Torn From The Headlines, Almost

With the death last month of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the film “Harrison’s Flowers” could not be more topical. The drama scheduled to open Friday stars Andie MacDowell as a newsmagazine photo editor whose husband, a photojournalist, disappears on assignment in Croatia. Desperate to find him, she makes the trek out to the war-torn nation, enlisting the help of his photojournalist buddies also shooting the war. She quickly finds that the perceived prestige of being a war correspondent is quickly shattered by reality.

The movie is inspired by Sipa Press photojournalist Isabel Ellsen’s biography, in which she describes the brutal reality of covering conflicts around the world. Ellsen, who served as a part-time consultant for the actors, carries around an old Nikon with a lens that was bent by a machete swipe intended for her head while covering wars in Africa.

“Harrison’s Flowers,” which also stars David Strathairn as the disappeared husband, may resonate with American audiences because of the Pearl abduction and subsequent execution. Pearl had the highest profile of any journalist killed in the U.S. war against terrorism, but he is not the only one. So far, nine journalists from all over the world have been killed in the war in Afghanistan.

For some, the trauma of seeing so much human misery becomes too much to bear. In 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Kevin Carter killed himself only months after winning the prestigious award for his harrowing shot of a vulture patiently waiting for an emaciated Sudanese child to die. “Few journalists saw as much violence and trauma as he did,” noted Scott MacLeod, then Time magazine’s South Africa bureau chief, in a tribute to the photographer. “Yet the photograph that epitomized Sudan’s famine would win Kevin Carter fame,” MacLeod said.

Despite the horrors of war, many photojournalists become hooked on the adrenaline rush that being in the thick of the action provides.

Nick Ut, the AP photographer who shot the 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of terrified Vietnamese children fleeing their village after a napalm attack, can attest to the horror and the high of covering war. “I have covered wars for many years; you see tragedy every day,” Ut said in an interview.

“You keep going because it’s your job. Because I cover wars I know that someday I may die, but I enjoy taking pictures. I need the action.”