The Pain of Our People is Not Your Cashcow: On Photojournalism and the Exploitation of Suffering in Conflicts

The pain that the people of Palestine and Lebanon have endured in the past three years is far too grand to summarize in a mere sentence or two, and perhaps, no words will ever be able to properly reflect such suffering or the weight of the atrocities committed by the occupation in our lands. 

For those living through it, suffering is never reduced to a single moment. It is layered and is carried across days, months, years, and generations.

However, the suffering extends beyond what is endured alone; it continues in how it is documented.  

As soon as Lebanon entered the global news cycle in 2023, with Israel’s war on the country in tandem with its genocide in Gaza, a surge of foreign media presence followed. Photojournalists and photographers –whether freelance or affiliated with major platforms—arrived in waves, drawn by urgency and visibility. We’ve experienced this countless times, whether in Lebanon, Palestine, or Syria. Many of them arrive when the story peaks, and they leave when it fades. Their presence is shaped by attention rather than continuity, and what remains is not only the ongoing suffering, but a cycle in which our lives are repeatedly entered, documented, and exited.

I believe in the power of documentation and archiving. I believe that the crimes of the occupation must be recorded and preserved as an undeniable record of their violence, and as a refusal of erasure. But I also believe that not all documentation is helpful, dignifying, or well-intentioned. 

In practice, this distinction becomes difficult to maintain. Many of these visiting photographers, journalists, and photojournalists have contributed to intensifying the suffering. They enter moments of devastation without regard for dignity, and turn people into subjects to be captured rather than recognizing them as human beings who have already lost too much. 

We’ve seen this happen repeatedly: when journalists crowd up in funeral processions of martyrs, as mothers weep over their sons and daughters that they’ll never see again, and as families attempt to process loss and partake in our customary mourning rites. And just like that, the vulnerability of these moments is interrupted by flashes, lenses and the urgency to capture a perfect shot. 

Such behaviors are not mere acts of “witnessing and reporting”. This becomes a form of extraction where grief is recorded and circulated, while those living through it have little control over how their image is used, interpreted, or remembered. For example, families displaced on  the streets of Beirut—already stripped of privacy and dignity as the government’s response to their hardship nowhere near enough—find themselves photographed without consent, their faces turned into tokenized symbols of crisis. They are not asked how they wish to be seen and not even given the choice to refuse. Their reality is simply taken advantage of. 

And though I acknowledge that this can vary from one individual to another, and that many do try their best to uphold ethical standards, this brings light to a broader mismatch within the field. Ethical standards in journalism emphasize consent and minimizing harm. Yet these standards are not applied equally. In Western contexts, photographing individuals in moments of extreme vulnerability without consent would be questioned, challenged, and often condemned. Here, those same boundaries are loosened, if not entirely abandoned.

This comes to show a selective application of ethics. 

In places like Lebanon and Palestine, countries pushed to the margins of the global order, people are positioned differently within hierarchies of whose lives are protected and whose are exposed. Accountability is weaker, less visible, and less enforced. The expectation of consequence fades. Much of this documentation is produced for audiences that are geographically and politically removed from the realities being captured. And in that distance, a dangerous comfort emerges: the belief that our suffering is accessible, and that our dignity is negotiable.

Photojournalism itself has long grappled with how images of inequality and suffering shape public perception. 

And from that, another layer of inequality emerges. The photos they snap of our people in such situations are by no means neutral records: they make their way across platforms, publications, and institutions. They’re sold, exhibited, and win awards, part of a global ecosystem that “recognizes powerful visual story telling.” They bring recognition, credibility, and financial gain to the one behind the lens, while the very subjects of these images were not asked to be photographed and did not consent to having their grief circulated globally. They do not gain financially nor professionally from these photos. Instead, they are left with a token of their most vulnerable moments, shared for the world to see without their control. And just like that, another person builds a career on the back of another person’s pain.

It is one thing to make a living. It is another to do so at the expense of someone else’s pain. 

Our people are not your entry point into a story or a global award nor are they evidence to validate narratives constructed elsewhere. These are people who are navigating loss and suffering under conditions imposed by violence and occupation. 

Our people are not your cash cows.

Our suffering belongs to us: it is not a resource to be circulated for recognition or reach. 

If there is to be documentation, then it must begin differently. It must move away from extraction and toward genuine accountability. It must question who is behind the lens, who the image serves, and what is returned to those whose lives are being captured, because what is at stake is not only how suffering is seen. It is who has the power to represent it, and who is left to live with the consequences.