Malibu can sometimes seem like an insular bubble, but MHS grad Julie Platner’s career as a photojournalist brought her to parts of the world — and our society — most people in America seldom witness firsthand.
Platner returned to her hometown last week as a featured presenter at the Malibu Library Speaker Series, detailing her exploits as a photojournalist — which included documenting the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, following a chapter of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club and spending a year on an exposé of a neo-Nazi group in Riverside headed by National Socialist Movement leader Jeff Hall. Her work on that project was cut short when Hall was murdered by his own 10-year-old son.
Platner was introduced to the local crowd of about 120 people by City Council Member Laura Rosenthal. Her photography has been published in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Al Jazeera Magazine, among many others, and featured on a number of national newscasts. A collection of Platner’s work is on display at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts as well as the Memory & Tolerance Museum in Mexico City, and she’s won a number of awards, including the 2011 National Public Radio Fellowship.
“I went out in the world with a camera to see the mundane and the ordinary, as well as to see what war was like,” she said. “My photos are ultimately taken from someone else’s story, which is not always my own. For me, the power was in making compelling imagery. The authority of a camera lens representing something truthful is the magic spot.”
Platner described her experience covering the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
“It was like descending into Dante’s Inferno,” she said. “A five-star hotel was a pile of rubble. At our hotel, there were heavily armed guards, and half of it was collapsed — we were given a choice of sleeping in a room or sleeping outside by the pool, which was safer during aftershocks.
“My first deeply troubling moral dilemma as a photojournalist was when I saw them performing amputations without anesthesia,” Platner recounted. “I was walking around with my depleted self, getting ready to photograph people in extreme pain, when a man led me to his four-year old daughter with head trauma and asked me for help. And I couldn’t do anything to help his daughter. Images may help bring in more aid, but the emotional experience of that moment shattered everything I knew. The most painful element of being in that hell was that I had chosen to be there, in my naiveté and my ignorance.
“The next morning downtown, there was a lot of looting. It felt edgy and scary, and police started shooting and killed somebody. It was chaos,” she said. Once she was back in the U.S., Platner described a kind of PTSD from the Haiti experience. “I needed time to process what I had seen,” she described.
Platner told of traveling to Mississippi to cover the night of the Presidential election that Obama won in 2008.
“I went to a bar, and they had sports on TV. I said, ‘Excuse me, do you know there’s a Presidential election?,’” Platner recalled. “The man behind the bar said, ‘We’re not gonna pay attention to that garbage.’ I realized then we were not entering a post-racial era.”
That got her interested in covering American Nazis. “What would make someone have such extreme hatred of others?” she asked herself. She eventually connected with Jeff Hall of Riverside, the West Coast unit leader, who was married with children. He began giving her the dates of rallies and letting her follow their day-to-day activities.
“I followed them for one year until young Joseph Hall shot and killed his Dad 12 hours after I left the house,” Platner said. The case received national and even international news coverage, which put Platner and her work in the spotlight on 60 Minutes, CNN and various other newscasts.
“If you take away the swastikas, it’s like any normal family gathering, and that’s what I wanted to show — the ordinariness of it,” Platner said.
Looking back on her photojournalistic experiences, Platner tended to be philosophical and introspective.
“I entered photojournalism with the idea of alleviating the suffering of others, but sometimes I wonder if I don’t create more suffering by exposing people to the suffering of others,” she reflected.
Platner currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and two young children.
