The Myth Of A War Correspondent and The Corporatisation Of War

Western media promotes the myth of the photojournalist as a lone moral witness. Photojournalists, in turn, often hide their connections to billionaire-owned corporate media and its links to political power, intelligence agencies, and profit motives. By doing so, they help create the image of the solitary moral witness and saviour, framing stories to focus on themselves while deflecting attention from Western policies and practices that may have caused the suffering they depict. 

 An excerpt titled ‘Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? It's a photojournalist!’ from independent photojournalist Asim Rafiqui’s upcoming self-published book False Prophets: Western Media and the Betrayal of its Myths’, which will be released in April 2026  

The advertisement is shot in black and white. Its aesthetics mimic 1940s Hollywood film noir–shaky camera, grainy, high contrast lighting. A woman–her voice emotionless, precise, curt, sharp–narrates it. She is the voice of war photographer, Robert Capa’s camera—quick cuts, short takes, close-ups, a melancholic air, a violin soundtrack. We see him sitting on his bed, concentrating on cleaning his camera. Young. White. Dishevelled. Indifferent. CUT. We see him jumping out of a plane with soldiers. CUT. We see him shaving, and in the next room, a young woman lies in bed, tears flowing down her cheeks. He is leaving for the war. CUT. He is at war, in the war, on the frontline. CUT. He makes love. CUT. He is in a dark room, obsessively processing his photos. CUT—more war. CUT—another woman. CUT. He gets a call. CUT. He is off. She fights and protests. CUT. He leaves. He must leave. CUT. He is in the war. He marches with the soldiers. European soldiers. We see him smoking, drinking, and reveling with soldiers as if one with them. CUT. We see a convoy. He walks with the soldiers. He charges with the soldiers. There is an explosion. He falls. He has stepped on a mine. The music dies. He dies. The camera survives. FADE TO BLACK. You can buy the camera–or at least a new version of it–at your local retailer. Just follow the link.  

When Leica produced this advertisement to help sell its digital cameras, it did not intend for us to examine it for its evasions and obfuscations. Based somewhat loosely on the myths surrounding the famous war photographer Robert Capa, who died when he stepped on a landmine in French-occupied Indochina, it exploited the romantic and idealised image of a war correspondent–a lone, angst-ridden, passionate (about war, suffering, love, and women), undaunted, reckless adventurer, conqueror (of women and worlds)–to help sell their expensive luxury camera products. Leica could do this because the journalism industry and journalists themselves have invested considerable time and effort in creating a near-mythic image of the war correspondent and photographer as a devil-may-care, cavalier, swashbuckling, damn-the-be-all warrior for justice and humanity. It is an image that has been repeatedly used in representations of the war correspondent in Hollywood movies and popular television dramas.

And it remains so entrenched that some even purport to build entire businesses around it. For example, when a journalist interviewed the photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, who had founded the crowd-funding site emphas.is (now defunct) “Photojournalists, particularly war photographers, have a certain allure,” the journalist crooned, “one Ben Khelifa hopes is the basis for a business model.” Karim Ben Khalifa himself underscored her point by chiming in and stating that, “We have a romanticism around our profession. We realised that our work isn’t the end product, but how we got to it. This is what we expect to monetise.”  

It was this very image of the brazen, bold, unfazed-by-danger, obsessively driven war correspondent that was caricatured (whether intentionally or unintentionally, I could never tell) in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which Sean Penn played a photojournalist named Sean O’Connell. If we were supposed to take the character seriously, we couldn’t because of lines like: “Sorry about the neg roll. I spilt some blood on it while self-stitching a gun wound to my abdomen.”

Add a scene where O’Connell is strapped to the top of a biplane with his cameras in hand, flying into the smoke and ash of an active volcano in Iceland, and the parody was complete. Like a gladiator heading into battle, unbothered by danger and connected solely to his camera and the subject he aims to capture, the photojournalist was portrayed as someone prepared to sacrifice everything and care for nothing. This mythic figure – dedicated to bearing witness to human suffering – has made frequent appearances in Hollywood films over the decades.  

However, this mythic character does not hold up under scrutiny. What Leica did not realise was that their slickly made advertisement inadvertently revealed the deep collaboration between French colonialism and an American photojournalist’s propagandistic representations of it. Robert Capa was killed when he stepped on a landmine as he was accompanying a French colonial army carrying out the orders of a French regime bent on maintaining its stranglehold over a “lesser” people.

Capa’s was no heroic walk. He had been sent on it by Henry Luce, the editor of Life magazine, to walk alongside French colonial forces in Indochina. Luce had close personal and ideological ties to the American and French political establishment and had pledged his support for the French colonial occupation of Indochina.  

Luve was no ordinary editor, and Life was no typical magazine. The New York Times pointed out the "remarkable extent during the peak of his total involvement with his magazines–Time, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated–the judgments and opinions that were printed reflected the focus of Mr. Luce's views, and these encompassed virtually every facet of human endeavour.” Luce decided what was covered and how his publications covered it. And Luce insisted that the French war in Vietnam only got favourable coverage. He was also a staunch believer in American exceptionalism, a defender of big business and “free enterprise”, an enemy of organised labour, and a believer in confronting Communism everywhere.

Some of the U.S.’s most famous writers and photojournalists worked for his publications. It was Luce who asked Robert Capa to go on what can only be described as a propaganda mission. Capa was sent there with a specific political, ideological, and, one can argue, racist agenda: to create a body of photographic work that would lionise the French colonial soldier, help justify the continued French colonial repression of the people, and win support for the ongoing killing of tens of thousands of people in the name of Western civilisation.  

Indo-China wasn’t Capa’s first such act of allegiance to Western colonial power. His celebratory, near-reverential visual documentation of the creation of the colonial settler-colony of Israel completely “erased Palestine.” His images, nearly 300 of which were published, depicted the European settler colony as a nation of heroes, pioneers, and victors of war, while completely removing the existence of the indigenous Palestinians and the Nakba that led to their killing and forcible expulsion from the land. “The idealized Jewish settler,” Jensehaugen pointed out, “and the absence of Palestinians in Capa’s images elided the reality of ethnic cleansing and gave credence to a narrative that denied that reality.” This absence was an ideological choice, not a mere mistake, because not only did he frequently embed with Israeli forces, but he was “emotionally and ideologically invested in the Zionist project of Israel.” 

Assignments. Ideology. Politics. Career Ambitions. Markets. Sales. Status. Faith. Prejudice. These are real influences that determine how journalism is done. Yet the construction and representation of the journalist as an individual conscience, a moral voice, and a hero is among the oldest and most consistently repeated. He is almost always spoken of as an individual, driven to document the sufferings of the world, motivated by a unique and powerful sense of moral and ethical consciousness, brave in the face of danger, a chaser of truth and justice, and with a near reckless disregard for their own life. It is a self-fashioning that reporters and photographers themselves have worked hard to manufacture, and one that the industry and its affiliates benefit from and love to pander to. This myth helps obscure the fact that mainstream and corporate journalism are deeply embedded in the state and produced in its service, advancing its ideologies. This role has become increasingly pronounced over the decades.  

When the photojournalist James Nachtwey received the Dresden Prize in 2012, Wim Wenders, who handed him the award, went out of his way to present Nachtwey as an individual conscience, acting and witnessing on our behalf. “The act of photographing is a very lonely job,” Wenders argued. “You are mostly left to your own devices, especially when war is raging around you or hunger and death are haunting the land.” In Wenders’ evocative description, the war photographer roams alone through a world of suffering. “But these photographs here all have one thing in common,” Wenders continued, “an ‘attitude’, a point of view, the photographer's awareness…of standing where he is for others, of seeing on behalf of others, of exposing himself, and of giving testimony, for others” (emphasis mine).

\Wenders constructs Nachtwey as an individual, Messiah-like figure–alone, bearing witness, giving testimony, standing on behalf of others, exposing himself to risk, and suffering on our behalf. He comes across as a near-prophetic figure, using his body to face risks and endure pain, suffer hunger, and face death on our behalf. Yet, Wenders never asks why Nachtwey was where he was in the first place. He never wonders what put him in that particular war instead of another. And, he never mentions Nachtwey's employment of over thirty-five years with Time magazine, one of the USA’s most nationalist, imperialist, and propagandist publications.  

Nachtwey himself has invested considerable time and effort in constructing a particular self-image. "I am a witness," his website page declares. "The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.” Ironically, Nachtwey has never spoken out against the human suffering, displacement, and deaths caused by drone strikes, torture regimes, indefinite detentions, rendition programs, targeted assassinations, aerial bombardments, ground invasions, and military occupations. He has remained silent and unmoved by the actions and brutality of the USA, unquestionably the world’s most militarily aggressive nation that has used its vast military apparently to destabilise dozens of countries, displace millions, and murder millions of others. He has equally failed to explain how his work has closely tracked US political and imperialist geographies and discourses. He has spent his career crafting a carefully curated image of a man alone against an unjust world, one he brings for our “comfortable concern” from the dark regions of the world.  

The very statement “I am a witness” is a statement of power and carries with it the unquestioned right to act as a witness, without addressing who appointed him to this role. How and from whom does he derive this authority? What affiliations with power are obscured when a detached, disinterested, and quasi-sacred or religious authority to witness is claimed? The anthropologist George Marcus wrote about how anthropological and journalistic witnessing “overlaps and blurs in interesting ways with the classic documentary/descriptive function of anthropological ethnography.” Marcus identified three aspects of a witness's posture. First, the detachment that the witness assumes is undone by the fact that he has to “be there,” on the ground and in the circumstances of suffering, and hence becomes complicit and attached. “There are no self-fashioning or rhetorical fixes for complicity,” Marcus pointed out, “[and]…no participation outside if you are there on the scene where history is unfolding.” 

Second, the role of witnessing cannot be understood outside the growth of regimes of “humanitarian reason,” and influential organisations such as humanitarian NGOs and transnational human rights organisations that created legitimate spaces for this posture.

Since the end of the twentieth century, humanitarianism has grown into a global 17 enterprise, with thousands of NGOs of all kinds operating worldwide. The discourse of humanitarianism and disinterested witnesses is one that NGOs and transnational organisations frequently use. Their easy movement between reportage, witnessing, and activism is another reason journalists, too, have found it necessary, if not convenient, to shift among these roles. Third, and perhaps most relevant for our discussion, from how and from whom did one get the authority to arrive and act as a “witness”? What affiliations with power are disassembled as a detached, disinterested, and near-sacred/religious authority to witness is claimed?  

This insistent disavowal, this erasure of the institutional conditions for the production of journalistic and photojournalistic works, is perhaps one of the most explicit ways in which liberal Western media creates its own myths of independence, free speech, ethics, and dissent. The image of the war journalist or photojournalist as “hero and myth-maker” is constructed by determinedly remaining silent about their clients, markets, politics, ideologies, and career interests. Christopher Breu referred to the disavowals of the material conditions that create our subjective experience of the world, and our ideas of the self, as "avatar fetishism,” in which we disavow not only the “social labor of production but the material processes, objects, and embodiments that structure and enable everyday life in our ostensibly postindustrial era.” It is a construction of the “ideal self or an ideal ego,” one that is not influenced or defined by the limits and demands of its material relations to economic and political interests. It is “a fantasy of the transcendence of the material,” allowing us to believe that we, as individuals, stand above and outside the material and immaterial realities that condition and define us.  

This “fantasy of transcendence” has rather strange consequences. Editors, curators, festival organizers, prize committees, book publishers, and critics seldom reveal, recognize, or critically examine a reporter's institutional connections and commitments. The industry recasts journalists and photojournalists – almost always employees or contractors of corporate media outlets – as solo artists and individual witnesses, actively concealing their material complicity. A powerful moral and cultural language is used to evade questions of the journalist’s complicity with corporate interests and profit-based media production agendas, or their allegiance to specific political projects and imperial ideologies. Journalists themselves seem to be unaware of their political, ideological, and subjective entrapment within dominant discourses, unwittingly parroting racist, imperialist, and supremacist justifications for their work, and unthinkingly perpetuating the illusion that the only meaningful relationship is between the creator of the work (reporter, photographer) and its audience.  

Journalists don't just produce random work; they make judgments about what to cover, when, and how. When not explicitly assigned a story, they often discuss ideas, story framing and perspectives, content requirements, intentions, and related topics with editors to understand a publication’s priorities, interests, and agendas. Even freelancers and independent reporters need to “read the room” to find a place on the magazine pages. They have to produce stories that are timely and aligned with the publications' politics, agendas, perspectives, and ideologies to be published. They are equally influenced by their personal ambitions – for success, status, and financial rewards – which are inevitably shaped by the industry's discourses, issues, and priorities. There is frequent “ambulance chasing” as journalists and reporters chase the biggest stories and fight to be the first on the scene. Photojournalists are infamous for scouring the pages of humanitarian NGOs or surreptitiously watching the media caravan to make sure they are heading towards the hot stories and producing the work editors need most. Yet, all these fundamental realities are ignored, and a strange, almost superheroic figure is offered instead.  

And as problematic as the disavowal of the individual’s relation to his material realities is, it is only a reflection of a larger disavowal of neoliberal capitalism and the economic policies of US imperialism that occurs when Western journalists report the world, thereby seriously distorting our understanding of it. 

Asim Rafiqui worked as an independent photojournalist from 2001-2017, producing stories for publications including National Geographic (France), GEO, Stern, and Time. He is currently pursuing a PhD, researching the sensory and embodied epistemologies of a fisherfolk community along Pakistan’s Makran coast in Balochistan