What makes a person choose a profession in which they know that scores of their colleagues, some of them friends, will be killed each year, while hundreds of other colleagues will be arrested and some will go missing, never to be found? Why choose a profession that entails running toward grave danger while those around flee from it? If you can answer these questions, you begin to gain some insight into the complex world of the front-line journalist.
In the case of Santiago Lyon, his choice of combat photography has a preordained element to it. His father, New York-born and a journalist with an overriding passion for bullfighting, named him after Santiago Martin (“El Viti”), one of the great matadors, hinting at a life of adventure to come. Soon the young Lyon was leading a peripatetic existence, shuttling between his mother and schooling in Ireland, and his father and the newswire services in Spain and Portugal.
Some of his earliest memories are of hanging around the Associated Press bureau in Lisbon, paging through their annual reports, beautifully produced hardcover books filled with photographs from around the world. He remembers standing on a chair in the AP darkroom in Lisbon after a military coup that overthrew the Salazarist regime of Marcelo Caetano and being asked by an indecisive photographer to pick out the prints for publication. Too young to grasp the political significance of the moment, he fondly recalls the stillness of the darkroom and the “miracle” of an image appearing in the wash. He also vividly recollects how the tranquillity of the darkroom vanished on a later trip to Madrid where, to his amazement, he saw that a huge blowup of Eddie Adam’s infamous Vietnam street execution photograph now filled a wall in the bureau.
With nature and nurture in seamless alignment, it comes as no surprise to learn that Lyon, after completing high school and securing a place at Trinity College in Dublin, took a gap year to work at Agencia EFE, a Spanish international news agency. Here, he had the evocative-sounding title of “copy taster.” His job was to identify stories of interest from Central America and translate them from Spanish into English. The news was dominated by lurid accounts of war and massacre. Lyon never made it to Trinity. He laughs that he is still on his gap year.
Being a copy taster may have opened the door to a distant world of conflict, but for Lyon, it was too far removed from events on the ground. Determined to taste the turmoil himself, he decided to become a photographer, swayed by the advice of a senior colleague who told him “they see all the stuff up close.” He left Agencia EFE, bought a used camera from an AP photographer, began work as a contract freelancer and set his sights on the revolutionary fervour of Central America. By the time he was 23 years of age, he had arrived in Mexico City as Reuters’s chief photographer for the region.
The desired posting was not entirely to his liking, for it came with considerable administrative responsibilities. Still, for someone who, by his own admission, “relished going into trouble,” the Civil War in El Salvador offered a long-sought-after entree into the world of a combat photographer. Lyon remembers feeling terrified during his first exposure to warfare, but in the same breath recalls Winston Churchill’s observation that “there is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.” He quickly learned to appraise risk and observed how his more senior colleagues responded to the disturbing sight of people killed deliberately – by adopting what he saw as “forced resilience,” putting aside their feelings.
When sent to photograph the first Gulf War in 1990, his administrative duties were thankfully over, but a new, unexpected challenge arose. He was one of a number of journalists taken captive by Saddam Hussein’s forces at war’s end. His six days of captivity, in which he was well treated, were less troubling than the episode’s aftermath. In London, after his release, he recalls that a letter was slipped under his door. “While I understand the lure of a good story,” wrote one of his managers, “I want you to know you wasted valuable management time securing your release…” Lyon was also taken to task for “losing valuable company equipment.” There was no expression of concern for his safety, no relief that the captivity had ended well. Incensed by his employer’s mercenary attitude, Lyon left to join the Associated Press soon thereafter. He was posted to Cairo and it was from the Egyptian capital that he was sent to cover the break-up of Yugoslavia.
The wars in the Balkans consumed Lyon, physically and emotionally, as it did many of that generation’s journalists. The longevity of the conflict, its proximity to countries the journalists considered home, the re-emergence of ethnic cleansing within living memory of the Holocaust and a dismay at what was seen as Europe’s recidivistic bloodletting all combined to create a set of circumstances that dragged in journalists and held them captive. To many in the press, the Balkan conflict was the Spanish Civil War redux, presenting a clear moral choice between right and wrong, aggressor and victim, democracy and authoritarianism. Couched in this emotional language, it becomes easier to appreciate how journalists came to view the conflict in such a personal way. Removing or weakening the buffer of objectivity, however, ran the risk of breaching the emotional floodgates, as many were to discover.
Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com
