The importance of photojournalists

With both flights MH17 and MH370 back in the news this week for different reasons, it’s good to reflect on some of the incredible photojournalism that occurred during that time.

French photographer Jérôme Sessini, who is an associate of Magnum Photos, documented some incredible images from the crash site of MH17 in Ukraine, scouring the field in which it had been shot down. One of them you can see at the top of this post.

It was a tragic, morbid and ugly scene, as he describes it in this video interview for World Press Photo, in which his series of shots was exhibited in 2015 un the Spot News category.

The importance of this type of work cannot be underestimated, and as he reveals here, we were very close to being not able to see it at all, such was the paranoia of those on the ground nearby once the story started to make headlines around the world.

The shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 is one of the most awful things anybody can surely imagine. And still very little has been done to bring those behind this act of murder, accidental or otherwise, to justice.