By Nathan Frandino*
Photojournalist Eros Hoagland agreed to have a film crew follow him through the streets of Rio de Janeiro for an upcoming HBO documentary on conflict photographers – but his driver didn’t. He warned Hoagland: if the film is released in Rio and he is recognized, then gang members would find and kill him.
It was a solemn reminder to Hoagland that while he would soon board a plane and leave, the gang members, fixers and people he photographed would all remain there to deal with the consequences of his pictures. Sometimes those consequences prove deadly.
“Part of what we have to do is negotiate the safety of the people we hire to work for us and that’s something I’m very passionate about,” Hoagland said in a recent interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. “I think that there are certainly a large number of journalists who don’t seem to care about their local people and I think it’s shameful.”
Balancing story and the safety of local residents is just one of the issues Hoagland deals with regularly as a conflict photographer and is a common thread in the new HBO Documentary Series “Witness,” which premieres on Monday, Nov. 5 and follows Hoagland through Juárez, Mexico and Rio de Janeiro. The series will also feature the work of photojournalists Michael Christopher Brown in Libya and Veronique de Viguerie in South Sudan. Click here for a review from the Los Angeles Times.
The trip to Rio was Hoagland’s first time in Brazil and he has traveled to Mexico several times since 2008, two years into the Mexican government’s war on criminal organizations. In both places, he sought to show exactly what he saw and the situation that his subjects live in.
During his assignment in Juárez -- often called the murder capital of the world -- Hoagland and a police unit found a man screaming “Help me” in Spanish. He was bleeding out from a gunshot wound to his torso as crowd watched from a nearby hill. There was nothing but the sounds of the man wincing in pain and Hoagland’s camera.
“You just never see that in Mexico as a journalist, you don’t actually see someone who is in the midst of their last breath,” Hoagland said.
Having photographed victims of gang violence in Juárez and in the favelas of Rio, Hoagland’s subjects have shown him that “you don’t have to go to a war to find conflict, it exists everywhere.”
“The conflict and violence is something that is very integral to our species and anybody is capable of it if they are put in the wrong situation,” he said.
Hoagland is particularly passionate about the safety of the fixers and local journalists he meets -- after all, he’s working in two countries where journalists are frequently targeted for their work. According to Reporters Without Borders, five journalists have been murdered and three have disappeared in Mexico this year, while 10 have been killed in Brazil.
This violence strikes a personal chord with Eros. His father, Newsweek magazine photojournalist John Hoagland, was shot and killed in El Salvador in 1984. The Newsweek editors came to the funeral and gave Eros his father’s camera. That’s when he knew he would become a photojournalist.
Hoagland’s career has also taken him to El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Iraq and Afghanistan. His job is all about building trust within the community, he said, which is vital when you’re embedding with police units or meeting with gang members.. You have to talk with everyone about everything from weather to soccer, he said.
“As a photographer, the first thing I do is not bust out the camera and start photographing but certainly to talk to people and get a sense of what the vibe is,” Hoagland said.
And for Hoagland, building trust also means not betraying it.
"You really have to think twice about how much is it worth to get a picture if you’re going to put someone else’s life and well-being at risk,” he said.
Click here to listen to The Voice of Russia's interview with Hoagland. Watch the trailer for HBO's documentary series below:
*Nathan Frandino is a freelance journalist based in Washington D.C. Follow him on Twitter @NathanFrandino
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
