Reuters reports “A Malaysian Muslim woman who will be caned next week for drinking beer has defiantly asked that the punishment be carried out in public in a case that is fuelling debate about tolerance in this multi-racial country. Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno will be the first Malaysian woman to be caned under Islamic laws applicable to Malaysia’s Muslims, who account for 60 percent of the 27-million population.”
Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno chats with her son (R) Muhammad Azfar, 7, and daughter Wann Kaitlynn Sari Dewi, 5, at her father’s house in Sungei Siput, about 300km (186 miles) north of Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia’s state of Perak, August 21, 2009. REUTERS/Zainal Abd Halim
If Kartika is caned in public would you as a photographer (if it were up to you decide) go to the event and take pictures of this mother of two being beaten? And if you did how would you shoot those pictures, wide and in close, so close you could hear the crack of the cane on her body and hear her cries of pain? On a longer lens from a distance, more detached as a person but shooting tight pictures that you know will give the viewer every painful detail of the punishment? Or, finally, from a distance on a wide lens to show the crowd surrounding the scene? And once you have shot those images how will you edit? Would you sanitise them and not file the pictures that show Kartika suffering the most or would you feel that everyone should see what you had photographed, knowing that a morning daily family paper may not even use that image?
Sometime next week these are the decisions our editors and photographers in Malaysia will have to make.
