Word: infernos
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...fire on takeoff, the crew had little real hope," says former pilot Manton Fain. About a minute after lifting off, four miles from the runway's end, the plane rolled left and slammed into the ground. Its more than 31,500 gal. of jet fuel erupted in an instant inferno. All 100 passengers--mostly German tourists--and nine crew members were killed, along with five people who were in the small hotel the plane plowed into. It was the first fatal accident for a Concorde and--because the plane's final, desperate struggles were captured in dramatic photos and videotapes...
...Inferno, which takes its name and epigraph from Dante, is Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya and Kosovo. It is gruesome stuff, some of the most grisly and horrifying photography I have ever seen, and certainly not right for you if your tastes fall on the squeamish side of Diane Arbus. Nachtwey surpasses in pure disgust value even Joel-Peter Witkin, who is known for raiding Mexican morgues in search of subjects. In one Nachtwey photograph taken in Rwanda in 1994, a carcass lies rotting in front of a church; the fact that it hasn't been removed hints that there are more...
...virtuoso at evoking pity. The line between a bad photographer and a good photographer of these horrors is drawn where the photographs stop making you feeling just sick and start making you feel both sick and sad. My stomach-knots and grief persisted long after seeing Inferno, and that is no mean feat for a photojournalist...
...More than anything else, Inferno should remind us why this sort of reportage is so important, why it provides what popular journalism sometimes lacks. The talking heads and hairsprayed anchors of network broadcasts show one side of the story, but we distrust it:anyone with the slightest cynicism regarding today's media-which is to say, anyone with a pulse and half a brain-regards such reporting with healthy skepticism. We never know how staged and contrived these events really are. But with Nachtwey, our cynicism gives way to empathy, and our skepticism to sorrow. The special place of Nachtwey...
...this, of course, is what the best journalism has always been: a way of showing the world in a new, true and sometimes unpalatable light, a fresh and direct sense of what we would like very much to ignore. The photographs in Inferno are, in their terrible beauty, both admirable and unforgettable; they will remind anyone who has stomach enough to view them that the world is still a nasty place, and that we should be thankful and mindful of our lucky lots in life...