the back of a pickup truck, won first place in the Associated Press Pictures of the Year International award categories.
Here we see the reality of Hamas’ wolves. Here are the ‘gentlemen’ who protestors around the world passionately defend. When they insist there is no evidence of rape or sexual assault: here is the rebuttal. Here we see just how professionally the Hamas terrorists sorted their victims into “anti-Zionists” and let Jews go, because, as the same pro-Hamas protestors never tire of telling us, “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism”.
And though feminists are supposed to care about women in general and victims of male violence especially, they wanted nothing to do with Shani and the other countless victims of October 7th, 2023. Were all the victims zionists so deserved their fate? It would seem so, though again, there’s no evidence that the terrorists were interested in the distinction or that the protestors care. It’s just a nice little slogan for idiots with Hamas derangement syndrome.
As for the ethics of photojournalism, as I said above, they are murky and always have been and perhaps always will be.
The photograph alone shows Shani with more dignity than the baying hounds that surround her. More dignity than the feminists and progressives who piously rationalise their bigotry. If you abide in a dark place for long enough, your eyes go through a process called a dark adaptation, where the eye adjusts to the lack of light and clarity and can see much better than you did upon entering. Hamas derangement syndrome has seen our culture go through a similar process, a similar dark adaptation. Progressives have been sitting in the dark so long that the light is now intolerable to them. This photograph, its light reflecting off their retinas, rips off the mask they try to hide behind.
Well one of the so called photo journalists entered Gaza with Hamas becusse like most so called journalists in Gaza they are at the minimum Hamas adjacent. That’s a problem I guess but not for the AP. this was a participant in a mass killing journalist.