tv Sophie Co RT May 9, 2019 11:00pm-11:31pm EDT
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because i can control my own financial destiny it's just a new way of coming to consensus it's a game changer in the human history this is columbus discovering a new world this paradigm shifting technology that transforms economics and finance in a heartbeat the apollo eleven landing. to the max and stacey. russia marks the seventy fourth anniversary of the end of the second world war as massive crowds marched through central moscow in a tribute to their loved ones who lived through and perished in the conflict while on red square. leaving third grade took center stage in their thursday morning with more than thirty thousand troops and dozens of armored vehicles passing through the night comics like. other news iran sets out its nuclear deal
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made them forcing european leaders to maneuver between tehran and washington to save the historic two thousand and fifteen agreement. r.t. dot com has more on today's top stories next sophie shevardnadze talks to some of the world's most interesting people on soviet goes through. shevardnadze they say a picture is worth one thousand words and that's probably twice the case for works of war photographers as their customer says to find in tragedy captured by camera lens well i asked zariah miller who documented the war. in iraq afghanistan and
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many other places. always in the sake of it but never in the fray always a witness never a participant wolf it's all give us don't take sides but the pictures can photos of tragedies really help prevent them or do they only make people aware and do images of conflict really reflect reality. zariah miller award winning photographer who put himself in the line of danger to document wars in iraq afghanistan gaza welcome to the show it's great to have you with us can't wait to talk to you so zoraida you say that you always are brass to portray is a reality of what you see are you remaining an impartial observer of the vans that you are shooting. yeah i think impartial is something every journalist strives for it doesn't mean that i'm not emotionally invested in what i photograph
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obviously i am a human being and i have opinions on what i see and i have opinions on what is right and what is wrong and injustice and i'll obviously try everything i can to you know bring injustice to light and you know i suppose my definition of injustice is my own personal opinion so you know i am impartial but i do have feelings and i do. follow those feelings and i hope to try to portray them in the photographs that i capture i suppose i suppose what you're saying bring your personal opinion are the key words this personality hinder you in telling a story as truthfully as you can see dad in a way no i mean i think that's one of the common misconceptions in journalism is that having feelings and having emotions and caring about a story is going to hinder your ability to capture that story or make you impartial
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i think you have to have feelings especially for this type of photography i mean when you're you know when you're with a family after they've lost a loved one or in a situation where people have lost everything i think it's impossible to not have feelings about it and i think. when you do see pictures from people that go into those situations without feelings you can see it in the imagery i mean they're not they're not able to capture the emotion of the situations i think it's important to feel and i don't think it's necessary for journalists to go into a situation without any opinions of their own you can go into a situation and have an opinion on what is right and what is wrong and you can still be open to every side of the story and open to every side of the argument and you know i think as long as you're willing to. except at some point if you're wrong and you know if you see something that goes against your beliefs you capture it anyway in your belief change i think i think that's good journalism not just
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walking into a situation trying to be as void of any. thought process or any feeling on the subject matter either that just ends up being cold in my opinion so photography only captures a split second and so is a lot out of contacts has it happened to you without the story your pictures were supposed to tell were interpreted falsely how do you deal with those context challenges of your citrate. yeah absolutely i mean i had a situation in which i don't remember was one of the bigger magazines in the u.s. either time or newsweek i can't remember at this point but they wanted to use a photograph that i'd taken in the gaza strip with. some militants who were building tunnels under the border and you know primarily these tunnels were being used to bring over medical goods and you know a basic everyday needs for the people in gaza and yes weapons did cross you these
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these tunnels at times and i understand that but the picture that they wanted to use they wanted to use that in the context of illustrating terrorism and luckily my editor at the time told me what they wanted to use the photo for and i said that that that's not the context that this photo was taken and i decided not to allow it to be published but yeah of course especially you know when you're working for international media organizations photo agencies you know oftentimes you don't know which photos of yours are being purchased you don't know how they're being used and that was one of the biggest reasons why i decided to become even more dependent than i already was and start to have my own blog in which i could actually post the photographs that i took and give the context give the context that i saw them and give the context that i photographed them in and let people know you know how i interpreted the photos and how the people that i was photographing felt about their
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situation so that it wasn't a completely left up to other people how these photographs were portrayed so that's time magazine i gather gathered to remember one hundred most influential photos at the time and those pictures are mostly political and military ones like the coffee covered with us flacks or the children playing chrome palm attack why are we the fact that by such great inventions this is about compassion. our last four tragedy or both i mean our always wonder why. yeah i mean you know there's the old saying that that editors used to use which is if it bleeds it leads meaning if there's blood in the photograph it's going to be the lead photograph and you know i i don't know i would say it's partially human nature i would say it's partially you know the drama of the photograph i mean i think that's one of the
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amazing powers of still photography is it's really able to kind of capture a mood in a feeling and you know portray that to people in a way that often times of video doesn't give give quite the same emotions so you know why so many of those photos are the really difficult ones i suppose it is you know it allows people to kind of put themselves in other people's shoes like oh you know what why what would it be like if that was me in that situation where i didn't have access to food or water or you know i was injured in that way or a family member or a friend was injured in that way i mean i think you know most people do have you know some some compassion and some ability to you know feel what others feel and you know i would say that probably a lot of those photos really have an emotional impact on people so i always then wonder when i look at those pictures because some are all the asli much more
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horrifying than others where is that five fine line that utero when you say when it bleeds it leads i mean this question may sound a little harsh but when you do blood and gore so close up are you afraid he may look like suffering porn instead of what you want to look like. you know i think there's you know people are going to look at images in different ways my my goal was always just to show what i saw to show what was actually there i mean especially you know in war zones a i just i don't think most westerners have any idea what that situation is like and media doesn't do a good job portraying it you know we're always trying to censor things we're always trying to dumb stuff down i mean you know the bottom line is you know a newspaper with a really graphic photo on the cover is going to make people call and complain it's going to make advertisers complain they don't want to be selling you know
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a rolex watch or you know alexis you know opposite a page of someone suffering and dying so i think we've gotten really used to things being dumbed down in the mainstream media and i didn't want to dumb things down i wanted to just capture what i saw and not only capture what i saw capture what you know the soldiers were seeing i mean i think a lot of it you know especially at the time when i was in iraq and afghanistan you know soldiers were coming back with severe p.t.s.d. and people didn't really understand what that was or how it happened and the media wasn't helping that at all because you know people see these very kind of vague photos of what's going on in a war zone and i just wanted to show what i was seeing and what other people were having to see and experience in the situation so you mentioned your work in iraq back in two thousand and eight you were in that it were the u.s.
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troops but were kicked out after you took photos of death soldiers i know there were banned photographing coffee into us from iraq as well why be so afraid of. what is after all just images. well i mean i think like i said before images do really have a power. i mean they've they affect people i think it's you know if you look back to the vietnam war and the images that started coming out of vietnam they went a great way in you know changing public opinion on that war and making people go into the streets and protest and start to demand that the u.s. withdraw from the war and i think militaries around the world have taken those lessons and they've seen what photographs can do and what you know the media can do to affect people's opinions and i think that's why we see all around the world i mean every year the job of journalists photojournalists in any type of videographers writing journalists is their job it's much more dangerous every year
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because so many people now see what we do as threats. threats to whatever their narrative is whatever the propaganda is and you know the like anything. in our culture the iraq and afghanistan wars had to be sold to the american people and you know it obviously wasn't what the government wanted to portray that you know there was pain and suffering in pointlessness and despair you know that that doesn't fit in with the narrative that they want to portray to continue selling the war so you have been saying that a war photographer wants to get an image that will stop the war but images can't really do that can they i mean look at all the amazing images we have of the war or from iraq or for that matter and not of that really helped stop anything yeah it's
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true you know and it's something that i realize more and more as i as i go on in life but i don't think that it's you know i don't think it's a reason to quit there is there's lots of things we do every day in this world that don't necessarily. of the end outcome that we want them to have i mean you know doctors will try to save people's lives that are you know horribly injured and a lot of times that doesn't work but sometimes it does and i think it's not a reason to stop trying you know i think the fact that you know whatever images we get from war zones and we show to people if it will have some effect on that person it might not be immediate it might not stop that war but maybe maybe if there's enough information out there maybe if people see this and you know their decisions might change over time and it's it's an idealistic approach and i don't know if
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it's right or not i you know i don't know if it's you know i don't know if it's worth the cost of what we paid to be war photographers but you know i i think that it's worth trying you know i think that people have to live through these things in the least we can do is acknowledge them at least we can do is look at them i mean if you know if my country is in a war that that's taking people's lives and ruining people's lives i feel like the the least we should do as a society is acknowledge that and see that it's happening even if we don't do anything we should do something but even if we don't don't do anything we should know that it's happening we should know what it looks like and we should try to imagine what it feels like right there and we're going to take a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking with journalists there ryan miller talking about his experience of documenting the human toll of war and disasters stay with us.
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the first century that it's also the elements. and the moment you it isn't a favor if you would like to see interactive the thing which is happening to individuals are using their judges through facebook swiftly to another interacting with me but that's a good thing it's so i. think the results. were
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back when i warned wedding photographers or ryan miller discussing the power of humanitarian side of journalism so do you feel some kind of or ex responsibility when you take pictures to way you do. your influence since your work can change things around that many minds even if it's not stopping wars it makes people aware of what's going on is that a burden sometimes or demands to stay only about catching the moment. yeah i mean it he and i guess there's two answers to that story in the moment you're just focusing on doing everything you can to to capture to capture that moment in the best way that you can i mean you're paying attention to light you're paying attention to what's going on around you you're paying attention to you know whatever your potential dangers might be in that situation but you know after
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you're out of that moment and you know when you're preparing for the next time you go out and film you you really feel a deep responsibility and to me it was always a deep responsibility to the people that i photographed more than anything else i mean i you know if i mess up a shot if i have my settings wrong on my camera something that feels like a big loss to me because i feel like i've let the people down that i'm trying to capture their stories so it is a responsibility and i think you know it does weigh on you but you know as you do the job more you learn what you need to do to get it right and you know hopefully you know the vast majority of the times you do get it right in the a lot of times if you don't know if you're able to you know in some way you know meet with that family again and capture those pictures again that's great a lot of times you don't have that luxury of being able to have a second chance and you have to work with what you have but of course i think we
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all want to capture images that are visually beautiful and stunning because that's what is going to bring people in to look at a subject matter that they might otherwise want to ignore i mean you know there could be a million articles on a subject matter out there for people to read about and people you know might just not even want to. bother with you know reading however many paragraphs the article is but you know if they're flipping through their newspaper or magazine an image just catches their field of vision for a second if that you know if it's a beautifully captured image and it shows the emotion of the scene then hopefully you've given them you know a little lesson or something that will stick in their mind or something that will make them curious to kind of figure out what's what's going on in that situation i mean that's for me that's what made me fall in love with photo journalism was just looking at books of photos of you know humanitarian issues around the world and saying you know wow what what's happening there and why is that happening and what
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does this mean and that you know pushed me to find out about the subject matter and also pushed me to want to capture images that would make other people feel that way but have you ever found yourself an environment where locals were resentful to the idea of bank rotorcraft i mean for instance when he were shooting palestinian tunnels in gaza didn't they suspect you of being an israeli spies sniffing around yeah absolutely i mean you know people will suspect you of you know a million different things and you a lot of times have to prove yourself i mean you know there was a lot of times where i had to carry a portfolio with me and show people the types of images that i'd captured and what i'd done in order to try and gain their trust and of course you know of course a lot of times you're unable to gain a certain person's trust and you know in that in that situation you have to move on you know you can't get it get everyone to trust you all the time. so you put
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yourself in a line of danger multiple times tell me when you're in the middle of war a callous and she take photos where you are scared that you know this is it. generally i'm scared to death before i go and when i get back those are the times that i allow my. to be scared. you know the first time i went to iraq it was the bloodiest time of the war and journalists were being killed it all arming rate and locals and military i mean they you know the amount of death that was happening when i chose to go in was just incredible and i had a real hard time with that decision. and i was very scared but the second you get into the situation e you let that go and you focus because you know fear fear is not doing you any good when you're in the situation you have to concentrate all of your attention has to be spent on what is going on around me and what is going on with what i'm doing
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i mean i've seen how dimension of attention spent on the you know the kick how do you manage to keep your hat cool one bullets are flying over you. you literally and in a way i mean i guess this is personal i'm sure everybody deals with this in a in a completely different way but for me i just i just shut it down i in a way i had to kind of think of myself in those situations as being invincible i just would say there's nothing that's going to harm me. i'm going to be fine there's nothing i have to worry about and just do it because you know if you start to let the fear take over you're not going to go in and take that photograph that you need to take and you're not going to put yourself in some of the situations that you need to put yourself into to document what's going on and you know it's i guess you can to psych yourself out for it and you just say it's kind of
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a meditative state you go into it you do what you need to do and then you know as soon as you come out and you get back home then you're you know having visits with your psychiatrist and you're taking p.t.s.d. medication depression medication and you know trying to deal with what you just went through and how crazy it actually was what your risk era live for a good shot. oh i did many times whether i would at this point i'm a lot older now than i was and you know it's. like you said before you know we don't really know what the meaning of these photos is we don't know what they're going to change we don't know if they're going to make any difference and i think that's something i've realized more as i've gotten older and i would reevaluating decisions a bit more at this point in my life than i did you know in my late twenty's and early thirty's where you know it was. something that i was so passionate about and
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believed in so much and didn't really care what the cost was and i you know i think a lot of young people like myself kind of thought of ourselves as bullet proof and . i got lucky a lot a lot of other people didn't and you know are either not around anymore or are suffering with any number of different injuries so when you worry about it what the u.s. forces in iraq you stayed with infantry troops and refused any special treatment as a photographer and a famous series generation kill the journalists who riots where the marines takes a gun when things go ralph on his back. or have to do something like that. to take a gun to get myself out of a situation i've never i've never had to act in a combat role i mean i've had that training i have you know i know how to use all the equipment that they use in those situations but you know and i suppose if my
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life really depended on it then you know that i would have to take those steps but luckily i was never in a situation where i had to make that choice was there was a journalist and i you know for sure didn't want to. take someone's life you know that that would that would be something that i would have a real hard time living with so i heard some i heard some more photographers say that they become addicted to war to the point where they feel that they can't help but go when war is there again and again time and time again has this happened to you. yeah the a no it's something that i very actively fought that instinct because it is extremely addictive i think on a number of different levels i mean i think the adrenaline is something that's easy to get addicted to i think another thing that's really hard is when you come back from these situations i mean when you come back from war zones and different
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countries i've worked in one hundred sixteen countries at this point you know when i when i come back to the u.s. and you know i'm around friends who you know have have wonderful quote unquote normal lives it's it's always hard to it's hard to relate to each other i mean i think they have a hard time picturing my life and what i see and what i experience and i have a hard time picturing what it's like to have a family and to live in one place and to come home to the same bed every night so there's a disconnect and it makes you feel kind of more out of place when you're home in a normal situation than when you're you know sleeping underneath a tank in a desert you know waiting for you know something crazy to happen and so it is very difficult mentally and i think that everybody that does this type of work. will come out from it with. some kind of issues i don't think you can see these
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kind of things and come out unscathed and i think it's important for young photographers and journalists to know that say out for the past couple of years you've been working on this project called dollar dollar straight that shows how others live at different income levels around the world why you decided to change to focus interest away from the war photography and go into that. and particular yes so sure so dollar street was it was a project which at which i really believed in from the beginning and it was it was a subtle a subtle way of giving an immense amount of information to a great number of people i mean this is this is a project that can be seen by anyone around the world and used and studied for free you know i spend a day with families in different income groups and i photograph their lives what a plate of food looks like for them what kind of toys their kids play with what their house looks like and this is now being used in schools around africa it's
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being viewed by people all around the world you know i think the subtle things are just as important i mean i think for you know someone here in the west to be able to go and see what it's like to live in bourke enough aso in the bottom to percentile of the income bracket and that's and that's important i think it's and you know it's possibly just as important or even more important than you know the war imagery and things that are you know very hard to look at is the raf thank you very much for the cent spend wonderful talking to you and having your insight we're going to this is a ryan miller award winning photographer who traveled into crisis regions from iraq to heidi to document human suffering there and that's it for this edition of said think oh i will see you next.
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