Most people realise by now that the news we get in the West is filtered, controlled and censored – both subtly and sometimes overtly – before it gets to us. This can be as blatant as army or police PRs telling journalists what they can or can’t put out there, or as subtle as individual reporters, photographers, and picture and news desks deciding what to run and how to present it.

These days, in our cosseted, permanently-outraged, safe little world, those in control of our news media have decided that blood, gore and death are too troublesome for the sensitive viewers – even if they form and important part of a particular story.
While I agree that there is no need to run shocking pictures or video of such things every day, surely by protecting people the editors are actually covering up some of the stuff that could sway opinion…?

And so it goes with Gaza. For a start, foreign journalists aren’t being allowed into the territory while the Israeli forces bombard and fight on the ground in their quest to crush Hamas. Secondly, the most popular mainstream media in the UK – BBC, and the Tory and tabloid press – inevitably swallow the Israeli line about what started the conflict. Thirdly, the images that are mainly used, while still shocking, certainly don’t tell the whole story.

Yesterday I was mucking about on the Flickr photo-sharing website and chanced upon the work of a photojournalist who calls himself nineteenseventy6.
This guy happened to be doing something else in Gaza when the bombardment began. His images are incredibly powerful and should be seen…..there is blood and random body parts on some but they tell it how it is – at least for the Palestinian residents.
This to me is the real value of documentary photography, and working independently, but I very much hope he gets them seen away from Flickr…can’t see them being used on CNN or Fox anytime soon though.

EDIT 29/1
Ok, so I’ve just been informed that this guy was in fact a hoaxer who has been lifting other people’s pictures – a pretty unethical and pointless thing to be doing. Indeed his Flickr profile has been deleted. I don’t know if this is true or not but rather than ditch this post altogether, I’m going to leave it up – I’m just sorry that I don’t know who the real copyright holders of these images are so I could link to them instead.
If he really was a fraud then I’m glad that Flickr has disabled his account and hope that the rightful photographers got their work seen and helped spread the word about what really happened over there.