Frederic Sautereau, a French freelance photographer, hesitated before distributing his shot of a baby girl lying abandoned in a morgue. The image of the lifeless body is disturbing, but, he says, not gratuitously so - it represents what was, and still is, happening in Haiti. Nonetheless some viewers have reacted violently to the photograph. 'I understand these reactions, but I think my work has always been respectful of the people I photograph,' he says.

Sautereau isn't alone in this dilemma. Photographers and pictures editors working on the Haiti disaster are walking a fine line between picturing the extent of the tragedy and falling into gruesome voyeurism.

Haiti was hit by earthquake on 12 January and in a matter of minutes, according to the latest estimates, 150,000 people were killed. Photographers and journalists immediately scrambled to reach the country - CNN's correspondent Anderson Cooper, boarding one of the last civilian planes to the country within minutes of hearing of the disaster.

The New York Times deployed two of its photographers, Damon Winter and Maggie Stebber, on the evening of 12 January. Winter arrived in the devastated country the day after the earthquake; Stebber, who has worked in Haiti for years, soon followed. In the ensuing days, Ozier Muhammad and Michael Appleton joined them. With limited resources on the ground, the newspaper had to make sure their photographers were provided with everything they needed, says Jessie De Witt, one of the picture editors.

'They need satellite phones in order to file their images. In these situations you have to get practical. You need, for example, power inverters that'll let you charge phones off a car battery.'

As the days went on, The New York Times sent other resources to its photographers, such as power bars, head lamps, pens, batteries - 'a lot of batteries', says De Witt says - satellite phones such as BGANs, lenses and even tents. 'On Thursday (21 January), our deputy foreign editor bought two generators,' she adds, the first of which went to Haiti with the NYT's United Nations correspondent when he covered Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's visit to the country. The second went with correspondent Ray Rivera through Santo Domingo.

Sautereau, who filed images for the Liberation newspaper, arrived in Haiti from the neighbouring Dominican Republic. 'I had to rent a car to reach the Haitian border, and then hitch a ride to get to Port-au-Prince,' he says. Jeroen Oerlemans, another freelance photographer, followed the same route, arriving in Haiti on 14 January with a Nikon DSLR camera and a couple of lenses. Like the other photographers, he had to work in very difficult conditions. 'There was a lack of security and a lack of information, due in main part to the scarce communication possibilities,' he tells BJP. 'The telephone network was down most of the time, and fuel was running out very quickly.'

To file his images, Oerlemans used a mix of ordinary mobile and satellite phones, coupled with a BGAN satellite dish. Even still, communication is patchy, and The New York Times is having trouble staying in touch with its photographers. 'Communication is very problematic,' says De Witt. 'The best way is to contact them on their BGANs - either by email or voice.' The photographers are each paired with a correspondent, so that they know which stories the journalists are working on and can select and file appropriate images without being briefed by the editors.

Trauma

As well as the practical difficulties, the reporters also have to deal with emotional effect of what they are seeing - not always easy when bodies are piling up on the streets. 'If you wander around anywhere, there's destruction,' Winter told Lens, The New York Times' photojournalism blog.

'Pretty much every pile of rubble that you see, whether it looks like it or not, has people buried underneath. You have to be so careful. I was just stepping up to a pile of rubble to get a shot and I looked down and this woman's head was right there among the broken pieces of the building. It's overwhelming.'

'I'm seeing a lot of human suffering,' adds Oerlemans. 'People are deprived of food, water and medication, and have often lost a lot of family. I have seen disasters before - every disaster knows it's own human tragedy - but I'm coping with the suffering, otherwise I shouldn't be here. Talking about it might be the best way to prevent symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.'

The horror inevitably raises questions about their work, as Sautereau has found. 'I hesitated before showing it (his photograph of a dead child),' he says. 'But then I decided that this kid in the morgue represented the situation as I saw it - dead kids, injured kids, amputated babies. I accept that people might react strongly against this photo, but I think it needs to be shown. Let's not forget that we're talking about more than 100,000 victims. We have to represent the dead.

'I don't think there is a right or wrong attitude,' he continues. 'Each photographer tries his best to show, with one or several pictures, the extent of the situation. Each works with his own conscience, his own story and his own instincts and feelings.'

The extent of the disaster has also brought the photojournalists' role into question, with some asking whether they shouldn't step in to help, and others criticising them for doing so. CNN's Anderson Cooper, for example, has come under heavy attack after being filmed helping an injured boy escape from a desperate group scavenging for food with an Italian photojournalist accusing him of 'playing with people'.

For Oerlemans, there's no simple answer but his photography does come first. 'I'm not a doctor or a medic, I'm photographer,' he says. 'But you try to do your best, on a small human scale, if the situation allows you to.'

Reuters photographer Jorge Silva agrees. 'Many people ask if journalists help in disasters,' he writes in a blogpost on Reuters.com. 'I don't think we help directly. Our job is to trigger the response from institutions that do. This is what motivates us to come to these places, to point the eyes of the world towards people who are suffering and clamouring for help. We have to sensitise people to the situation through our pictures.'

Editorial choice

Back in the newspaper offices, thousands of miles away from Haiti, picture editors are faced with the difficult dilemma of what to publish. 'You can walk a fine line between voyeurism and journalism,' says Graham Cross of the Eyevine agency.

'But after simple common sense and making judgment calls on taste and relevance to the story, our rule of thumb is that if an image is so horrific we think it won't be published, we won't distribute it. There have been many such images from Haiti.'

'We are careful in making judgment calls that reflect the news and don't sensationalise or engage in gratuitous gruesomeness,' De Witt tells BJP. 'We do feel very strongly that we have an obligation to reflect what is happening, but there have been some very gruesome images that we chose not to publish because we felt they did not add to the information people need. What I'm really careful to do is to balance the coverage. Context is important. Also, there are many different levels of trauma. Some might not have lost a limb, but they still lost a lot.'

And then, every now and again, images surface that are full of hope and happiness, such as Matthew McDermott's shot of Kiki's Rescue. Kiki, a five-year-old boy, was rescued unharmed after spending five days underneath concrete in the ruins of his home. In this case the devastation frames a moment of joy, and the photographer was on hand to catch it.

Online

fredericsautereau.com
jeroenoerlemans.com
eyevine.com
lens.blogs.nytimes.com
blogs.reuters.com/photo