The photographer who took this picture at the collapsed sweatshop in Bangladesh says it best:

Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me. It’s as if they are saying to me, we are not a number — not only cheap labor and cheap lives. We are human beings like you. Our life is precious like yours, and our dreams are precious too.

They are witnesses in this cruel history of workers being killed.

Jesus Fucking Christ

[Time Light Box]
25 Comments

As a former journalist, I saw my share of death and tragedy as part of the job. What really bothered me about the work was how photographers would angle for the best shots of people in grief, trying to get what I called the “crying mom shot.” I got turned off after seeing a lot of fist pumping and self-congratulation in the photo room crowing over “did you see that look on her face?” I understand that their function is to capture to moment, to find the defining image, but there was a bit of the locker room about it also, plus a lot of talking about the great themes and messages embodied in the shot.

That shot will probably win the Pulitzer this year. Personally, it just takes me back to those days, and not in a good way. I’m really glad not to be part of the horde covering that story about the rescued young women.

“Akhter writes for LightBox about the photograph, which appears in this week’s TIME International alongside an essay by David Von Drehle.” I went to college with that dude.

I’ve been more than once to the Triangle Shirtwaist building on NYU’s campus on March 25th, the anniversary of the disaster. There is a single rose for each woman that died, with her name. The men who owned the building, who locked the women in so they couldn’t take breaks, were never punished. There was no law that covered the awful things they did.

Just found out that one of my coworkers is a Benghazi-is-worse-than-Watergate raving lunatic. Fun.

@blogenfreude: Most of the Triangle Shirtwaist victims were Jewish immigrants, as were the company owners who had locked them in. I met Rose Schneiderman, one of the survivors, who said she figured that the owners would have an escape route for themselves, so she ran up to their office and found it.

@redmanlaw: I find this more respectful (and peaceful) than an “anguished crying mom” shot would be. I understand there’s a fine line between documenting the pain and exploiting the pain, but for example would Americans have finally gotten their heads around the horrors of Vietnam and what we were doing to innocent people had it not been for Nick Ut’s photo?

I dunno…

@mellbell: Good lord, I’m sorry.

I got into an argument on another site after some guy posted that the dead couple “died wealthier than the people with tons of money in the bank,” claiming that love was more valuable than money. Am I the only one that finds such gratuitous silver-cloud-lining BS to be offensive? We know nothing of this pair other they died horribly. We can only honor their memory by doing what we can to prevent other such needless deaths. But to claim that this couple is somehow “wealthy” in death just strikes me as patronizing, self-centered and totally thoughtless, i.e. mental masturbation.

@SanFranLefty: Agreed. Sometimes a reaction shot tells the whole story (to wit, I haven’t watched footage of Kevin Ware’s injury, because the reactions of the players on Louisville’s bench were sufficient to convey the gruesomeness of it), but the stillness — when there is no longer any urgency to pulling bodies from the wreckage because all hope of finding survivors is gone and the magnitude of the death toll is painfully clear — and, yes, intimacy of the moment captured here are, as he says, haunting, incomparably so.

@mellbell: if you want to fuck with them tell them the tale of Whitewater and how this is the same – the Clintons were hounded and investigated for years and they found … nothing.

Because fruitlessly voting to repeal Obamacare for the thirryleventh time and screaming about coverups are so crucial to getting people back to work.

@gunnergoz: Oh for Chrissake, that’s beyond idiotic…

@mellbell: Play along with your coworker: Agree with them that Hillary Clinton is worse than a thousand black Hitlers, then record the response. I’m sensing a YouTube hit.

@¡Andrew!: I’ve always wanted to take sections of translations of some of Hitler’s speeches, replace “Jews” with “Gays”, post them on “Redstate” or “Ace of Spades”, then sit back as the right-tards post their monosylabic grunts of praise.

@matador1015: That is all sorts of awesome there. I didn’t have it in me to do a post on the idiocy of simultaneously voting for Sanford and for a ballot initiative to preserve the sanctity of marriage from teh gheyz.

@matador1015: Ha ha, awesome. And one can easily scratch out SC and add the name of any state in Dumbfuckistan.

@matador1015: I haven’t smiled a real smile in days. Thank you. XD

Hey, nojo. I work with a kid who is a Duck. He was telling me that Oregon used to have segregated dorms — like one building would have a white side and a black side, and you couldn’t cross over to the other side.

Do you know anything about this? I was like, “In Eugene?” His wife is Latina and he’s from Pennsyltucky. He said that people gave her a hard time. Eugene? Really?

@JNOV: Never heard of dorm segregation. I can personally vouch for 1977-1981, and I’ve been in constant contact with campus all my life. (Not just clients — Mom worked in the bureaucracy.)

Plus — how to put this gently — Eugene ain’t the most diverse place. Not counting athletes, were there even enough black students to fill one side of a dorm?

(Also: One side? If yer gonna do that, floor-by-floor makes a lot more sense. Especially when you consider which side the bathroom’s on. With communal showers.)

Regarding the Latina missus: It’s really hard to think of anyone giving her shit in Eugene, and here I’m speaking as a 1959 native. That’s the kind of exotic stuff I saw on TV news, not on the streets.

But — Eugene’s a liberal town in a redneck county. Step into Springfield, all bets are off.

@JNOV: On the other hand, RML’s been an occasional visitor to campus. Maybe he’s heard things my Nice White Boy ears missed.

@nojo: Ducktown has been very, very good to me. Sometimes the white liberal classes can be condescending in showing how much they appreciate your culture, or contributions to humanity or whatever but as an environmental lawyer attending, presenting or drinking some beer at the Public Interest Environmental Conference at the university, I was welcomed and treated as a peer. People in Portland and the coast were way cool with the RML family last summer. Our friend who is a conservative Christian black guy in an interracial marriage is way happier in the Portland area than in Phoenix. He left because Arizona was getting too weird for him.

Montana has its problems with anti-Indian racism, but I always had good experiences traveling there on a case I was working on up there on the Fort Peck reservation flying in either to Billings or Williston ND, but it might have been due to the places I was going and things I was doing, although I did hit a surplus/survivalist gear place in Billings with a friend (the Army Ranger I outshot one time) on my last trip there. They were cool there. I just don’t get bent out of shape over the anti-Obama crap on display – a common feature of such places and some independent gun stores. Maybe they kept the white power stickers under the counter.

@redmanlaw: Sometimes the white liberal classes can be condescending in showing how much they appreciate your culture, or contributions to humanity

Now that’s the Eugene I know.

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