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A Photographer in GazaHow to take pictures of a war.

By Scout TufankjianPosted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, at 11:52 AM ET

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I've spent a lot of time in working in hospitals during the last few weeks. You get unfettered access here (Wanna see us try to save a guy missing his entire lower body? Come on in!). But the streets are also becoming more dangerous. The current Israeli incursion is a little bit outside town, where there are no side streets I can use to approach the action safely. Plus, the Israeli tanks are backed up by helicopter gunships, which scare the crap out of me. At least with tanks, you know what direction they'll be shooting in. Over the last few weeks, two journalists have been shot, and a lot more have been shot at, so unless you have an armored car, it makes more sense to cover this incursion from the hospital. Still, the thought of missing good pictures eats at me, so I'm relieved to see all of the local journalists sitting in front of the hospital smoking cigarettes.

My fixer, Mahdi, is completely unflappable. I've been working with him for more than a year, and I have never seen him be wrong. When he says that we are safe, I believe him, and when he says something is too dangerous, we don't go. For the last few weeks, he's been bringing his puppyish 16-year-old nephew, Bubbus, along as a kind of errand boy. Apparently Bubbus, who is named after a kind of fish he's said to resemble, was driving Mahdi's sister nutty and she ordered Mahdi to get him out of the house. Bubbus has the quite sensible habit of taking for the hills at the slightest sign of trouble. This can, however, be problematic, since we have to find him after the trouble has passed, and trouble in the form of Israeli helicopters comes with additional cell-phone-jamming powers.

All and all, I have it pretty easy here. My hotel has a generator that runs 24-7, while most Gazans have electricity only a few hours a day, if that. The IDF bombed the main power station a few weeks ago, and it looks like it might take years to fix. My hotel even has wireless Internet and hasn't yet run out of food, which is served on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. (Gaza has the sweetest strawberries in the world.) More important, I can leave whenever I want to, something most Palestinians can't do. If I decide that I want to see the opening night of my boyfriend's play, or catch a Red Sox game or attend my mother's 60^th birthday party at a Connecticut casino, I can.

But most of the time, I'm happy to stay. The nights are not as much fun as they were before the foreign press corps picked up and left en masse for Lebanon and Haifa, but I enjoy my days more now that the streets are not clogged with other reporters. Although international attention has shifted to Lebanon, the violence here continues unabated, so there's plenty to do. And the Gazans generally treat me with warmth and courtesy. They see the foreign press as a lifeline—a chance to tell the world their story. Almost everybody believes that the world will listen.

I have my doubts. Polaris, my agency, sends me plenty of e-mails reassuring me that my pictures are not being sent out into a void, but the outside world doesn't seem all that interested in making the shelling stop. My politics are pretty simple. Killing people is bad. Killing civilians is worse. Killing children is an obscenity—whether it's the Katyusha rockets that killed two kids playing in their yard in Nazareth or the 6-year-old girl killed in her house in Shajiya. But no one in charge of this conflict has much to gain by stopping it. With each new atrocity, the extremists on both sides gain greater strength. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has never been more popular in Israel, and Palestinians are hunkering down behind Hamas.

I asked one of my best friends, a local AP photographer, how he was doing and he said, "Work is good. The situation is kharra (shit)." That pretty much sums up life here. It's the essential contradiction of what I do. If my kid were killed, I wouldn't want some grimy little snapper sticking her lens in my face, but I do that to people every day. I don't beat myself up for it, either. I'm here to work, not to watch or to hold their hand and experience their pain. And it's my job to show that the shelling leaves real people, crying real tears, over their really dead sons and daughters.

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Scout Tufankjian is a photographer with Polaris Images. Her book, Yes We Can (powerHouse/Melcher Media), documents her two years covering the Obama campaign.

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