Are readers sensitive to graphic war photography?

One thing that people were drawn to over and over were photographs that showed resilience, and they also seem to gravitate toward photos where the people that were injured or had been affected by the war were looking straight at the camera.”

Lisa Krantz, assistant professor, University of Montana and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer

Your readers are probably not as sensitive to graphic war photography as you think.

That’s the takeaway from academics who led a study examining readers’ sensitivity to photos that depict war’s reality.

Dr. Keith Greenwood, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, read literature on the topic but wanted to dig deeper. He said editors and publishers across the news industry tend to lean more conservatively to publish safer images to avoid offending their audience.

Editors generally are “making these decisions based on what they think the audience would accept, basing a lot of that on their personal reaction; people who they knew or family members, and no one, at least that I ran across, said, ‘Well, let’s talk to news consumers and find out if that’s actually what they think.’”

Pulitzer Prize-winning Photographer Lisa Krantz, now an assistant professor at the University of Montana, selected Ukraine war photos to present to individuals. Krantz said the images were taken from official sources, plus those shared on social media. University of Missouri doctoral student and photojournalist Corey MacNeil assisted with the study.

The study included 31 regular news consumers, which Greenwood acknowledged was a “smallish group” but “not unusual for this kind of method.”

Dr. Keith Greenwood, associate professor, University of Missouri

Greenwood said the study’s participants were asked to arrange the photos in an inverted pyramid pattern of images they would most want to see published and those they’d least want to see published, with the middle having the widest column of neutral feelings.

“Also, we interviewed them a little more broadly about what they thought the role of the news organization in conveying information regarding the conflict of war,” he said. “The people who participated in the study had a strong sense that news organizations need to show them the actual reality; we know that people get killed in war. We know that war is chaotic. It’s OK to show us that. They were willing, at least some participants more than others, to see fairly graphic pictures and accept that those should be published.

“But where they kind of uniformly drew the line was ‘we don’t just want to see graphic, violent pictures just for some sensationalistic sense. We don’t want to see gore just for the sake of publishing gore.’ But they didn’t mind seeing people who had been injured or bodies that were obviously dead.”

In addition to selecting the images, Krantz was also involved in interviewing the participants.

“One thing that people were drawn to over and over were photographs that showed resilience, and they also seem to gravitate toward photos where the people that were injured or had been affected by the war were looking straight at the camera,” she said. “They did not select ones where the photographs were just very graphic. They were thinking about the people in the photographs. They were thinking about what those people were experiencing and how their lives were affected. Those are the photographs that they often chose as the ones they would want to most see published, which is what we are going for as journalists and photojournalists … to make photos that have emotional resonance and to make photos that connect with people and make people care about the story and the people in the images.”

Greenwood hopes the study is just the beginning of diving deeper into readers’ feelings.

“There are other areas we could delve into,” he said. “You know, we could replicate this study with different kinds of graphic pictures to get more [feedback] — if this kind of event might happen in your community, which would give us more answers. And it also can be the starting point for that bigger national survey, where we could talk to a much bigger audience and gather data and have something that speaks to a bigger part of the country.”

Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.