Rial Profile

(Page 3 of 3)

“A lot of that is because there was so little information in the beginning. You couldn’t get into the countryside in Rwanda in those first 100 days. There will always be two sides to that story. Many people suffered. Everybody suffered,” Rial said.

Covering international events, of course, is not a game of zeroing out one group’s suffering against another. Rial’s international work focuses almost exclusively on the aftermath of conflicts and disasters. Whether in Kosovo in 1999 or in Northern Ireland in 2000, Rial focused on the lives of women and children. One of her last assignments before leaving the Post-Gazette for the St. Petersburg Times was to photograph the conditions in New Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina.

“Martha is not an adventurer. She ain’t no Jill Carroll,” said Dr. Steve Williams of Pittsburgh. He met Rial in Haiti when she photographed a story on the hospital where he works for part of the year. “She doesn’t want to sleep in the mud for two weeks. It’s just not who she is,” he said.

Rial has never covered a war live, but said she would consider it. A must would be enough money to provide good security. But as the international news hole shrinks and stories of fighting and geopolitical maneuvering fill those spaces, Rial’s work actually becomes more unusual. In a sense, seeing the intimacy of suffering distanced by time from the concussions of conflict is a revolutionary way to cover the world. The argument can be made that it is more powerful as well, especially in a media environment drinking a constant trickle of blood in far-away lands. For every Rial, there are ten Hadi Mizban’s, an AP photographer photographing the day-to-day carnage in Iraq.

Rial left the Post-Gazette in 2006 because she was disappointed by the direction in which the paper was heading. Management asked for 10 percent pay cuts and for staffers to give back a week of vacation; a photo editor, since gone, once said to her “The only reason you go to Africa, Martha, is so you can marry a black man.” Financial pressures consistently made international reporting a difficult sell.

Taking a job at the St. Petersburg Times was tough for Rial personally; she had built an extensive set of contacts in Pittsburgh and was melancholy about leaving her well-established social life. But she liked the independence of the Times (owned by a foundation) and knew the photo editor, Boyzell Hosey, from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. She hopes to continue shooting international stories there, though the Cuban government thwarted her first effort by refusing to issue a visa to a photographer working for a Florida newspaper.

Just before Rial left Pittsburgh in late October 2006, she spent more than a week in her basement organizing her twenty years of clips, negatives, and prints. “It was pretty emotional for me,” she said, “at times I had tears in my eyes.” The most emotional pictures for her, however, were not the accumulated images from broken countries around the world. They were pictures of her mother and her sisters, of old friends. The question American journalism must ask is: who is our family? Should the American media spend its heavily scrutinized resources to cover the entire world? And what are the consequences if it doesn’t?