This disk is war, and it's not a game

A frustrated photojournalist has become an eager convert to CD- Rom. Tom Standage explains why

Most CD-Roms are either packed with information or are pure entertainment. But serious artists are increasingly seeing the potential of multimedia, and are starting to publish their work on disc.

Judah Passow is an award-winning photojournalist who has just launched a series of CD-Roms, each of which sets out to examine current affairs issues from the viewpoint of the participants in a number of the world's recent conflicts.

"These are the little people in the war," says Passow, "people who have never been asked what they thought, the people in whose names these wars are waged, people who got lost in the smoke and the fire and the haze. Here they are speaking amazingly candidly as individuals who had just had enough."

The first disk to appear is Days of Rage: Beirut 1982-1985. It combines black-and-white photographs with spoken commentaries in a compelling slide- show, playing back the reactions of an Israeli soldier and a Lebanese civilian to each image in turn. The two witnesses were interviewed separately, but the interweaving of their words along the common thread of Passow's hard-hitting photographs has a powerful impact.

Passow became involved with CD-Rom technology in response to the state of the newspaper market, for despite being one of the most regularly commissioned photographers in his field and a World Press Photo award winner, he has watched support for traditional black-and-white photojournalism decline very rapidly in recent years.

"I've become frustrated by the state of the newspaper and magazine market, and its attitude towards serious documentary photography," Passow says. "Picture desks' budgets mean that it is almost impossible for photographers to go off and work on the kinds of stories that I'm interested in working on, and when you do get a chance, the amount of space that the photographs are given is often completely inadequate to explain the subject properly."

Accordingly, Days of Rage also features an essay by the journalist Julie Flint, statistics, and maps showing where each photograph was taken. Rather than use the sanitised, simplified maps seen on TV reports, Passow has instead scanned in the dog-eared street map that he carried around in his pocket. The result is a far greater immediacy - showing Beirut in the way that its occupants see it from the ground, rather than as a distant, abstract, computer-generated map populated solely by embassies, borders and bomb blasts.

The combination of still photographs, text and sound - the voices of participants in the conflict, the brooding, evocative saxophone solo that accompanies one of the slide shows, and Passow's own introduction, spoken down a crackling international telephone line - is skilfully handled, and manages to combine the best elements of TV and radio documentary, still photography, and newspaper journalism.

After using the disk, I had the strong impression that it had made its point in a way that none of these forms of conventional media could have done alone. If only there were more multimedia titles of which the same could be said.

'Days of Rage' (Mac/PC dual format) is available from Multimedia Solutions, 01132 342 528. Further Vision's homepage can be found at http://gaia.gn.apc.org/comsites/vision/home.html