The Face of People: The Work of Indian Photojournalist Danish Siddiqui

On July 16, Danish Siddiqui, an Indian photojournalist working for Reuters, was killed by the Taliban while reporting in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Famous for his coverage of disturbing events and experienced in working in challenging environments, including war zones, he was an excellent photographer and some of his works remain truly iconic. Siddiqui was part of a team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for the way it covered the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.

At the same time, his work has been controversial in India, where recently many questioned the ethics of his photographs of funeral pyres, so many of which had to be lit during the second wave of COVID-19. Discussing the ethics of photographing people in no way detracts from Siddiqui’s talent, nor does diminishing the tragedy of his death.

Over the past several years, Siddiqui recorded India’s modern history unfolding in pictures. His photographs captured recent major events, including the 2020 Delhi riots and other religious tensions; the 2020 border tensions between India and China; the farmers’ protests in Delhi; events in Kashmir; the COVID-19 pandemic and the way it was dealt with, from the woes of migrants during the lockdown in 2020 to the scale of deaths during the second wave in 2021.

His photographs were people-centered both in a good way and at the same time in a questionable way. The lens zoomed in on people, and people were often the main theme of the pictures. They showed life as it was, beyond make-up or posing, telling us of the people’s woes – but at the price of those same people’s privacy.

His photographs were used for a piece by Sankalp Phartiyal, “Death in the Himalayas,” which showcased the challenges of the pandemic faced by the inhabitants of the rural areas in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand. The story focused on the life of one person who eventually died of COVID-19.

His pictures also accompanied an article by Devjyot Ghoshal, “High road at Chilling,” which documented the infrastructure construction work conducted in the Himalayas to allow the Indian Army to move faster against its Chinese rivals. Siddiqui’s photographs naturally focused on the construction site workers.

Another article, “Two killings symbolize reach of Kashmir conflict as death toll surges,” by Alasdair Pal and Fayaz Bukhari, focused on the political and security situation in Indian Kashmir, with Siddiqui’s camera taking us inside the homes and lives of ordinary Kashmiris.

While having high regard for Siddiqui’s remarkable skills, I must admit I do find this way of reporting by putting the camera in a person’s face troubling. This is a general remark about photojournalism as such, not about Siddiqui, in particular. In one of my previous texts for The Diplomat, I argued that a text should not be like a close-up photograph of an anguished person taken without permission, or even without talking to a person. This is what I believe about the photographs themselves, although I am fully aware that asking a person for permission before taking a photograph of them is not always possible. I am equally aware that calling for such a rule to be followed is probably futile: A journalist who asks for permission will end up shooting less attractive, less real, and moving photographs than the one who does not ask for it.

One matter that was hotly debated in India was photographing funeral pyres. When obtaining the permission of a deceased person’s family is not possible, I believe at least a photographer should be sensible enough not to share images that clearly show parts of a person’s body, focusing instead only on the pyre: the wood and the fire. As far as I know, Siddiqui’s photographs remained within these limits.

These ethical questions of persons and privacy aside, it must be stressed that Siddiqui’s work was highly valuable in the way, and the depth to which, it shared the stories of ordinary people. Moreover, in most of recent cases his coverage went against the narrative of the government in New Delhi. This is also likely a reason some people criticized his coverage of the pandemic: Just like other journalists, he showed the true scope of the tragedy, an account contrary to the official government claims. In this case, keeping a middle path was probably very difficult. Countering the government declarations was important to do, but could it be done with more sensibility toward the tragedy of the families? The number of funeral pyres, the movements around the morgues, and the number of obituaries in newspapers were nearly the only ways through which journalists could at least approximately prove that the official death toll was lower than the true scale of death in India.

In a nutshell, the work of photojournalists, like all journalists, is very often necessary and frequently of high worth. But this does not mean that professional methods should not be constantly debated and constantly evolving.