What's Wrong with These Pictures?

Crisis Pictures is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that buys and publishes photos from world trouble spots that the mainstream media don't publish. Here's what they say about themselves and their mission:

By showing the consequences of policies, Crisis Pictures demands viewers reflect on their values. The child in Fallujah, bleeding to death in their mother’s arms, the bulldozed home in a refugee camp in Gaza, the eight year old boy missing an arm in Liberia — is this the world you thought you were building?

The “Crisis” in “Crisis Pictures” is in the heart of each and every visitor who is silent long enough to look in the face of the grieving. Either we are responsible for our fellow man (woman, child), or we are not.

We may have vastly different solutions for these tragedies. Crisis Pictures starts the conversation from the shared emotional understanding that tragedies like Fallujah are not just another bad day in the third world. They are about real people that are like you and we, not our leaders, we are responsible.

Politics

Crisis Pictures is non political. We are neither left nor right, nor center. Crisis Pictures’ mission is to inform visitors of the human costs of armed conflict. If there are political implications of posting these pictures, that’s between you and your conscience.

I had begun a post about their work and returned to the site to update some links. Instead of the stirring photos I expected, I found this message.

Crisis Pictures desperately needs your help to stay online

Last Friday, without warning we were locked out of our image server. We have no reason to believe we will regain access.

We consume an astronomical amount of bandwidth. Content is only getting more expensive. If you can help, you can donate by check or credit card here.

After checking around, I haven't found much of an outcry in the blogosphere, but if Crisis Pictures goes down, we will have lost an important visual connection to what is being carried out in our name around the world. As yet, there's no word on whether this is simply a matter of being unable to pay bills or some nefarious form of censorship.

Two bloggers had posted some of the Crisis Pictures before the server went down, and the links are here to Dumb Life of Roots and here. The Republic of T has posts here and here.

If you haven't visited the site before, it's hard to grasp the power of all the images in one repository. In a later post, I'll describe some that still stick with me. In the meantime, I've made a donation and hope to start a ripple effect of support.

This is important....