DANGER PAY
Snapshot of the Middle East by a Female Photojournalist, 1984-1994
Ellen Spencer Susman (Editor).
University of Texas Press (Publisher).
I'm anxious about how my pictures could be used by News week about how this conflict will be oversimplified. The more I am exposed to the complexities of the Middle East, the more I find the situations turned into media events defying stereotypical photographic representation I. think about the connections between "the story" and the manner in which real people are constructed or contrived in photographs how images which purport to have captured real life can be used by the mass media to perpetuate a specific way of looking at the world, how the lives of people seen through the camera's lens have become a commodity for the international news media. You learn to toughen up, expect less, notice more, until one day the madness of an unpredictable moment blurs your sure-shot vision, and suddenly you ask yourself: "What am I doing here? What the hell am I doing? Everything's negotiable at the right price, even life. 'Danger pay,' the invoice says. Double day rate - a photographer's war zone value."
Carol Spencer (Mitchell) began her career in photojournalism in 1975 in the United States, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. She moved to Jerusalem in 1984 as a member of the foreign press corps and spent the next decade covering the Middle East and North Africa. Her photographs have appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek both of which she worked for extensively. She also traveled on special assignment for U.S. News & World Report, Look, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and numerous European publications. The diary she created became the basis of her book, Danger Pay.
Carol Spencer's writing and photographs chronicled the refugee camps of the Gaza strip before, during, and after the intifada, historic meetings between world leaders, the sea jacking of the Achille Lauro, and profiles of dignitaries such as Yassar Arafat, Anwar Sadat, and King Hussein of Jordan. The violence and turmoil Carol witnessed in the Middle East in the 1980s and 90s has its repercussions today. After photographing a PLO training camp for children in 1986, she wrote, "Where will they be in 17 years' time?" That time is now.
Carol Spencer Mitchell passed away from cancer in 2004. She was 50.