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Morris
worked as a Hollywood correspondent for Life, picture editor for Life's
London Bureau during World War II, the first executive editor of Magnum
Photos press agency, picture editor for both the Washington Post and
the New York Times, and a correspondent and editor for National Geographic.
He has been called 'the world's most influential photo editor', and
was the editor of Robert Capa. During his remarkable lifetime, he's
worked alongside leading photographers while experiencing war and other
major events - always in the right place at the right time.
Morris currently lives in Paris.
I've always
worked with pictures. It's partly because I'm a lazy writer, and I don't
take notes fast enough to be a good reporter. I've always enjoyed working
with photographers because they're like a bunch of children, and I have
children all over the world – thousands of them.
Like a child, they have a certain naiveté, and approach the world
with the open eyes of a child. A photographer should really have a head
as well as a heart, and naturally an eye, and those are the three elements
that make a good photographer.
The first war that was heavily covered was the Spanish Civil War – with
small cameras and so on. I've always pointed out that in my judgment
one of the terrible reasons why the First World War, then called the
Great War, dragged on so long was because photographers were banned
from the front and the public back home didn't see the real gruesome
picture.
In World War II, we were under censorship. Every picture I sent home
from London had to be stamped 'Passed by Censor.' Very few pictures
were refused by censors, but what happened was the photographers themselves
censored what they shot as they were shooting. They knew that the photographs
of the faces of dead Americans would not be passed and so they didn't
shoot them.
Korea marked a change, and the man most responsible for that change
was David Douglas Duncan. He accompanied the U.S. marines at one of
the bitterest battles in their history, which was the retreat from the
North Korean border just before Christmas 1950. And Life published that
retreat in all its horror. I mean these soldiers were in true pain,
and that was a remarkable story. For one thing, it represented a change
in American perception of the war.
I think the big difference between present day wars and World War II
is that now people are beginning to see war from both sides at once,
and it's my hope that this trend will continue. Because I think that's
the only way we can ever abolish war is to perceive it in terms of the
destruction, not just on your side but the other side as well.
It sickens me when I hear that America won the first Gulf War so easily.
We had 150 or so dead so from our standpoint it sounded great, but we
killed thousands of Iraqis and the American public didn't sense that.
And that's one reason that it became so easy to sell the American public
on going into Iraq the second time.
I think that today's war photographers are perhaps ahead of their colleagues
on the writing side, perhaps ahead of their editors in searching for
truth because they are there. They see the truth in front of them. When
you get close enough to war to smell the corpses then you know what
reality is, and I think photographers more than writers come close to
the smell.
I still believe photojournalists are very important, but I may be overly
sentimental in saying so. I'm terribly depressed by the failure of the
public to respond to what we have done so far.
I look at the images. I go every year to Perpignan where the works of
the war photographers are shown and I see so many graphic images of
conflict that are never seen in the published press – less in
American than abroad. Photographs are published in Europe, especially
in England, that are just not seen in America.
I think that the ignorance of the public, which is spawned by the lack
of responsibility in the press, is a very basic cause of war. People
are simply stupid about war and they are not helped as much as they
should be by the press.
I don't know what it takes to convince the public that war is horrible.
I mean I just cannot grasp why it is even as we show it more and more
realistically. I think the public still supports warmongers on both
sides. If I sound anti-American, I don't mean to sound it. I'm just
trying to sound pro-peace.
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