On November 7, 1956, in Budapest, on a barricade erected to oppose invading Soviet troops, Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini was killed. He was 29 years old and a photographer for Paris Match. That was my earliest memory of a photographer who fell on the battlefield in the name of journalism. I was eight years old.

In November 1956, I was already deep in the world of “the press.” My father ran La Grosse Pipe, a newspaper and tobacco shop in Troyes, in Champagne, and I was in charge of counting the unsold papers. Paris Match was never in the unsold pile.

Years later, as a young man fascinated by the talented Gilles Caron, his disappearance on April 5, 1970, in Cambodia, felt like a warning. I was about to leave behind the comforts of studying journalism to enter the real world, freelancing for a collective of photojournalists

Five years later, on April 27, 1975, Michel Laurent of Gamma disappeared on an Asian road. We had crossed paths several times while on assignment. I was struck by his professional and sartorial elegance. He seemed like a poet lost in the uniform ranks of Elysée photographers. His disappearance shocked me.

Was it worth it? Was this the price of information? All young journalists ask themselves these questions, and neither one is reprehensible. That’s why I think everyone urging young photographers not to go to the frontlines is ridiculous. On what grounds can you forbid a young freelance photographer from going to Syria or anywhere else? It’s a pointless debate. In the real world, local news is responsible for more deaths than covering wars.

Of the 89 journalists killed in 2012 identified by Reporters Without Borders and the International Center for Photography, not a single one chose to die for his or her profession. But they all accepted the possibility.

The “A Day Without News?” initiative is excellent because it aims to remind the public and the authorities of the life and death conditions faced by journalists.

In this era of “globalization,” governments can target journalists with impunity. Only the intervention of an international legal body can prove to the public that these men and women were not killed “accidentally” or because they “took too many risks,” but because someone in power deemed that it was better to keep whatever was happening out of the news.

If the investigation continues, perhaps one day we’ll know how and why Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik were killed in Homs on February 22, 2012.

Photographer, photojournalist, war correspondent—whatever you want to call these curious people, they don’t have it easy. It’s hard to make a living. Their lives are haunted by the names of the dead, the names of cities: Algiers, Saigon, Sarajevo, Grozny.

In this profession, we’re reluctant to speak of death. We’re reluctant to speak of ourselves. We only censor ourselves at confession. We come back from the field and go back to our lives in Paris, New York or wherever, and we keep our mouths shut.

But every day reporters like us are out there, crawling through hell on earth, capturing the horror. The public accuses us of showing too much violence. They never imagine, not for a minute, that what they see in the papers are only muted visions of that hell. We were there. We saw it all.

Michel Puech