Louis Leeson and Antonio Olmos: Photojournalism and Projects

Louis Leeson and Antonio Olmos have both spent their careers photographing harm, for newspapers and for aid organisations, and both have written and spoken about the ethics of doing so. They were billed together for a London talk on 13 August 2019, described at the time as an evening about human rights and the photographic representation of traumatic events.

Antonio Olmos

Antonio Zazueta Olmos is a photojournalist based in London, with a reporting career spent largely on conflict and its aftermath. His own site is at antonioolmos.com, which is where the range of that work can be seen.

The project he is best known for, though, was made entirely inside the M25. It is also the clearest statement of how he thinks a photograph should carry violence, which is why it is worth taking slowly.

The Landscape of Murder

His best known book is The Landscape of Murder, published by Dewi Lewis. The publisher's page describes the project: over 2011 and 2012 Olmos photographed the sites of murders committed inside London's M25, visiting each location and photographing it as it was, usually some time after the fact and usually looking like nothing at all. Seventy-nine of those sites appear in the book, which carries contributions from Sean O'Hagan and Peter Stubley. Olmos has said the idea came after he heard that a young woman had been killed a few streets from his home and was struck by how ordinary the place looked.

The approach is the point. A murder scene photographed weeks later contains no event, only a pavement, a stairwell or a patch of grass, and the caption supplies what the picture withholds. It is a deliberate refusal of the conventions of crime photography, and it is why the work sits closer to landscape than to news, despite being entirely reportage. Sean O'Hagan, writing in the Observer, included the book among his photography books of the year.

Louis Leeson

Leeson is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in London, working internationally on human rights and humanitarian stories. The ethics of photographing people in crisis is a stated part of his practice rather than an afterthought, which is the thread connecting his work to Olmos's.

His Blink profile gives a First Class BA in Photojournalism from the London College of Communication, studied from 2009 to 2012, and lists human rights and development work, largely in West Africa and India. A WePresent profile adds that he has worked as a photojournalist for CNN, that his photography is represented by Eyevine in London, and that he has lectured on the ethics of reporting, including the psychological effects of trauma imagery on both subjects and viewers.

The film he is best known for is A Million Waves, made with the director Daniel Ali, which follows the only female surfer in Sierra Leone, a woman who taught herself to surf through the civil war and the Ebola crisis. His own account of why he made it is on the WePresent page.

"I thought it would be great to go back and see the country in a more positive light, to tell a better, or happier story."

Photographing harm: the practical questions

The subject splits into questions with different answers. Who consents, and can someone in a camp or a hospital give meaningful consent to a photographer who arrived with an aid convoy. Who gets named, and who is captioned as an anonymous victim. What a commissioning NGO needs from a picture, usually an image that raises money, against what the person in it would choose.

Both photographers on this page answer partly through form. Olmos photographs murder sites with the violence already gone, so the viewer has to supply the knowledge rather than consume the event. Leeson has worked on a story about a surfer rather than a story about a war, in a country he had previously covered during an epidemic. Neither is a solution to the problem of representing suffering, but both are decisions made at the level of the picture rather than the caption.

Most of the people covering emergencies are freelances, paid per job and often working for the organisations running the response, so these decisions are made by individuals under financial pressure rather than by institutions with policies. Freelances have organised part of their own response through the Frontline Freelance Register, which represents freelance journalists exposed to risk while gathering news.

Other photojournalists covered here are on the speakers index, with the full archive at events and earlier years under previous talks. Related pages include Charlie Bibby and Chris J Ratcliffe on newspaper and agency work, and the article on diversity in British photojournalism.