Dispatches from Missouri's Twin City

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

FESTUS, Mo. — Festus and Crystal City have histories so intertwined that a Walmart store happily sits on the border between them (and the cities share the sales tax). Crystal City, population 4,549, is nestled on the Mississippi River about 34 miles south of St. Louis. Festus is due west of Crystal City, essentially trapping the latter against the river on the east and the town of Herculaneum to the north. These two small towns share an identity as the Twin City, although the tension of “us versus them” remains.

I am here as a member of the digital darkroom crew of the Missouri Photo Workshop, a yearly, weeklong boot camp in documentary photography put on by the Missouri School of Journalism. This year 31 workshop participants, 13 faculty members and 20-some MU student-volunteers (that’s me) have descended upon Festus and Crystal City to document and hopefully shed photographic light on this place.

I find it an odd contradiction in journalism that those who hold the pen (or camera, in this case) are expected to explain another person’s truth in so little time. How can one-hundredth of a second, a click of the shutter, one photo (or maybe five or seven) be expected to tell the entire truth of someone’s story?

This is the rub: A documentary photo is not BIG TRUTH. It is the truth of the moment. Part of the workshop is learning to narrow the story the photos are telling so that the moments do tell the story. A photograph is a slice of time, made static. Or as author and critic Susan Sontag wrote, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

I think what we are really doing here in Festus is enabling a visual anthropology through documentary photography. We're trying to look at the world as it is today — to look at this town — and to find and preserve the one-hundredths of a second that will collectively reveal a sense of what is happening here now.

Workshop participants have been documenting small-town Missouri for 61 years.  At first the idea was to tell the big story of the town hosting the workshop, but it eventually found the form it uses today, for each photographer to tell a smaller, more personal story. The result is an emergence of understanding, a synergy of individual photos that make up individual stories that in turn create a portrait of the town that is greater than the sum of its parts.

“A great photograph poses more questions than it answers,” said David Rees, the workshop co-director, head of the MU photojournalism department and all-around Yoda. The process of making these photo stories is not really to present the meaning of life, but to challenge viewers to search for it.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and a current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism and is currently volunteering on the multimedia team for the 61st Missouri Photo Workshop in Festus and Crystal City.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, September 30, 2009.

Got a secret? Not on the Internet

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Everybody’s got a secret.

So, why do we need to share them on the Internet?  I speak specifically of PostSecret, a “community art project” in which one creates a postcard-size piece of artwork containing a confession and then sends it into Frank Warren, who then posts about 20 secrets every Sunday on the PostSecret blog (there have also been four PostSecret books and a fifth arriving in October). People send in secrets about everything from small social transgressions or oddities to the darkest recesses of depression and self-harm.

“My wife won’t brush her dog,” one person writes in, on top of a photo of a dog. “So I put the dog’s hair in her food.”

Another person writes: “I cheated on my eye exam to get the glasses I always wanted.” And another: “I religiously read the blogs of 2 women who have recently given birth to their first children. It distracts me from the fact that my husband doesn’t want to have children.”

All the secrets on PostSecret, confessions to the anonymous Internet gods, are carefully constructed by the confessor. Each secret’s presentation is "aesthetic-ized," through word choice and drawing and graphic design, like the confessor is trying to make their secrets (which are too ugly for their immediate social circle) beautiful for the entire world. This highlights the inherent tension between the artifice of the medium and the supposed honesty of the content.

But there are other sites like it. My personal favorite these days is Dear Old Love, where contributors send in “pithy, specific” notes directed to their former flames. It is a more literary pursuit, as opposed to the visual beauty of PostSecret, where writers are trying to outwit and out write each other on the subject of old, lost or future paramours.

“I taught you how to fold towels and properly iron shirts,” writes in one disappointed woman. “Didn’t you know you were in training to be my husband, not hers?”

They’re all only a few lines each — I doubt many are longer than the 140 characters of a tweet, and yet they all tell a story within them. It’s like the anonymous writer wants the intended recipient of the note to know, but be unable to confirm, that it was he or she who sent it.

It’s a little strange to turn our deepest secrets, the ones that would normally only be whispered to the most dear of confidantes after a few glasses of wine, into small spectacles for public viewing. But for generations of Americans forced to read “The Scarlet Letter” in high school (or college or both), secrets are seen as destroyers of personal psyches. Hester Prynne, at the very least, had her secret out in the open. She couldn’t hide it — her symbol of a child and the letter she was forced to wear were evidence of her sin, her secret. But Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s partner in adultery, was left unexposed and thus tortured himself as penance.

Dimmesdale’s brand of self-flagellation, I suspect, is not nearly as popular as anonymous truth telling. I think that the popularity of PostSecret and other incognito secret Web sites (SecretTweet, FMyLife, Txt Frm Lst Nght, Group Hug) has a lot to do with an open type of voyeurism. Finding amusement in the pain and humiliation of others is a lot more acceptable when the pain and humiliation is willingly packaged for public consumption — it takes the taboo out of looking in secret at secrets.

Looking at or reading the secrets is a cathartic experience. The human intricacies brought to light through self-examination invite the voyeur to identify with the secret. The writer/artist/confessor is seeking that affirmation from the reader: See me, hear me and love my secret.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, September 23, 2009.

Fallen Marine's photo shows a more human war

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised." – Susan Sontag

It is hard to believe that in this age of hyper-realistic violent imagery that a blurred photo of a mortally injured Marine can be so shocking. And yet, there was a national response to The Associated Press photo that ran in the Missourian and other papers across the world on Sept. 4.

Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, all of 21 years old, was the injured Marine in the photograph. The image was made soon after he was struck in the legs by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan. It depicts fellow Marines rushing to Bernard’s assistance. It is blurred, but there is an ominous pool of red amid the blur. Bernard died during surgery the night the photograph was made from a blood clot in his heart.

On Sept. 4, I picked up a copy of the Missourian and, after examining the front-page image of a Mizzou football player, turned to page 3A. The photo, by embedded AP photographer Julie Jacobson, ran three columns wide and was the newspaper equivalent of being pushed into Lake Michigan in December. I had to look, and look again and then again to be sure, but that blob of blood red on the page was undeniable.

The story, by Jacobson and AP reporter Alfred De Montesquiou, that accompanied the image was descriptive and in my mind as graphic as the photo: "Bernard lay on the ground, two Marines standing over him exposed, trying to help. A first tourniquet on Bernard's leg broke. A medic applied another.

'I can't breathe, I can't breathe,' Bernard said. Troops crawling under the bullets dragged him to the MRAP, the mine-resistant armored vehicle that accompanied the patrol."

And this is really what bothers me about the public reaction: The photo is unacceptable — even unpatriotic — to publish, but the words are not to be so censored. Bernard’s parents talked with reporters at their home in Maine and spoke of Bernard’s love of literature and his faith in God. But John Bernard found the image to be disrespectful of his son’s memory. Defense Secretary Robert Gates even asked the AP to hold the photo back.

War is ugly — about that there is no doubt. In the Missourian, you are far more likely to encounter images of press conferences, festivals and football games than images of war from far away. The photo of Bernard’s injuries is painful, breathtaking and, unlike so many other stories and photographs in the newspaper that day, it was stunningly immediate and emotionally real.

"Images transfix. Images anesthetize," critic and author Susan Sontag wrote in "On Photography." “An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs.”

The AP released excerpts of Jacobson’s journal entries. In them, she wrote of the image: “Death is a part of life and most certainly a part of war. Isn't that why we're here? To document for now and for history the events of this war? We'd shot everything else thus far and even after, from feature images of a Marine talking on a SAT phone to his girlfriend, all the way to happy meetings between Marines and civilians.”

Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard is one of 807 Americans killed in Afghanistan since 2001. This is an agonizing statistic. Because the agony of Bernard’s death should really be felt 806 times over.  I saw the photo. I read the story. And I felt it.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on September 16, 2009.

Denying public money to fund abortion unfair

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

On the last day of August, my esteemed op-ed editor handed me a letter from Mr. James D. Miller of Fayette. “A story idea,” my editor said. I really love story ideas. Having something to write about (or photograph, as the case may be) is more than half the battle.

Mr. Miller had written the Missourian, confused about the reportage of a comment by Sen. Claire McCaskill at an Aug. 26 town hall meeting in Jefferson City about health care. Missourian reporter Michael Sewall wrote: “McCaskill also tried to dispel the rumor that abortion would be covered under the new health plan. She said that would be impossible unless an amendment was inserted to repeal the black-letter law, which prohibits the federal government from funding abortion.”

Thus, Mr. Miller wrote in his letter, “What is the ‘black letter law’? When I called Sen. McCaskill’s Washington, D.C., office … the staffer I talked to did not know what this ‘black letter law’ is.”

As far as I can tell, this is a case of jargon making it into a story without explanation. A “black letter law” is a law that is already on the books — a law that already exists and is generally well known. It turns out that Sen. McCaskill was really talking about the Hyde Amendment at the Aug. 26 town hall meeting. I called Sen. McCaskill's office in Washington, and a staffer confirmed that the black letter law she referred to was indeed the Hyde Amendment.

Congress first passed the Hyde Amendment in 1976 as a legislative response to Roe v. Wade, which was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. Nestled into the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (the current incarnation), it forbids the federal government from funding abortions (with some exceptions for rape, incest and the mother's health). It’s long, but here are the important bits:

• SEC. 507 (a) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for any abortion.
• (b) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for health benefits coverage that includes coverage of abortion.

Which means, in effect, that neither Medicare nor health insurance for federal employees and military personnel paid for by the federal government can cover abortions. In 1993, the language was added to the law to allow funding of abortions in the case of rape, incest or when the mother’s health was at risk.

In 1980, the Supreme Court decided in Harris v. McRae that the ban on federal funding of abortions was constitutional. Justice Potter Stewart wrote: “It does not follow that a woman's freedom of choice carries with it a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of the full range of protected choices. … The Hyde Amendment … places no governmental obstacle in the path of a woman who chooses to terminate her pregnancy.”

Justice Stewart, I respectfully disagree.

First, think of other rights that we have under the Constitution: freedom of speech, for example. In 2007, the city of Columbia spent almost $40,000 on security to protect members of the National Socialist Movement (aka neo-Nazis) while they held a 45-minute rally downtown. That’s public, taxpayer money. Forty thousand dollars is an absurd amount of money spent to protect the speech of very few people with some ugly, vile views.

I hate what they say. But they have the right to say it, and I’ll pay to protect their rights to say whatever hateful poison they want to spew.

Roe v. Wade said women have the constitutional right to choose an abortion. It’s controversial, and it wasn’t as explicitly stated as freedom of speech, but it is unfair to deny public money to protect this right.

Furthermore, the Hyde Amendment punishes women who can’t afford to choose to terminate a pregnancy. The procedure in the first trimester can cost between $350 and $900, according to Planned Parenthood. This can be prohibitively expensive.

But, I defer to Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said it best in his Harris v. McRae dissent: “The Court's opinion studiously avoids recognizing the undeniable fact that for women eligible for Medicaid — poor women — denial of a Medicaid-funded abortion is equivalent to denial of legal abortion altogether. … If abortion is medically necessary and a funded abortion is unavailable, they must resort to back-alley butchers, attempt to induce an abortion themselves by crude and dangerous methods, or suffer the serious medical consequences of attempting to carry the fetus to term. … The Court's decision today marks a retreat from Roe v. Wade and represents a cruel blow to the most powerless members of our society. I dissent.”

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism, and a teaching assistant for the communications law class.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on September 9, 2009.