A few years ago—three to be more exact—I was
encountering the usual indignities of a life of freelance
writing and was talking with the Boston Globe Arts
editor, Scott Powers, about opportunities at that august newspaper.
About the same time the renowned photographer James
Nachtwey was in town to lecture at the Photographic Resource
Center in conjunction with his book, Inferno, newly
published by Phaidon. Seizing an opportunity to showcase my
skills and
initiative, versatility, sense of humor, grasp of social issues,
equanimity, fashion sense, news nose and kindness to animals,
I wrote up a seven hundred word news piece on Nachtwey’s
lecture and the book. Which I then e-mailed to editor
Powers shortly after the lecture that evening (hoping, of
course, to also prove my creative rapidity and/or my rapid
creativity).
Power’s response was flabbergasting. He might have
told me that I was a terrible writer and that what I had written
was terrible. Or he might have told me that what I had written
was okay but not for a newspaper—or any number of variations
on that theme.
Here’s what he did tell me: the Globe had
done a big piece on Nachtwey three years hence when the Mass
College of Art hosted a major exhibition of Nachtwey’s
work. Therefore, there was no need to cover this lecture or
review the book. Maybe he was being a nice guy and sparing
my feelings by not trashing my offering. Who knows?
Here is what I wrote:
Photojournalist James Nachtwey, who was raised and went
to college in New England, spoke and presented slides from
his new book Inferno at the Photographic Resource
Center in Boston last night. Over two hundred people heard
Nachtwey refer to the emotional challenge posed by the photographs
in that nearly 500-page tome. As he showed some of the photographs
he repeatedly acknowledged “the harrowing nature of
these images” and his commitment to putting them in
front of the world and his respect for the readers whom viewed
them.
Edited from 10 years of visits to the mouths of hell
in Romania, Somalia, India, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire,
Chechnya and Kosovo, Inferno is not a “best
of” collection of photographs. Rather it is the expression
of the narrative thread that Nachtwey realized was emerging
in his work around 1992. From the horrors of the orphanage
gulag in Romania he discovered in 1990 to the profound despair
in he portrayed in Kosovo last year James Nachtwey, who is
a member of the hallowed Magnum photo agency, has shot for
Time, Life, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic,
the German magazine Stern and the major Spanish magazine
El Pais. In his photographs, he conveys the dignity
of the sufferers in a dramatically personal and direct way.
We look right into the faces of Romanian AIDS orphans. We
see close up a dead Somali child being washed in preparation
for her funeral shroud. Nachtwey gives us a picture of just
the arms of Indian “untouchables” doing body-breaking
menial labor. In Bosnia, we watch the bodies of Serbian soldiers
being dumped out of a flat bead truck. In Kosovo, we are placed
face to face with the despairing and displaced Albanian deportees.
In page after page of this beautifully designed and printed
book— which is dedicated to the people in it—eloquent
and direct testimony is given to suffering of the victims
of these crimes against humanity.
Nachtwey, who eschews any skill in writing and in fact,
sees its practice as a totally different mind set, was persuaded
by a good friend to contribute an afterward to his book (Luc
Sante wrote the Introduction), “Inferno represents
a personal journey through the dark reaches of the last decade
of the twentieth century. It is a record of loss grief injustice,
suffering violence, and death. Implicit is the appeal to the
reader’s best instincts---a spirit of generosity, a
sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness
to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.”
James Nachtwey has won the World Press Photo award twice,
the Robert Capa Gold Medal four times, the Magazine Photographer
of the year six times and numerous other awards. He has published
Deeds of War (with a Foreword by Robert Stone) in
1989 and the Inferno in 1995. His photos have been
exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New
York, the Hasselblad Center in Sweden and in 1996 an enormous
collection of his work, curated by Jeffrey Keough, was shown
at the Massachusetts College of Art.
Referring to himself as an anti-war
photographer Nachtwey asserted, “After I published
Deeds of War I felt I had been released psychologically
from covering war itself---I was starting to turn to other
struggles people face---and I realized I hadn’t become
a war photographer, but an anti-war photographer.” Nachtwey
also scoffed at the validity of compassion fatigue. Despite
the horrific circumstances and the cruel misery depicted in
these pages he suggested that it is his responsibility to
show these horrors to the rest of the world and not allow
for his personal withdrawal from the tragedies he depicts,
and he debunked the notion that people have a finite supply
of human compassion. As he concluded the Inferno's
Afterward, “The people whose photographs appear in this
book are worthy of one’s recognition and the patience
that may require. I have witnessed people who have had everything
taken from them—their homes, their families, their arms,
their legs, their sanity. And yet, each still possessed dignity,
the irreducible element of being human.”
In any case, I was reminded of my Nachtwey story this last
week when the Globe mentioned in its spectacularly
bland “Names” (it’s version of a gossip)
column that James Nachtwey and documentary filmmaker Fredric
Weisman were joint winners of the Dan
David Prize, which has a monetary value of one million
dollars. Is there a story there? One would think. And maybe
The Globe is using one of their better writers—Alex
Beam, Mark Feeney or Joseph Kahn to write it. One would hope.
But so far nothing.
The proposition that still photographs are more powerful
and iconic than news reel and video footage is, I suppose,
arguable. But having been imprinted with images from Auschwitz,
Robert Capra’s Spanish soldier photo and the photos
of the naked Vietnamese girl running down the road, the Viet
Cong suspect being shot in the head and a Kent State student
kneeling at one of the fallen victims—it is an argument
I would be willing to make. And it would be James Nachtwey's
photos I would offer as evidence…
James Nachtwey by Robert Birnbaum
copyright 2000