finding versus looting

[Hollis Barnhart]

If you thought refugee, evacuee, insurgent were loaded words --- now
there's looter and, presumably, finder.
Photographer Graythen (and Agence France-Presse) have re-written their
caption, not the AP.
Hollis Barnhart (David Barnhart's spouse).

>From today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/business/05caption.html

"Who's a Looter? In Storm's Aftermath, Pictures Kick Up a Different Kind
of Tempest"

By TANIA RALLI
Published: September 5, 2005
Two news photographs ricocheted through the Internet last week and set off
a debate about race and the news media in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina.
[photo] Information from The A.P. photographer described this young man as
looting.
[photo] In a similar visual circumstance, the white couple was described
by a different agency's photographer as finding food.

The first photo, taken by Dave Martin, an Associated Press photographer in
New Orleans, shows a young black man wading through water that has risen
to his chest. He is clutching a case of soda and pulling a floating bag.
The caption provided by The A.P. says he has just been "looting a grocery
store."
The second photo, also from New Orleans, was taken by Chris Graythen for
and distributed by Agence France-Presse. It shows a white couple up to
their chests in the same murky water. The woman is holding some bags of
food. This caption says they are shown "after finding bread and soda from
a local grocery store."
Both photos turned up Tuesday on Yahoo News, which posts automatic feeds
of articles and photos from wire services. Soon after, a user of the
photo-sharing site Flickr juxtaposed the images and captions on a single
page, which attracted links from many blogs. The left-leaning blog Daily
Kos linked to the page with the comment, "It's not looting if you're
white."
The contrast of the two photo captions, which to many indicated a double
standard at work, generated widespread anger toward the news media that
quickly spread beyond the Web.
On Friday night, the rapper Kanye West ignored the teleprompter during
NBC's live broadcast of "A Concert for Hurricane Relief," using the
opportunity to lambaste President Bush and criticize the press. "I hate
the way they portray us in the media," he said. "You see a black family,
it says they're looting. You see a white family, it says they're looking
for food."
Many bloggers were quick to point out that the photos came from two
different agencies, and so could not reflect the prejudice of a single
media outlet. A writer on the blog BoingBoing wrote: "Perhaps there's more
factual substantiation behind each copywriter's choice of words than we
know. But to some, the difference in tone suggests racial bias, implicit
or otherwise."
According to the agencies, each photographer captioned his own photograph.
Jack Stokes, a spokesman for The A.P., said that photographers are told to
describe what they have seen when they write a caption.
Mr. Stokes said The A.P. had guidelines in place before Hurricane Katrina
struck to distinguish between "looting" and "carrying." If a photographer
sees a person enter a business and emerge with goods, it is described as
looting. Otherwise The A.P. calls it carrying.
Mr. Stokes said that Mr. Martin had seen the man in his photograph wade
into a grocery store and come out with the sodas and bag, so by A.P.'s
definition, the man had looted.
The photographer for Getty Images, Mr. Graythen, said in an e-mail message
that he had also stuck to what he had seen to write his caption, and had
actually given the wording a great deal of thought. Mr. Graythen described
seeing the couple near a corner store from an elevated expressway. The
door to the shop was open, and things had floated out to the street. He
was not able to talk to the couple, "so I had to draw my own conclusions,"
he said.
In the extreme conditions of New Orleans, Mr. Graythen said, taking
necessities like food and water to survive could not be considered
stealing. He said that had he seen people coming out of stores with
computers and DVD players, he would have considered that looting.
"If you're taking something that runs solely from a wall outlet that
requires power from the electric company - when we are not going to have
power for weeks, even months - that's inexcusable," he said.
Since the photo was published last Tuesday Mr. Graythen has received more
than 500 e-mail messages, most of them supportive, he said.
Within three hours of the photo's publication online, editors at Agence
France-Presse rewrote Mr. Graythen's caption. But the original caption
remained online as part of a Yahoo News slide show. Under pressure to keep
up with the news, and lacking the time for a discussion about word choice,
Olivier Calas, the agency's director of multimedia, asked Yahoo to remove
the photo last Thursday.
Now, in its place, when readers seek the picture of the couple, a
statement from Neil Budde, the general manager of Yahoo News, appears in
its place. The statement emphasizes that Yahoo News did not write the
photo captions and that it did not edit the captions, so that the photos
can be made available as quickly as possible.
Mr. Calas said Agence France-Presse was bombarded with e-mail messages
complaining about the caption. He said the caption was unclear and should
have been reworded earlier. "This was a consequence of a series of
negligences, not ill intent," he said.
For Mr. Graythen, whose parents and grandparents lost their homes in the
disaster, the fate of the survivors was the most important thing. In his
e-mail message he wrote: "Now is no time to pass judgment on those trying
to stay alive. Now is no time to argue semantics about finding versus
looting. Now is no time to argue if this is a white versus black issue."
.