The image that cracked Israel’s Christian story
The image of an Israeli soldier taking an axe to a crucified-Jesus statue in southern Lebanon spread faster than almost any photograph from that front, and I wanted to understand why this one, and not the bodies. My answer for Maailman Kuvalehti is that it broke a story Israel’s Christian supporters have spent decades building — and that symbolic harm still provokes more outrage than human harm. Which says something uncomfortable about how we look.
Authoritarian regimes’ version of reality finds its way into newsrooms all too easily
After Khamenei’s death the pictures from Iran showed a nation in mourning – weeping crowds, portraits, flags. Every one of them was true. Together they were still less than the sum of their parts, because everything that cannot safely be photographed in Iran stayed outside the frame. I wrote this for Maailman Kuvalehti to argue that verifying a caption isn’t enough; a newsroom also has to ask who decides which pictures can be made at all.