Try to imagine yourself on a road trip with two acquaintances. Not friends you know well, just two people who, for whatever reason, had to come on the trip with you. Imagine a stop for gasoline. You fill the pump, go inside to pay. You look outside and find a stranger has approached one of your mates and seems to be engaging him confrontationally, the stranger looks angry, starts putting hands on your mate, shoving him. Quickly it escalates into a fist-fight, your mate is mostly trying to defend himself, his attacker is becoming more aggressive by the moment, first knocking your mate to the ground, then punching him in the head, in the face, kicking him violently, in the stomach, in the face. The confrontation turns from shocking to unimaginably macabre: the assailant pulls out a knife and starts unreservedly slashing at your travel mate, slashing at neck, face, arms, back, whatever part of your mate’s body is most exposed. The assailant is so violent and aggressive that no one interferes as your mate is pinned, and the attacker begins slicing your mate’s neck. Onlookers are all morbidly still, frozen and staring with vague emotionless expressions of curiosity. The violent assault proceeds until your mate’s head is severed from his body, and it lays on the ground just a few inches removed from where the rest of the body lays, and an unimaginable pool of paint-red blood is flowing in all directions along the ground from the neck space where your mate’s head used to be.

            This evening I listened to a speaker at a conference who experienced pretty much exactly the preceding story. Haider Hamza grew up in Iraq, only about 18 years old when the United States invaded his home country. His biography in the event’s program states that he graduated from Baghdad University in 2006, won a Fulbright Scholarship and moved to the United States… covered and witnessed major events including the trail of his former president Saddam Hussein, the killing of Saddam’s sons…” and so on.

            Hamza is a photojournalist, and his presentation included a slideshow of very big photos on a very big screen, and he had photos of the recently murdered man described above, severed head and astonishing pool of blood included. Hamza had a very casual, understated mode of speaking, as if he wanted the photos to do most of the talking, he was just there to offer captions. He spoke very dispassionately but somehow still captivatingly. He only very casually warned before the slideshow began that it would contain violent images, the understated tone with which he dispensed with the warning belied the very stunning nature of the photos we saw. He showed dead children, he showed the beheaded bloodbath, he showed an Iraqi man confronting a U.S. soldier while the barrel of the soldier’s rifle was literally pressed against the Iraqi man’s belly.

            His delivery and pacing offered absolutely no attempt to dramatize what he was presenting. He proceed with a calm, casual assuredness. He gave us time to process the photos. He told the horrific beheading story casually. He showed a photo of a child who looked about 6 years-old, casually telling us that he’d snapped the photo moments after the child had passed away from war wounds. He casually told us that witnessing war as he had hardens a person to rather unimaginable things, but the one exception, the one thing to which he never became immune, was the sight of children dying, “every time you witness it is the first time.” Again, his casual delivery belied the macabre reality with which he was presenting us. He casually, in fact with a tone of some humor, showed us one photo of a recently-fired U.S. army tank, explaining that the right side of his body had been cut by shrapnel from that firing. He nonchalantly explained that it was the taking of that photo which taught him to photograph tank-firings from behind the tank, and proceeded to the next photo: a recently-fired tank photographed from behind. He might as well have been describing his experience tasting a funny new food at a restaurant.

            In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that he would not dramatically warn us about the gruesome images we were about to see. He had taken these photos. He was there. He actually saw his beheaded travel-mate. He actually saw the dead children. His driver (the other travel mate) had actually been shot in the buttocks (and he had a photo of this). He had actually been wounded by tank shrapnel. He hadn’t just seen the photographs of the bellowing Iraqi widows, one who’d recently lost her husband and her son, another waving the shirt almost completely covered in blood which her husband had been wearing before he’d been shot, he’d taken the photographs, he was there. The idea that we citizens of the country that initiated all this horror deserved even slight warning about how images of its consequences might effect us now seems incredibly offensive. It’d have been more fair for him to say “you fuckers better sign off of Facebook, close your fucking laptops, allow me to confiscate your phones and never return them, tear up your fucking magazines, shut the fuck up for 5 fucking minutes of your lives and stare at these fucking photos.”

            Hamza was one of four panelists to give a presentation at this event. I happened to sit near the back and I became profoundly, almost violently disturbed by the lack of attention almost everyone around me paid to the other speakers. They too were giving informative presentations that every American ought to be forced to contemplate, but only Hamza seemed to truly captivate the entire room for almost all of his presentation. The others were talking ideas, had powerpoints and theories, and also some very important experiences to talk about, but they did not have photos. I will forever have more appreciation for the power of photojournalism thanks to Hamza.