Podcast: Lucian Read Explains His Haditha Photos

When freelance photographer Lucian Read came upon a house of grieving Iraqis back in November of last year, he wasn't quite sure what to make of the scene. Read, who was embedded with the Kilo company of Marines tasked with securing the farm town of Haditha, let his instincts take over and quickly entered the house, where he photographed more than a dozen bodies of dead Iraqis, including women and children.

The pictures didn't seem all that out-of-the-ordinary at the time, this being a war zone and all, but only now have they became front-page news as allegations surfaced that Marines in Kilo company had slaughtered innocent Iraqis in a fit of rage after one of their comrades was killed by a roadside bomb.

Read's photos ran extensively in last week's issues of Time and Newsweek, including the covers, and word has spread of a bidding war for the TV rights to the images, which are being licensed by WorldPictureNews.

For Read, who has been embedded with the Marines during some of the war's heaviest fighting, including the battle at Fallujah, the personal success of his photos has been bittersweet. Over the past three years he's befriended many of the Marines he's photographed, and to see some of them accused of war-time atrocities is difficult to fathom.

Now back in Southern California, Read says the Haditha photos didn't strike him as being "some sort of seminal moment in the history of the war" when he took them. "It was more just another in a long series of sad events that I've seen over there," he says.

Although the military is now investigating allegations that the Marines tried to cover up the killings, Read says he was never pressured overtly or covertly to censor the photos.

"I showed these pictures to lots of people over there and nobody ever told me not to send them back [to the U.S.], nobody ever really raised an eyebrow," Read says.

The fact that the photos got so little attention before the full extent of Haditha was known is a fact that clearly bothers Read.

"Nobody paid attention for months," he says. "That's the place the military has gotten to, the journalists have probably gotten to and the American public has gotten to, where until you have an extraordinary story, nobody cares about another bunch of dead Iraqis."

Now that the world is paying attention, the response to Read's Haditha photos should give all photographers hope that the images they capture today might some day have a historical impact.

And for Read, the success of his photos gives lie to the argument that unembedded photographers can somehow get to the unvarnished truth in Iraq better than those traveling with the military.

"I've always felt a little bad that I'm not in Baghdad covering the Iraqi side," Read admits. "But by having relationships with the military where they trust you and help you get to where you want to go and do what you want to do, that's what led me to take these pictures. ... The only stories aren't in Baghdad. And the only way you can get at the rest of the country is with the military. And the only way you can get at that story with the military is to put in the time."

 "The most important thing is just to be there," he says.  "Whether you have some cool idea of what you're doing or not, there are so few [photojournalists in Iraq] now that just by showing the world what you see around you every day makes a tremendous contribution."

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