When I write on social affairs I often wonder if the resulting article helps in any way at all. Can journalism make a difference, or am I essentially being exploitative?
It's hardly an original dilemma, and is surely experienced by every journalist and photographer. It feels a bit naive and studenty to still be asking myself the question, to be honest, but all the same.... it niggles. I make some of my living interviewing people in pretty desperate situations. An assignment I was commissioned to do for a national children's charity campaign illustrates the issue.
I'm asked to drive to south Wales to interview one of the charity's clients, a single mum with five kids. I'm pleased to get the work. It's well paid and interesting. Arriving, I find that she lives in a house where black mould spreads thickly across the kitchen ceiling and down the back wall... where one of her daughters, a little girl with asthma, sleeps in a pink bedroom so icily cold I feel my skin shrink when we look in... where the picture of a baby lost to cot death is unobtrusively placed among the many, many photos of her other children proudly displayed in the front room.
There’s a housing association building site at the end of the little terraced row, but this woman can’t get hold of the £400 deposit she needs to secure one of the warm, dry family houses that will soon be available. I leave feeling angry and hopeless. I write my piece, and still feel angry and hopeless. My fee for this work is more than the money she needs for the deposit. I wrestle with the thought that I should give it to her. I don't. A year on I still wonder if I should have done.
That £400 would have helped her family more immediately than any charity campaign. This is hardly war reporting, but these are people living on a front line. Does this kind of journalism change anything about this woman's life? I don’t know. It’s what I do, what I can do, what I have time to do. It’s not enough.
