Profile: Martha Rial

The Hutu woman pulls away her skirt enough to show a scar, scabbed and horizontal, across her thigh. There is a scar on her breast as well. The photographer shoots.  The colors are muted and the background of bundled sticks propping up the woman’s hut in this Tanzanian refuge camp is abstract. Two women from international aid organizations watch and translate. They tell the photographer that the Hutu woman was raped; they tell the photographer that her husband was abducted and killed; they tell the photographer that her home was set on fire with her six children inside. They tell the photographer that five of those children died. “I have never seen so much pain in a person’s eyes before,” the photographer would say later. “The experience was very powerful.”

Martha Rial, then 36 and in her third year as a staff photographer for her hometown Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was that photographer. A year later she would be a Pulitzer Prize winner. How she got to that small hut in Tanzania from a town where stories about the Pittsburgh Steelers regularly land on A1 and lead the TV newscasts is a tale about the personality and beliefs of a single journalist. Yet it is also a tale about the role that international journalism can assume in increasingly budget-strapped and locally fixated domestic news industry. Is foreign reporting a necessary spice in the often-flavorless porridge of newspaper journalism? Do readers care about events unfolding 9,000 miles from their doorstep?

Rial grew up in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, a gray-skied, suburban strip fifteen miles outside of Pittsburgh. Her mother was a public health nurse, a career that two of her four sisters would later pursue. Rial began shooting pictures after buying a Yashica camera from a photographer at a local newspaper called The Ben Franklin. At 17, she moved into the city to attend The Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

“It was a decadent time,” she said, “much wilder than Murrysville.”

She parlayed that two-year degree into a decade of freelance work. Mellon Bank, a Pittsburgh women’s magazine, the City of Pittsburgh­ – Rial found work around town shooting portraits, ads, and company events.

At 29, sick of corporate work, she enrolled at Ohio University, one of the nation’s best photojournalism programs. It was here, in small town Ohio, that she shot her first photo story about a black woman pledging an all-white sorority. “I saw her and I thought, this girl has balls. ”

From Ohio University she worked several internships, eventually landing a job at newspapers in Alexandria, Virginia, and Ft. Pierce, Florida. At 32, with her mother in Pittsburgh seriously ill, Rial applied for a job at the Post-Gazette.

 “To me,” said former Post-Gazette managing editor Maddy Ross, “Martha was the quintessential journalist. Not photojournalist– journalist. She was great at reading people, understanding issues, and getting behind the jargon.” But initially, Ross thought Rial was too inexperienced for the job.

“We want to hire a big name,” Rial recalls a different editor telling her. “We want someone who’s maybe won a Pulitzer.” But persistence and an ally in the photo department got her hired, nevertheless.

The defining moment of her career would come 1997, in the wake of the genocide in Rwanda. The catalyst was her sister, Amy, a public health nurse working in the Tanzanian refugee camps who encouraged Martha to photograph the dire situation.

“I approached the paper and said I want to do a story on my sister. They just chuckled and said you can’t be serious. But I bugged them,” said Rial. The access her sister ensured (“I could glom onto her,” Rial said), coupled with the comparatively cheap $5,000 price tag (“that’s unheard of”), buckled the editors after a month of nagging. “You better make sure as hell she doesn’t get hurt,” said one editor. Soon Rial was on her way to Kigali, Rwanda. “I had no idea what to expect,” she said.

To understand Rial’s feelings on that flight into Africa, one must keep in mind how provincial the American public and media had become at the time. A May 1996 Washington Post poll showed that only 23 percent of newspaper readers were interested in international reportage, compared to 70 percent who were interested in local news. Though September 11, 2001, bumped up public interest towards a narrow slice of the world, the bleak consensus was, and still is, that Americans find the world much less interesting than they do themselves.