Last week, as details of the murders at an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania were still unfolding, a CJR Daily reader wrote to us wondering whether “all the photogs flocking to the scene know” that the Amish believe that being photographed violates the Bible’s second commandment. (Specifically, “Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath …”)

It’s challenging enough, this reader suggested, to photograph a grieving community, to balance the news value of a given image against a certain respectfulness for its subjects. But how does one photograph a grieving community whose beliefs prohibit them from being photographed?

“I’m curious,” the reader wrote, “about the editorial calls made on photographing the distraught Amish/not photographing them. In some cases it looks like there was consent, but I can’t be sure. In others it looks like the Amish were photographed without notification … I am genuinely curious — does the newsworthiness of the story override sensitivity/respect for their traditions? Some of the photographic coverage seems a bit like voyeuristic rubbernecking to me …”

We put these questions to several news photographers and editors who covered the story last week, all of whom indicated that they made a special effort to be as sensitive as possible. As one photographer put it: “It was a torturous enough assignment first because of what it was and then because they were Amish on top of it.” What “being sensitive” meant in practice, however, varied from photographer to photographer.

Carolyn Kaster, a Harrisburg, Pa.-based Associated Press photographer, has worked extensively with the Amish community during her fifteen-year career and, when the news of the shooting broke, she sought “guidance” from an old source — an Amish woodworker — about how to handle the assignment. The man stressed the importance of telling the story and advised that everyone is different, to ask each individual how to proceed. Kaster describes as typical her approach to a recent project involving the Amish: “I talk to them, [tell] them what I’m doing and that I [will] photograph them in a way that [won’t] identify them or make them stand out. I [make] them part of the landscape, silhouette them.”

This is similar to the tack that Dan Marschka, a photographer for the Lancaster, Pa. Intelligencer Journal, takes when photographing the Amish community. Explained Marschka, “I understand the religious aspect and we have a policy here we try to adhere to [vis à vis the Amish]: we try not to take recognizable photos, where people are recognizable, in a non-news situation.” He added, “If it’s a news situation, the Amish understand and so do we that they are part of a very public event and if they present themselves that way in the midst of that news situation, it’s all understood.”

Ed Hille, a longtime Philadelphia Inquirer photographer, concurred that, in this case, the news value of the photographs trumped most cultural considerations. “This wasn’t a story about the Amish and their quaintness,” Hille said. “It was about five girls who were executed by a sick person. We were covering a news story.”

Hille’s Inquirer colleague, Scott Hamrick, added, “To a certain extent, you take the picture and you presume that your editor will make sure that if there’s a concern about something being too graphic or painful that the editor won’t use that photograph.” Continued Hamrick, “My job is to collect the information and begin the process of telling the story. I shoot first, ask later.”

The AP’s Carolyn Kaster appreciates this approach but has a slightly different philosophy: whenever possible, do no harm. “You can go through this business and try to make pictures of impact and importance but if an image is to have a journalistic purpose, to communicate something, if you can communicate it in a different way, without causing harm, then I think you’re obliged to do that,” Kaster said. She described a photograph that she declined to take last week because consent was not granted: She approached an Amish school in the area and “without my cameras explained who I was and what I’d like to do, to take a picture of kids on school grounds with no one singled out.” The teacher told Kaster that the children were “very wary” and asked her not to take the picture. “I said no problem. I did not make that photograph.”

Kaster went to two other schools and got the same answer. “I had every right as an American to stand on public property and take that photograph,” she said. “I could’ve taken the picture and asked the teacher later. But that’s just how I approach this community.” Kaster added, “That might have been a key picture — children in the schoolyard of a one-room Amish schoolhouse,” and conceded that colleagues might criticize her for not having taken that photograph. “But,” she said, “I found another way to communicate what I wanted to communicate that I felt was within the boundaries of the [Amish traditions]” — by waiting for the children to get out of school and “be away from the school house environment,” finding a group of them walking home and talking to them and photographing them as they “hammed it up.” Said Kaster, “I could tell I wasn’t frightening them and causing them grief by photographing them. And I did have a job to do. I needed to make pictures of the Amish community, specifically children.” (As both Kaster and the Intelligencer Journal’s Dan Marschka pointed out, the Amish are baptized as adults and so children, not yet church members, are not under the same religious prohibitions regarding photography).

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