Danger Pay : Memoir of a Photojournalist in the Middle East, 1984-1994

by Mitchell, Carol Spencer

• ISBN13: 9780292718821
• ISBN10: 0292718829
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

"You're going where?" Carol Spencer Mitchell's father demanded as she set off in 1984 to cover the Middle East as a photojournalist for Newsweek and other publications. In this intensely thoughtful memoir, Spencer Mitchell probes the motivations that impelled her, a single, Jewish woman, to document the turmoil roiling the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as how her experiences as a photojournalist "compelled [me] to set aside [my] cameras and reexamine the way images are created, scenes are framed, and how 'real life' is packaged for specific news stories." In Danger Pay, Spencer Mitchell takes us on a harrowing journey to PLO military training camps for Palestinian children and to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the first intifada. Through her eyes, we experience the media frenzy surrounding the 1985 hijackings of TWA Flight #847 and the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. We meet Middle Eastern leaders, in particular Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, with whom Spencer Mitchell developed close working relationships. And we witness Spencer Mitchell's growing conviction that the Western media's portrayal of conflicts in the Middle East actually helps to fuel those conflicts--a conviction that eventually, as she says, "shattered my career." Although the events that Spencer Mitchell records took place a generation ago, their repercussions reverberate in the conflicts going on in the Middle East today. Likewise, her concern about "the triumph of image over reality" takes on greater urgency as our knowledge of the world becomes ever more filtered by virtual media.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Prologue

There's a New Kid in Town

The Burning Bush

Reorienting

Crossing the Bridge

Ode to Abu Ammar

Gaza Slick

Photo Op

A Room with a View

The Moment and the Mask

His Majesty

Let's Get Some Color

House of Hashem

Up, Up, and Away

Private Conversations (I)

Passing Through

TWA Flight #847

Exile

Cruising

Caviar, Khat, and Cover Pix

Inside Terror, Inc.

Dance into Darkness

Journalists Are Used to Danger

He Who Builds

Private Conversations (II)

Promise Me I Won't Be Touched

Lebanon

Travels in Sudan

Sorry, All Lines Are Jammed

Wau (Wow!)

I Don't Know What I'm Feeling

You Need Something to Peg the Story On

The Striptease

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Photo-Realism, the "Real" Picture, and the Ingathering

The Striptease

The Mother of All Battles

What the Hell Am I Doing?

The Sealed Room

The Striptease, Take 2

Epilogue

The Old Man

War on Another Front

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